However, there's a lot of people that just don't give a shit about anything or they're ignorant to the true cost of a place like WalMart.
More often that not, people will chose WalMart because it's cheaper. Cheaper almost always wins. Just like politicians that promise you free stuff. Free healthcare, free internet, free welfare, etc...
Hell, that's why Obama won. And that's why WalMart will win. Especially in a recession.
WalMart is a dangerous company. They can put other business out of business because they can sell for lower prices than anyone else could ever afford to do, because WalMart is so huge and is the only choice of shopping places in many parts of the country.
...yet so many people just keep shopping there. Maybe one day everyone will wake up and realize they want a store that doesn't negotiate for lower prices on the products they sell...
I would have beat you if I could have remembered my login details...
OpenID and passwords have problems.
With OpenID, your provider could go down, or go out of business. Then you're locked out of all your sites. Screw that.
With passwords, every site has a different length, case, or punctuation requirement. You might use the same password for eBay and your bank (bad!). Your password app could break, corrupt your passwords, etc...
How about a solution where you control the one and only key?
You verify the site either by a normal SSL cert--or by the fact that you've been there before and already have it's gpg key. Next it verifies you by the gpg key provided when you first signed up.
Again my rant is directed to those who think a top down, I like our web portal(broken as it is) and all shall use it is the best policy. The insightful rating of the parent post indicates my dislike of this policy is not unique.
Everywhere I have the ability, I set my start page to blank. Every single time I get on the internet, I'm usually going somewhere different. The most frequent site I use is google search--which I have a widget for in firefox. I could care less if my homepage was set to the power rangers--I never go to one page consistently enough to require it as a home page.
If my company decides they want to make things 'professional' by having every desktop look the same, or every browser set to the same page, that's fine with me. I'm never on the 'home page' for more than the 5 seconds it takes to google something, or type in slashdot.org.
51 would be retained while the company liquidates its assets.
I've called them several times this last month for RMAs or server issues, and the support has been horrible--which is unusual for them.
On Christmas Eve a client called me with a server down--apparently the RAID card just decided to eat it. I called MPC for an RMA around noon and was told "the server guy should be in around 8:00 tonight if you could call back then".
WTF? I'm not calling in for an RMA at 8:00 PM on Christmas Eve. Bastards!
(why would it ever make sense to launch the task manager minimized when the task bar becomes unresponsive at the drop of a hat when an app isn't responding?) that ultimately should have been found in testing and fixed before the product got out the door
*Walks up to the podium*
Whoa, whoa! Remember, they've only been working on Vista for the past 8ish years. You can't expect them to fix and implement *everything* in that short amount of time.
Let's look at some of the wonder features they've packed in over the past 8 years.
WinFS - Your filesystem is actually a database. Can you imagine how much time it takes to convert your operating systems IO API calls to get/set data from a SQL server? Dealing with full-text searching, writing conversion utilities to move from FAT32 or NTFS to WINFS, handling security, locking, etc... That's a lot of work.
Wha? They didn't? Oh.
Someone just told me that WinFS didn't actually make it into Vista. Sorry.
That's ok--we can always look at Enhanced IE - Ballmer said there would be a version of IE that's much better than IE 7 in Vista. It would have enhanced parental controls, better integration, and...what? Really? Shit. Uh, now I'm being told that they apparently just shipped Vista with IE7.
Well--what about palladium? It's supposed to be the "next generation" in secure computing and all that. I'm sure Microsoft devs spent years writing tons of code, while other devs spent years reviewing the security of it all to make sure your documen...What? You're kidd... *sigh* Ok--I guess palladium was nixed too.
Well, they certainly spent a lot of time making the interface look 'flashy' and shuffling a bunch of stuff around so you spend weeks re-learning where things are after the upgrade.
Oh--and they spent a lot of time taking stuff out too. Old code like HyperTerminal, the Messenger service, the 'Luna' theme, device profiles, IP over firewire, and IPX/SPX support.
Hell, no one ever uses terminal programs anymore. And the messenger service was only used by admins to send snarky popups to users from remote.
So quit your Vista bashin'. It took 8 years to rewrite the graphics system to support a 'flashy' interface that you spend weeks re-learning, and to remove some useful code. I'd like to see anyone else do better.
I'm really surprised that people on 14" and larger monitors could still be at 800x600 for any reason in a situation where it's IT's job to set up the computers. I doubt accessibility is an issue if you are having them use Office 2007 applications.
