We are in the same boat. I'm thinking about dropping the CD service, since we stream the large majority of our content from Netflix.
Starz going away isn't a killer, but it hurts. Better Watch Toy Story III while we still can!
I wish Netflix would go to a Streaming/2DVD per month package for like $12/month. We only use the mailers to get the most obscure content that Netflix only seems to carry (we have "The Mask of Zorro" with Errol Flynn right now).
Usually takes two weeks to get the family together to watch a DVD, especially during a school year. A package that limited the number of 90 postage charges Netflix got per month to two might hold subscribers and preserve their bottom line.
However, I propose having USB access on removable PCI cards, or some similar removable interface. Keep the cards locked up unless you are doing an update.
Sure, a very stupid user could go buy a USB card to play his collection of Lady Gaga hits in the reactor control mainframe, but he's probably more likely to buy a USB player instead of going to the trouble of installing a card and rebooting the system.
A process engineer I used to work for had a Golden Rule: Design the work space so that doing things right is the easiest way to do it.
Just want to second this. My little bitty computer shop has three of these DOA units. There is a law office investigating a Class Action suit regarding these.
Thompson LLP is investigating allegations that certain model laptops manufactured by HP are experiencing unusually high rates of wireless connection failures. The HP model numbers allegedly affected are the HP Pavilion dv2000 series, the HP Pavilion dv6000 series, the HP Pavilion dv9000 series, the HP Pavilion tx1000 series, the Compaq Presario V3000 series, and the Compaq Presario V6000 series. HP has continued to market and sell these defective laptops despite allegedly knowing, since at least as early as 2007, that these models carry wireless device defects.
Isn't just wireless that dies--it just dies first. The whole laptop follows.
Same problem is happening with HP and Compaqs Slimline desktops. Just had one of those in here with an identical problem. DOA. Fortunately I found the customer is entitled to a 12 month extension on his original warrantee. Runs out December 31.
Beware!
I'm not at all certain this is a nVidia problem so much as HP trying to cram a high performance graphic chip onto a motherboard without adequate heat dissipation. But it's a very real problem.
I clean multiple infected systems every week. I do it for individuals in my little bitty computer shop. They don't have images or good backups (or even their install CD a lot of the time).
I have a very good record of cleaning people's machines without resorting to a wipe (sometimes, you have to, because the system is so damaged). I don't get many people coming back quickly with renewed infections (amazing what having a properly patched machine with basic anti-malware software installed can do). I don't advertise, and word of mouth keeps me working steadily.
It's partially knowing what belongs in the Root, Windows,System32 directories of a healthy system, and learning to recognized the polymorphed names of suspect files (hint--polymorphed files use random use random names, most legitimate files have vaguely recognizable titles). Anything I'm not sure of gets an all-caps "UNTRUST" in front of its name. Screws up the naughties, and it's easy to undo if it turns out (rarely) that the file is a needed one. Also, once you find one bad actor, you can use creation dates and file sizes to snag the others tucked away in more obscure places (and nuke all old System Restore points). Plus, they have to be called in order to do their wicked work. Who care if you have a hidden malware executable or.dll if there isn't anything around to call it? Polymorphs can't be activated remotely for the same reason they are hard to detect with signatures
Now, I don't do big networked corporate systems, and I don't advise customers with super-secret important data (especially financial data--I've refused jobs with accounting firms) to trust that I can make them perfectly safe. That would be bullshit.
But for normal users with normal installations and standard use patterns, a cleanout is often a very good solution.
I remove these things for about 50% of my living.
I used to see email viruses, CoolWebSearch, and other insta-installers. Now EVERY infection is a trojan.
They use compromised web ads on legitimate sites (I've personally seen pop-ups on websites for CNN and The Washington Post) and post recompiled versions en masse. It's the Zero-Day attack, where most anti-virus can't get definitions for the first 12-24 hours. Given how these folks blanket the web with their stolen ad spaces, they can hit a lot of people. $49.95 for every sucker they catch (assuming they don't also steal the credit card info--although I have not had any reports of this from the several infected people who have paid them and later came to me).
I've seen every flavor of anti-virus compromised. McAffee and Norton most often (the bad guys obviously target the biggest marketshare--plus folks who pay those two crap-sellers are the most gullible). But nothing can really protect against a competent Zero-Day attack.
The good news about this is that XP, Vista (and I assume) Windows 7 are no longer vulnerable to automated attacks. They need a couple of user clicks in order to bypass their unwillingness to install programs with Admin privileges. That's why everything is Trojans these days, at least for auto-updating systems.
Hasn't really cut down on the amount of infections, to my jaundiced eyes, however.
I've also seen my first 'infected' Macintosh (running Leopard 10.5). The infection consisted a link in the user startup that launched Safari and sent it to a website advising the user that they were infected. The site tried to download a windows executable, but that obviously didn't accomplish much.
I still got paid for deleting the link and about 8 executables, so no complaints.
The key to fixing Windows infections is to start with an offline scan on anther computer. Use at least two and preferably three anti-malware products, including MalAwareBytes. Windows Defender does a very good custom on a slave drive.
Afterwards, boot the (still infected) machine in Safe Mode and update it with the Spybot Includes file (get that from MajorGeeks). Scan the machine in Safe Mode. Spybot might not find as many nasties as it used to, but it is still very good at detecting compromised system settings. There's quite a bit more, including repairing damaged system files and such, but the best first step is an offline scan on a clean computer, and then a Safe Mode scan with Spybot. After that, you can most likely use the computer to clean up traces on its own.
I have heard these Trojan pros are former KGB computer warfare people who lost their livelihoods when the former Soviet Union collapsed. Since they were trained messing up computers in the US, they just went ahead and kept doing what the knew best. A lot of the stuff seems to originate in poorly policed Eastern European servers.
I use the *buntu and Suse variants of Linux on a daily basis. Unless this offers any real advantage I won't move to it even it I purchase a netbook with it I would probably format and load Ubuntu on it.
And YOU are the last person Google is trying to get as a user for the Chrome OS. You're already in the Open Source boat, and in fact, you're helping row!
