Right, but in this case you're refusing service to your customer AFTER they paid for the service. This is basically fraud or cheating. You're not providing a service to some random website, you're providing a service to your paying customers. In general that serivice is understood as being a connection to the internet. Now you want to prevent them from connecting to part of the internet. Without notice.
Spam is unsolicited. Websites in general are not. I can usually opt-out of spam filtering either individually or en-masse. If I can do the same with blocked web sites then fine - but it needs to be as clear as the junkmail folder / spam notice so I know what the problem is, and how to bypass it if I want to.
Why do I want this? Because I want to decide what sites I go to. I probably won't agree with someone else's decisions.
Well, first of all, a lot of software seems to be sold at a good enough feaureset for the price. When the price is $0, the featureset often needs to just be somewhere near the commercial competitiors. (Bad car analogy: When buying a car for food deliveries, a $14,000 toyota Echo might well be good enough even though there are additional features in a $40,000 lincoln towncar, and the towncar beats the Echo in every featureset measure for a car, but not enough for the base purpose of driving around with pizzas to justify tens of thousands more).
On Topic: OCSNG + GLPI, OSS inventory and deployment software. These mostly need to run a client on each machine. Any commercial vendor I looked at wanted per client and server licenses, and the few that covered multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX) were in the range of ZenWorks @ $41 per client. For a 400 machine network... that's a lot of money.
What we need is a list of hardware, software, and the user logged on the machine, oh, and package deployment on Windows is a nice extra. OCSNG gives us that for free. Without having to spend months trying to get licenses, tracking to make sure every time we deploy a new image that we've got one more license in order (We're trying to get our licenses in order, not make it worse! And it costs a lot in time checking and ordering and waiting for new licenses). GLPI integrating with license tracking, location tracking, generic information fields, contract tracking etc is all just gravy on top of the base need, which is some idea of what's installed where, and who's using it. The somewhat unique deployment feature of a pull from the client works lots better with the increasing laptop base for them actually getting the packages vs them often missing the deployment as they weren't on the network when it was pushed with our previous solution.
Does OCSNG beat ZenWorks feature to feature, or even polish to polish? I doubt it, but I never even got to try ZenWorks as it was too expensive. And this is another reason the price selling point pops up again and again - we were stuck with having no inventory system, or an OSS inventory system (free licenses). None of the commercial cross platform products were within our budget, which isn't huge, ~$5 per machine might have happened, but no way $41 per was.
Compared to 1998 and 1999, google today sucks. It's almost worthless. I've tried using Microsoft's search engine, and it really doesn't seem any better or worse.
I see this posted all the time, but my experiance doesn't bear it out. The vast majority of the time, Google has what I'm looking for in the first 5 results. It's still good enough that many use it over typing in url's as the I'm feeling lucky search gets them where they want to go.
Ahh yes, you're just a linux troll - go have fun with open office.
Well, how about Vista brings things I've had in *XP* for years - and does many of them worse?
They still aren't competing with ProcessGuard with UAC, they have all the bad(random, frequent pop-ups), and none of the good I can see(rules, check all processes).
Their search is nothing big - Locate + Find and run Robot do as well or better in XP (as I can easily distinguish whether I'm searching executables - well start menu shortcuts for programs - or for files on all my hard drives) and they are free on top of an OS I already have.
Firewall? There are numerous free and pay firewalls that almost everyone with XP already have that provide as much or more than Vista's firewall.
Built in Windows Defender? There are free and pay AS and AV that are better than that(and better than onecare according to AV Comparitives).
As it was with XP, few are going to upgrade - it'll be software that's Vista only that will pull people there or it will be new computer purchases, with the former driving the latter. Of course, unlike 98SE/ME -> XP, there aren't obvious stability increases, or an entirely different kernal - Vista to XP as far as I can tell is like 98SE to 95, there are advancements, but the general underlying OS is the same.
