Update: Just over a yaer ago speeds of 7.21 Gbps were achieved. And that was multi-hop more than half way around the world. Claiming a need for tiered plans for home users is a bit silly.
Digital signatures != DRM. The signatures indicate authenticity but there is no managing of rights or control going on.
Signed RPMs are perfectly usable even if you don't have the keys. You can't verify that they are legitimate RPMs but they CAN be installed.
You also can freely generate your own RPM signatures and distribute the public key for them. So even if the RPM installer refused to use unsigned RPMs it wouldn't preclude the original developer from modifying the GPLed code and distributing their changes. All with absolutely no need to distribute private keys.
The tricky part would be if all keys are locked away somewhere and there is no way for the user to add keys from 3rd parties. That would be a real problem as Red Hat could now start selling DRM protected systems which could only install Red Hat's version of any RPM. This would completely lock out anyone else even these programmers who wrote the GPLed code contained in the RPMs.
We don't like it because we understand the tech behind the networking. Much of the "scarcity" of bandwidth has more to do with telco policies than reality especially when you get away from the last mile. As long ago as 2001 it was already possible to transfer over 3 Tbps over a single fiber the distance from the US to Europe.
Sure, there are some equipment costs, but if these types of connections are used on just the primary backbones that still would provide a LOT of bandwidth.
Look at it this way. Is your Internet access slowing down steadily as more people go online? Not likely. If we were using all available capacity it would be. Requests would get queued up and delayed.
If Hong Kong can offer 1 Gbps Internet access for $215/mo and Japan can offer 100 Mbps access for around $40/mo or less, I certainly think Verizon could manage to NOT need to change teired rates on 3Mbps lines.
It's like seeing a car having been beaten up with a sledgehammer lying nearby, and then picking it up and waiting for the owner to see you.
I don't buy that analogy. In that case there is clear evidence that a crime was committed. Not just a suspision that one was, but real evidence. And you've just went and implicated yourself. A slightly closer analogy would be if you picked up a beat-up car from the salvage yard, parked it in some parking lot and sat in a chair next to it holding a sledge hammer. Assuming there wasn't a law against paking the car in the lot, what exactly have you done that could get you in trouble?
Perhaps even closer would be more like setting a bunch of boxes of baking soda relabeled as "cocain" on a table in your front yard as a prank and went inside to eat dinner. Someone takes a picture of it and calls the police. In the mean time people come and take a bunch of boxes and you eventually decide that the joke isn't funny anymore and throw away the labels. Then when the cops show up they find an empty table.
If you deny it really was cocain and there is no evidence of cocain or proof that anyone took/purchased any, how could you go to jail for it? You didn't even encourage paople to take it short of putting it in your front year near the sidewalk. Heck, you didn't even expect them to take it in this case... you just wanted to freak passers-by out.
Even this analogy is seriously flawed since cocain is an illegal substance. Ripped songs ARE NOT illegal. Distributing them may be, but ripping a copy of songs or movies you own doesn't fall into that catagory.
Read most of your site. Great stuff! Two things though:
1) The grandfather post said, "I am pretty sure planting a few hundred hydrogen bombs a couple of miles below the surface of the planet at strategic locations"
Seems to me that at best you could cause some serious earthquakes and kill a lot of people but it seems that a great deal of the earth would remain habitable. Wouldn't it take quite a few more bombs to do the job? And wouldn't blowing them up closer to the surface in order to have better radioactive contamination be more effective?
2) In a recent/. article, a post claimed that it would take less energy to send something completely out of our solar system and beyond the reach of the sun's gravity than it would take to send it into the sun itself. Due to the great reach of the sun's gravitational field, it seems to me it seems that this couldn't be correct. If you were to use another planet as a slingshot to reduce angular velocity then it seems even more incorrect.
So, would a slingshot around another planet into the sun use less energy than escaping the sun's gravity well entirely? And, if you didn't do that would it really take more energy to drop something into the sun than to send it flying endlessly into space?
the Milky Way used to be considered a plainly visible feature of the night sky, for instance. When was the last time you saw it?
The last time I was outside and looked up (sometime this week.) You too can see the milky way (and various other celestial bodies you seem to think are being "darkened" out of view) if you get out of the city or throw a goose into the main power grid in the correct spot to knock out enough lights.
The reality is that most bosses don't have a clue if their staff needs training unless they fsck something up bad. It doesn't hurt to go ask for training. If you wait for them to offer you might be waiting a long long time.
