I will vote against the Republican nominee, no matter who wins the Democratic primary race. I would prefer John Edwards, but he won't be winning this one. Hopefully, Ho-bama (whoever wins) will make him Veep.
I'm not a Democrat, I'm a liberal: Democrats go to meetings.
...oh wait, you were serious? That will never happen.
There is no Evil Empire behind Linux capable of marketing it to OEMs, and Sun is way too arrogant, insular and farked up to manage such a thing.
Remember: it's not the best product that prevails, it's the best marketed product.
The only Microsoft desktop operating system available to new PC buyers, after M$ stops licensing XP, will be Vista.
The only way to get Vista to run halfway decent is to throw better hardware at it.
When a new Vista laptop comes with 4 GB of RAM and a 512 MB video adapter, it will run almost as well as an XP laptop did with 512 MB RAM and a 128 MB video adapter. Nostalgia for XP will fade. As existing PCs fail, they will be replaced by Vista boxes.
Sooner or later, the OEMs will start offering 64-bit Vista on these machines (as a higher-cost option), and limiting the included bloatware to 64-bit versions. (This will have the desired effect of locking those buyers into subscribing to the pre-installed $ecurity $oftware, and constraining their ability to use older software... all win-win for McAfee, $ymantec, and M$).
My first wife was American.
Second time around, I married a Russian lawyer.
Back to eBay, I guess...
How much to ship 110 pounds from China, including airholes?
We had this guy at a client site who used to forward all the pornographic spam he received to the Help Desk.
That issue solved itself: a severely repressed Christian woman spent a day on the desk, received one of his Emails, and crossed the hall to Human Resources.
Get one USB-powered 2.5" external hard drive per laptop, and write some quick & dirty batch files. You can use the "set/p" command to account for changes in the drive letter.
I had a similar issue: they mailed us an offer of a huge bundle of stuff, including the 8Mb/s speed. I called them up, told them that we were paying for 6 already but barely getting 4... and then I accepted the bundle, intending to cancel if our download speeds didn't double. I actually get the extra speed, at least according to Speakeasy.net.
Vista runs so slowly that people are paying a premium to stay with XP. Dell, for example, charges $99 more. I just had a customer pay $300 labor to "upgrade" his two-month-old Dell Vista Business laptop -- CoreDuo, 1 GB RAM, Intel 845 video (which may have been the bottleneck) -- to XP Pro. He provided the software, which cost him almost as much again. When he called, he said, "I either need to put XP on this laptop, or buy a new laptop with XP." I went to look at the laptop, turned off virtually every startup item except his Symantec corporate anti-virus client, and agreed that XP was the only cure available.
Later versions of the Kalashnikov design are just different calibers of the same firearm. The differences between an AK-47 and an AK-74 are much smaller than between Office 2000 and Office 2003.
(Anyway, mine's legal: I own a Saiga-12, a 12-gauge semi-auto Kalashnikov shotgun manufactured by Ishmash in Izhevsk. It's the fastest, most reliable semi-auto shotgun on God's gray Earth, for only about $400. Even in that huge caliber, it's pretty much the same gun).
Before I 'retired' to fix home PCs, I was the alpha geek on a Help Desk. A guy called, infested with spyware... I started poking around, and found a text file. Before I continued, I called the Help Desk manager over, and put the client on speaker:
"Um, sir, do you bank at Bank of America?" "Yeah, why?" "Is your password 'Snoopy67'?"
Since then, I've found a few dozen files with clear-text keylogger yields... and thousands of log files filled with coded stuff that could be anything.
[just kidding] Zango has infested millions of PCs and caused tens of millions of dollars worth of damages... Zango is an actual company that has offices here in the USA... Zango's offices are presumably flammable... Why is Zango still causing problems? [/just kidding]
We were testing an edition of Dragon Naturally Speaking back in 2000, when an Asian-American woman on our team took the microphone. She had a heavy accent, and the software interpreted her words as... nothing.
She stood there, trying to get it to write something, and finally ended up repeating, "It not woking! Why it is not woking?"
We were afraid to laugh, fearing a trip to HR... we all stood there, biting the insides of our cheeks, until she gave up and left the room; then, we collapsed on the floor, literally ROTFL.
I tild them everything they need to know about myself:
My name is Willie Horton.