Microsoft's biggest problem here of course, is competing with themselves. For all the people who still prefer 98SE over XP (and there are some, I don't know why), there are likely many more who are perfectly happy with XP and the software suite they've built over it. Finally, while between when 98 came out and XP came out, there were still noticable gains in PC speeds, right around the end days of 98SE for consumers was when we really hit that plateau for basic use - a 633 celeron with 256 MB of RAM is equivelant to the latest greatest for many basic users who do e-mail, surf the web, and play party poker. There's still no reason to upgrade unless the physical hardware dies. Even then, replacing a hard drive is $50 for those machines... We're looking at many 5-8 year old machines that aren't worthless for the home users, more than ever before IMO, and either refreshing the version of windows they're running or keeping it clean of viruses works fine.
Also, for many of these people, the next "upgrade" could be linux, they use webmail, they chat on IM of some sort, and they type some letters. The biggest killers I see are taxes, IDK if Wine runs taxcut/turbotax, but more tax preparation is online now too.
Well, I used to work at the Geek Squad, and let me tell you, there were a lot of people coming and paying $150-$250 every 4 - 12 months for various virus/spyware problems on their machines. The weird part was these were the people who were very "cheap", buying the E-Machines special, and always complaining about the cost, and whether we could do only part of a service for less money. Why they came to Geek Squad with their unabashadly premium (HIGH) prices I'll never know.
Yea, same thing happened to me in 2001, but then Mozilla didn't even exist as an RC. I got tired of waiting and gave Opera 5.12 a try, and never looked back. Never really had a reason to use anything else very often.
Wait, so the problem is not that it's hard to use at all, but that it takes 30 seconds to render a graph? For me I'd then look at how often this is done, and the benefit from moving further off the MS upgrade mill. While personell time is costly, if this is something someone does once a day or less, 30 seconds rounds to 0 for any practical purpose (where I work).
Now, if someone is doing this all day long, one after another, 30 seconds is indeed unacceptable, but then I might well look towards automating it also, or some other workflow than graph after graph via click in Excel - it seems at that point it's something that's coming from automatic data collection, and computers can graph far more efficiently than a person in that situation.
The hard part is somewhere in the middle, and the only answer is "it depends", and again I may have a distorted view from where I work, but I just don't see much Excel for graphing use.
I have to say, this argument vis a vis support is bullshit. Now that I've actually been there and done that in the working world for a year, I feel I can say that with more authority than I ever have before. I have several "supported" produtcs - Symantec AV (with a platnium contract no less), Acronis True Image with their paid priority support, Opera browser with it's paid yearly support, and I could go on but I'm tired, oh there is Windows, but does anyone call MS?
Anyway, I also have several OSS products I use - OCSNG, GLPI, Firefox and Thunderbird etc.
So, let's see. SAV decides to eat AutoIT Scripts and Thunderbird mailboxes. Ok, call up support and are told... Update to the latest version. Uh huh, cause that works so well with SAV Server. Then the thunderbird issue is a "known issue" that isn't fixable... That was helpful, thanks.
Acronis True Image w/ Universal Restore. UR is awesome, except once it gets my XP booted on different hardware - THE MOUSE AND KEYBOARD NEVER WORK! So 2 weeks of e-mail, phone calls, sending images back and forth... and they say they know what the problem is. Great but it's code problem. Nice, but really, not useful. No ETA to a possible fix.
Opera - report problems... Oh, we've told our "Open the Web Group". They will talk to MediaMax. Look, if FireFox can do it, it's not ActiveX - so why can't you make it work? Why no, oh it uses feature Z, we plan to support that in 9.25. That I can live with, but oh, we'll talk to them. And nothing happens. Still doesn't work. Wow, I paid for what? (To support the company in this case as mostly I like the browser, but their support isn't better and frequently worse than the free support on their forums).
Actually, let me reiterate that - I often get faster responses, with the same or more info, and sometimes with workarounds from user forums than I do from paid support offerings. And the user forums are free!
