I amend each one with a post-it note now, just as you would amend a two-sided contract, sign it, and send it back and if they counter-sign they accept the modified terms (such as you would on a commercial lease). I modify the terms ("right of first sale applies to this product") and click Accept/Yes, and they accept that amendment by proceeding with the installation. I got this idea here on/.
I passed on the original iPhone because of the inevitable bugs and lack of 3G. I passed on the 3G iPhone because it stupidly STILL lacked copy&paste and also has horrible battery life. They've finally got it to the point I want. However, as one who qualifies for an upgrade from AT&T, can I go to the Apple store and get the upgrade, or do I HAVE to go directly to AT&T? I want the extended warranty (for phones and laptops and maybe high-end DSLR cameras the warranties are worth it - for everything else they're money thrown away) and do not want to deal with AT&T's idea of a "refurbished" phone in the event that I do need a replacement.
Hey News Corp, wake yup! You successfully drew people away from bittorrent and earn revenue through ads. Don't fuck it up now by encouraging everyone to go back to bittorrents, where you receive ZERO revenue!
Hospitals managed without computers before the '60s/'70s, so why can't they get by with a paper-based backup process today? I'm surprised they don't have such a process in place stemming from the cold war and fear of an EMP - with today's non-lethal microwave weapons could make EMP an even greater concern as the technology is miniaturized. There needs to be a paper-based process in place!
Besides, it's a frigging hospital. They treat no-documentation illegal aliens for free all the time, so why can't they just deal with treating legal citizens for a short period that their computer systems are down? Lives are at stake, fuck the billing and charging $50 for a tylenol or ibuprofen tablet.
$3.00 per month for Windows + $3.00 per month for antivirus + $6.00 per month for office suite + $18.00 per month for enterprise-quality image/illustration editing suite adds up quickly. Linux gives you all that and more for free - or for $3.00 per month (by your metric) if you buy the distro to support its continued development/maintenance.
if the tools you can get for Linux don't work, check out R-Studio.
If you come across a product called "Stellar Phoenix" RUN AWAY. They are the shittiest company in existence. A few years ago I needed a tool and the demo of Stellar Phoenix seemed it would work (it lists the files it said it could recover) so we purchased it only to find that it could not recover them. Come to find out that while they claim support for ALL of NTFS's features, their software WOULD NOT recover files compressed using NTFS compression. This was despite their claims of NTFS5.1 support. They refused to issue a refund and it was a months-long battle so we finally complained to Amex to try to get a chargeback against them but we tried to work it out directly with stellarinfo for too long, so it was too late. They (stellarinfo) claim a 30-day money-back guarantee but DO NOT HONOR IT - or at least they didn't back then.
We then tried R-Studio, and their trial software listed files it could recover - AND it could recover 64KB chunks to prove it. So for some files I needed immediately I used the trial to decompress and reassemble the files (in 64KB chunks, and then catted them together), and for the rest when we received the key for the full version. We were able to recover every single file. I've used R-studio for clients since then and it has worked every single time, providing the drive will enumerate.
If the drive will not enumerate you have two possibilities: freezing it in CO2 (I have had success with that), or finding another of the same model drive with the same firmware and swap PCBs, and hope that the problem is with the controller and not the drive itself.
Why was there no backup? Believe me I asked the same question.:)
Summary:
free Linux tools - good R-Studio - Awesome stellar phoenix from stellar info - snake oil from a shitty company comprised of douchebags
There is a difference between posting about what is wrong in a dicsussion with tech folks on a site such as/. or zdnet (which are both made up of technology workers and professional and/or amateur journalists) and communicating with customers. The approach and tone for each is and should be different as the education level, expectations, and requirements of each audience is different. Here I do not need to sugar-coat my comments or opinions of given product choices.
With customers sometimes the medicine needs to be dosed with a spoonful of sugar. I'm sorry you cannot grasp that distinction, however in this case I do not feel any need to apologise if this particular post offends you, since having nothing worthwhile to say you went directly for an ad-hominem attack. Therefore, I will assume you are a Symantec shill - either an employee, distributor, or associated with an advertising firm for them.
L0phtcrack--cracks--passwords. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Valid reasons include:
* lack of backups and a need to recover an existing password
Log in as Administrator (or root on *nix) and change the password. No recovery necessary.
