My XP Pro notebook resumes several times daily. I go two or three weeks without rebooting, and resuming 70-100 times. Wireless comes back every time. I usually reboot because of an update, not failed networking. It even tolerates several different access points and SSIDs, unencrypted and WPA-PSK. I rarely see WEP anywhere anymore, unless it's a neighborhood router that hasn't been updated. Ewww...
But more fascinating in TFA:
"His problems are with the UI, the networking protocols, as well as drivers. On brand new hardware, no less."
Sounds like XP. Remember the dark days, before SP2? And before SP1?
If the concept of a community-edited 'encyclopedia' makes sense, you only had to wait until so many editors began to insert their own subjective rants into articles intended to be factual and objective.
We will need to overhaul Wikipedia:
- A front-page, factual, objective wiki, intended to be so, and carefully moderated. Editors will wait to see their contributions be checked and verified by the 'community', a group that gains reputations as fair and objective.
- A back-page, no-holds-barred, subjective wiki, intended to permit editors to wax on about whatever they can make stick. No fairness here.
Of course, the 'back-page' wiki will really jut be a blog, but that's what's happened to Wikipedia anyways.
The defacing of articles in Wikipedia will either force Wikipedia to go even further than they have to control editing, or give up.
And the most important feature of an 'encyclopedia', be it the World Book, Britannica, or Wikipedia, is the reputation of the editors (and by extension the authors of articles). Without a reputation for quality work, why bother to reference any such work(s), not knowing of you're reading genuine data, or someone's own subjective rants?
I cannot rely on Wikipedia for much right now. Many articles are in small part factual, and then devolve into long exposes of *all* sides of issues, statements, and 'facts'. As an example, most articles on religious matters add so many different viewpoints and contradicting opinons that getting the bare facts can be hard, if not impossible. In particular, it wasn't long ago that virtually all articles on the Bible turned into determined efforts to discredit the Bible. Not helpful when most failed to offer any support for veracity of the Bible. And my first complaint resulted in rejecting my request for more supportive material - justified by one editor as immaterial, the Bible was, in his words, 'a known and proven fraud'. So much for objectivity. I hear it's better now, but I go to various Bible societies and publishers instead. I get better info.
... that students are largely unmotivated and undisciplined, and that's mostly because their parents don't instill in them any motivation to exert themselves at school.
My wife has retired from public school teaching after 25 years. She can't bear the insolence, lack of respect, apathy, and disinterest in her students.
There was a time in America when if you swore at your teacher you would receive some minimal punishment. Today, it's just as likely that the teacher and/or school will be sued for defamation, as the parent defends their child. It's not that teachers get a big kick out of falsely reporting students with foul mouths. It's also amazing how many of their parents are verbally abusive, even obscene. My wife reached her limit when a parent told her there was "no *!^{ing way my child would use that language!". Well, anyways... Her students whose parents were interested did ok. Students whose parents were not involved didn't do so well.
And my wife has seen a steady decline over the past 10 years. She's given up.
I don't recall having much choice of what to study in high school (I graduated in 1972), so I'm not very savvy on the current school thing, where students choose to not take math. I was expected to take 4 years of math, English, sciences, phys. ed. (ha!), and history. 2 years of foreign language, and that left me with not of available time for elective courses.
Somehow we've lost sight of the basics in schools. It's not as simple as mainstreaming 'special ed' students (in Maine, some school districts have 30% of their students in 'special ed' classifications, and expect to be over 50% by 2010 - not so special any more), or some imaginary need to prepare our students for a 'global economy' or 'technological age'. If we really wanted to prepare our students, we would be focusing even more in the 3R's, wouldn't we?
Our schools are failing because our parents are failing. Kids today get away with a lot. If a group of kids, even just one, want to cross a street whether the traffic has the green light or not, around here they can just do it and you screech to a halt and wait. While they give you the look of 'piss off, I can do anything I want'. No, I'm not advocating running down anyone who decides to cross the street without regard for the traffic. I'm advocating waiting for the light.
I watch a regular stream of neighborhood kids walk through my back yard as a shortcut. I really don't begrudge them a shorter route, some time in the shade on a hot day, but once when I came around the corner and we nearly collided, I got the 'Who the &*(# are Y-O-U' look. Wait, this is MY property. Since when do they give me attitude? Since they are invulnerable. What am I gonna do? At best, I go to jail. All I want is a little respect, apparently what the kids want. No, I haven't put a gate up. I just remember to go wide around the corner. It may be my property, but it really isn't my domain any more. I just pay for it.
My wife gave up on public school teaching because of that specific 'Who the %^^$ are Y-O-U' attitude. It wasn't always like this. But it's not good. And it will cost us.
BTW, I was a skater before skating was at all cool. I don't remember trying tricks in crowded areas - back then, we figured spitting our boards into parked cars and pedestrian shins was wrong. we didn't have parks yet, so we skated when it was quiet and isolated. We still got rousted. I'm aware of the rebellious attitude of youth. I just don't recall being deliberately disrespectful.
I am getting old. But that doesn't make wrong right. And this is just my opinion. No doubt, you hve yours.
No, actually, we believe in one God, with three aspects;
The Father, Creator and God of the Universe... The Son, send by the Father, and of Him, to do His work... The Spirit, that of God which pervades our existence... And I greatly simplify this.
But it the Three that are One. Do not be deceived by the lies of those who only seek to discredit Him. His first Commandment states, "I am the Lord your God...", which is fairly clearly singular. And Christ even stated He came from 'the Father'.
Just one God. But an easy mistake to make, thinking the three aspects are three not three parts of one.
Kinda like you have five fingers, two hands, but one body. Not 12 bodies. Assuming you're a typical human, and haven't lost any or weren't given all of them in the first place.
I can find regular unleaded gas around here (Phoenix area) for $2.599/gal. I suspect you pay a different amount. visiting the Northeast last week, prices were generally around 42.999/gal.
It's the same item, unleaded gasoline. Why pay different prices?
Supply. Distance to ship. Formulation maybe, but both places I cite use oxygenated formula.
The way I understand the Ameistreet formula, popularity drives the price up, nothing drives it down.
It's not the same product in that scenario. The first buyers are buying an unknown or not yet popular song, the later buyers are buying a product that's been vetted by popularity, and possibly by their friends recommendations.
Not exactly apples and oranges, but if your complaint is about it being the same product, well, it might not be.