First find out how much it will cost and how much time off your job you need to complete the training/certification. Ask for both (expenses and time) and see what you get. State a business case why they should train you (ie: it might keep your IT system from suddenly becomming a big boat anchor.) Be prepared to offer a concession... maybe you'll sign a document agreeing to reimburse the costs if you leave within a year. Maybe instead of that you agree to forego a salary increase (beyond what you normally would have gotten) for a year.
With luck you'll get everything paid for. Maybe they'll just pay for the classes but not your time. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe they'll tell you they won't pay for anything but at least you are no worse off than you are now. (Just don't go in and demand training or you will quit. Your boss won't like it and you might have to eat your words... or file for unenployment!)
I've seen enough "employee management" decisions from the administrator side to know that often companies have no problem with you working a reasonable schedule. If you are willing to be the guy who puts in a 24 hour work day once or twice a year for some critical project or disaster they are tend to be very adverse to losing you as an employee too.
But! They are also often more than willing to let you work 80 hour weeks or work without training if you give them the chance. When your boss asks if you'd mind putting putting in an extra 10-20 hours every week he might very well just be testing the waters to see if he can get something extra from you for nothing.
If you are a good employee (can be relied upon and know your stuff) then saying, "I really wouldn't like to be away from my family that much more every week" will rarely be a problem. In fact your boss's next move might be to offer overtime or some sort of compensation without you even needing to ask for it.
P.S. If you aren't valuable enough to your employer then you might have a problem here. Could they hire someone at the same salary who would be almost as productive as you immediately? If so then you have even more reason to approach your boss and ask for training so you can manage things the way they need to be managed. (Think about it... could they really hire someone to replace you and bring them up to speed for less than it would cost to train you?)
Of course, as long as you are competing against legions of MCSEs your skills may never be all that rare or valuable to your employer.
I'm glad I got my initial training of TCP/IP from an MCSE class. What I learned in that class accounts for probably 20% of what I need day to day. But at least when Windows behaves oddly on the network I know why. (Usually at least... when it's not just being odd for the sake of being odd.)
Personally I don't take someone too seriously if they only know single OS. You don't get a wide enough exposure. If your only OS is Windows then you usually know only what your MCSE instructor taught you and not what the standards are or how things really work.
On the other hand if someone knows Linux networking, NetWare networking and Windows Networking they are probably reasonably comnpitent.
I would add that it would be a good idea to verify and if possible test restoration along the entire process. This is especially true if different people have different administrative roles on the server.
This bit us hard at a former employer I was in charge ot the server (OS, hardware) and someone else was in charge of the database system. I verified that tapes were readable nightly automatically and actually performed a restore every couple of months and compared that data on the tape matched what was on the drives.
The backup to tape was great. What was on tape was exactly what was supposed to be and it was restorable, however, the DB admin hadn't checked the database dump files in months and they were bad. The result was that after a bad crash we lost 2 years of data. OUCH!
PS. After the dust settled DB admin and another admin was fired. I left a few months later because they wanted me to do the work of 3 people for the pay of 1.
I doubt that it will be much easier to graduate if he doesn't stand up for himself. He has already pissed off people at the college and doesn't have any fear of lawsuit to keep them in line going forward.
I call B.S. too. On a very hot summer day you can feel a very noticable *decrease* in temperature if you drive through a hardwood forest.
Much of the heat absorbed is converted into food for the plant and ends up being stored in the plant fibers (where do people think the energy released while burning wood comes from?) Evaporative cooling also has an effect. On the same day go stand in the middle of a large blacktop parking lot. Then tell me which one has the biggest warming effect.
Who wrote TFA? Were they working for the petroleum industry? "No. Polution is GOOOD for you. GOOOOD for you. Trees are bad. They cause all the problems people attribute to polution. You are sleeping, very sleepy."
Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?
At this point I'd argue marketing has the most to do with it. Many many businesses buy what their local vendor is selling or what they've heard about. The local vendors haven't had OOo pushed down their throats weekly like they have MS-Office so many don't know it exists. Also many of them can't figure out how to make $$$ selling OOo so why would they want customers to use it much less even mention that it's an option?
Many many people have never heard of OOo and don't even have any idea that alternatives to MS-Office/Word exist in any fasion whatsoever. Heck most people don't even realize that Word isn't the only word processor on th planet.
Me: Purchase music/video on CD/DVD or online once and play anytime and anywhere I feel like on anything I own which is capable of playing them.
