I am using the the latest Intel display driver on my laptop and it fixes a lot of old problems with the driver. No more 915resolution, no more mode lines in xorg.conf, automatic detection of external monitors, etc. So what exactly does Linux lack that Windows 95 had?
Yes, but that's specific to the driver (and quite often the vendor provides a tool which writes an appropriate xorg.conf).
AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong) there is no generic way to reconfigure for a second monitor, change resolution/colour depth on the fly or any one of the other things that Windows and Mac users have been able to do for years short of editing xorg.conf by hand. (Well, I guess there is with resolution - ctrl-shift-+/- - but I'm going to discount that because it's not widely documented and outside of circles of people who actually know X pretty well isn't terribly well known. It's certainly not a right-click on the desktop job.)
Yeah, the two articles don't agree on that. But the system is based on the Panasonic eX2 which is Linux by all accounts. And simple math (500+ seats times $299 per office license) tells you a single plane would have an IT cost roughly equivalent to that of a mid-sized company.
You've never scoped out Microsoft volume licensing, have you?
I can tell you now, it's more like $200 per user when you've got just 80-100 users. And that drops further as you add more users.
That's assuming they didn't cut a special deal with Singapore Airlines. If they did, all bets are off.
Of course an ls command can trigger a read of/etc/passwd. ls -l shows owners as username rather than numeric UID - where do you think it gets that information from?
This is why a shadow password file was invented in the first place.
1. Problems solved. That's easy - but unless you're constantly firefighting (which you shouldn't be anyway) you'll have to be disciplined and log everything, including things that you've noticed but haven't yet become an issue. Which leads nicely onto the next one: 2. Problems avoided through preventative maintenance. 3. System uptime.
Of course, problems don't all take the same legnth of time to solve. So you might want to include an estimate of "number of hours problem is likely to require" in there as well, to demonstrate that you aren't sitting around doing nothing all day.
But if you're so lost as to how to do this that you have to post to/. to ask, then might I humbly suggest that you have reached the holy grail of systems admin - you have succeeded in making yourself redundant.
Google and Youtube also have two major thing in their favour which many hospitals, banks and air traffic control systems don't have:
1. The problem they're trying to solve lends itself to their architecture. 2. They don't have to integrate with a bunch of legacy stuff, which could very easily introduce potential failure points.
This prompts the question of why on earth you're running NAS on a box with a head anyhow? If you're going to use a box for a NAS server, hooking up a graphics card to it is counter-productive, and using a typical GUI-based distro likewise. It's something that people brought up in the Microsoft way of thinking might do, but if relegating an old PC to become a NAS, the first thing I would do is get rid of anything I don't need, including graphics cards, whose main purpose in a server is to collect dust and increase heat.
Do not underestimate the pervasiveness of the Microsoft way of thinking. It has created an entire generation of sysadmins and IT managers whose solution to every problem is to buy the first product which claims to solve it, rather than actually engage their brains.
I don't hold with that - the argument that "it's cheaper because it takes less time and time is money" doesn't hold much water in my experience. Few commercial products are as quick and simple as the vendors claim, and the argument that you can instead spend your time doing "more useful, productive stuff" is complete guff when the entire purpose of your job is to solve technology problems.
I don't debate for one moment that there is a place for Microsoft products - but I really don't have a lot of time for the "Throw money at everything" attitude they seem to encourage. I much prefer the "Think about what you need to throw money at" approach.
I note from he summary that "the icon is still there".
How come there even is an icon to see? I'd have expected such a filter to be implemented on a physically separate proxy server operated by the ISP - otherwise how does a parent who's got a Mac or an older PC use the product? Unless the software is on a proxy server but there's a Windows applet which confirms that the proxy is being used.
Even then, Tor (or similar) would make short work of this.
There's a few things which immediately spring to mind:
1. We already know that it was meant to be running Apache. Perhaps there was some PHP application which wasn't very secure? Even so, if that were the case then the exploit they used must have been fairly convoluted because it probably wouldn't have got them root access immediately.
