Much as I love Avira, it currently has a memory leak on Windows XP that can cause computers to freeze and icons to temporarily disappear (until reboot). You can get around it, though, by unchecking "Protect files and registry entries" under "Security" in its settings.
In the most recent comparative, Avast did about as well as Antivir, and it's free also.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but what's the problem with allowing the browser to remember logins for you if you don't ever allow anyone else to use your computer? I'm reasonably sure the way my account was hacked was when I stupidly logged into it on someone else's computer.
If someone steals your password, as I learned when my gmail account was hacked, the first thing they're going to do if they know anything is change both your password and your security questions. The only way changing your password will help is if the person who's stolen it is too dumb to do this, and that seems unlikely.
As anyone who's ever accidentally done it knows, installing more than one antivirus on your computer (assuming both have background scanning) is a great way to make sure your computer freezes, is slow, or develops weird errors. Microsoft's detection is not going to be flawless - certainly if it's the same as Windows Security Center's detection, which often reports the wrong information about whether or not an installed antivirus is working. This means users are going to be offered Security Essentials when they already have a working antivirus, and many of them aren't going to know enough to avoid installing it if they see it.
I've had one client already who did this very thing.
Avira AntiVir Personal is free, detects at a much higher rate than Security Essentials (99.1 vs 97.2 percent, I believe, based on data from av-comparatives.org), and definitely is more lightweight also.
Yes, clearly the problem here is Harry Potter rather than lousy parenting. If your child wants something that's both impractical and could hurt the ecosystem, a responsible parent says, "No, I'm sorry, but you just can't have that." Real children are a lot more reasonable than Veruca Salt, and those who aren't can be disciplined until they learn to be. And really, hasn't anyone thought of the comparison with baby alligators?
Yes, clearly the problem is Harry Potter rather than lousy parenting. If a child wants something that's both impractical and could be damaging to the ecosystem, a responsible parent says, "I'm sorry, but you can't have that." Real children are a lot more reasonable than Veruca Salt. And seriously, I'm amazed no one has made the comparison with baby alligators yet.
I'm amazed to be the first saying this, but clearly the problem here is not Harry Potter, it's parents who aren't willing or able to tell their children "no". An owl is not a pet.
I wrote a paper in 9th grade (13 years ago) about the effects of rising dioxin levels on human fertility statistics. If it's indeed true that human male fertility has been falling steadily since the 1930s, dioxins are most likely the reason. Because they are estrogenic and can cross the placenta, they can cause numerous other birth defects as well, including undescended testes, hypogonadism, micropenis, hermaphroditism, other intersex conditions, and gender identity disorders (if a male fetus' brain or body - but not both - develops in a typically female way because of the presence of dioxin). In mice, it produced male mice who would assume the typically female position with other males, and who were infertile.
The continued presence of dioxins in the environment may well lead to the extinction of the human race, not now or even in 50 years, but whenever the concentration in our tissue (which increases with successive generations) is high enough that none of us are fertile anymore. Of course, by then we'll probably be able to create new people via in-vitro or cloning.
If a tattoo (or piercing or other body-mod) is an expression of your religion - particularly one that your religion or cultural group required of you - then it is likely protected under the First Amendment and employment non-discrimination laws. While this is pretty rare, I know it's traditional for Maori to get tattoos (even facial tattoos) as part of a cultural tradition, and I know of at least one Native American ceremony (the Sun Dance) that involves piercing. I'm sure there are other. If you're wiccan, and the head of your circle or coven tells you it's important for your spiritual development to get a particular tattoo, that might even be enough... as might a Celtic-looking tattoo if you're Irish and trying to display your cultural pride. Asking you not to display such devotional tattoos / piercings at work would be akin to asking an Orthodox Jew not to wear fringes, or asking a Sikh to take off his turban - in other words, very illegal. Especially if your company doesn't have a well-stated anti-tattoo policy.
If your tattoo was just for shits and giggles, though, it's your own fault for not getting it in an area that's easily covered with clothing. And if companies can now refuse to hire tobacco smokers - or medicinal marijuana smokers in states in which such things are legal - then I'm sure recreational tattoos are no different.
I bet this is a case of the superintendent or someone on the school board being a rabid Mac-head, and like all rabid Mac-heads, trying to convince as many people as possible to join the "one true way" by whatever means necessary.
