It may be that this time, Microsoft will Get It about security. But you'll forgive the rest of us if we don't get too excited until we actually see the things in operation.
Which is why there is the corrolary rule:
Only suckers install any Microsoft product prior to the first service pack.
We don't know anything about an unaltered timestream, where Cole never went back, for comparison purposes. However, thats part of the point of the movie... that there IS no alternate timeline.
Indeed, part of the "fun" of 12 Monkeys is that nothing Cole or Clair do can change the outcome of the coming plague. They can't stop it from happening, the only goal is to gather a pure sample so that the future's future can be changed.
Strip all attachments.
All of them. Don't process them, just ban them.
If you want to send a file, use ftp or send a link to a read-only http or smb/nfs share.
Love to... but not gonna happen with our users.
We settled on blocking all executable attachments (VBS, EXE, SCR, etc.).
You know, the extensions that 99.999% of users have no business reason to be sending to each other, but which are used by the viruses/worms to spread. Blocking those put a good damper on the amount of virus/worm mails that were getting through and was cheap CPU-wise.
Their system doesn't account for naps. I generally sleep from 3am-9am, and 6pm-8pm. Work for the man during the day. Take a nap to refresh yourself. Work for yourself at night. I've used this system on and off for a few years, and it works well.
Ugh... that's the exact sleep schedule that I'm trying to break!
I much prefer to fall asleep around 10pm and rise at 6am. I've always found it to be rather relaxing to have 2 hours in the morning to dop around prior to walking downstairs and logging in.
I can't because, only Seti has a client for my computers running OS/2. I'd like to move, but I won't until those other projects support my OS of choice.
Wow you're still running that? Er, I mean, way-to-go!
(This from a rabid OS/2 user, 2.0 2.1 and Warp 3... at least until NT 4 came out and was close enough to being as stable.)
I think it's time to dig that series out again... was good up until the last book where everything got all metaphysical. High-brow sci-fi it ain't, but still a good space opera read.
I'm complaining about the goddamned "extreme" surfing that will apparently be taking place in a battle that should be serious and epic, two former Jedi partners fighting each other in a conflict of Light and Dark Force!
Ah, but bonch-san, without the "extreme" surfing there would be no way to tie in the game where you have to surf through lava.
Dollars to donuts there will be a game that involves lava and surfing that is branded with the Star Wars trademark. And I'd lay further odds that there's already a contract or even lines of code already written. (Lucas' mantra: leave no tie-in dollar unclaimed.)
I realised this when I was looking for a 17" LCD for my dad. What I wanted was 1024x786, he doesn't need more pixels but bigger ones - his eyesight isn't that good any more.
On the 1400x1050 15" laptop display, I find that the regular font size is just too small for me to comfortably read anymore. Of course, I'm overdue for another trip to the eye-doc, so...
However, bumping up to Large Fonts / ClearType really improved the readability of the monitor at a normal distance. Then he can have a hobby of berating programmers and website designers who use fixed font sizes or controls that don't account for large fonts.
And there's a 1440x960 17" on mine. Aside from the laptop market, it is extremely difficult to find anything other than the following size/resolution combos:
Amen to that, I'd love a 17" LCD that did 1600x1200... I have a 1400x1050 15" on my laptop and the higher DPI is especially sweet when you switch to large fonts and ClearType. It results in a very crisp, easy to read display. The approximate DPI is around 124 or so (0.20mm dot pitch), compared to a measly 100dpi for a desktop LCD monitor (0.254mm dot pitch).
I'm especially jealous of those with the 1600x1200 15" displays, which I believe is around 142 DPI (0.175mm dot pitch?). That's approaching the 200dpi of the much-hyped IBM LCD display from a few years back (0.127mm dot pitch).
By comparison, a *good* CRT monitor has a dot pitch of around 0.22mm to 0.24mm.
Here in the UK you can't put a pump on automatic fill. You need to hold the trigger whilst all the time. The handle is grounded, so that as soon as you touch it, the static goes, and as long as you keep on holding it, there won't be a problem, as there will be no sparks.
