Everything HD is anti-consumer and even anti-producer given the prohibitively high costs of production in HD. It's amazing, it's like they didn't learn a thing from the past, they just keeping doing it the same way they've done it for 50 years using technology to speed up parts of the process as opposed to eliminating steps entirely.
NAB is the epitome of this, it's a huge cluster because there are hundreds of ways to do everything and they are all the same with just a slightly different look to them. Very few take advantage of what modern databases have to offer in organization, metatagging, and cataloging. It's astounding and is no wonder why it costs so much to make a movie or produce a TV show.
HD is all about the content distributors, they weren't making enough money in the past so they push for HD everywhere, on disc and over the air it was all crippled. Going digital for broadcast made sense but we didn't need to go HD at the same time or more importantly, we didn't need to add broadcast flags and encryption. Those exist purely for anti-consumer purposes.
On a positive note, the videos my company is going to start distributing soon will be DRM free in easy to use common formats. Transcoding is trivially easy these days afterall. Thank heavens for the OSS community on that front.
It's amazing the amount of money the big stations spend on cataloging their video when it can all be stored in a database so easy, then referenced and metatagged at will. Then transcription can be associated as well. I have no idea why file based storage took so long to become mainstream.
I never upgrade, always an uninstall of Office 2003, then an install of 2007. I do it specifically to avoid those kinds of migration issues. Just like I never upgrade Windows.
Even upgrades on the Linux side are tricky.
Given that Office 2007 even gives you the option of doing it all in one wizard I'm surprised people are still choosing to upgrade.
How would that be perjury? Unless they sent the takedown notice knowing it wasn't valid. Also, the government doesn't routinely go after someone for just perjury, it has to be associated with other crimes.
If you could prove that they knowingly supported a false takedown notice then you could probably use the perjury in your counter claim to get back any lost business you might have endured since the first action is to terminate your access.
Except that MS does have thousands of partners, Insight, Cisco, and HP just to name a few.
Also as a side note, my users have no trouble with Outlook 2007 on XP or Vista while connecting to Exchange 2003. Perhaps someone screwed up your AD implementation? I love it because Outlook does a lookup to find which server to connect to so I don't have to do any typing if I'm a first time user of Outlook 2007.
At any rate, competition comes from all sides for them, it's natural given the number of markets they are a part of. They probably should have expanded more slowly but look how much crap Novell got for partnering with Microsoft? Sometimes MS has to do it on their own because their reputation is so bad. I'll even go so far as saying it's deservedly bad but their behavior since the regulations began is indeed quite different. The products that were released were a direct result of those actions. XP, Server 2003, Exchange 2003, SQL 2005 are all much better products than anyone had seen out of Redmond to date. Exchange 2007 and Server 2008 are shaping out to be a fair bit better than the Vista flop. They are moving towards being more open, they just have to learn how now.
They are definitely making money and utilizing the companies that they purchased so they at least aren't just sitting on IP for the fun of it.
Besides my personal experience there is:
this. I'll grant that it is anecdotal however and is thus not to be taken as fact. Regardless I didn't make anything up. Unless you're referring to marijuana addiction. If that's the case I'll refer you to Here and
Here
and
Here
Most people drink or smoke to relax, mj doesn't make you hung over so naturally it's a better choice of the two.
Also, the vast majority of people out there that get drunk first and then attempt to smoke immediately get dizzy and then proceed to get sick. If people start with MJ and mix through-out an evening then they accomplish what you are describing quite regularly.
I'll agree that legalizing marijuana would do a great deal to cut down on alcohol abuse as people would have a good alternative that has proven far less destructive again and again. Of course nothing works for everyone so you'd have to deal with the consequences of people that get addicted even if it is only a psychological addiction.
Mechanisms already exist to handle addiction anyways, cut back on the drug wars and better fund treatment programs and we can put a whole ton of money back into education which is the root cause of most stupid behavior.
Personally I'm inclined to agree, if you're old enough to die for your country and to vote then you should be able to have a beer.
What's worse is that they deployed without a full plan. If you go from one system with a retention system and that is a requirement then don't you want to plan out your retention policies on the new system?
Exchange has no trouble retaining email and archiving it off with any number of products, most SAN providers even provide software to do it. It's malice, there is simply no way anyone with enough knowledge to deploy Exchange for a site that large wouldn't know how to retain the messages.