RI/MPAA: Pay per view/listen preferably, pay per device as a close 2nd, pay per cheap easily damaged plastic disk which can not be copied if they have to.
Me: Copy to any media/device which is convinient for my own use or my family's use.
RI/MPAA: Copy NOWHERE. If forced, allow limited copies to devices they control and can disable if desired.
Me: The ability to set up a PC that stores all my CDs and DVDs to disk and allows me to play anything I own anywhere in my house on demand.
RI/MPAA: Install rootkits and hidden device drivers to control how/where/when I play things I've paid for.
It appears our needs are incompatible. The more the record and movie industries try to force their wants over mine the more I'm likely to simply avoid their products and turn to independant producers.
Why do I have to pay extra to keep some company who's product I don't use in business? I'd prefer to pay access charges to get my Internet connection and then have the option to pay for whatever services I want/need from whoever is best able to meet my needs.
Why should I have to pay any per-call or per-minute charges to use my Internet connection one way but not pay them to use it others? In the end it's all just IP packets flying back and forth. Should I have to pay a fee/tax just because the packets going accross the network are carrying voice?
Some regulation is needed but not this type. They should be forcing ISPs to provide non-exclusionary and fair access and not allowing artificial restrictions just because it impacts other aspects of their business negatively. Then again if enough people get ticked off about having their VoIP traffic demoted and change ISPs then maybe the trend will go away.
And if it is rejected and they get a bounce message they could jump on the IT dept for not doing their job. eMail isn't and shouldn't be relied upon for extremely critical communications. What if there is a disk crash? A software bug, etc?
Besides, It's not like mail servers just bring themselves online and start participating in sending mail without anyone knowing that it is going to happen. Plus they could just as easily provide all full netblocks that they control in their SPF record. Then the record would only need to be updated when they get a new set of IP addys assigned to them.
The biggest issue I have with SPF is that too many of the big players don't want to use it. Or they use it but seem indecisive about what hosts are allowed to send email for them. For example:
yahoo.com, peoplepc.com, sbc.com, fbi.gov, irs.gov, irs.com, whitehouse.gov - no SPF records at all
gmail.com, google.com, aol.com, verizon.com - includes ?all in their SPF record which basically says "these are my authorized senders but other hosts are probably ok too.
hotmail.com, msn.com, charter.net, ebay.com, usbank.com, citibank.com - include ~all in their SPF record which means "soft fail" or "these are my only authorized hosts but don't block stuff from other hosts"
Why doesn't even one of these specify -all which means "fail" or "If it isn't from one of the hosts just listed then it's not from us."? It looks to me like none of the domains above are willing to do what needs to be done unless forced into it. So, at this point SPF checks on my mail gateway do little more than consume CPU time.
If your network is a hodge-podge of deal-of-the-day PCs with whatever OS they shipped with (as it sounds like the poster's is) then a 100:1 ratio can be completely unmanagable.
We run roughly 350:1 for Windows workstations here and 40:1 for servers (me being the server/network admin.) I doubt I could pull off 40:1 if the servers were all Windows boxes but fortunately most are Linux or Netware and don't require a lot of babysitting.
Doing 350:1, even with a very locked-down environment and standardized PCs and system images is still borderline insanity. We keep most stuff running but are constantly putting out fires. If we had a variety of different hardware and uncontrolled software it would be a nightmare.
To get out of the "putting out fires" mode I recommend
1) Get consistent with your PCs. If you have to buy a bunch. Get decent quality and the same model. Plus at least one "spare" PC per 100 in use. 2) Get consistent with software. Create a "base" image with the OS, networking and any programs you have licensed for the entire organization. 3) Take control of software. While it's a PITA for users get a policy of software is only installed by IS if you want it supported. But then be quick responding to requests. Record every program installed and which station(s) it's put on. If you have larger groups running similar sets of programs create another image (sales image, engineering image, etc.) 4) Get users saving EVERYTHING on the network. Use profiles to default thier "profile" and My Documents folders to their network home directory somewhere. Roaming profiles in this environment are your freind.
After you've done that, never fix anything but the simplest of problems at the user's location. If you think a fix is going to take you longer than ghosting an image (and possibly re-installing some apps special to that PC) then ghost it.
If ghosting it doesn't fix it then replace it with your spare and take it back to your own office and find out what piece of hardware is causing the problem. Replace the part when you get it from the vendor and hold onto that PC as your new "spare."