Here in the mid-Atlantic states (in the U.S.), most of those "hold-open" latches have been removed from the pumps. (I remember them being quite common a decade or two ago.) So it's similar to the situation in the U.K., not possible to start the pump, walk away, come back to either:
- shock yourself with a static discharge
or (which is probably the main reason?)
- come back to find that the auto-shutoff function didn't work and there is now a fuel spill
You've been out of the PC market for about a decade then, if you've never heard of PCI-Express.
That's rather over-stating the case.
Roughly 10 years ago, PCI was finally just supplanting EISA/VESA and ISA boards were still common.
I build a few machines per year, and PCI-Express only just hit my radar screen in the past 12-18 months. Even today, I have yet to see mainstream motherboards or cards for it, so it's still rather ephemeral at this point.
It is an interesting design. Whether or not it will live up to it's promise remains to be seen.
I take from the cost difference that you probably live in/near a major city. Does your city not have some kind of commuter rail or light rail system that could reduce your drive? I live 25 miles from work - I drive 10 miles to public transit and take rail the rest of the way in.
Mass transit is a joke in most US cities. Made worse by the fact that most MTAs run on spoke system that assumes that everyone commutes from the burbs to the center of the city. Which simply isn't the case for places like Baltimore / Philadelphia.
The only rail system that I've seen work, and that seems to work well is the LIRR for all the people who commute into the city from Long Island. Still sucks if you need to commute across the breadth of the isle instead of the length of the isle though. But LI has the advantages of high population density, combined with a large number of people moving in the same direction during the rush hour(s).
Owing to poor planning for metro areas like Baltimore (decades of poor planning)... a lot of folks commute from one suburb to another. Which makes it very difficult to have a mass-transit system to service what is almost brownian motion during rush hour.
Are there any documented cases of Mobil Speedpass RFID's being stolen and cloned? I do recall reading a slashdot story about a product that could be used for this purpose.
But right now, there's very limited gain by stealing a Mobil Speedpass.
About all it gets you is free gas and snacks.
Now you're expanding the use of the RFID to general-purpose credit cards, you need to re-examine the risks. Because I guarantee that the attacker is now looking at the increased reward for hacking/stealing one of these.
The inconvienece is that Magnetic card readers wear quickly and everyone gets mad at a multiple swipe purchases, or when it doesn't even work at all.
I call bullpucky on that.
I have a direct-debit card that's also a VISA (with the same protections as a regular VISA card), that I use a lot for everything. Before the bank replaced it (bank changed names a year ago, finally swapped out the old cards), the card was so worn that you could barely read the bank name on the front, yet I never had to multi-swipe it or fiddle with the readers to get it to work.
I think what you're talking about is no longer true. The magnetic strips have either gotten more reliable, or the card reader companies have made their equipment better.
At gas stations, where credit card is self-serve, its really convienent. Thats why mobil invented speedpass. so this is a speedpass for 'everywhere else'.
Ah yes, "Mobil SpeedPass". An extremely useless piece of technology. Every Mobil that I've been too with the SpeedPass also allows you to use the credit card at the pump. Swiping your credit card talks all of 1 second longer then waving your keys frantically at the proper SpeedPass spot on the pump. There's no incentive there to use SpeedPass, unless you buy into the marketing drivel.
Ho hum... I guess this will be modded OT now... lets bring it back on topic - why has no-one made a flip phone that makes that Star Trek communicator "chirrup" sound when you flip it open, and a similar ring tone, with a black body and a gold coloured flip - you just know that all those fans would flock to buy one - hell, even I would...
Not sure I would... modern cell phones are a good bit more svelte then the old ST:ToS communicators (If I remember correctly what they looked like when the crew was holding one of them.). Although with the push-to-talk craze, we're almost back to using cell phones the way they used communicators on the show. You know, holding them in front of you instead of up to your ear like a regular phone.
(Of course, my PalmOS Kyocera QCP6035 isn't exactly the smallest cell phone on the planet either... so who am I to talk?)
Funny thing that... I just saw an article in the past few days that RAMBUS is suing memory manufacturers under an anti-trust heading.
