Support. Microsoft will eventually end support for Windows XP. Here's a good example: Exchange 2000 is now in "extended support" which means it gets security updates and nothing else. If you want the Exchange 2000 DST Calendar fix, you've got to pony up $4,000 for the Microsoft fix. If you're on Exchange 2003, the fix is free. You can stay on older products for a while, but eventually you've got to upgrade or switch.
Putting your productivity apps on someone else's server is actually a great idea. You have no software licensing cost ($300-$400 per copy of Office 2007). There are little to no rollout or upgrade costs with a hosted app (someone actually has to INSTALL Office on all of the machines). You don't have to worry about patches, upgrades, backups or security and a hosted application is going to be down a lot less than the collective crashes of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint across all of your machines.
The problem with Google Apps is functionality and offline use. It's just not as functional, even for basic use, as a full-fledged office suite. It also can't be used by a laptop owner on an airplane. I'm sure Google will address these issues over the next few years. At some point, hosted apps will become a better solution than applications that are locally installed.
The only way logging off will help is if malware authors don't put their crud in startup. ANY piece of malware that doesn't run as a service starts on login, so even if it doesn't run while you're logged off, it's going to run while you're logged on. If you've got a hole in the vault, closing the door isn't going to do you any good.
You might look at AppRiver for spam filtering. We use them as a proxy for our incoming mail, and 99% of it never hits our server at all. Makes things much better than users having to spend their time meesing with spam.
That is exactly why I want a full-blown Outlook. Do you really want to do your e-mail online? Have a copy of that residing on google's server where it is stored or "cached"? They put out these services to aggregate your life, to advertize to you. You are there to make money, that's all they care about. Your privacy be damned.
You might also look at CA's eTrust antivirus. It's free for a year by going here:
http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft/
It's an active scanner, is light on the system resources and is backed by a fairly large company. It's essentially a commercial product that they're giving away. I use and recommend it.
Agreed. Let's say I have a machine I don't ever want connected to the Internet for security reasons. If the machine is never allowed to phone home, will Aero stop working after some period of time?
If you cant go back to the no-frills win2k classic interface I plan to squeeze every last drop of life out of XP Pro.
The classic interface is still there.
If current betas are any indication at all (and I think they are), Vista's gaming performance is going to SUCK. With all the fancy graphics turned on, Vista uses over 500 MB of RAM with nothing else running. Microsoft ought to come up with a "Gaming Mode" which is sort of like a Safe Mode or DOS-only mode. Minimal services and no Explorer running. Gaming performance would be much better.
As a brown person, I think discrimination in IT is much less of a problem than it is in other fields. IT people (at least where I live) tend to be fairly liberal - meaning that they have seen, interacted and can deal with brown people. I haven't experienced anything I'd classify as out and out racism. I've been denied a job here and there and wondered why, but you can never really know the hiring manager's reasons. I've run into a very few IT people who are likely racists, but I've never had to work with or for one. As another poster commented, age discrimination is a much bigger problem in IT.
I disagree. Simply using a NAT router DOES NOT protect your machine from e-mail worms (like Sober, for example). It also doesn't protect your machine from any other wom-infected machine behind the router. NAT routers are an absolute requirement as step one. Step two is to immediately update your system.
I actually tried the Copilot product. It's very easy to use and works well over faster connections. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well over high latency/low bandwidth connections. I think this has more to do with basing the product on VNC than on anything they did wrong.
I ended up with GoToMeeting, which works exceptionally well over slower connections. I was able to (usably) remote contol a 1920x1200 screen that was located on a home broadband connection across the US.
Still, the movie looks very cool, and it's possible Copilot performance will improve with some tweaks. It would probably work well for people with small remote offices that have decent upstream connections.
Sounds to me like an admission that MacOS is better combined with an excuse as to why this is so.
It's like saying that I'm a better golfer than Tiger Woods considering that I have to administer servers 40 hours a week and he doesn't.
I'm primarily a Windows user. The question is, which one is better, Windows or MacOS? The answer has nothing to do with whether or not we should give Microsoft a break because their work is (admittedly) more difficult.
Cost: With MCE, you're either forced to pay a premium ($1,000?) for a complete system or pay a preimum to buy your own quiet case and video card fans, a quiet power supply and a home theater form factor case.
Integration: TiVo is a home theater component. It's quiet and fits perfectly into a rack of home theater gear. With MCE, or you've got to live with a big, loud PC in your living room or pay a big premium for something that looks like it belongs with your other gear.
Patch in the rear: TiVo patches itself. You'll be patching a security hole in that MCE PC at least every month. There are also the requisite driver updates, anti-virus and spyware updates, not to mention any MCE updates.
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Support. Microsoft will eventually end support for Windows XP. Here's a good example: Exchange 2000 is now in "extended support" which means it gets security updates and nothing else. If you want the Exchange 2000 DST Calendar fix, you've got to pony up $4,000 for the Microsoft fix. If you're on Exchange 2003, the fix is free. You can stay on older products for a while, but eventually you've got to upgrade or switch.