2. We don't know what other services were supposed to be running, how/if they were firewalled and secured. SSH, for instance, is only as secure as the weakest password on the box - for best results you probably want to combine it with minimising the number of shell accounts, only allowing root access through private/public keys and using denyhosts (or similar) to automatically block bruteforce dictionary attacks.
3. We don't know how secure the desktop PC which was used to administer this box is. There is an awful lot of Windows-based malware out there - it wouldn't surprise me if there's more than one piece which looks around for when you start a connection to a host on port 22, enables a keylogger and sends the results back.
The target market is, and always has been, the sort of IT manager who bases their decisions on what they read in magazines and sales literature.
Many commercial software products, you buy them (often for a surprisingly low price) but you HAVE to get support and that's expensive. But you have someone to call if things go wrong - and if you're lucky, they're somewhat more intelligent than the telephone handset they're speaking into.
The perception amongst such management is that the same is true of Windows. You're paying for it, therefore you get support. Microsoft are fully aware that this is the perception and they milk it for all it's worth - even though more or less everyone who actually works on the coal face knows that this is complete twaddle.
As long as Windows works well enough that anything that is likely to go wrong can be fixed in a reasonable timescale without having to beg Microsoft to crank out a patch because you've encountered a genuine bug which is a showstopper for you, this will continue.
Those cameras have been going in for 10 years or more.
9 times out of 10, whenever a tape is played back on a TV crime show, you see an amorphous grey blob and some bloke giving a voiceover saying "Do you know this man?". (The other 1 time out of 10 the cameras weren't working so instead you have a talking head for a few minutes explaining how distressing it is and how they've drawn an artists impression based on witness reports).
It's basically a technical solution to a social problem - and it works about as well as most technical solutions to social problems. Frankly, I'm astonished that the USA, with a traditional love for technical solutions, is so far behind in the CCTV stakes.
No such thing as a truly unbreakable anti-theft system.
1. What happens if someone genuinely loses their keys? There needs to be some way for the manufacturer to sort them out. 2. Car theft won't stop overnight. But it will cause more things like carjackings (rather more violent and distressing) and key theft. 3. In any major city, there are enough tow trucks that nobody will bat an eyelid if they see a car being lifted onto the back of one. It's brazen, but by the time it dawns on the driver that their car has been stolen it's in a lockup 100 miles away being modified to take a different key altogether.
Which would imply a stability that leads to dependability which leads to usability which leads to widespread use. At least that is my hope in the enterprise, that the combination of commodity hardware with a commodity, high powered and stable OS can be coupled with increasingly powerful database engines such as mySQL, Veritas, etc. Oracle on Linux is now considered stable as well.
Depending on what kind of infrastructure you needed, six or seven years ago, you were fairly likely to get funny looks if you announced you were running a significant chunk of your servers on Linux. If you were running a significant chunk of your desktop infrastructure on Linux, the funny looks were a dead cert.
Three or four years ago, the funny looks regarding Linux servers were long gone, replaced with genuine interest.
Today, nobody bats an eyelid about server infrastructure, and you'd be just as likely (if not more so) to get genuine interest as funny looks if you are seriously migrating desktops to Linux. About the only thing you can't easily replace is Exchange and the centralised configuration UI that Active Directory gives you (no, LDAP user authentication doesn't count). The centralised configuration isn't too difficult to work around, the full integration of Exchange is.
On Gentoo I've had far fewer problems getting things to run.
That's as maybe, but the problem you describe is not a function of Gentoo versus RedHat's package management systems, but a function of the number of packages available for a given distribution. I've not used RedHat since before the Fedora project, but back then this was a real issue.
I've recently started migrating from Gentoo to Debian. All the benefits of a distribution with many packages availalble, with none of the issues of sitting around waiting for something to compile only to discover that you forgot to compile in an option that you need.
