The United States of America was founded on principles of justice and freedom for all.
o During the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, there were no special "carve-outs" for people of wealth. Every participant started racing at the sound of the starter's gun.
o When railroads were built, there were special coaches for first class, but they were part of the same train, going at the same speed, along the same route, to the same destination.
o While the rich can buy their own jet aircraft, the Air Traffic Control system that manages all aircraft in the skies give no special treatment to the jet aircraft, nor the lone pilot in a Piper Cub.
o When Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway system, he did not mandate special travel lanes for trucks or limousines; all traffic uses the same routes.
Every one of these historical innovations lifted up the poor, the middle class, and the rich. As a result, we became the world's most respected democracy, and the model for many other, newer countries to emulate.
Now, the FCC would like to change all that history and allow those who can afford to pay for a "special lane" on the Internet, crowding out other traffic, and making it slower. It will reward the oligarchs and penalize the common citizen.
I have been in the computer and electronics industry, from bench technician to CEO, since 1957. Now retired, I have watched as the very rich people, and the very large corporations have worked tirelessly in recent decades to destroy that equality of opportunity. If we are to survive as a nation, we must return to a democracy, with every citizen treated fairly and equitably.
We should, instead, be requiring our "common carriers" to expand their Internet capacity, robustness and security for all. Where there is plenty of reliable capacity, everyone will have the opportunity to use the Internet without disadvantage. The large carriers, like Comcast (which the FCC has misclassified), AT&T, Verizon, et. al., have been intentionally restricting their expansion of the Internet to make it slower and slower. Yes, they save the investments they should be making. But, deeper and more cynically, they have been intending to leverage those self-imposed restrictions into higher prices for these restricted servicesby adding a special lane for those willing to pay.
"Demos" is the Greek word for people; "kratia" is the Greek word for rule. Democracy puts the emphasis on people deciding how to rule. When appointed public officials usurp that decision-making to favor one class of people (or corporations) over another, it has violated basic democratic principles. The consequences will be uncomfortable for the citizens, and will erode our principles and the quality of our beloved nation.
You are a public, appointed official. I trust you will decide on the basis of democracy that the rich deserve no more preferential treatment than the middle class or the poor. We need to expand our Internet capacity for all, not make it available only to the highest bidders, driving all prices upward for the benefit of the already-rich.
...and Specs, even if they are absurdly wrong, but ONLY if they expect to keep their customers...as "The Brick" will no doubt discover.
This isn't, to me, a moral issue: It is just acknowledging that sometimes mistakes happen, and the customer has behaved by buying into those terms as offered. The customer isn't wrong here; they're just taking advantage of an apparent price advantage. The seller isn't wrong here; they just made a mistake.
"Customer satisfaction" is a core principle of capitalism, although many capitalists (to their own disadvantage) still refuse to understand that fact.
AT&T Still think it IS High-speed! (I, too, am rural, and getting the fastest speed I can...3 Mb/s...and cursing AT&T every hour of the day for their focus on THEIR profit, not any customers' quality of service.
Of course, if you're willing to pay them thousands of dollars a month, they'll happily give you higher speed...but not a worldwide comparable rates.
Broadband, in the home country of broadband, still sucks, and AT&T, Verizon, and all the other crooks enabled by the FCC (the head of the agency came from one of the major firms) have a singular pricing policy: Summarized, it is: "BEND OVER!"
What an ignorant troll. What "WiFI" module that you can't change? What make and model? I just changed/upgraded several WiFi Modules in Dell laptops in the past few days to gain speed and reliability.
And, when you finally need to buy parts for that "ThinkPenguin" or other small-time maker, where will you go? At least with a major manufacturer, I know I can still buy a replacement powerswitch or cover hinge when I need one, years after the products is no longer being sold.
This sounds like the AC posting is an employee of the company they extol...even to the extent of theorizing BIOS might become "open" at some future date. What a CROCK!
On the issue of TPM: It's there if I ever need it...but because I don't install the software for it, it appears to be abandoned and affects nothing people do on these computers.
1. For keeping two drives synchronized, check out GoodSync. It's powerful, and I use it to keep two separate computers holding identical copies of two major folders of data synchronized, so if one goes down, there's minimal loss of data (1 hour, max) I use this, for example, to keep a client's two 1TB collections of photos and iTunes synchronized. http://www.goodsync.com/
2. For making backups that are compact, efficient and easy to recover, look at "Disk Snapshot". It's inexpensive, robust and I've never experienced a restore failure. I make "Disk Snapshot" images of every computer, every night, in a development environment. That way, if the thing I just did breaks the system, I can restore a 100 GB Drive is less than an hour by booting from a CD and pointing to the backup on an external drive. http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm
This malware (which puts up the appearance of a credit/debit card and asks for all you information) calls a server in the Ukraine. It was delivered by eMail (to a naive user) and intercepts attempts to reach your financial institution via their website. It presents, after login (did they capture the login info?), a panel looking like the credit/debit card, asking for the user to fill in all information, including account number, CVC, address, and other personal information (why anyone would fill in that data is beyond me!)
After much gnashing of teeth, I discovered it was undetectable by any known virus checker I use (AVG, Malwarebytes, Spybot), so I had to dig deeper. It turned out that the malware was using any references to 127.0.0.1 (local machine) for it's hook. All I had to do was edit the HOSTS file and add the domain names of the miscreant with a reference to a different IP address that is known to be a deadend (you could, for example, use 127.7.7.7).
