Oh that's a simple one. It would use any convential military force, and (theoretically) even WMD's if it thinks necessary to repel the invasion. It will depend on the looniness of the Supreme Commander currently reigning the White House.
Look, we're kinda dancing around the issue here : if you look at the facts, the USA is more and more becoming what it claims it hates the most, a rogue nation. Just about any rule to determine if a country is a rogue nation or supporting terrorism, has to have the standard "except the USA ofcourse" term added, otherwise the USA would classify automatically.
Bollocks to that. If you want to get Joe Sixpack angry, don't start about all this 'evil' wish-wash. Instead point out how much money MS has been overcharging him through the years, and how they're using that money to hurt the competition and ensure their monopoly and thus their abilty to price gauge him stays intact. People don't care too much about the morality of a company (unless the victims look good on a tv special), but they'll raise hell to defend their wallets.
Don't forget there are actually lusers out there who know their windows box is infected but refuse to do something about it because they aren't hindered by the virusses and doing something would cost money/time/energy (take your pick). I've encountered some of these and I wish their computer a slow, painful death.
He has the same ISP as me:D And I know they don't care enough to disconnect him. Still, in the end I got paid, and he got virus free even if he won't appreciate it. I just wanted to point out the mindset of people who deliberately leave worms on their pc because it does not hurt THEM.
This is the exact reason why I still haven't bought a dvd writer. +RW, +R, RAM, -RW, -R... a gazillion formats and now we have speed incompatibilities AND ofcourse a bunch of manufacturers who lied about their drives being firmware upgradeable. Why can't these clowns all sit down and actually define AND FOLLOW a standard ? Thanks to them, the whole dvd writer market is substantially less than it could have been. I've been waiting for more than two years now for things to clear up but still there's all these silly incompatibilities. How the heck do they expect to convince Joe Sixpack to buy one when MY head feels like exploding from all the confusion around this ?
Exactly. Today I took all known variants of msblaster from a new client's personal machine (the original and B,C,D variants, all in memory at the same time). He then tried to skip paying for it because "it didn't bother him so I didn't have to remove it". His machine was constantly online with four variants in memory all sending copies of themselves to the outside world. People like this should have their connections disabled when they start spout virusses and worms, but few ISP's seem to care.
This is what I usually do, I have copies of all major windows versions with me at all times, and if they can produce a valid key I'll gladly install with it. And yes, the number of people who actually lose their windows cd is staggering. But the thing I really hate is those damn system restore cds that come with the big name pc's like Compaq.
Right on. Everywhere I come, I install the same things. A version of Windows, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express, Office, etc. Now before you guys come lynch me for supporting The Evil Empire, I've got to plead in my defense that this is WHAT PEOPLE WANT. Sure they're mindless sheep, brain washed by the Redmond Emperor, but still it's what they want. To me the client is king. If he wants a buggy piece of software, I'll install it and any updates I can track down. I'll configure it to disable the most annoying 'features' so it's more usable. Almost every time I'll also point out the many, many better alternatives, but they simply don't want that. They want something exactly like the neighbors or their friends have. My job is trying to make their MS products work as good as possible. And ofcourse plug the holes in the swiss cheese that is Windows.
I'm probably not trying hard enough to convert them to other applications, but it's simply not my job. I'll gladly support open source whenever I can, but it's not my duty to go door to door spreading the word of Linus. If someone else wants to, they're welcome.
You know, right now my rate is 10 euros/hour, and this for an incorporated business of my own. That's very cheap and won't stay that way, but for a lot of people it isn't cheap enough. Some clients gladly pay me that, and some even insist on tipping me. And you know what these fine clients have in common ? They all tried the 'competition' first and now have something to compare me to. Typically, it's the people who
a) Know NOTHING about their own pc and can barely use it as it is, and seem to think that therefore taht everything pc repair related should be easy and cheap (I know this is a non sequitor but thos epople really seem to believe it)
b) Have only tried the 'free' helpdesk of their manufacturer
who complain to me that I'm "too expensive". Sadly, a lot of these will not come to me even when their own insistence on using the neigbor's ten year old as a tech has cost them all their data. To some people paying for experienced tech help is out of the question, they want it FREE.
