Posts by Morely Dotes 939 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
The business-critical applications here (CRM, ERP, and CAD) *will not run* on Vista. Period.
Out of the 5 systems that came with Vista pre-installed, we have flatlined 4 and installed SP. One has been retained to test applications which claim to be Vista-ready.
CDW's figures most likely represent sales of systems with pre-installed Vista *and no choice* of a different OS. I'd bet real money (if I had any) that most SMBs are installing XP before deploying the PCs.
"when you get back your spouse, kids and mates will be long dead. Not my idea of a happy life."
Take the kids and mates with you. Leave the wife behind to handle your financial affairs. One way or another, it's a happy return.
The leather one with the anti-tweed elbow patches, thanks.
Which, of course, translates to an additional $20 actually *paid* paid by the citizen.
Now, multiply that by an estimated 250 million drivers* and we get an additional $5,000,000,000 (thats 5 billion dollars) in citizen costs paid to keep Michael Goerring, er, Chertoff in a job for one more year.
How many terrorist attacks would it take to cost us $5 billion?
* - Anyone who lives in New York City or Los Angeles will testify that there are more drives than that currently stuck in traffic, but never mind.
...assigns a routable IP address to a print server?
Barring a completely cretinous sysadmin, attacking a standard TCP/IP print server *will* require compromising a PC within the network first.
If that happens, printers and print servers are the least of your worries.
Oh, and advice to Anonymous Coward: "Many (smaller-sized) companies only have one, and if that goes balls-up," then go down to the nearest Dell outlet and buy a new, full-color network-attached printer for US$250, or something less fancy for less money. If the company is so strapped they can't afford to replace the most-likely-to-fail component (the printer) on their network, then they're f*cked anyhow.
Why i it that the death penalty is *always* wrong?
Use small words. Apparently, I am not too bright, because I believe all three of the villains in this piece should be stopped from wasting oxygen at the first possible moment.
Skull & crossbones because cretins such as these poison the gene pool.
"ISPs would surely lose their common carrier status"
This is a common misconception, fostered by the big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, so that they can claim they "can't" do anything about malicious users (spammers, virus distributors, spyware users, etc.). However, they try to have it both ways; Verizon, for example, claims that their ISP business is totally seperate from their telecomms business, thus avoiding ISP customer help offered by the Public Utilities Commission for telecomms users, when the ISP business screws the consumer.
ISPs do not *have* common carrier status. Common carriers are very strictly regulated, and becoming a common carrier is both very difficult, and unattractive to the business operator, since it means a tremendous load of expensive paperwork, and constant regulatory scrutiny.
ISPs are regulated only to the extent that any other business is regulated; that is, outright fraud, if it's big enough, and public enough, will earn a slap on the wrist.
Edsger Dijkstra was (is? He's dead to me) a narrow-minded, bigoted specialist.
My second programming language was BASIC (Tiny-BASIC, to be precise). Hardware constraints forced me to teach myself assembly language, and, since no compiler available would fit in the memory I had available (this was the Z80 era, 4K RAM was expensive and 16K was luxury beyond belief), I also had to hand-compile it. Prior to that, I had learned enough FORTRAN to make it through my local community college's CompSci 101 course (all programs to be punched on lovely cards, sorted, and run through numerous torture devices before they could be submitted to the High Priests who determined exactly what was to be run, and what was to be discarded, presumably by reading the entrails of a freshman).
I later learned C, PowerBASIC (a lovely compiled BASIC that rivaled C for final code execution speed), C++, and several other "languages" which are Web-related and which I therefor consider less qualified to be called "programming" languages. I've been published, worked in Intel's Network Products Division as a build engineer, and moved on to enjoying the fruits of others' programming rather than writing much more than bash scripts these days.
The leeches deprecating Java are not wholly incorrect, but they have placed emphasis on the language which they prefer for venal reasons, rather than logical ones. Students should learn to program in pseudo-code, hand-compile, and run the results, before they are ever "taught" a high-level language such as Fortran, BASIC, or Java - or Ada. I wasn't fortunate enough to go that route myself, but I was sensible enough to go seek out the knowledge I needed when I needed it. I know from my experience as a supervisor that not everyone will do that.
Naturally, I don't post with my real name.
In other words: Network Solutions has a long history of unethical, but legal to-the-letter-of-the-law, practices.
Which is why my employer has moved all our domains elsewhere, and why I have never used NetSol for my own domains, nor for those of any of my consulting customers.
"Overall am I correct in saying theres a higher chance of being hit by the proverbial lightening strike?"