When the malware couldn't execute, it couldn't disable the various malware detectors, and several files were then identified and removed.
The world's first "Service Bureau" was reputedly C-E-I-R, in what is now Crystal City, VA. I went to work there in 1962 (or 63?) with no programming experience, but a real grasp of electronics and transistor circuitry. Fortunately, I worked with pioneers in the field of Linear Programming (Bill Orchard-Hays, Eli Hellerman), and with an incredible team of programmers (people like Ed Yourdon) who freely shared code around the offices.
I'd ask someone how to, for example, write code to read data off a tape drive. They wrote a short subroutine in Assembly Language for the 1401. Then another person needed it, and she added robust code for backup and re-reading in an attempt to overcome errors on the media. Then another guy added another feature. I even, as a novice, added a couple of features, too.
To my mind, it was that tight team that taught me how to program...and we were all learning from each other.
That tape drive reading/writing subroutine was the beginning of my learning. We added more and more to that desk of punched cards until it was about 6" thick, and called it CELIB (C-E-I-R Library). It became a mainstay of programming at the company until the S/360 was announced. And, about 10 years later, while I was consulting in Canberra, Australia, I came across a government agency still using CELIB on their now-ancient 1401s!
I used to take home the 6" thick printout of the kernel of the 7090 IBSYS operating system, so I could read it and understand how it accomplished its' marvels. I learned it before there were any classes, any courses, not even technical schools teaching the field. I learned from close people who were, quite literally, only a month or two ahead of me on the learning curve, and from acknowledged experts who wrote that O.S. What an exciting time that was to be a young geek:-)
I wish ATI would focus more energy on making their product stable, reliable and unable to be corrupted from innocent programs on the same computer. Right now, ATI and Nvidia drive the industry, and they couldn't give a damn about the BSODs they create!
Microsoft’s major success has been Windows (although they’ve made more money from products like Office). Now, they seem hell-bent on making sure that success is the root of their demise.
Microsoft’s products have traditionally reached their zenith in the third version.
Save for experimenters, we all ignored Windows 1 and even Windows 2.1 was an acknowledged dog, but it held promise. The first usable version, with serious networking capability, was Windows 3.1. Although still built atop DOS, we could finally do something productive with Windows. We got used to WYSIWYG.
Windows 95 was a dramatic improvement, but needed to be reinstalled every year or so just to keep it running. Windows 98 was much more solid, and morphed quietly into the product-extending “Second Edition,” which was an operating system that most homes and businesses adopted. Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was a throwback to Windows 98, with added features few found useful.
Finally, in a break with DOS, Microsoft turned to “New Technology.” Windows NT was, for all intents and purposes, an ignored product save for use on Servers. Because it was the first real “server” technology Microsoft sold, NT had a life in corporate America, but few individuals used it. It was quickly supplanted by the dramatically more stable Windows 2000, with more Internet and user-interface features. While limited, it was still a productive tool, and now crashes no longer took down the entire system, which was a boon in business, and in 24x7 servers. It was Windows XP (Windows 2000 with bug fixes, and a new “glossy” appearance) that finally took over the world; XP drove virtually all the earlier operating systems out of the inventory during it’s decade of dominance.
But, Microsoft couldn’t resist tampering: They designed anew and emerged with Vista, and both customers were happy. It was slow, buggy, and poorly thought out, like many of Microsoft’s “first version” products. They reasonably quickly moved to Windows 7, with a cleaner user interface, but still plagued by all kinds of security impositions on users and a complicated security model that only a security expert could navigate. Even though Microsoft forced Windows 7 on new computer buyers, most of them actually installed Windows XP (if they knew how) to regain access to familiar tools and a well-known user interface.
Based on the trend, you might expect that Microsoft has been readying Windows 8 to be the real successor to Windows 7but Microsoft has decided to follow short-term marketing trends to make the product utterly incompatible with user’s expectations: They abandoned the “Start” menu, changed to the “Metro” interface copied from cellphones, and they’re not catering to any of the millions of users who recognize XP is already wickedly obsolete, but saw Windows Vista and Windows 7 as a trip sideways, not a step up.
It’s as if Microsoft has decided that Windows 8 should be the start of yet another line of operating systems, and it will be a dog to learn and use for the next two generations.
But, worse, how will Microsoft replace all the Windows XP systems out there that Windows 8 can’t even emulate? How many retail computer systems, restaurant cash registers, laptops as field-service tools (etc.) are going to go without a new replacement because Microsoft has arbitrarily decided to cater to the “smartphone” and “tablet” users, who don’t have to deal with unique peripheral devices (e.g., receipt printers), or have the robustness that business demands? And, efforts to lockout users from changing their operating system, and creating a “closed ecosystem” for hardware and software products means that Microsoft will pursue the Apple strategyall the way down to Apple’s nominal 10% of the computer market (Apple is an electronic products company, with computer
...you're able to think critically, and to discern which evidence is relevant to the case in point. I don't care if you can use the Simplex method to invert a sparse 100x100 matrix in your head, but I DO care, as an employer, that you know what the Simplex method is, when it would be useful to apply, and what class of problems it can be used to solve.
