It's certainly not required. I've got two machines beside me on my desk happily installed with SP1 without the KB update. We've got a few dozen users now using SP1, and so far not a peep.
You shouldn't pay them more for a product. But it may very well be worth your time to pay them more for a service. Some small businesses provide a level of SERVICE which are worth a premium.
Dumb legislation is nothing new. There have always been politicians passing laws about things they know nothing about. So hearing about a new internet censorship law that is vague is no surprise.
What I want to know is how do they plan to enforce it? If MySpace moves their servers to another country, does the U.S. government have any jurisdiction over them whatsoever? Will they block content that is illegal in the U.S. from these servers in other nations? Because if they do, how are they any different from China? People in America want to use MySpace, and their government is preventing them from doing what they want to do? Who would be the repressive regime then?
I can't agree more, Windows isn't worth the money they charge. I know a lot of people who pirate for the same reason. I personally don't, I just hate having to deal with the hassles (like this article is discussing). Not having to deal with the hassles of piracy is worth enough to me that I will pay, but I certainly am not paying for Windows itself.
I have been working IT for a few years, and have been a computer geek for a long time now. I use Windows, Linux, and OSX about equally. Whenever anyone asks me to reccomend a system for them, I always reccomend Mac. I used to hesitate because of the need for Windows programs. But with the release of Boot Camp there is no longer any reason to hesitate in reccomending it to them.
I think it's politically incorrect to say this because no one should ever hear that they are "doomed to be dumb". I actually agree that no one should hear this, but denying that nature has a large effect on intellegence isn't the way.
People need to realise that there are many types of intelligence, and that not having a high IQ really only related to a small number of them. There is acedemic intelligence (heck you can often find a person who is great in one subject area and not another), there is emotional intelligence, there is interpersonal/social intelligence, there is technical (hands on) aptitudes that are also intelligences.
Nature affecting IQ doesn't mean that someone who has "bad" genes is dumb. It just means that they will probably use some other intelligence or talent to make their contribution to the world.
Consider Alberta as a place to look for work. Our two major cities (Edmonton and Calgary) are the fastest growing in Canada. There's lots of IT employment available if you have the skills, heck there's lots of most kinds of employment. We currently have a shortage of skilled workers, and a jobless rate of less than 5%. It's not quite as beautiful or warm as BC, but it's still nice.
I'm a Calgarian myself. When I compare the quality of life in Calgary to most other places, the results are enough to motivate me to tough out the weather. Course, sometimes I've got to take holidays to somewhere warm.
I had to do a final project just last semester, and there are a few tips that I can share with you.
My project was a computer engineering project. We controlled a bunch of simple devices over the web through a server that we had set up.
One thing I learned was to have backup plans and modularity. We listed somewhere between 6-8 devices that we thought might work. We ended up getting 3 of them to work.
What was nice about that was that we could still deliver those 3 devices (which showed up the project that presented right after us which picked a single device and got it to work in a similar fashion).
But we also could scale the amount of work. If things had gone better, and we'd had a little more time, we could have added another device or two. As it is, it took us the semester to get what we did working.
I'd reccomend trying to pick a similar project where you can get a basic set of features working relatively easily, but also have a bunch of other interesting features that you can bring out if you have the time for them. That way you're guaranteed a project that does something right, and the ability to challenge yourself if you need to.
Also, always make sure to have more than one method for doing each part of the project. Inevitably you figure out that something isn't going to work out the way that you thought it would. We had to start from scratch on portions of the project a couple of times. It was immensely helpful to have a solid backup plan to start working on right away.
This week I met an old-school mainframe guy who started working for IBM in the early 50s. He had some amazing stories to tell.
The one that I like best involved backing up to tape. Apparently tape backup started not as tape, but as thin steel ribbon. This was some heavy stuff, so they employed 3-5 horsepower motors to spin it. Of course, if the motors weren't calibrated right, the steel tape would often snap. One guy even lost his arm to this tape.
How's that for nuts? Computer maintainers don't get these kind of injuries anymore I'd assume. What with steel tape being phased out.
This topic has been discussed a good dozen times already on slashdot. The same conclusion is reached every time.
The long and the short of it is that nobody knows for sure. The point isn't exactly what the number means (80 000 000 unique downloads vs. 80 000 000 downloads by a crazed fan), but that the number is increasing, and therefore so much Firefox use to some extent.
