You would think so, but guess what? This year my son had to buy specific clothes in order to get an education. A specific green or white shirt (one model, just that one choice of color) and black pants (again one model). Required, no remuneration for that either. I understand a lot of schools are doing this because it lets the bad kids look more like the good kids or something so they don't fight. Makes no sense to me, but that's what the schools are doing. I don't see a whole lot of difference between that and "buy this computer". Although I think it is stupid to require a certain OS when they can all just use Google Docs with any OS they bring.
Exactly! I was just thinking that they should probably just require a portable computer that can connect to wireless and has a modern browser and leave it at that. Have the teachers and students use Google Docs or the equivalent and make sure the classes, common areas, etc. all have good WiFi coverage and you are pretty much done.
True, but you need some warning that it will have ads in it. On my Droid, I used to blithely update whenever I got a notification of a new version of an app - Google's apps or 3rd party. That was probably stupid, but that's what I did. Then I got hit by a free app that was "limited" (didn't have all the features of the paid app, but otherwise worked well) all of a sudden getting annoying ads in an update. Of course I dumped the app fairly quickly after that. It made me realize that there is no real notification system for "what changed" in these apps that has any requirements on it. Nothing said, "New and improved; now with ads!". So, sure, you don't have to update - but good luck finding out that there are now ads in it BEFORE you update. And good luck getting the old version back. Now I usually wait a few days before updating a non-Google app and check the web to see if anyone is reporting "now with ads darn it" about that app. Not the best system for sure.
People who say "post something on the internet and then complain about privacy" are missing a key point: Access Controls. Facebook has them. Just like many web sites do. The problem is that Facebook has a habit of either removing or neutering certain controls and making available information that they shouldn't.
This is similar to having a HR web site at work where people can access their own records to update emergency contact, children, addresses, etc. This site probably has lots of info on you (national ID number, etc.). Now imagine the admin of the site made a change that neutered or removed the access control list so that everyone in the company could see each other's information. Well, you posted it on the intranet so it's your fault? Not really - it is the fault of that admin. In Facebook's case it is the fault of them changing their model and changing items that had an access control list to public.
I agree with that, but I would point out that they probably try to represent this to folks outside their organization as being one scale instead of separate programmer and manager scale. Which would tend to show a manager at level 7 as more experienced than a programmer at level 6.
pre-render blocking does indeed save you some bandwidth and can make pages render more quickly. That's my main reason that I use FF. However, some folks may WANT to do post-render. The reason (a bit on the shady side though) is that downloading the ad and just not seeing it will:
1) Give the site you are visiting revenue
2) Cost the advertiser in bandwidth even though you don't have to see the ad.
Some folks have gone to Chrome preferentially so that they can block post render and allow their favorite sites to get revenue without having the bother of the ads blemishing the page.
I think I would be willing to pay for it to ensure privacy (some small amount). However, the problem there is that nobody on my (rather small) "friends" list would be willing to. So if it was "pay or nothing" they would all leave and then I would too soon after as it gets old talking to yourself. Now, maybe if they have levels:
1) Free, but we sell your info - be careful what you share.
2) Small yearly fee, we may target you with ads but won't share anything with anyone unless you manually set it to allow sharing.
3) Some other option that I missed.
I came to the thread to say mostly the same thing, but to also add in that raw performance doesn't mean anywhere near what reliability and break/fix experience do. You really want to base your decision on a mix of reliability / break-fix / and price.
If you want to get some data, you can really just use xperf from the Windows Performance Toolkit. You can get great info on boot times, etc. and what is slowing them down, doing all the disk I/O, etc. using the xbootmgr tool that comes with it as well. I'd really suggest picking the hardware on other factors than performance and then tuning your image as much as possible using the set of xperf / xbootmgr tools.
