A few tips. I work on a college campus, and I get stuck with XP and Vista reinstalls all the time. You may or may not be aware of some/a lot/all of these, but I'll take that risk if it could save you a few minutes. (It's loads of fun fixing exchange students' machines. They're all by "weird" manufacturers like NEC and I don't speak Japanese!)
Not much you can do with a crappy sysprep'd recovery disc. But, once the install is finished, run PC Decrappifier on the box. It'll yank out all the trialware/garbage bloat that comes with most PCs. It is a lot faster than having to manually remove all of them from Add/Remove programs.
(Remember to curse HP-Compaq and Dell for these programs, not Microsoft. Invoke not Crom's name on the wrong party.)
Keep Windows XP SP3, Vista SP1, IE7, Office 2003 SP3, and the Office 2007 patches on a flash drive. Find out what drivers the computer is going to need while Windows is installing and download them on another machine. This'll save you a few hours of Windows Update. Keep them stored somewhere, sorted by manufacturer and model so you'll never have to find them again. (For a while.)
If you are working on a fairly common model of computer, consider making an image from it. If you get a similar model again, it'll take minutes and not hours to fix it.
I can't speak for ways to reduce the XP install time, and I haven't installed a Linux distro recently. But in my experience, it's 30 minutes to install XP, and another 30 to install office, patches (from disk), and to register it on our network.
Who was the guy who had a few quid worth of bribes in his freezer again? Who was the last president to get impeached? Who signed executive order 9066 and jailed 110,000 law-abiding Americans?
Your neighbour is transmitting their open-access signal into your own house for you to use. Your analogy is therefore broken.
Not exactly. Your neighbor may be transmitting a signal into your house, but it's most likely not for you to use.
Besides, you transmit a signal into his house when you use his network. If that's not "breaking in" in this weird network-is-my-house analogy, I don't know what is.
My question has always been what is to stop the government (or anyone else for that matter) from going to the public key server and getting your key to decrypt your email?
Because the public key can only encrypt e-mail.
I suggest a Google of "private public key encryption" because my knowledge is fuzzy at best. But, reverse-engineering the private key (the one that can decrypt) from the public one requires factoring big numbers. On a typical machine, this takes until the sun burns out. On an atypical machine, this takes longer than the average lifespan of a human.
OK, just making up numbers. But, only the private key can decrypt, and getting the private key from the public is non-trivial. Especially if you have a few hundred/thousand/million public keys on that server to crack.
Most banks in America are FDIC insured. Post-Great Depression, can you name an instance where banks loaning money too generously resulted in "screw[ing] depositors over 100k?" Does this happen often? And does this happen because banks are pressued to make loans to "the little guy," whatever the current definition of that term is?
How many bank executives can you name that retired with a "golden parachute package" after failing at banking? Were they forced to retire, perhaps by the board of directors? Does that not sound like a clear case of "the system works?"
"Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble"... You realize that the housing bubble screws banks out of any money related to mortages? Y'know, how this "housing bubble" you say those evil bankers made involves them being stuck with a devalued house and a bad loan? I can see how they had to scheme hard for that deal - it must go all the way to the highest levels of our government!
Continue living in ignorance, and tell me where you cash your paychecks and keep your savings. I'll be happy to call you a hypocrite.
Thing is if that was profitable, how do you think paper companies would go about procuring wood pulp? If "someone" in the Amazon can do it cheaper, it would already be done in the paper industry.
Why again must everyone assume all new technologies will immediately start burning rainforests? They could make oil from cat litter and you'd be telling me it's animal abuse.
Hee hee. Make sure you check "use this as my default search engine", and it could help to remove MSNLive from the list of search providers after that. (And make sure it's plugged in...) Besides, you can choose whatever search engine you want from the drop-down list to the right of the search box; I have Google, thottbot, and Wikipedia.
I had to install "Yahoo Companion" just to make sure IE 7 stays with Yahoo search engine, to prevent it from changing "accidentally" to MSN Livesearch.
I hate to be a pedantic asshat... But how did you have that problem?