So, higher math is just evidence to me, your prospective employer, that you're not prone to take the easy way out, to rely on trusted (but irrelevant) methods, that you can seek out new solutions when they are called for. Without that breadth of background in the "thinking arts," you are doomed to a life of programming what others design.
Most of the people who claim certain languages don't support certain advanced math features are just exposing their lack of imagination; they are coders, not programmers.
Your ignorance of the utility of the Concorde is, like an earlier poster, astounding.
From London to New York, I could have meetings in the morning, and meetings the same day, four hours later in New York (4.5 for Dulles/Washington). That improved my productivity and saved many sophisticated business opportunities from running off the rails.
Your ignorance of the flight regimes of the Concorde are astounding. Remember, it flew at Mach 2 (and very quite inside the cabin, as I can confirm as a passenger), and that produces "sonic boom" across the landscape; over water there are few people, so little source of complaints.
Sure, the Concorde "is nor more noisy than a normal jet..." only if you consider the XB-70 the exemplar of a "normal jet."
The available maps of service areas, and specific locations of infrastructure, are held as potential "terrorist assets" (although, through typical "security theater," they don't bother saying how attacked on these components would be attractive to some would be terrorist, who'd be much more likely to attack and contaminate the water system).
Basically, telcos--aided and abetted by the government--make broad and extravagant claims about coverage (why, right here where I live, the "Desolation wildnerness" prohibits entry except on foot or horseback, and there are no addresses there, but, if maps are to be believed, the area has marvelous high-speed coverage for Internet services).
For my county alone (aobut 88,000 households and businesses), I am planning a "primary research" survey to find out who has Internet service, and who doesn't). Do do that on a national scale will require tremendous effort and cost.
I know that visiting my local Forest Ranger District HQ recently got me a map of all the cell sites within their jurisdiction, but that would require individual visits to the thousands of sites the govenment own across the Country.
So, to be clear: The precision of data you can get from telcos and the regulatory agencies is as precise as those "coverage maps" for their "cellular service area;" Dramatically more aspirational than factual.
1) If you want to be understood. Can you imagine a judge issuing a decision in a case with bad grammar? It only inspires hundreds of unnecessary future cases, to litigate "what the judge really meant." Grammar represents the social rules of how literate people communicate. And, intentional violation of grammatical rules is the stuff of art: You represent the school teacher in a novel by giving their lines grammatical correctness; you represent the village idiot with the LACK of good grammar. Legal documents, professional publications, technical manuals are all most productive of positive outcomes when writter within the accepted grammatical rules of the language. See "Strunk & White." (And, yes, grammar changes over time, which is why so many people fail to appreciate Shakespeare in the original.)
2) If you want to be perceived as credible. Ah kin skribble to mah kin, but do you think those are the words of someone you'd trust to invest in? Business plans, project proposals, provocative ideas, scientific papers are rejected by readers if the authors' text is ungrammatical, because they project the writer's image as one with little reasoning power (with Mark Twain and WIll Rogers as credible exceptions, because of the obvious intentionality behind the text), and therefore render the entire text as unreliable. Imagine where Higgs' Boson would be if Einstein had--despite writing in other than his native tongue--written in poor grammatical form, Would it even have a name?
So, argue against rules of grammar all you want, make fun of the grammatically accomplished...and live your life impoverished in the process.
--Carol Anne
What are you trying to do, make a living or change the world? (You generally can't do both at once; if you get rich from work, you can THEN maybe change the world.)
Let's start with the basics: What's in it for YOU? Is open source a buzzword, something you think you have to do ethically, just don't have the chops to turn it into a business, it based on other open source code? Is income something you vitally need to continue your work, to live a better life, or are you independently wealthy (I think you've ruled out the latter)?
I agree with an earlier poster: Make the core code that delivers basic utility to the user open source, if you want to use it as your "loss leader" to show them what's possible. Include all the extra features in the menus or configuration options of your program, so users can see what they're missing (clicking on it opens a window telling them it's in the commercial product, if they'd just buy it).
But, remember, open source is just a way for other people to leverage your code and make it into a competitive product...some will even violate your license agreement, and modify it to suit their customer base. Do you really want to spawn your own competitors?
...because I use Lotus Domino/Notes. Creating new databases with specialized forms and views takes, oh, maybe an hour. As owner/operator of two business, one new start-up, plus sitting on both public and private boards of directors, I never thought I'd be this busy. But, I know exactly what I have to do every day with the built-in calendar and eMail. When I send an eMail, it's logged, so I can find it (and the responses).
As one example: I keep a Technology database of hard-won knowledge and acquired information about fixing computers (my own, private Knowledgebase). When (as just the other day) I discover a new solution (the nasty uses by malware authors of the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options registry key, and how to clean it out), I document it, so I have the solution on my notebook wherever I go. When I find new information and add it to the database in the field, it's immediately copied back to the server for others to use when I return to the office.).
I expect many of you to issue the usual gripes and outrageous claims about Lotus Domino/Notes, but unless you really build apps for it in a hour, you don't even understand the power of the product. I've been using it since 1992, and it's STILL the primary tool on every computer in my company.
Sure, you'll save a few bucks...for a few months. Then, things will start failing. You'll find there're no hardware drivers for many of the parts inside, and when people start finding mechanical parts, like pushbuttons, sockets and controls, falling off, you'll discover that the caseworks maker doesn't sell spare parts. Also, as mentioned above, you'll have to pay for Windows licenses (unless you're moving to Ubuntu, too).