For clarification, if you believe in the Christian God, Jehovah or whichever of His names you choose, you *don't* believe in any of the others. If you believe in more than one God, you *don't* believe in a Christian one at all. His words, not mine, read the book.
Allah has a similar statement. I'm pretty sure Buddha doesn't much care about this God-thing, singular or plural. He has a different agenda.
Yeah, the whole 'it's God's will' is variously dismissed as a clever rhetorical device by many, and misunderstood by others. We see this planet's characteristics as 'not making sense', and sure enough we'll want to figure it out and make it fit into our clever theories about the Universe. We just don't know all the rules yet, and may never. But it keeps us busy, which, being that we are crunchy and taste good with ketchup, keeps us from looking for dragons too much.
"I realize this idea is extremely unpopular and is not in the spirit of the original Internet"
The idea that you should be able to mask your true identity, deluge others with unwanted data, and consume excessive bandwidth in the process is NOT in the spirit of the original Internet. It's not even in the spirit of a commercially operated Internet.
Spam is now the single greatest scourge of the Internet. It wastes resources, causes significant effort to merely manage, not eliminate, and has been the tool of those who wish to hijack systems for their purposes.
None of that was in the spirit of the original Internet.
Accountability and fair play was.
If spammers abided by the spirit of the original Internet, they would mark their messages clearly as spam. They would accept requests to remove addresses from their lists. They would not disguise their true identities. They would not mask the contents of their messages to avoid filters.
An identity-based email system is probably the answer. More likely, a reputation-based system in addition, which would allow us to both know who the sender really was, and then both report them as spammers and check to see if they are generally regarded as spammers.
And, sadly, this would lead to the undeniable realization that much spam is coming from compromised personal machines. ISPs would be forced to block outgoing SMTP or whatever traffic, requiring it to go through their own gateways. And then they would be forced to block these compromised (read: botted) machines, users would have to go through the painful process of removing the botware and/or rebuilding their systems, and there would be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
We're in a perfect storm. Most Windows machines can be pwned by a single click. SMTP is fundamentally insecure, able to be exploited easily. Users pretty much just want to use their machines, and not have to have an MCSE come in and scrape them clean regularly. ISPs are afraid to filter more than they do. And everyone wrings their hands.
No, I don't have a solution either. I'm just some slime on a tooth of a gear. Hopefully, in the spirit of the original Internet, smart people will join together and propose solutions, and we will adopt them.
Sadly, even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Birth Wikipedia eventually points out that the Greek 'parthenos'was used for Hebrew 'na`arah' and 'bethulah'. And then, quoting from Wikipedia:
"Additionally, the Greek-English Lexicon edited by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott lists other meanings for the word:
[parthenos], I. 1. maiden, girl; virgin, opp. [gyn], "woman". 2. of unmarried women who are not virgins, Iliad 2.514, etc. 3. , [parthenos, h], the Virgin Goddess, as a title of Athena at Athens. 4. the constellation Virgo. II. as adj., maiden, chaste. III. as masc., , [parthenos, ho], unmarried man, Apocalypse 14.4.".
It's not so simple. Christians have only our faith that if God wanted it different, He would make it different.
Now that we're sufficiently off-topic, carry on...
Not http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/09/01/nanotec h/index.html/everyone is willing to take it on faith that nanotech is harmless or should be assumed to be safe.
And I'm guessing that when some nano- product turns out to be worse than asbestos, you'll all be screaming for reform at the FDA, how could they have betrayed us? Oh, the humanity.
Figures. In one breath we decry the reduction of the FDA, and the lax inspections. Next, we oppose their expanding into examining new products that plainly need to be studied.
Sheesh.
I continue to be astonished that so many/.ers will defend electronic voting machines. If we dumb them down to merely counting what the voter inputs, we get a glorified scanner. Just use the scanners that paper fill-in-the-bubble ballots use. You get both an electronic count to satisfy the media's craving for instantaneous results and our thirst for 'news', and a countable paper ballot we can argue over. Sheesh.
But any kind of electronic system without at least a paper receipt I can go back with and ask to see my vote and how it was counted is preposterous. No, wait. It's criminal. Using these things that Diebold and others are making is criminal.
Just so you know, I'm a life-long Republican. Spare me the Florida/Ohio flames. I've voted most of my adult life in precincts run by Democrats, from the Ward Clerk to the wonderful old ladies as poll workers. I've monitored polling places, been removed from the rolls for failure to respond to a postcard that was not stamped by the city clerk, (one of 3,500 or so, amusing) and been run from one polling place to another to figure out where the heck I vote. After all that, I just want my vote counted. I can live with the honest results. If you think Republicans have just started election fraud, you must not have lived in Chicago. And I direct your gaze towards the topic, Berkeley. Not a Republican stronghold last time I checked, but it's been a while...
Remember, also, we are also a Republic, and the states elect our President and Vice-President. It will be up to the states to do elections. If the Federal Government gets much more involved, I'll be asking my representatives to stop it. It's bad enough to have Miami and Dade County running elections, for which they are demonstrably incompetent to do, but to trust the Feds? Ha. I like thousands of small-ish screwups better than one massive 'Gee, it doesn't seem to be working' Charlie Foxtrot.
You people who want electronic voting, you have no idea the trouble you are asking for. You'll get one of these outcomes:
- Something like Windows, so insecure and compromised you can't tell the 'real' apps from the viruses. As if I need to provide examples. THIS we trust?
- Something like Ubuntu, so promising until you actually use it. Test me on this. Ask around. Ubuntu installation is nightmare on your street. Actually, Debian is a better example. Upgrading Debian is like smoking a grenade. No, wait, Linux in general is the example. It pretty much works great. Until it doesn't. Then God Help You. The user community will mostly proclaim you incompetent, and recommend you get an expert in. Might as well use Windows. (Oh dear, her come the flames....)
- Something like OS X, wonderful until you find out that you really have to trust the provider, and in the end it can be pwned like all the rest of them.
Lord Above, please give me a piece of paper I can mark. And people to take a look at the machines and test them.
Save us from the poor blighters seeking some Grail of -=Electronic Voting=-, as if this is a panacea for ANYTHING.
Stop them.
PS- Imagine this scenario:
- Machines built, softwware open-sourced, studied by thousands, and declared 'excellent'
Well, actually, maybe you can. Someone posted that Airpoerr Extremes have interesting DHCP problems. I would not be surprised if the DHCP client in the iPhone wasn't just impatient, or trying to hog a lease at the expense of any other competitor device. Not the first time Apple has been caught playing 'mine's bigger than yours' in networking code.