Personally I've been installing it on customer's systems for a few weeks now as a way to beat spyware. Some of them adopt it, some of them don't. But those who do adopt constitute an increase in Firefox use.
This sounds to me like a great idea, I know I'd join such a group. Unfortunately I have no idea if such things exist. If they do, likely they can be found out about at a local post-secondary institution or computer service shop.
Why not start you own? If you happen to live in Calgary, I'd gladly help you do it.
My experience, as I've recovered from both video game and drug addictions is that the major difference lies in the chemical effect of drug/alcohol addictions.
To quit an MMO when you're addicted requires an amount of effort equivalent to that of the phsycological component of a drug addiction. This effort is mainly to destroy the habit of your addiction, the physical action of sitting in front of the computer OR the physical action of taking a hit. Also, both addictions make inroads into other areas of your life such as socializing. People quitiing MMOs have to deal with the same issues of either dropping friends, or explaining their wish to quit that drug addicts do.
The major difference comes in the chemical addiction. MMOs don't have the significant chemical addiction that hard drugs have. This is what adds difficulty to tackling a drug addiction that is above and beyond an MMo addiction. Physiological sysmptoms of withdrawal also become an issue.
For this reason MMO addiction is less serious than drug addiction. However, it is still serious.
Actually, they are hoping for an increase specifically in corporate environments who are choosing to stick to Windows 2000. These people are not entirely ingnorant to browser issues the way that most 98/ME/2000 home users are.
I'd assume that corporate environments sticking with Windows 2000 are doing so either for the cost benefits, or the better stability compared with XP. I'm sure they'd love to have a better browser if they could.
Asa may be right about this benefiting Firefox. The article also states that they've put a fair amount of effort into adding auto-update and preference locking features into future Firefox releases. This is aimed directly at the corporate environment.
Every time my inner geeks feels pleased with the idea that MS is starting to release it's control of the computer industry...
I am then crushed by an article about MS doing really well.
I sincerely hope that MS is in fact loosing it's dominance. Not because I hate Microsoft, but because the continued dominance of MS means yet more time we'll spend without significant innovation through competition.
It's taken me a while, but I've got the other techs at my shop finally convinced that Firefox is a good idea. We're now installing it for people who have routine malware problems. These people are quite happy to switch if it offers a chance of not having the same problems. However, it's not something that they would ever seek out themselves.
So I guess I'm responsible for converting a few non-technical users. I urge the rest of you to try to do the same for people you know with malware problems. People will switch in a second when they personally have a good reason to do it.
I have a few passwords that I use for all the various things that I need passwords for. The upside of this is that I don't have to remember as much. The downside is that if anyone ever did learn my password, it would compromise more than if I used a different password in each instance.
However, as a countermeasure I've been known to make my few passwords very long and obscure (full sentence method).
I work as a tech part time while going to school. And all I see all day is compromised machines.
There is a lot of talk here about how a SP2 machine should be just fine, given that the Windows Firewall is enabled by default. Doesn't happen, in my experience. Half the machines we have in our shop being scanned for viruses are SP2. SP2 is almost a year old, there are a good 20 critical updates after SP2 now.
At my shop we've gotten to the point where we sometimes don't even bother cleaning the virii up. We just tell the customer straight up that it's $80CDN for a backup, wipe, and reload. Because it simply isn't worth our time to fight it out with these things.
We've got tons of sophisticated virus scanning tools. We run fully some 7 scans/tools to clean up a system. The thing that amazes me is that they all find stuff the others didn't. No AV maker is actually keeping up with all the new crap out there.
It takes about 1 hour worth of time to sit down with a customer, back-up their data, and then install using an unattended installation CD with the works. They get a cleaner PC than if we spend the several hours it takes to set up all the virus scanning.
The only thing I have to say is this: Windows is insecure. Otherwise we wouldn't be making money cleaning up two day old systems caked with malware. The problem is real, and it is large. But in my experience, AV providers are not going to solve it.
This is _not_ a troll. If you think the comments are one-sided, uninteresting, etc., then don't bother reading them. Just read the articles.
The thing about the internet is you have to allow everyone a chance to speak. Sometimes people speak nonsense. It can be hard to sort through the nonsense and find the actual good stuff. That's life.
I'm loathe to post this in another thread, but no one bothered to reply to me before.
In the Paul Thurott article that calls Longhorn "not positive at all" (see slashdot posting a few hours ago), he also drops this bombshell: This one's bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible cheaps this very year. Yeah, seriously.