I've got lots of happy clients, because I keep replacing the crap they have (e.g., the computer with a touch-screen display that overheats every Summer day afternoon) with brand-name products. They pay me my comparatively higher prices (considering the local dolts who call themselves my "competition") because I deliver stable, reliable systems that they never have to worry about (until, like yesterday, a UPS went up in smoke...quick to fix that one).
Stick with reputable makers. Avoid the small storefronts that will "build yours" and put in everything cheap, but charge you somewhat less than brand-name products.
Heck, I've only been in this computer business for over half-a-century, so my experience probably will be punished by others with a more "home-brew" bent...but you said it's a business, not a bunch of students. You should take a good look at whether, over the entire life (which will inevitably be more than 18 months!), you'll have made a good bargain. I'd wager that "white box clones" will end up saving you nothing.
Quickbooks now allows you to download transactions, semi-automatically (you have to go through them and edit them, in some cases, so you know what was the transaction was for.
Then, export the data from Quickbooks for further analysis.
Ever since Quickbooks added the "download transactions" functionality, my bank accounts are NEVER out of balance in my records, monthly reconciliation typically takes me 3-5 minutes/month/account, and (because I use "Memo" fields extensively), I can always search for a particular transaction.
I recommend everyone have three passwords, for situations that demand High, Medium and Low security. Your bank and credit card accounts, and places where you have to supply a bank or credit card number (e.g., a site where you purchase stuff) deserve High security. Places on the Internet where your identity is at stake (e.g., do you want a criminal sending eMails from your account?) deserve Medium security. And, finally, you need a "throwaway," Low security passwords for those situations where you are required to provide a password, but you don't sense a security need (e.g., a password required to read a newspaper online; do you really care if someone else uses your password to read that same news?). But, mind you, three is not a magic number. If you have need for four security levels, by all means, select four...or more. Or, if you have different passwords for your business and your family matters, set up two sets of passwords (say, three for the office, and four for home).
Now I'd like to show you a way to create a High security password that's easy to remember, in xx easy steps:
1) Pick a word that connects with you, one that isn't particularly obvious. It might be a term of art in a hobby (not "woodworking" but, perhaps, "dovetail," not "stamps" but "philatelist."). Make it a longer word if you have more concerns about security. You can use very longs words, like "antidisestablishmentarianism," but make sure you can easily remember it (for purposes of illustration, I've picked "philatelist").
2) Pick a short string of digits, but don't use your age, your home address, or some part of your Social Security number, or other common information other people already know about you. And never use your bank account number as a password! I like to pick a word (say, that word you use to refer to some silly event in your past that still produces a smile), tap it out on the telephone touchpad, and write down those digits. Now there's a number that's hard to guess! Or, pick the month and day of an important date (but avoid those dates easy to learn or guess, like your birthday). Let's use "3981" for our example.
3) Now, take the word you picked, and break it into two parts (most people like to split on syllable boundaries, but you can pick, say, the first six letters, leaving all the rest. Write down the two parts on a piece of paper, separated by some space (you'd see "phila", some space, and then "telist").
4) Now, insert the digits you created in step #2 in the space between the two parts; you get "phila3981telist".
5) Finally, capitalize some of the letters. Capitalizing the first letter of each of the two parts is fairly obvious; maybe you'd like to make it a bit more complex and captialize the second letter in each string, ending up with "pHila3981tElist." That makes your password easier to remember (it's a word and string of digits you know, with your own personal preference on positioning of the parts and the capitalization).
From this you can easily use use the first two-thirds or the last two-thirds for your Medium-security password (e.g., "pHila3981" or "3981tElist"; just pick one, and remember that).
Finally, for a throw-away password, just pick some easy part of your Medium-security password (e.g., "3981t"; notice I included one of the letters, too; some websites refuse all-digit passwords).
Within a couple of days, you'll have easily remembered three different passwords, none of which are easy to guess. And, you won't have to keep them written down, anywhere (however, I always recommend you write them down and store them in a safe, or a bank deposit drawer, in case you're incapacitated and somebody needs to legitimately act like you to pay the mortgage, etc.)
Okay, so my 53 years trumps your 15.
The issue is that by installing Chrome in profile directories, you've left it completely read/write-capable. That means some malware can simply change the executable at boot time to what ever they'd prefer to put in place, and there's no protection.
When it's in the %ProgramFiles% structure, however, I can set the permissions (like Windows 7 does, by default, with the "TrustedInstaller" service, or like most of us who care about security do with prohibiting writing to executables by imposing an Administrator's permissions as the only "Write" authority.)
Generally, things in the %ProgramFiles% structure should be--under proper security--virtually invulnerable to malware attempting to corrupt software, while data, largely in the "Profiles", can be read and written freely.
Perhaps that's not a security vulnerability in your world, but it certainly is in mine.
Slashdot Mirror
The United States of America was founded on principles of justice and freedom for all.
o During the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, there were no special "carve-outs" for people of wealth. Every participant started racing at the sound of the starter's gun.
o When railroads were built, there were special coaches for first class, but they were part of the same train, going at the same speed, along the same route, to the same destination.
o While the rich can buy their own jet aircraft, the Air Traffic Control system that manages all aircraft in the skies give no special treatment to the jet aircraft, nor the lone pilot in a Piper Cub.
o When Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway system, he did not mandate special travel lanes for trucks or limousines; all traffic uses the same routes.