IIRC, the best one-liner in the article was to the effect that RAMBUS was complaining that the memory manufacturers didn't use the RAMBUS technology because the manufacturers didn't want to pay the licensing fees. And RAMBUS felt that this was unfair.
Um, it *is* still a free market right? Which means my company does not have to choose a particular technology if I don't like the licensing terms/fees (and there's an alternate technology that works as well and has nicer licensing).
Not only for laptops or server rooms. My power consumption at home has increased by 25% in three years due to increasing computer use by kids & wife.
I'd like to install still more always-on equipment like webcams, video servers and such. But, with energy prices that will probably triple over the next 10 years, I'm not going to be able to afford these increases much longer.
Which is why I think this is a good move for Intel. There's a lot more interest in the home market for small form factor and/or noiseless PCs then there was a few years ago. Probably mostly because computers have gotten 10x better at multimedia. Back when all your PC could do was crunch numbers, noise didn't really matter a lot (and older PCs were pretty quiet since they didn't have large power/heat issues). Now, it's a lot more common to see PCs being used in home theatre setups, or used as a simple stereo system playing MP3s or videos. IOW, uses where noise matters.
Looking back at my power bills from 2002, I used a measly 500 KWH on an average month. That creeped up to 750 KWH in 2003 and is now at 1000 KWH in 2004. Not to mention the amount of heat and noise that all that equipment generates in my office. So I'm quite interested in systems that are low-power / quiet yet fast enough to do what I want done. (I just built a mini-ITX gentoo server...)
A primary concern will be preventing hacking, etc. A VPN may be sufficient to transport the data securely between the home-office and the company, but there is no guarantee that it will be safe on the employee's computer. Companies can prevent a lot of attacks by installing a good firewall. But it is virtually impossible to require the tech staff to monitor all offsite installations.
We tackle that by only allowing them to work from home using company-owned equipment. We also require use of a hardware firewall/router. Since we own the equipment, we have a bit of say about what's allowed to be installed on it and who's allowed to use the computer.
Right now, with only a dozen folks who work from home, it's quite manageable and we don't have to be fascist about locking the machines down. However, if you're a user that constantly breaks your machine, management will have to re-visit whether you're allowed to work from home.
I work from home. I save an hour of commute time each day and no longer have to share an office with someone else. I have a home office setup and I still stick to the same sleep schedule. I find the biggest problem is not that I don't work enough, but instead that I often work to much. I am also a manager, so while I can't keep tabs on employees every minute of the day, I do expect them to work. I give them tasks and get daily (or even more often) updates on their progress. We set up source sharing (CVS) and have a VPN. Company cel phones mean we can be reached at our "desks", company laptop mean we can have an impromptu meeting if need be or can travel to a site and take our development/testing tools with us.
That matches pretty well with the setup that we have. Company paid cell phones and laptops are a must as well as VPNs and distributed file systems like CVS or SourceOffSite. (I'm trying to determine whether SubVersion is going to replace VSS/SOS at some point... maybe even putting the rest of the company on SubVersion.) Another big help is that we all have WiredRed's E/Pop instant messaging solution, which includes the ability to remote control another person's PC. Very helpful for cutting down on those single-question phone calls, plus you can remote in and help troubleshoot someone's code.
There are now 5 people in our group. Two folks still work out of the main office 90% of the time (one just came off sick-leave and was working remotely for a few weeks). The lead guy in our group used to work out of the main office until 2 years ago when he moved about 3 hours away to be closer to family. The other two of us live in the same town, about 4-5 hours away from the main office. (Close enough to get up to the office when needed, far enough that it's no more often then once or twice per year.) I've been off-site for 4 years, my co-hort across town has been with us for 3 years. There are also the periodic day-meetings where we all meet at a central point and talk shop for a few hours.
All of our work is I guess what you would call task-driven, e.g. the client needs X finished by next Tuesday. Deadlines are typically only a day or two apart, so there's not much room for schedule slippage before it becomes apparent.
Actually, on a lot of my CD-Rs, I packed files in RAR archives with recovery records enabled. This allows similar corruption detection/correction. Although QuickPar seems to be a better tool (allowing more redundant data). Thanks for the link.
