Wow I wish I had some mod points.
Truly insiteful.
We are a windows shop (sort of) in a vertical market, where the OS is irrelevent, as far as the consumer cares.
We used Windows 2000 for a long time, and then some jerk at one of our suppliers decided that new drivers that only worked on XP would be funny. Grrrr. Dogface. So we had to switch to XP. (I still have 10 copies of Windows 2000 sitting on my shelf waiting for an insurance fire....no officer, it was just the windows 2000 CDs that caught on fire...really.) Anyway, when we upgrade to XP, it was not too bad, but when SP2 came out it was a freakin disaster because it broke the web based component of our machines, and some smart end users did the XP upgrade, even though we disable the auto upgrade on XP for them, so they don't break it.
Anyway we spent a lot of time building up completely stable builds that our machines run on, and I am dreading changing to Vista. Even PCI Express (our hardware uses PCI 2.1) threatening to take over is causing us grief. I still await the day...Sorry sir, the 800SP is no longer available, but the new board is even better with 0 pci slots. Yay.
But I rant.
Really? Wow, I bow to your superior rememberances.
I think we modded it.:)
Ah the 1541, a wonderful machine.
I remember formatting a floppy drive and listening to the head clicks. At click 28, pull the floppy out, and it would put an error on that track.
Then you could put that great old flight simulator game and play it. Ahhh sweet.
It was pretty cool, you could shoot down the red baron. I never actually did, but I heard that you could.
Remember M.U.L.E.? Awesome.
I think there was a game called "The dragonriders of PERN" as well, it was only text based, but it was pretty cool.
Vista is nice. It certainly (IMHO) not worth an upgrade, and I'm not buying a new PC.
I don't see any benefits. I see it breaking my music, or making it harder for me to play it.
I see it making things less easy to configure (at the low level). It does look cool, but so what.
There is no way my office is upgrading to Vista (Luckily, I make that choice).
All these analysts saying this and that and the other about Vista. Why don't they do something useful instead of shooting off a bunch of useless positions.
When I was 14 or so (I think) my Dad bought me a Commodore 64, and I was one of the lucky ones cause I had a 5 1/4" floppy drive (360K of course).
Me and my buddy spent hours working on that thing. We learned to program in BASIC, and we programmed some pretty cool stuff.
I wrote a program that was so big once, that the code went into the memory section defined for variables (they weren't protected), and the stupid program trashed my code. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Anyway that's another story. Assembly changed a lot of things for me on the C64, but also another story.
My next computer purchase was an Amiga 500 (or was it an Amiga 512?). What an amazing machine. I remember my PC buddy had all sorts of problems because it used the backslash instead of slash for path divisions and coming from the C64 world, I had no idea what a slash was. Or what a dot was.
Some great ideas came out of that machine. I remember you could hard wire in a switch (onto the motherboard, using 2 wires and a toggle switch) and change the amount of video RAM available. I remember I had to buy a new power supply to get cleaner power so I could do something that needed doing (forget what now).
Anyway, that machine really moved me along the computer world, and got me where I am today. I owe Amiga a great deal, and I will certainly buy one when they are available, if for no other reason than nostalga.
OK but I would add...
What does some guy from Manchester care about some guy from Edinborough, or London?
What does some guy from Liverpool care about someone from Weston-Super-Mare?
What does someone from South London care about someone from North London?
And what does someone from Smith street in London care about someone from Jones Street in London?
See my point? You can always regionalize things, and ultimately people mostly only care about people in their own family, and maybe not even then.
It is an overslimplification, but that is the easiest way to describe it to end users. If you say, "well, probably no one will listen" then that is mostly correct".
From what I read, the logs of the IM software was what was pulled, on the local machine, so anybody with logging turned on can have that happen to them if their hardware gets subpeoned (did I spell that right?).
Your best protection from casual surveillance on the net is the sheer volume of IP traffic. But if someone is looking for you specifically, especially if they are connected to the right people, you are cooked. Come on, you know it's true.
