The pre-installed programs that Dell chose to include on its computer were almost certainly the cause of all these problems, and unloading these programs from the boot-up routine fixed the problems.
Dell does that to all their consumer level machines, one of the things that got me interested in building my own. I still remember the first time booting up a home built with an OEM OS disk, it was so clean. No AOL or other ISP's, no trialware and it booted so much faster.
Guess I'm a little surprised some users would be willing to reinstall the OS to get rid of the junk Dell loads their machines with at the expense of your time.
It costs a little more to build your own but you get such great components. And it doesn't come loaded with junkware.
He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
This is a surprise? The administration that ships people off to overseas prisons so they can be tortured, spies on his own citizens and labels it "necessary", let's the military spy on US citizens, holds suspects indefinitely with no charges and no access to a lawyer.
After all that anyone's surprised to find out they're investigating innocent Americans for requesting a suspicious book? Get real. How does this compare with all the atrocities you've already tolerated?
There's no lower limit to the behavior of this administration. The only difference now is the clueless 52% is starting to wake up to reality.
In my inexpert opinion, this sharp decline in CD sales is attributable to a general stagnation in popular music styles, the aforementioned competition from other kinds of entertainment, and perhaps also widespread disgust with the music cartel.
Quite right. Suing your customers and then expecting nothing to happen, makes you wonder what planet record executives really come from.
Gosh, let's see. 10 out 12 songs on a CD are crap. Most of the popular music all sounds the same. Suing their customers, including grandparents and single moms. Trying to buy legislation to put people in jail for downloading music. Price fixing for decades. Installing spyware on customer PC's without permission. Screwing the artist just as hard as the customer.
Yeah, definitely a deep mystery why CD sales are tanking.
the Republicans are going to attempting to beat the Democrats to the "the President's no friend" position on the political map.
Not going to happen. Anyone that tries to distance themselves from Bush is going to face ad after ad reminding voters that they supported every one of Bush's failed policies, supplemented with clips of them praising him at the Republican convention.
Bankruptcy give back to credit card companies
Terri Schaivo
Iraq
The budget deficit
Stem cell research
The Patriot Act
Spying on Americans
Leadership corruption
Haliburton
Taxpayer financed government propaganda
Valarie Plame
Jean Schmidt calling Murtha a coward (after taking big bucks from pharmaceutical companies and 10K from Delay's PAC)
Secret prisons
Oh, yeah. It's a big shit sandwich and the Republicans are going to get a big bite in every state, in every district, in every race. I'd bet Bush is in almost as many campaign commercials in '06 as he was in '04, just be a different party running them this time.
an international standard in 1999, helps customers in key market segments evaluate IT products when making software purchase decisions and contribute to higher levels of consumer confidence in IT product security,
Ouch! Oh, great. Now I have...Ouch!...monkies flying out of my butt. Ouch!
Just move to a semi-populated rural area where there is a lower crime rate with less prying police.
I live in one of those places and in some ways it's worse than a data rich urban area. If I go to the store they know me and will mention that they saw my wife in there this am, she had the pot roast for lunch and said she was going to her hair appointment.
Sooner or later you have to go to the co-op for something. After that someone will know you. The mail carrier knows where you live and what magazines you subscribe to. The police don't need to pry into your business because everyone already knows.
Thus, even if someone steals your username and password, they won't be able to get into your account unless they also use your computer and log in with your fingerprint.
And you won't be able to get to your own account from the office or a kiosk or the loaner laptop you got from tech support. But let them accidentally give it to the wrong person and your bank account will be paying off big time.
(In fact, with TPM, your bank wouldn't even need to ask for your username and password -- it would know you simply by the identification on your machine.)
Buy a computer on eBay and you might be surprised all the web sites opening up for you. You all know about how much information is left on excessed hard drives. This will be the mother load. Anything that's invisible to the user has to be juicy.
The chip permanently assigns a unique and permanent identifier to every computer before it leaves the factory and that identifier can't subsequently be changed.
Okay, one of you hot shots write a program that let's me watch what my chip is sending out. And then another one of you please write a spoofing routine that runs at the router. Okay, you can't change it at the machine, but as long as it's my router, then one of you smart people can whip out a program that either blocks it or spoofs it between here and the outside world.
Not to mention when you swap chips with another PC, like I do around here all the time.
The military people are going to have a fit about it, too. And the NSA, CIA and FBI, they're going to love knowing their agent PC's are being tracked individually. But it will definitely make finding stupid people a lot easier.
But yes, the audio CD created by iTunes is a conformant audio CD with no DRM restrictions. You can also burn MP3 CDs, which some stereos support. Once you've burned it to audio CD, you can rip it like any other audio CD.