And let me be clear, I have a Mac and an iPhone. I like them both quite a bit. But seriously, some of you Mac cultists creep me the hell out.
It's because of familiarity, I'm pretty sure. I've had clients absolutely refuse to use anything else, even IE8, because it "felt" (in other words, looked) different from what they were used to. My solution to this is usually one of the Firefox themes that makes Firefox look like IE. The IE6 one is pretty flawless.
But... isn't using IE6 in a corporate environment the equivalent of saying, "Yes, please infect my computers with malware without warning!"?
That's not even to touch matters of compatibility... Doesn't security mean anything? And wouldn't most IE6 web apps work in IE8 under its compatibility mode... or am I being overly optimistic about said compatibility mode?
I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned a solution I tried - get yourself an under-desk mini stepper or bike, along with a non-rolling chair, and you can pedal or step away while you sit at your desk. Even if you're only doing it very slowly, doing it for hours will certainly help you lose weight, and probably get you in better shape than you're in now.
Okay, so I know it's not actually meatspace, but I've had pretty good luck with OkCupid for meeting both friends and people for dating. It's free, it's geek-friendly, and the matching system works pretty well. Plus the questions are interesting, as are some of the tests.
While I liked the movie overall, I do have one thing to say:
Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", particularly the version he sang himself, is possibly the most incongruous song you could ever choose for a love scene. The entire theater was laughing their asses off, myself included. I don't know how anyone could possibly have thought that was a good idea, except maybe as some kind of bizarre joke.
This does make me wonder - what sort of lobbying (if any?) does the FOSS community engage in, to try to convince the federal government to ditch its long-standing Microsoft-only-by-default position? Surely if we could convince the government that using an OS developed by the people is the patriotic thing to do, an Obama White House might at least consider it...
There is no "have to" about this. Nowhere does the original article say Silverlight will be used *exclusively*, but the post on Slashdot says as much. Yellow journalism, anyone?
Hulu has been advertising that they're showing the inauguration for several days now, with a countdown to the start time and everything. And Hulu works just fine on my Ubuntu machines, the fast ones at least..
The Linux community seems to be very invested in being perpetually misunderstood and discriminated against. Get over yourself, guys, and get the facts before whining about something that's not even true.
I feel like I should speak to this as extensively as I can, since I'm self-employed as a tech support guy, and around 95 percent of my 250+ clients are seniors.
The suggestion about using Ubuntu is a good one, but Ubuntu may not be going far enough in the direction of ease-of-use. I'm surprised more people don't seem to be aware of Linux Mint, which removes the hassle of installing video codecs and browser plugins, so the setup process for a basic user is two steps - 1. Install the OS, and 2. Install Acrobat Reader and the browser plugin for it. This takes around half an hour, and then you're done, and Mint 6 is based on Ubuntu Intrepid anyway, but the menu is a bit slicker (imho), and the artwork more polished.
Putting icons on the desktop for the browser and the email program, and also the word processor, is essential, of course. Ubuntu or Mint is a great Windows replacement for nearly any beginning or advanced user - it's normally only intermediate users who want to install lots of random crap from the internet who might get upset when they can't under Wine. In my experience, most seniors fall into the "basic user" category anyway, so they won't really notice a difference between Windows and Ubuntu unless they're already dependent on AOL 9.
With seniors, the most important thing is to be not just patient but reassuring. Many seniors have a mental block against technology, but if you patiently reassure them that yes, they really can figure it out if they just read everything on the screen and use logic, eventually they'll believe you and try. This can be time consuming at first, but in the long run it will save you a great deal of time as they start to become self-sufficient. It's a natural human tendency in most people to bug someone else if you think you can get away with it, rather than trying to fix your problems yourself - training that out of a person can be tricky, but is ultimately very beneficial for both you and your time.
My intro programming class at U of Chicago was taught entirely in Scheme. Having already taken C++ and Basic before, I found it tedious and hellish, but I can see how it would definitely leave a new programmer open to any other paradigm.
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Much as I love Avira, it currently has a memory leak on Windows XP that can cause computers to freeze and icons to temporarily disappear (until reboot). You can get around it, though, by unchecking "Protect files and registry entries" under "Security" in its settings. In the most recent comparative, Avast did about as well as Antivir, and it's free also.