Yes. And that there's a better chance that GW Bush and Osama will sit down and settle their "differences" over a nice cuppa down t'local. Assuming you believe they have any real differences.
P2P file sharing of music and movies can easily make money - if the producers of the content (*NOT* the record labels, mind, the actual producers) contribute that content to an "official" tracker server, which also servers advertising when downloaders are browsing for torrents.
The producers get paid by the advertisers. It works for television, and it will work for music and video.
Now, now, don't be too hard on Bill. After all, he's been a visionary, predicting the future with certainty, for example:
"Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981
And his company expanded on that:
"DOS addresses only 1 Megabyte of RAM because we cannot imagine any applications needing more." Microsoft on the development of DOS - 1980
And then:
"Windows 95 needs at least 8 MB RAM." -- Bill Gates, 1996
And now, looking at the "minimum system requirements" for Windows Vista, the bare minimum of system RAM is 512 MB (Vista Home Basic), or 1024 MB (Home Premium / Business / Ultimate).
So let's cut Bill some slack on Vista's security. He's been right about so much, so often, that one little mistake shouldn't be held against him!
"the N-Gage application which came with the latest firmware update on the N95 is still strangely empty"
Perhaps N-gage failed to take the market by storm because the first thing that comes to mind is a 1:160 scale model train, and not a telephone/mobile games platform.
Perhaps a degree in Marketing is a bit less valuable in the real world than used bog roll. Certainly most Marketers are.
Fine, no problem. After the arrest, trial, and conviction of an accused illegal filesharer, the ISP can disconnect him without notice.
Any time prior to conviction, however, the ISP is liable to find themselves facing civil charges of defamation, should they disconnect someone for "illegal filesharing."
Another useless, unworkable law that will punish only the legitimate ISP. Apparently UK politicians are at least as stupid (and venal) as US politicians.
And I (in the USA) will continue to use BitTorrent to share Linux distros - which is purely legal, Mister "Lord" Triesman. I suppose UK residents will be forced to pay the Microsoft tax (probably by having Inland Revenue collect it, and paying Microsoft directly out of the National Treasury).
Too bloody right! The moral is, go far enough from the office that it's too much trouble to send someone after you, and plan in advance - you're not "taking a long lunch," you're "doing field research."
How's the pub brew in Scotland? Does anyone at El Reg know? Who's going to find out?
"There are at least three new Best Buy stores going up around the Portland metro area right now, so they at least think there is more money to be made in retail in Oregon."
That's because people around here don't have prior experience with Best Buy. I do; I moved to PDX from Houston about 13 years ago, and if the only two places to shop were Best Buy and Fry's, I'd go to Fry's. I hate Fry's.
Fortunately, there are online shops (TigerDirect.com is a good one to avoid like the plauge, for example).
That is, he trusted his bank.
I can't speak to the law in the UK, but in the USA, *anyone* can set up a DD to a bank account without a single piece of paper changing hands. My wife is a retired banker, and tells me she had to correct such "errors" several times weekly. Teh professional fraudsters set up recurring DDs for only a few dollars, and most people never notice. If you set up, say, a thousand DDs at $5/month, you're making a very respectable income with little to no risk; the banks won't call in the legal authorities for such small amounts, because it would make the news.
Laws are written by special interests, and passed by politicians who haven't the faintest clue what the law actually says.
Can you imagine trying to explain to a politician what you mean when you tell him "the data have been repeatedly overwritten by a walking 01 pattern, and the original data can't be reliably reconstructed from what's left?" Or "the date/time stamps on these files may have been tampered with, but there's no way to know for certain?"
I'd rather try to teach dolphins to ride unicycles. The odds of success are far better.
"Benedict has been accused of looking to turn the clock back on his predecessor's embrace of science, to the extent of apparently endorsing intelligent design."
The most compelling evidence against intelligent design is the existence of Mankind. No intelligent creator would ever produce an ape that is so fractious, obstinate, fratricidal, bigoted, repressive, greedy... I could go on, but there's only so much time in the day.
That people are too stupid to read what's displayed on the screen.
Somehow, I tend to doubt that this particular problem could be laid at the feet of the FF dev team; nor even the IE dev team (although that lot seem to have gotten their degrees entirely in Marketing, and picked up coding as a hobby...).
Do not confuse Java with Javascript. The only evident relationship between the two is the four letters in "java."
I'm not entirely certain that anything calling Friendster "malware" is incorrect, however. It seems to me to be a bit less dangerous than a bio-engineered version of anthrax, and a bit more malicious than a kiss from your auntie; somewhere in between, but leaning towards anthrax.