I don't know about early Apples, but in the early 1980's it was fairly common for personal computers to use audio cassettes for data and program storage. Wouldn't surprise me if someone built a computer which had a built-in audio cassette player which could be used for both audio tape playback and loading software.
Whether or not someone believes in evolution is in what way relevant to their ability to govern?
To a greater or lesser extent, it may very well be concerning depending on their role in government.
A man in charge of defense who believed in Aristotelean theories of motion might be quite entertaining - particularly if he demanded that any systems purchased used Aristotelean theories of motion in calculating where projectiles would land. But while it would be entertaining to watch from afar, there's no way I'd want him in charge of my country's military.
A man who believes in creationism and doesn't believe in evolution - well, let's just say that I don't want him deciding educational policy.
Remember the origins of quite a few parts of the bible are lost in the mists of time. It's fairly certain that many authors with differing beliefs were involved over the course of many years. So saying something like "The bible says the four corners of the earth" doesn't tell us much beyond "At least one author involved in writing the bible believed it to have corners".
Let's say we open the cupboard. The pencil is either there or it isn't (though you could argue that it was in an undefined quantum state until such time as we opened the cupboard, whereupon we found both the pencil and a rather annoyed cat).
But God's a bit different. As soon as we prove he exists, we don't need faith. And in God's own words, "without faith I am nothing".
Therefore, assuming we were able to crack open the glued cupboard which may or may not contain God, if we see Him (or any hard evidence of Him) there He immediately ceases to exist. It's reasonable to say that without hard evidence, God is in a quantum state of both existing and not existing at the same time - but as soon as we find hard evidence, God's state changes to "does not exist".
It's also worth mentioning that tourists to the US won't have a RealID or a US passport.
Yet the way this sounds, I cannot think of any reading which doesn't result in - if not now, then in the future - an edict stating "We can't verify the authenticity of any non-US passport or RealID, therefore tourist numbers shall follow a strict quota system at our borders, and any tourists must be accompanied at all times by a US citizen on a federally-approved tour. Tourists are not allowed in any area where US ID is required".
There are already plenty of bars which demand ID from everyone, regardless of age, and refuse ID which isn't US-issued. Can't see why that idea might not extend to other areas.
All in all, this sounds to me more like that bastion of freedom and individualism, North Korea, than the USA.
Has it occurred to anyone that there will most likely NEVER be another successful hijacking of an airliner BECAUSE of 9/11? Any effort to do so will result in another Flight 93. It's not hard to be a hero when you know the only other option is death...I doubt any group of American passengers is likely to sit quietly the next time an Arab with a box cutter starts barking orders.
I'd go several steps further.
Most hijackings are unsuccessful, because at some point the plane has to land. Normally, when it lands it's surrounded by a small army of armed law enforcement officials. September 11 is the first and only time that the goal was not to land the aircraft.
Since September 11, many countries have adopted a policy of shooting down hijacked aircraft.
Further, since September 11 aircraft have had stronger doors with locks fitted on the cabin. The captain can just carry on flying while the crazed hijacker has to deal with 2-400 angry passengers bearing down on them at once.
It therefore follows that only the most mentally deranged terrorist group would even consider an aircraft hijacking today. It's expensive, and the chances of it all going to plan these days are practically zero.
Negative. Microsoft is a publicly traded and owned company. Their one and only goal is to make money for their shareholders. Everything they do is subordinate to (and supportive of) that goal.
Technically correct, but Microsoft have shown on any number of occasions that their favourite method to do this is to attempt to gain and maintain a monopoly position in a given market so they can charge pretty much what they like.
The main reason they aren't is a lack of DRM on those other platforms.
By letting the Dirac project die on the vine, the BBC has essentially demonstrated that it has no real interest in developing its own cross-platform codec (and almost certainly cross-platform DRM). Fundamentally, it's a broadcaster so it probably won't pay someone else to come up with something either.