RAR with recovery records does indeed work well. (Same idea.)
My personal objection to using RAR as an archive format is that it's a closed-source program that uses a proprietary format. I archive using ZIP because there exist open-source implementations of ZIP tools (Info-ZIP), plus I know that just about any operating system out there has had the Info-ZIP tools ported to it.
While QuickPar isn't open-source, there's a command-line version that is... so again, I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to get my data back even if I change operating systems.
On CD-R, the physical structure is that there's about 1 mm of plastic on the bottom (non-label), then a data layer, then the reflective layer, then a thin layer of laquer(?) then the label.
Since the reflective layer is so close to the label side, writing on the label side with a hard-tip pen will damage/distort/dimple the reflective layer.
DVD-R is much better, the data/reflective layer is in the middle of the media, roughly 0.6mm of plastic on *both* sides. (The reason that the data layer is at a different depth is because DVD media was designed for dual-sided, unlike CD-R.)
I have an XP1600+ that overclocks to 2200+ at default voltage and works ideally under a torturous FAH load. In fact, you could view the chip as being underclocked at the factory instead of overclocked by the user!
Now that's a reasonable approach to O/C, taking advantage of a chance occurence where the chip was capable of more without spending extra cash on cooling.
My objection to O/C is where it's done solely for the bragging-rights, or people that spend way more cash then makes sense to gain a measly 5% gain.
BTW, another good O/C testing program is Prime95. It's proven to be so reliable as a stress test over the years, that they've even added a mode where it functions solely as a stress test.
Notebooks are not desktops. If a part is crap, you can't grab another and replace it... You have to go through the company. You better be buying from a company you REALLY trust, because notebooks are 100% lock-in.
Worse, if a part fails in a notebook, it's usually when you're in a hotel room, hours away from the nearest company tech, and you're due to give a presentation in an hour.
Buying a cheap notebook makes sense only if your time is not billable or you have access to a spare machine within walking distance.
If I go to download Fedora or Debian via ISO images, and burn them, I often have a maintained distrobution that is very young. Less than a month old.
If I go and buy Windows XP via Amazon and have it delivered next day, I still have an OS image which is over a year old, even the new one that rolls up SP1.
You know, with the online product activation that MS has added to Windows in more recent versions. I'm surprised that they haven't embraced the ISO method of delivering the product to the user. Let the user download/install it, then get their credit-card details during the activation process if they don't already have a product-key. And it's not like MS can say that there's anything inside the current WinXP retail boxes other then a fluff pamphlet and a CD, so why not skip the step of manufacturing a retail box.
Keep the ISOs up-to-date with the latest security patches so that even existing users can use those ISOs rather then the 2-year old CDs when doing re-installs. They'd catch a lot less flack about security issues in the base-install.
Now, to avoid ticking off the retail channel, they should charge full-price for the online purchase method. Want it cheaper? Go find a company that will sell you an OEM version with a motherboard, then go grab the latest ISO from Microsoft.
My first CD-Rs (over 10 years old) also still work perfectly. Some simple rules I follow are:
- Buy CD-Rs withouth printed label (the printing process causes material stress)
- Burn them at low speed (the lowest my current burner allows with my SW is 8x)
- Verify the data after writing (very important!)
- Always be careful with the label side (e.g. don't put that side on the table, dirt could cause scratches)
- Prevent hot temperatures and direct sunlight
Good, but you should also add recovery data to those CDs using QuickPar.
Right now, once you discover that your discs have been damaged, it's too late to recover the data files that have been stored on the discs. With the addition of recovery data, you can add a "window of recovery" which allows you to correct errors that are too much for the C1/C2 error correction to fix. Depending on your risk-averseness, you can make that recovery window larger/smaller by including more/less recovery data.
Some folks even spread the PAR2 files across multiple disks, say taking 5 disks of data, creating 40% recovery data (2 additional disks worth), and then evenly spreading the 40% recovery data and the protected data across 7 disks. In that scenario, you can physically lose up to 2 disks and still get your data back.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be that this time, Microsoft will Get It about security. But you'll forgive the rest of us if we don't get too excited until we actually see the things in operation.