Ah. Very good point. I hadn't considered the jealous girlfriend / boyfriend angle.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but what's the problem with allowing the browser to remember logins for you if you don't ever allow anyone else to use your computer? I'm reasonably sure the way my account was hacked was when I stupidly logged into it on someone else's computer.
If someone steals your password, as I learned when my gmail account was hacked, the first thing they're going to do if they know anything is change both your password and your security questions. The only way changing your password will help is if the person who's stolen it is too dumb to do this, and that seems unlikely.
As anyone who's ever accidentally done it knows, installing more than one antivirus on your computer (assuming both have background scanning) is a great way to make sure your computer freezes, is slow, or develops weird errors. Microsoft's detection is not going to be flawless - certainly if it's the same as Windows Security Center's detection, which often reports the wrong information about whether or not an installed antivirus is working. This means users are going to be offered Security Essentials when they already have a working antivirus, and many of them aren't going to know enough to avoid installing it if they see it. I've had one client already who did this very thing.
Avira AntiVir Personal is free, detects at a much higher rate than Security Essentials (99.1 vs 97.2 percent, I believe, based on data from av-comparatives.org), and definitely is more lightweight also.
Yes, clearly the problem here is Harry Potter rather than lousy parenting. If your child wants something that's both impractical and could hurt the ecosystem, a responsible parent says, "No, I'm sorry, but you just can't have that." Real children are a lot more reasonable than Veruca Salt, and those who aren't can be disciplined until they learn to be. And really, hasn't anyone thought of the comparison with baby alligators?
Yes, clearly the problem is Harry Potter rather than lousy parenting. If a child wants something that's both impractical and could be damaging to the ecosystem, a responsible parent says, "I'm sorry, but you can't have that." Real children are a lot more reasonable than Veruca Salt. And seriously, I'm amazed no one has made the comparison with baby alligators yet.
I'm amazed to be the first saying this, but clearly the problem here is not Harry Potter, it's parents who aren't willing or able to tell their children "no". An owl is not a pet.
I knew someone would go there. Are you Beavis or Butthead?
I wrote a paper in 9th grade (13 years ago) about the effects of rising dioxin levels on human fertility statistics. If it's indeed true that human male fertility has been falling steadily since the 1930s, dioxins are most likely the reason. Because they are estrogenic and can cross the placenta, they can cause numerous other birth defects as well, including undescended testes, hypogonadism, micropenis, hermaphroditism, other intersex conditions, and gender identity disorders (if a male fetus' brain or body - but not both - develops in a typically female way because of the presence of dioxin). In mice, it produced male mice who would assume the typically female position with other males, and who were infertile.
The continued presence of dioxins in the environment may well lead to the extinction of the human race, not now or even in 50 years, but whenever the concentration in our tissue (which increases with successive generations) is high enough that none of us are fertile anymore. Of course, by then we'll probably be able to create new people via in-vitro or cloning.
If a tattoo (or piercing or other body-mod) is an expression of your religion - particularly one that your religion or cultural group required of you - then it is likely protected under the First Amendment and employment non-discrimination laws. While this is pretty rare, I know it's traditional for Maori to get tattoos (even facial tattoos) as part of a cultural tradition, and I know of at least one Native American ceremony (the Sun Dance) that involves piercing. I'm sure there are other. If you're wiccan, and the head of your circle or coven tells you it's important for your spiritual development to get a particular tattoo, that might even be enough... as might a Celtic-looking tattoo if you're Irish and trying to display your cultural pride. Asking you not to display such devotional tattoos / piercings at work would be akin to asking an Orthodox Jew not to wear fringes, or asking a Sikh to take off his turban - in other words, very illegal. Especially if your company doesn't have a well-stated anti-tattoo policy.
If your tattoo was just for shits and giggles, though, it's your own fault for not getting it in an area that's easily covered with clothing. And if companies can now refuse to hire tobacco smokers - or medicinal marijuana smokers in states in which such things are legal - then I'm sure recreational tattoos are no different.
I bet this is a case of the superintendent or someone on the school board being a rabid Mac-head, and like all rabid Mac-heads, trying to convince as many people as possible to join the "one true way" by whatever means necessary.