Google can make a big difference if they provide a lightweight OS that runs on cheap equipment and gets the user decent Web functionality. Get their email(GMail), their Facebook, their YouTube and their free Flash games. And get all the advertising that goes with it.
Maybe even write some papers and share photos with friends (store said content in the Cloud and never lose their stuff).
Currently, Charter Communications (Boo!) a big Evil ISP, doesn't even support Windows 98se, Windows Millenium, and Windows 2000 computers. They don't support Mac OS9 or Linux either. If one of their customers calls up their tech support for any of these operating systems, they say "Sorry, not supported, can't help you".
Even though every one of these OSs are perfectly capable of connecting to Charter's high-speed connections and using their POP email clients. I set em' up all the time. Works great.
But ask Charter and they say "Sorry, not supported. Click."
Chrome OS, from Google, and with a simple set of instructions for email and ISP connections (phone droid scripts) instantly gets over this major hurdle for computer doofuses (Gawd luv em'). A single Chrome OS, based on Linux, can be the gold standard for the unwashed masses, that gets them out of the clutches of Micro$oft and $teve Jobs (for case designers) (BTW, I luv Steve, have used Apples since the Apple II, and own Apple stock--but a lot of folks resist giving up the coin needed to get that first Apple computer).
If Google pulls off a lightweight OS with the core functionality "the folks" need, that can run on the cheap hardware that is currently choking our landfills, it will be huge. HHHUUUUUUUUUGGGGGEEEE! {/Donald Trump}
I've been a Charter customer here in Wisconsin for over 6 years. It's for my business. Just high-speed internet, no TV or phone service. I've been quite happy with the service and reliability.
I have DSL from our local phone company. I am less satisfied with the phone company service in terms of both reliability and service. For example, the phone company issues passwords to customers and won't let them change it. That's supposed to improve security, but it really means customers write the passwords on their monitors, or have Windows remember it, and when the computer needs service or replacing, they have no idea what their passwords are.
As a long time Mac guy, and Green Bay Packers fan, I have no love for Paul Allen. But I don't hate Charter.
I read the article. They boasted they could reflash the BIOS every time the computer boots.
"It was very easy. We can put the code wherever we want," said Ortega. "We're not using a vulnerability in any way. I'm not sure if you understand the impact of this. We can reinfect the BIOS every time it reboots."
That's not preventing me from cleaning the BIOS by reflashing it. That's infecting the bios from the hard drive to continue an infection.
If you wipe the hard drive, the malware returns through the BIOS. If you flash the BIOS, the malware is rewritten through from the hard drive at boot. That's probably why they're working on a rootkit to hide the hard drive half. Make it a lot harder to eradicate.
However, my standard procedure is to pull a hard drive out of the infected computer first and scan it as a slave. That disables the vast majority of malware protections. If this exploit showed up in the wild, then after detecting it, I would also have to reflash the BIOS (not just wipe user settings with the jumper) before putting the hard drive back into the computer and finishing the cleanup. One more thing to do, but nobody said malware cleanup was supposed to be easy.
One other question I have is what type of machine this thing is infecting? They name three operating systems, but don't mention whether it was different motherboards/BIOSes. If the bad guys have to write hardware-specific code bits for every different manufacturer (and every new BIOS), they're the ones who will be working harder.
Why land a spacecraft on it at all? Put a couple of particle beams on the poles of the Moon, and use them to push any asteroids into safe orbits.
Tune the beam so it is slightly greater then the diameter of the asteroid, and you get rid of the problem of spinning, or dealing with spin. Just push it with a stream of charged particles, it can rotate if it wants to. Its orbit will still change in response to force applied in a particular direction and since we're talking about microns of change, you don't need to send that much power through a vacuum--we're trying to shift it, not vaporize it.
Since the Particle Beams wouldn't have to be that powerful, that would help allay fears of the Moon Space Weapon being seized by terra'ists and used to fry our precious bodily fluids.
Would go along nicely with polar Moon bases for Lunar telescope installations, since the infrastructure could do double duty, and the particle beams would hardly, if ever, be used, so they would interfere with observations.
Next step: Profit!
I have a guy who takes electronic scrap (he really likes boards) and smelts them down for the metals.
He's not fond of monitors, but will take a few dead ones with each load. He puts them into the back seats and trunks of cars he's crushing for scrap.
Seems like a pretty good solution to me. The big scrap smelters can make good use of the copper yoke metal, and they must already get a lot of other electronic scrap from the stuff built into cars, so I'm pretty sure they can separate out the heavy metal elements for reuse.
Of course we talk to our kids about right and wrong and what is savory and unsavory. And I am proud of their judgment in that regard (my kids are 10 and 12 years old).
We also choose not to have cable television in our house, and restrict general TV viewing. We do get DVDs and watch them with our kids (I just returned my first Netflix DVD on the way to my shop).
Part of parenting is deciding what kinds of media children should and should not have access to. Sex is one thing, but snuff videos and autopsy and war dead photos are even more disturbing. I've seen things on the internet (some linked from here, so we can skip the obligatory Goatse post) that still haunt my subconscious. I don't want my 10 and 12 year old to have that access because some nitwit neighbor has an open network they could access when we're not home and our computers are locked out.
Blah, blah, blah (Oh, yeah, please enter your administrator password here:__________________, and your Windows XP Key here:_____ _______ _______ ________ _______, then copy this line to an email and send it to me. After verifying your entry, I will send you free naked pix of Brittany and Paris*)
Much silly discussion of the difference between a trojan and a virus, and comparisons of stupidity between Mac, Windows and Linux users. Yawn. Worthless, under the circumstances.
Here's the most important thing. How hard is it to remove from the machine? Will the OS require wiping to remove it? Will expensive software have to be purchased to clean it off?
The biggest problem with Windows Malware isn't just that there is so much of it--it's that it is such a PITA to remove once somebody screws up and gets their machine infected. Well, actually, that may not be such a problem. I get a lot of business cleaning off malware on Windows machines.
*The naked pix will be of the designated geographical regions of France, using Google Earth--what were you thinking I was going to send?
"My personal thought was perhaps this is really a pair of orbiting black holes, but another poster pointed out that ternary systems are unlikely to impossible with massive stars, and further reading on the system indicates that the companion star is regularly eclipsed by the black hole. If there were a second black hole, the eclipse pattern should be distinct enough to tell."