Putting your productivity apps on someone else's server is actually a great idea. You have no software licensing cost ($300-$400 per copy of Office 2007). There are little to no rollout or upgrade costs with a hosted app (someone actually has to INSTALL Office on all of the machines). You don't have to worry about patches, upgrades, backups or security and a hosted application is going to be down a lot less than the collective crashes of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint across all of your machines. The problem with Google Apps is functionality and offline use. It's just not as functional, even for basic use, as a full-fledged office suite. It also can't be used by a laptop owner on an airplane. I'm sure Google will address these issues over the next few years. At some point, hosted apps will become a better solution than applications that are locally installed.
DxO image processing software doesn't work at all. Photoshop Elements 5 doesn't work right.
The only way logging off will help is if malware authors don't put their crud in startup. ANY piece of malware that doesn't run as a service starts on login, so even if it doesn't run while you're logged off, it's going to run while you're logged on. If you've got a hole in the vault, closing the door isn't going to do you any good.
You might look at AppRiver for spam filtering. We use them as a proxy for our incoming mail, and 99% of it never hits our server at all. Makes things much better than users having to spend their time meesing with spam.
That's funny stuff.
Parent is modded funny. It isn't funny at all. It's an absolutely accurate description of the problem.
That is exactly why I want a full-blown Outlook. Do you really want to do your e-mail online? Have a copy of that residing on google's server where it is stored or "cached"? They put out these services to aggregate your life, to advertize to you. You are there to make money, that's all they care about. Your privacy be damned.
So journalists will be prosecuted for leaks, but Karl Rove won't? People who live in glass houses...
You might also look at CA's eTrust antivirus. It's free for a year by going here: http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft/ It's an active scanner, is light on the system resources and is backed by a fairly large company. It's essentially a commercial product that they're giving away. I use and recommend it.
Agreed. Let's say I have a machine I don't ever want connected to the Internet for security reasons. If the machine is never allowed to phone home, will Aero stop working after some period of time?
If I'm not doing anything illegal, then they don't need to monitor me.
I liked it too.
If you cant go back to the no-frills win2k classic interface I plan to squeeze every last drop of life out of XP Pro. The classic interface is still there.
Mod parent up, please.
If current betas are any indication at all (and I think they are), Vista's gaming performance is going to SUCK. With all the fancy graphics turned on, Vista uses over 500 MB of RAM with nothing else running. Microsoft ought to come up with a "Gaming Mode" which is sort of like a Safe Mode or DOS-only mode. Minimal services and no Explorer running. Gaming performance would be much better.
As a brown person, I think discrimination in IT is much less of a problem than it is in other fields. IT people (at least where I live) tend to be fairly liberal - meaning that they have seen, interacted and can deal with brown people. I haven't experienced anything I'd classify as out and out racism. I've been denied a job here and there and wondered why, but you can never really know the hiring manager's reasons. I've run into a very few IT people who are likely racists, but I've never had to work with or for one. As another poster commented, age discrimination is a much bigger problem in IT.
Microsoft has already responded to this article by saying that nothing has changed: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,190 2540,00.asp
I disagree. Simply using a NAT router DOES NOT protect your machine from e-mail worms (like Sober, for example). It also doesn't protect your machine from any other wom-infected machine behind the router. NAT routers are an absolute requirement as step one. Step two is to immediately update your system.
I actually tried the Copilot product. It's very easy to use and works well over faster connections. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well over high latency/low bandwidth connections. I think this has more to do with basing the product on VNC than on anything they did wrong. I ended up with GoToMeeting, which works exceptionally well over slower connections. I was able to (usably) remote contol a 1920x1200 screen that was located on a home broadband connection across the US. Still, the movie looks very cool, and it's possible Copilot performance will improve with some tweaks. It would probably work well for people with small remote offices that have decent upstream connections.
Sounds to me like an admission that MacOS is better combined with an excuse as to why this is so. It's like saying that I'm a better golfer than Tiger Woods considering that I have to administer servers 40 hours a week and he doesn't. I'm primarily a Windows user. The question is, which one is better, Windows or MacOS? The answer has nothing to do with whether or not we should give Microsoft a break because their work is (admittedly) more difficult.
Other TiVo Advantages:
Cost: With MCE, you're either forced to pay a premium ($1,000?) for a complete system or pay a preimum to buy your own quiet case and video card fans, a quiet power supply and a home theater form factor case.
Integration: TiVo is a home theater component. It's quiet and fits perfectly into a rack of home theater gear. With MCE, or you've got to live with a big, loud PC in your living room or pay a big premium for something that looks like it belongs with your other gear.
Patch in the rear: TiVo patches itself. You'll be patching a security hole in that MCE PC at least every month. There are also the requisite driver updates, anti-virus and spyware updates, not to mention any MCE updates.
Yes, you can search network drives via a registry modification detailed here:
t ml
http://users.tns.net/~skingery/firefox/GDS_Tips.h
How is this more dangerous than, let's say, shooting at the planes with a REAL gun? Are we going to ban those too? If we don't, do the terrorists win?
You can take my laser from my cold dead...blah blah blah...
It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people.
Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.