It wouldn't surprise me, either, that the iPhone might even try using the last IP it had. Never know, it might have just moved a few feet, and sheesh, that last AP has some hot packets, dude. Break me off another piece of that eh? Gone? Ah well, in the wireless biz, easy come easy gone.
World-class bicycle racers can reach 300 watts in some races. Most of the top tier count on 250 watts sustained, and try to peak around 280-290 watts.
No, I'm betting a typical soldier can't generate much more than 150 watts sustained, since they are well-trained physically but not to the level of a Mercxx or Basso, for instance.
But if you could harness 80 watts over 8 hours a day, is that even a little of a boost?
Personally, I like the butane fuel cells, but then your IR signature goes up. Higher density batteries can become your very own personal flare, and burn you up. Probably the answer lies with something like a zinc-air chemistry, though I think they have lousy power-weight ratios.
Of course, the ultimate answer is standardised batteries and lower power consumption for devices. Having said that, satellite-dependent devices eat power. Comparing this problem to XM or Sirius recievers is not a good analogy. Imagine designing a wearable earth station for voice-rate data. Even sending up 16kb is gonna cost you some watts. Maybe part of the solution is to fly some drones or LEOs to provide battlefield comm and data.
Wait. I bet they already do that. Nevermind. Just have Palm or Nokia design your next gen of wearables. They'll hold up in battle.
We had trouble with MSI and ECS board dropping like flies, and a few ASUS boards came in with the telltale 'K' caps. There were others. It wasn't just Dell/HP/Compaq/Acer.
And my USR modem just died two weeks ago. It had a 'K' cap in it, bloated. Death. So very young...:-)
I doubt many motherboard, card, or modem manufacturers escaped some exposure, but the ones that actually tested incoming components might, repeat *might* have spotted those. For the majority, it was really just a 'fess up and buck up' situation.
Remember the Seagate 'stiction' back in the old days? Well, maybe you don't. Similar situation.
These things, among others, age IT 'managers' preamturely. Like the politician said, in the IT business, if you want a friend, get a dog.
First thing I do is put my glasses on. Check the BlackBerry. Flush. Shower/shave/breakfast. Check real e-mail. Drive 40 minutes.
It is now about 0705. I'm still 25 minutes from my first stop. I'm a field technician by title, but I'm the 'IT Manager' for 12-25 clients. And every single one is the most important client I have. Just ask my boss.
It's either the backup that didn't run again, the Exchange server that once again needs to be rebooted form an overnight &*#$up, the routers need to be reloaded since the power went out cause the UPS can't hold them overnight after the cleaners vacuum the cord out of the wall, or a new Dell workstation doesn't boot two days after being received and Dell won't get there before I can. And I charge them a maintenance agreement, cause they like Dell hardware but can't run a business on the service. And I told them about the capacitor problems a few years ago and they trust me but still buy Dell. Sheesh.
If only I were the IT manager for one single company with just as much stuff on fire, but a lot less driving, usually.
Ha! I ditched it for cubicle life! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I'm just a tooth on the gears now, not the SAE90 that gets dumped out and changed on some insane schedule...
If you're a good IT manager, you get coffee, check status, make the first call(s) of the morning, and settle in. If you're not a good IT manager, you check status, pee on whatever fires are burning the hottest, get coffee, and pray a little.
You do whatever needs to be done first. Right after coffee.
Wasn't it this week we read about vibration-powered generators? Gotta scale these up some, but this might lead to a constant-recharging system.
Then again, it was a year ago or more I read about Phillips or some outfit planning butane powered fuel cells, intended to retrofit notebook batteries.
Somehow, I think there's existing technology that solves this.
I've worked in either the office machine service field, office automation field, or IT field for about 31 years. At one time I had most of the attornies in my home town as clients. I couldn't listen to the office chatter - if any one of them considered me anything but discreet and professional, I would be unable to work in the entire state. I'd be getting a new job, probably something involving french fries.
And that was just typewriter service.
As I moved on to word processors and PCs, the ethics didn't change. Don't look, don't copy. It's not worth the trouble. Even when I moved to a bigger city, the threat of being caught outweighed any value of the data.
Plus, I wanted to be able to look my clients in the eye, hard to do if I've just browsed through their kiddie pr0n collection. I'd just as soon not know who had what where.
I did have a few clients ask me to come in and remove 'some stupid picture that just showed up on my desktop OUT OF NOWHERE!!! Darn. I did explain to them how it happened (clicking on the link, bonehead), and most never did it again.
At one time I was seriously into pr0n, way back when Usenet was Useful. I had gigs, so much I had to save it onto CDs by the dozens. I got pr0n spam most people would pay for. I'm past that now, thank God. But back then, it was too easy. And I know many of my customers also indulged. I just didn't look.
As my first employer told me, looking at stuff, overhearing conversations, you are just busting out to tell someone what you saw/heard. Pretty soon, you feel like 8 pounds of shit in a 5 pound sack.
Of course, young kids today have to have the same ethics taught to them early. About 5th grade, at least. And Napster/Bittorrent/Pirate Bay aren't teaching the right lessons. Information doesn't want to be free. It doesn't 'want' anything. People who make great music deserve to be paid for it, and if everyone else dips their beak in and leaves them with a dime for every dollar them generate, your complaint isn't with the artist, it's with the system. Stealing from the system leaves the artist without even that dime. And rifling through customer's hard drives is just plain stealing. And an invasion of privacy.
Remember those stories of Harvard professors being dismissed for having pr0n on their office puters? At the time, the question I had was why the tech was looking at the images. Not for restoral purposes. All I ever needed was a filename.
Had you read my post more carefully, you would know:
- Our software is NOT a logger. We produce financial services software (not specified in my post), and were forced to adapt to the listing of one of the components we purchased because that component was listed as part of a 'spyware' package.
- The software that was included the listing as 'spyware' is a commercially available package that does file encryption and compression. It does not do keylogging or IM logging.
- The software that causaed all this is an IM logger, and marketed as shareware. It is specifically marketed to corporations for regulatory compliance, and to parents to monitor their childrens' IM activities. Yes, you could use it surreptitiously in other contexts.
- My overall point was that in the sometimes overly-zealous field of anti-spyware, harmless software sometimes gets ruined, often by innocent association.