Look, I can go to the OSS versions forums and hope for responses just like I can with the paid products... So more and more, I'm thinking, if there is an OSS piece of software that does X, lets save the upfront costs if I have to spend the same labor either way. Or let's at least test it and see if it's useable, along with all the commercial offerings.
Maybe my problem is I've been working with the wrong companies, but I cannot remember the last time (if ever) I as a home user or now at work have ever actually gotten something solved or fixed by calling tech support. So I no longer count support as a benefit.
Now, for Autodesk, we do have a consulting company called Adraft that helps us out, so far in my experiance (which is limited, I'm not the main Autodesk support contact) they've had a 50% hit rate, so maybe that makes them awesome in comparison, but it still leaves me underwhelmed.
I might guess that the reporting icon somehow got broke (I've seen it). So the battery would charge, but they weren't seeing the nice 1%,2%,etc charging...
The problem with this isn't so much Vista as MS in general, and that's it's tools defaulting to a locked down setting on recording stuff, and THEY DON'T TELL YOU. Not that it would make much difference for most people, but the assumption that something you're recording is not your own stuff (while perhaps more likely to be copyrighted) seems insulting - more and more the OS is assuming I'm a criminal than an honest user - and I paid for this?
Anyway, one reason why I just ignore all the MS built in tools, I figure they are likely to screw me, and have since XP, forget about Vista. I wish there was a way in the installer to tell XP to forget about crap like in Linux installers - can you do this in Vista? I'm getting Vista Ultimate via a retail bundle at a good price, but I don't have my computer as a media center - I only want the business stuff (mostly I browse the web and use Winamp for music) and the ability to very occasionally play games. I'd love to save space by dropping 10ft interface etc.
I'm also quite disappointed with the results of moving from Streamload to MediaMax. That said, I haven't lost any files. But the interface is unuseable in Opera now (when it worked fine before) and extremely painfully slow in IE. If any of the other services offer easy sharing and decent space for a decent price I might well switch. But I've yet to see anyone duplicate what SL has for sharing.
That said, I was going to use them for backup, but their beta app is really beta, crashing every time I close the UI and then requiring me to reboot my XP machine to get it to run again (this isn't acceptable). It also randomly will just NOT upload a file. So if I do end up canceling MediaMax, Mozy is looking like the off site backup of choice for me. I use the free 2GB now for import documents.
Well, Mediamax certainly provides somewhere near that though I don't know about the transfer - that might be better with a hosting account. That is, for $10 a month you get 250GB storage and 25GB transfer, plus they support hotlinking to your hosted files and I've seen people host websites right off of there. Of course, what makes mediamax so interesting is the ease of sharing files with other users so you're not paying for everyone's transfer unless you want to.
Of course, if the above 2.6TB transfer is real, then I suppose it doesn't matter.
I don't know if you've ever used any of the more useful HIPS, but they would flag your senario because first, a new program is running. The user may well allow that. But it would also flag that it's executing FORMAT.exe. Now, if the user is getting anything out of any of these pop-ups, he'll know he didn't want slideshow to run format, and deny that call, and again, likely lock down even further what exactly slideshow can execute/read or write.
Plus in that instance, I would expect that Windows wouldn't allow format.exe to run on the system drive live anyway - even in XP. I know I can't overwrite the system partition with Acronis without rebooting to a special environment first.
And the best part IMHO, and the part that Microsoft missed, is that it A) can save your answer and automatically apply it in the future - and matches a program hash to make sure it's the same program and b) per program.
This all gets down IMO to the need for per process permissions, such as what CoreForce tries to do.
I'm pretty sure that TOS only make you, at most, liable for breech of contract with your service provider, and cannot possibly affect your legal standing with regard to third parties, including the government.
I haven't personally tried this, so I may be wrong and VMWare marketing is talking out of their @ss, but what ESX server and VMotion lets you do is take RAID/hotswap to a whole new level, so you can hotswap out entire servers without actual downtime. Before these sorts of things were available, I believe you'd need mainframe level hardware to swap out CPUs/systemboards without taking down the services.