Most of what you've written is right on. However I think you misunderstand how much of the remaining oil reserves are controlled by national oil companies (read governments). Just because the US, the UK, and the like don't participate in this national oil company setup doesn't mean that a whole lot of oil isn't spoken for by them. In fact, the global integrated companies like the BPs and Chevrons of the world are having an increasingly hard time adding to their P1 (proven reserves that can be reported to the SEC) reserves because of the amount of leases tied up by the nationals. Increasingly, these companies are having to buy into agreements where they simply produce the oil at a per barrel fee paid to them by the national oil companies. So governments will indeed be profiting when the price of oil goes up. It just won't be the government of the US, UK, etc.
Well, we use them with HP printers all the time. Any confidential document is "printed" to the printer with a code selected by the user. The job won't print until the user is standing at the printer and enters the code. With current technology on the print servers, this requires the printer to manage it and have a hard drive. We also use Smart Cards on the HP printers for some functions (such as scanning and sending to email). That function either requires it store to RAM (might be a lot of RAM required) or to a hard drive as well. Both of these are functions used on our office printers at least weekly if not more. They certainly aren't used for every job, but they definitely are used.
I was at a conference three weeks ago where the subject of "self encrypting drives" (the ones with encryption in the drive firmware) came up and one of the other people representing a large business there mentioned that he buys those drives for his printers and that they use them. So there are use cases where it makes sense.
I might have this backwards because copyright, etc. seems to be a morass - but I don't think the record companies can sue for you performing a song yourself. I think that is ASCAP that does that - the people representing the songwriters and composers. You know, the ones who don't want restaurant staff to be able to sing Happy Birthday. Generally isn't it ASCAP that hassles locations that hire cover bands and not the RIAA?
Blast can also mean "burn" as in a rocket. Not that you are wrong at all - if the GP meant blast in the "blow it up" sense that would be really bad. But if he meant "a 4 second blast on the rocket engine or thruster" - then, as long as they set that burn sequence up to either deorbit the satellite or put it in an orbit that won't intersect any useful satellite's orbit for a long, long time it should be good.
Actually many companies are connecting with customers through facebook, twitter, etc. It may just be a fad or it may last. I don't know. But I do know there are a lot of company pages appearing on facebook - http://www.facebook.com/Chevron is an example. The employees who have access to these type of accounts certainly need to be able to logon and post their updates and connect with their customers. Similarly, I understand some companies are giving support through twitter as well. So, although I would certainly be the first to admit that only a small number of folks at these companies need this access, they do indeed need it to perform the role they have been asked to perform.
True, for analogous situations here in our district of CA you have to have papers on file with the school (not for candy - that would be absolutely ridiculous, but for medications such as asthma inhalers and even motrin for migraines) with signatures from both a doctor and the parents. This medication policy is a bit overboard, but at least they don't do it for candy. I would imagine that there are similar "unless paper on file stating child is diabetic and may need candy" or something exceptions in the Texas rule too.
Interestingly, the main article linked clearly shows a check box that allows you to turn off making your list of friends available. I go to that same page they are showing and the check box is no longer there. Also, they have a very deceptive page for setting your "visibility" of various things (home town, likes, interests, etc.). It has the normal drop-down for "everyone, friends only, friends of friends, and custom". However when you set them to say "friends only" and re-visit the page a few minutes later they are all mysteriously switched back to "everyone". So they make it LOOK like you can control these things - but you can't. They also try to link you to pre-existing "pages". I recently had to go through facebook and either delete or replace all data about me with false info because from week to week you have no idea what they are going to divulge next. Several months ago it was fairly easy to do something like "real family" can see x, "work friends" can see x - y, and "facebook friends" can see (x - y) - z. This is no longer the case and has been changing from month to month very rapidly. If the data is that important to advertisers and marketers - fine. All they get is crap data now.
So you just boot Windows PE (freely available download) and use that as your live CD. Full support for entering a BitLocker key and accessing the drive. We do this all the time at work; in fact our WDS (PXE) boot image includes not just the ability to rebuild a machine, but to unlock the volume for just the types of repairs you mention.