I was born 12 August 1951.
My address is:
Maryland House of Corrections Annex
PO Box 534
Jessup, MD 20794-0534
E-mail: willie.horton@mail.com
They may even realize that I'm the same Willie Horton whose image was used to defeat Mike Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential election... but I guess that's the price of fame.
The media -- and the consumer anti-virus manufacturers -- feed our "obsession with firewalls," and I see it every day in the home-user world. Computers sitting behind a NAT router, which is pretty much all the firewall most machines need, come factory-loaded with Norton Internet Security or McAfee Security Center. This makes it nearly impossible for the average home user to share files and printers, and (especially with Norton) makes it very likely that they will answer some of the hundreds of pop-up questions wrong and break something they want:
"MSIMN.exe is trying to access the Internet! What do you want to do: 1. Permanently block it? 2. Dial 911? 3. Buy even more Norton crapware?
I try to explain to my customers that they want a hardware firewall (the router) and don't really need a software firewall other than the one-way jobbie that ships inside Windoze. OTOH, one customer this morning still has an XP SP1 machine plugged directly into her cable modem... guess what happened to her machine?
Oh, well, I get paid to fix these kind of problems, so I guess I don't mind. God forbid they ever get it right!
I was the purchasing agent for a chain of auto parts stores, and we used a method called GROI: Gross Return on Inventory. The original pricing theory in traditional auto parts stores was based on four "turns" per year: after opening a parts store and filling it up with stuff to sell, you needed to sell each stock number four times, at 35% gross profit, to make an adequate gross profit to cover your expenses -- and pay off your inventory in twelve months.
This resulted in some items being priced much higher than at mass retailers, and caused stores to lose sales on popular items: people would go elsewhere for oil, antifreeze, and the most common spark plugs, brake pads and filters, because they were much less expensive at places like Pep Boys. The GROI method constantly recalculated sales and adjusted the prices downward on popular items, thus increasing sales and lowering the prices still further. For example, the best-selling oil filters would sell at under 10% gross profit, but we would sell out our inventory of those items twelve to fifteen times per year... thus making a larger profit on the initial purchases we had made to stock a new store. By setting a minimum gross profit percentage, runaway sales on an item would result in higher profits instead of ever-lower margins.
This was all calculated by an incredibly expensive 200 MHz Pentium Pro box, running proprietary software atop SCO Unix. (I was the only one who could work the thing... which led to me running a newly purchased Netware 4.1 network in the chain's offices... which led me out of that filthy auto parts business altogether, thank Jeebus).
I was the alpha geek on the Help Desk for a multi-state corporation. Many of the callers seemed to have a guilty conscience: they would say things like "Is it something I did wrong?" My standard answer: "This probably wasn't your fault, but I'm looking for a way to blame you."
I fix Windows PCs for a living, and I run my company on QuickBooks 2006. When Vista came out, I stuck a new drive in my main laptop, built it out with Vista Ultimate, and installed all the applications I need... including QuickBooks. QB worked fine, but I unfortunately failed to disable its Automatic Update feature.
About a month later, QuickBooks downloaded an update that included this splash screen, with its dire warnings about application incompatibility and system instability.
I resent the fact that Intuit is trying to frighten QuickBooks users into upgrading, and I will never buy any of their products again... even if I'm forced to keep my books in, um, actual books. I also turned off Automatic Updates, because I'm afraid Intuit will deliberately destabilize the software if they don't sell enough copies of the 2007 & 2008 versions.
On or about October 16, 2004, while I was driving home, the Help Desk where I was alpha geek received a virus report. The senior tech had to delete a bunch of files, including Excel.exe, before the machine would stop reporting infections. By the time she finished, it barely ran (and was later re-imaged). I went in early the next day, and more reports started trickling in right away. I went to one of the first computers, and found that McAfee was reporting Excel.exe and other key files were infected even on the CD. By the time I got back to the desk, they were swamped with calls. As yet, there was no information on the McAfee site about the new virus.
I went into a room with the CIO and other execs, where they started making plans to shut down the WAN and unplug the local switches... and I spoke up: "I don't think this is a virus." They looked at me like I was crazy, and shooed me out of the room. I refreshed the page on the McAfee site, and they had just posted information about a "false positive caused by new definitions combined with the outdated, no-longer-supported engine version 4.xxx." I printed that page, and burst back into the emergency meeting. The planning changed to updating the McAfee clients in bulk and fixing the PCs.