I agree, having someone install a logger on a shared machine at home would get my attention. In my case, I'm nor worried. At work, it's both allowed and expected by policy. For some people, this is a real concern. But the listing that we tried to fight wasn't for the specific components that made that OTHER software a logger. It was for a third-party module that was not by any reasonable definition 'spyware'.
...environment, the AS/400 and now iSeries are the shits. Reliable, fast, flexible.
You can run Websphere with or without Java, be your LAN's SMB server, and take heart in knowing that the hardware is the least of your concerns. You still need backups, but your IBM rep is a LOT less likely to be telling you the data is 'lost' than with your Sun, Compaq, HP, or even IBM x86 server.
FWIW, the HP9000s were the shits too. If only HP coulda spun up the Alpha to reasonable performance levels. Damn, that stuff just hummed.
Don't go dissing the AS/400 line. It gets it done. You wish your Linux box was as solid. Oh, crap, I be they can run Linux on the iSeries by now....:-)
...At a T-Mobile store that was designed to be what an Apple Store should be. More on that in a minit.
And they sell Linksys WRT54Gsomethings and D-Link I-don't-care-what-model-cause-DLink-sucks-after-th eir-NTP-fiasco. Not too overpriced, either. The Linksys was $49.95 I think. I'm doubting it's a damned bit different than a stock model, but I'll have a chance tonight or Friday to look underneath and also check the firmware.
Sounds intriguing, if for no other reason than making free calls from home. The in-store pitch is that you can do away with your landline (duh), and the clerk was pretty hyper over avoiding the Vonage/Skype hype and billing fiascos. Yeah sure.
Now, the store. White. Very White. Round window frames (inside of the usual rectilinear stip mall aluminum). Nice blue chairs, very modern and laid back, I forget the designer who made these famous years ago. A set of 4 PSPs for customers to 'just play with', I dunno the games installed. Every modem phone had a working demo except the Sidekick3, which was just a dead battery. Clean layout, touch screens everywhere, really big on the blue scheme. And hints that there's some sort of Sony connection coming. Along with the WiFi stuff.
I'm told by the resident geek clerk that the WiFi should be working in-store by today. He was positively damp over it. The cute clerk actually knows what WiFi is, and is more interested in the Scion Xb out front...
Me? If they whack up a BB Curve with the WiFi plan, I'm in. Otherwise, I'm sticking with my tired old 7105t till I get too much money in my pocket. They unlocked it for me last week, so it's open season for a new plan... woowoo.
I feel like a piece of meat when I try to negotiate a new plan.
...extends beyond poor performance, spam, cost of software, etc.
We got hit here with a collateral listing of one of our tools as 'spyware'.. It shut down our software across the U.S.
We used a toolkit from a vendor to encrypt and compress files for transmission and for patch distribution. It was slick, lightweight, and sufficiently secure. it was also a commercial product, and was sold to another publisher who used it in their software.
One of their packages is an IM logging and monitoring tool. Good for AOL IM, and others. You have to either download it as shareware, or buy it outright, and then you have to install it, with the usual requirement that you actually have access to the PC. It's not and has never been distributed as 'spyware' in the sense of an unexpected or unsolicited install, nor was it ever distributed from a website or as part of another package - unless you repackaged it yourself. The biggest users were corporate IT departments monitoring IMs for compliance, and parents/spouses/etc snooping on others.
Not what I think of as 'spyware'. But someone else thought differently.
The IM logger got reported to either Trend Micro or McAfee as 'spyware' more than a year ago. Sporadic reports continued, until the latest (?) release came out and got popular. Then the flood of reports ensued. And when I say 'flood', I mean 'dozens'. I suspect some HijackThis logs started showing it, and after a few more reports, it was assumed by someone that this application was part of other kits. Listing the application by one anti- company leads to everyone else listing it. No one wants to be left behind, and none of the 'security' companies wants to be the one that lets bad stuff in, just because they actually evaluated the listing. No, it got listed by everyone.
And the controls along with it. Including the one we used for everyday, legitimate encryption and compression.
Our customers started reporting failed installs and reinstallations. One reported they got a virus alert. We looked things over. Why now? We hadn't changed anything substantial in years.
Then, on a whim, I Googled for it. BAM! Our control was listed as malware. WHA?
We figured it out an an hour. I asked around some of the contacts I knew at Symantec, etc. Their advice was simple - give up. Go get a new tool, recode, and move on. Surrender. Even though the module we used was by itself harmless, it was guilty by association. So we did. So far as I know, the company that produced these tools & modules is struggling with this. After all, their code signatures are now officially 'malware'. Kinda like banning drills 'cause someone drilled a hole in their finger by accident. Pretty soon, nothing gets drilled. Not a good state of affairs for the drillmakers.
And not a good state of affairs for drill users, either.
That IM logger that started all this? It was commercial software, and other than being highly annoying for kids who value hiding their IMS from snooping parents ("Hey, who's paying the Internet bill around here?"), or spouses caught on dating sites, the businesses forced by law to treat IMs as if they were business correspondence found this to be a good tool. Not so good any more. About the only way to use this is to keep writing exceptions to your anti- software. If you can. And keep re-writing these exceptions every damned update. Maybe more than twice a day.
It looks like this application is dead. Kinda sad.
We survived, though some of our customers did get concerned. In our business, being labelled as 'spyware' could cause massive problems, beyond the usual. It could be front-page of the fishwrap stuff.
In the midst of the virus/spyware/malware/anti- battle, this is one small story of how unintended consequences have real costs. We had to scurry to buy new stuff, re-code, and distribute. Our original tool vendor has had to give up on a good product, through no fault of their own. The application vendor that 'st
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What does that matter? You gotta have a lot of CON to slay a Level 3 Network.
Me, I got all I can do to survive the surprise round with my dialup FTP server, miserable thing. I will kill it, I WILL!
Kill the wabbit, Kill the wabbit, Kill the wabbit, Kill the wabbit, Kill the wabbit, KILL THE WABBIT!
My XP Pro notebook resumes several times daily. I go two or three weeks without rebooting, and resuming 70-100 times. Wireless comes back every time. I usually reboot because of an update, not failed networking. It even tolerates several different access points and SSIDs, unencrypted and WPA-PSK. I rarely see WEP anywhere anymore, unless it's a neighborhood router that hasn't been updated. Ewww...
But more fascinating in TFA:
"His problems are with the UI, the networking protocols, as well as drivers. On brand new hardware, no less."
Sounds like XP. Remember the dark days, before SP2? And before SP1?
