Yup, that looks about as ergonomic as a medieval rack, and with a simple linear set of letter combinations and no apparent thought gone in to making them easy to use.
The Agenda micro writer my baby sister had back in the 1990's was light years ahead of this.
Unless you go for ReFS, which is Microsofts new file system available in Server 2012. It's still new, but looks to have all the best features of NTFS, ZFS and Btrfs rolled into one.
Another physics game. The first levels are easy enough for a young child, and our little girl loves it. With the fans, boards, and other mechanisms its a good introduction to gravity and other forces.
We had a company with those requirements and we refused point blank to allow it Internet access. We allowed them a one day trial to prove it was secure and of course it was riddled with viruses within hours. We then forced them to wipe and reinstall it, and plugged it in to our isolated production network.
The guys designing and working with these systems haven't the first clue about IT, let alone security.
No way to easily report the files? You just email them in, a 30 second phone call to Sophos will get you the details.
In a previous role we would help clean users home computers from time to time, and we discovered a good number of new viruses. I submitted half a dozen viruses to Sophos that weren't being picked up by any virus scanners. They confirmed them all within a few days, and signatures were added within weeks. The whole process is incredibly easy.
Same here, I used to get marked A for attainment, and B or C for effort. I never could understand exactly what else I was meant to do when the work was so easy and I was bored out of my brains.
At university I was so bored in lectures I got into the habbit of completing the previous weeks assignment during the lectures, and taking notes at the same time. Still got good marks, the biggest problem I had was staying awake.
After taking a year out I realised real work had more challenges and more opportunities, and kept me interested in a way education never had. I quit my degree and have never looked back. I have two girls of my own now, and my main focus is to make sure they don't get bored at school and actually get to work to their level, whatever that may be.
As a log term windows admin who's cleaned up more home computers than I care to count, here are my tips:
1. Ensure windows updates are set to download and install automatically. 2. Install AVG Free, sure MS essentials is good, but I guarantee every virus is written to avoid it, I go with 3rd party AV wherever possible. 3. Install Chrome for web browsing, sync the account to google 4. Setup his account as a regular user, don't give him the admin password 5. Setup something to backup Warcraft, it's a huge download, you don't want to be doing it again if you need to reinstall
And that's it, it's basic security but win7 is pretty good, the above has been enough to keep our home XP machine safe for many years.
Ultimately it's a kids computer and they're going to click anything shiny, sooner or later it will get a virus. There are a few key points to bear in mind here:
1. It's going to happen, preventing it is pretty much impossible. 2. Your other computers are Linux, so the risk to them is negligible. 3. Most viruses these days are botnets or phishing, so long as he's not spending a fortune on a debit card, the risk to him is minimal. 4. All the software I recommended will update itself, so it's zero maintenance. That's a major factor in keeping windows secure. 5. If it does end up riddled with viruses, a quick re-install over the top, followed by a sync to google and it's all back to normal, including your files and settings.
I suspect it's more a case of Intel and AMD wanting to break into the mobile space, but not wanting to take on ARM head to head. Win8 products give them that opportunity. Thry'll target Android when they have a product that's competitive with ARM, until then no manufacturer would have any reason to use their hardware for an Android product.
Riiiight. Because requiring every single programmer in the world to design perfect software with no errors is sooooo much easier than adding extra security to the OS.
People make mistakes, it's why the term human error exists. In the real world people accept this and work with it. It isn't something you can eliminate.
No, the greatest advantage is that you can be sure the thing is air tight *before* anybody gets in to it. Checking for damage just became a whole lot safer!
As others have said, Fujitsu Snapscan. For around £350 you get a compact dual sided scanner that just works. We used them in a previous job and they had no trouble scanning thousands of pages a week with almost no jams.
Also, if any scanner starts to pick up multiple sheets or jam, look for a maintenance kit. Replacing the pads and rollers is a simple, routine task and does wonders. We kept spares in stock and had to service scanner feeds every couple of years or so.
I wouldn't count out Autodesk, they are big MS fans and have a tendency to jump on the last and greatest. At the very least I would expect a tablet compatible viewer; that allows the kinds of demonstrations that sell product.
Autocad proper will be x86 only, but there will almost certainly be some MS tablet support.
There's already at least one virus that successfully worked around this with a man in the middle attack: Instead of trying to make a payment directly, it modified a payment you were making. Of course the bank prompted for an authorisation code, but as the user was making a payment they were expecting this, and promptly entered the details, sending some random amount to an account controlled by the virus writers.