People are so damn picky about screen resolution.
One client of mine uses an app called Eaglesoft. This thing is a piece of garbage. Nothing in the app scales when you resize a window. In fact, most of their windows can't be resized. The fonts are horrible too. When you switch the screen from 1024x768 into something else--like widescreen resolutions, the application looks distorted, the background image has ugly white borders around it because it doesn't scale, etc...
Half this crap is due to shitty software developers. The other half is the continuous complaints I get from users "My screen looks too small--I'm not as young as I used to be. I can't see it."
Uuh...you're 30. Get glasses. Seriously--who wants to have a resolution of 640x480 still? Totally reminds me of 'big world' in super mario brothers. Ugh.
For this exact reason I'm switching my Active Directory Group Policies to use wpkg in combination with OCS Inventory NG (or maybe GLPI, I'm just starting my research on migrating).
With WPKG you aren't constrained to MSI packages, you can distribute and manage ANY package. With the latest IE security flaw fiasco it got me looking at how to deploy Firefox. This seems to be the best way and should actually make my maintenance jobs much easier.
I've looked at wpkg a few times in the past, but there was a lot of overhead getting the system setup, and adding/deploying new packages. I wouldn't mind a system like that, but I work with several admins that are "Windows Admins". They don't want to deal with anything that isn't point-and-click.
...plus add the ability to control things like the home page via Group Policy, they'll be set.
Why oh why does the world think the need this level of granular control? To all the PHB out there who think your so smart to make the bloated ass corp intranet site everyones' home page and then lock that down, you need to find better ways to spend your time. Let me set the damn thing to about:blank and I'll use the portal when I need to rather than everytime I fire up a browser.
You want the simple answer: They're the boss. It's their computer, and they can do whatever the f*ck they want. If my boss tells me to set everyone's desktop to hot pink, I may ask him privately what was wrong with his head--but if he says "do it", it gets done.
Here's the complex answer: Not every business works under the model you have under your head. One of my clients is a dental office. There are only two things they use a web browser for. The first is for checking email. (For some strage reason, they all use gmail, yahoo, and/or hotmail for their work addresses). The second reason they use a web browser is to pull up THEIR OWN F*CKING WEBSITE...because it's chock-full of patient education videos.
So I want to be able to set the home page on about 70 computers that are used mainly to show patient education videos instead of setting the home page for every pc multiplied by the number of different user accounts that happen to use that PC.
If you are pissed that your company forces your homepage to a certain value, I think you probably have a few options:
1. Talk to the boss or network admin and see if they remove the restriction for you or the entire company.
2. If it's such a horrible issue for you, quit. Go find a company that has browser lockdown settings more inline with your worldview.
3. Shut the f*ck up and take it like a man.
Damn--it's about time they updated. While providing an awesome service, they were continually several months behind in releases. Not good enough when there's a security update. And none of the companies wanted to pay for the service since IE is 'free'.
..."Firefox really has a much higher share because of all the users who (do what you said)"...
If mozilla would pull their heads out of their asses and do what I said, they'd take over another 15% easily.
Notice how the graph in TFA dips on the weekend--and also how the article comments "IE6 loses a lot of share on the weekend"?
Most people are at home on the weekend. They install Firefox on their local PC and surf the net.
But at work, people are still stuck with Microsoft shit. Why? Mozilla still hasn't released an MSI of Firefox.
I admin servers for several companies. If I could simply push out a copy of Firefox using Group Policy, I would give firefox about 250 additional users first thing tomorrow morning.
The moment Mozilla makes it easy for corporations using Windows and Active Directory to deploy their software--plus add the ability to control things like the home page via Group Policy, they'll be set.
But until they do, I'm not going around to 200 computers every few weeks to install or update Firefox.
XP is bloody operating system for personal computer, not operating system for AI that operates terminator drones. Microsoft probably didn't even build the system they are using and doesn't know their OS is being used for said system. Like most things done for government, a contractor build the system, they developed in Windows because A. Government is more then happy to spend your tax dollars on Windows licenses. B. Windows programmers are dime a dozen.
Try not seeing evil conspiracy where there is none. You can probably walk through check point wearing a Linux TShirt and system isn't going to deploy ceiling mounted turrets and blow you away. You might want to try removing the tinfoil, I think it's cutting off circulation.
My Honda has had it's problems too, but they were insignficant or properly handled by the vendor. If it got to the point were someone didn't want MS anymore, they go find something else. Simple as that.