I removed my personal information by just changing it to random cities, phone number of a business in that random city (address too). I was one of those who had some level of "real" info there in the past that was locked down to be visible by certain users only. However, with all the "privacy" changes (read turning off privacy) that FB has been making lately I went and changed the info to false info. I'd imagine some cache somewhere will still have the real stuff for awhile, but that it will become harder and harder over time for people to access it. The profile is still "locked" so that only certain people can see it and "friends" can't share it - it will be interesting to see when FB "leaks" that fake info.
It really depends on the intersection of folks running McAfee along with SP 3 in the enterprise. My company is just finishing a migration to Vista, but we still do have about 15,000 Windows XP SP3 desktops (not done deploying yet). However, late last year, I was at a MS Global Accounts meeting (35 very large companies) and NONE of the rest of them had deployed SP 3 for their XP machines. They were all on SP 2 and were harping on Microsoft about the end of support for SP 2 that was fast approaching. None of them wanted to deploy SP 3. It was flabbergasting to me, but they just didn't want to do it. So none of those companies were impacted - even if they ran McAffee.
Yes, the MAC you can get from WiFi is from the internal network. Most (not all) home routers have a wired connection to the ISP. That MAC address can't be sniffed wirelessly (well it can, but you'd have to either have a "no security at all" wireless network or they'd have to crack each WiFi network, which they aren't doing. A simple sniff can't get the wired address). So they associate the wireless MAC and SSID with the location. For the longest time, their location lookups via the Google database showed me in a different state, so I know it isn't perfect.
Not just google sniffing the document. Having the government subpoena the document from Google (as it will be somewhere in their huge data store). Of course, my printer (and yours too) don't have an outward facing IP and we don't port forward our routers to it either for exactly the reason you mention. Spam, or just some jack nut deciding to waste all your paper and toner.
I guess I would have more faith in it if it does the equivalent of creating the print file, sending that back to your Chrome device, then your chrome device does the equivalent of the old ability to just copy formatted print file to a printer. So nothing on your network gets exposed. But certainly there would need to be a very stringent policy on what Google could do with your print file and how long they could store it (0 seconds!).
You hit the nail on the head with that one. I, too, find myself using queries containing "site:msdn.microsoft.com (rest of search)" (for say Windows API information) or using "-" in the searches to suppress certain results. Like you say, otherwise you get basically "a bunch of crap" - mainly from people who have no idea what they are doing. Just today I had a problem with elbyvcdshell.dll (from Slysoft's Virtual Clone Drive) causing Windows Explorer to hang for 5 minutes each time I renamed a folder. I tried searching that on Google - hell half of the hits were stupid posts of every file on a system at malware check sites, or bleepingcomputer.com, or other "is this malware" posts. Did I say half? Shoot - I just checked again and I think I meant 85%. The results for most tech searches are indeed useless unless you already know what site you want and include that information in your search. The internet is just filled with crap sites that make it into the indexes and get high relevance.
http://runescape.com/ is a Java site my son uses all the time. AT&T Connect web conferencing service is one I use at work all the time. There are certainly folks that need it for a bunch of different things, but I will certainly stipulate that it isn't used on the desktop (thankfully!) as much as it was. That said, at work, every time we send out a Java security patch we get calls from users of all kinds of vertical market apps about how the patch broke their app and we have to get the vendor to get a new version out really quick. Quite annoying how it always breaks stuff as it moves forward.
Well, for an extremely techie user they could install the Android SDK and build environment on their computer and search the Android Market in the emulator. I know that is a lame suggestion for a normal consumer, but most of the folks who post here on/. are more than capable of doing it.
I'm in for Ring World but are you seriously saying Will Smith would be Louis Wu? Or would he dress up in a Wookie outfit and be Speaker To Animals? (Yes, I know a Kzin isn't supposed to look quite like a Wookie - more catlike and all, but it was still funny). He certainly couldn't be a Pierson's Pupeteer or Teela Brown. Darn, why do I remember all their names?