If the black hole in question is currently orbiting a regular star, then apparently something can survive a nova explosion in the gravitational vicinity. So why not some supermassive planets? Maybe they were orbiting at large radiuses, survived the explosion with much of their mass intact, and then, with their orbits knocked into highly elliptical patterns by the nova, were eventually consumed by the parent black hole (perhaps after hoovering up a lot of the original ejecta from the nova?).
Just saying. We got prima facie evidence that stuff (a companion star) can hang around after a nova explosion (or the resulting black hole can migrate into the vicinity of stuff/stars, which is basically the same thing). So why not assume a normal stellar black hole formation (10 solar masses) that just got lucky and wandered into an area with lots of stuff to pick up?
Windows 95 was superior in every way to 3.1. Same way that Windows NT/2000/XP was a major jump in architecture over Windows 98se/ME (MicroKernel, NTFS support for large files).
Upgrading required some effort and carried some risks, but when you were done, you could do stuff you couldn't ever do before! That drove new adopters.
Vista offers us nothing but lipstick on Windows XP. The slightly improved (and majorly annoying) security model and improved memory usage are OK, but they don't make any possible that isn't already there for Windows XP. And the hardware burden is obscene.
I'm making good money putting together machines for non-business customers who want XP on a new machine. I just went through huge hoops to get XP installed on a couple of Toshiba laptops, because they don't have any XP drivers available.
People are only moving to Vista because they are being forced to. By a Monopoly.
"In point of fact, Bill Clinton was impeached and disbarred for the same crime."
No. Clinton was not ever accused of Perjury in any court. The Perjury charge was soundly defeated in Senate, even with a majority of Republicans seated. The Obstruction of Justice charge also failed to get a majority in the Republican Senate. The only thing Clinton was accused of in court was Contempt of Court for failing to testify truthfully. Clinton cut a deal for that charge, which would have been tough to prove, since the lawyers questioning Clinton under oath never asked him straight up questions about what they knew he had done.
For example "Mr Clinton, did you ejaculate on Monica Lewinsky's dress?" "Did Monica Lewinsky touch your penis with her mouth?" "Did you touch Monica Lewinsky's vagina with a cigar?"
They knew all these things had happened, because of Linda Tripp's blabbing (not completely sure Tripp knew about the cigar). They could have asked those questions directly and established the facts of Lewinsky's and Clinton's relationship for the civil court. They did not do these things. Instead, they asked highly circular and vague questions that barely, if at all, touched on the situation. "Were you ever alone with Monica Lewinsky? "No" (I was on the phone with Yasser Arafat while she sucked my dick).
The lawyers asked these questions in this odd fashion because they weren't interested in establishing the truth of the matter. As was later ruled by the judge in the case, Clinton's canoodling with Monica had no bearing on the Paula Jones case. Clinton didn't supervise Monica officially, and never did anything official that affected Lewinsky's White House responsibilities. The lawyers were already in substantial possession of the details of what Clinton and Lewinsky did, but did not seek to confirm those detail in a straightforward fashion.
The lawyers asked vague questions because they were hoping to trap the President into Lying Under Oath to avoid revealing politically and personally embarrassing details. If they had asked direct, yes or no questions about the specific behavior they already knew about, Clinton would have realized they had a source, and not tried to weasel his way out of admitting his infidelities. He would have 'fessed up and avoided a big chunk of trouble, although when the lawyers for Jones illegally leaked details of his testimony Clinton would have suffered serious political damage.
But, Clinton was a pretty good lawyer himself, and knew how to parse the truth. Using a dictionary definition, he did not have "sex" with Lewinsky. As far as the touching with intent to arouse, etc., I think a pretty strong defense could have been made that time and personal feelings of shame had clouded Clinton's memory regarding the specific 'blow-by-blow' activities with Lewinsky*. There is no guarantee a charge of Lying Under Oath would have succeeded. I myself doubt it. But there is no question that the process of beating the charge would have been a humiliating one for Bill, and I completely understand his decision to pay a fine and surrender his law license to put it behind him.
Not like he needs to try cases anymore to make a living.
Scooter Libby was tried and convicted of Perjury and Obstruction of Justice. He was accused by a Republican Prosecutor, convicted by a highly sympathetic jury and sentenced by a Republican Judge. No one attempted to entrap or deceive him to get the conviction. The crimes Libby committed had direct bearing and relation to his duties and responsibilities as a Cabinet Officer. Libby continues to cover up the criminality of his superiors, and has just had his sentence commuted to enable him to keep covering up that criminality.
Clinton screwed up. Libby is a convicted criminal. George Bush Jr and Dick Cheney are criminals.
*Scooter Libby tried a similar defense, with less time for forgetting and an amazing ability to remember false details that never happened.
"I once attended a symposium where this lead astronomer from Harvard (I think it was) spoke. It's been so many years ago. Anyhow, he lectured on some molocule discovered and how if not for this single thing there would never have been life on earth. He went on to discuss the near impossibility of it existing by chance, and then went on to admit it had moved him, for the first time ever, toward a theistic belief."
But for some reason, this Harvard scientist has never bothered to write a paper and submit it for peer review to detail the particulars of this miraculous molecule. A solid piece of science that The Discovery Institute and other pseudo-science myth shops could publish and trumpet as real science.
But he failed to do so. Probably because, as an astronomer, he doesn't really know squat about miraculous molecules. Just another meaningless anecdote.
I personally believe in an existing or potential higher power, and The Tao. I do not, however, make the claim that my belief is in any way scientific. It isn't. Science is based on fact and human understanding of what those facts mean. I believe the ways of a higher power are greater than human understanding, and don't believe we will find their plain writ in the physical world.
Maybe one day, if we don't wipe ourselves out, we'll evolve to the point where we are more in tune with the higher power and can actually understand it. I don't claim to know.
Until then, my motto is to live according to the desires of my heart, using the tool of my mind. And not delude myself that I have all the answers of Creation, or that those answers are in a book scribbled by barbaric goat-herders or modern navel-gazers. What I believe (heart) and what I know (brain) are two different arenas. I prefer not to confuse them.