Good think every car dealership in the US doesn't only sell Honda, forcing you to buy a much faster, more secure, and safer Finnish-made car built by a bunch of geeky looking mechanics in a garage down the street.
If only someone would resurrect the following two games:
1. TradeWars 2002--not the new EIS crap, but the original Gary Martin version
2. Land of Devastation--just update it from the original turn-based multi-player to actual multi-player--and keep the ability to tweak and configure maps, in-game objects, etc...
If those two games were released...damn. I'd party like it was 1993ish all over again.
In other words, anyone who looks Islamic will be stopped and searched as will a few others chosen at random.
I know no one reads TFA, but doesn't it bother anyone that the screenshot is Windows XP?
How long before the system can detect people who don't pass the Windows Genuine Advantage test, or it detects an image of a penguin or a logo from any one of the numerous Linux distributions--and then flags you as "terrorist, shoot on sight"?
However, I still feel the risk to linemen is minimal - as someone else pointed out, they know how to deal with live wires, because the other pair is live, and I'm certain they treat every wire as though it were live in any case.
Exactly.
Procedure:
1. Get hotstick out
2. Test to see if line is energized...nope
3. Put hotstick down
4. At the same time as step 3, some tool down the road fires up a generator
5. Grab line to start working on it
6. Die
Only if you celebrate New Year's at 23:59 GMT. All other time zones will have New Year's take place exactly on schedule to the second including Times Square in New York.
Call me geeky, but isn't that the only true way to celebrate it? That's when all my servers are celebrating it...
That'll work, right up until the spam bots are told to ignore spampoison.com, or the person who is running the spam bots decides to put spampoison.com into his hosts file and point it to 127.0.0.1.
Slashdot Mirror
However, there's a lot of people that just don't give a shit about anything or they're ignorant to the true cost of a place like WalMart.
More often that not, people will chose WalMart because it's cheaper. Cheaper almost always wins. Just like politicians that promise you free stuff. Free healthcare, free internet, free welfare, etc...
Hell, that's why Obama won. And that's why WalMart will win. Especially in a recession.
WalMart is a dangerous company. They can put other business out of business because they can sell for lower prices than anyone else could ever afford to do, because WalMart is so huge and is the only choice of shopping places in many parts of the country.
and who would've thought - the niggers.
*uncomfortable silence*
*cough*
Uh...a1? You might want to actually read the lyrics...
I would have beat you if I could have remembered my login details...
OpenID and passwords have problems.
With OpenID, your provider could go down, or go out of business. Then you're locked out of all your sites. Screw that.
With passwords, every site has a different length, case, or punctuation requirement. You might use the same password for eBay and your bank (bad!). Your password app could break, corrupt your passwords, etc...
How about a solution where you control the one and only key?
GPGAuth
You verify the site either by a normal SSL cert--or by the fact that you've been there before and already have it's gpg key. Next it verifies you by the gpg key provided when you first signed up.
Again my rant is directed to those who think a top down, I like our web portal(broken as it is) and all shall use it is the best policy. The insightful rating of the parent post indicates my dislike of this policy is not unique.
Everywhere I have the ability, I set my start page to blank. Every single time I get on the internet, I'm usually going somewhere different. The most frequent site I use is google search--which I have a widget for in firefox. I could care less if my homepage was set to the power rangers--I never go to one page consistently enough to require it as a home page.
If my company decides they want to make things 'professional' by having every desktop look the same, or every browser set to the same page, that's fine with me. I'm never on the 'home page' for more than the 5 seconds it takes to google something, or type in slashdot.org.
51 would be retained while the company liquidates its assets.
I've called them several times this last month for RMAs or server issues, and the support has been horrible--which is unusual for them.
On Christmas Eve a client called me with a server down--apparently the RAID card just decided to eat it. I called MPC for an RMA around noon and was told "the server guy should be in around 8:00 tonight if you could call back then".
WTF? I'm not calling in for an RMA at 8:00 PM on Christmas Eve. Bastards!
Oh, I bet it's George Bush fault too!
Just like the lack of coffe in the machine this morning :/
Indeed! Unfortunately, neither your coffee machine nor Micron qualified for bailout money. :(
Damn! I want Big IT bailed out! Send some of that money my way!
Wait--unless that also includes Microsoft. Crap.