This leaves only one option. Wait for someone else to write a cross-platform DRM product they can use. But such a thing already exists - it's called Flash. Flash can support DRM and is reasonably cross platform. But that's been the case for some time, and yet the BBC didn't use Flash.
Now, most TV companies (and I'm sure the BBC is no exception) have a fair mix of IT. Most of the creative types will almost certainly be using Apple Macs, for starters. So it's not like the BBC as an organisation is unaware of the existence of platforms other than Windows.
Others have said "give them time, it's a beta". I say "get real, nobody prepares a beta product with a view to completely redesigning it from the ground up when they go live".
There is therefore only one sensible explanation. The BBC is lying. This was intended as a quick, easy, cheap project which could gain them brownie points from the general public and the BBC Trust - nothing more, nothing less.
Get real. They'd arrive at Heathrow around 10:00 at night London time and by the time they've got through customs and negotiated transport to Oxford Street or Kensington, it'll be closer to 11:00. Much of the designer shopping will have closed for the night by then.
1. That's under the UK legal system. 2. Specifically, it's under the Small Claims court. Which is a system we have in the UK which is designed specifically so that small (under £5,000) claims can be heard in relatively informal surroundings, and where it's not really necessary to hire an army of solicitors to fight your case. Neither is it necessary to wait 2 years for your case to be heard.
Unlike Judge Judy, it is part of the same legal system as everything else and decisions are just as binding. If you decide not to defend, the chances are the court will decide against you. And if you don't pay up, and don't show up when the person taking you to court goes back to ask the court to send the bailiffs in (yes, the court sends the bailiffs in), chances are the court will simply rubber-stamp the request to send the bailiffs in.
Absolutely right. I do something similar - why on Earth would I want my inbox clogged up with email from the various monitoring systems and backup systems I run?
Yet IME, 95% of people never even look at this filtering capability.
IME, very few encryption systems meet the major requirement : are they "user-proof"? Bear in mind that it's all very well going on about encryption keys, but 99.9% of general PC users neither understand nor care to understand about them. And you'd be amazed (and faintly disturbed) how many people have a remarkably cavalier attitude towards security.
Telling colleagues their password, writing it down, using the same password with an incrementing number on the end - all these things are commonplace. If the encryption is even 1 step more complicated than just storing the data unencrypted, I bet you £100 that there will be at least one user who decides it's too complicated and avoids it altogether.
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I am using the the latest Intel display driver on my laptop and it fixes a lot of old problems with the driver. No more 915resolution, no more mode lines in xorg.conf, automatic detection of external monitors, etc. So what exactly does Linux lack that Windows 95 had?
Yes, but that's specific to the driver (and quite often the vendor provides a tool which writes an appropriate xorg.conf).
AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong) there is no generic way to reconfigure for a second monitor, change resolution/colour depth on the fly or any one of the other things that Windows and Mac users have been able to do for years short of editing xorg.conf by hand. (Well, I guess there is with resolution - ctrl-shift-+/- - but I'm going to discount that because it's not widely documented and outside of circles of people who actually know X pretty well isn't terribly well known. It's certainly not a right-click on the desktop job.)
Yeah, the two articles don't agree on that. But the system is based on the Panasonic eX2 which is Linux by all accounts. And simple math (500+ seats times $299 per office license) tells you a single plane would have an IT cost roughly equivalent to that of a mid-sized company.
You've never scoped out Microsoft volume licensing, have you?
I can tell you now, it's more like $200 per user when you've got just 80-100 users. And that drops further as you add more users.
That's assuming they didn't cut a special deal with Singapore Airlines. If they did, all bets are off.
Of course an ls command can trigger a read of /etc/passwd. ls -l shows owners as username rather than numeric UID - where do you think it gets that information from?
This is why a shadow password file was invented in the first place.
A number of things:
/. to ask, then might I humbly suggest that you have reached the holy grail of systems admin - you have succeeded in making yourself redundant.