Cool. Well, that puts a different spin on things. I understand compression loss. Unless it's really bad most times I can't hear it. I would've thought they'd cripple it somehow that it was really obvious.
Thanks for clearing that up. You can really make regular audio CD's from iTunes. Maybe I'll get the wife one for Xmas and play around with it.
You forgot to mention that when you buy that music off iTunes, the first thing it mentions is to burn it to Audio CD.
Fair enough. Answer one question for me. Can you rip the CD you burn to MP3 and transfer it to another file format and player? Can you play your iTunes music CD in the car?
Because if you can then I may change my mind about iTunes. Otherwise you're going to be dependent on iTunes to play your stuff 10 years from now and the mod is righteous. Who knows if Apple will even be here in ten years. Probably, but I don't want to trust my music to them. Or what if they say, "Well, you've had that song for four years, time to renew it for a nominal fee."? They can change the terms so maybe whoever buys it from Apple decides on new rules and you lose.
But I'd still rather have a CD than download directly from iTunes. Then I can move my material from device to device as the media changes.
It's mp3 this year but who knows what audio format is coming around next year? Are you going to be able to play your iTunes downloads 10 years from now?
I'm glad Apple is doing well with iTunes, but it's just not for me. I want a disk. I want a disk I can rip to the PC and portable device of my choosing whether it's on Windows, OSX or Linux. And I especially want to be able to find something that can still play that CD 10 years from now.
You put me in a bucket of water. Oh, that's nice. You could have at least made it warm water, but no. Oh, what's the point? I suppose I'll just lay here and drown. Hope that will make you feel good, drowning a poor hamster. Even if you pull me out of the bucket all I have to look forward to is running in a stupid wheel. I run and run and run but never get anywhere. And all I ever get to eat are pellets and water. Boy, there's a five star menu. It's all so pointless....
But Barrett said similar schemes in the past elsewhere in the world had failed and users would not be satisfied with the new machine's limited range of programs.
You mean like eMachines? I still have one of those chugging away out in the garage. What similar scheme would that be, Mr. Barrett?
I'm pretty happy with the range of programs available for my Linux machine. Not going to do much video editing on a $200.00 hand crank computer anyway. If they were available today, I'd buy one today. I could think of a lot of uses for a half-PDA, half-notebook type of device that could run anywhere, especially if it has a serial port or card slot.
Maybe that's part of the reason the last two PC's I've built are AMD's running Xandros. Just because Barrett lacks imagination doesn't mean there's a shortage in the rest of the world.
In most cases I have also locked myself out of the systems before walking in w/ the resignation letter.
That's good advice. If the company would like to keep you busy the last two weeks you're there they have the option to allow you back on the system with permissions appropriate to the remaining tasks. And you can have that discussion like adults...as far as your company is capable of acting like one. Most are.
Personally, I think it's a waste of money to boot IT people who offer notice, depending on the circumstances of course. The "A" list people who provide notice are not likely to be malicious. On many of the contracts I work notice is immaterial anyway. It takes them longer than two weeks to even start the paperwork to get a replacement on board. There won't be a hand-off, regardless of how much notice they get.
Because I'm strictly contract I adopt another strategy that involves keeping all my personal stuff in a box all the time. Every Friday I make sure everything that's mine is in the box. The first few times someone will walk in and ask if I'm quitting. After that it stands as a reminder that our relationship is by mutual consent. I know it seems counter-intuitive, that I'm seemingly hanging up a sign that says CUT BUDGET HERE but it has just the opposite effect. No manager has ever barked at me with the box sitting on the desk. Whenever contract cut backs are going to be announced, someone always makes an effort to come by and tell me in advance not to worry about the announcement this afternoon, that will only impact another department.
Pretty funny the number of times one of the head shed types will come through the office and ask if that person is quitting. Someone will explain that I'm a contractor and always keep my stuff in a box.
The majority of companies these days have very little loyalty to their employees. I'm just setting up a reminder that you only get as good as you give.
I think this is a good long term strategy by IBM. Before you can take on an entrenched monopoly, there has to be an alternative support structure in place. This appears to be IBM building that foundation of standards which will ultimately undermine MSFT's monopoly position.
Nice to see a company breaking out of the quarter-to-quarter mind set and building a long term strategy for their success. And, oh yeah, a lot of us will also benefit from the sea change.
if you are truly to clean a machine out, you're going to need to use like three - five of these...
And the wider body of MSFT users find this situation normal and acceptable? Just amazes me. Don't surf the internet with Windows! Keep a Linux machine with firefox around for browsing, email and chat. Don't leave the windows box connected to the internet for anything but updates and that behind a firewall.