The really clever bit was that it also re-wrote the screen display, to make it appear as though your expected transaction had gone through. It calculated the appropriate balance, and even re-wrote the online statements so nothing appeared out of place. It was running for many, many months before it was discovered.
For a gaming console, watch the Apple TV. It will only happen if they feel the market is ripe for it, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the Apple TV morph into a low cost home entertainment hub, covering TV, movies, internet, music and gaming.
One thing you can count on - if Apple move into gaming, it won't be just another console.
PS. If they do release one, if the controller isn't a wireless touchscreen device of some kind I'll eat my hat.
No, I don't mean is there a setting to do this. I mean, just by using Activesync to connect to a free gmail account, is my phone granting remote wipe privileges to google?
They probably haven't implemented it, and I do trust google more than most companies, but I still don't like the thought of my email provider having any kind of remote wipe ability, purely by virtue of the connection type being used.
So if this is tied to Activesync, does that mean google can wipe my phone now?
Activesync is the way everyone I know connects to gmail to synchronise calendars as well as email, I wasn't aware that I was granting remote wipe privileges to google as I set this up.
Sure, it's unlikely to happen, but it shouldn't even be possible! Stuff like that is an accident waiting to happen.
Don't think of it as a replacement for a console, but instead of a way for you to take your console game out with you wherever you go. That has the potential to be a powerful combination. A full console game you play as normal at home, but while you're out you can still work on character progression, or play with your friends.
Sure, the gameplay experience on the phone isn't going to be identical, but it doesn't have to be. The added convenience of having your games with you wherever you go means that people are more than happy to put up with a smaller screen. I was a huge fan of flight sims on the PC, now one of my favourite games is a space combat sim on the iPhone. Sure, the graphics aren't as good, and the controls are a bit more fiddly, but it has the all essential essence of the game, it's fun to play, and because I always have my phone with me, I can play it anytime I want.
Sure, this might not be for everyone. For a die hard console enthusiast, with plenty of time to stay home and play, they're always going to prefer native console games. However, there's a much bigger market of people for whom gaming is something they have to fit around their other commitments, and for that market, this could be huge.
Also, if your phone becomes an integral part of the games, imagine this: There's nothing to stop companies using phones as a wireless controller with a built in display, and built in storage. You can use the phone to display game elements distinct to your character, and to store your save games. So now you don't need to buy consoles with a bunch of controllers for multiplayer gaming, if you want to play with some mates you can head over to anybody's house with a console, you all have your controllers with you, and you all have your saved characters. Plus you could start the game while you're in the pub, not many consoles can do that:-)
And I'll leave you with one final bit of food for thought: Imagine what's going to happen if something like WoW were to adopt that platform... An immersive MMO that you can play online at home with your friends, or play with friends at somebody's house, or just play on your own anywhere you like...
I doubt phones will replace consoles, but there's potential for them to supplement them beautifully.
Lovely in theory, except for all the moronic teens who will delight in jumping out in front of Volvos confident that the car can't hit them. You're going to have idiot kids hit by drivers of old style cars, as well as a whole bunch of tail end collisions caused by this. It'd render roads near schools undrivable at closing time.
Oh, and you have to love the fact that they're adding a warning light that flashes when it sees a problem. Which seems to miss the fact that the warning light itself is going to immediately distract you, and make it more likely that you're not going to see the pedestrian it's trying to warn you of.
While backed by the best of intentions, I just can't see this becoming reality for a long while.
The thing is, if you ignore the sensationalist headline and look at what there doing, it's just a list of websites that are accessed over their network, which they're using to create an opt in filtering system.
Oh no, an ISP actually doing something useful for it's customers, whatever will we do!
Stories like this are what annoy me about the press (slashdot included).
As one of their ideal customers, we used to make a lot of use of eOpen. We registered all our licences on there, and it was nice, a single portal to track all of our Microsoft licences and upgrade rights.
Then we left it without logging on for a while (after all, it was all working fine), and the next time we tried to use it we discovered Microsoft had wiped *ALL* of our licence information that we had painstakingly entered into their site.
Turns out that they linked the accounts to Live, and that your account expires if you don't use it for 90 days.
Handy that for corporate account licence management, and strangely enough we haven't used it since.
Slashdot Mirror
For internal passwords, and its ability to securely allow teams to share access to a password list I can highly recommend password state.
Its a great program with a really responsive team behind it. I've used it in two companies now and its proven popular both times.
VirtualBox also has a seamless mode and is both free and open source, well worth a look.
Yup, that looks about as ergonomic as a medieval rack, and with a simple linear set of letter combinations and no apparent thought gone in to making them easy to use.
The Agenda micro writer my baby sister had back in the 1990's was light years ahead of this.