Later that evening, after a grueling day of remote Office reinstallations, the CIO came to me and said, "Do you have any idea what a huge disaster this would have been if you hadn't figured this out?" I calmly replied, "You're not paying me to fail."
A few months later, I got a $500 bonus (less taxes) in my check.
Contending that the contents of a company-owned laptop belong to the employee carrying it is nonsense. If you are using the company's computer, everything on it belongs to them. A company laptop can be searched by the company anytime, or by the police anytime the company permits it. If you don't like that, get your own. I worked Desktop Support in an environment where we were forbidden to say or write the letters "PC" because they stood for "Personal Computer:" we were required to describe computers as workstations.
I opened my own business months before 'retiring' from the consulting firm, which forbade us from having any other company's information on our laptops. Before I did that, I bought my own laptop, moved all my personal and business information to it, and re-imaged the hard disk on the company laptop. Sure enough, about a month later, they asked for my laptop to do a "shell upgrade." I was happy to turn it over...
What's the best car to buy? Although some brands have quality issues that rule them out, ultimately the question "which car is best?" depends on who will be driving it. I'm a former cabdriver, so I'd be happiest in a Dodge Charger police package; my ex-wife hates big cars, so her Saturn is perfect for her.
Similarly, I'm a Windows geek/MCP. I'm better at installing, configuring and running M$ products, so IIS would be best for an environment I had to design and support. Others who read this would be far better off (and happier) running *nix, so a non-M$ solution would best meet their needs.
Choose the one you want, then find facts to support your preference... they're out there somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I will vote against the Republican nominee, no matter who wins the Democratic primary race. I would prefer John Edwards, but he won't be winning this one. Hopefully, Ho-bama (whoever wins) will make him Veep.
I'm not a Democrat, I'm a liberal: Democrats go to meetings.
Now they'll be able to oversell my neighborhood's available bandwidth by 24,000% instead of only 2400%.
Or maybe offer Linux or Solaris instead.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
...oh wait, you were serious?
That will never happen.
There is no Evil Empire behind Linux capable of marketing it to OEMs, and Sun is way too arrogant, insular and farked up to manage such a thing.
Remember: it's not the best product that prevails, it's the best marketed product.
The only Microsoft desktop operating system available to new PC buyers, after M$ stops licensing XP, will be Vista.
The only way to get Vista to run halfway decent is to throw better hardware at it.
When a new Vista laptop comes with 4 GB of RAM and a 512 MB video adapter, it will run almost as well as an XP laptop did with 512 MB RAM and a 128 MB video adapter. Nostalgia for XP will fade. As existing PCs fail, they will be replaced by Vista boxes.
Sooner or later, the OEMs will start offering 64-bit Vista on these machines (as a higher-cost option), and limiting the included bloatware to 64-bit versions. (This will have the desired effect of locking those buyers into subscribing to the pre-installed $ecurity $oftware, and constraining their ability to use older software... all win-win for McAfee, $ymantec, and M$).
My first wife was American. Second time around, I married a Russian lawyer. Back to eBay, I guess... How much to ship 110 pounds from China, including airholes?
We had this guy at a client site who used to forward all the pornographic spam he received to the Help Desk.
That issue solved itself: a severely repressed Christian woman spent a day on the desk, received one of his Emails, and crossed the hall to Human Resources.
Click here for hot sexy Israeli babes frolicking on the beach! Satisfaction guaranteed!
Fixed that for you.
This is the problem with our War on Terror: we assume our enemies are dumber than our parents.
Get one USB-powered 2.5" external hard drive per laptop, and write some quick & dirty batch files. You can use the "set /p" command to account for changes in the drive letter.
I had a similar issue: they mailed us an offer of a huge bundle of stuff, including the 8Mb/s speed. I called them up, told them that we were paying for 6 already but barely getting 4... and then I accepted the bundle, intending to cancel if our download speeds didn't double.
I actually get the extra speed, at least according to Speakeasy.net.
Vista runs so slowly that people are paying a premium to stay with XP. Dell, for example, charges $99 more.