Get management to buy into all of this by explaining how, if you weren't putting out fires all the time (a time log would be really helpful here!) you could better protect them from viruses, worms and other downtime. If they refuse to even entertain the thought then it might be time to find a new job.
I've worked places where they were too short-sighted and cheap to do the right thing even when presented with why it made financial sense. (btw, you MUST show how what you want to do affects money. The technical reasons for doing them are irrelevent to most managers.) Anyhow... if you aren't allowed to do that stuff expect to get blamed when the next virus ravishes your network.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, nothing like spouting off how you were the only vendor to detect MyWife.c (because nobody else called the exact same virus something else.)
Update: Just over a yaer ago speeds of 7.21 Gbps were achieved. And that was multi-hop more than half way around the world. Claiming a need for tiered plans for home users is a bit silly.
So far though it seems to have all of the devastation of the y2k disaster.
-OR-
Too simplistic?
Signed RPMs are perfectly usable even if you don't have the keys. You can't verify that they are legitimate RPMs but they CAN be installed.
You also can freely generate your own RPM signatures and distribute the public key for them. So even if the RPM installer refused to use unsigned RPMs it wouldn't preclude the original developer from modifying the GPLed code and distributing their changes. All with absolutely no need to distribute private keys.
The tricky part would be if all keys are locked away somewhere and there is no way for the user to add keys from 3rd parties. That would be a real problem as Red Hat could now start selling DRM protected systems which could only install Red Hat's version of any RPM. This would completely lock out anyone else even these programmers who wrote the GPLed code contained in the RPMs.
Sure, there are some equipment costs, but if these types of connections are used on just the primary backbones that still would provide a LOT of bandwidth.
Look at it this way. Is your Internet access slowing down steadily as more people go online? Not likely. If we were using all available capacity it would be. Requests would get queued up and delayed.
If Hong Kong can offer 1 Gbps Internet access for $215/mo and Japan can offer 100 Mbps access for around $40/mo or less, I certainly think Verizon could manage to NOT need to change teired rates on 3Mbps lines.
Actually Texas is almost 3x larger than the UK by itself. (696,241 sq km versus 244,820 sq km.)
Actually you'd want to multiply it by almost 40 to approximate the size of the US (9,631,418 sq km)
I don't buy that analogy. In that case there is clear evidence that a crime was committed. Not just a suspision that one was, but real evidence. And you've just went and implicated yourself. A slightly closer analogy would be if you picked up a beat-up car from the salvage yard, parked it in some parking lot and sat in a chair next to it holding a sledge hammer. Assuming there wasn't a law against paking the car in the lot, what exactly have you done that could get you in trouble?
Perhaps even closer would be more like setting a bunch of boxes of baking soda relabeled as "cocain" on a table in your front yard as a prank and went inside to eat dinner. Someone takes a picture of it and calls the police. In the mean time people come and take a bunch of boxes and you eventually decide that the joke isn't funny anymore and throw away the labels. Then when the cops show up they find an empty table.
If you deny it really was cocain and there is no evidence of cocain or proof that anyone took/purchased any, how could you go to jail for it? You didn't even encourage paople to take it short of putting it in your front year near the sidewalk. Heck, you didn't even expect them to take it in this case... you just wanted to freak passers-by out.
Even this analogy is seriously flawed since cocain is an illegal substance. Ripped songs ARE NOT illegal. Distributing them may be, but ripping a copy of songs or movies you own doesn't fall into that catagory.
1) The grandfather post said, "I am pretty sure planting a few hundred hydrogen bombs a couple of miles below the surface of the planet at strategic locations"
Seems to me that at best you could cause some serious earthquakes and kill a lot of people but it seems that a great deal of the earth would remain habitable. Wouldn't it take quite a few more bombs to do the job? And wouldn't blowing them up closer to the surface in order to have better radioactive contamination be more effective?
2) In a recent /. article, a post claimed that it would take less energy to send something completely out of our solar system and beyond the reach of the sun's gravity than it would take to send it into the sun itself. Due to the great reach of the sun's gravitational field, it seems to me it seems that this couldn't be correct. If you were to use another planet as a slingshot to reduce angular velocity then it seems even more incorrect.
So, would a slingshot around another planet into the sun use less energy than escaping the sun's gravity well entirely? And, if you didn't do that would it really take more energy to drop something into the sun than to send it flying endlessly into space?