So, don't say anything on the net you aren't happy shouting across a crowded room.
You know, 12 years is too long a punishment for what they did.
I think what will happen is that they will get probation and have to pay the $30,000. The problem is, it shouldn't be 30,000, because someone will just go into her purse, and say "do you have change for a 50[,000]?".
To my way of thinking no jail time, 2 million in fines. Hit them in the wallet, where it hurts the most.
Anything that catches stupid people is good.
I used to tell people years ago, when I ran a computer store: "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't be comfortable shouting across a crowded room."
How hard is that to understand? If you can't figure that out, you have no business running a huge conglomerate like HP. Man, oh man.
Well it was mostly tongue in cheek ya know, but there is a huge potential.
OMG I was in Vegas at the Montecarlo, and there was a bank there that would take the deed to your house and lend you gambling money, and all you had to do was put up your house.
It saddens me deeply, and that's not sarcasm.
We test stuff from China. Most of it we don't buy because the quality isn't there. It isn't that much cheaper than the stuff that comes from Taiwan. The Korean stuff isn't bad, better than China, but is hit and miss sometimes.
Doing business with China is hard because you really can't return stuff to them. Some of the more advanced companies have "depots" in Hong Kong, but not many yet.
Look at Japan 30 years ago, or Taiwan/Korea 10 to 15 years ago, and they were in the same state that China is in now. Today, Japanese product comes at a premium, and is superior to most product (IMHO) that is manufactured here in North America (vehicles immediately spring to mind).
Once the Chinese people get their head around the different methodology of doing business in North America, they will come in full force and North America will have some serious issues to deal with.
Is that really invisible?
It looked like they just changed the focus of the camera.
Plus, I really wouldn't want to be the pilot. Holy bed spins.
Er, just kidding, but it really didn't look too invisible.
hey all you American online gamblers!!
Up here in Canada, we don't tax winnings. You can come up here and gamble away and keep all your winnings.
I'll bet some enterprising bank will let you put your money here so you don't have to bring it into the US, but here's a bank card so it's all good.
Everybody always thinks that they are the critical link in a company.
The truth is everyone is replacable. Not without some growing pains, in some cases, but everyone is replacable. Well, except me.:) Ahem. I am thinking of that Simpsons where Bart is walking around with a pot and a wooden spoon screaming "I am so great, I am so great."
It seems to me that everyone these days is concerned with whats good for them, and hopefully that works out for the company too, but these people are forgetting that the ongoing good fortune of the company they work for also ensures their good fortune and continued employment.
For instance, we offer a 10% profit sharing plan with out employees, the week between Christmas and Newyears off (as well as their regular vacation) and performance bonuses for good months. Every Friday we have a BBQ and the staff get burgers or hotdogs or whatever we decide to make that week. There is a free pop machine in the kitchen. We just had a review and someone said that our bonus plan was not fair. Of course we will not take any action but it sure is a pisser to think that 10% of (net) profit is not a good bonus. Hey that's money right out of my pocket into theirs.
Anyway I'm just ranting but it seems to me that the worker is not very greatful. "Minimum work for minimum wage". What a crock.
I hate to say it, but how many times did DOS crash? Well, not very many.
Can you imagine some grade 3 kid punching in 3 X 4 to find out the answer is !#$!^%$#^!%@
And then the inevitable viruses in calculators. MMM.. Cool.
Every nation is a sovereign nation. The laws of one nation have no validity in another nation. If a nation signs a treaty, then it is required (mandated) to have legislation reflecting that treaty, but it is unenforcable except by procedures set out in the treaty itself.
As for civil law, the US judicial system has no jurisdiction outside the US.
Now, if you have one of the officers of a corporation in the US, then you can bring him to trial.
If you have an extradition treaty with The UK, then you can try to have the officers extradited, but my understanding is that pertains only to criminal matters of a grevious nature, and the UK only has to exercise due diligence to get the offender back to the US.
But here's the big kicker, the US is not entitled to enforce it's legal system on any other country in the world.