Can anyone confirm or deny this for me? Am I just an idiot to be worried about this? PowerPC architecture is as much a reason to love Macs as OSX in my opinion.
From TFA:
This one's bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible cheaps this very year. Yeah, seriously.,
Can anyone either confirm or deny this? I sincerely hope it doesn't happen. PowerPC is a much better architecture and is as much of a reason to switch to a Mac as OSX is. IMHO, anyways.
There was a difference though. The reputation of Sony was improving during that time period. And SEGA had some terrible previous flops, Saturn anyone?
With the current climate, Google and Apple are gaining public favour. Whereas Microsoft is plagued by favourability problems such as adware/spyware/viruses.
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly not required. I've got two machines beside me on my desk happily installed with SP1 without the KB update. We've got a few dozen users now using SP1, and so far not a peep.
You shouldn't pay them more for a product. But it may very well be worth your time to pay them more for a service. Some small businesses provide a level of SERVICE which are worth a premium.
Dumb legislation is nothing new. There have always been politicians passing laws about things they know nothing about. So hearing about a new internet censorship law that is vague is no surprise.
What I want to know is how do they plan to enforce it? If MySpace moves their servers to another country, does the U.S. government have any jurisdiction over them whatsoever? Will they block content that is illegal in the U.S. from these servers in other nations? Because if they do, how are they any different from China? People in America want to use MySpace, and their government is preventing them from doing what they want to do? Who would be the repressive regime then?
I can't agree more, Windows isn't worth the money they charge. I know a lot of people who pirate for the same reason. I personally don't, I just hate having to deal with the hassles (like this article is discussing). Not having to deal with the hassles of piracy is worth enough to me that I will pay, but I certainly am not paying for Windows itself.
I have been working IT for a few years, and have been a computer geek for a long time now. I use Windows, Linux, and OSX about equally. Whenever anyone asks me to reccomend a system for them, I always reccomend Mac. I used to hesitate because of the need for Windows programs. But with the release of Boot Camp there is no longer any reason to hesitate in reccomending it to them.
I think it's politically incorrect to say this because no one should ever hear that they are "doomed to be dumb". I actually agree that no one should hear this, but denying that nature has a large effect on intellegence isn't the way.
People need to realise that there are many types of intelligence, and that not having a high IQ really only related to a small number of them. There is acedemic intelligence (heck you can often find a person who is great in one subject area and not another), there is emotional intelligence, there is interpersonal/social intelligence, there is technical (hands on) aptitudes that are also intelligences.
Nature affecting IQ doesn't mean that someone who has "bad" genes is dumb. It just means that they will probably use some other intelligence or talent to make their contribution to the world.
Consider Alberta as a place to look for work. Our two major cities (Edmonton and Calgary) are the fastest growing in Canada. There's lots of IT employment available if you have the skills, heck there's lots of most kinds of employment. We currently have a shortage of skilled workers, and a jobless rate of less than 5%. It's not quite as beautiful or warm as BC, but it's still nice. I'm a Calgarian myself. When I compare the quality of life in Calgary to most other places, the results are enough to motivate me to tough out the weather. Course, sometimes I've got to take holidays to somewhere warm.
My project was a computer engineering project. We controlled a bunch of simple devices over the web through a server that we had set up.
One thing I learned was to have backup plans and modularity. We listed somewhere between 6-8 devices that we thought might work. We ended up getting 3 of them to work.
What was nice about that was that we could still deliver those 3 devices (which showed up the project that presented right after us which picked a single device and got it to work in a similar fashion).
But we also could scale the amount of work. If things had gone better, and we'd had a little more time, we could have added another device or two. As it is, it took us the semester to get what we did working.
I'd reccomend trying to pick a similar project where you can get a basic set of features working relatively easily, but also have a bunch of other interesting features that you can bring out if you have the time for them. That way you're guaranteed a project that does something right, and the ability to challenge yourself if you need to.
Also, always make sure to have more than one method for doing each part of the project. Inevitably you figure out that something isn't going to work out the way that you thought it would. We had to start from scratch on portions of the project a couple of times. It was immensely helpful to have a solid backup plan to start working on right away.
Hope that helps.
The one that I like best involved backing up to tape. Apparently tape backup started not as tape, but as thin steel ribbon. This was some heavy stuff, so they employed 3-5 horsepower motors to spin it. Of course, if the motors weren't calibrated right, the steel tape would often snap. One guy even lost his arm to this tape.
