Posts by Bill The Cat

McAfee false-positive glitch fells PCs worldwide

Never Update Over A Weekend!

Never update over a weekend -- especially a holiday or 3 day weekend. This has been the rule of IT for decades. Any company that does a major pushes on a Fridays should be seriously reconsidered. No excuse for this one.

No snapping: Photographers get collars felt

It's OK in Russia

I visited Red Square outside the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia and photographed the entire thing. Sure, roof cameras were everywhere but nobody threw me to the ground and held me in a cell for taking both video and still of the place.

Welcome to the land of the FREE

Microsoft pledges to fight Vista 'myths'

Vista *IS* Expensive

Vista IS expensive for business. I just had to replace a central box in my company that ran Windows 2000 Pro. It ran for years serving many functions. The only thing I could get was Vista. NOBODY at the vendor, HP, Microsoft, etc. could tell me how to acquire the XP downgrade by the deadline except to say go buy a full retail version! Not.

So here I sit with Vista. Over half my expensive software won't run on it. Compatibility mode doesn't work. MS and HP support are worthless. The bottom line is it would have cost just as much to go with Mac since I have to buy all new software anyway. MS doesn't like the expensive software I have that runs just fine. They pop up and say, MS doesn't like your software.

The computer and the OS are the cheap part of a major business system. The software is the killer. Now that I get to buy over $12,000 in new software, please Balmer, throw a chair and tell me how much I'm saving by going with Vista!!!

Vista sets 2007 land-speed record for copying and deleting

Who needs vista?

I have a fairly new box - 3 hard drives, ATI All-in-Wonder Video card, onboard sound, 2.2 GHz cpu, 2 GB or RAM and Vista says the system isn't capable of running the OS. Fine. Everything else runs on it just fine! Solaris, Linux, Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Why would I want Vista? From what I've read, its a package of bugs and problems. Maybe I'll upgrade to BeOS

Ugly view mars Windows Vista birthday

Windows not really certified

Apparently all those boxes that say Vista Certified are not necessarily capable of running all versions of Vista -- only the weakest one. Microsoft is backpeddling yet again on those statements and I believe there is one suit pending. If Balmer had spent as much time listening to his customers as he did throwing chairs, we could have had a good product. Redmond is so out of touch today that its is like they are intentionally wearing blinders.

RIAA tried to shake down 10-year-old daughter, suit claims

An old addage

Never get angry.

Never make a threat.

Reason with people.

- Don Corleone

Dutch police arrest 111 West Africans in 419 clampdown

No Nederlands here

We block all Nederlands access to our systems. 88% of the computer attacks on our systems came from the Nederlands and most attempts reaching the firewall still do. SPAM was another issue.

Repeated requests to the ISPs over there fell on deaf ears. It was easier just to block the entire country. It is their loss -- not ours. If the country ever decides they want to play nice on the net, we may relax our policies but until then, they are banned.

Taiwan mislays millions of honeybees

CCD - A lot of Speculation

The loss of bees to CCD is not the same as other losses due to disease, mites or environment. In the case of CCD, bees are fine, they leave the hive to collect their nectar and never return. Thus, there are no dead bees around the hive. Only the queen and some drones remain behind. The young workers and the older workers just disappear.

What is also strange is that typical hive predators such as the wax moth, small hive beetle and such do not attack a hive that has been hit with CCD. These normal predators would invade an abandoned hive quickly but with CCD they do not.

This is a new problem and a lot of research is going into it but we know that the cause is Not Cell Phones and other reported phenominea because thousands of hives are not located near people or cell phone towers.

Beekeepers are considering not transporting their hives for pollination because they don't want to pick up a disease somewhere and then bring it home to their other hives. They also don't want to risk spreading any diseases to locations that are currently clean.

There is a lot that is not known and very little that is known but progress is being made in at least figuring out what is not causing CCD. Most likely, it will be the cause of many factors working together.

Dell offers XP again amidst Vista complaints

No Vista or XP

I've got Windoze 2000 Pro running on all our systems because, it just works and works and works. We tried to upgrade to XP a few years ago but some of our critical applications didn't run with XP. I had to completely replace the mother board, power supply, CPU, RAM, Video Card, Ethernet, and Sound (ethernet and sound were on motherboard so I didn't need the slave cards) due to a power supply failure. I added a new DVD burner and an additional hard drive while I was at it. Turned on the power and up she came! Windows 2000 asked me to locate some drivers and I was up and running in a few hours. Try that with XP or Vista!! Nope, if it works, don't fix it. I'll stay with Windows 2000 until there is a REAL need to change.

Mobile phone threat to honeybees

Too Much Noise Surrounding Data

The problem is that there is just so much noise regarding this apiary CCD condition. People are speculating left and right all over the world about the cause. To make matters worse, rags like this report it and then other beekeepers believe what they read.

Research will take time and it will be involved. There are many aspects to this that need to be evaluated. One primary aspect is that bees are frequently moved hundred or thousands of miles/kilometers to pollinate crops. Durig their stay at a different location, they may pick up a disease. Then, when the hives are transported to their next destination, they carry the disease with them. The result is that a disease propogates across the country much faster than it would by nature.

There are also many people who are claiming CCD but their symptoms are not fitting. If the bees return to the hive, then they don't have CCD. If the hive population is dropping gradually, then they don't have CCD. Responsibile beekeepers know the difference.

One other detail that isn't being widely reported is that once CCD hits a hive, normal preditors to the hive won't touch it either. Why? We honestly don't know but moths, animals, beetles and the like that would normally invade and consume an abandoned hive don't touch CCD hives.

If you're going to report about Bees and CCD, please report facts and not rumors.