MSFT should offer a web safe version called Windows Unplugged.
There was a story not long ago about ISP's telling Disney that if they wanted their content available to the ISP's customers, that Disney would have to pay them to deliver it.
So the middle-man trying to squeeze both sides. Charge the end user for the pipe, then charge the providers for putting stuff in the pipe. Nice work when you can get it.
Sounds more like the BellSouth CEO has been hitting the crack pipe. If he wasn't so high up the chain this would be a laugher, but this idiot is serious!
How is it possible to carry on a rational, rhetoric-free debate when even the summary is riddled with such a subjective premise?
I think one of the points would be that even having this discussion in the first place is staggering all by itself. An administration justifying police spying on the citizenry, maintaining secret prisons in foreign countries, awarding no bid contracts to their buddies in big business, arguing for torture, compromising our own anti-terror agents in the process misleading the country into war. Stripping away Constitutional protections to....what end? Some illusion of safety?
What I can't figure out is why anyone who calls themselves a conservative isn't screaming for this corrupt bunch to be rounded up and stashed in a cell awaiting trial on charges of treason. We could show them how the justice system is supposed to work by giving them access to a lawyer.
Or maybe you don't know what a conservative is supposed to be.
Don't just attack the message, smear the messenger.
We complain about not having good candidates to vote for, but what sane person is going to run for office in this sleazy poliical climate?
Yes, Mass. was proposing an open document format. That would make him a good choice as a keynote speaker at OSS conferences. And they break this on a weekend? This stinks like yesterday's diapers.
[b]First, the study says that Windows based Servers accounted for 37 percent in revenue. Now traditionally, Windows based systems are more expensive than Linux based systems,[/b]
Talk about Gartner making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If Linux is only a couple percentage points behind Windows servers on a [b]revenue[/b] basis it's Linux supporters who should be dancing in the streets. That's fantastic!
Crimeny, no wonder Ballmer comes flying in like some giant winged monkey every time there's talk of a big Linux conversion. They're scared...and should be.
It was a local restaurant supply center, last winter...maybe Jan/Feb time frame. Went in to ask about bulk vegetable oil and when I told them about the project they were the ones suggesting the recycled stuff. They said it was blended and filtered. They didn't call it recycled, they used another term...repacked, reblended...something like that. I didn't ask what other uses the oil had or if it could be used in food preparation again. They had it in rectangular metal 5 gallon cans and said they could get it by the drum and if I bought it 55 gallons at a time they'd waive the delivery charge. Which was a big relief to my wife who had nightmares about me hauling grease barrels around. It was a $1.20/gallon in the five gallon tins.
I still haven't been able to find an old diesel or had time to follow through on the project but I remember the price they quoted because I had them check to make sure it wasn't a mistake.
That was before Katrina so who knows. The commercial vegoil sites are full of companies looking for bulk vegetable oil for biodiesel projects. My short term project has shifted to getting a shell corn stove put in. Just don't have the time or mechanical skill for a car conversion.
It's a real pain in the ass getting that grease out of dumpsters...
When I was looking at a grease car kit I discovered recycled vegetable oil at a restaurant supply house for $1.20/gallon. My plan was to buy it in 55 gallon drums, which they'd deliver free.
Just wondered if there was a reason recycled oil wouldn't work? Because dumpster diving in grease barrels for waste oil doesn't really appeal to me either.
I'm happy to pay $1.20/gallon for someone else to handle the collection and filtering.
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Dell does that to all their consumer level machines, one of the things that got me interested in building my own. I still remember the first time booting up a home built with an OEM OS disk, it was so clean. No AOL or other ISP's, no trialware and it booted so much faster.
Guess I'm a little surprised some users would be willing to reinstall the OS to get rid of the junk Dell loads their machines with at the expense of your time.
It costs a little more to build your own but you get such great components. And it doesn't come loaded with junkware.
This is a surprise? The administration that ships people off to overseas prisons so they can be tortured, spies on his own citizens and labels it "necessary", let's the military spy on US citizens, holds suspects indefinitely with no charges and no access to a lawyer.
After all that anyone's surprised to find out they're investigating innocent Americans for requesting a suspicious book? Get real. How does this compare with all the atrocities you've already tolerated?
There's no lower limit to the behavior of this administration. The only difference now is the clueless 52% is starting to wake up to reality.
Quite right. Suing your customers and then expecting nothing to happen, makes you wonder what planet record executives really come from.