How's that for nuts? Computer maintainers don't get these kind of injuries anymore I'd assume. What with steel tape being phased out.
The long and the short of it is that nobody knows for sure. The point isn't exactly what the number means (80 000 000 unique downloads vs. 80 000 000 downloads by a crazed fan), but that the number is increasing, and therefore so much Firefox use to some extent.
Personally I've been installing it on customer's systems for a few weeks now as a way to beat spyware. Some of them adopt it, some of them don't. But those who do adopt constitute an increase in Firefox use.
Why not start you own? If you happen to live in Calgary, I'd gladly help you do it.
To quit an MMO when you're addicted requires an amount of effort equivalent to that of the phsycological component of a drug addiction. This effort is mainly to destroy the habit of your addiction, the physical action of sitting in front of the computer OR the physical action of taking a hit. Also, both addictions make inroads into other areas of your life such as socializing. People quitiing MMOs have to deal with the same issues of either dropping friends, or explaining their wish to quit that drug addicts do.
The major difference comes in the chemical addiction. MMOs don't have the significant chemical addiction that hard drugs have. This is what adds difficulty to tackling a drug addiction that is above and beyond an MMo addiction. Physiological sysmptoms of withdrawal also become an issue.
For this reason MMO addiction is less serious than drug addiction. However, it is still serious.
I've been planning to buy one as soon as this update was made. However, they don't seem to be available in Canada yet.
I'd assume that corporate environments sticking with Windows 2000 are doing so either for the cost benefits, or the better stability compared with XP. I'm sure they'd love to have a better browser if they could.
Asa may be right about this benefiting Firefox. The article also states that they've put a fair amount of effort into adding auto-update and preference locking features into future Firefox releases. This is aimed directly at the corporate environment.
I am then crushed by an article about MS doing really well.
I sincerely hope that MS is in fact loosing it's dominance. Not because I hate Microsoft, but because the continued dominance of MS means yet more time we'll spend without significant innovation through competition.
So I guess I'm responsible for converting a few non-technical users. I urge the rest of you to try to do the same for people you know with malware problems. People will switch in a second when they personally have a good reason to do it.
However, as a countermeasure I've been known to make my few passwords very long and obscure (full sentence method).
There is a lot of talk here about how a SP2 machine should be just fine, given that the Windows Firewall is enabled by default. Doesn't happen, in my experience. Half the machines we have in our shop being scanned for viruses are SP2. SP2 is almost a year old, there are a good 20 critical updates after SP2 now.
At my shop we've gotten to the point where we sometimes don't even bother cleaning the virii up. We just tell the customer straight up that it's $80CDN for a backup, wipe, and reload. Because it simply isn't worth our time to fight it out with these things.
We've got tons of sophisticated virus scanning tools. We run fully some 7 scans/tools to clean up a system. The thing that amazes me is that they all find stuff the others didn't. No AV maker is actually keeping up with all the new crap out there.
It takes about 1 hour worth of time to sit down with a customer, back-up their data, and then install using an unattended installation CD with the works. They get a cleaner PC than if we spend the several hours it takes to set up all the virus scanning.
The only thing I have to say is this: Windows is insecure. Otherwise we wouldn't be making money cleaning up two day old systems caked with malware. The problem is real, and it is large. But in my experience, AV providers are not going to solve it.
It's a trap!!!
The thing about the internet is you have to allow everyone a chance to speak. Sometimes people speak nonsense. It can be hard to sort through the nonsense and find the actual good stuff. That's life.
I am in awe of your standard for real manliness.
Please, get it right: Real men program in hex.
In the Paul Thurott article that calls Longhorn "not positive at all" (see slashdot posting a few hours ago), he also drops this bombshell: This one's bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible cheaps this very year. Yeah, seriously.
Can anyone confirm or deny this for me? Am I just an idiot to be worried about this? PowerPC architecture is as much a reason to love Macs as OSX in my opinion.
From TFA: This one's bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible cheaps this very year. Yeah, seriously.,
Can anyone either confirm or deny this? I sincerely hope it doesn't happen. PowerPC is a much better architecture and is as much of a reason to switch to a Mac as OSX is. IMHO, anyways.
(See the guy down below who got a copy and is posting how great it is)
With the current climate, Google and Apple are gaining public favour. Whereas Microsoft is plagued by favourability problems such as adware/spyware/viruses.