Of course the question is do you save money in using ESX server + several commodity servers vs Mainframe? I suppose it depends, but I could see major benefits in being able to migrate over NT4 services to more reliable hardware via virtulization as useful, and other legacy apps. Then when your Server2003 machine is finally ready to take over, you're not tossing hardware, you can easily phase out the legacy apps down to some small allocated resources - and it can be dynamic allocation too! More efficient use of hardware there.
Also, there's physical space, cooling, electricity, etc. You may not have room to add an unlimited number of blade servers for every new server you need, you may not have the cooling necessary etc. Virtulization can save on those as well. Finally, there is the ease of moving a virtualized OS - you don't have to deal with sysprep or the linux equivelent to move it to different hardware.
I'd argue in a follow on to my previous post in this thread that there is a general confusion in saying IT work, like most other work, it's the most general term to use.
For instance, I have close to zero understanding of OO, Collections, and threading. Guess what - so far it doesn't matter. My job isn't to write code. I occasionally write scripts. My job is to pick solutions to problems and test them, and work on implementing and maintaining them. My job is to deploy desktop systems in a managed, sane method. I collaborate on system and network security. My job is to help users do their jobs. Now, this may be low level (hey, fist job out of college once I left Geek Squad), but I think you'd be hard pressed to say it wasn't IT.
And I think there's plenty of advancement in it, from desktop support to systems analyst to project management etc. Of course I don't think it pays as well as other fields per se, but I like doing it.
That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability.
That may be part of it. But I think another part is that Tech companies don't know what they want either, or don't know how to describe it or how to interview to determine if someone meets that need.
Now, my perspective may be a little skewed as I currently work in Academia in a Tech position, but we have a moderately seinor guy leaving, and we have to fill that spot. Now, I'm not senior at all, so I only hear about the process in Staff Meetings and the like - but one constant is they know
a) they guy leaves in a month. Pretty decent amount of notice IMHO. b) they can't get someone who will have the same skill mix exactly, so no one will be a drop in replacement (duh) c) what does he do? What is his job description? OMG we have to get this out ASAP, we can't run without that person for too long (we won't have hired someone in a month - they are still trying to write the replacement job description).
Now, it's primarily the IT department writing the job description and doing interviews. So they should have some clue right? Not really - he did stuff and stuff worked. Everyone else did other stuff in other buildings etc.
He's spent time trying to help discuss what his job was, but he's not HR, and his talents don't really like in the hiring process or writing job descriptions.
So then we get these horribly malformed job ads - we've all seen them and laughed at them, and part of the reason is the techies aren't sure what they want or need. And then there's what they are budgeted for too.
For instance, this guy custom built some electronics for stuff, like testing powersupplies under load. But does his replacement need to be able to do that? I don't know, but I do know we have an electronics shop, so it wouldn't be the end of the world for our department if the replacement was only IT and no EE...
So, I think part of the problem is also that we have difficulty writing an ad that gets us the applicants we need.
What's not so exciting is you can add this sort of protection (and also tell you what launched the app) to XP just fine, and 2k for that matter with products that are less expensive than Vista. ProcessGuard, Prevx and more provide this ability. Some are free!
Granted, they just tell you when an unknown app is trying to run, but hey - you can also set it to remember your answer! It uses hashes of the executable, so when it updates or something, you do get asked again.
Granted, this is taking it a little further than Vista does, but it seems like as useful, if not moreso, a scheme that doesn't require an expensive upgrade to a so far mostly untested system.
And I still think the free CoreForce will be where it's at.
Slashdot Mirror
IDK, my Yahoo mail seems to get plenty of SPAM into the junkmail folder. Maybe they also filter things and silently discard them, I have no idea.
Right, but in this case you're refusing service to your customer AFTER they paid for the service. This is basically fraud or cheating. You're not providing a service to some random website, you're providing a service to your paying customers. In general that serivice is understood as being a connection to the internet. Now you want to prevent them from connecting to part of the internet. Without notice.