Every one of these historical innovations lifted up the poor, the middle class, and the rich. As a result, we became the world's most respected democracy, and the model for many other, newer countries to emulate.
Now, the FCC would like to change all that history and allow those who can afford to pay for a "special lane" on the Internet, crowding out other traffic, and making it slower. It will reward the oligarchs and penalize the common citizen.
I have been in the computer and electronics industry, from bench technician to CEO, since 1957. Now retired, I have watched as the very rich people, and the very large corporations have worked tirelessly in recent decades to destroy that equality of opportunity. If we are to survive as a nation, we must return to a democracy, with every citizen treated fairly and equitably.
We should, instead, be requiring our "common carriers" to expand their Internet capacity, robustness and security for all. Where there is plenty of reliable capacity, everyone will have the opportunity to use the Internet without disadvantage. The large carriers, like Comcast (which the FCC has misclassified), AT&T, Verizon, et. al., have been intentionally restricting their expansion of the Internet to make it slower and slower. Yes, they save the investments they should be making. But, deeper and more cynically, they have been intending to leverage those self-imposed restrictions into higher prices for these restricted servicesby adding a special lane for those willing to pay.
"Demos" is the Greek word for people; "kratia" is the Greek word for rule. Democracy puts the emphasis on people deciding how to rule. When appointed public officials usurp that decision-making to favor one class of people (or corporations) over another, it has violated basic democratic principles. The consequences will be uncomfortable for the citizens, and will erode our principles and the quality of our beloved nation.
You are a public, appointed official. I trust you will decide on the basis of democracy that the rich deserve no more preferential treatment than the middle class or the poor. We need to expand our Internet capacity for all, not make it available only to the highest bidders, driving all prices upward for the benefit of the already-rich.
...and Specs, even if they are absurdly wrong, but ONLY if they expect to keep their customers...as "The Brick" will no doubt discover.
This isn't, to me, a moral issue: It is just acknowledging that sometimes mistakes happen, and the customer has behaved by buying into those terms as offered. The customer isn't wrong here; they're just taking advantage of an apparent price advantage. The seller isn't wrong here; they just made a mistake.
"Customer satisfaction" is a core principle of capitalism, although many capitalists (to their own disadvantage) still refuse to understand that fact.
AT&T Still think it IS High-speed! (I, too, am rural, and getting the fastest speed I can...3 Mb/s...and cursing AT&T every hour of the day for their focus on THEIR profit, not any customers' quality of service.
Of course, if you're willing to pay them thousands of dollars a month, they'll happily give you higher speed...but not a worldwide comparable rates.
Broadband, in the home country of broadband, still sucks, and AT&T, Verizon, and all the other crooks enabled by the FCC (the head of the agency came from one of the major firms) have a singular pricing policy: Summarized, it is: "BEND OVER!"
What an ignorant troll. What "WiFI" module that you can't change? What make and model? I just changed/upgraded several WiFi Modules in Dell laptops in the past few days to gain speed and reliability.
And, when you finally need to buy parts for that "ThinkPenguin" or other small-time maker, where will you go? At least with a major manufacturer, I know I can still buy a replacement powerswitch or cover hinge when I need one, years after the products is no longer being sold.
This sounds like the AC posting is an employee of the company they extol...even to the extent of theorizing BIOS might become "open" at some future date. What a CROCK!
On the issue of TPM: It's there if I ever need it...but because I don't install the software for it, it appears to be abandoned and affects nothing people do on these computers.
...that cause every Windows system to crash and have to be powered-off to resume...I'll consider putting it on my phone! --CAO
1. For keeping two drives synchronized, check out GoodSync. It's powerful, and I use it to keep two separate computers holding identical copies of two major folders of data synchronized, so if one goes down, there's minimal loss of data (1 hour, max) I use this, for example, to keep a client's two 1TB collections of photos and iTunes synchronized. http://www.goodsync.com/
2. For making backups that are compact, efficient and easy to recover, look at "Disk Snapshot". It's inexpensive, robust and I've never experienced a restore failure. I make "Disk Snapshot" images of every computer, every night, in a development environment. That way, if the thing I just did breaks the system, I can restore a 100 GB Drive is less than an hour by booting from a CD and pointing to the backup on an external drive. http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm
Appropriate you list yourself as a "Coward." Unsubstantiated opinions that fly in the face of logic are cowardly.
Gee, should I never eat again, because the food might be contaminated?
I said I fixed one instance. I didn't say I solved the entire malware problem!
This malware (which puts up the appearance of a credit/debit card and asks for all you information) calls a server in the Ukraine. It was delivered by eMail (to a naive user) and intercepts attempts to reach your financial institution via their website. It presents, after login (did they capture the login info?), a panel looking like the credit/debit card, asking for the user to fill in all information, including account number, CVC, address, and other personal information (why anyone would fill in that data is beyond me!)
After much gnashing of teeth, I discovered it was undetectable by any known virus checker I use (AVG, Malwarebytes, Spybot), so I had to dig deeper. It turned out that the malware was using any references to 127.0.0.1 (local machine) for it's hook. All I had to do was edit the HOSTS file and add the domain names of the miscreant with a reference to a different IP address that is known to be a deadend (you could, for example, use 127.7.7.7).