And neither do most of you. It's over.
If the concept of a community-edited 'encyclopedia' makes sense, you only had to wait until so many editors began to insert their own subjective rants into articles intended to be factual and objective.
We will need to overhaul Wikipedia:
- A front-page, factual, objective wiki, intended to be so, and carefully moderated. Editors will wait to see their contributions be checked and verified by the 'community', a group that gains reputations as fair and objective.
- A back-page, no-holds-barred, subjective wiki, intended to permit editors to wax on about whatever they can make stick. No fairness here.
Of course, the 'back-page' wiki will really jut be a blog, but that's what's happened to Wikipedia anyways.
The defacing of articles in Wikipedia will either force Wikipedia to go even further than they have to control editing, or give up.
And the most important feature of an 'encyclopedia', be it the World Book, Britannica, or Wikipedia, is the reputation of the editors (and by extension the authors of articles). Without a reputation for quality work, why bother to reference any such work(s), not knowing of you're reading genuine data, or someone's own subjective rants?
I cannot rely on Wikipedia for much right now. Many articles are in small part factual, and then devolve into long exposes of *all* sides of issues, statements, and 'facts'. As an example, most articles on religious matters add so many different viewpoints and contradicting opinons that getting the bare facts can be hard, if not impossible. In particular, it wasn't long ago that virtually all articles on the Bible turned into determined efforts to discredit the Bible. Not helpful when most failed to offer any support for veracity of the Bible. And my first complaint resulted in rejecting my request for more supportive material - justified by one editor as immaterial, the Bible was, in his words, 'a known and proven fraud'. So much for objectivity. I hear it's better now, but I go to various Bible societies and publishers instead. I get better info.
It's just over. Kinda sad, but inevitable.
... that students are largely unmotivated and undisciplined, and that's mostly because their parents don't instill in them any motivation to exert themselves at school.
My wife has retired from public school teaching after 25 years. She can't bear the insolence, lack of respect, apathy, and disinterest in her students.
There was a time in America when if you swore at your teacher you would receive some minimal punishment. Today, it's just as likely that the teacher and/or school will be sued for defamation, as the parent defends their child. It's not that teachers get a big kick out of falsely reporting students with foul mouths. It's also amazing how many of their parents are verbally abusive, even obscene. My wife reached her limit when a parent told her there was "no *!^{ing way my child would use that language!". Well, anyways... Her students whose parents were interested did ok. Students whose parents were not involved didn't do so well.
And my wife has seen a steady decline over the past 10 years. She's given up.
I don't recall having much choice of what to study in high school (I graduated in 1972), so I'm not very savvy on the current school thing, where students choose to not take math. I was expected to take 4 years of math, English, sciences, phys. ed. (ha!), and history. 2 years of foreign language, and that left me with not of available time for elective courses.
Somehow we've lost sight of the basics in schools. It's not as simple as mainstreaming 'special ed' students (in Maine, some school districts have 30% of their students in 'special ed' classifications, and expect to be over 50% by 2010 - not so special any more), or some imaginary need to prepare our students for a 'global economy' or 'technological age'. If we really wanted to prepare our students, we would be focusing even more in the 3R's, wouldn't we?
Our schools are failing because our parents are failing. Kids today get away with a lot. If a group of kids, even just one, want to cross a street whether the traffic has the green light or not, around here they can just do it and you screech to a halt and wait. While they give you the look of 'piss off, I can do anything I want'. No, I'm not advocating running down anyone who decides to cross the street without regard for the traffic. I'm advocating waiting for the light.
I watch a regular stream of neighborhood kids walk through my back yard as a shortcut. I really don't begrudge them a shorter route, some time in the shade on a hot day, but once when I came around the corner and we nearly collided, I got the 'Who the &*(# are Y-O-U' look. Wait, this is MY property. Since when do they give me attitude? Since they are invulnerable. What am I gonna do? At best, I go to jail. All I want is a little respect, apparently what the kids want. No, I haven't put a gate up. I just remember to go wide around the corner. It may be my property, but it really isn't my domain any more. I just pay for it.
My wife gave up on public school teaching because of that specific 'Who the %^^$ are Y-O-U' attitude. It wasn't always like this. But it's not good. And it will cost us.
BTW, I was a skater before skating was at all cool. I don't remember trying tricks in crowded areas - back then, we figured spitting our boards into parked cars and pedestrian shins was wrong. we didn't have parks yet, so we skated when it was quiet and isolated. We still got rousted. I'm aware of the rebellious attitude of youth. I just don't recall being deliberately disrespectful.
I am getting old. But that doesn't make wrong right. And this is just my opinion. No doubt, you hve yours.
Flame on...
No, actually, we believe in one God, with three aspects;
The Father, Creator and God of the Universe...
The Son, send by the Father, and of Him, to do His work...
The Spirit, that of God which pervades our existence... And I greatly simplify this.
But it the Three that are One. Do not be deceived by the lies of those who only seek to discredit Him. His first Commandment states, "I am the Lord your God...", which is fairly clearly singular. And Christ even stated He came from 'the Father'.
Just one God. But an easy mistake to make, thinking the three aspects are three not three parts of one.
Kinda like you have five fingers, two hands, but one body. Not 12 bodies. Assuming you're a typical human, and haven't lost any or weren't given all of them in the first place.
No, it's more like going up to Rosa Parks with a bus pendnant on.
I can find regular unleaded gas around here (Phoenix area) for $2.599/gal. I suspect you pay a different amount. visiting the Northeast last week, prices were generally around 42.999/gal.
It's the same item, unleaded gasoline. Why pay different prices?
Supply. Distance to ship. Formulation maybe, but both places I cite use oxygenated formula.
The way I understand the Ameistreet formula, popularity drives the price up, nothing drives it down.
It's not the same product in that scenario. The first buyers are buying an unknown or not yet popular song, the later buyers are buying a product that's been vetted by popularity, and possibly by their friends recommendations.
Not exactly apples and oranges, but if your complaint is about it being the same product, well, it might not be.
For clarification, if you believe in the Christian God, Jehovah or whichever of His names you choose, you *don't* believe in any of the others. If you believe in more than one God, you *don't* believe in a Christian one at all. His words, not mine, read the book.
Allah has a similar statement. I'm pretty sure Buddha doesn't much care about this God-thing, singular or plural. He has a different agenda.