Spam is unsolicited. Websites in general are not. I can usually opt-out of spam filtering either individually or en-masse. If I can do the same with blocked web sites then fine - but it needs to be as clear as the junkmail folder / spam notice so I know what the problem is, and how to bypass it if I want to.
Why do I want this? Because I want to decide what sites I go to. I probably won't agree with someone else's decisions.
Well, first of all, a lot of software seems to be sold at a good enough feaureset for the price. When the price is $0, the featureset often needs to just be somewhere near the commercial competitiors. (Bad car analogy: When buying a car for food deliveries, a $14,000 toyota Echo might well be good enough even though there are additional features in a $40,000 lincoln towncar, and the towncar beats the Echo in every featureset measure for a car, but not enough for the base purpose of driving around with pizzas to justify tens of thousands more).
On Topic: OCSNG + GLPI, OSS inventory and deployment software. These mostly need to run a client on each machine. Any commercial vendor I looked at wanted per client and server licenses, and the few that covered multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX) were in the range of ZenWorks @ $41 per client. For a 400 machine network... that's a lot of money.
What we need is a list of hardware, software, and the user logged on the machine, oh, and package deployment on Windows is a nice extra. OCSNG gives us that for free. Without having to spend months trying to get licenses, tracking to make sure every time we deploy a new image that we've got one more license in order (We're trying to get our licenses in order, not make it worse! And it costs a lot in time checking and ordering and waiting for new licenses). GLPI integrating with license tracking, location tracking, generic information fields, contract tracking etc is all just gravy on top of the base need, which is some idea of what's installed where, and who's using it. The somewhat unique deployment feature of a pull from the client works lots better with the increasing laptop base for them actually getting the packages vs them often missing the deployment as they weren't on the network when it was pushed with our previous solution.
Does OCSNG beat ZenWorks feature to feature, or even polish to polish? I doubt it, but I never even got to try ZenWorks as it was too expensive. And this is another reason the price selling point pops up again and again - we were stuck with having no inventory system, or an OSS inventory system (free licenses). None of the commercial cross platform products were within our budget, which isn't huge, ~$5 per machine might have happened, but no way $41 per was.
Compared to 1998 and 1999, google today sucks. It's almost worthless. I've tried using Microsoft's search engine, and it really doesn't seem any better or worse.
I see this posted all the time, but my experiance doesn't bear it out. The vast majority of the time, Google has what I'm looking for in the first 5 results. It's still good enough that many use it over typing in url's as the I'm feeling lucky search gets them where they want to go.
Ahh yes, you're just a linux troll - go have fun with open office.
Well, how about Vista brings things I've had in *XP* for years - and does many of them worse?
They still aren't competing with ProcessGuard with UAC, they have all the bad(random, frequent pop-ups), and none of the good I can see(rules, check all processes).
Their search is nothing big - Locate + Find and run Robot do as well or better in XP (as I can easily distinguish whether I'm searching executables - well start menu shortcuts for programs - or for files on all my hard drives) and they are free on top of an OS I already have.
Firewall? There are numerous free and pay firewalls that almost everyone with XP already have that provide as much or more than Vista's firewall.
Built in Windows Defender? There are free and pay AS and AV that are better than that(and better than onecare according to AV Comparitives).
As it was with XP, few are going to upgrade - it'll be software that's Vista only that will pull people there or it will be new computer purchases, with the former driving the latter. Of course, unlike 98SE/ME -> XP, there aren't obvious stability increases, or an entirely different kernal - Vista to XP as far as I can tell is like 98SE to 95, there are advancements, but the general underlying OS is the same.