"The new Windows Display Drive Model in Vista, which underlies Aero, is a lot more than just a pretty shell. Microsoft have been working with the graphics hardware manufacturers to enable GPUs to be virtualised/managed by the OS, in the way that CPUs have long been, i.e. through virtual memory and interruptability (for scheduling)."
Uh, huh. This is probably a great idea, but unless I read it incorrectly, it also puts the OS in charge of the GPU. Which may be very good if the OS is hitting on all cylinders and driving the GPU briskly. But it also seems like OS problems will immediately be experienced as GPU stalls and errors.
In other words, we may have added a layer of complexity to the GPU subsystem, and introduced opportunities for sub-optimal utilization, particularly on equipment designed pre-Vista. This could account for the problems that are being reported quite frequently, when it would seem like video performance in Vista should be better.
My experience with Vista on customers' computers is universally negative. I dislike the interface, find performance excessively slow, and especially dislike the way networking and wizards are set up. Just my experience.
P.S. Another dumb idea. Is the Aero interface still accessing the GPU when the User is trying to play WOW or some other game? Does the Display Drive Model drop out, or continue to try to access the GPU? I seem to remember a similar problem with games way back when Windows 95/98 came out. Games like Doom wanted total GPU control, and couldn't get it without dropping everything on the machine straight into DOS. Maybe we've got something analogous happening with Vista?
Thanks for the link to the air car--seems very cool to me, and I think cars are the least exciting use for air power.
Think of wind power that--instead of using lossy conversion of mechanical power to electricity, which has to be transported somewhere and is hard to store--uses compressed air directly, and stores it in big tanks (which are not bombs, as intelligent posters, and decades of experience with SCUBA tanks has shown).
Imagine a farm, where the farmer pulls his tractor, or Combine, up to the air tap (run from his windmill) and fills up to go and plow, harvest, whatever that back forty. Imagine that the same compressed air runs a generator to power his house (and air-condition it). Imagine heating same house in the winter with the waste heat that results when air is compressed (just need a thermal sink, basically a big slab of masonry to store the heat for a heat exchanger).
Imagine massive rows of windmills in South Dakota, the Saudi Arabia of wind, compressing air that is transported in high pressure pipelines (easier to build than hydrogen pipes) to centralized industrial centers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Where the power runs cleanly and predictably, backed up by big storage tanks. Big power plants can be built in anyone's backyard, since their only output is extra air and cooling (put a cold sink for one of these on Lake Superior, to help counteract the current warming caused by climate damage).
Will it work everywhere? Probably not. But we could take some big chunks of our current power needs off the Carbon grid and put it into wind.
Viva compressed air!
P.S. For the inevitable trolls, remember we already handle liquid nitrogen in industrial quantities without ever hearing about disasters caused by exploding tanker trucks, etc. Counter that with the recent total destruction of an access bridge in Oakland caused by a single tanker hitting an abutment and burning. Nothing is totally safe, but compressed air power can be made much safer than energy relying on combustion. And it is inherently more efficient, since there is no state changes involved. Air get squeezed, air expands.
I do this all the time to clean used keyboards in my computer shop before selling them (I buy a lot of surplus computers from our local university).
Hold the keyboard upside down, and give it a light spraying with Windex (or any other generic glass cleaner containing Ammonia, but not abrasives). Hold it for about 30 seconds to let the Windex work on the greasy fingerprints, then wipe down the keys with a nice soft terrycloth towel. Wipe from several different directions to get all sides of the keys.
Voila! Looks great. Holding it upside down keeps the Windex from running into the works where I suppose it would cause corrosion.
As far as other equipment go, I pretty routinely douse entire laptops in fresh water when they've had Cola, coffee or beer spilled into them (or in a couple of cases, they're back from Iraq, and full of sand and grit). I remove the keyboards, CDROMS and hard drives, along with the batteries and speakers, and stick them in the sink under warm water. After a good vigorous swishing, I rinse them with distilled water and use compressed air to blow out all the droplets possible.
Then I sit them under a fan for a couple of days, turning them every few hours to let trapped water drain out. After two day, reassemble and restart.
Works every time. I learned the basic principle as a RADAR technician in the Marine Corps. It was standard procedure for electronics that get splashed with salt water during carrier operations.
I live in Wisconsin, which is one of the largest producer of paper in the country. I have known people who work in the business of cutting down the trees from which much pulp paper is made.
They're Poplars. Young Poplars, 10-15 years old. They cut em' down, and grow em' back. Poplar bark is easy to shuck off, and the wood is very white, which cuts down on the bleach needed.
I agree about recycling paper. I think it is silly, from a carbon footprint standpoint. What I think we should do is to gather waste paper, heat it anaerobically to boil off the flammable methane and methanol (use that to run the process and create extra energy) and use the remaining carbon to build a mountain (Wisconsin is a great place, but we don't have any actual mountains). I don't know how hard it is to turn charcoal into graphite, but if it isn't too hard, then we really need a mountain somewhere just west of the Fox River Valley. We also have a lot of PCB polluted sediment in the Fox river (from old paper mills, among other things) which needs a long, long, term home. I think that sediment would make a good center of the Wisconsin Mountain, and could be nicely walled off and isolated by giant blocks of graphite, which would form a huge carbon sink.
So toss that paper into the waste stream, and lets build a new green mountain out of charcoal and polluted sediment in Wisconsin!
Hmmm, maybe I gotta work on that slogan a little bit, but I've still always liked the idea...
"Did the submitter know this is/.? Plenty of us here think the answer is yes, and have been thinking that for a loooong time."
This was my first sub. I have been wondering about how Vista is catching on for personal reasons. I'm scared of the authorization process getting even more restrictive than at present--the current situation with XP is already making my business as a small computer repair shop more difficult. So I don't have much fondness for Vista.
I've also had a lot of customers saying they don't hear good things about Vista. Currently, they're the majority by far. So when I saw the report that Dell had backtracked on offering Vista-only, it seemed like a good time to see what others thought on the subject.
Hey, it's the only sub I ever got accepted, and it's being hit over and over. The section on New Coke dwarfed a lot of other discussion threads all by itself! And I'm picking up some pretty good tech tips from some of the submissions.