The last time I was outside and looked up (sometime this week.) You too can see the milky way (and various other celestial bodies you seem to think are being "darkened" out of view) if you get out of the city or throw a goose into the main power grid in the correct spot to knock out enough lights.
First find out how much it will cost and how much time off your job you need to complete the training/certification. Ask for both (expenses and time) and see what you get. State a business case why they should train you (ie: it might keep your IT system from suddenly becomming a big boat anchor.) Be prepared to offer a concession... maybe you'll sign a document agreeing to reimburse the costs if you leave within a year. Maybe instead of that you agree to forego a salary increase (beyond what you normally would have gotten) for a year.
With luck you'll get everything paid for. Maybe they'll just pay for the classes but not your time. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe they'll tell you they won't pay for anything but at least you are no worse off than you are now. (Just don't go in and demand training or you will quit. Your boss won't like it and you might have to eat your words... or file for unenployment!)
But! They are also often more than willing to let you work 80 hour weeks or work without training if you give them the chance. When your boss asks if you'd mind putting putting in an extra 10-20 hours every week he might very well just be testing the waters to see if he can get something extra from you for nothing.
If you are a good employee (can be relied upon and know your stuff) then saying, "I really wouldn't like to be away from my family that much more every week" will rarely be a problem. In fact your boss's next move might be to offer overtime or some sort of compensation without you even needing to ask for it.
P.S. If you aren't valuable enough to your employer then you might have a problem here. Could they hire someone at the same salary who would be almost as productive as you immediately? If so then you have even more reason to approach your boss and ask for training so you can manage things the way they need to be managed. (Think about it... could they really hire someone to replace you and bring them up to speed for less than it would cost to train you?)
Of course, as long as you are competing against legions of MCSEs your skills may never be all that rare or valuable to your employer.
Personally I don't take someone too seriously if they only know single OS. You don't get a wide enough exposure. If your only OS is Windows then you usually know only what your MCSE instructor taught you and not what the standards are or how things really work.
On the other hand if someone knows Linux networking, NetWare networking and Windows Networking they are probably reasonably comnpitent.
Do they have vested interests in coal, oil or other industries which could suffer?
This bit us hard at a former employer I was in charge ot the server (OS, hardware) and someone else was in charge of the database system. I verified that tapes were readable nightly automatically and actually performed a restore every couple of months and compared that data on the tape matched what was on the drives.
The backup to tape was great. What was on tape was exactly what was supposed to be and it was restorable, however, the DB admin hadn't checked the database dump files in months and they were bad. The result was that after a bad crash we lost 2 years of data. OUCH!
PS. After the dust settled DB admin and another admin was fired. I left a few months later because they wanted me to do the work of 3 people for the pay of 1.
I doubt that it will be much easier to graduate if he doesn't stand up for himself. He has already pissed off people at the college and doesn't have any fear of lawsuit to keep them in line going forward.
Possibly with no way to go back.
I call B.S. too. On a very hot summer day you can feel a very noticable *decrease* in temperature if you drive through a hardwood forest. Much of the heat absorbed is converted into food for the plant and ends up being stored in the plant fibers (where do people think the energy released while burning wood comes from?) Evaporative cooling also has an effect. On the same day go stand in the middle of a large blacktop parking lot. Then tell me which one has the biggest warming effect. Who wrote TFA? Were they working for the petroleum industry? "No. Polution is GOOOD for you. GOOOOD for you. Trees are bad. They cause all the problems people attribute to polution. You are sleeping, very sleepy."
Who's job is it to report news or provide useful information?
At this point I'd argue marketing has the most to do with it. Many many businesses buy what their local vendor is selling or what they've heard about. The local vendors haven't had OOo pushed down their throats weekly like they have MS-Office so many don't know it exists. Also many of them can't figure out how to make $$$ selling OOo so why would they want customers to use it much less even mention that it's an option?
Many many people have never heard of OOo and don't even have any idea that alternatives to MS-Office/Word exist in any fasion whatsoever. Heck most people don't even realize that Word isn't the only word processor on th planet.
RI/MPAA: Pay per view/listen preferably, pay per device as a close 2nd, pay per cheap easily damaged plastic disk which can not be copied if they have to.
Me: Copy to any media/device which is convinient for my own use or my family's use.
RI/MPAA: Copy NOWHERE. If forced, allow limited copies to devices they control and can disable if desired.
Me: The ability to set up a PC that stores all my CDs and DVDs to disk and allows me to play anything I own anywhere in my house on demand.