I just had a customer pay $300 labor to "upgrade" his two-month-old Dell Vista Business laptop -- CoreDuo, 1 GB RAM, Intel 845 video (which may have been the bottleneck) -- to XP Pro. He provided the software, which cost him almost as much again.
When he called, he said, "I either need to put XP on this laptop, or buy a new laptop with XP." I went to look at the laptop, turned off virtually every startup item except his Symantec corporate anti-virus client, and agreed that XP was the only cure available.
Once again, Vista makes me money... I love it!
Later versions of the Kalashnikov design are just different calibers of the same firearm. The differences between an AK-47 and an AK-74 are much smaller than between Office 2000 and Office 2003.
(Anyway, mine's legal: I own a Saiga-12, a 12-gauge semi-auto Kalashnikov shotgun manufactured by Ishmash in Izhevsk. It's the fastest, most reliable semi-auto shotgun on God's gray Earth, for only about $400. Even in that huge caliber, it's pretty much the same gun).
Before I 'retired' to fix home PCs, I was the alpha geek on a Help Desk.
A guy called, infested with spyware... I started poking around, and found a text file. Before I continued, I called the Help Desk manager over, and put the client on speaker:
"Um, sir, do you bank at Bank of America?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Is your password 'Snoopy67'?"
Since then, I've found a few dozen files with clear-text keylogger yields... and thousands of log files filled with coded stuff that could be anything.
they don't make unix os type products
There aren't enough people using "unix os type products..."
and those who are usually don't have any money anyway.
(sorry, just kidding...)
[just kidding]
Zango has infested millions of PCs and caused tens of millions of dollars worth of damages...
Zango is an actual company that has offices here in the USA...
Zango's offices are presumably flammable...
Why is Zango still causing problems?
[/just kidding]
We were testing an edition of Dragon Naturally Speaking back in 2000, when an Asian-American woman on our team took the microphone. She had a heavy accent, and the software interpreted her words as... nothing.
She stood there, trying to get it to write something, and finally ended up repeating, "It not woking! Why it is not woking?"
We were afraid to laugh, fearing a trip to HR... we all stood there, biting the insides of our cheeks, until she gave up and left the room; then, we collapsed on the floor, literally ROTFL.
I tild them everything they need to know about myself:
My name is Willie Horton.
I was born 12 August 1951.
My address is:
Maryland House of Corrections Annex
PO Box 534
Jessup, MD 20794-0534
E-mail: willie.horton@mail.com
They may even realize that I'm the same Willie Horton whose image was used to defeat Mike Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential election... but I guess that's the price of fame.
The media -- and the consumer anti-virus manufacturers -- feed our "obsession with firewalls," and I see it every day in the home-user world.
Computers sitting behind a NAT router, which is pretty much all the firewall most machines need, come factory-loaded with Norton Internet Security or McAfee Security Center. This makes it nearly impossible for the average home user to share files and printers, and (especially with Norton) makes it very likely that they will answer some of the hundreds of pop-up questions wrong and break something they want:
"MSIMN.exe is trying to access the Internet!
What do you want to do:
1. Permanently block it?
2. Dial 911?
3. Buy even more Norton crapware?
I try to explain to my customers that they want a hardware firewall (the router) and don't really need a software firewall other than the one-way jobbie that ships inside Windoze.
OTOH, one customer this morning still has an XP SP1 machine plugged directly into her cable modem... guess what happened to her machine?
Oh, well, I get paid to fix these kind of problems, so I guess I don't mind. God forbid they ever get it right!
I was the purchasing agent for a chain of auto parts stores, and we used a method called GROI: Gross Return on Inventory.
The original pricing theory in traditional auto parts stores was based on four "turns" per year: after opening a parts store and filling it up with stuff to sell, you needed to sell each stock number four times, at 35% gross profit, to make an adequate gross profit to cover your expenses -- and pay off your inventory in twelve months.
This resulted in some items being priced much higher than at mass retailers, and caused stores to lose sales on popular items: people would go elsewhere for oil, antifreeze, and the most common spark plugs, brake pads and filters, because they were much less expensive at places like Pep Boys.