When the malware couldn't execute, it couldn't disable the various malware detectors, and several files were then identified and removed.
The world's first "Service Bureau" was reputedly C-E-I-R, in what is now Crystal City, VA. I went to work there in 1962 (or 63?) with no programming experience, but a real grasp of electronics and transistor circuitry. Fortunately, I worked with pioneers in the field of Linear Programming (Bill Orchard-Hays, Eli Hellerman), and with an incredible team of programmers (people like Ed Yourdon) who freely shared code around the offices.
:-)
I'd ask someone how to, for example, write code to read data off a tape drive. They wrote a short subroutine in Assembly Language for the 1401. Then another person needed it, and she added robust code for backup and re-reading in an attempt to overcome errors on the media. Then another guy added another feature. I even, as a novice, added a couple of features, too.
To my mind, it was that tight team that taught me how to program...and we were all learning from each other.
That tape drive reading/writing subroutine was the beginning of my learning. We added more and more to that desk of punched cards until it was about 6" thick, and called it CELIB (C-E-I-R Library). It became a mainstay of programming at the company until the S/360 was announced. And, about 10 years later, while I was consulting in Canberra, Australia, I came across a government agency still using CELIB on their now-ancient 1401s!
I used to take home the 6" thick printout of the kernel of the 7090 IBSYS operating system, so I could read it and understand how it accomplished its' marvels. I learned it before there were any classes, any courses, not even technical schools teaching the field. I learned from close people who were, quite literally, only a month or two ahead of me on the learning curve, and from acknowledged experts who wrote that O.S. What an exciting time that was to be a young geek
I wish ATI would focus more energy on making their product stable, reliable and unable to be corrupted from innocent programs on the same computer. Right now, ATI and Nvidia drive the industry, and they couldn't give a damn about the BSODs they create!
Microsoft’s major success has been Windows (although they’ve made more money from products like Office). Now, they seem hell-bent on making sure that success is the root of their demise.
Microsoft’s products have traditionally reached their zenith in the third version.
Save for experimenters, we all ignored Windows 1 and even Windows 2.1 was an acknowledged dog, but it held promise. The first usable version, with serious networking capability, was Windows 3.1. Although still built atop DOS, we could finally do something productive with Windows. We got used to WYSIWYG.
Windows 95 was a dramatic improvement, but needed to be reinstalled every year or so just to keep it running. Windows 98 was much more solid, and morphed quietly into the product-extending “Second Edition,” which was an operating system that most homes and businesses adopted. Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was a throwback to Windows 98, with added features few found useful.
Finally, in a break with DOS, Microsoft turned to “New Technology.” Windows NT was, for all intents and purposes, an ignored product save for use on Servers. Because it was the first real “server” technology Microsoft sold, NT had a life in corporate America, but few individuals used it. It was quickly supplanted by the dramatically more stable Windows 2000, with more Internet and user-interface features. While limited, it was still a productive tool, and now crashes no longer took down the entire system, which was a boon in business, and in 24x7 servers. It was Windows XP (Windows 2000 with bug fixes, and a new “glossy” appearance) that finally took over the world; XP drove virtually all the earlier operating systems out of the inventory during it’s decade of dominance.
But, Microsoft couldn’t resist tampering: They designed anew and emerged with Vista, and both customers were happy. It was slow, buggy, and poorly thought out, like many of Microsoft’s “first version” products. They reasonably quickly moved to Windows 7, with a cleaner user interface, but still plagued by all kinds of security impositions on users and a complicated security model that only a security expert could navigate. Even though Microsoft forced Windows 7 on new computer buyers, most of them actually installed Windows XP (if they knew how) to regain access to familiar tools and a well-known user interface.
Based on the trend, you might expect that Microsoft has been readying Windows 8 to be the real successor to Windows 7but Microsoft has decided to follow short-term marketing trends to make the product utterly incompatible with user’s expectations: They abandoned the “Start” menu, changed to the “Metro” interface copied from cellphones, and they’re not catering to any of the millions of users who recognize XP is already wickedly obsolete, but saw Windows Vista and Windows 7 as a trip sideways, not a step up.
It’s as if Microsoft has decided that Windows 8 should be the start of yet another line of operating systems, and it will be a dog to learn and use for the next two generations.
But, worse, how will Microsoft replace all the Windows XP systems out there that Windows 8 can’t even emulate? How many retail computer systems, restaurant cash registers, laptops as field-service tools (etc.) are going to go without a new replacement because Microsoft has arbitrarily decided to cater to the “smartphone” and “tablet” users, who don’t have to deal with unique peripheral devices (e.g., receipt printers), or have the robustness that business demands? And, efforts to lockout users from changing their operating system, and creating a “closed ecosystem” for hardware and software products means that Microsoft will pursue the Apple strategyall the way down to Apple’s nominal 10% of the computer market (Apple is an electronic products company, with computer
...you're able to think critically, and to discern which evidence is relevant to the case in point. I don't care if you can use the Simplex method to invert a sparse 100x100 matrix in your head, but I DO care, as an employer, that you know what the Simplex method is, when it would be useful to apply, and what class of problems it can be used to solve. So, higher math is just evidence to me, your prospective employer, that you're not prone to take the easy way out, to rely on trusted (but irrelevant) methods, that you can seek out new solutions when they are called for. Without that breadth of background in the "thinking arts," you are doomed to a life of programming what others design. Most of the people who claim certain languages don't support certain advanced math features are just exposing their lack of imagination; they are coders, not programmers.