RI/MPAA: Install rootkits and hidden device drivers to control how/where/when I play things I've paid for.
It appears our needs are incompatible. The more the record and movie industries try to force their wants over mine the more I'm likely to simply avoid their products and turn to independant producers.
Why do I have to pay extra to keep some company who's product I don't use in business? I'd prefer to pay access charges to get my Internet connection and then have the option to pay for whatever services I want/need from whoever is best able to meet my needs.
Why should I have to pay any per-call or per-minute charges to use my Internet connection one way but not pay them to use it others? In the end it's all just IP packets flying back and forth. Should I have to pay a fee/tax just because the packets going accross the network are carrying voice?
Some regulation is needed but not this type. They should be forcing ISPs to provide non-exclusionary and fair access and not allowing artificial restrictions just because it impacts other aspects of their business negatively. Then again if enough people get ticked off about having their VoIP traffic demoted and change ISPs then maybe the trend will go away.
And if it is rejected and they get a bounce message they could jump on the IT dept for not doing their job. eMail isn't and shouldn't be relied upon for extremely critical communications. What if there is a disk crash? A software bug, etc?
Besides, It's not like mail servers just bring themselves online and start participating in sending mail without anyone knowing that it is going to happen. Plus they could just as easily provide all full netblocks that they control in their SPF record. Then the record would only need to be updated when they get a new set of IP addys assigned to them.
The biggest issue I have with SPF is that too many of the big players don't want to use it. Or they use it but seem indecisive about what hosts are allowed to send email for them. For example:
yahoo.com, peoplepc.com, sbc.com, fbi.gov, irs.gov, irs.com, whitehouse.gov - no SPF records at all
gmail.com, google.com, aol.com, verizon.com - includes ?all in their SPF record which basically says "these are my authorized senders but other hosts are probably ok too.
hotmail.com, msn.com, charter.net, ebay.com, usbank.com, citibank.com - include ~all in their SPF record which means "soft fail" or "these are my only authorized hosts but don't block stuff from other hosts"
Why doesn't even one of these specify -all which means "fail" or "If it isn't from one of the hosts just listed then it's not from us."? It looks to me like none of the domains above are willing to do what needs to be done unless forced into it. So, at this point SPF checks on my mail gateway do little more than consume CPU time.
If your network is a hodge-podge of deal-of-the-day PCs with whatever OS they shipped with (as it sounds like the poster's is) then a 100:1 ratio can be completely unmanagable.
We run roughly 350:1 for Windows workstations here and 40:1 for servers (me being the server/network admin.) I doubt I could pull off 40:1 if the servers were all Windows boxes but fortunately most are Linux or Netware and don't require a lot of babysitting.
Doing 350:1, even with a very locked-down environment and standardized PCs and system images is still borderline insanity. We keep most stuff running but are constantly putting out fires. If we had a variety of different hardware and uncontrolled software it would be a nightmare.
To get out of the "putting out fires" mode I recommend
1) Get consistent with your PCs. If you have to buy a bunch. Get decent quality and the same model. Plus at least one "spare" PC per 100 in use.
2) Get consistent with software. Create a "base" image with the OS, networking and any programs you have licensed for the entire organization.
3) Take control of software. While it's a PITA for users get a policy of software is only installed by IS if you want it supported. But then be quick responding to requests. Record every program installed and which station(s) it's put on. If you have larger groups running similar sets of programs create another image (sales image, engineering image, etc.)
4) Get users saving EVERYTHING on the network. Use profiles to default thier "profile" and My Documents folders to their network home directory somewhere. Roaming profiles in this environment are your freind.
After you've done that, never fix anything but the simplest of problems at the user's location. If you think a fix is going to take you longer than ghosting an image (and possibly re-installing some apps special to that PC) then ghost it.
If ghosting it doesn't fix it then replace it with your spare and take it back to your own office and find out what piece of hardware is causing the problem. Replace the part when you get it from the vendor and hold onto that PC as your new "spare."
Get management to buy into all of this by explaining how, if you weren't putting out fires all the time (a time log would be really helpful here!) you could better protect them from viruses, worms and other downtime. If they refuse to even entertain the thought then it might be time to find a new job.
I've worked places where they were too short-sighted and cheap to do the right thing even when presented with why it made financial sense. (btw, you MUST show how what you want to do affects money. The technical reasons for doing them are irrelevent to most managers.) Anyhow... if you aren't allowed to do that stuff expect to get blamed when the next virus ravishes your network.