Which is why there is the corrolary rule:
Only suckers install any Microsoft product prior to the first service pack.
We don't know anything about an unaltered timestream, where Cole never went back, for comparison purposes. However, thats part of the point of the movie... that there IS no alternate timeline.
Indeed, part of the "fun" of 12 Monkeys is that nothing Cole or Clair do can change the outcome of the coming plague. They can't stop it from happening, the only goal is to gather a pure sample so that the future's future can be changed.
Strip all attachments.
All of them. Don't process them, just ban them.
If you want to send a file, use ftp or send a link to a read-only http or smb/nfs share.
Love to... but not gonna happen with our users.
We settled on blocking all executable attachments (VBS, EXE, SCR, etc.).
You know, the extensions that 99.999% of users have no business reason to be sending to each other, but which are used by the viruses/worms to spread. Blocking those put a good damper on the amount of virus/worm mails that were getting through and was cheap CPU-wise.
Their system doesn't account for naps. I generally sleep from 3am-9am, and 6pm-8pm. Work for the man during the day. Take a nap to refresh yourself. Work for yourself at night. I've used this system on and off for a few years, and it works well.
Ugh... that's the exact sleep schedule that I'm trying to break!
I much prefer to fall asleep around 10pm and rise at 6am. I've always found it to be rather relaxing to have 2 hours in the morning to dop around prior to walking downstairs and logging in.
I can't because, only Seti has a client for my computers running OS/2. I'd like to move, but I won't until those other projects support my OS of choice.
Wow you're still running that? Er, I mean, way-to-go!
(This from a rabid OS/2 user, 2.0 2.1 and Warp 3... at least until NT 4 came out and was close enough to being as stable.)
so ok, I read Doc Smith!
Damm, another fan of E. E. "Doc" Smith.
I think it's time to dig that series out again... was good up until the last book where everything got all metaphysical. High-brow sci-fi it ain't, but still a good space opera read.
I'm complaining about the goddamned "extreme" surfing that will apparently be taking place in a battle that should be serious and epic, two former Jedi partners fighting each other in a conflict of Light and Dark Force!
Ah, but bonch-san, without the "extreme" surfing there would be no way to tie in the game where you have to surf through lava.
Dollars to donuts there will be a game that involves lava and surfing that is branded with the Star Wars trademark. And I'd lay further odds that there's already a contract or even lines of code already written. (Lucas' mantra: leave no tie-in dollar unclaimed.)
I realised this when I was looking for a 17" LCD for my dad. What I wanted was 1024x786, he doesn't need more pixels but bigger ones - his eyesight isn't that good any more.
On the 1400x1050 15" laptop display, I find that the regular font size is just too small for me to comfortably read anymore. Of course, I'm overdue for another trip to the eye-doc, so...
However, bumping up to Large Fonts / ClearType really improved the readability of the monitor at a normal distance. Then he can have a hobby of berating programmers and website designers who use fixed font sizes or controls that don't account for large fonts.
And there's a 1440x960 17" on mine. Aside from the laptop market, it is extremely difficult to find anything other than the following size/resolution combos:
Amen to that, I'd love a 17" LCD that did 1600x1200... I have a 1400x1050 15" on my laptop and the higher DPI is especially sweet when you switch to large fonts and ClearType. It results in a very crisp, easy to read display. The approximate DPI is around 124 or so (0.20mm dot pitch), compared to a measly 100dpi for a desktop LCD monitor (0.254mm dot pitch).
I'm especially jealous of those with the 1600x1200 15" displays, which I believe is around 142 DPI (0.175mm dot pitch?). That's approaching the 200dpi of the much-hyped IBM LCD display from a few years back (0.127mm dot pitch).
By comparison, a *good* CRT monitor has a dot pitch of around 0.22mm to 0.24mm.
Here in the UK you can't put a pump on automatic fill. You need to hold the trigger whilst all the time. The handle is grounded, so that as soon as you touch it, the static goes, and as long as you keep on holding it, there won't be a problem, as there will be no sparks.