Yeah, the whole 'it's God's will' is variously dismissed as a clever rhetorical device by many, and misunderstood by others. We see this planet's characteristics as 'not making sense', and sure enough we'll want to figure it out and make it fit into our clever theories about the Universe. We just don't know all the rules yet, and may never. But it keeps us busy, which, being that we are crunchy and taste good with ketchup, keeps us from looking for dragons too much.
"I realize this idea is extremely unpopular and is not in the spirit of the original Internet"
The idea that you should be able to mask your true identity, deluge others with unwanted data, and consume excessive bandwidth in the process is NOT in the spirit of the original Internet. It's not even in the spirit of a commercially operated Internet.
Spam is now the single greatest scourge of the Internet. It wastes resources, causes significant effort to merely manage, not eliminate, and has been the tool of those who wish to hijack systems for their purposes.
None of that was in the spirit of the original Internet.
Accountability and fair play was.
If spammers abided by the spirit of the original Internet, they would mark their messages clearly as spam. They would accept requests to remove addresses from their lists. They would not disguise their true identities. They would not mask the contents of their messages to avoid filters.
An identity-based email system is probably the answer. More likely, a reputation-based system in addition, which would allow us to both know who the sender really was, and then both report them as spammers and check to see if they are generally regarded as spammers.
And, sadly, this would lead to the undeniable realization that much spam is coming from compromised personal machines. ISPs would be forced to block outgoing SMTP or whatever traffic, requiring it to go through their own gateways. And then they would be forced to block these compromised (read: botted) machines, users would have to go through the painful process of removing the botware and/or rebuilding their systems, and there would be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
We're in a perfect storm. Most Windows machines can be pwned by a single click. SMTP is fundamentally insecure, able to be exploited easily. Users pretty much just want to use their machines, and not have to have an MCSE come in and scrape them clean regularly. ISPs are afraid to filter more than they do. And everyone wrings their hands.
No, I don't have a solution either. I'm just some slime on a tooth of a gear. Hopefully, in the spirit of the original Internet, smart people will join together and propose solutions, and we will adopt them.
Hopefully.
Sadly, even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Birth Wikipedia eventually points out that the Greek 'parthenos'was used for Hebrew 'na`arah' and 'bethulah'. And then, quoting from Wikipedia:
"Additionally, the Greek-English Lexicon edited by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott lists other meanings for the word:
[parthenos], I. 1. maiden, girl; virgin, opp. [gyn], "woman". 2. of unmarried women who are not virgins, Iliad 2.514, etc. 3. , [parthenos, h], the Virgin Goddess, as a title of Athena at Athens. 4. the constellation Virgo. II. as adj., maiden, chaste. III. as masc., , [parthenos, ho], unmarried man, Apocalypse 14.4.".
It's not so simple. Christians have only our faith that if God wanted it different, He would make it different.
Now that we're sufficiently off-topic, carry on...
"to record the sum of our knowledge for future intelligences."
Yeah, we better start on that right away. It might take us what, a whole decade or so to work that out. Maybe less.
A lot less. Fear not, we are hosed by cosmic radiation, but not by our inability to feel important.
Wait...
Well, after the German scare, which turned out to be http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=726.php/ misguided, we may actually want to look over the whole nano- thing.
c h/index.html/everyone is willing to take it on faith that nanotech is harmless or should be assumed to be safe.
And I'm guessing that when some nano- product turns out to be worse than asbestos, you'll all be screaming for reform at the FDA, how could they have betrayed us? Oh, the humanity.
Figures. In one breath we decry the reduction of the FDA, and the lax inspections. Next, we oppose their expanding into examining new products that plainly need to be studied.
Sheesh.
Not http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/09/01/nanote
- The PG trace window shows INCOMING frames...
- Apparently the author's firewall is not blocking incoming requests...
-or-
- The trace does not show the outgoing requests...
- No evidence from the screenshot that anything is reporting back to anywhere from the author's machine...
- Further discussion without more information is a waste of time
I continue to be astonished that so many /.ers will defend electronic voting machines. If we dumb them down to merely counting what the voter inputs, we get a glorified scanner. Just use the scanners that paper fill-in-the-bubble ballots use. You get both an electronic count to satisfy the media's craving for instantaneous results and our thirst for 'news', and a countable paper ballot we can argue over. Sheesh.
But any kind of electronic system without at least a paper receipt I can go back with and ask to see my vote and how it was counted is preposterous. No, wait. It's criminal. Using these things that Diebold and others are making is criminal.
Just so you know, I'm a life-long Republican. Spare me the Florida/Ohio flames. I've voted most of my adult life in precincts run by Democrats, from the Ward Clerk to the wonderful old ladies as poll workers. I've monitored polling places, been removed from the rolls for failure to respond to a postcard that was not stamped by the city clerk, (one of 3,500 or so, amusing) and been run from one polling place to another to figure out where the heck I vote. After all that, I just want my vote counted. I can live with the honest results. If you think Republicans have just started election fraud, you must not have lived in Chicago. And I direct your gaze towards the topic, Berkeley. Not a Republican stronghold last time I checked, but it's been a while...
Remember, also, we are also a Republic, and the states elect our President and Vice-President. It will be up to the states to do elections. If the Federal Government gets much more involved, I'll be asking my representatives to stop it. It's bad enough to have Miami and Dade County running elections, for which they are demonstrably incompetent to do, but to trust the Feds? Ha. I like thousands of small-ish screwups better than one massive 'Gee, it doesn't seem to be working' Charlie Foxtrot.
You people who want electronic voting, you have no idea the trouble you are asking for. You'll get one of these outcomes:
- Something like Windows, so insecure and compromised you can't tell the 'real' apps from the viruses. As if I need to provide examples. THIS we trust?
- Something like Ubuntu, so promising until you actually use it. Test me on this. Ask around. Ubuntu installation is nightmare on your street. Actually, Debian is a better example. Upgrading Debian is like smoking a grenade. No, wait, Linux in general is the example. It pretty much works great. Until it doesn't. Then God Help You. The user community will mostly proclaim you incompetent, and recommend you get an expert in. Might as well use Windows. (Oh dear, her come the flames....)
- Something like OS X, wonderful until you find out that you really have to trust the provider, and in the end it can be pwned like all the rest of them.
Lord Above, please give me a piece of paper I can mark. And people to take a look at the machines and test them.
Save us from the poor blighters seeking some Grail of -=Electronic Voting=-, as if this is a panacea for ANYTHING.
Stop them.