Unless you go for ReFS, which is Microsofts new file system available in Server 2012. It's still new, but looks to have all the best features of NTFS, ZFS and Btrfs rolled into one.
Needs a +5 epic. I lol'd
Another physics game. The first levels are easy enough for a young child, and our little girl loves it. With the fans, boards, and other mechanisms its a good introduction to gravity and other forces.
We had a company with those requirements and we refused point blank to allow it Internet access. We allowed them a one day trial to prove it was secure and of course it was riddled with viruses within hours. We then forced them to wipe and reinstall it, and plugged it in to our isolated production network.
The guys designing and working with these systems haven't the first clue about IT, let alone security.
No way to easily report the files? You just email them in, a 30 second phone call to Sophos will get you the details.
In a previous role we would help clean users home computers from time to time, and we discovered a good number of new viruses. I submitted half a dozen viruses to Sophos that weren't being picked up by any virus scanners. They confirmed them all within a few days, and signatures were added within weeks. The whole process is incredibly easy.
Same here, I used to get marked A for attainment, and B or C for effort. I never could understand exactly what else I was meant to do when the work was so easy and I was bored out of my brains.
At university I was so bored in lectures I got into the habbit of completing the previous weeks assignment during the lectures, and taking notes at the same time. Still got good marks, the biggest problem I had was staying awake.
After taking a year out I realised real work had more challenges and more opportunities, and kept me interested in a way education never had. I quit my degree and have never looked back. I have two girls of my own now, and my main focus is to make sure they don't get bored at school and actually get to work to their level, whatever that may be.
As a log term windows admin who's cleaned up more home computers than I care to count, here are my tips:
1. Ensure windows updates are set to download and install automatically.
2. Install AVG Free, sure MS essentials is good, but I guarantee every virus is written to avoid it, I go with 3rd party AV wherever possible.
3. Install Chrome for web browsing, sync the account to google
4. Setup his account as a regular user, don't give him the admin password
5. Setup something to backup Warcraft, it's a huge download, you don't want to be doing it again if you need to reinstall
And that's it, it's basic security but win7 is pretty good, the above has been enough to keep our home XP machine safe for many years.
Ultimately it's a kids computer and they're going to click anything shiny, sooner or later it will get a virus. There are a few key points to bear in mind here:
1. It's going to happen, preventing it is pretty much impossible.
2. Your other computers are Linux, so the risk to them is negligible.
3. Most viruses these days are botnets or phishing, so long as he's not spending a fortune on a debit card, the risk to him is minimal.
4. All the software I recommended will update itself, so it's zero maintenance. That's a major factor in keeping windows secure.
5. If it does end up riddled with viruses, a quick re-install over the top, followed by a sync to google and it's all back to normal, including your files and settings.
Actually, I suspect this means they can now have a whole host of *offline* backup servers ready to be launched the second the main site goes offline.
It's going to be kind of hard for the police to get a warrant to shutdown something that doesn't exist yet.
I suspect it's more a case of Intel and AMD wanting to break into the mobile space, but not wanting to take on ARM head to head. Win8 products give them that opportunity. Thry'll target Android when they have a product that's competitive with ARM, until then no manufacturer would have any reason to use their hardware for an Android product.
Riiiight. Because requiring every single programmer in the world to design perfect software with no errors is sooooo much easier than adding extra security to the OS.
People make mistakes, it's why the term human error exists. In the real world people accept this and work with it. It isn't something you can eliminate.
Gnome Shell is junk, distos have deserted it in droves and users hate it. Since when did this train wreck of a GUI have hardcore fans?
Somebody needs to mod this article -1 Flamebait.
No, the greatest advantage is that you can be sure the thing is air tight *before* anybody gets in to it. Checking for damage just became a whole lot safer!
As others have said, Fujitsu Snapscan. For around £350 you get a compact dual sided scanner that just works. We used them in a previous job and they had no trouble scanning thousands of pages a week with almost no jams.
Also, if any scanner starts to pick up multiple sheets or jam, look for a maintenance kit. Replacing the pads and rollers is a simple, routine task and does wonders. We kept spares in stock and had to service scanner feeds every couple of years or so.
I wouldn't count out Autodesk, they are big MS fans and have a tendency to jump on the last and greatest. At the very least I would expect a tablet compatible viewer; that allows the kinds of demonstrations that sell product.
Autocad proper will be x86 only, but there will almost certainly be some MS tablet support.
There's already at least one virus that successfully worked around this with a man in the middle attack: Instead of trying to make a payment directly, it modified a payment you were making. Of course the bank prompted for an authorisation code, but as the user was making a payment they were expecting this, and promptly entered the details, sending some random amount to an account controlled by the virus writers.