1. Problems solved. That's easy - but unless you're constantly firefighting (which you shouldn't be anyway) you'll have to be disciplined and log everything, including things that you've noticed but haven't yet become an issue. Which leads nicely onto the next one:
2. Problems avoided through preventative maintenance.
3. System uptime.
Of course, problems don't all take the same legnth of time to solve. So you might want to include an estimate of "number of hours problem is likely to require" in there as well, to demonstrate that you aren't sitting around doing nothing all day.
But if you're so lost as to how to do this that you have to post to
Google and Youtube also have two major thing in their favour which many hospitals, banks and air traffic control systems don't have:
1. The problem they're trying to solve lends itself to their architecture.
2. They don't have to integrate with a bunch of legacy stuff, which could very easily introduce potential failure points.
This prompts the question of why on earth you're running NAS on a box with a head anyhow? If you're going to use a box for a NAS server, hooking up a graphics card to it is counter-productive, and using a typical GUI-based distro likewise. It's something that people brought up in the Microsoft way of thinking might do, but if relegating an old PC to become a NAS, the first thing I would do is get rid of anything I don't need, including graphics cards, whose main purpose in a server is to collect dust and increase heat.
Do not underestimate the pervasiveness of the Microsoft way of thinking. It has created an entire generation of sysadmins and IT managers whose solution to every problem is to buy the first product which claims to solve it, rather than actually engage their brains.
I don't hold with that - the argument that "it's cheaper because it takes less time and time is money" doesn't hold much water in my experience. Few commercial products are as quick and simple as the vendors claim, and the argument that you can instead spend your time doing "more useful, productive stuff" is complete guff when the entire purpose of your job is to solve technology problems.
I don't debate for one moment that there is a place for Microsoft products - but I really don't have a lot of time for the "Throw money at everything" attitude they seem to encourage. I much prefer the "Think about what you need to throw money at" approach.
I note from he summary that "the icon is still there".
How come there even is an icon to see? I'd have expected such a filter to be implemented on a physically separate proxy server operated by the ISP - otherwise how does a parent who's got a Mac or an older PC use the product? Unless the software is on a proxy server but there's a Windows applet which confirms that the proxy is being used.
Even then, Tor (or similar) would make short work of this.
There's a few things which immediately spring to mind:
1. We already know that it was meant to be running Apache. Perhaps there was some PHP application which wasn't very secure? Even so, if that were the case then the exploit they used must have been fairly convoluted because it probably wouldn't have got them root access immediately.
2. We don't know what other services were supposed to be running, how/if they were firewalled and secured. SSH, for instance, is only as secure as the weakest password on the box - for best results you probably want to combine it with minimising the number of shell accounts, only allowing root access through private/public keys and using denyhosts (or similar) to automatically block bruteforce dictionary attacks.
3. We don't know how secure the desktop PC which was used to administer this box is. There is an awful lot of Windows-based malware out there - it wouldn't surprise me if there's more than one piece which looks around for when you start a connection to a host on port 22, enables a keylogger and sends the results back.
The target market is, and always has been, the sort of IT manager who bases their decisions on what they read in magazines and sales literature.
Many commercial software products, you buy them (often for a surprisingly low price) but you HAVE to get support and that's expensive. But you have someone to call if things go wrong - and if you're lucky, they're somewhat more intelligent than the telephone handset they're speaking into.
The perception amongst such management is that the same is true of Windows. You're paying for it, therefore you get support. Microsoft are fully aware that this is the perception and they milk it for all it's worth - even though more or less everyone who actually works on the coal face knows that this is complete twaddle.
As long as Windows works well enough that anything that is likely to go wrong can be fixed in a reasonable timescale without having to beg Microsoft to crank out a patch because you've encountered a genuine bug which is a showstopper for you, this will continue.
Those cameras have been going in for 10 years or more.
9 times out of 10, whenever a tape is played back on a TV crime show, you see an amorphous grey blob and some bloke giving a voiceover saying "Do you know this man?". (The other 1 time out of 10 the cameras weren't working so instead you have a talking head for a few minutes explaining how distressing it is and how they've drawn an artists impression based on witness reports).