Are you serious? Even by your 30gig estimate which is a conservative figure you still have millions of subscribers. There are over 80 million subscribers in the U.S. alone. That's 2400 million gigabytes to store all that information to accomplish what?
Here's news for ya, SQL 2000 asks ya for a password for SA if you want to use database authentication which is optional.
Just because people enabled SQL authentication and didn't bother to set the password on the same damned screen speaks nothing about the product itself other than the fact that they make it real easy to setup and install and get running.
I'll add that Oracle even to this day doesn't input text into the password field for you during install because they expect you set it which is pretty logical.
How is that interesting? Parent claims Microsoft and Windows are responsible for the files in every location problem. Yes they could certainly prevent it but the vast majority of software out there abandoned ini files and then never properly implemented the registry. The mechanisms to make it smooth and secure are all there but nobody does it opting for the lazy way. I'm sorry to bust your bubble but you will run into this on alternate platforms if all were to abandon Windows that is.
There are plenty of Linux boxen out there that get compromised just the same due to clue-less admins. If you prevent users from executing files then they will not be happy but they will be safe. There are many attack vectors available to a standard Linux box operating as a workstation in a typical corporate setup.
There is a lot Microsoft needs to do to make their platform safer but the platform disappearing will not end the problems of the Internet by a long shot. As long as spamming remains legal in most places expect the zombie makers to go where they can. The kind of security Linux can offer is practically irrelevant when talking about a home PC as end-users are unlikely to follow the majority of best practices as seen with their use of Windows. This behavior will not go away anytime soon. I've seen plenty of OS X users click blindly accepting installation dialogs without reading anything. The package could do whatever it wanted as long as the user is that blind with that level of access to their system which you can except in the home environment and in the majority of work environments.
If you want to argue that the problems might be easier to deal with without Windows getting in the way and I might be able to support it better. You are describing lazy 3rd-party and Microsoft developers along with lazy end-users. The platform changing will not change any of their behaviors. There is definitely plenty of sloppy written FOSS out there along with a lot of solid software just like the closed source world. There is no need for self delusion, there is even poorly written OS X software as astonishing as that may sound to you.
As long as people are lazy you're going to have problems running up against the people who aren't lazy.
Why is this scary? It's a school with only 60 computers, it's not a big deal if the computers go down or data gets lost especially given that it is not a high school.
In that situation I'd say using software that is simple enough for an 11 year old to figure out is perfectly sensible. It speaks great volumes about the simplicity of the interface and illustrates quite nicely what the strength of Windows is.
That said, if the kid thinks he knows everything about administration because he can just point and click then he or the company he employs would likely be sorry when they begin to rely on these systems to make money. When downtime is a big issue you need better and more sophisticated management which is more than just point and click.
Of course I was 13 when I administered the middle school I was attending, I did it until I was 17, at that time I was helping 4 other schools too. It was all netware so it worked once you got it going. Little annoyed I didn't get an article when I was a kid. Oh well, the kid is on the right track, in 10 years he will probably have a pretty impressive skill-set at his disposal. Assuming he doesn't get lazy and doesn't think everything is as easy as creating a user in Active Directory.
Except that the upload speed is not a technological limitation, it is a policy limitation to for them to better manage their resources. If you can only request information using your upload speed so fast then your download is restricted. That is the reason different operators have different upload/download ratios.
Cable POPs are more than capable of handling the bandwidth, the hub and spoke model works just fine with modern switching systems which most cable companies use. They do hybrid fiber/copper systems so they can handle increased load in neighbors where they offer service.
There is no reason the head-end bandwidth can't handle the 400 or so subscribers at the most that are on it. You can easily service that bandwidth with 4 strands of fiber and I guarantee they put a lot more than just 4 strands in.
I think you've missed the mark on why bittorrent at least is so revolutionary. Yes it can eat a lot of bandwidth, but for a large cable operator a large number of people are going to be on your own backbone not using any of your upstream bandwidth or at least using a lot less of it.
So from your perspective you have your 100meg connection with 100 million 10meg connections coming off of it, if they are copying from one to another then your 100meg feed is irrelevant and they will not be degrading the performance of anybody since your switch can take 100meg connections without dropping packets or reducing speed. So in short, the large ISPs are completely full of it especially here in the U.S. where we have subsidized on the order of a few billion dollars to help them develop infrastructure to handle all of this traffic. Money they have squandered of course.