I forgot one detail
. ..using an offline registry editor if/when necessary.
Sorry, my point is invalid without that detail. I forgot to add it in when I added my lamenting over the crapware vendor that Norton/Symantec has become in recent years.
L0phtcrack--cracks--passwords. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Valid reasons include:
* lack of backups and a need to recover an existing password
Log in as Administrator (or root on *nix) and change the password. No recovery necessary.
* testing employee passwords for compliance with policy and strength requirements with authorization
Implement password policies which are supported through technical measures (group policies or any number of *nix equivalents) and require that everyone change passwords at next login.
Unfortunately I have only one client who will willingly accept strict password policies, but it's a finance company. Even for clients in the medical industry I have to practically shout HIPAA to get them to even consider accepting requiring letters and numbers, let alone non-dictionary words and punctuation. People are LAZY, and they just don't care until an exploit is used to get in to the network. A person is smart but people are stupid.
* being paid to pen-test a system
So, do you need to purchase a per-site "license?" In that case use an open source alternative because so many people are cheap they won't want a proprietary tool unless they can "pirate" it.
* Just freakin' wanting to run it at home to see how fast such tools 'really work'
Oh, for the same reason that people will download "pirated" copies of Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCAD, Maya, and so forth. Just for bragging rights. Gotcha. Open source is not a solution in those cases.
* Discovering passwords used on a compromised system (it may help reveal passwords used in encrypted files with naive rootkits)
Now, THERE is an interesting use, but even in that case won't the superior open source solutions work? L0phtcrack was a steaming pile even back in the day, only way-back-when there was no open source solution unless you rolled your own. Now there is a plethora of open source solutions that are more capable and since you have the source on hand, you can tailor them yourself using bash, vbscript, C++, and so forth.
* General Proof of concept against poor password implementations--early versions of l0phcrack hit some systems a lot faster than others as I recall
An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. It may result in fewer billable hours in the short term but it's nice to not get calls at 6:00am or 12:00am from clients. Implement password policies for clients who will accept it, and work HARD at educated the ones who won't until they at _least_ accept mixing letters and numbers in passwords.
Now, as far as [written by 'bad people' is 'bad'] is concerned, Symantec does have a long history of turning gold into poop. In L0phtcrack's case, it would be a matter of turning copper or maybe silver into poop, and then charging platinum pricing for it. If there is any company where I'd agree that software has become bloated, it is the antivirus companies - especially symantec and mcafee. Their released products are so loaded with subtle advertising for other products that it's disgusting, and the drain on system performance is inexcusable. It's a sad state of affairs when an alpha OSS product like Moon Secure that hasn't seen an update in over a year is superior, or when a Computer Associates product works better than yours.
Symantec was once one of the best, if not THE best software utilities producer out there. Remember the original Norton(Symantec) Antivirus which barely impacted performance even on a lowly 386? Remember the original Norton Utilities which you used to repair countless FATs and MBRs that were eaten by the Smartdrive cache or Win3x, but since the move to the NT family (WinNT, Win2K, WinXP, Win2K3, Vista, etc.) became nothing more than a gimmick application with little real uti
Instead, they are clicking the "full screen" button and are watching the content -- and embedded advertisements -- just like the more tech-savvy users. Either way, you see the same ads, so I fail to understand the media producers' complaint(s).
Bloat for you and me is a necessary feature for someone else, and vice-versa. The real issue is this: is the interface intuitive enough to not overwhelm the user, and is it spaghetti code or modular enough that unneeded/unused parts do not have to be loaded into RAM at run time?
Unlike the global positioning system, the pulsars are always going to be moving relative to each other and to your position AND the reference point, which adds a tremendous amount of error. That combined with the unpredictable changes in chances in pulsars' emissions, makes the "GPS" somewhat unreliable for interstellar travel.
However, given that we're probably centuries if not eons off from traveling outside our solar system, it's a moot point. On the scale we can use it NOW (interplanetary probes, etc.) it should be highly accurate.
The promise was if we kept the income tax, tolls, sales taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, and so forth would not increase. They are ALL going up. We are going to have the highest fuel tax in the nation.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree.
It is an unstable, short-lived element. I vote cowboynealium!