Your ignorance of the utility of the Concorde is, like an earlier poster, astounding. From London to New York, I could have meetings in the morning, and meetings the same day, four hours later in New York (4.5 for Dulles/Washington). That improved my productivity and saved many sophisticated business opportunities from running off the rails.
Your ignorance of the flight regimes of the Concorde are astounding. Remember, it flew at Mach 2 (and very quite inside the cabin, as I can confirm as a passenger), and that produces "sonic boom" across the landscape; over water there are few people, so little source of complaints. Sure, the Concorde "is nor more noisy than a normal jet..." only if you consider the XB-70 the exemplar of a "normal jet."
The available maps of service areas, and specific locations of infrastructure, are held as potential "terrorist assets" (although, through typical "security theater," they don't bother saying how attacked on these components would be attractive to some would be terrorist, who'd be much more likely to attack and contaminate the water system).
Basically, telcos--aided and abetted by the government--make broad and extravagant claims about coverage (why, right here where I live, the "Desolation wildnerness" prohibits entry except on foot or horseback, and there are no addresses there, but, if maps are to be believed, the area has marvelous high-speed coverage for Internet services).
For my county alone (aobut 88,000 households and businesses), I am planning a "primary research" survey to find out who has Internet service, and who doesn't). Do do that on a national scale will require tremendous effort and cost.
I know that visiting my local Forest Ranger District HQ recently got me a map of all the cell sites within their jurisdiction, but that would require individual visits to the thousands of sites the govenment own across the Country.
So, to be clear: The precision of data you can get from telcos and the regulatory agencies is as precise as those "coverage maps" for their "cellular service area;" Dramatically more aspirational than factual.
1) If you want to be understood. Can you imagine a judge issuing a decision in a case with bad grammar? It only inspires hundreds of unnecessary future cases, to litigate "what the judge really meant." Grammar represents the social rules of how literate people communicate. And, intentional violation of grammatical rules is the stuff of art: You represent the school teacher in a novel by giving their lines grammatical correctness; you represent the village idiot with the LACK of good grammar. Legal documents, professional publications, technical manuals are all most productive of positive outcomes when writter within the accepted grammatical rules of the language. See "Strunk & White." (And, yes, grammar changes over time, which is why so many people fail to appreciate Shakespeare in the original.) 2) If you want to be perceived as credible. Ah kin skribble to mah kin, but do you think those are the words of someone you'd trust to invest in? Business plans, project proposals, provocative ideas, scientific papers are rejected by readers if the authors' text is ungrammatical, because they project the writer's image as one with little reasoning power (with Mark Twain and WIll Rogers as credible exceptions, because of the obvious intentionality behind the text), and therefore render the entire text as unreliable. Imagine where Higgs' Boson would be if Einstein had--despite writing in other than his native tongue--written in poor grammatical form, Would it even have a name? So, argue against rules of grammar all you want, make fun of the grammatically accomplished...and live your life impoverished in the process. --Carol Anne
Ah, another vote for fluid, situational ethics. That'll get you lots of moral support from the criminal community!
What are you trying to do, make a living or change the world? (You generally can't do both at once; if you get rich from work, you can THEN maybe change the world.)
Let's start with the basics: What's in it for YOU? Is open source a buzzword, something you think you have to do ethically, just don't have the chops to turn it into a business, it based on other open source code? Is income something you vitally need to continue your work, to live a better life, or are you independently wealthy (I think you've ruled out the latter)?
I agree with an earlier poster: Make the core code that delivers basic utility to the user open source, if you want to use it as your "loss leader" to show them what's possible. Include all the extra features in the menus or configuration options of your program, so users can see what they're missing (clicking on it opens a window telling them it's in the commercial product, if they'd just buy it).
But, remember, open source is just a way for other people to leverage your code and make it into a competitive product...some will even violate your license agreement, and modify it to suit their customer base. Do you really want to spawn your own competitors?
An interview that just plows the same old ground is worthless; if it yields new insights that others can glean, it could be priceless.
I'm betting it's the former.
...because I use Lotus Domino/Notes. Creating new databases with specialized forms and views takes, oh, maybe an hour. As owner/operator of two business, one new start-up, plus sitting on both public and private boards of directors, I never thought I'd be this busy. But, I know exactly what I have to do every day with the built-in calendar and eMail. When I send an eMail, it's logged, so I can find it (and the responses).
As one example: I keep a Technology database of hard-won knowledge and acquired information about fixing computers (my own, private Knowledgebase). When (as just the other day) I discover a new solution (the nasty uses by malware authors of the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options registry key, and how to clean it out), I document it, so I have the solution on my notebook wherever I go. When I find new information and add it to the database in the field, it's immediately copied back to the server for others to use when I return to the office.).
I expect many of you to issue the usual gripes and outrageous claims about Lotus Domino/Notes, but unless you really build apps for it in a hour, you don't even understand the power of the product. I've been using it since 1992, and it's STILL the primary tool on every computer in my company.