I already do this in my business. I repair pc's and do just about anything possible you can do with a pc, but I don't really sell them. If someone asks me to build a new pc for them, I gladly will, but I've given up on trying to compete with the large retailers that dump pc's for ridiculous prices. The latest trend here has been low cost supermarkets selling ultra cheap pc's. Nobody can compete with that, so I won't even try. Instead I make my money when the guy that buys a cheap pc gets home, connects it to the internet (if he can even do that himself) and then proceeds whithin the next month to get beleaguered by the unholy trinity of spam, spyware and virusses, until his pc is rendered almost unusable. That's when they call me to fix their pc's. They usually try their manufacturer's helpdesk first, but the recent outsourcing trends have made sure that I get the business sooner than later, because
1) I show up
2) I speak their language
3) I can fix their stuff instead of dicking around with fixing the wrong stuff and reformatting their hard drives until they don't dare call anymore.
I don't think there's ANY future in hardware sales, since most people simply are too much cheap bastards to really consider the level of quality and service that they'll get before they buy. They only see the price. But if they want to keep their shit going in this day and age, they'll invariably end up on my doorstep.
Re:And most consumers wouldn't know about them.
on
Is Windows Worth $45?
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· Score: 1
I'm in the pc repair business, and the number of pc's I see that have a pirated Windows XP install is really quite large. Most of these are Windows XP Pro Corporate editions, and they seem to be installed by the small shops that sell the pcs. Ofcourse they all seem to use that one pirated dell key that was banned in SP1 so SP1 cannot be installed without changing the key. A lot of people are surprised and (rightfully) angry that their friendly neighborhood shop sold them an illegal version of Windows. A lot of those shops even CHARGE for it. And this is in Europe, not in Asia. Don't underestimate the number of pirated XP installs.
Don't forget SpywareBlaster, which does the same as the Immunize feature of Spybot, but it has a far larger database and seems to get updated more often. I think the combination of Spybot (to remove spyware) and Spywareblaster (to prevent it from drive-by-installing in the first place) is unbeatable.
UUnet is not being attacked because of the number of spam originating from its networks, but because of the large number of KNOWN spamgangs STILL residing on their network after literally thousands upon thousands of complaints. Some of the spammers haven been there for over TEN MONTHS now.
This leaves us with two possible scenarios to explain this :
1) UUNet is a spamhaus and will host spammers as long as they pay.
2) UUNet is dead set against spam, however somehow their abuse department has never read all the complaints, including ten month old ones. Maybe they got "lost in traffic or stuff". Or maybe those poor abuse department people are overworked ? Or just plain DEAD ? After all this silence you start to wonder...
Maybe, but data theft might actually spur the owners of virus ridden pcs to actually DO something. Right now they aren't too bothered by the fact that their beloved pc is attacking and spamming the rest of 'that internet thingy', grand scale data theft and extortion WILL make a lot more clueless people aware of the problem of trojans.
Humour is a delicate concept. What's funny for one, is completely unfunny for others, and vice versa. While we can argue about what's funny or not until the cows come home, the one thing I do know is that I don't like people who think they and they alone can determine what's funny. A lot of people still like this "I for one.." joke and will give it some Funny points, others do not. I've learned to accept that. Will you ?
The even more interesting part was that Nokia's own 'experts' couldn't distinguish original batteries from fakes without opening them up and checking the (absence) of certain electronics. So the original complaint is still valid : you cannot know if the battery you bought, even in a fully legal Nokia import store, is a real one or not. Nokia should take extra action to provide people with a way of knowing which is the real deal so they can at least CHOOSE to buy safer, more expensive batteries. Instead Nokia has been claiming at first that all stories about exploding batteries were completely false, then that those users were using pirated batteries (additionally implicating the users had brought it on themselves). Test-Aankoop was complaining about a REAL problem which Nokia was and still is trying to play down in every possible way.
It wouldn't run on the 486SX variants, because those didn't have the FPU part of the 486 activated. Quake uses the FPU, so 486DX processors were fine. Heck I even tried it on my 486DX-33 for kicks, and marvelled at the one-frame-per-two-seconds slideshow. It worked, but it wasn't really playable. A 486DX-133 would do absolutely great and a lot better than a P60.
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Oh that's a simple one. It would use any convential military force, and (theoretically) even WMD's if it thinks necessary to repel the invasion. It will depend on the looniness of the Supreme Commander currently reigning the White House.