I've used Internet Explorer 7 since Beta 1, and it's never done that. When you open the browser for the first time, it takes you to a page to pick what search engine you want as the default. I always pick Google, and it sticks.
I also work for Technical Support on a college campus. The lab and student machines all run IE6 and Firefox 2, but a few of the faculty machines have IE7. All of these machines (about a dozen that I've worked on) never have any problems sticking with Google.
Maybe you just missed the news that Microsoft bought Yahoo, and that Yahoo! search is now "MSN Livesearch"... ^.<
Of course games don't need amazing graphics to be fun.
But, I'm glad we can do more than plain ASCII nowadays. Anyone who wishes technological progress stopped circa 1960 because (according to a parent poster) bad graphics must make the story better deserves to be carved up by my link gun's alt-fire.
Well, maybe most of the parent posters need to be carved up with a link gun. I could make the world a better place with a link gun...
Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Right. Because it's cheaper to burn a rainforest and ship it back to the United States than it is to take what farmers are throwing out for free. And, if the point is to turn the woodchips to oil, I doubt you'll make more fuel from your Amazonian rain forest than you consumed shipping it.
Nice try, though. Way to hate Western Civilization.
Interesting - I wasn't aware that they do offer interest on deposits, which puts them more towards bank status.
However, storing money in an account is just delayed payment processing. And, they're not FDIC insured. They also don't offer any "bank" services, other than giving the money to another PayPal account.
If you could withdraw money again, I'm guessing it would also be a different situation. And, they still have to comply with Regulation E whether they're a bank or not.
So, to further obfuscate my metaphor, your PayPal balance is Chuck E. Cheese tickets. But, they'll give you more tickets as you hold a balance.
The other problem from my limited understanding is that it is incredibly resistant to doing just that - "look at the code."
The executable is encrypted, making disassembly difficult. People have purposefully infected isolated sandbox machines to try to attach a debugger to the decrypted, running process - and the bot kills the debugger. Researchers have found their machines (and the entire network they're connected to!) DDoS'd and effectively shut down as Storm found out and got angry.
Avoiding infection is easy. But, you probably know how to turn your computer on; for the rest of the population, this escapes them.
Do you have proof that tax receipts would have been higher without the tax cuts? The parent I replied to said cutting taxes while increasing spending was insane, the implication being that there would less taxes means less money to offset the increased spending. Clearly, that was not the case.
It's amazing what a growing economy will do for taxes - there's more money to tax. 35% of a small amount versus 25% of a much larger amount. Politicians will always take the 35%, because 35 is a bigger number.
And yes, there are a lot of fraternities that need to be closed down, and I don't condone torture. But it's one helluva stretch to compare humiliation with 5 and a half years of beatings.
Because PayPal is not a bank. It doesn't offer loans, it doesn't pay interest, it doesn't have a required holdings (no loans = 100% cash on hand), etc, etc.
PayPal is as much of a bank as Chuck E. Cheese is a bank for handing out those game tokens and tickets. It's just a convenient way for you to give money to eBay before you spend it on an actual good (the appeal of which I have yet to understand.)
Here's the thing - tax receipts have increased 26.8% from 2000 to 2007.
Since the "Bush Tax Cuts" were passed in 2003, let's look at the numbers from 2004-2007. Tax receipts grew 36.6% over this time.
Now, people can scream and argue until they're blue in the face about whether the war in Iraq is good/bad/ugly/Cowboy Neal, but the tax cuts decreased the deficit, not increased it.
Now, as far as I know, McCain doesn't "back" Bush - he's been trying to very careful distance himself from the least popular president in recent history. That "unprovoked preemptive war" - whether that assertion or the war itself is right or not - has decimated Al-Qaeda leadership. More have been killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan in related skirmishes.
So, one could argue that we fail at "nation building", although there's been a lot of progress with schools, electricity, roads, running water, and hospitals. Definitely not much in the WMD department, but we've been doing a pretty good job of gutting Al-Qaeda.
As for "torture", I assume you're talking about Guantanamo Bay. We're not using torture racks, electricity, acid baths, or wood chippers like Saddam Hussein - most of it is humiliation, like forcing the 20th hijacker to wear panties on his head. Now, that's morally reprehensible, and to my limited knowledge a questionable interrogation technique, but if that's torture there are a lot of college fraternities who need to be closed down, too.