So, yeah, I'm way happy for how I set it up and how it's going.
Slashdot Mirror
We are in the same boat. I'm thinking about dropping the CD service, since we stream the large majority of our content from Netflix.
Starz going away isn't a killer, but it hurts. Better Watch Toy Story III while we still can!
I wish Netflix would go to a Streaming/2DVD per month package for like $12/month. We only use the mailers to get the most obscure content that Netflix only seems to carry (we have "The Mask of Zorro" with Errol Flynn right now).
Usually takes two weeks to get the family together to watch a DVD, especially during a school year. A package that limited the number of 90 postage charges Netflix got per month to two might hold subscribers and preserve their bottom line.
I propose using USB!!
However, I propose having USB access on removable PCI cards, or some similar removable interface. Keep the cards locked up unless you are doing an update.
Sure, a very stupid user could go buy a USB card to play his collection of Lady Gaga hits in the reactor control mainframe, but he's probably more likely to buy a USB player instead of going to the trouble of installing a card and rebooting the system.
A process engineer I used to work for had a Golden Rule: Design the work space so that doing things right is the easiest way to do it.
"Your lose."
Oh, fer de Cry Eye! That's "You're lose"!
Try and hold it together here, people!
http://www.finkelsteinthompson.com/investigation/hp_laptop_wireless_failure_investigation.php
Isn't just wireless that dies--it just dies first. The whole laptop follows.
Same problem is happening with HP and Compaqs Slimline desktops. Just had one of those in here with an identical problem. DOA. Fortunately I found the customer is entitled to a 12 month extension on his original warrantee. Runs out December 31.
Beware!
I'm not at all certain this is a nVidia problem so much as HP trying to cram a high performance graphic chip onto a motherboard without adequate heat dissipation. But it's a very real problem.
I clean multiple infected systems every week. I do it for individuals in my little bitty computer shop. They don't have images or good backups (or even their install CD a lot of the time).
.dll if there isn't anything around to call it? Polymorphs can't be activated remotely for the same reason they are hard to detect with signatures
I have a very good record of cleaning people's machines without resorting to a wipe (sometimes, you have to, because the system is so damaged). I don't get many people coming back quickly with renewed infections (amazing what having a properly patched machine with basic anti-malware software installed can do). I don't advertise, and word of mouth keeps me working steadily.
It's partially knowing what belongs in the Root, Windows,System32 directories of a healthy system, and learning to recognized the polymorphed names of suspect files (hint--polymorphed files use random use random names, most legitimate files have vaguely recognizable titles). Anything I'm not sure of gets an all-caps "UNTRUST" in front of its name. Screws up the naughties, and it's easy to undo if it turns out (rarely) that the file is a needed one. Also, once you find one bad actor, you can use creation dates and file sizes to snag the others tucked away in more obscure places (and nuke all old System Restore points). Plus, they have to be called in order to do their wicked work. Who care if you have a hidden malware executable or
Now, I don't do big networked corporate systems, and I don't advise customers with super-secret important data (especially financial data--I've refused jobs with accounting firms) to trust that I can make them perfectly safe. That would be bullshit.
But for normal users with normal installations and standard use patterns, a cleanout is often a very good solution.
I remove these things for about 50% of my living. I used to see email viruses, CoolWebSearch, and other insta-installers. Now EVERY infection is a trojan.
They use compromised web ads on legitimate sites (I've personally seen pop-ups on websites for CNN and The Washington Post) and post recompiled versions en masse. It's the Zero-Day attack, where most anti-virus can't get definitions for the first 12-24 hours. Given how these folks blanket the web with their stolen ad spaces, they can hit a lot of people. $49.95 for every sucker they catch (assuming they don't also steal the credit card info--although I have not had any reports of this from the several infected people who have paid them and later came to me).
I've seen every flavor of anti-virus compromised. McAffee and Norton most often (the bad guys obviously target the biggest marketshare--plus folks who pay those two crap-sellers are the most gullible). But nothing can really protect against a competent Zero-Day attack.
The good news about this is that XP, Vista (and I assume) Windows 7 are no longer vulnerable to automated attacks. They need a couple of user clicks in order to bypass their unwillingness to install programs with Admin privileges. That's why everything is Trojans these days, at least for auto-updating systems.
Hasn't really cut down on the amount of infections, to my jaundiced eyes, however.
I've also seen my first 'infected' Macintosh (running Leopard 10.5). The infection consisted a link in the user startup that launched Safari and sent it to a website advising the user that they were infected. The site tried to download a windows executable, but that obviously didn't accomplish much.
I still got paid for deleting the link and about 8 executables, so no complaints.
The key to fixing Windows infections is to start with an offline scan on anther computer. Use at least two and preferably three anti-malware products, including MalAwareBytes. Windows Defender does a very good custom on a slave drive.
Afterwards, boot the (still infected) machine in Safe Mode and update it with the Spybot Includes file (get that from MajorGeeks). Scan the machine in Safe Mode. Spybot might not find as many nasties as it used to, but it is still very good at detecting compromised system settings. There's quite a bit more, including repairing damaged system files and such, but the best first step is an offline scan on a clean computer, and then a Safe Mode scan with Spybot. After that, you can most likely use the computer to clean up traces on its own.
I have heard these Trojan pros are former KGB computer warfare people who lost their livelihoods when the former Soviet Union collapsed. Since they were trained messing up computers in the US, they just went ahead and kept doing what the knew best. A lot of the stuff seems to originate in poorly policed Eastern European servers.
And YOU are the last person Google is trying to get as a user for the Chrome OS. You're already in the Open Source boat, and in fact, you're helping row!
Google can make a big difference if they provide a lightweight OS that runs on cheap equipment and gets the user decent Web functionality. Get their email(GMail), their Facebook, their YouTube and their free Flash games. And get all the advertising that goes with it.
Maybe even write some papers and share photos with friends (store said content in the Cloud and never lose their stuff).
Currently, Charter Communications (Boo!) a big Evil ISP, doesn't even support Windows 98se, Windows Millenium, and Windows 2000 computers. They don't support Mac OS9 or Linux either. If one of their customers calls up their tech support for any of these operating systems, they say "Sorry, not supported, can't help you".