Additionally, there is nothing stopping a foreign country from blocking snail mail and burning it (Saudi Arabia does it all the time) so why would it be any different with Emails?
The national do-not-call list will help keep the legit soliciters at bay. But the bad guys...well...international law is a bitch.
International law really has nothing to do with do not call lists. It's all about treaties and human rights and international organizations and other cool things.
International lawyers refer to legal systems within a country as "municipal", and municipal law has nothing to do with international law, except that a signatory to a treaty is required to have it's legal system enforce the articles in a treaty.
That's why China never signed the treaties for human rights.
Having said that, I hate telemarketers more than people who kick puppies.
So calling the phone company and pretending to be somebody else to get their records is called Pretexting??? I kinda thought that was called fraud.
As for Dunn stepping down, the buck stops here, and if she can't keep control of her ship, then she would step down.
Of course, it's probably a case of Nixonitis, i.e. everybody does it, but HP got caught.
I know that unions used to serve a purpose, and certainly in Henry Ford's time they were necessary for post-industrial era. Even as recently as the 1970s and 1980s companies like Radio Shack had all sorts of problems with management trying to break up unions and sneak spies into closed union meetings.
SO I understand there is a need for them, but I think you will find that many of the outsourcing issues the USA is having comes from Unionization.
A company that is unprofitable because of union associated costs can make a go of it in a 3rd world. Hey you may not like it, but that's life.
Look at the auto industry. The Asian world is going to wipe out American industry if the US doesn't do something to stop it.
But I digress.
When you can't fire an unprofitable or incompetent employee because of union rules, you are applying socialist views and not the capitalist views that the US used to thrive on so much.
As for scum rising to the top, I agree, and it's called politics.:)
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Wow I wish I had some mod points. Truly insiteful. We are a windows shop (sort of) in a vertical market, where the OS is irrelevent, as far as the consumer cares. We used Windows 2000 for a long time, and then some jerk at one of our suppliers decided that new drivers that only worked on XP would be funny. Grrrr. Dogface. So we had to switch to XP. (I still have 10 copies of Windows 2000 sitting on my shelf waiting for an insurance fire....no officer, it was just the windows 2000 CDs that caught on fire...really.) Anyway, when we upgrade to XP, it was not too bad, but when SP2 came out it was a freakin disaster because it broke the web based component of our machines, and some smart end users did the XP upgrade, even though we disable the auto upgrade on XP for them, so they don't break it. Anyway we spent a lot of time building up completely stable builds that our machines run on, and I am dreading changing to Vista. Even PCI Express (our hardware uses PCI 2.1) threatening to take over is causing us grief. I still await the day...Sorry sir, the 800SP is no longer available, but the new board is even better with 0 pci slots. Yay. But I rant.
Really? Wow, I bow to your superior rememberances. I think we modded it. :)
Ah the 1541, a wonderful machine.
I remember formatting a floppy drive and listening to the head clicks. At click 28, pull the floppy out, and it would put an error on that track.
Then you could put that great old flight simulator game and play it. Ahhh sweet.
It was pretty cool, you could shoot down the red baron. I never actually did, but I heard that you could.
Remember M.U.L.E.? Awesome.
I think there was a game called "The dragonriders of PERN" as well, it was only text based, but it was pretty cool.
Vista is nice. It certainly (IMHO) not worth an upgrade, and I'm not buying a new PC. I don't see any benefits. I see it breaking my music, or making it harder for me to play it. I see it making things less easy to configure (at the low level). It does look cool, but so what. There is no way my office is upgrading to Vista (Luckily, I make that choice). All these analysts saying this and that and the other about Vista. Why don't they do something useful instead of shooting off a bunch of useless positions.