Sure, you'll save a few bucks...for a few months. Then, things will start failing. You'll find there're no hardware drivers for many of the parts inside, and when people start finding mechanical parts, like pushbuttons, sockets and controls, falling off, you'll discover that the caseworks maker doesn't sell spare parts. Also, as mentioned above, you'll have to pay for Windows licenses (unless you're moving to Ubuntu, too). I've got lots of happy clients, because I keep replacing the crap they have (e.g., the computer with a touch-screen display that overheats every Summer day afternoon) with brand-name products. They pay me my comparatively higher prices (considering the local dolts who call themselves my "competition") because I deliver stable, reliable systems that they never have to worry about (until, like yesterday, a UPS went up in smoke...quick to fix that one). Stick with reputable makers. Avoid the small storefronts that will "build yours" and put in everything cheap, but charge you somewhat less than brand-name products. Heck, I've only been in this computer business for over half-a-century, so my experience probably will be punished by others with a more "home-brew" bent...but you said it's a business, not a bunch of students. You should take a good look at whether, over the entire life (which will inevitably be more than 18 months!), you'll have made a good bargain. I'd wager that "white box clones" will end up saving you nothing.
Quickbooks now allows you to download transactions, semi-automatically (you have to go through them and edit them, in some cases, so you know what was the transaction was for. Then, export the data from Quickbooks for further analysis. Ever since Quickbooks added the "download transactions" functionality, my bank accounts are NEVER out of balance in my records, monthly reconciliation typically takes me 3-5 minutes/month/account, and (because I use "Memo" fields extensively), I can always search for a particular transaction.
I recommend everyone have three passwords, for situations that demand High, Medium and Low security. Your bank and credit card accounts, and places where you have to supply a bank or credit card number (e.g., a site where you purchase stuff) deserve High security. Places on the Internet where your identity is at stake (e.g., do you want a criminal sending eMails from your account?) deserve Medium security. And, finally, you need a "throwaway," Low security passwords for those situations where you are required to provide a password, but you don't sense a security need (e.g., a password required to read a newspaper online; do you really care if someone else uses your password to read that same news?). But, mind you, three is not a magic number. If you have need for four security levels, by all means, select four...or more. Or, if you have different passwords for your business and your family matters, set up two sets of passwords (say, three for the office, and four for home).
Now I'd like to show you a way to create a High security password that's easy to remember, in xx easy steps:
1) Pick a word that connects with you, one that isn't particularly obvious. It might be a term of art in a hobby (not "woodworking" but, perhaps, "dovetail," not "stamps" but "philatelist."). Make it a longer word if you have more concerns about security. You can use very longs words, like "antidisestablishmentarianism," but make sure you can easily remember it (for purposes of illustration, I've picked "philatelist").
2) Pick a short string of digits, but don't use your age, your home address, or some part of your Social Security number, or other common information other people already know about you. And never use your bank account number as a password! I like to pick a word (say, that word you use to refer to some silly event in your past that still produces a smile), tap it out on the telephone touchpad, and write down those digits. Now there's a number that's hard to guess! Or, pick the month and day of an important date (but avoid those dates easy to learn or guess, like your birthday). Let's use "3981" for our example.
3) Now, take the word you picked, and break it into two parts (most people like to split on syllable boundaries, but you can pick, say, the first six letters, leaving all the rest. Write down the two parts on a piece of paper, separated by some space (you'd see "phila", some space, and then "telist").
4) Now, insert the digits you created in step #2 in the space between the two parts; you get "phila3981telist".
5) Finally, capitalize some of the letters. Capitalizing the first letter of each of the two parts is fairly obvious; maybe you'd like to make it a bit more complex and captialize the second letter in each string, ending up with "pHila3981tElist."
That makes your password easier to remember (it's a word and string of digits you know, with your own personal preference on positioning of the parts and the capitalization).
From this you can easily use use the first two-thirds or the last two-thirds for your Medium-security password (e.g., "pHila3981" or "3981tElist"; just pick one, and remember that).
Finally, for a throw-away password, just pick some easy part of your Medium-security password (e.g., "3981t"; notice I included one of the letters, too; some websites refuse all-digit passwords).
Within a couple of days, you'll have easily remembered three different passwords, none of which are easy to guess. And, you won't have to keep them written down, anywhere (however, I always recommend you write them down and store them in a safe, or a bank deposit drawer, in case you're incapacitated and somebody needs to legitimately act like you to pay the mortgage, etc.)
I hope this helps someone else, too.
--Carol Anne (Copyright 2009, Carol Anne Ogdin)
Okay, so my 53 years trumps your 15. The issue is that by installing Chrome in profile directories, you've left it completely read/write-capable. That means some malware can simply change the executable at boot time to what ever they'd prefer to put in place, and there's no protection. When it's in the %ProgramFiles% structure, however, I can set the permissions (like Windows 7 does, by default, with the "TrustedInstaller" service, or like most of us who care about security do with prohibiting writing to executables by imposing an Administrator's permissions as the only "Write" authority.) Generally, things in the %ProgramFiles% structure should be--under proper security--virtually invulnerable to malware attempting to corrupt software, while data, largely in the "Profiles", can be read and written freely. Perhaps that's not a security vulnerability in your world, but it certainly is in mine.