In the DVD world you're way off base although your argument is more valid for Blueray. DVD used MPEG2 which is a crappy format to hold anything in for the end-user. Re-encoding H.264 from MPEG2 results in the kinds of gains I am referring to. You can most definitely retain Dolby Digital surround in H.264 while transcoding a DVD.
In the blueray world they have a 25 or 50gig disc to use, they have no reason to compress the video any better. The same thing happened in the DVD world, they didn't put much effort into compressing the video because they didn't need to. It sounds like you haven't dealt with video production houses. They do not to do massive processing to yield the best bits to "press" onto the master. They are lazy, real lazy, the hours that go into making a movie go into editing and post-production. The DVD/Blueray discs are not even part of the process for most movies. Some places are filming for additional content on their discs now but that is still separate and encoded differently. An interview with the director is not going to be in Dolby Digital 5.1.
I also didn't say there was no difference from a CD sized re-encode, I said that you wouldn't notice the difference unless you're one of the rare few projecting on to a 10' screen. H.264 is THAT much more efficient than MPEG2.
The whole argument for blueray is also irrelevant as the movie itself is not even 20gigs. All the menus and alternate audio streams add up to that amount, none of that you need ahead of time while streaming over the Internet. You choose your language and it only gives you that language.
You can have both without using the ridiculous amount of space that they waste when mastering blueray, it's completely absurd to think you can't have the same quality both audio and video in smaller formats. It's the exact same argument people used for DVDs. You don't need 4.7gigs for a DVD even though they use it for a DVD you buy in a store. It compresses quite easily to 700megs without a noticeable loss of quality. Of course that depends on the complexity of the video.
With blueray you're stuck with certain supported codecs some of which are excellent, H.264 for one but when it's a file that can be transcoded you can use other compression techniques which are more effective. The content producing industry never uses the latest and greatest, they only go with what they know works. Bunch of typer-writer using hacks that are making decisions about digital content distribution.
You're making an incredibly bad assumption that an HD movie streamed over the Internet is 20GB in size. It is not in the same format you would find on a blue-ray disc. It would be compressed and ultimately be at most a couple of gigs easily streamed at a respectable bit-rate. People all the time download HD content. Azureus has a whole section just for it and I stream it without any issue over a standard cable Internet connection.
ISP's could wreck the model but they have always adapted to the increases and I see no reason why that would stop now.
You can't use regular CFLs in dimmer lit circuit. Every CFL I've used has lasted for 6 years and counting. As they degrade they take longer to light up but that's the only trick. If you care what kind or color of light they produce then you can run into other problems but they make all kinds now. That's probably the real problem is that there are so many different kinds.
On the flip side though if you are always obsessing about your projects then you are probably missing some important piece of the puzzle that you would get if you just slept or if you let your mind switch gears. I know I was exhausted and making bone-headed moves at work. Then some friends came to visit for 5 days, we partied it up and at the end of it I went back to work and did some pretty darned amazing work. Stuff I thought I couldn't do just came easy to me.
Sometimes a little distance is a good thing, and beer helps you get that distance rather quickly. Of course many people cross the fine line between drinking too much, causing you to be unproductive.
I'd say balance is always a good thing, just like a little exercise helps you clear your mind allowing you to concentrate better than if you'd just sat there for 18 hours straight coding.
Thats funny, I can say the same things about my DOS and Windows boxes, never had an infection of any of my personal computers, but when you manage for other people the rules change as different people have different priorities and skillsets.
I may not know as much as I think I know but this definitely exists, combined with auditing on ports you know you don't use and you can have a bunch of real-time information about your Windows box. A Deep packet inspection firewall will by no means protect you from everything but SSH over the Internet is certainly blocked for the corporate network I'm responsible for along with inbound and outbound SMTP to anything but my authorized email servers.
There are ways around every system of course, security is always a learning process. Securing Windows once I'll agree isn't a simple task, but securing en masse once you've figured out the one is pretty darned simple especially for me with SMS and MOM deployed. I'm limited only by the number of alerts I want to be interrupted by.
I might add the sysinternals is now owned by Microsoft and their products are still offered for free. There are dozens of tools right there.