It's basically a technical solution to a social problem - and it works about as well as most technical solutions to social problems. Frankly, I'm astonished that the USA, with a traditional love for technical solutions, is so far behind in the CCTV stakes.
No such thing as a truly unbreakable anti-theft system.
1. What happens if someone genuinely loses their keys? There needs to be some way for the manufacturer to sort them out.
2. Car theft won't stop overnight. But it will cause more things like carjackings (rather more violent and distressing) and key theft.
3. In any major city, there are enough tow trucks that nobody will bat an eyelid if they see a car being lifted onto the back of one. It's brazen, but by the time it dawns on the driver that their car has been stolen it's in a lockup 100 miles away being modified to take a different key altogether.
Which would imply a stability that leads to dependability which leads to usability which leads to widespread use. At least that is my hope in the enterprise, that the combination of commodity hardware with a commodity, high powered and stable OS can be coupled with increasingly powerful database engines such as mySQL, Veritas, etc. Oracle on Linux is now considered stable as well.
Depending on what kind of infrastructure you needed, six or seven years ago, you were fairly likely to get funny looks if you announced you were running a significant chunk of your servers on Linux. If you were running a significant chunk of your desktop infrastructure on Linux, the funny looks were a dead cert.
Three or four years ago, the funny looks regarding Linux servers were long gone, replaced with genuine interest.
Today, nobody bats an eyelid about server infrastructure, and you'd be just as likely (if not more so) to get genuine interest as funny looks if you are seriously migrating desktops to Linux. About the only thing you can't easily replace is Exchange and the centralised configuration UI that Active Directory gives you (no, LDAP user authentication doesn't count). The centralised configuration isn't too difficult to work around, the full integration of Exchange is.
On Gentoo I've had far fewer problems getting things to run.
That's as maybe, but the problem you describe is not a function of Gentoo versus RedHat's package management systems, but a function of the number of packages available for a given distribution. I've not used RedHat since before the Fedora project, but back then this was a real issue.
I've recently started migrating from Gentoo to Debian. All the benefits of a distribution with many packages availalble, with none of the issues of sitting around waiting for something to compile only to discover that you forgot to compile in an option that you need.
I don't know about early Apples, but in the early 1980's it was fairly common for personal computers to use audio cassettes for data and program storage. Wouldn't surprise me if someone built a computer which had a built-in audio cassette player which could be used for both audio tape playback and loading software.
Whether or not someone believes in evolution is in what way relevant to their ability to govern?
To a greater or lesser extent, it may very well be concerning depending on their role in government.
A man in charge of defense who believed in Aristotelean theories of motion might be quite entertaining - particularly if he demanded that any systems purchased used Aristotelean theories of motion in calculating where projectiles would land. But while it would be entertaining to watch from afar, there's no way I'd want him in charge of my country's military.
A man who believes in creationism and doesn't believe in evolution - well, let's just say that I don't want him deciding educational policy.
Remember the origins of quite a few parts of the bible are lost in the mists of time. It's fairly certain that many authors with differing beliefs were involved over the course of many years. So saying something like "The bible says the four corners of the earth" doesn't tell us much beyond "At least one author involved in writing the bible believed it to have corners".
But the pencil is rather different to God.
Let's say we open the cupboard. The pencil is either there or it isn't (though you could argue that it was in an undefined quantum state until such time as we opened the cupboard, whereupon we found both the pencil and a rather annoyed cat).
But God's a bit different. As soon as we prove he exists, we don't need faith. And in God's own words, "without faith I am nothing".
Therefore, assuming we were able to crack open the glued cupboard which may or may not contain God, if we see Him (or any hard evidence of Him) there He immediately ceases to exist. It's reasonable to say that without hard evidence, God is in a quantum state of both existing and not existing at the same time - but as soon as we find hard evidence, God's state changes to "does not exist".