Look, we're kinda dancing around the issue here : if you look at the facts, the USA is more and more becoming what it claims it hates the most, a rogue nation. Just about any rule to determine if a country is a rogue nation or supporting terrorism, has to have the standard "except the USA ofcourse" term added, otherwise the USA would classify automatically.
Bollocks to that. If you want to get Joe Sixpack angry, don't start about all this 'evil' wish-wash. Instead point out how much money MS has been overcharging him through the years, and how they're using that money to hurt the competition and ensure their monopoly and thus their abilty to price gauge him stays intact. People don't care too much about the morality of a company (unless the victims look good on a tv special), but they'll raise hell to defend their wallets.
November '04 ? I seriously hope this was a typo and not a prediction of the future...
Don't forget there are actually lusers out there who know their windows box is infected but refuse to do something about it because they aren't hindered by the virusses and doing something would cost money/time/energy (take your pick). I've encountered some of these and I wish their computer a slow, painful death.
He has the same ISP as me :D And I know they don't care enough to disconnect him. Still, in the end I got paid, and he got virus free even if he won't appreciate it. I just wanted to point out the mindset of people who deliberately leave worms on their pc because it does not hurt THEM.
This is the exact reason why I still haven't bought a dvd writer. +RW, +R, RAM, -RW, -R... a gazillion formats and now we have speed incompatibilities AND ofcourse a bunch of manufacturers who lied about their drives being firmware upgradeable. Why can't these clowns all sit down and actually define AND FOLLOW a standard ? Thanks to them, the whole dvd writer market is substantially less than it could have been. I've been waiting for more than two years now for things to clear up but still there's all these silly incompatibilities. How the heck do they expect to convince Joe Sixpack to buy one when MY head feels like exploding from all the confusion around this ?
Exactly. Today I took all known variants of msblaster from a new client's personal machine (the original and B,C,D variants, all in memory at the same time). He then tried to skip paying for it because "it didn't bother him so I didn't have to remove it". His machine was constantly online with four variants in memory all sending copies of themselves to the outside world. People like this should have their connections disabled when they start spout virusses and worms, but few ISP's seem to care.
This is what I usually do, I have copies of all major windows versions with me at all times, and if they can produce a valid key I'll gladly install with it. And yes, the number of people who actually lose their windows cd is staggering. But the thing I really hate is those damn system restore cds that come with the big name pc's like Compaq.
Right on. Everywhere I come, I install the same things. A version of Windows, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express, Office, etc. Now before you guys come lynch me for supporting The Evil Empire, I've got to plead in my defense that this is WHAT PEOPLE WANT. Sure they're mindless sheep, brain washed by the Redmond Emperor, but still it's what they want. To me the client is king. If he wants a buggy piece of software, I'll install it and any updates I can track down. I'll configure it to disable the most annoying 'features' so it's more usable. Almost every time I'll also point out the many, many better alternatives, but they simply don't want that. They want something exactly like the neighbors or their friends have. My job is trying to make their MS products work as good as possible. And ofcourse plug the holes in the swiss cheese that is Windows.
I'm probably not trying hard enough to convert them to other applications, but it's simply not my job. I'll gladly support open source whenever I can, but it's not my duty to go door to door spreading the word of Linus. If someone else wants to, they're welcome.
You know, right now my rate is 10 euros/hour, and this for an incorporated business of my own. That's very cheap and won't stay that way, but for a lot of people it isn't cheap enough. Some clients gladly pay me that, and some even insist on tipping me. And you know what these fine clients have in common ? They all tried the 'competition' first and now have something to compare me to. Typically, it's the people who
a) Know NOTHING about their own pc and can barely use it as it is, and seem to think that therefore taht everything pc repair related should be easy and cheap (I know this is a non sequitor but thos epople really seem to believe it)
b) Have only tried the 'free' helpdesk of their manufacturer
who complain to me that I'm "too expensive". Sadly, a lot of these will not come to me even when their own insistence on using the neigbor's ten year old as a tech has cost them all their data. To some people paying for experienced tech help is out of the question, they want it FREE.