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You would think so, but guess what? This year my son had to buy specific clothes in order to get an education. A specific green or white shirt (one model, just that one choice of color) and black pants (again one model). Required, no remuneration for that either. I understand a lot of schools are doing this because it lets the bad kids look more like the good kids or something so they don't fight. Makes no sense to me, but that's what the schools are doing. I don't see a whole lot of difference between that and "buy this computer". Although I think it is stupid to require a certain OS when they can all just use Google Docs with any OS they bring.
Exactly! I was just thinking that they should probably just require a portable computer that can connect to wireless and has a modern browser and leave it at that. Have the teachers and students use Google Docs or the equivalent and make sure the classes, common areas, etc. all have good WiFi coverage and you are pretty much done.
True, but you need some warning that it will have ads in it. On my Droid, I used to blithely update whenever I got a notification of a new version of an app - Google's apps or 3rd party. That was probably stupid, but that's what I did. Then I got hit by a free app that was "limited" (didn't have all the features of the paid app, but otherwise worked well) all of a sudden getting annoying ads in an update. Of course I dumped the app fairly quickly after that. It made me realize that there is no real notification system for "what changed" in these apps that has any requirements on it. Nothing said, "New and improved; now with ads!". So, sure, you don't have to update - but good luck finding out that there are now ads in it BEFORE you update. And good luck getting the old version back. Now I usually wait a few days before updating a non-Google app and check the web to see if anyone is reporting "now with ads darn it" about that app. Not the best system for sure.
People who say "post something on the internet and then complain about privacy" are missing a key point: Access Controls. Facebook has them. Just like many web sites do. The problem is that Facebook has a habit of either removing or neutering certain controls and making available information that they shouldn't.
This is similar to having a HR web site at work where people can access their own records to update emergency contact, children, addresses, etc. This site probably has lots of info on you (national ID number, etc.). Now imagine the admin of the site made a change that neutered or removed the access control list so that everyone in the company could see each other's information. Well, you posted it on the intranet so it's your fault? Not really - it is the fault of that admin. In Facebook's case it is the fault of them changing their model and changing items that had an access control list to public.
I agree with that, but I would point out that they probably try to represent this to folks outside their organization as being one scale instead of separate programmer and manager scale. Which would tend to show a manager at level 7 as more experienced than a programmer at level 6.
The default android browser is based on webkit (like safari) so it probably works because of the common rendering engine.
pre-render blocking does indeed save you some bandwidth and can make pages render more quickly. That's my main reason that I use FF. However, some folks may WANT to do post-render. The reason (a bit on the shady side though) is that downloading the ad and just not seeing it will:
1) Give the site you are visiting revenue
2) Cost the advertiser in bandwidth even though you don't have to see the ad.
Some folks have gone to Chrome preferentially so that they can block post render and allow their favorite sites to get revenue without having the bother of the ads blemishing the page.
I think I would be willing to pay for it to ensure privacy (some small amount). However, the problem there is that nobody on my (rather small) "friends" list would be willing to. So if it was "pay or nothing" they would all leave and then I would too soon after as it gets old talking to yourself. Now, maybe if they have levels:
1) Free, but we sell your info - be careful what you share.
2) Small yearly fee, we may target you with ads but won't share anything with anyone unless you manually set it to allow sharing.
3) Some other option that I missed.
I came to the thread to say mostly the same thing, but to also add in that raw performance doesn't mean anywhere near what reliability and break/fix experience do. You really want to base your decision on a mix of reliability / break-fix / and price.
If you want to get some data, you can really just use xperf from the Windows Performance Toolkit. You can get great info on boot times, etc. and what is slowing them down, doing all the disk I/O, etc. using the xbootmgr tool that comes with it as well. I'd really suggest picking the hardware on other factors than performance and then tuning your image as much as possible using the set of xperf / xbootmgr tools.