I amend each one with a post-it note now, just as you would amend a two-sided contract, sign it, and send it back and if they counter-sign they accept the modified terms (such as you would on a commercial lease). I modify the terms ("right of first sale applies to this product") and click Accept/Yes, and they accept that amendment by proceeding with the installation. I got this idea here on /.
Windows Me and Windows Vista are also considered malware by many users so I think Microsoft would qualify there as well! ;)
That was Bender, actually. Not Fry.
N/M I just checked Apple's site and their form has the upgrade options on there. Woohoo!
I passed on the original iPhone because of the inevitable bugs and lack of 3G. I passed on the 3G iPhone because it stupidly STILL lacked copy&paste and also has horrible battery life. They've finally got it to the point I want. However, as one who qualifies for an upgrade from AT&T, can I go to the Apple store and get the upgrade, or do I HAVE to go directly to AT&T? I want the extended warranty (for phones and laptops and maybe high-end DSLR cameras the warranties are worth it - for everything else they're money thrown away) and do not want to deal with AT&T's idea of a "refurbished" phone in the event that I do need a replacement.
Hey News Corp, wake yup! You successfully drew people away from bittorrent and earn revenue through ads. Don't fuck it up now by encouraging everyone to go back to bittorrents, where you receive ZERO revenue!
Hospitals managed without computers before the '60s/'70s, so why can't they get by with a paper-based backup process today? I'm surprised they don't have such a process in place stemming from the cold war and fear of an EMP - with today's non-lethal microwave weapons could make EMP an even greater concern as the technology is miniaturized. There needs to be a paper-based process in place!
Besides, it's a frigging hospital. They treat no-documentation illegal aliens for free all the time, so why can't they just deal with treating legal citizens for a short period that their computer systems are down? Lives are at stake, fuck the billing and charging $50 for a tylenol or ibuprofen tablet.
$3.00 per month for Windows + $3.00 per month for antivirus + $6.00 per month for office suite + $18.00 per month for enterprise-quality image/illustration editing suite adds up quickly. Linux gives you all that and more for free - or for $3.00 per month (by your metric) if you buy the distro to support its continued development/maintenance.
If these did run teh internetz, then the Internet really WOULD be a series of tubes! :D
if the tools you can get for Linux don't work, check out R-Studio.
If you come across a product called "Stellar Phoenix" RUN AWAY. They are the shittiest company in existence. A few years ago I needed a tool and the demo of Stellar Phoenix seemed it would work (it lists the files it said it could recover) so we purchased it only to find that it could not recover them. Come to find out that while they claim support for ALL of NTFS's features, their software WOULD NOT recover files compressed using NTFS compression. This was despite their claims of NTFS5.1 support. They refused to issue a refund and it was a months-long battle so we finally complained to Amex to try to get a chargeback against them but we tried to work it out directly with stellarinfo for too long, so it was too late. They (stellarinfo) claim a 30-day money-back guarantee but DO NOT HONOR IT - or at least they didn't back then.
We then tried R-Studio, and their trial software listed files it could recover - AND it could recover 64KB chunks to prove it. So for some files I needed immediately I used the trial to decompress and reassemble the files (in 64KB chunks, and then catted them together), and for the rest when we received the key for the full version. We were able to recover every single file. I've used R-studio for clients since then and it has worked every single time, providing the drive will enumerate.
If the drive will not enumerate you have two possibilities: freezing it in CO2 (I have had success with that), or finding another of the same model drive with the same firmware and swap PCBs, and hope that the problem is with the controller and not the drive itself.
Why was there no backup? Believe me I asked the same question. :)
Summary:
free Linux tools - good
R-Studio - Awesome
stellar phoenix from stellar info - snake oil from a shitty company comprised of douchebags
Netbooks can be had for $300. Tell them to stop blowing mommy's and daddy's money on beer, blow, and 420 and buy a netbook. :-)
There is a difference between posting about what is wrong in a dicsussion with tech folks on a site such as /. or zdnet (which are both made up of technology workers and professional and/or amateur journalists) and communicating with customers. The approach and tone for each is and should be different as the education level, expectations, and requirements of each audience is different. Here I do not need to sugar-coat my comments or opinions of given product choices.
With customers sometimes the medicine needs to be dosed with a spoonful of sugar. I'm sorry you cannot grasp that distinction, however in this case I do not feel any need to apologise if this particular post offends you, since having nothing worthwhile to say you went directly for an ad-hominem attack. Therefore, I will assume you are a Symantec shill - either an employee, distributor, or associated with an advertising firm for them.