With the firewall exception Windows does some with the IDS you are referring to. Network monitoring is deeply ingrained and has no trouble reporting to a syslog server. The problem is the effort it takes to setup a proper IDS so that it doesn't overwhelm you with false-positives which is really the same with any IDS package. Microsoft likes the basic approach that comes with Windows and then the advanced approach they get through their Operations Manager software. Of course now it's being rolled and merged with SMS so patching should become simpler as well.
The problem is either incompetent administrators or overworked admins. I've seen both lead to those kinds of issues. The other problem is that the data was on the computers to begin with. In this day and age with centralized storage from NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, etc... there is no need for workstations to even have hard-drives, especially in a security conscious organization. Security isn't easy thats for sure but it's certainly not impossible with what Microsoft gives you out of the box. If you really want to you can always turn on TCP/IP filtering and disable 25 either ingress and/or egress. Of course that's only a patch as a proper botnet client would call home and find a new port to send on through a proxy. Of course email should be blocked at the firewall as well doing deep packet inspection on any port.
So in short, Microsoft does provide some powerful network security tools. A lot of them are even free even if they don't come on the Windows cd. The Baseline Security Analyzer is free for instance and makes securing Windows boxes en masse a pretty simple task.
Actually it sounds like you think there is an inherent difference. A URL even if it is just an IP address resolves to an owner just like a domain name would. Ping -a and whois the result. If the endpoint blocks reverse lookup then you just go to the last point which didn't and recover from there. It's quite easy. There are even products which automate all this for you.
It's still local escalation and not global, they may gain admin access to the machine but they won't gain admin on the server so they still only have access to what the user had access to to begin with so the whole point is moot since the user would have to be logged into their machine left unlocked and then let some other guy come in unsupervised with unlocked access to firewire/usb and plenty of time to find files. Sounds to me like it's a none issue, if your environment is insecure enough to allow such a hack then you might as well give them console access direct where there are plenty of local privilege escalation exploits available.
Basically I'm not going to lose an ounce of sleep over this as IT would have to be pretty careless to allow such things to happen. A regular user can plug-in unauthorized USB/firewire devices? That's already a nightmare waiting to happen.
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Why? So they can pay more and you still get degraded service because you share the pop with them?
Everything HD is anti-consumer and even anti-producer given the prohibitively high costs of production in HD. It's amazing, it's like they didn't learn a thing from the past, they just keeping doing it the same way they've done it for 50 years using technology to speed up parts of the process as opposed to eliminating steps entirely.
NAB is the epitome of this, it's a huge cluster because there are hundreds of ways to do everything and they are all the same with just a slightly different look to them. Very few take advantage of what modern databases have to offer in organization, metatagging, and cataloging. It's astounding and is no wonder why it costs so much to make a movie or produce a TV show.
HD is all about the content distributors, they weren't making enough money in the past so they push for HD everywhere, on disc and over the air it was all crippled. Going digital for broadcast made sense but we didn't need to go HD at the same time or more importantly, we didn't need to add broadcast flags and encryption. Those exist purely for anti-consumer purposes.
On a positive note, the videos my company is going to start distributing soon will be DRM free in easy to use common formats. Transcoding is trivially easy these days afterall. Thank heavens for the OSS community on that front.
It's amazing the amount of money the big stations spend on cataloging their video when it can all be stored in a database so easy, then referenced and metatagged at will. Then transcription can be associated as well. I have no idea why file based storage took so long to become mainstream.
I never upgrade, always an uninstall of Office 2003, then an install of 2007. I do it specifically to avoid those kinds of migration issues. Just like I never upgrade Windows.
Even upgrades on the Linux side are tricky.
Given that Office 2007 even gives you the option of doing it all in one wizard I'm surprised people are still choosing to upgrade.
How would that be perjury? Unless they sent the takedown notice knowing it wasn't valid. Also, the government doesn't routinely go after someone for just perjury, it has to be associated with other crimes.
If you could prove that they knowingly supported a false takedown notice then you could probably use the perjury in your counter claim to get back any lost business you might have endured since the first action is to terminate your access.
Except that MS does have thousands of partners, Insight, Cisco, and HP just to name a few.
Also as a side note, my users have no trouble with Outlook 2007 on XP or Vista while connecting to Exchange 2003. Perhaps someone screwed up your AD implementation? I love it because Outlook does a lookup to find which server to connect to so I don't have to do any typing if I'm a first time user of Outlook 2007.