I already do this in my business. I repair pc's and do just about anything possible you can do with a pc, but I don't really sell them. If someone asks me to build a new pc for them, I gladly will, but I've given up on trying to compete with the large retailers that dump pc's for ridiculous prices. The latest trend here has been low cost supermarkets selling ultra cheap pc's. Nobody can compete with that, so I won't even try. Instead I make my money when the guy that buys a cheap pc gets home, connects it to the internet (if he can even do that himself) and then proceeds whithin the next month to get beleaguered by the unholy trinity of spam, spyware and virusses, until his pc is rendered almost unusable. That's when they call me to fix their pc's. They usually try their manufacturer's helpdesk first, but the recent outsourcing trends have made sure that I get the business sooner than later, because
1) I show up
2) I speak their language
3) I can fix their stuff instead of dicking around with fixing the wrong stuff and reformatting their hard drives until they don't dare call anymore.
I don't think there's ANY future in hardware sales, since most people simply are too much cheap bastards to really consider the level of quality and service that they'll get before they buy. They only see the price. But if they want to keep their shit going in this day and age, they'll invariably end up on my doorstep.
I'm in the pc repair business, and the number of pc's I see that have a pirated Windows XP install is really quite large. Most of these are Windows XP Pro Corporate editions, and they seem to be installed by the small shops that sell the pcs. Ofcourse they all seem to use that one pirated dell key that was banned in SP1 so SP1 cannot be installed without changing the key. A lot of people are surprised and (rightfully) angry that their friendly neighborhood shop sold them an illegal version of Windows. A lot of those shops even CHARGE for it. And this is in Europe, not in Asia. Don't underestimate the number of pirated XP installs.
Don't forget SpywareBlaster, which does the same as the Immunize feature of Spybot, but it has a far larger database and seems to get updated more often. I think the combination of Spybot (to remove spyware) and Spywareblaster (to prevent it from drive-by-installing in the first place) is unbeatable.
Too bad my prototype just blew up. Thanks a lot, mister.
UUnet is not being attacked because of the number of spam originating from its networks, but because of the large number of KNOWN spamgangs STILL residing on their network after literally thousands upon thousands of complaints. Some of the spammers haven been there for over TEN MONTHS now.
This leaves us with two possible scenarios to explain this :
1) UUNet is a spamhaus and will host spammers as long as they pay.
2) UUNet is dead set against spam, however somehow their abuse department has never read all the complaints, including ten month old ones. Maybe they got "lost in traffic or stuff". Or maybe those poor abuse department people are overworked ? Or just plain DEAD ? After all this silence you start to wonder...
I think it would be cheaper to just unplug every device except the hard disk and see if that helps.
Maybe, but data theft might actually spur the owners of virus ridden pcs to actually DO something. Right now they aren't too bothered by the fact that their beloved pc is attacking and spamming the rest of 'that internet thingy', grand scale data theft and extortion WILL make a lot more clueless people aware of the problem of trojans.
Do you have any idea how many people I have to off to get to a three figure ID ? I vote we have a lottery for his number.
Humour is a delicate concept. What's funny for one, is completely unfunny for others, and vice versa. While we can argue about what's funny or not until the cows come home, the one thing I do know is that I don't like people who think they and they alone can determine what's funny. A lot of people still like this "I for one.." joke and will give it some Funny points, others do not. I've learned to accept that. Will you ?
Yes, but burritos are biodegradable. Well, MOST of them anyway (yuck)
The even more interesting part was that Nokia's own 'experts' couldn't distinguish original batteries from fakes without opening them up and checking the (absence) of certain electronics. So the original complaint is still valid : you cannot know if the battery you bought, even in a fully legal Nokia import store, is a real one or not. Nokia should take extra action to provide people with a way of knowing which is the real deal so they can at least CHOOSE to buy safer, more expensive batteries. Instead Nokia has been claiming at first that all stories about exploding batteries were completely false, then that those users were using pirated batteries (additionally implicating the users had brought it on themselves). Test-Aankoop was complaining about a REAL problem which Nokia was and still is trying to play down in every possible way.
Now, what has Microsoft Bob given us?
Well, it got Bill Gates married and off the street, always a good thing...
And who's going to mod the meta-mods ?
I wouldn't use a "take me" sign, but a "valuable ! do not take this" one. Basic human psychology.
It wouldn't run on the 486SX variants, because those didn't have the FPU part of the 486 activated. Quake uses the FPU, so 486DX processors were fine. Heck I even tried it on my 486DX-33 for kicks, and marvelled at the one-frame-per-two-seconds slideshow. It worked, but it wasn't really playable. A 486DX-133 would do absolutely great and a lot better than a P60.