Gosh, let's see. 10 out 12 songs on a CD are crap. Most of the popular music all sounds the same. Suing their customers, including grandparents and single moms. Trying to buy legislation to put people in jail for downloading music. Price fixing for decades. Installing spyware on customer PC's without permission. Screwing the artist just as hard as the customer.
Yeah, definitely a deep mystery why CD sales are tanking.
Not going to happen. Anyone that tries to distance themselves from Bush is going to face ad after ad reminding voters that they supported every one of Bush's failed policies, supplemented with clips of them praising him at the Republican convention.
Bankruptcy give back to credit card companies
Terri Schaivo
Iraq
The budget deficit
Stem cell research
The Patriot Act
Spying on Americans
Leadership corruption
Haliburton
Taxpayer financed government propaganda
Valarie Plame
Jean Schmidt calling Murtha a coward (after taking big bucks from pharmaceutical companies and 10K from Delay's PAC)
Secret prisons
Oh, yeah. It's a big shit sandwich and the Republicans are going to get a big bite in every state, in every district, in every race. I'd bet Bush is in almost as many campaign commercials in '06 as he was in '04, just be a different party running them this time.
Ouch! Oh, great. Now I have...Ouch!...monkies flying out of my butt. Ouch!
I live in one of those places and in some ways it's worse than a data rich urban area. If I go to the store they know me and will mention that they saw my wife in there this am, she had the pot roast for lunch and said she was going to her hair appointment.
Sooner or later you have to go to the co-op for something. After that someone will know you. The mail carrier knows where you live and what magazines you subscribe to. The police don't need to pry into your business because everyone already knows.
It's really not any different, just lower tech.
And you won't be able to get to your own account from the office or a kiosk or the loaner laptop you got from tech support. But let them accidentally give it to the wrong person and your bank account will be paying off big time.
(In fact, with TPM, your bank wouldn't even need to ask for your username and password -- it would know you simply by the identification on your machine.)
Buy a computer on eBay and you might be surprised all the web sites opening up for you. You all know about how much information is left on excessed hard drives. This will be the mother load. Anything that's invisible to the user has to be juicy.
The chip permanently assigns a unique and permanent identifier to every computer before it leaves the factory and that identifier can't subsequently be changed.
Okay, one of you hot shots write a program that let's me watch what my chip is sending out. And then another one of you please write a spoofing routine that runs at the router. Okay, you can't change it at the machine, but as long as it's my router, then one of you smart people can whip out a program that either blocks it or spoofs it between here and the outside world.
Not to mention when you swap chips with another PC, like I do around here all the time.
The military people are going to have a fit about it, too. And the NSA, CIA and FBI, they're going to love knowing their agent PC's are being tracked individually. But it will definitely make finding stupid people a lot easier.
This is Passport all over again.
Cool. Well, that puts a different spin on things. I understand compression loss. Unless it's really bad most times I can't hear it. I would've thought they'd cripple it somehow that it was really obvious.
Thanks for clearing that up. You can really make regular audio CD's from iTunes. Maybe I'll get the wife one for Xmas and play around with it.
Fair enough. Answer one question for me. Can you rip the CD you burn to MP3 and transfer it to another file format and player? Can you play your iTunes music CD in the car?
Because if you can then I may change my mind about iTunes. Otherwise you're going to be dependent on iTunes to play your stuff 10 years from now and the mod is righteous. Who knows if Apple will even be here in ten years. Probably, but I don't want to trust my music to them. Or what if they say, "Well, you've had that song for four years, time to renew it for a nominal fee."? They can change the terms so maybe whoever buys it from Apple decides on new rules and you lose.
It's mp3 this year but who knows what audio format is coming around next year? Are you going to be able to play your iTunes downloads 10 years from now?
I'm glad Apple is doing well with iTunes, but it's just not for me. I want a disk. I want a disk I can rip to the PC and portable device of my choosing whether it's on Windows, OSX or Linux. And I especially want to be able to find something that can still play that CD 10 years from now.
lol. Don't hold back, Linus, tell us what you really think!
Hey, you didn't see any eligible warlocks in the movie, now did you? A few thousand years without getting laid, you'd be an icy bitch too.
You put me in a bucket of water. Oh, that's nice. You could have at least made it warm water, but no. Oh, what's the point? I suppose I'll just lay here and drown. Hope that will make you feel good, drowning a poor hamster. Even if you pull me out of the bucket all I have to look forward to is running in a stupid wheel. I run and run and run but never get anywhere. And all I ever get to eat are pellets and water. Boy, there's a five star menu. It's all so pointless....
You mean like eMachines? I still have one of those chugging away out in the garage. What similar scheme would that be, Mr. Barrett?