(why would it ever make sense to launch the task manager minimized when the task bar becomes unresponsive at the drop of a hat when an app isn't responding?) that ultimately should have been found in testing and fixed before the product got out the door
*Walks up to the podium*
Whoa, whoa! Remember, they've only been working on Vista for the past 8ish years. You can't expect them to fix and implement *everything* in that short amount of time.
Let's look at some of the wonder features they've packed in over the past 8 years.
WinFS - Your filesystem is actually a database. Can you imagine how much time it takes to convert your operating systems IO API calls to get/set data from a SQL server? Dealing with full-text searching, writing conversion utilities to move from FAT32 or NTFS to WINFS, handling security, locking, etc... That's a lot of work.
Wha? They didn't? Oh.
Someone just told me that WinFS didn't actually make it into Vista. Sorry.
That's ok--we can always look at Enhanced IE - Ballmer said there would be a version of IE that's much better than IE 7 in Vista. It would have enhanced parental controls, better integration, and...what? Really? Shit. Uh, now I'm being told that they apparently just shipped Vista with IE7.
Well--what about palladium? It's supposed to be the "next generation" in secure computing and all that. I'm sure Microsoft devs spent years writing tons of code, while other devs spent years reviewing the security of it all to make sure your documen...What? You're kidd... *sigh* Ok--I guess palladium was nixed too.
Well, they certainly spent a lot of time making the interface look 'flashy' and shuffling a bunch of stuff around so you spend weeks re-learning where things are after the upgrade.
Oh--and they spent a lot of time taking stuff out too. Old code like HyperTerminal, the Messenger service, the 'Luna' theme, device profiles, IP over firewire, and IPX/SPX support.
Hell, no one ever uses terminal programs anymore. And the messenger service was only used by admins to send snarky popups to users from remote.
So quit your Vista bashin'. It took 8 years to rewrite the graphics system to support a 'flashy' interface that you spend weeks re-learning, and to remove some useful code. I'd like to see anyone else do better.
I'm really surprised that people on 14" and larger monitors could still be at 800x600 for any reason in a situation where it's IT's job to set up the computers. I doubt accessibility is an issue if you are having them use Office 2007 applications.
People are so damn picky about screen resolution.
One client of mine uses an app called Eaglesoft. This thing is a piece of garbage. Nothing in the app scales when you resize a window. In fact, most of their windows can't be resized. The fonts are horrible too. When you switch the screen from 1024x768 into something else--like widescreen resolutions, the application looks distorted, the background image has ugly white borders around it because it doesn't scale, etc...
Half this crap is due to shitty software developers. The other half is the continuous complaints I get from users "My screen looks too small--I'm not as young as I used to be. I can't see it."
Uuh...you're 30. Get glasses. Seriously--who wants to have a resolution of 640x480 still? Totally reminds me of 'big world' in super mario brothers. Ugh.
For this exact reason I'm switching my Active Directory Group Policies to use wpkg in combination with OCS Inventory NG (or maybe GLPI, I'm just starting my research on migrating).
With WPKG you aren't constrained to MSI packages, you can distribute and manage ANY package. With the latest IE security flaw fiasco it got me looking at how to deploy Firefox. This seems to be the best way and should actually make my maintenance jobs much easier.
I've looked at wpkg a few times in the past, but there was a lot of overhead getting the system setup, and adding/deploying new packages. I wouldn't mind a system like that, but I work with several admins that are "Windows Admins". They don't want to deal with anything that isn't point-and-click.
You want the simple answer: They're the boss. It's their computer, and they can do whatever the f*ck they want. If my boss tells me to set everyone's desktop to hot pink, I may ask him privately what was wrong with his head--but if he says "do it", it gets done.
Here's the complex answer: Not every business works under the model you have under your head. One of my clients is a dental office. There are only two things they use a web browser for. The first is for checking email. (For some strage reason, they all use gmail, yahoo, and/or hotmail for their work addresses). The second reason they use a web browser is to pull up THEIR OWN F*CKING WEBSITE...because it's chock-full of patient education videos.
So I want to be able to set the home page on about 70 computers that are used mainly to show patient education videos instead of setting the home page for every pc multiplied by the number of different user accounts that happen to use that PC.
If you are pissed that your company forces your homepage to a certain value, I think you probably have a few options:
1. Talk to the boss or network admin and see if they remove the restriction for you or the entire company.
2. If it's such a horrible issue for you, quit. Go find a company that has browser lockdown settings more inline with your worldview.
3. Shut the f*ck up and take it like a man.
How about Frontmotions MSI packages?
