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Networking

Throttle Shared Users With OS X — Is It Possible? 403

whisper_jeff writes "I work in a design studio where the production director is also the owner's son (translation = he can do no wrong). He is fond of accessing a designer's computer via filesharing and working directly on files off of the designer's computers rather than transferring the files to his computer to work on them there. In so doing, he causes the designer's computer to grind to a near-halt as the harddrive is now tasked with his open/save requests along with whatever the designer is doing. Given that there is no way he's going to change his ways (since he doesn't see anything wrong with it...), I was wondering if there was a way to throttle a user's shared access to a computer (Mac OSX 10.5.8) so that his remote working would have minimal impact on our work. Google searches have revealed nothing helpful (maybe I should Bing it... :) so I was hoping someone with more technical expertise on Slashdot could offer a suggestion."

Comment Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile? (Score 1) 146

and I really enjoy trying to make any complaint about their crappy coverage (for example, downtown Decatur GA).. "We show 3 bars of coverage there"... blah blah blah... and they can't seem to handle handoff between particular towers either (at least places I know around the Atlanta area always result in a call drop while traveling along the same path...
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft banned from selling Word (computerworld.com) 3

priyank_bolia writes: "It sounds like a joke. But, it's real and it's anything but a joke for Microsoft. Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, has issued an injunction (PDF link) that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.""

Comment Re:Another way to overcharge smaller users (Score 1) 112

Ed Nisley of Circuit Cellar shared an interesting statistic a couple of years ago - that it costs approximately $2 per watt per year. This counts both the supplying the power to the computer, and the power to the fans and chillers to take it out...Needless to say, I don't put friend's servers in my basement....

Comment It depends (Score 1) 592

Do you like children? If you don't, don't become a manager. A *lot* of the job is getting people to act like adults..
Similarly, do you have control over budgets and people? Who would you answer to? What would be the expectations from your boss over the next 6 months?
Is your boss competent? If not, trouble.

Comment Re:Sadly, I don't agree. (Score 2, Informative) 691

What a joke! I just tried this on my wife's Vista laptop. Your two options for account creation are 'administrator' or 'standard account', with 'standard' being the first defaulted choice. The only problem with this is that you can't install software at all with the standard account. Good luck with trying to install Microsoft Office from a standard account...
There is so much software out there that simply won't install correctly if the user is not an administrator, I don't even try any more...
And of course, this does nothing for the bulk of Windows home users, running Windows XP. These are the principal vectors of most malware...

Comment Re:Sadly, I don't agree. (Score 2, Insightful) 691

Linux would never have the same level of bugs as Windows, for one simple reason. The default user configuration on Windows in a home environment is that any user has administrative rights (which is not the case, by and large, in corporate environments). This is primarily due to the vast majority of Windows applications being unable to install correctly if the user does not have administrator capability.

This leads to all sorts of bogus cruft getting installed on machines by users who are without a clue with computer security, and simply don't know to install tools like NoScript or SiteAdvisor and to pay attention to the warnings they generate.

Linux's in general do not run normal users with superuser capabilities, which stops a lot of garbage from getting installed on machines in the first place.

Microsoft

The Hidden Cost of Using Microsoft Software 691

Glyn Moody writes "Detractors of free software like to point out it's not really 'free,' and claim that its Total Cost of Ownership is often comparable with closed-source solutions if you take everything into account. And yet, despite their enthusiasm for including all the costs, they never include a very real extra that users of Microsoft's products frequently have to pay: the cost of cleaning up malware infections. For example, the UK city of Manchester has just paid out nearly $2.5 million to clean up the Conficker worm, most of which was 'a £1.2m [$2million] bill in the IT department, including £600,000 [$1 million] getting "consultancy support" to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft.' To make the comparisons fair, isn't it about time these often massive costs were included in TCO calculations?"

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