At any rate, competition comes from all sides for them, it's natural given the number of markets they are a part of. They probably should have expanded more slowly but look how much crap Novell got for partnering with Microsoft? Sometimes MS has to do it on their own because their reputation is so bad. I'll even go so far as saying it's deservedly bad but their behavior since the regulations began is indeed quite different. The products that were released were a direct result of those actions. XP, Server 2003, Exchange 2003, SQL 2005 are all much better products than anyone had seen out of Redmond to date. Exchange 2007 and Server 2008 are shaping out to be a fair bit better than the Vista flop. They are moving towards being more open, they just have to learn how now.
They are definitely making money and utilizing the companies that they purchased so they at least aren't just sitting on IP for the fun of it.
Besides my personal experience there is: this. I'll grant that it is anecdotal however and is thus not to be taken as fact. Regardless I didn't make anything up. Unless you're referring to marijuana addiction. If that's the case I'll refer you to Here and Here and Here
You mean how else could you motivate 200 college students on Cinco de Mayo!
Most people drink or smoke to relax, mj doesn't make you hung over so naturally it's a better choice of the two.
Also, the vast majority of people out there that get drunk first and then attempt to smoke immediately get dizzy and then proceed to get sick. If people start with MJ and mix through-out an evening then they accomplish what you are describing quite regularly.
I'll agree that legalizing marijuana would do a great deal to cut down on alcohol abuse as people would have a good alternative that has proven far less destructive again and again. Of course nothing works for everyone so you'd have to deal with the consequences of people that get addicted even if it is only a psychological addiction.
Mechanisms already exist to handle addiction anyways, cut back on the drug wars and better fund treatment programs and we can put a whole ton of money back into education which is the root cause of most stupid behavior.
Personally I'm inclined to agree, if you're old enough to die for your country and to vote then you should be able to have a beer.
What's worse is that they deployed without a full plan. If you go from one system with a retention system and that is a requirement then don't you want to plan out your retention policies on the new system?
Exchange has no trouble retaining email and archiving it off with any number of products, most SAN providers even provide software to do it. It's malice, there is simply no way anyone with enough knowledge to deploy Exchange for a site that large wouldn't know how to retain the messages.
Are you serious? Even by your 30gig estimate which is a conservative figure you still have millions of subscribers. There are over 80 million subscribers in the U.S. alone. That's 2400 million gigabytes to store all that information to accomplish what?
Here's news for ya, SQL 2000 asks ya for a password for SA if you want to use database authentication which is optional.
Just because people enabled SQL authentication and didn't bother to set the password on the same damned screen speaks nothing about the product itself other than the fact that they make it real easy to setup and install and get running.
I'll add that Oracle even to this day doesn't input text into the password field for you during install because they expect you set it which is pretty logical.
How is that interesting? Parent claims Microsoft and Windows are responsible for the files in every location problem. Yes they could certainly prevent it but the vast majority of software out there abandoned ini files and then never properly implemented the registry. The mechanisms to make it smooth and secure are all there but nobody does it opting for the lazy way. I'm sorry to bust your bubble but you will run into this on alternate platforms if all were to abandon Windows that is.
There are plenty of Linux boxen out there that get compromised just the same due to clue-less admins. If you prevent users from executing files then they will not be happy but they will be safe. There are many attack vectors available to a standard Linux box operating as a workstation in a typical corporate setup.
There is a lot Microsoft needs to do to make their platform safer but the platform disappearing will not end the problems of the Internet by a long shot. As long as spamming remains legal in most places expect the zombie makers to go where they can. The kind of security Linux can offer is practically irrelevant when talking about a home PC as end-users are unlikely to follow the majority of best practices as seen with their use of Windows. This behavior will not go away anytime soon. I've seen plenty of OS X users click blindly accepting installation dialogs without reading anything. The package could do whatever it wanted as long as the user is that blind with that level of access to their system which you can except in the home environment and in the majority of work environments.
If you want to argue that the problems might be easier to deal with without Windows getting in the way and I might be able to support it better. You are describing lazy 3rd-party and Microsoft developers along with lazy end-users. The platform changing will not change any of their behaviors. There is definitely plenty of sloppy written FOSS out there along with a lot of solid software just like the closed source world. There is no need for self delusion, there is even poorly written OS X software as astonishing as that may sound to you.