So we haze^w "torture" prisoners we've captured shooting at us. John McCain's plane was shot down, crushing his legs and causing him to nearly drown when he parachuted into a lake. When he regained consciousness, a crowd crushed his shoulder with a the butt of a rifle and stabbed him with a bayonet. He was refused medical treatment for weeks, until they learned that his father was connected.
He spent two years in solitary confinement. His hair turned white. Then, they tied him up and repeatedly beat him until he "confessed." They offered to release McCain early because his father was a big-wig, but McCain refused repatriation unless everyone else was also released. While he suffered from dysentery, the beatings declined to only three times a week.
After five and a half years, we was released. Because of his injuries, he can't lift his arms above his head. He lost 50 pounds after his capture, yet the average Guantanamo detainee has gained 30. (Evidently they like Captain Crunch with sugar and honey.) We provide them with medical care and religious items - Qurans and prayer mats. We even released a lot with comparably minor offenses, who returned to bombing markets and shooting at soldiers.
There's a large difference between the torture inflicted upon John McCain and the prisoners at Guantanamo.
It doesn't help their "organization" any that Osama bin Laden is hiding in a cave, or that we keep killing all their officers in that silly, unjustifiable war in Iraq...
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A few tips. I work on a college campus, and I get stuck with XP and Vista reinstalls all the time. You may or may not be aware of some/a lot/all of these, but I'll take that risk if it could save you a few minutes. (It's loads of fun fixing exchange students' machines. They're all by "weird" manufacturers like NEC and I don't speak Japanese!)
Not much you can do with a crappy sysprep'd recovery disc. But, once the install is finished, run PC Decrappifier on the box. It'll yank out all the trialware/garbage bloat that comes with most PCs. It is a lot faster than having to manually remove all of them from Add/Remove programs.
(Remember to curse HP-Compaq and Dell for these programs, not Microsoft. Invoke not Crom's name on the wrong party.)
Keep Windows XP SP3, Vista SP1, IE7, Office 2003 SP3, and the Office 2007 patches on a flash drive. Find out what drivers the computer is going to need while Windows is installing and download them on another machine. This'll save you a few hours of Windows Update. Keep them stored somewhere, sorted by manufacturer and model so you'll never have to find them again. (For a while.)
If you are working on a fairly common model of computer, consider making an image from it. If you get a similar model again, it'll take minutes and not hours to fix it.
I can't speak for ways to reduce the XP install time, and I haven't installed a Linux distro recently. But in my experience, it's 30 minutes to install XP, and another 30 to install office, patches (from disk), and to register it on our network.
Good luck!
Funny how only Republicans are capable of crimes.
Who was the guy who had a few quid worth of bribes in his freezer again? Who was the last president to get impeached? Who signed executive order 9066 and jailed 110,000 law-abiding Americans?
Others would have modded you funny (instead of flamebait), too, but they were destroyed by Java's implementation of "sockets."
Think "light bulbs" instead of "network connectivity" and you'll see what I mean.
Your neighbour is transmitting their open-access signal into your own house for you to use. Your analogy is therefore broken.
Not exactly. Your neighbor may be transmitting a signal into your house, but it's most likely not for you to use.
Besides, you transmit a signal into his house when you use his network. If that's not "breaking in" in this weird network-is-my-house analogy, I don't know what is.
My question has always been what is to stop the government (or anyone else for that matter) from going to the public key server and getting your key to decrypt your email?
Because the public key can only encrypt e-mail.
I suggest a Google of "private public key encryption" because my knowledge is fuzzy at best. But, reverse-engineering the private key (the one that can decrypt) from the public one requires factoring big numbers. On a typical machine, this takes until the sun burns out. On an atypical machine, this takes longer than the average lifespan of a human.
OK, just making up numbers. But, only the private key can decrypt, and getting the private key from the public is non-trivial. Especially if you have a few hundred/thousand/million public keys on that server to crack.
I'm running Vista. I'm located at 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1, or possibly at FF02::1. Take me down if you can; Vista's pretty secure!