Here in the mid-Atlantic states (in the U.S.), most of those "hold-open" latches have been removed from the pumps. (I remember them being quite common a decade or two ago.) So it's similar to the situation in the U.K., not possible to start the pump, walk away, come back to either:
- shock yourself with a static discharge
or (which is probably the main reason?)
- come back to find that the auto-shutoff function didn't work and there is now a fuel spill
You've been out of the PC market for about a decade then, if you've never heard of PCI-Express.
That's rather over-stating the case.
Roughly 10 years ago, PCI was finally just supplanting EISA/VESA and ISA boards were still common.
I build a few machines per year, and PCI-Express only just hit my radar screen in the past 12-18 months. Even today, I have yet to see mainstream motherboards or cards for it, so it's still rather ephemeral at this point.
It is an interesting design. Whether or not it will live up to it's promise remains to be seen.
I take from the cost difference that you probably live in/near a major city. Does your city not have some kind of commuter rail or light rail system that could reduce your drive? I live 25 miles from work - I drive 10 miles to public transit and take rail the rest of the way in.
Mass transit is a joke in most US cities. Made worse by the fact that most MTAs run on spoke system that assumes that everyone commutes from the burbs to the center of the city. Which simply isn't the case for places like Baltimore / Philadelphia.
The only rail system that I've seen work, and that seems to work well is the LIRR for all the people who commute into the city from Long Island. Still sucks if you need to commute across the breadth of the isle instead of the length of the isle though. But LI has the advantages of high population density, combined with a large number of people moving in the same direction during the rush hour(s).
Owing to poor planning for metro areas like Baltimore (decades of poor planning)... a lot of folks commute from one suburb to another. Which makes it very difficult to have a mass-transit system to service what is almost brownian motion during rush hour.
Are there any documented cases of Mobil Speedpass RFID's being stolen and cloned? I do recall reading a slashdot story about a product that could be used for this purpose.
But right now, there's very limited gain by stealing a Mobil Speedpass.
About all it gets you is free gas and snacks.
Now you're expanding the use of the RFID to general-purpose credit cards, you need to re-examine the risks. Because I guarantee that the attacker is now looking at the increased reward for hacking/stealing one of these.
The inconvienece is that Magnetic card readers wear quickly and everyone gets mad at a multiple swipe purchases, or when it doesn't even work at all.
I call bullpucky on that.
I have a direct-debit card that's also a VISA (with the same protections as a regular VISA card), that I use a lot for everything. Before the bank replaced it (bank changed names a year ago, finally swapped out the old cards), the card was so worn that you could barely read the bank name on the front, yet I never had to multi-swipe it or fiddle with the readers to get it to work.
I think what you're talking about is no longer true. The magnetic strips have either gotten more reliable, or the card reader companies have made their equipment better.
At gas stations, where credit card is self-serve, its really convienent. Thats why mobil invented speedpass. so this is a speedpass for 'everywhere else'.
Ah yes, "Mobil SpeedPass". An extremely useless piece of technology. Every Mobil that I've been too with the SpeedPass also allows you to use the credit card at the pump. Swiping your credit card talks all of 1 second longer then waving your keys frantically at the proper SpeedPass spot on the pump. There's no incentive there to use SpeedPass, unless you buy into the marketing drivel.
Ho hum... I guess this will be modded OT now... lets bring it back on topic - why has no-one made a flip phone that makes that Star Trek communicator "chirrup" sound when you flip it open, and a similar ring tone, with a black body and a gold coloured flip - you just know that all those fans would flock to buy one - hell, even I would...
Not sure I would... modern cell phones are a good bit more svelte then the old ST:ToS communicators (If I remember correctly what they looked like when the crew was holding one of them.). Although with the push-to-talk craze, we're almost back to using cell phones the way they used communicators on the show. You know, holding them in front of you instead of up to your ear like a regular phone.
(Of course, my PalmOS Kyocera QCP6035 isn't exactly the smallest cell phone on the planet either... so who am I to talk?)
SCO must be ground into the dust, same as RAMBUS.
Funny thing that... I just saw an article in the past few days that RAMBUS is suing memory manufacturers under an anti-trust heading.