The GROI method constantly recalculated sales and adjusted the prices downward on popular items, thus increasing sales and lowering the prices still further. For example, the best-selling oil filters would sell at under 10% gross profit, but we would sell out our inventory of those items twelve to fifteen times per year... thus making a larger profit on the initial purchases we had made to stock a new store. By setting a minimum gross profit percentage, runaway sales on an item would result in higher profits instead of ever-lower margins.
This was all calculated by an incredibly expensive 200 MHz Pentium Pro box, running proprietary software atop SCO Unix.
(I was the only one who could work the thing... which led to me running a newly purchased Netware 4.1 network in the chain's offices... which led me out of that filthy auto parts business altogether, thank Jeebus).
I was the alpha geek on the Help Desk for a multi-state corporation.
Many of the callers seemed to have a guilty conscience: they would say things like "Is it something I did wrong?"
My standard answer: "This probably wasn't your fault, but I'm looking for a way to blame you."
I fix Windows PCs for a living, and I run my company on QuickBooks 2006. When Vista came out, I stuck a new drive in my main laptop, built it out with Vista Ultimate, and installed all the applications I need... including QuickBooks. QB worked fine, but I unfortunately failed to disable its Automatic Update feature.
About a month later, QuickBooks downloaded an update that included this splash screen, with its dire warnings about application incompatibility and system instability.
I resent the fact that Intuit is trying to frighten QuickBooks users into upgrading, and I will never buy any of their products again... even if I'm forced to keep my books in, um, actual books. I also turned off Automatic Updates, because I'm afraid Intuit will deliberately destabilize the software if they don't sell enough copies of the 2007 & 2008 versions.
Slashdot got scooped by Nova .
500 bucks? A lousy 500 bucks?
Yeah. I must have saved them tens of thousands of dollars...
However, I lived to tell the story on Slashdot, so I guess I won in the end!
On or about October 16, 2004, while I was driving home, the Help Desk where I was alpha geek received a virus report. The senior tech had to delete a bunch of files, including Excel.exe, before the machine would stop reporting infections. By the time she finished, it barely ran (and was later re-imaged).
I went in early the next day, and more reports started trickling in right away. I went to one of the first computers, and found that McAfee was reporting Excel.exe and other key files were infected even on the CD. By the time I got back to the desk, they were swamped with calls. As yet, there was no information on the McAfee site about the new virus.
I went into a room with the CIO and other execs, where they started making plans to shut down the WAN and unplug the local switches... and I spoke up: "I don't think this is a virus."
They looked at me like I was crazy, and shooed me out of the room.
I refreshed the page on the McAfee site, and they had just posted information about a "false positive caused by new definitions combined with the outdated, no-longer-supported engine version 4.xxx." I printed that page, and burst back into the emergency meeting. The planning changed to updating the McAfee clients in bulk and fixing the PCs.
Later that evening, after a grueling day of remote Office reinstallations, the CIO came to me and said, "Do you have any idea what a huge disaster this would have been if you hadn't figured this out?"
I calmly replied, "You're not paying me to fail."
A few months later, I got a $500 bonus (less taxes) in my check.
Contending that the contents of a company-owned laptop belong to the employee carrying it is nonsense. If you are using the company's computer, everything on it belongs to them. A company laptop can be searched by the company anytime, or by the police anytime the company permits it. If you don't like that, get your own.
I worked Desktop Support in an environment where we were forbidden to say or write the letters "PC" because they stood for "Personal Computer:" we were required to describe computers as workstations.
I opened my own business months before 'retiring' from the consulting firm, which forbade us from having any other company's information on our laptops. Before I did that, I bought my own laptop, moved all my personal and business information to it, and re-imaged the hard disk on the company laptop.
Sure enough, about a month later, they asked for my laptop to do a "shell upgrade." I was happy to turn it over...
What's the best car to buy? Although some brands have quality issues that rule them out, ultimately the question "which car is best?" depends on who will be driving it.
I'm a former cabdriver, so I'd be happiest in a Dodge Charger police package; my ex-wife hates big cars, so her Saturn is perfect for her.
Similarly, I'm a Windows geek/MCP. I'm better at installing, configuring and running M$ products, so IIS would be best for an environment I had to design and support.
Others who read this would be far better off (and happier) running *nix, so a non-M$ solution would best meet their needs.
Choose the one you want, then find facts to support your preference... they're out there somewhere.