PS- Imagine this scenario:
- Machines built, softwware open-sourced, studied by thousands, and declared 'excellent'
- Election held, results whacko, machines checked.
- Software found to be tampered with
- Officials agree, no paper receipts, no way to tell what happened.
- Hilarity Ensues.
Berkeley on a state-wide scale? I think this is bad. Just don't.
Well, actually, maybe you can. Someone posted that Airpoerr Extremes have interesting DHCP problems. I would not be surprised if the DHCP client in the iPhone wasn't just impatient, or trying to hog a lease at the expense of any other competitor device. Not the first time Apple has been caught playing 'mine's bigger than yours' in networking code.
It wouldn't surprise me, either, that the iPhone might even try using the last IP it had. Never know, it might have just moved a few feet, and sheesh, that last AP has some hot packets, dude. Break me off another piece of that eh? Gone? Ah well, in the wireless biz, easy come easy gone.
And, don't forget, Duke sucks.
This is where the numbers get wierd.
World-class bicycle racers can reach 300 watts in some races. Most of the top tier count on 250 watts sustained, and try to peak around 280-290 watts.
No, I'm betting a typical soldier can't generate much more than 150 watts sustained, since they are well-trained physically but not to the level of a Mercxx or Basso, for instance.
But if you could harness 80 watts over 8 hours a day, is that even a little of a boost?
Personally, I like the butane fuel cells, but then your IR signature goes up. Higher density batteries can become your very own personal flare, and burn you up. Probably the answer lies with something like a zinc-air chemistry, though I think they have lousy power-weight ratios.
Of course, the ultimate answer is standardised batteries and lower power consumption for devices. Having said that, satellite-dependent devices eat power. Comparing this problem to XM or Sirius recievers is not a good analogy. Imagine designing a wearable earth station for voice-rate data. Even sending up 16kb is gonna cost you some watts. Maybe part of the solution is to fly some drones or LEOs to provide battlefield comm and data.
Wait. I bet they already do that. Nevermind. Just have Palm or Nokia design your next gen of wearables. They'll hold up in battle.
Other two? Which two?
We had trouble with MSI and ECS board dropping like flies, and a few ASUS boards came in with the telltale 'K' caps. There were others. It wasn't just Dell/HP/Compaq/Acer.
And my USR modem just died two weeks ago. It had a 'K' cap in it, bloated. Death. So very young...:-)
I doubt many motherboard, card, or modem manufacturers escaped some exposure, but the ones that actually tested incoming components might, repeat *might* have spotted those. For the majority, it was really just a 'fess up and buck up' situation.
Remember the Seagate 'stiction' back in the old days? Well, maybe you don't. Similar situation.
These things, among others, age IT 'managers' preamturely. Like the politician said, in the IT business, if you want a friend, get a dog.
First thing I do is put my glasses on. Check the BlackBerry. Flush. Shower/shave/breakfast. Check real e-mail. Drive 40 minutes.
It is now about 0705. I'm still 25 minutes from my first stop. I'm a field technician by title, but I'm the 'IT Manager' for 12-25 clients. And every single one is the most important client I have. Just ask my boss.
It's either the backup that didn't run again, the Exchange server that once again needs to be rebooted form an overnight &*#$up, the routers need to be reloaded since the power went out cause the UPS can't hold them overnight after the cleaners vacuum the cord out of the wall, or a new Dell workstation doesn't boot two days after being received and Dell won't get there before I can. And I charge them a maintenance agreement, cause they like Dell hardware but can't run a business on the service. And I told them about the capacitor problems a few years ago and they trust me but still buy Dell. Sheesh.
If only I were the IT manager for one single company with just as much stuff on fire, but a lot less driving, usually.
Ha! I ditched it for cubicle life! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I'm just a tooth on the gears now, not the SAE90 that gets dumped out and changed on some insane schedule...
If you're a good IT manager, you get coffee, check status, make the first call(s) of the morning, and settle in. If you're not a good IT manager, you check status, pee on whatever fires are burning the hottest, get coffee, and pray a little.
You do whatever needs to be done first. Right after coffee.
Wasn't it this week we read about vibration-powered generators? Gotta scale these up some, but this might lead to a constant-recharging system.
Then again, it was a year ago or more I read about Phillips or some outfit planning butane powered fuel cells, intended to retrofit notebook batteries.
Somehow, I think there's existing technology that solves this.
And you can have my million. You're welcome.
I've worked in either the office machine service field, office automation field, or IT field for about 31 years. At one time I had most of the attornies in my home town as clients. I couldn't listen to the office chatter - if any one of them considered me anything but discreet and professional, I would be unable to work in the entire state. I'd be getting a new job, probably something involving french fries.
And that was just typewriter service.
As I moved on to word processors and PCs, the ethics didn't change. Don't look, don't copy. It's not worth the trouble. Even when I moved to a bigger city, the threat of being caught outweighed any value of the data.
Plus, I wanted to be able to look my clients in the eye, hard to do if I've just browsed through their kiddie pr0n collection. I'd just as soon not know who had what where.
I did have a few clients ask me to come in and remove 'some stupid picture that just showed up on my desktop OUT OF NOWHERE!!! Darn. I did explain to them how it happened (clicking on the link, bonehead), and most never did it again.
At one time I was seriously into pr0n, way back when Usenet was Useful. I had gigs, so much I had to save it onto CDs by the dozens. I got pr0n spam most people would pay for. I'm past that now, thank God. But back then, it was too easy. And I know many of my customers also indulged. I just didn't look.
As my first employer told me, looking at stuff, overhearing conversations, you are just busting out to tell someone what you saw/heard. Pretty soon, you feel like 8 pounds of shit in a 5 pound sack.
Of course, young kids today have to have the same ethics taught to them early. About 5th grade, at least. And Napster/Bittorrent/Pirate Bay aren't teaching the right lessons. Information doesn't want to be free. It doesn't 'want' anything. People who make great music deserve to be paid for it, and if everyone else dips their beak in and leaves them with a dime for every dollar them generate, your complaint isn't with the artist, it's with the system. Stealing from the system leaves the artist without even that dime. And rifling through customer's hard drives is just plain stealing. And an invasion of privacy.
Remember those stories of Harvard professors being dismissed for having pr0n on their office puters? At the time, the question I had was why the tech was looking at the images. Not for restoral purposes. All I ever needed was a filename.