Why didn't you put a Firefox logo on the cake? That's the object of the celebration.
Somebody's even more humorless than Microsoft...
Is this the time to mention that the cake was a lie?
Most banks in America are FDIC insured. Post-Great Depression, can you name an instance where banks loaning money too generously resulted in "screw[ing] depositors over 100k?" Does this happen often? And does this happen because banks are pressued to make loans to "the little guy," whatever the current definition of that term is?
How many bank executives can you name that retired with a "golden parachute package" after failing at banking? Were they forced to retire, perhaps by the board of directors? Does that not sound like a clear case of "the system works?"
"Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble"... You realize that the housing bubble screws banks out of any money related to mortages? Y'know, how this "housing bubble" you say those evil bankers made involves them being stuck with a devalued house and a bad loan? I can see how they had to scheme hard for that deal - it must go all the way to the highest levels of our government!
Continue living in ignorance, and tell me where you cash your paychecks and keep your savings. I'll be happy to call you a hypocrite.
Thing is if that was profitable, how do you think paper companies would go about procuring wood pulp? If "someone" in the Amazon can do it cheaper, it would already be done in the paper industry.
Why again must everyone assume all new technologies will immediately start burning rainforests? They could make oil from cat litter and you'd be telling me it's animal abuse.
You seem to have missed my point. The parent I replied to was implying that turning woodchips into oil meant we would woodchip the amazon.
My point was that we wouldn't be importing woodchips when we have plenty of our own here.
I'll leave the net energy balance of either as an exercise to the reader.
Only 200-odd million to go! Up and away...!
Hee hee. Make sure you check "use this as my default search engine", and it could help to remove MSNLive from the list of search providers after that. (And make sure it's plugged in...) Besides, you can choose whatever search engine you want from the drop-down list to the right of the search box; I have Google, thottbot, and Wikipedia.
Magic and kittens!
I had to install "Yahoo Companion" just to make sure IE 7 stays with Yahoo search engine, to prevent it from changing "accidentally" to MSN Livesearch.
I hate to be a pedantic asshat... But how did you have that problem?
I've used Internet Explorer 7 since Beta 1, and it's never done that. When you open the browser for the first time, it takes you to a page to pick what search engine you want as the default. I always pick Google, and it sticks.
I also work for Technical Support on a college campus. The lab and student machines all run IE6 and Firefox 2, but a few of the faculty machines have IE7. All of these machines (about a dozen that I've worked on) never have any problems sticking with Google.
Maybe you just missed the news that Microsoft bought Yahoo, and that Yahoo! search is now "MSN Livesearch"... ^.<
Of course games don't need amazing graphics to be fun.
But, I'm glad we can do more than plain ASCII nowadays. Anyone who wishes technological progress stopped circa 1960 because (according to a parent poster) bad graphics must make the story better deserves to be carved up by my link gun's alt-fire.
Well, maybe most of the parent posters need to be carved up with a link gun. I could make the world a better place with a link gun...
There is no "Vista DRM." That little copy protection stuff lets you play Blu-Ray discs.
You can rip CDs, DVDs, and pirate t3h internetz if you want. I do so on a daily basis on my Vista x64 machine.
Now, if OS support for DRM bothers you, take it up with the studios that require it. Not playing DVDs is not an option.
Great! Let's chip the Amazon!
Insightful?
Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Right. Because it's cheaper to burn a rainforest and ship it back to the United States than it is to take what farmers are throwing out for free. And, if the point is to turn the woodchips to oil, I doubt you'll make more fuel from your Amazonian rain forest than you consumed shipping it.
Nice try, though. Way to hate Western Civilization.
What's 5 years between friends? ^.<
IE7 had it first. >.>
Interesting - I wasn't aware that they do offer interest on deposits, which puts them more towards bank status.
However, storing money in an account is just delayed payment processing. And, they're not FDIC insured. They also don't offer any "bank" services, other than giving the money to another PayPal account.
If you could withdraw money again, I'm guessing it would also be a different situation. And, they still have to comply with Regulation E whether they're a bank or not.