Even though every one of these OSs are perfectly capable of connecting to Charter's high-speed connections and using their POP email clients. I set em' up all the time. Works great.
But ask Charter and they say "Sorry, not supported. Click."
Chrome OS, from Google, and with a simple set of instructions for email and ISP connections (phone droid scripts) instantly gets over this major hurdle for computer doofuses (Gawd luv em'). A single Chrome OS, based on Linux, can be the gold standard for the unwashed masses, that gets them out of the clutches of Micro$oft and $teve Jobs (for case designers) (BTW, I luv Steve, have used Apples since the Apple II, and own Apple stock--but a lot of folks resist giving up the coin needed to get that first Apple computer).
If Google pulls off a lightweight OS with the core functionality "the folks" need, that can run on the cheap hardware that is currently choking our landfills, it will be huge. HHHUUUUUUUUUGGGGGEEEE! {/Donald Trump}
I've been a Charter customer here in Wisconsin for over 6 years. It's for my business. Just high-speed internet, no TV or phone service. I've been quite happy with the service and reliability.
I have DSL from our local phone company. I am less satisfied with the phone company service in terms of both reliability and service. For example, the phone company issues passwords to customers and won't let them change it. That's supposed to improve security, but it really means customers write the passwords on their monitors, or have Windows remember it, and when the computer needs service or replacing, they have no idea what their passwords are.
As a long time Mac guy, and Green Bay Packers fan, I have no love for Paul Allen. But I don't hate Charter.
That's not preventing me from cleaning the BIOS by reflashing it. That's infecting the bios from the hard drive to continue an infection.
If you wipe the hard drive, the malware returns through the BIOS. If you flash the BIOS, the malware is rewritten through from the hard drive at boot. That's probably why they're working on a rootkit to hide the hard drive half. Make it a lot harder to eradicate.
However, my standard procedure is to pull a hard drive out of the infected computer first and scan it as a slave. That disables the vast majority of malware protections. If this exploit showed up in the wild, then after detecting it, I would also have to reflash the BIOS (not just wipe user settings with the jumper) before putting the hard drive back into the computer and finishing the cleanup. One more thing to do, but nobody said malware cleanup was supposed to be easy.
One other question I have is what type of machine this thing is infecting? They name three operating systems, but don't mention whether it was different motherboards/BIOSes. If the bad guys have to write hardware-specific code bits for every different manufacturer (and every new BIOS), they're the ones who will be working harder.
Why land a spacecraft on it at all? Put a couple of particle beams on the poles of the Moon, and use them to push any asteroids into safe orbits.
Tune the beam so it is slightly greater then the diameter of the asteroid, and you get rid of the problem of spinning, or dealing with spin. Just push it with a stream of charged particles, it can rotate if it wants to. Its orbit will still change in response to force applied in a particular direction and since we're talking about microns of change, you don't need to send that much power through a vacuum--we're trying to shift it, not vaporize it.
Since the Particle Beams wouldn't have to be that powerful, that would help allay fears of the Moon Space Weapon being seized by terra'ists and used to fry our precious bodily fluids.
Would go along nicely with polar Moon bases for Lunar telescope installations, since the infrastructure could do double duty, and the particle beams would hardly, if ever, be used, so they would interfere with observations. Next step: Profit!
I talked to a guy last week who got the pre-release service pack.
He said Vista really sucks before applying the Service Pack, and is pretty OK after applying it.
He is also more of a Linux/Unix sort of guy, so I don't think he was spewing Fanboi.
They sure need to do something with Vista.
I have a guy who takes electronic scrap (he really likes boards) and smelts them down for the metals. He's not fond of monitors, but will take a few dead ones with each load. He puts them into the back seats and trunks of cars he's crushing for scrap. Seems like a pretty good solution to me. The big scrap smelters can make good use of the copper yoke metal, and they must already get a lot of other electronic scrap from the stuff built into cars, so I'm pretty sure they can separate out the heavy metal elements for reuse.
Of course we talk to our kids about right and wrong and what is savory and unsavory. And I am proud of their judgment in that regard (my kids are 10 and 12 years old).
We also choose not to have cable television in our house, and restrict general TV viewing. We do get DVDs and watch them with our kids (I just returned my first Netflix DVD on the way to my shop).
Part of parenting is deciding what kinds of media children should and should not have access to. Sex is one thing, but snuff videos and autopsy and war dead photos are even more disturbing. I've seen things on the internet (some linked from here, so we can skip the obligatory Goatse post) that still haunt my subconscious. I don't want my 10 and 12 year old to have that access because some nitwit neighbor has an open network they could access when we're not home and our computers are locked out.
It isn't all of one or all of another.
Blah, blah, blah (Oh, yeah, please enter your administrator password here:__________________, and your Windows XP Key here:_____ _______ _______ ________ _______, then copy this line to an email and send it to me. After verifying your entry, I will send you free naked pix of Brittany and Paris*)
Much silly discussion of the difference between a trojan and a virus, and comparisons of stupidity between Mac, Windows and Linux users. Yawn. Worthless, under the circumstances.
Here's the most important thing. How hard is it to remove from the machine? Will the OS require wiping to remove it? Will expensive software have to be purchased to clean it off?
No. A bit of Terminal work will suffice. http://www.macworld.com/2007/10/firstlooks/trojanhorse/index.php. The guy who wrote this deliberately infected his machine and then cleaned it off.
The biggest problem with Windows Malware isn't just that there is so much of it--it's that it is such a PITA to remove once somebody screws up and gets their machine infected. Well, actually, that may not be such a problem. I get a lot of business cleaning off malware on Windows machines.
*The naked pix will be of the designated geographical regions of France, using Google Earth--what were you thinking I was going to send?
"My personal thought was perhaps this is really a pair of orbiting black holes, but another poster pointed out that ternary systems are unlikely to impossible with massive stars, and further reading on the system indicates that the companion star is regularly eclipsed by the black hole. If there were a second black hole, the eclipse pattern should be distinct enough to tell."
If the black hole in question is currently orbiting a regular star, then apparently something can survive a nova explosion in the gravitational vicinity. So why not some supermassive planets? Maybe they were orbiting at large radiuses, survived the explosion with much of their mass intact, and then, with their orbits knocked into highly elliptical patterns by the nova, were eventually consumed by the parent black hole (perhaps after hoovering up a lot of the original ejecta from the nova?).