The really clever bit was that it also re-wrote the screen display, to make it appear as though your expected transaction had gone through. It calculated the appropriate balance, and even re-wrote the online statements so nothing appeared out of place. It was running for many, many months before it was discovered.
For a gaming console, watch the Apple TV. It will only happen if they feel the market is ripe for it, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the Apple TV morph into a low cost home entertainment hub, covering TV, movies, internet, music and gaming.
One thing you can count on - if Apple move into gaming, it won't be just another console.
PS. If they do release one, if the controller isn't a wireless touchscreen device of some kind I'll eat my hat.
No, I don't mean is there a setting to do this. I mean, just by using Activesync to connect to a free gmail account, is my phone granting remote wipe privileges to google?
They probably haven't implemented it, and I do trust google more than most companies, but I still don't like the thought of my email provider having any kind of remote wipe ability, purely by virtue of the connection type being used.
So if this is tied to Activesync, does that mean google can wipe my phone now?
Activesync is the way everyone I know connects to gmail to synchronise calendars as well as email, I wasn't aware that I was granting remote wipe privileges to google as I set this up.
Sure, it's unlikely to happen, but it shouldn't even be possible! Stuff like that is an accident waiting to happen.
Don't think of it as a replacement for a console, but instead of a way for you to take your console game out with you wherever you go. That has the potential to be a powerful combination. A full console game you play as normal at home, but while you're out you can still work on character progression, or play with your friends.
Sure, the gameplay experience on the phone isn't going to be identical, but it doesn't have to be. The added convenience of having your games with you wherever you go means that people are more than happy to put up with a smaller screen. I was a huge fan of flight sims on the PC, now one of my favourite games is a space combat sim on the iPhone. Sure, the graphics aren't as good, and the controls are a bit more fiddly, but it has the all essential essence of the game, it's fun to play, and because I always have my phone with me, I can play it anytime I want.
Sure, this might not be for everyone. For a die hard console enthusiast, with plenty of time to stay home and play, they're always going to prefer native console games. However, there's a much bigger market of people for whom gaming is something they have to fit around their other commitments, and for that market, this could be huge.
Also, if your phone becomes an integral part of the games, imagine this: There's nothing to stop companies using phones as a wireless controller with a built in display, and built in storage. You can use the phone to display game elements distinct to your character, and to store your save games. So now you don't need to buy consoles with a bunch of controllers for multiplayer gaming, if you want to play with some mates you can head over to anybody's house with a console, you all have your controllers with you, and you all have your saved characters. Plus you could start the game while you're in the pub, not many consoles can do that :-)
And I'll leave you with one final bit of food for thought: Imagine what's going to happen if something like WoW were to adopt that platform... An immersive MMO that you can play online at home with your friends, or play with friends at somebody's house, or just play on your own anywhere you like...
I doubt phones will replace consoles, but there's potential for them to supplement them beautifully.
Great concept, but there are some rather glaring problems.
Let's take the "Pedestrian detection with auto brake" feature for example:
http://www.volvocars.com/intl/top/about/corporate/volvo-sustainability/safety/pages/pedestrian-detection-with-full-auto-brake.aspx
Lovely in theory, except for all the moronic teens who will delight in jumping out in front of Volvos confident that the car can't hit them. You're going to have idiot kids hit by drivers of old style cars, as well as a whole bunch of tail end collisions caused by this. It'd render roads near schools undrivable at closing time.
Oh, and you have to love the fact that they're adding a warning light that flashes when it sees a problem. Which seems to miss the fact that the warning light itself is going to immediately distract you, and make it more likely that you're not going to see the pedestrian it's trying to warn you of.
While backed by the best of intentions, I just can't see this becoming reality for a long while.
The thing is, if you ignore the sensationalist headline and look at what there doing, it's just a list of websites that are accessed over their network, which they're using to create an opt in filtering system.
Oh no, an ISP actually doing something useful for it's customers, whatever will we do!
Stories like this are what annoy me about the press (slashdot included).
As one of their ideal customers, we used to make a lot of use of eOpen. We registered all our licences on there, and it was nice, a single portal to track all of our Microsoft licences and upgrade rights.
Then we left it without logging on for a while (after all, it was all working fine), and the next time we tried to use it we discovered Microsoft had wiped *ALL* of our licence information that we had painstakingly entered into their site.
Turns out that they linked the accounts to Live, and that your account expires if you don't use it for 90 days.
Handy that for corporate account licence management, and strangely enough we haven't used it since.