Log in as Administrator (or root on *nix) and change the password. No recovery necessary.
I forgot one detail
. . .using an offline registry editor if/when necessary.
Sorry, my point is invalid without that detail. I forgot to add it in when I added my lamenting over the crapware vendor that Norton/Symantec has become in recent years.
Log in as Administrator (or root on *nix) and change the password. No recovery necessary.
Implement password policies which are supported through technical measures (group policies or any number of *nix equivalents) and require that everyone change passwords at next login.
Unfortunately I have only one client who will willingly accept strict password policies, but it's a finance company. Even for clients in the medical industry I have to practically shout HIPAA
to get them to even consider accepting requiring letters and numbers, let alone non-dictionary words and punctuation. People are LAZY, and they just don't care until an exploit is used to get in to the network. A person is smart but people are stupid.
So, do you need to purchase a per-site "license?" In that case use an open source alternative because so many people are cheap they won't want a proprietary tool unless they can "pirate" it.
Oh, for the same reason that people will download "pirated" copies of Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCAD, Maya, and so forth. Just for bragging rights. Gotcha. Open source is not a solution in those cases.
Now, THERE is an interesting use, but even in that case won't the superior open source solutions work? L0phtcrack was a steaming pile even back in the day, only way-back-when there was no open source solution unless you rolled your own. Now there is a plethora of open source solutions that are more capable and since you have the source on hand, you can tailor them yourself using bash, vbscript, C++, and so forth.
An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. It may result in fewer billable hours in the short term but it's nice to not get calls at 6:00am or 12:00am from clients. Implement password policies for clients who will accept it, and work HARD at educated the ones who won't until they at _least_ accept mixing letters and numbers in passwords.
Now, as far as [written by 'bad people' is 'bad'] is concerned, Symantec does have a long history of turning gold into poop. In L0phtcrack's case, it would be a matter of turning copper or maybe silver into poop, and then charging platinum pricing for it. If there is any company where I'd agree that software has become bloated, it is the antivirus companies - especially symantec and mcafee. Their released products are so loaded with subtle advertising for other products that it's disgusting, and the drain on system performance is inexcusable. It's a sad state of affairs when an alpha OSS product like Moon Secure that hasn't seen an update in over a year is superior, or when a Computer Associates product works better than yours.
Symantec was once one of the best, if not THE best software utilities producer out there. Remember the original Norton(Symantec) Antivirus which barely impacted performance even on a lowly 386? Remember the original Norton Utilities which you used to repair countless FATs and MBRs that were eaten by the Smartdrive cache or Win3x, but since the move to the NT family (WinNT, Win2K, WinXP, Win2K3, Vista, etc.) became nothing more than a gimmick application with little real uti
Instead, they are clicking the "full screen" button and are watching the content -- and embedded advertisements -- just like the more tech-savvy users. Either way, you see the same ads, so I fail to understand the media producers' complaint(s).
Scientology does not want information to be free though. They want it shrink-wrapped with large price tags to access that information.
Tor
Bloat for you and me is a necessary feature for someone else, and vice-versa. The real issue is this: is the interface intuitive enough to not overwhelm the user, and is it spaghetti code or modular enough that unneeded/unused parts do not have to be loaded into RAM at run time?
With other options out there shipping with ubuntu, who needs Asus?
I see a problem with this immediately:
Unlike the global positioning system, the pulsars are always going to be moving relative to each other and to your position AND the reference point, which adds a tremendous amount of error. That combined with the unpredictable changes in chances in pulsars' emissions, makes the "GPS" somewhat unreliable for interstellar travel.
However, given that we're probably centuries if not eons off from traveling outside our solar system, it's a moot point. On the scale we can use it NOW (interplanetary probes, etc.) it should be highly accurate.
I'd only build a hackintosh to have a BETTER Mac than the real thing.
I'm sorry, I couldn't make it through the entire summary. I got distracted. Could someone please summarize the summ-- OH LOOK! A BUTTERFLY!
That is an excellent one as well.
The promise was if we kept the income tax, tolls, sales taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, and so forth would not increase. They are ALL going up. We are going to have the highest fuel tax in the nation.