When I was 14 or so (I think) my Dad bought me a Commodore 64, and I was one of the lucky ones cause I had a 5 1/4" floppy drive (360K of course). Me and my buddy spent hours working on that thing. We learned to program in BASIC, and we programmed some pretty cool stuff. I wrote a program that was so big once, that the code went into the memory section defined for variables (they weren't protected), and the stupid program trashed my code. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Anyway that's another story. Assembly changed a lot of things for me on the C64, but also another story. My next computer purchase was an Amiga 500 (or was it an Amiga 512?). What an amazing machine. I remember my PC buddy had all sorts of problems because it used the backslash instead of slash for path divisions and coming from the C64 world, I had no idea what a slash was. Or what a dot was. Some great ideas came out of that machine. I remember you could hard wire in a switch (onto the motherboard, using 2 wires and a toggle switch) and change the amount of video RAM available. I remember I had to buy a new power supply to get cleaner power so I could do something that needed doing (forget what now). Anyway, that machine really moved me along the computer world, and got me where I am today. I owe Amiga a great deal, and I will certainly buy one when they are available, if for no other reason than nostalga.
I'd mod that up if I had mod points. damn, had some this afternoon. Sorry about that chief.
OK but I would add... What does some guy from Manchester care about some guy from Edinborough, or London? What does some guy from Liverpool care about someone from Weston-Super-Mare? What does someone from South London care about someone from North London? And what does someone from Smith street in London care about someone from Jones Street in London? See my point? You can always regionalize things, and ultimately people mostly only care about people in their own family, and maybe not even then.
I thought it looked funny, but every way I tried it, it looked funny so I gave up and left it. I'm far too proud to use a spell check. :(
It is an overslimplification, but that is the easiest way to describe it to end users. If you say, "well, probably no one will listen" then that is mostly correct". From what I read, the logs of the IM software was what was pulled, on the local machine, so anybody with logging turned on can have that happen to them if their hardware gets subpeoned (did I spell that right?). Your best protection from casual surveillance on the net is the sheer volume of IP traffic. But if someone is looking for you specifically, especially if they are connected to the right people, you are cooked. Come on, you know it's true. So, don't say anything on the net you aren't happy shouting across a crowded room.
You know, 12 years is too long a punishment for what they did. I think what will happen is that they will get probation and have to pay the $30,000. The problem is, it shouldn't be 30,000, because someone will just go into her purse, and say "do you have change for a 50[,000]?". To my way of thinking no jail time, 2 million in fines. Hit them in the wallet, where it hurts the most.
Hello.....R2D2 can't talk....helloooo...C3PO does the talking...hello. :)
Anything that catches stupid people is good. I used to tell people years ago, when I ran a computer store: "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't be comfortable shouting across a crowded room." How hard is that to understand? If you can't figure that out, you have no business running a huge conglomerate like HP. Man, oh man.
Well it was mostly tongue in cheek ya know, but there is a huge potential. OMG I was in Vegas at the Montecarlo, and there was a bank there that would take the deed to your house and lend you gambling money, and all you had to do was put up your house. It saddens me deeply, and that's not sarcasm.
We test stuff from China. Most of it we don't buy because the quality isn't there. It isn't that much cheaper than the stuff that comes from Taiwan. The Korean stuff isn't bad, better than China, but is hit and miss sometimes. Doing business with China is hard because you really can't return stuff to them. Some of the more advanced companies have "depots" in Hong Kong, but not many yet. Look at Japan 30 years ago, or Taiwan/Korea 10 to 15 years ago, and they were in the same state that China is in now. Today, Japanese product comes at a premium, and is superior to most product (IMHO) that is manufactured here in North America (vehicles immediately spring to mind). Once the Chinese people get their head around the different methodology of doing business in North America, they will come in full force and North America will have some serious issues to deal with.
Is that really invisible? It looked like they just changed the focus of the camera. Plus, I really wouldn't want to be the pilot. Holy bed spins. Er, just kidding, but it really didn't look too invisible.
hey all you American online gamblers!! Up here in Canada, we don't tax winnings. You can come up here and gamble away and keep all your winnings. I'll bet some enterprising bank will let you put your money here so you don't have to bring it into the US, but here's a bank card so it's all good.