It's also worth mentioning that tourists to the US won't have a RealID or a US passport.
Yet the way this sounds, I cannot think of any reading which doesn't result in - if not now, then in the future - an edict stating "We can't verify the authenticity of any non-US passport or RealID, therefore tourist numbers shall follow a strict quota system at our borders, and any tourists must be accompanied at all times by a US citizen on a federally-approved tour. Tourists are not allowed in any area where US ID is required".
There are already plenty of bars which demand ID from everyone, regardless of age, and refuse ID which isn't US-issued. Can't see why that idea might not extend to other areas.
All in all, this sounds to me more like that bastion of freedom and individualism, North Korea, than the USA.
I'd go several steps further.
It therefore follows that only the most mentally deranged terrorist group would even consider an aircraft hijacking today. It's expensive, and the chances of it all going to plan these days are practically zero.
Negative. Microsoft is a publicly traded and owned company. Their one and only goal is to make money for their shareholders. Everything they do is subordinate to (and supportive of) that goal.
Technically correct, but Microsoft have shown on any number of occasions that their favourite method to do this is to attempt to gain and maintain a monopoly position in a given market so they can charge pretty much what they like.
The main reason they aren't is a lack of DRM on those other platforms.
By letting the Dirac project die on the vine, the BBC has essentially demonstrated that it has no real interest in developing its own cross-platform codec (and almost certainly cross-platform DRM). Fundamentally, it's a broadcaster so it probably won't pay someone else to come up with something either.
This leaves only one option. Wait for someone else to write a cross-platform DRM product they can use. But such a thing already exists - it's called Flash. Flash can support DRM and is reasonably cross platform. But that's been the case for some time, and yet the BBC didn't use Flash.
Now, most TV companies (and I'm sure the BBC is no exception) have a fair mix of IT. Most of the creative types will almost certainly be using Apple Macs, for starters. So it's not like the BBC as an organisation is unaware of the existence of platforms other than Windows.
Others have said "give them time, it's a beta". I say "get real, nobody prepares a beta product with a view to completely redesigning it from the ground up when they go live".
There is therefore only one sensible explanation. The BBC is lying. This was intended as a quick, easy, cheap project which could gain them brownie points from the general public and the BBC Trust - nothing more, nothing less.
Get real. They'd arrive at Heathrow around 10:00 at night London time and by the time they've got through customs and negotiated transport to Oxford Street or Kensington, it'll be closer to 11:00. Much of the designer shopping will have closed for the night by then.
There is an important difference there:
1. That's under the UK legal system.
2. Specifically, it's under the Small Claims court. Which is a system we have in the UK which is designed specifically so that small (under £5,000) claims can be heard in relatively informal surroundings, and where it's not really necessary to hire an army of solicitors to fight your case. Neither is it necessary to wait 2 years for your case to be heard.
Unlike Judge Judy, it is part of the same legal system as everything else and decisions are just as binding. If you decide not to defend, the chances are the court will decide against you. And if you don't pay up, and don't show up when the person taking you to court goes back to ask the court to send the bailiffs in (yes, the court sends the bailiffs in), chances are the court will simply rubber-stamp the request to send the bailiffs in.
Absolutely right. I do something similar - why on Earth would I want my inbox clogged up with email from the various monitoring systems and backup systems I run?
Yet IME, 95% of people never even look at this filtering capability.
IME, very few encryption systems meet the major requirement : are they "user-proof"? Bear in mind that it's all very well going on about encryption keys, but 99.9% of general PC users neither understand nor care to understand about them. And you'd be amazed (and faintly disturbed) how many people have a remarkably cavalier attitude towards security.
Telling colleagues their password, writing it down, using the same password with an incrementing number on the end - all these things are commonplace. If the encryption is even 1 step more complicated than just storing the data unencrypted, I bet you £100 that there will be at least one user who decides it's too complicated and avoids it altogether.