I'm pretty happy with the range of programs available for my Linux machine. Not going to do much video editing on a $200.00 hand crank computer anyway. If they were available today, I'd buy one today. I could think of a lot of uses for a half-PDA, half-notebook type of device that could run anywhere, especially if it has a serial port or card slot.
Maybe that's part of the reason the last two PC's I've built are AMD's running Xandros. Just because Barrett lacks imagination doesn't mean there's a shortage in the rest of the world.
That's good advice. If the company would like to keep you busy the last two weeks you're there they have the option to allow you back on the system with permissions appropriate to the remaining tasks. And you can have that discussion like adults...as far as your company is capable of acting like one. Most are.
Personally, I think it's a waste of money to boot IT people who offer notice, depending on the circumstances of course. The "A" list people who provide notice are not likely to be malicious. On many of the contracts I work notice is immaterial anyway. It takes them longer than two weeks to even start the paperwork to get a replacement on board. There won't be a hand-off, regardless of how much notice they get.
Because I'm strictly contract I adopt another strategy that involves keeping all my personal stuff in a box all the time. Every Friday I make sure everything that's mine is in the box. The first few times someone will walk in and ask if I'm quitting. After that it stands as a reminder that our relationship is by mutual consent. I know it seems counter-intuitive, that I'm seemingly hanging up a sign that says CUT BUDGET HERE but it has just the opposite effect. No manager has ever barked at me with the box sitting on the desk. Whenever contract cut backs are going to be announced, someone always makes an effort to come by and tell me in advance not to worry about the announcement this afternoon, that will only impact another department.
Pretty funny the number of times one of the head shed types will come through the office and ask if that person is quitting. Someone will explain that I'm a contractor and always keep my stuff in a box.
The majority of companies these days have very little loyalty to their employees. I'm just setting up a reminder that you only get as good as you give.
Nice to see a company breaking out of the quarter-to-quarter mind set and building a long term strategy for their success. And, oh yeah, a lot of us will also benefit from the sea change.
And the wider body of MSFT users find this situation normal and acceptable? Just amazes me. Don't surf the internet with Windows! Keep a Linux machine with firefox around for browsing, email and chat. Don't leave the windows box connected to the internet for anything but updates and that behind a firewall.
MSFT should offer a web safe version called Windows Unplugged.
Die, ActiveX, die!
So the middle-man trying to squeeze both sides. Charge the end user for the pipe, then charge the providers for putting stuff in the pipe. Nice work when you can get it.
Sounds more like the BellSouth CEO has been hitting the crack pipe. If he wasn't so high up the chain this would be a laugher, but this idiot is serious!
North Carolina threatens honest elections!
I think one of the points would be that even having this discussion in the first place is staggering all by itself. An administration justifying police spying on the citizenry, maintaining secret prisons in foreign countries, awarding no bid contracts to their buddies in big business, arguing for torture, compromising our own anti-terror agents in the process misleading the country into war. Stripping away Constitutional protections to....what end? Some illusion of safety?
What I can't figure out is why anyone who calls themselves a conservative isn't screaming for this corrupt bunch to be rounded up and stashed in a cell awaiting trial on charges of treason. We could show them how the justice system is supposed to work by giving them access to a lawyer.
Or maybe you don't know what a conservative is supposed to be.
We complain about not having good candidates to vote for, but what sane person is going to run for office in this sleazy poliical climate?
Yes, Mass. was proposing an open document format. That would make him a good choice as a keynote speaker at OSS conferences. And they break this on a weekend? This stinks like yesterday's diapers.
Talk about Gartner making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If Linux is only a couple percentage points behind Windows servers on a [b]revenue[/b] basis it's Linux supporters who should be dancing in the streets. That's fantastic!
Crimeny, no wonder Ballmer comes flying in like some giant winged monkey every time there's talk of a big Linux conversion. They're scared...and should be.
I still haven't been able to find an old diesel or had time to follow through on the project but I remember the price they quoted because I had them check to make sure it wasn't a mistake.
That was before Katrina so who knows. The commercial vegoil sites are full of companies looking for bulk vegetable oil for biodiesel projects. My short term project has shifted to getting a shell corn stove put in. Just don't have the time or mechanical skill for a car conversion.
When I was looking at a grease car kit I discovered recycled vegetable oil at a restaurant supply house for $1.20/gallon. My plan was to buy it in 55 gallon drums, which they'd deliver free.
Just wondered if there was a reason recycled oil wouldn't work? Because dumpster diving in grease barrels for waste oil doesn't really appeal to me either.
I'm happy to pay $1.20/gallon for someone else to handle the collection and filtering.