As long as people are lazy you're going to have problems running up against the people who aren't lazy.
Why is this scary? It's a school with only 60 computers, it's not a big deal if the computers go down or data gets lost especially given that it is not a high school.
In that situation I'd say using software that is simple enough for an 11 year old to figure out is perfectly sensible. It speaks great volumes about the simplicity of the interface and illustrates quite nicely what the strength of Windows is.
That said, if the kid thinks he knows everything about administration because he can just point and click then he or the company he employs would likely be sorry when they begin to rely on these systems to make money. When downtime is a big issue you need better and more sophisticated management which is more than just point and click.
Of course I was 13 when I administered the middle school I was attending, I did it until I was 17, at that time I was helping 4 other schools too. It was all netware so it worked once you got it going. Little annoyed I didn't get an article when I was a kid. Oh well, the kid is on the right track, in 10 years he will probably have a pretty impressive skill-set at his disposal. Assuming he doesn't get lazy and doesn't think everything is as easy as creating a user in Active Directory.
Except that the upload speed is not a technological limitation, it is a policy limitation to for them to better manage their resources. If you can only request information using your upload speed so fast then your download is restricted. That is the reason different operators have different upload/download ratios.
Cable POPs are more than capable of handling the bandwidth, the hub and spoke model works just fine with modern switching systems which most cable companies use. They do hybrid fiber/copper systems so they can handle increased load in neighbors where they offer service.
There is no reason the head-end bandwidth can't handle the 400 or so subscribers at the most that are on it. You can easily service that bandwidth with 4 strands of fiber and I guarantee they put a lot more than just 4 strands in.
I think you've missed the mark on why bittorrent at least is so revolutionary. Yes it can eat a lot of bandwidth, but for a large cable operator a large number of people are going to be on your own backbone not using any of your upstream bandwidth or at least using a lot less of it.
So from your perspective you have your 100meg connection with 100 million 10meg connections coming off of it, if they are copying from one to another then your 100meg feed is irrelevant and they will not be degrading the performance of anybody since your switch can take 100meg connections without dropping packets or reducing speed. So in short, the large ISPs are completely full of it especially here in the U.S. where we have subsidized on the order of a few billion dollars to help them develop infrastructure to handle all of this traffic. Money they have squandered of course.
In the DVD world you're way off base although your argument is more valid for Blueray. DVD used MPEG2 which is a crappy format to hold anything in for the end-user. Re-encoding H.264 from MPEG2 results in the kinds of gains I am referring to. You can most definitely retain Dolby Digital surround in H.264 while transcoding a DVD.
In the blueray world they have a 25 or 50gig disc to use, they have no reason to compress the video any better. The same thing happened in the DVD world, they didn't put much effort into compressing the video because they didn't need to. It sounds like you haven't dealt with video production houses. They do not to do massive processing to yield the best bits to "press" onto the master. They are lazy, real lazy, the hours that go into making a movie go into editing and post-production. The DVD/Blueray discs are not even part of the process for most movies. Some places are filming for additional content on their discs now but that is still separate and encoded differently. An interview with the director is not going to be in Dolby Digital 5.1.
I also didn't say there was no difference from a CD sized re-encode, I said that you wouldn't notice the difference unless you're one of the rare few projecting on to a 10' screen. H.264 is THAT much more efficient than MPEG2.
The whole argument for blueray is also irrelevant as the movie itself is not even 20gigs. All the menus and alternate audio streams add up to that amount, none of that you need ahead of time while streaming over the Internet. You choose your language and it only gives you that language.
You can have both without using the ridiculous amount of space that they waste when mastering blueray, it's completely absurd to think you can't have the same quality both audio and video in smaller formats. It's the exact same argument people used for DVDs. You don't need 4.7gigs for a DVD even though they use it for a DVD you buy in a store. It compresses quite easily to 700megs without a noticeable loss of quality. Of course that depends on the complexity of the video.
With blueray you're stuck with certain supported codecs some of which are excellent, H.264 for one but when it's a file that can be transcoded you can use other compression techniques which are more effective. The content producing industry never uses the latest and greatest, they only go with what they know works. Bunch of typer-writer using hacks that are making decisions about digital content distribution.