Microsoft's biggest problem here of course, is competing with themselves. For all the people who still prefer 98SE over XP (and there are some, I don't know why), there are likely many more who are perfectly happy with XP and the software suite they've built over it. Finally, while between when 98 came out and XP came out, there were still noticable gains in PC speeds, right around the end days of 98SE for consumers was when we really hit that plateau for basic use - a 633 celeron with 256 MB of RAM is equivelant to the latest greatest for many basic users who do e-mail, surf the web, and play party poker. There's still no reason to upgrade unless the physical hardware dies. Even then, replacing a hard drive is $50 for those machines... We're looking at many 5-8 year old machines that aren't worthless for the home users, more than ever before IMO, and either refreshing the version of windows they're running or keeping it clean of viruses works fine.
Also, for many of these people, the next "upgrade" could be linux, they use webmail, they chat on IM of some sort, and they type some letters. The biggest killers I see are taxes, IDK if Wine runs taxcut/turbotax, but more tax preparation is online now too.
Well, I used to work at the Geek Squad, and let me tell you, there were a lot of people coming and paying $150-$250 every 4 - 12 months for various virus/spyware problems on their machines. The weird part was these were the people who were very "cheap", buying the E-Machines special, and always complaining about the cost, and whether we could do only part of a service for less money. Why they came to Geek Squad with their unabashadly premium (HIGH) prices I'll never know.
Yea, same thing happened to me in 2001, but then Mozilla didn't even exist as an RC. I got tired of waiting and gave Opera 5.12 a try, and never looked back. Never really had a reason to use anything else very often.
Wait, so the problem is not that it's hard to use at all, but that it takes 30 seconds to render a graph? For me I'd then look at how often this is done, and the benefit from moving further off the MS upgrade mill. While personell time is costly, if this is something someone does once a day or less, 30 seconds rounds to 0 for any practical purpose (where I work).
Now, if someone is doing this all day long, one after another, 30 seconds is indeed unacceptable, but then I might well look towards automating it also, or some other workflow than graph after graph via click in Excel - it seems at that point it's something that's coming from automatic data collection, and computers can graph far more efficiently than a person in that situation.
The hard part is somewhere in the middle, and the only answer is "it depends", and again I may have a distorted view from where I work, but I just don't see much Excel for graphing use.
Why would this be bad though? Then I could be even more assured I could use Open Office and be able to interoperate with MS Office users.
I have to say, this argument vis a vis support is bullshit. Now that I've actually been there and done that in the working world for a year, I feel I can say that with more authority than I ever have before. I have several "supported" produtcs - Symantec AV (with a platnium contract no less), Acronis True Image with their paid priority support, Opera browser with it's paid yearly support, and I could go on but I'm tired, oh there is Windows, but does anyone call MS?
Anyway, I also have several OSS products I use - OCSNG, GLPI, Firefox and Thunderbird etc.
So, let's see. SAV decides to eat AutoIT Scripts and Thunderbird mailboxes. Ok, call up support and are told... Update to the latest version. Uh huh, cause that works so well with SAV Server. Then the thunderbird issue is a "known issue" that isn't fixable... That was helpful, thanks.
Acronis True Image w/ Universal Restore. UR is awesome, except once it gets my XP booted on different hardware - THE MOUSE AND KEYBOARD NEVER WORK! So 2 weeks of e-mail, phone calls, sending images back and forth... and they say they know what the problem is. Great but it's code problem. Nice, but really, not useful. No ETA to a possible fix.
Opera - report problems... Oh, we've told our "Open the Web Group". They will talk to MediaMax. Look, if FireFox can do it, it's not ActiveX - so why can't you make it work? Why no, oh it uses feature Z, we plan to support that in 9.25. That I can live with, but oh, we'll talk to them. And nothing happens. Still doesn't work. Wow, I paid for what? (To support the company in this case as mostly I like the browser, but their support isn't better and frequently worse than the free support on their forums).
Actually, let me reiterate that - I often get faster responses, with the same or more info, and sometimes with workarounds from user forums than I do from paid support offerings. And the user forums are free!