Osama bin Laden might be a bit miffed to be called a terrorist. Stalin might have been a bit miffed to be called a monster. Paris Hilton and both Spears sisters might be a bit miffed to be called whores and idiots.
Sometimes the truth is insulting.
"the sheet rock guy drove some nails through the cable"
What sort of incompetent boob uses nails to put up sheetrock?
Oh. The sort that gets hired because he's a union member, rather than a competent worker, of course.
And that's why I do my own sheetrock work (my house was built in 1921, and by the time I am done renovating, I will have "re-plastered" all 3000 square feet with new sheetrock, replacing the original lath-and-plaster work).
As for HDMI: Well, gosh, you know my eyes aren't good enough to get full advantage from upscaled DVD, so there's no need for me to spend even $10 on HDMI cabling. Plus the content is all crap anyway. I like that my neighbor's HDMI signal won't reach my house, though.
The first time this trojan gets onto a US Government PC (or one owned by a government contractor), the VXers have committed a Federal 1st class felony, *and* can be declared "enemy combatants" if it happens to be a PC in the Defense industry.
No subpoena and no court order of any kind will be required for the spooks to get all the relevant data from the premium rate phone operator, and the people who are ultimately getting paid will simply be "disappeared" to some place a bit less attractive than GitMo.
While I would not hold up the CIA to be the sharpest crayons in the box, they are very, very good at doggedly following a money trail back to the people they consider to be "bad guys," and they aren't terribly gentle once those guys are found.
I think some VXers somewhere have finally made a literally-fatal error.
The fact is that there were more people clamouring to buy the EV1 than GM ever made cars; the same is true of the Ford Electric Ranger pickup, and the Toyota electric RAV-4.
The car makers *refused* point-blank to sell the vehicles; it was lease, or nothing, and when the leases expired, the cars reverted to GM's possession, with no possibility of an electric replacement.
The vast majority of Americans drive less than 50 miles per day; the vast majority of American families also have 2 (or more) cars. An electric commuter vehicle is ideal for economy (cost of operation is roughly one-fifth or less that of a similar-weight vehicle with an internal combustion engine, and may be even better with the current costs of oil products, eliminates pollution problems at the end-user point (it's easier to control pollution on a single, large plant than on millions of tiny ones), and never, ever suffers from a spilled-fuel fire hazard in a crash (no matter what Hollywood tells us in movies, it's almost impossible to make a gas tank explode, but spilled fuel burns quite merrily).
Electric auto makers other than the major are thriving. Of course, they actually sell cars, and don't field them in a deliberate effort to "disprove" demand.
Electric cars may also become a means of smoothing peak electric power demands on the grid; please see http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn13000-electric-cars-could-act-as-batteries-for-the-energy-grid-.html
I am a charter member of the National Electric Drag-Racing Association, and I tried to buy every electric vehicle offered by the big auto makers in the past decade or more - and was refused for every one of them.
"But then in Linux, the GUI randomly failing is far too common based on my personal experience."
What in the name of all the odd gods are you doing, then? I've been running various flavors of linux since before Mandrake (now Mandriva), and have never had a GUI fail, not fluxbox, not gnome, and not KDE.
"most people won't be using older versions anyway."
In point of fact, John, most people *never* buy a newer version of MS Office, once they have any version installed. The installed user base for "prior to Office 2003" is roughly ten times the size of the combined 2003 and 2007 user base.
So it's going to affect anyone who receives files from 9 out of 10 users outside their own office, and who is using Office 2003.
"So instead of getting proof of concept malware from hobbyists we're dealing with the Storm worm Trojan and other sophisticated "professionally developed" botnet clients..."
Laws that criminalize the behavior of indulging in one's curiosity have a chilling effect on benign security research, while having little to no effect on the criminal code producers. The same phenomenon has been demonstrated repeatedly, in practically every field of human intellectual endeavor, since ancient Athens was the center of Western civilization.
Of course, the politicians continue to make the same errors over and over again, with the same easily foreseen results; criminals flourish, and those who would have gladly helped improve things without expecting payment are afraid to do so, with a huge net loss to the improvment of Mankind's intellectual wealth.
It's very sad, but until an intelligence test is a prerequisite for holding public office, I suppose it's inevitable. The stupid will continue to run the world.
There are two options:
1. Propose another proven, non-fossil-fueled power source that is equally economical and sustainable. You have 5 minutes.
2. Freeze in the dark.
I humbly suggest that the Greenpeacers opposed to nuke plants go live in Chad, without any electricity whatsoever. Coincidentally, they won't have telephones, radios, nor televisions, thus preventing them from bothering humans who wish to live above the line which separates us from savages and wild animals.
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