Everybody always thinks that they are the critical link in a company. The truth is everyone is replacable. Not without some growing pains, in some cases, but everyone is replacable. Well, except me. :) Ahem. I am thinking of that Simpsons where Bart is walking around with a pot and a wooden spoon screaming "I am so great, I am so great."
It seems to me that everyone these days is concerned with whats good for them, and hopefully that works out for the company too, but these people are forgetting that the ongoing good fortune of the company they work for also ensures their good fortune and continued employment.
For instance, we offer a 10% profit sharing plan with out employees, the week between Christmas and Newyears off (as well as their regular vacation) and performance bonuses for good months. Every Friday we have a BBQ and the staff get burgers or hotdogs or whatever we decide to make that week. There is a free pop machine in the kitchen. We just had a review and someone said that our bonus plan was not fair. Of course we will not take any action but it sure is a pisser to think that 10% of (net) profit is not a good bonus. Hey that's money right out of my pocket into theirs.
Anyway I'm just ranting but it seems to me that the worker is not very greatful. "Minimum work for minimum wage". What a crock.
I hate to say it, but how many times did DOS crash? Well, not very many. Can you imagine some grade 3 kid punching in 3 X 4 to find out the answer is !#$!^%$#^!%@ And then the inevitable viruses in calculators. MMM.. Cool.
Every nation is a sovereign nation. The laws of one nation have no validity in another nation. If a nation signs a treaty, then it is required (mandated) to have legislation reflecting that treaty, but it is unenforcable except by procedures set out in the treaty itself. As for civil law, the US judicial system has no jurisdiction outside the US. Now, if you have one of the officers of a corporation in the US, then you can bring him to trial. If you have an extradition treaty with The UK, then you can try to have the officers extradited, but my understanding is that pertains only to criminal matters of a grevious nature, and the UK only has to exercise due diligence to get the offender back to the US. But here's the big kicker, the US is not entitled to enforce it's legal system on any other country in the world. Additionally, there is nothing stopping a foreign country from blocking snail mail and burning it (Saudi Arabia does it all the time) so why would it be any different with Emails?
If telemarketers had puppies, it would be to eat them. So as long as you didn't bruise it up too much, they probably wouldn't care. :)
The national do-not-call list will help keep the legit soliciters at bay. But the bad guys...well...international law is a bitch. International law really has nothing to do with do not call lists. It's all about treaties and human rights and international organizations and other cool things. International lawyers refer to legal systems within a country as "municipal", and municipal law has nothing to do with international law, except that a signatory to a treaty is required to have it's legal system enforce the articles in a treaty. That's why China never signed the treaties for human rights. Having said that, I hate telemarketers more than people who kick puppies.
So calling the phone company and pretending to be somebody else to get their records is called Pretexting??? I kinda thought that was called fraud. As for Dunn stepping down, the buck stops here, and if she can't keep control of her ship, then she would step down. Of course, it's probably a case of Nixonitis, i.e. everybody does it, but HP got caught.
I think I am going to copyright taking a crap. Everybody start sending me cash$$$$
There is also a difference in the burden of proof in a civil case, is there not?
I know that unions used to serve a purpose, and certainly in Henry Ford's time they were necessary for post-industrial era. Even as recently as the 1970s and 1980s companies like Radio Shack had all sorts of problems with management trying to break up unions and sneak spies into closed union meetings. SO I understand there is a need for them, but I think you will find that many of the outsourcing issues the USA is having comes from Unionization. A company that is unprofitable because of union associated costs can make a go of it in a 3rd world. Hey you may not like it, but that's life. Look at the auto industry. The Asian world is going to wipe out American industry if the US doesn't do something to stop it. But I digress. When you can't fire an unprofitable or incompetent employee because of union rules, you are applying socialist views and not the capitalist views that the US used to thrive on so much. As for scum rising to the top, I agree, and it's called politics. :)
Don't forget about unions. They are all about letting the cream rise to the top... Wait a second, no they aren't. Oh well.