Look, I can go to the OSS versions forums and hope for responses just like I can with the paid products... So more and more, I'm thinking, if there is an OSS piece of software that does X, lets save the upfront costs if I have to spend the same labor either way. Or let's at least test it and see if it's useable, along with all the commercial offerings.
Maybe my problem is I've been working with the wrong companies, but I cannot remember the last time (if ever) I as a home user or now at work have ever actually gotten something solved or fixed by calling tech support. So I no longer count support as a benefit.
Now, for Autodesk, we do have a consulting company called Adraft that helps us out, so far in my experiance (which is limited, I'm not the main Autodesk support contact) they've had a 50% hit rate, so maybe that makes them awesome in comparison, but it still leaves me underwhelmed.
I might guess that the reporting icon somehow got broke (I've seen it). So the battery would charge, but they weren't seeing the nice 1%,2%,etc charging...
The problem with this isn't so much Vista as MS in general, and that's it's tools defaulting to a locked down setting on recording stuff, and THEY DON'T TELL YOU. Not that it would make much difference for most people, but the assumption that something you're recording is not your own stuff (while perhaps more likely to be copyrighted) seems insulting - more and more the OS is assuming I'm a criminal than an honest user - and I paid for this?
Anyway, one reason why I just ignore all the MS built in tools, I figure they are likely to screw me, and have since XP, forget about Vista. I wish there was a way in the installer to tell XP to forget about crap like in Linux installers - can you do this in Vista? I'm getting Vista Ultimate via a retail bundle at a good price, but I don't have my computer as a media center - I only want the business stuff (mostly I browse the web and use Winamp for music) and the ability to very occasionally play games. I'd love to save space by dropping 10ft interface etc.
Eh, Eset NOD32. But Symantec Coporate Manged server is basically impossible to update (the server), you have to do a new install.
I'm also quite disappointed with the results of moving from Streamload to MediaMax. That said, I haven't lost any files. But the interface is unuseable in Opera now (when it worked fine before) and extremely painfully slow in IE. If any of the other services offer easy sharing and decent space for a decent price I might well switch. But I've yet to see anyone duplicate what SL has for sharing.
That said, I was going to use them for backup, but their beta app is really beta, crashing every time I close the UI and then requiring me to reboot my XP machine to get it to run again (this isn't acceptable). It also randomly will just NOT upload a file. So if I do end up canceling MediaMax, Mozy is looking like the off site backup of choice for me. I use the free 2GB now for import documents.
Well, Mediamax certainly provides somewhere near that though I don't know about the transfer - that might be better with a hosting account. That is, for $10 a month you get 250GB storage and 25GB transfer, plus they support hotlinking to your hosted files and I've seen people host websites right off of there. Of course, what makes mediamax so interesting is the ease of sharing files with other users so you're not paying for everyone's transfer unless you want to.
Of course, if the above 2.6TB transfer is real, then I suppose it doesn't matter.
Well, mediamax gives you 25GB. But their OS integration is somewhat lacking.
I don't know if you've ever used any of the more useful HIPS, but they would flag your senario because first, a new program is running. The user may well allow that. But it would also flag that it's executing FORMAT.exe. Now, if the user is getting anything out of any of these pop-ups, he'll know he didn't want slideshow to run format, and deny that call, and again, likely lock down even further what exactly slideshow can execute/read or write.
Plus in that instance, I would expect that Windows wouldn't allow format.exe to run on the system drive live anyway - even in XP. I know I can't overwrite the system partition with Acronis without rebooting to a special environment first.
There is also a program called Sudo for Windows that allows configurable credential caching time.
Interesting, Sudo For Windows does allow a list of allowed apps and a regular expression for the allowed arguments.
And the best part IMHO, and the part that Microsoft missed, is that it A) can save your answer and automatically apply it in the future - and matches a program hash to make sure it's the same program and b) per program.
This all gets down IMO to the need for per process permissions, such as what CoreForce tries to do.
I'm pretty sure that TOS only make you, at most, liable for breech of contract with your service provider, and cannot possibly affect your legal standing with regard to third parties, including the government.