Most of what you've written is right on. However I think you misunderstand how much of the remaining oil reserves are controlled by national oil companies (read governments). Just because the US, the UK, and the like don't participate in this national oil company setup doesn't mean that a whole lot of oil isn't spoken for by them. In fact, the global integrated companies like the BPs and Chevrons of the world are having an increasingly hard time adding to their P1 (proven reserves that can be reported to the SEC) reserves because of the amount of leases tied up by the nationals. Increasingly, these companies are having to buy into agreements where they simply produce the oil at a per barrel fee paid to them by the national oil companies. So governments will indeed be profiting when the price of oil goes up. It just won't be the government of the US, UK, etc.
Well, we use them with HP printers all the time. Any confidential document is "printed" to the printer with a code selected by the user. The job won't print until the user is standing at the printer and enters the code. With current technology on the print servers, this requires the printer to manage it and have a hard drive. We also use Smart Cards on the HP printers for some functions (such as scanning and sending to email). That function either requires it store to RAM (might be a lot of RAM required) or to a hard drive as well. Both of these are functions used on our office printers at least weekly if not more. They certainly aren't used for every job, but they definitely are used.
I was at a conference three weeks ago where the subject of "self encrypting drives" (the ones with encryption in the drive firmware) came up and one of the other people representing a large business there mentioned that he buys those drives for his printers and that they use them. So there are use cases where it makes sense.
I might have this backwards because copyright, etc. seems to be a morass - but I don't think the record companies can sue for you performing a song yourself. I think that is ASCAP that does that - the people representing the songwriters and composers. You know, the ones who don't want restaurant staff to be able to sing Happy Birthday. Generally isn't it ASCAP that hassles locations that hire cover bands and not the RIAA?
Blast can also mean "burn" as in a rocket. Not that you are wrong at all - if the GP meant blast in the "blow it up" sense that would be really bad. But if he meant "a 4 second blast on the rocket engine or thruster" - then, as long as they set that burn sequence up to either deorbit the satellite or put it in an orbit that won't intersect any useful satellite's orbit for a long, long time it should be good.
Actually many companies are connecting with customers through facebook, twitter, etc. It may just be a fad or it may last. I don't know. But I do know there are a lot of company pages appearing on facebook - http://www.facebook.com/Chevron is an example. The employees who have access to these type of accounts certainly need to be able to logon and post their updates and connect with their customers. Similarly, I understand some companies are giving support through twitter as well. So, although I would certainly be the first to admit that only a small number of folks at these companies need this access, they do indeed need it to perform the role they have been asked to perform.
True, for analogous situations here in our district of CA you have to have papers on file with the school (not for candy - that would be absolutely ridiculous, but for medications such as asthma inhalers and even motrin for migraines) with signatures from both a doctor and the parents. This medication policy is a bit overboard, but at least they don't do it for candy. I would imagine that there are similar "unless paper on file stating child is diabetic and may need candy" or something exceptions in the Texas rule too.
Interestingly, the main article linked clearly shows a check box that allows you to turn off making your list of friends available. I go to that same page they are showing and the check box is no longer there. Also, they have a very deceptive page for setting your "visibility" of various things (home town, likes, interests, etc.). It has the normal drop-down for "everyone, friends only, friends of friends, and custom". However when you set them to say "friends only" and re-visit the page a few minutes later they are all mysteriously switched back to "everyone". So they make it LOOK like you can control these things - but you can't. They also try to link you to pre-existing "pages". I recently had to go through facebook and either delete or replace all data about me with false info because from week to week you have no idea what they are going to divulge next. Several months ago it was fairly easy to do something like "real family" can see x, "work friends" can see x - y, and "facebook friends" can see (x - y) - z. This is no longer the case and has been changing from month to month very rapidly. If the data is that important to advertisers and marketers - fine. All they get is crap data now.
So you just boot Windows PE (freely available download) and use that as your live CD. Full support for entering a BitLocker key and accessing the drive. We do this all the time at work; in fact our WDS (PXE) boot image includes not just the ability to rebuild a machine, but to unlock the volume for just the types of repairs you mention.