And let me be clear, I have a Mac and an iPhone. I like them both quite a bit. But seriously, some of you Mac cultists creep me the hell out.
I should have clarified. I'm a freelance support guy. My clients are home users who don't know much about computers, not corporate people.
It's because of familiarity, I'm pretty sure. I've had clients absolutely refuse to use anything else, even IE8, because it "felt" (in other words, looked) different from what they were used to. My solution to this is usually one of the Firefox themes that makes Firefox look like IE. The IE6 one is pretty flawless.
But... isn't using IE6 in a corporate environment the equivalent of saying, "Yes, please infect my computers with malware without warning!"? That's not even to touch matters of compatibility... Doesn't security mean anything? And wouldn't most IE6 web apps work in IE8 under its compatibility mode... or am I being overly optimistic about said compatibility mode?
This is not news. I did a report on the effect of dioxins on human children in my high school Civics class... in 1996.
Ubuntu's stock kernel has been tickless for several releases now.
I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned a solution I tried - get yourself an under-desk mini stepper or bike, along with a non-rolling chair, and you can pedal or step away while you sit at your desk. Even if you're only doing it very slowly, doing it for hours will certainly help you lose weight, and probably get you in better shape than you're in now.
Okay, so I know it's not actually meatspace, but I've had pretty good luck with OkCupid for meeting both friends and people for dating. It's free, it's geek-friendly, and the matching system works pretty well. Plus the questions are interesting, as are some of the tests.
While I liked the movie overall, I do have one thing to say: Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", particularly the version he sang himself, is possibly the most incongruous song you could ever choose for a love scene. The entire theater was laughing their asses off, myself included. I don't know how anyone could possibly have thought that was a good idea, except maybe as some kind of bizarre joke.
This does make me wonder - what sort of lobbying (if any?) does the FOSS community engage in, to try to convince the federal government to ditch its long-standing Microsoft-only-by-default position? Surely if we could convince the government that using an OS developed by the people is the patriotic thing to do, an Obama White House might at least consider it...
There is no "have to" about this. Nowhere does the original article say Silverlight will be used *exclusively*, but the post on Slashdot says as much. Yellow journalism, anyone?
Hulu has been advertising that they're showing the inauguration for several days now, with a countdown to the start time and everything. And Hulu works just fine on my Ubuntu machines, the fast ones at least..
The Linux community seems to be very invested in being perpetually misunderstood and discriminated against. Get over yourself, guys, and get the facts before whining about something that's not even true.
I feel like I should speak to this as extensively as I can, since I'm self-employed as a tech support guy, and around 95 percent of my 250+ clients are seniors.
The suggestion about using Ubuntu is a good one, but Ubuntu may not be going far enough in the direction of ease-of-use. I'm surprised more people don't seem to be aware of Linux Mint, which removes the hassle of installing video codecs and browser plugins, so the setup process for a basic user is two steps - 1. Install the OS, and 2. Install Acrobat Reader and the browser plugin for it. This takes around half an hour, and then you're done, and Mint 6 is based on Ubuntu Intrepid anyway, but the menu is a bit slicker (imho), and the artwork more polished.
Putting icons on the desktop for the browser and the email program, and also the word processor, is essential, of course. Ubuntu or Mint is a great Windows replacement for nearly any beginning or advanced user - it's normally only intermediate users who want to install lots of random crap from the internet who might get upset when they can't under Wine. In my experience, most seniors fall into the "basic user" category anyway, so they won't really notice a difference between Windows and Ubuntu unless they're already dependent on AOL 9.
With seniors, the most important thing is to be not just patient but reassuring. Many seniors have a mental block against technology, but if you patiently reassure them that yes, they really can figure it out if they just read everything on the screen and use logic, eventually they'll believe you and try. This can be time consuming at first, but in the long run it will save you a great deal of time as they start to become self-sufficient. It's a natural human tendency in most people to bug someone else if you think you can get away with it, rather than trying to fix your problems yourself - training that out of a person can be tricky, but is ultimately very beneficial for both you and your time.
My intro programming class at U of Chicago was taught entirely in Scheme. Having already taken C++ and Basic before, I found it tedious and hellish, but I can see how it would definitely leave a new programmer open to any other paradigm.