So, to further obfuscate my metaphor, your PayPal balance is Chuck E. Cheese tickets. But, they'll give you more tickets as you hold a balance.
The other problem from my limited understanding is that it is incredibly resistant to doing just that - "look at the code."
The executable is encrypted, making disassembly difficult. People have purposefully infected isolated sandbox machines to try to attach a debugger to the decrypted, running process - and the bot kills the debugger. Researchers have found their machines (and the entire network they're connected to!) DDoS'd and effectively shut down as Storm found out and got angry.
Avoiding infection is easy. But, you probably know how to turn your computer on; for the rest of the population, this escapes them.
Do you have proof that tax receipts would have been higher without the tax cuts? The parent I replied to said cutting taxes while increasing spending was insane, the implication being that there would less taxes means less money to offset the increased spending. Clearly, that was not the case.
It's amazing what a growing economy will do for taxes - there's more money to tax. 35% of a small amount versus 25% of a much larger amount. Politicians will always take the 35%, because 35 is a bigger number.
And yes, there are a lot of fraternities that need to be closed down, and I don't condone torture. But it's one helluva stretch to compare humiliation with 5 and a half years of beatings.
Because PayPal is not a bank. It doesn't offer loans, it doesn't pay interest, it doesn't have a required holdings (no loans = 100% cash on hand), etc, etc.
PayPal is as much of a bank as Chuck E. Cheese is a bank for handing out those game tokens and tickets. It's just a convenient way for you to give money to eBay before you spend it on an actual good (the appeal of which I have yet to understand.)
Here's the thing - tax receipts have increased 26.8% from 2000 to 2007.
Since the "Bush Tax Cuts" were passed in 2003, let's look at the numbers from 2004-2007. Tax receipts grew 36.6% over this time.
Now, people can scream and argue until they're blue in the face about whether the war in Iraq is good/bad/ugly/Cowboy Neal, but the tax cuts decreased the deficit, not increased it.
Now, as far as I know, McCain doesn't "back" Bush - he's been trying to very careful distance himself from the least popular president in recent history. That "unprovoked preemptive war" - whether that assertion or the war itself is right or not - has decimated Al-Qaeda leadership. More have been killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan in related skirmishes.
So, one could argue that we fail at "nation building", although there's been a lot of progress with schools, electricity, roads, running water, and hospitals. Definitely not much in the WMD department, but we've been doing a pretty good job of gutting Al-Qaeda.
As for "torture", I assume you're talking about Guantanamo Bay. We're not using torture racks, electricity, acid baths, or wood chippers like Saddam Hussein - most of it is humiliation, like forcing the 20th hijacker to wear panties on his head. Now, that's morally reprehensible, and to my limited knowledge a questionable interrogation technique, but if that's torture there are a lot of college fraternities who need to be closed down, too.
So we haze^w "torture" prisoners we've captured shooting at us. John McCain's plane was shot down, crushing his legs and causing him to nearly drown when he parachuted into a lake. When he regained consciousness, a crowd crushed his shoulder with a the butt of a rifle and stabbed him with a bayonet. He was refused medical treatment for weeks, until they learned that his father was connected.
He spent two years in solitary confinement. His hair turned white. Then, they tied him up and repeatedly beat him until he "confessed." They offered to release McCain early because his father was a big-wig, but McCain refused repatriation unless everyone else was also released. While he suffered from dysentery, the beatings declined to only three times a week.
After five and a half years, we was released. Because of his injuries, he can't lift his arms above his head. He lost 50 pounds after his capture, yet the average Guantanamo detainee has gained 30. (Evidently they like Captain Crunch with sugar and honey.) We provide them with medical care and religious items - Qurans and prayer mats. We even released a lot with comparably minor offenses, who returned to bombing markets and shooting at soldiers.
There's a large difference between the torture inflicted upon John McCain and the prisoners at Guantanamo.
You're right - I provided a bad link.
Here's a better one: Iraq
It doesn't help their "organization" any that Osama bin Laden is hiding in a cave, or that we keep killing all their officers in that silly, unjustifiable war in Iraq...
"im in ur base, killin ur doodz", as it were.