Damn--it's about time they updated. While providing an awesome service, they were continually several months behind in releases. Not good enough when there's a security update. And none of the companies wanted to pay for the service since IE is 'free'.
..."Firefox really has a much higher share because of all the users who (do what you said)"...
If mozilla would pull their heads out of their asses and do what I said, they'd take over another 15% easily.
Notice how the graph in TFA dips on the weekend--and also how the article comments "IE6 loses a lot of share on the weekend"?
Most people are at home on the weekend. They install Firefox on their local PC and surf the net.
But at work, people are still stuck with Microsoft shit. Why? Mozilla still hasn't released an MSI of Firefox.
I admin servers for several companies. If I could simply push out a copy of Firefox using Group Policy, I would give firefox about 250 additional users first thing tomorrow morning.
The moment Mozilla makes it easy for corporations using Windows and Active Directory to deploy their software--plus add the ability to control things like the home page via Group Policy, they'll be set.
But until they do, I'm not going around to 200 computers every few weeks to install or update Firefox.
XP is bloody operating system for personal computer, not operating system for AI that operates terminator drones. Microsoft probably didn't even build the system they are using and doesn't know their OS is being used for said system. Like most things done for government, a contractor build the system, they developed in Windows because A. Government is more then happy to spend your tax dollars on Windows licenses. B. Windows programmers are dime a dozen.
Try not seeing evil conspiracy where there is none. You can probably walk through check point wearing a Linux TShirt and system isn't going to deploy ceiling mounted turrets and blow you away. You might want to try removing the tinfoil, I think it's cutting off circulation.
Whoa...settle down man--it was a joke.
My Honda has had it's problems too, but they were insignficant or properly handled by the vendor. If it got to the point were someone didn't want MS anymore, they go find something else. Simple as that.
Good think every car dealership in the US doesn't only sell Honda, forcing you to buy a much faster, more secure, and safer Finnish-made car built by a bunch of geeky looking mechanics in a garage down the street.
If only someone would resurrect the following two games:
1. TradeWars 2002--not the new EIS crap, but the original Gary Martin version
2. Land of Devastation--just update it from the original turn-based multi-player to actual multi-player--and keep the ability to tweak and configure maps, in-game objects, etc...
If those two games were released...damn. I'd party like it was 1993ish all over again.
In other words, anyone who looks Islamic will be stopped and searched as will a few others chosen at random.
I know no one reads TFA, but doesn't it bother anyone that the screenshot is Windows XP?
How long before the system can detect people who don't pass the Windows Genuine Advantage test, or it detects an image of a penguin or a logo from any one of the numerous Linux distributions--and then flags you as "terrorist, shoot on sight"?
You missed out: 2A. *Earth the wire*
Meh. I'm not an electrician--I just play one on slashdot.
<VallyGirlVoice>What eeeever. Magma is HOT, dummy.</VallyGirlVoice>
Blast! I mis-typed 'valley', and then cut and pasted my mash of html and text, and the spell-checker chocked on the html. Bah!
It's more likely to cause global cooling, as TFS and TFA state.
<VallyGirlVoice>What eeeever. Magma is HOT, dummy.</VallyGirlVoice>
However, I still feel the risk to linemen is minimal - as someone else pointed out, they know how to deal with live wires, because the other pair is live, and I'm certain they treat every wire as though it were live in any case.
Exactly.
Procedure:
1. Get hotstick out
2. Test to see if line is energized...nope
3. Put hotstick down
4. At the same time as step 3, some tool down the road fires up a generator
5. Grab line to start working on it
6. Die
Good plan.
Only if you celebrate New Year's at 23:59 GMT. All other time zones will have New Year's take place exactly on schedule to the second including Times Square in New York.
Call me geeky, but isn't that the only true way to celebrate it? That's when all my servers are celebrating it...
Uhh, wouldn't it be nice if we were given a little bit more of a warning? Say, something like, oh a week?
Yeah! This totally f*cks my schedule. One second totally ruins New Years for me.
No one has disassembled the binary yet to see what it does? Does it call SetWindowsHookEx or something?
After seeing the slashdot article, I decided to scan one I recently bought for my wife. Sure enough. Virus.
Funny thing though--it didn't run under Linux.
read my sig
That'll work, right up until the spam bots are told to ignore spampoison.com, or the person who is running the spam bots decides to put spampoison.com into his hosts file and point it to 127.0.0.1.
Lame solution.