IIRC, the best one-liner in the article was to the effect that RAMBUS was complaining that the memory manufacturers didn't use the RAMBUS technology because the manufacturers didn't want to pay the licensing fees. And RAMBUS felt that this was unfair.
Um, it *is* still a free market right? Which means my company does not have to choose a particular technology if I don't like the licensing terms/fees (and there's an alternate technology that works as well and has nicer licensing).
Not only for laptops or server rooms. My power consumption at home has increased by 25% in three years due to increasing computer use by kids & wife.
I'd like to install still more always-on equipment like webcams, video servers and such. But, with energy prices that will probably triple over the next 10 years, I'm not going to be able to afford these increases much longer.
Which is why I think this is a good move for Intel. There's a lot more interest in the home market for small form factor and/or noiseless PCs then there was a few years ago. Probably mostly because computers have gotten 10x better at multimedia. Back when all your PC could do was crunch numbers, noise didn't really matter a lot (and older PCs were pretty quiet since they didn't have large power/heat issues). Now, it's a lot more common to see PCs being used in home theatre setups, or used as a simple stereo system playing MP3s or videos. IOW, uses where noise matters.
Looking back at my power bills from 2002, I used a measly 500 KWH on an average month. That creeped up to 750 KWH in 2003 and is now at 1000 KWH in 2004. Not to mention the amount of heat and noise that all that equipment generates in my office. So I'm quite interested in systems that are low-power / quiet yet fast enough to do what I want done. (I just built a mini-ITX gentoo server...)
A primary concern will be preventing hacking, etc. A VPN may be sufficient to transport the data securely between the home-office and the company, but there is no guarantee that it will be safe on the employee's computer. Companies can prevent a lot of attacks by installing a good firewall. But it is virtually impossible to require the tech staff to monitor all offsite installations.
We tackle that by only allowing them to work from home using company-owned equipment. We also require use of a hardware firewall/router. Since we own the equipment, we have a bit of say about what's allowed to be installed on it and who's allowed to use the computer.
Right now, with only a dozen folks who work from home, it's quite manageable and we don't have to be fascist about locking the machines down. However, if you're a user that constantly breaks your machine, management will have to re-visit whether you're allowed to work from home.
I work from home. I save an hour of commute time each day and no longer have to share an office with someone else. I have a home office setup and I still stick to the same sleep schedule. I find the biggest problem is not that I don't work enough, but instead that I often work to much. I am also a manager, so while I can't keep tabs on employees every minute of the day, I do expect them to work. I give them tasks and get daily (or even more often) updates on their progress. We set up source sharing (CVS) and have a VPN. Company cel phones mean we can be reached at our "desks", company laptop mean we can have an impromptu meeting if need be or can travel to a site and take our development/testing tools with us.
That matches pretty well with the setup that we have. Company paid cell phones and laptops are a must as well as VPNs and distributed file systems like CVS or SourceOffSite. (I'm trying to determine whether SubVersion is going to replace VSS/SOS at some point... maybe even putting the rest of the company on SubVersion.) Another big help is that we all have WiredRed's E/Pop instant messaging solution, which includes the ability to remote control another person's PC. Very helpful for cutting down on those single-question phone calls, plus you can remote in and help troubleshoot someone's code.
There are now 5 people in our group. Two folks still work out of the main office 90% of the time (one just came off sick-leave and was working remotely for a few weeks). The lead guy in our group used to work out of the main office until 2 years ago when he moved about 3 hours away to be closer to family. The other two of us live in the same town, about 4-5 hours away from the main office. (Close enough to get up to the office when needed, far enough that it's no more often then once or twice per year.) I've been off-site for 4 years, my co-hort across town has been with us for 3 years. There are also the periodic day-meetings where we all meet at a central point and talk shop for a few hours.
All of our work is I guess what you would call task-driven, e.g. the client needs X finished by next Tuesday. Deadlines are typically only a day or two apart, so there's not much room for schedule slippage before it becomes apparent.
Actually, on a lot of my CD-Rs, I packed files in RAR archives with recovery records enabled. This allows similar corruption detection/correction. Although QuickPar seems to be a better tool (allowing more redundant data). Thanks for the link.