I removed my personal information by just changing it to random cities, phone number of a business in that random city (address too). I was one of those who had some level of "real" info there in the past that was locked down to be visible by certain users only. However, with all the "privacy" changes (read turning off privacy) that FB has been making lately I went and changed the info to false info. I'd imagine some cache somewhere will still have the real stuff for awhile, but that it will become harder and harder over time for people to access it. The profile is still "locked" so that only certain people can see it and "friends" can't share it - it will be interesting to see when FB "leaks" that fake info.
It really depends on the intersection of folks running McAfee along with SP 3 in the enterprise. My company is just finishing a migration to Vista, but we still do have about 15,000 Windows XP SP3 desktops (not done deploying yet). However, late last year, I was at a MS Global Accounts meeting (35 very large companies) and NONE of the rest of them had deployed SP 3 for their XP machines. They were all on SP 2 and were harping on Microsoft about the end of support for SP 2 that was fast approaching. None of them wanted to deploy SP 3. It was flabbergasting to me, but they just didn't want to do it. So none of those companies were impacted - even if they ran McAffee.
Yes, the MAC you can get from WiFi is from the internal network. Most (not all) home routers have a wired connection to the ISP. That MAC address can't be sniffed wirelessly (well it can, but you'd have to either have a "no security at all" wireless network or they'd have to crack each WiFi network, which they aren't doing. A simple sniff can't get the wired address). So they associate the wireless MAC and SSID with the location. For the longest time, their location lookups via the Google database showed me in a different state, so I know it isn't perfect.
Not just google sniffing the document. Having the government subpoena the document from Google (as it will be somewhere in their huge data store). Of course, my printer (and yours too) don't have an outward facing IP and we don't port forward our routers to it either for exactly the reason you mention. Spam, or just some jack nut deciding to waste all your paper and toner.
I guess I would have more faith in it if it does the equivalent of creating the print file, sending that back to your Chrome device, then your chrome device does the equivalent of the old ability to just copy formatted print file to a printer. So nothing on your network gets exposed. But certainly there would need to be a very stringent policy on what Google could do with your print file and how long they could store it (0 seconds!).
You hit the nail on the head with that one. I, too, find myself using queries containing "site:msdn.microsoft.com (rest of search)" (for say Windows API information) or using "-" in the searches to suppress certain results. Like you say, otherwise you get basically "a bunch of crap" - mainly from people who have no idea what they are doing. Just today I had a problem with elbyvcdshell.dll (from Slysoft's Virtual Clone Drive) causing Windows Explorer to hang for 5 minutes each time I renamed a folder. I tried searching that on Google - hell half of the hits were stupid posts of every file on a system at malware check sites, or bleepingcomputer.com, or other "is this malware" posts. Did I say half? Shoot - I just checked again and I think I meant 85%. The results for most tech searches are indeed useless unless you already know what site you want and include that information in your search. The internet is just filled with crap sites that make it into the indexes and get high relevance.
http://runescape.com/ is a Java site my son uses all the time. AT&T Connect web conferencing service is one I use at work all the time. There are certainly folks that need it for a bunch of different things, but I will certainly stipulate that it isn't used on the desktop (thankfully!) as much as it was. That said, at work, every time we send out a Java security patch we get calls from users of all kinds of vertical market apps about how the patch broke their app and we have to get the vendor to get a new version out really quick. Quite annoying how it always breaks stuff as it moves forward.
Well, for an extremely techie user they could install the Android SDK and build environment on their computer and search the Android Market in the emulator. I know that is a lame suggestion for a normal consumer, but most of the folks who post here on /. are more than capable of doing it.
I'm in for Ring World but are you seriously saying Will Smith would be Louis Wu? Or would he dress up in a Wookie outfit and be Speaker To Animals? (Yes, I know a Kzin isn't supposed to look quite like a Wookie - more catlike and all, but it was still funny). He certainly couldn't be a Pierson's Pupeteer or Teela Brown. Darn, why do I remember all their names?
I'm sure he's down with rishathra though!