Just my $.02. Carry on. Dumb Geeks.
rick
Had you read my post more carefully, you would know:
- Our software is NOT a logger. We produce financial services software (not specified in my post), and were forced to adapt to the listing of one of the components we purchased because that component was listed as part of a 'spyware' package.
- The software that was included the listing as 'spyware' is a commercially available package that does file encryption and compression. It does not do keylogging or IM logging.
- The software that causaed all this is an IM logger, and marketed as shareware. It is specifically marketed to corporations for regulatory compliance, and to parents to monitor their childrens' IM activities. Yes, you could use it surreptitiously in other contexts.
- My overall point was that in the sometimes overly-zealous field of anti-spyware, harmless software sometimes gets ruined, often by innocent association.
I agree, having someone install a logger on a shared machine at home would get my attention. In my case, I'm nor worried. At work, it's both allowed and expected by policy. For some people, this is a real concern. But the listing that we tried to fight wasn't for the specific components that made that OTHER software a logger. It was for a third-party module that was not by any reasonable definition 'spyware'.
And this is not an isolated circumstance.
...environment, the AS/400 and now iSeries are the shits. Reliable, fast, flexible.
You can run Websphere with or without Java, be your LAN's SMB server, and take heart in knowing that the hardware is the least of your concerns. You still need backups, but your IBM rep is a LOT less likely to be telling you the data is 'lost' than with your Sun, Compaq, HP, or even IBM x86 server.
FWIW, the HP9000s were the shits too. If only HP coulda spun up the Alpha to reasonable performance levels. Damn, that stuff just hummed.
Don't go dissing the AS/400 line. It gets it done. You wish your Linux box was as solid. Oh, crap, I be they can run Linux on the iSeries by now....:-)
...At a T-Mobile store that was designed to be what an Apple Store should be. More on that in a minit.
h eir-NTP-fiasco. Not too overpriced, either. The Linksys was $49.95 I think. I'm doubting it's a damned bit different than a stock model, but I'll have a chance tonight or Friday to look underneath and also check the firmware.
And they sell Linksys WRT54Gsomethings and D-Link I-don't-care-what-model-cause-DLink-sucks-after-t
Sounds intriguing, if for no other reason than making free calls from home. The in-store pitch is that you can do away with your landline (duh), and the clerk was pretty hyper over avoiding the Vonage/Skype hype and billing fiascos. Yeah sure.
Now, the store. White. Very White. Round window frames (inside of the usual rectilinear stip mall aluminum). Nice blue chairs, very modern and laid back, I forget the designer who made these famous years ago. A set of 4 PSPs for customers to 'just play with', I dunno the games installed. Every modem phone had a working demo except the Sidekick3, which was just a dead battery. Clean layout, touch screens everywhere, really big on the blue scheme. And hints that there's some sort of Sony connection coming. Along with the WiFi stuff.
I'm told by the resident geek clerk that the WiFi should be working in-store by today. He was positively damp over it. The cute clerk actually knows what WiFi is, and is more interested in the Scion Xb out front...
Me? If they whack up a BB Curve with the WiFi plan, I'm in. Otherwise, I'm sticking with my tired old 7105t till I get too much money in my pocket. They unlocked it for me last week, so it's open season for a new plan... woowoo.
I feel like a piece of meat when I try to negotiate a new plan.
And I'm deeply hurt by the realisation that I'm so damned old nobody else knows of this game.
Pus.
...extends beyond poor performance, spam, cost of software, etc.
We got hit here with a collateral listing of one of our tools as 'spyware'.. It shut down our software across the U.S.
We used a toolkit from a vendor to encrypt and compress files for transmission and for patch distribution. It was slick, lightweight, and sufficiently secure. it was also a commercial product, and was sold to another publisher who used it in their software.
One of their packages is an IM logging and monitoring tool. Good for AOL IM, and others. You have to either download it as shareware, or buy it outright, and then you have to install it, with the usual requirement that you actually have access to the PC. It's not and has never been distributed as 'spyware' in the sense of an unexpected or unsolicited install, nor was it ever distributed from a website or as part of another package - unless you repackaged it yourself. The biggest users were corporate IT departments monitoring IMs for compliance, and parents/spouses/etc snooping on others.
Not what I think of as 'spyware'. But someone else thought differently.
The IM logger got reported to either Trend Micro or McAfee as 'spyware' more than a year ago. Sporadic reports continued, until the latest (?) release came out and got popular. Then the flood of reports ensued. And when I say 'flood', I mean 'dozens'. I suspect some HijackThis logs started showing it, and after a few more reports, it was assumed by someone that this application was part of other kits. Listing the application by one anti- company leads to everyone else listing it. No one wants to be left behind, and none of the 'security' companies wants to be the one that lets bad stuff in, just because they actually evaluated the listing. No, it got listed by everyone.
And the controls along with it. Including the one we used for everyday, legitimate encryption and compression.
Our customers started reporting failed installs and reinstallations. One reported they got a virus alert. We looked things over. Why now? We hadn't changed anything substantial in years.
Then, on a whim, I Googled for it. BAM! Our control was listed as malware. WHA?
We figured it out an an hour. I asked around some of the contacts I knew at Symantec, etc. Their advice was simple - give up. Go get a new tool, recode, and move on. Surrender. Even though the module we used was by itself harmless, it was guilty by association. So we did. So far as I know, the company that produced these tools & modules is struggling with this. After all, their code signatures are now officially 'malware'. Kinda like banning drills 'cause someone drilled a hole in their finger by accident. Pretty soon, nothing gets drilled. Not a good state of affairs for the drillmakers.
And not a good state of affairs for drill users, either.
That IM logger that started all this? It was commercial software, and other than being highly annoying for kids who value hiding their IMS from snooping parents ("Hey, who's paying the Internet bill around here?"), or spouses caught on dating sites, the businesses forced by law to treat IMs as if they were business correspondence found this to be a good tool. Not so good any more. About the only way to use this is to keep writing exceptions to your anti- software. If you can. And keep re-writing these exceptions every damned update. Maybe more than twice a day.
It looks like this application is dead. Kinda sad.
We survived, though some of our customers did get concerned. In our business, being labelled as 'spyware' could cause massive problems, beyond the usual. It could be front-page of the fishwrap stuff.
In the midst of the virus/spyware/malware/anti- battle, this is one small story of how unintended consequences have real costs. We had to scurry to buy new stuff, re-code, and distribute. Our original tool vendor has had to give up on a good product, through no fault of their own. The application vendor that 'st