I haven't personally tried this, so I may be wrong and VMWare marketing is talking out of their @ss, but what ESX server and VMotion lets you do is take RAID/hotswap to a whole new level, so you can hotswap out entire servers without actual downtime. Before these sorts of things were available, I believe you'd need mainframe level hardware to swap out CPUs/systemboards without taking down the services.
Of course the question is do you save money in using ESX server + several commodity servers vs Mainframe? I suppose it depends, but I could see major benefits in being able to migrate over NT4 services to more reliable hardware via virtulization as useful, and other legacy apps. Then when your Server2003 machine is finally ready to take over, you're not tossing hardware, you can easily phase out the legacy apps down to some small allocated resources - and it can be dynamic allocation too! More efficient use of hardware there.
Also, there's physical space, cooling, electricity, etc. You may not have room to add an unlimited number of blade servers for every new server you need, you may not have the cooling necessary etc. Virtulization can save on those as well. Finally, there is the ease of moving a virtualized OS - you don't have to deal with sysprep or the linux equivelent to move it to different hardware.
I'd argue in a follow on to my previous post in this thread that there is a general confusion in saying IT work, like most other work, it's the most general term to use.
For instance, I have close to zero understanding of OO, Collections, and threading. Guess what - so far it doesn't matter. My job isn't to write code. I occasionally write scripts. My job is to pick solutions to problems and test them, and work on implementing and maintaining them. My job is to deploy desktop systems in a managed, sane method. I collaborate on system and network security. My job is to help users do their jobs. Now, this may be low level (hey, fist job out of college once I left Geek Squad), but I think you'd be hard pressed to say it wasn't IT.
And I think there's plenty of advancement in it, from desktop support to systems analyst to project management etc. Of course I don't think it pays as well as other fields per se, but I like doing it.
That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability.
That may be part of it. But I think another part is that Tech companies don't know what they want either, or don't know how to describe it or how to interview to determine if someone meets that need.
Now, my perspective may be a little skewed as I currently work in Academia in a Tech position, but we have a moderately seinor guy leaving, and we have to fill that spot. Now, I'm not senior at all, so I only hear about the process in Staff Meetings and the like - but one constant is they know
a) they guy leaves in a month. Pretty decent amount of notice IMHO.
b) they can't get someone who will have the same skill mix exactly, so no one will be a drop in replacement (duh)
c) what does he do? What is his job description? OMG we have to get this out ASAP, we can't run without that person for too long (we won't have hired someone in a month - they are still trying to write the replacement job description).
Now, it's primarily the IT department writing the job description and doing interviews. So they should have some clue right? Not really - he did stuff and stuff worked. Everyone else did other stuff in other buildings etc.
He's spent time trying to help discuss what his job was, but he's not HR, and his talents don't really like in the hiring process or writing job descriptions.
So then we get these horribly malformed job ads - we've all seen them and laughed at them, and part of the reason is the techies aren't sure what they want or need. And then there's what they are budgeted for too.
For instance, this guy custom built some electronics for stuff, like testing powersupplies under load. But does his replacement need to be able to do that? I don't know, but I do know we have an electronics shop, so it wouldn't be the end of the world for our department if the replacement was only IT and no EE...
So, I think part of the problem is also that we have difficulty writing an ad that gets us the applicants we need.
What's not so exciting is you can add this sort of protection (and also tell you what launched the app) to XP just fine, and 2k for that matter with products that are less expensive than Vista. ProcessGuard, Prevx and more provide this ability. Some are free!
Granted, they just tell you when an unknown app is trying to run, but hey - you can also set it to remember your answer! It uses hashes of the executable, so when it updates or something, you do get asked again.
Granted, this is taking it a little further than Vista does, but it seems like as useful, if not moreso, a scheme that doesn't require an expensive upgrade to a so far mostly untested system.
And I still think the free CoreForce will be where it's at.