By sending you a doc file your city is de-facto mandating that you buy MS office.
Or that you download the free Microsoft Word Viewer;)
Better yet, dsaklad or another local techie should contact them and offer to go show them how to save their docs as HTML, which Word has been able to do for years. That way the council can just email a link to the HTML minutes on the city's web site. 'Citizen participation, and all that.
City Council members generally aren't elected (or appointed) for their IT skills so they're probably mailing.DOC files out of ignorance, not malice or the Great Micro$oft Conspiracy.
...it's kind of a Rube-Goldberg device when there are robust IPSec and SSL implementations for just about every platform out there. For the infrequent connections mentioned in the article - server administration, employees submitting documents from unknown remote locations, etc. - the extra CPU overhead of IPSec or SSL wouldn't have a significant impact.
Of course, you could combine port knocking with packet- or session-encryption but if you've implemented that correctly then port knocking doesn't buy you much extra security IMO.
On Win2K and higher, you can split out the file system browsing from the desktop instance of Explorer.exe. Run Explorer and select Tools->Folder Options->View->"Launch folder windows in a separate process". It uses a little more memory but prevents a slow device from slowing down the rest of the GUI.
You're right, though; Explorer blocks waiting for I/O way more often than it ought to. Most of the multithreading in GUIs is pretty good on Windows, so I'm not sure why Explorer tends to block on floppy I/O, network I/O, etc. Fortunately, it usually doesn't affect other running apps.
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...it's kind of a Rube-Goldberg device when there are robust IPSec and SSL implementations for just about every platform out there. For the infrequent connections mentioned in the article - server administration, employees submitting documents from unknown remote locations, etc. - the extra CPU overhead of IPSec or SSL wouldn't have a significant impact.
Of course, you could combine port knocking with packet- or session-encryption but if you've implemented that correctly then port knocking doesn't buy you much extra security IMO.
On Win2K and higher, you can split out the file system browsing from the desktop instance of Explorer.exe. Run Explorer and select Tools->Folder Options->View->"Launch folder windows in a separate process". It uses a little more memory but prevents a slow device from slowing down the rest of the GUI.
You're right, though; Explorer blocks waiting for I/O way more often than it ought to. Most of the multithreading in GUIs is pretty good on Windows, so I'm not sure why Explorer tends to block on floppy I/O, network I/O, etc. Fortunately, it usually doesn't affect other running apps.