Just saying. We got prima facie evidence that stuff (a companion star) can hang around after a nova explosion (or the resulting black hole can migrate into the vicinity of stuff/stars, which is basically the same thing). So why not assume a normal stellar black hole formation (10 solar masses) that just got lucky and wandered into an area with lots of stuff to pick up?
Windows 95 was superior in every way to 3.1. Same way that Windows NT/2000/XP was a major jump in architecture over Windows 98se/ME (MicroKernel, NTFS support for large files).
Upgrading required some effort and carried some risks, but when you were done, you could do stuff you couldn't ever do before! That drove new adopters.
Vista offers us nothing but lipstick on Windows XP. The slightly improved (and majorly annoying) security model and improved memory usage are OK, but they don't make any possible that isn't already there for Windows XP. And the hardware burden is obscene.
I'm making good money putting together machines for non-business customers who want XP on a new machine. I just went through huge hoops to get XP installed on a couple of Toshiba laptops, because they don't have any XP drivers available.
People are only moving to Vista because they are being forced to. By a Monopoly.
That really sucks.
"Start thrusters, take off, aim nose towards Andromeda, sit back and wait for two million years, find an airport, land."
You forgot something...
Profit!
"In point of fact, Bill Clinton was impeached and disbarred for the same crime."
No. Clinton was not ever accused of Perjury in any court. The Perjury charge was soundly defeated in Senate, even with a majority of Republicans seated. The Obstruction of Justice charge also failed to get a majority in the Republican Senate. The only thing Clinton was accused of in court was Contempt of Court for failing to testify truthfully. Clinton cut a deal for that charge, which would have been tough to prove, since the lawyers questioning Clinton under oath never asked him straight up questions about what they knew he had done.
For example "Mr Clinton, did you ejaculate on Monica Lewinsky's dress?" "Did Monica Lewinsky touch your penis with her mouth?" "Did you touch Monica Lewinsky's vagina with a cigar?"
They knew all these things had happened, because of Linda Tripp's blabbing (not completely sure Tripp knew about the cigar). They could have asked those questions directly and established the facts of Lewinsky's and Clinton's relationship for the civil court. They did not do these things. Instead, they asked highly circular and vague questions that barely, if at all, touched on the situation. "Were you ever alone with Monica Lewinsky? "No" (I was on the phone with Yasser Arafat while she sucked my dick).
The lawyers asked these questions in this odd fashion because they weren't interested in establishing the truth of the matter. As was later ruled by the judge in the case, Clinton's canoodling with Monica had no bearing on the Paula Jones case. Clinton didn't supervise Monica officially, and never did anything official that affected Lewinsky's White House responsibilities. The lawyers were already in substantial possession of the details of what Clinton and Lewinsky did, but did not seek to confirm those detail in a straightforward fashion.
The lawyers asked vague questions because they were hoping to trap the President into Lying Under Oath to avoid revealing politically and personally embarrassing details. If they had asked direct, yes or no questions about the specific behavior they already knew about, Clinton would have realized they had a source, and not tried to weasel his way out of admitting his infidelities. He would have 'fessed up and avoided a big chunk of trouble, although when the lawyers for Jones illegally leaked details of his testimony Clinton would have suffered serious political damage.
But, Clinton was a pretty good lawyer himself, and knew how to parse the truth. Using a dictionary definition, he did not have "sex" with Lewinsky. As far as the touching with intent to arouse, etc., I think a pretty strong defense could have been made that time and personal feelings of shame had clouded Clinton's memory regarding the specific 'blow-by-blow' activities with Lewinsky*. There is no guarantee a charge of Lying Under Oath would have succeeded. I myself doubt it. But there is no question that the process of beating the charge would have been a humiliating one for Bill, and I completely understand his decision to pay a fine and surrender his law license to put it behind him.
Not like he needs to try cases anymore to make a living.
Scooter Libby was tried and convicted of Perjury and Obstruction of Justice. He was accused by a Republican Prosecutor, convicted by a highly sympathetic jury and sentenced by a Republican Judge. No one attempted to entrap or deceive him to get the conviction. The crimes Libby committed had direct bearing and relation to his duties and responsibilities as a Cabinet Officer. Libby continues to cover up the criminality of his superiors, and has just had his sentence commuted to enable him to keep covering up that criminality.
Clinton screwed up. Libby is a convicted criminal. George Bush Jr and Dick Cheney are criminals.
*Scooter Libby tried a similar defense, with less time for forgetting and an amazing ability to remember false details that never happened.
Follow the link. Read the article. Thanks for posting it.
That is all...
"I once attended a symposium where this lead astronomer from Harvard (I think it was) spoke. It's been so many years ago. Anyhow, he lectured on some molocule discovered and how if not for this single thing there would never have been life on earth. He went on to discuss the near impossibility of it existing by chance, and then went on to admit it had moved him, for the first time ever, toward a theistic belief."
But for some reason, this Harvard scientist has never bothered to write a paper and submit it for peer review to detail the particulars of this miraculous molecule. A solid piece of science that The Discovery Institute and other pseudo-science myth shops could publish and trumpet as real science.
But he failed to do so. Probably because, as an astronomer, he doesn't really know squat about miraculous molecules. Just another meaningless anecdote.
I personally believe in an existing or potential higher power, and The Tao. I do not, however, make the claim that my belief is in any way scientific. It isn't. Science is based on fact and human understanding of what those facts mean. I believe the ways of a higher power are greater than human understanding, and don't believe we will find their plain writ in the physical world.
Maybe one day, if we don't wipe ourselves out, we'll evolve to the point where we are more in tune with the higher power and can actually understand it. I don't claim to know.
Until then, my motto is to live according to the desires of my heart, using the tool of my mind. And not delude myself that I have all the answers of Creation, or that those answers are in a book scribbled by barbaric goat-herders or modern navel-gazers. What I believe (heart) and what I know (brain) are two different arenas. I prefer not to confuse them.