You're making an incredibly bad assumption that an HD movie streamed over the Internet is 20GB in size. It is not in the same format you would find on a blue-ray disc. It would be compressed and ultimately be at most a couple of gigs easily streamed at a respectable bit-rate. People all the time download HD content. Azureus has a whole section just for it and I stream it without any issue over a standard cable Internet connection.
ISP's could wreck the model but they have always adapted to the increases and I see no reason why that would stop now.
You can't use regular CFLs in dimmer lit circuit. Every CFL I've used has lasted for 6 years and counting. As they degrade they take longer to light up but that's the only trick. If you care what kind or color of light they produce then you can run into other problems but they make all kinds now. That's probably the real problem is that there are so many different kinds.
On the flip side though if you are always obsessing about your projects then you are probably missing some important piece of the puzzle that you would get if you just slept or if you let your mind switch gears. I know I was exhausted and making bone-headed moves at work. Then some friends came to visit for 5 days, we partied it up and at the end of it I went back to work and did some pretty darned amazing work. Stuff I thought I couldn't do just came easy to me.
Sometimes a little distance is a good thing, and beer helps you get that distance rather quickly. Of course many people cross the fine line between drinking too much, causing you to be unproductive.
I'd say balance is always a good thing, just like a little exercise helps you clear your mind allowing you to concentrate better than if you'd just sat there for 18 hours straight coding.
Thats funny, I can say the same things about my DOS and Windows boxes, never had an infection of any of my personal computers, but when you manage for other people the rules change as different people have different priorities and skillsets.
I may not know as much as I think I know but this definitely exists, combined with auditing on ports you know you don't use and you can have a bunch of real-time information about your Windows box. A Deep packet inspection firewall will by no means protect you from everything but SSH over the Internet is certainly blocked for the corporate network I'm responsible for along with inbound and outbound SMTP to anything but my authorized email servers.
There are ways around every system of course, security is always a learning process. Securing Windows once I'll agree isn't a simple task, but securing en masse once you've figured out the one is pretty darned simple especially for me with SMS and MOM deployed. I'm limited only by the number of alerts I want to be interrupted by.
I might add the sysinternals is now owned by Microsoft and their products are still offered for free. There are dozens of tools right there.
With the firewall exception Windows does some with the IDS you are referring to. Network monitoring is deeply ingrained and has no trouble reporting to a syslog server. The problem is the effort it takes to setup a proper IDS so that it doesn't overwhelm you with false-positives which is really the same with any IDS package. Microsoft likes the basic approach that comes with Windows and then the advanced approach they get through their Operations Manager software. Of course now it's being rolled and merged with SMS so patching should become simpler as well.
The problem is either incompetent administrators or overworked admins. I've seen both lead to those kinds of issues. The other problem is that the data was on the computers to begin with. In this day and age with centralized storage from NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, etc... there is no need for workstations to even have hard-drives, especially in a security conscious organization. Security isn't easy thats for sure but it's certainly not impossible with what Microsoft gives you out of the box. If you really want to you can always turn on TCP/IP filtering and disable 25 either ingress and/or egress. Of course that's only a patch as a proper botnet client would call home and find a new port to send on through a proxy. Of course email should be blocked at the firewall as well doing deep packet inspection on any port.
So in short, Microsoft does provide some powerful network security tools. A lot of them are even free even if they don't come on the Windows cd. The Baseline Security Analyzer is free for instance and makes securing Windows boxes en masse a pretty simple task.
Actually it sounds like you think there is an inherent difference. A URL even if it is just an IP address resolves to an owner just like a domain name would. Ping -a and whois the result. If the endpoint blocks reverse lookup then you just go to the last point which didn't and recover from there. It's quite easy. There are even products which automate all this for you.
It's still local escalation and not global, they may gain admin access to the machine but they won't gain admin on the server so they still only have access to what the user had access to to begin with so the whole point is moot since the user would have to be logged into their machine left unlocked and then let some other guy come in unsupervised with unlocked access to firewire/usb and plenty of time to find files. Sounds to me like it's a none issue, if your environment is insecure enough to allow such a hack then you might as well give them console access direct where there are plenty of local privilege escalation exploits available.
Basically I'm not going to lose an ounce of sleep over this as IT would have to be pretty careless to allow such things to happen. A regular user can plug-in unauthorized USB/firewire devices? That's already a nightmare waiting to happen.