RAR with recovery records does indeed work well. (Same idea.)
My personal objection to using RAR as an archive format is that it's a closed-source program that uses a proprietary format. I archive using ZIP because there exist open-source implementations of ZIP tools (Info-ZIP), plus I know that just about any operating system out there has had the Info-ZIP tools ported to it.
While QuickPar isn't open-source, there's a command-line version that is... so again, I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to get my data back even if I change operating systems.
On CD-R, the physical structure is that there's about 1 mm of plastic on the bottom (non-label), then a data layer, then the reflective layer, then a thin layer of laquer(?) then the label.
Since the reflective layer is so close to the label side, writing on the label side with a hard-tip pen will damage/distort/dimple the reflective layer.
DVD-R is much better, the data/reflective layer is in the middle of the media, roughly 0.6mm of plastic on *both* sides. (The reason that the data layer is at a different depth is because DVD media was designed for dual-sided, unlike CD-R.)
I have an XP1600+ that overclocks to 2200+ at default voltage and works ideally under a torturous FAH load. In fact, you could view the chip as being underclocked at the factory instead of overclocked by the user!
Now that's a reasonable approach to O/C, taking advantage of a chance occurence where the chip was capable of more without spending extra cash on cooling.
My objection to O/C is where it's done solely for the bragging-rights, or people that spend way more cash then makes sense to gain a measly 5% gain.
BTW, another good O/C testing program is Prime95. It's proven to be so reliable as a stress test over the years, that they've even added a mode where it functions solely as a stress test.
Notebooks are not desktops. If a part is crap, you can't grab another and replace it... You have to go through the company. You better be buying from a company you REALLY trust, because notebooks are 100% lock-in.
Worse, if a part fails in a notebook, it's usually when you're in a hotel room, hours away from the nearest company tech, and you're due to give a presentation in an hour.
Buying a cheap notebook makes sense only if your time is not billable or you have access to a spare machine within walking distance.
If I go to download Fedora or Debian via ISO images, and burn them, I often have a maintained distrobution that is very young. Less than a month old.
If I go and buy Windows XP via Amazon and have it delivered next day, I still have an OS image which is over a year old, even the new one that rolls up SP1.
You know, with the online product activation that MS has added to Windows in more recent versions. I'm surprised that they haven't embraced the ISO method of delivering the product to the user. Let the user download/install it, then get their credit-card details during the activation process if they don't already have a product-key. And it's not like MS can say that there's anything inside the current WinXP retail boxes other then a fluff pamphlet and a CD, so why not skip the step of manufacturing a retail box.
Keep the ISOs up-to-date with the latest security patches so that even existing users can use those ISOs rather then the 2-year old CDs when doing re-installs. They'd catch a lot less flack about security issues in the base-install.
Now, to avoid ticking off the retail channel, they should charge full-price for the online purchase method. Want it cheaper? Go find a company that will sell you an OEM version with a motherboard, then go grab the latest ISO from Microsoft.
My first CD-Rs (over 10 years old) also still work perfectly. Some simple rules I follow are:
- Buy CD-Rs withouth printed label (the printing process causes material stress)
- Burn them at low speed (the lowest my current burner allows with my SW is 8x)
- Verify the data after writing (very important!)
- Always be careful with the label side (e.g. don't put that side on the table, dirt could cause scratches)
- Prevent hot temperatures and direct sunlight
Good, but you should also add recovery data to those CDs using QuickPar.
Right now, once you discover that your discs have been damaged, it's too late to recover the data files that have been stored on the discs. With the addition of recovery data, you can add a "window of recovery" which allows you to correct errors that are too much for the C1/C2 error correction to fix. Depending on your risk-averseness, you can make that recovery window larger/smaller by including more/less recovery data.
Some folks even spread the PAR2 files across multiple disks, say taking 5 disks of data, creating 40% recovery data (2 additional disks worth), and then evenly spreading the 40% recovery data and the protected data across 7 disks. In that scenario, you can physically lose up to 2 disks and still get your data back.