"The new Windows Display Drive Model in Vista, which underlies Aero, is a lot more than just a pretty shell. Microsoft have been working with the graphics hardware manufacturers to enable GPUs to be virtualised/managed by the OS, in the way that CPUs have long been, i.e. through virtual memory and interruptability (for scheduling)."
Uh, huh. This is probably a great idea, but unless I read it incorrectly, it also puts the OS in charge of the GPU. Which may be very good if the OS is hitting on all cylinders and driving the GPU briskly. But it also seems like OS problems will immediately be experienced as GPU stalls and errors.
In other words, we may have added a layer of complexity to the GPU subsystem, and introduced opportunities for sub-optimal utilization, particularly on equipment designed pre-Vista. This could account for the problems that are being reported quite frequently, when it would seem like video performance in Vista should be better.
My experience with Vista on customers' computers is universally negative. I dislike the interface, find performance excessively slow, and especially dislike the way networking and wizards are set up. Just my experience.
P.S. Another dumb idea. Is the Aero interface still accessing the GPU when the User is trying to play WOW or some other game? Does the Display Drive Model drop out, or continue to try to access the GPU? I seem to remember a similar problem with games way back when Windows 95/98 came out. Games like Doom wanted total GPU control, and couldn't get it without dropping everything on the machine straight into DOS. Maybe we've got something analogous happening with Vista?
Thanks for the link to the air car--seems very cool to me, and I think cars are the least exciting use for air power.
Think of wind power that--instead of using lossy conversion of mechanical power to electricity, which has to be transported somewhere and is hard to store--uses compressed air directly, and stores it in big tanks (which are not bombs, as intelligent posters, and decades of experience with SCUBA tanks has shown).
Imagine a farm, where the farmer pulls his tractor, or Combine, up to the air tap (run from his windmill) and fills up to go and plow, harvest, whatever that back forty. Imagine that the same compressed air runs a generator to power his house (and air-condition it). Imagine heating same house in the winter with the waste heat that results when air is compressed (just need a thermal sink, basically a big slab of masonry to store the heat for a heat exchanger).
Imagine massive rows of windmills in South Dakota, the Saudi Arabia of wind, compressing air that is transported in high pressure pipelines (easier to build than hydrogen pipes) to centralized industrial centers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Where the power runs cleanly and predictably, backed up by big storage tanks. Big power plants can be built in anyone's backyard, since their only output is extra air and cooling (put a cold sink for one of these on Lake Superior, to help counteract the current warming caused by climate damage).
Will it work everywhere? Probably not. But we could take some big chunks of our current power needs off the Carbon grid and put it into wind.
Viva compressed air!
P.S. For the inevitable trolls, remember we already handle liquid nitrogen in industrial quantities without ever hearing about disasters caused by exploding tanker trucks, etc. Counter that with the recent total destruction of an access bridge in Oakland caused by a single tanker hitting an abutment and burning. Nothing is totally safe, but compressed air power can be made much safer than energy relying on combustion. And it is inherently more efficient, since there is no state changes involved. Air get squeezed, air expands.
I do this all the time to clean used keyboards in my computer shop before selling them (I buy a lot of surplus computers from our local university).
Hold the keyboard upside down, and give it a light spraying with Windex (or any other generic glass cleaner containing Ammonia, but not abrasives). Hold it for about 30 seconds to let the Windex work on the greasy fingerprints, then wipe down the keys with a nice soft terrycloth towel. Wipe from several different directions to get all sides of the keys.
Voila! Looks great. Holding it upside down keeps the Windex from running into the works where I suppose it would cause corrosion.
As far as other equipment go, I pretty routinely douse entire laptops in fresh water when they've had Cola, coffee or beer spilled into them (or in a couple of cases, they're back from Iraq, and full of sand and grit). I remove the keyboards, CDROMS and hard drives, along with the batteries and speakers, and stick them in the sink under warm water. After a good vigorous swishing, I rinse them with distilled water and use compressed air to blow out all the droplets possible.
Then I sit them under a fan for a couple of days, turning them every few hours to let trapped water drain out. After two day, reassemble and restart.
Works every time. I learned the basic principle as a RADAR technician in the Marine Corps. It was standard procedure for electronics that get splashed with salt water during carrier operations.
I live in Wisconsin, which is one of the largest producer of paper in the country. I have known people who work in the business of cutting down the trees from which much pulp paper is made.
They're Poplars. Young Poplars, 10-15 years old. They cut em' down, and grow em' back. Poplar bark is easy to shuck off, and the wood is very white, which cuts down on the bleach needed.
I agree about recycling paper. I think it is silly, from a carbon footprint standpoint. What I think we should do is to gather waste paper, heat it anaerobically to boil off the flammable methane and methanol (use that to run the process and create extra energy) and use the remaining carbon to build a mountain (Wisconsin is a great place, but we don't have any actual mountains). I don't know how hard it is to turn charcoal into graphite, but if it isn't too hard, then we really need a mountain somewhere just west of the Fox River Valley. We also have a lot of PCB polluted sediment in the Fox river (from old paper mills, among other things) which needs a long, long, term home. I think that sediment would make a good center of the Wisconsin Mountain, and could be nicely walled off and isolated by giant blocks of graphite, which would form a huge carbon sink.
So toss that paper into the waste stream, and lets build a new green mountain out of charcoal and polluted sediment in Wisconsin!
Hmmm, maybe I gotta work on that slogan a little bit, but I've still always liked the idea...
"Did the submitter know this is /.? Plenty of us here think the answer is yes, and have been thinking that for a loooong time."
This was my first sub. I have been wondering about how Vista is catching on for personal reasons. I'm scared of the authorization process getting even more restrictive than at present--the current situation with XP is already making my business as a small computer repair shop more difficult. So I don't have much fondness for Vista.
I've also had a lot of customers saying they don't hear good things about Vista. Currently, they're the majority by far. So when I saw the report that Dell had backtracked on offering Vista-only, it seemed like a good time to see what others thought on the subject.
Hey, it's the only sub I ever got accepted, and it's being hit over and over. The section on New Coke dwarfed a lot of other discussion threads all by itself! And I'm picking up some pretty good tech tips from some of the submissions.
So, yeah, I'm way happy for how I set it up and how it's going.
YMMV