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Comment Re:So, if you have a Linked-in account, what now? (Score 1) 271

Evidently the password leak was via iOS so if you're not logging in with an iPhone or iPad then you're probably not affected.

I've never, ever even installed a LinkedIn app on my iPhone or any other mobile device, nor has my co-worker. Both of our passwords were found on the list with the leading 0's. I agree that their app is shitty because it doesn't encrypt communications, but I'm pretty certain it has nothing to do with the compromised passwords. Also, another co-worker who does use the iOS apps, did not find their password on the list.

Comment Re:Hopefully with UI improvements to come (Score 4, Insightful) 106

No, $10 is totally reasonable and worth it for me, since it's a tool I use almost daily as a sysadmin. The developer actually provides support too. I've personally exchanged email with him when I was trying to get a proprietary VT100-based warehouse inventory app working on it and he helped me sort it out in a later update. It is one of the few apps I've actually paid for though. I don't mind paying for an app if it's reasonably priced, of good quality and well supported. Something that was NOT the case when I had a BlackBerry, where apps were rarely priced below $30 and totally blew anyways.

If you want SSH for free, you could try that SSH Mobile app I guess. Or, if you don't like the walled garden you can jailbreak and hope you don't come across any rouge free apps. But for me, the handful of admin apps I've purchased have totally paid for themselves by not having to drive back home or into the office to solve issues that required some minor intervention.

Comment Re:Hopefully with UI improvements to come (Score 2) 106

and IOS, while pleasant enough, is too much of a limiting walled garden for me. I like being able to use VNC over an SSH tunnel, for instance, or get a terminal on my phone.

I'm not arguing that iOS isn't a "walled garden", but there are apps out there that will allow you to tunnel VNC (or even RDP) over SSH. I use iSSH and it's freakin awesome. I've used several other SSH apps, but iSSH so far is the best IMHO.

Comment Re:Technology (Score 1) 388

Unfortunately no one remembered the A-body to F/J/M body fiasco, and how aging Valiants and Darts were outliving their Aspen and Volare cousins, when the two chassis were for the same market.

My grandparents had a Dodge Aspen, what a POS. It seemed like the thing never ran right unless the freakin stars were aligned properly with it being sunny, 75 and 0% humidity. Towards the end of it's short life, it overheated constantly until the crack in the head was so huge that it couldn't hold coolant anymore. One time when we were stranded in a parking lot, I actually said to my Grandpa: "Grandpa, I can't even imagine this stupid car being new and exciting when it came off of the assembly line." I'm pretty objective about vehicles, but Chrysler made a lot of junk back in those days. Chrysler "Ultradrive" transmissions were also notoriously junk.

Comment Re:This Is Slashdot's Forte (Score 2) 963

Even if the science remains as is, we are going to be moving away from a carbon economy simply because new scientists and engineers are going to be educated in the possibility that the carbon economy is not the best solution, and, being scientists and engineers, many of them are going to looking for a better solution. As time goes on, and those vested in the carbon economy become less powerful, than a more balanced picture will emerge.

You do realize that fuels aren't the only things produced from dead dinosaurs, right? How do we feed people when we can't create the fertilizers necessary to support massive crops? Plastics, composite materials and rubber are all created from oil, how do we replace those modern materials that are pretty much made from long carbon chains without living like the damn Flintstones? I'm really interested in hearing the solutions from people who think that modern civilization can survive these changes, but so far I've heard none. At best, all we can do is slow the inevitable, entropy ultimately wins in the end.

Comment Re:Better Email Blocking (Score 1) 75

Seriously. I'm getting sick of AOL, Earthlink, and MSN just deleting order receipt emails I send out to people when they buy my software. (Gmail and a million others don't have this problem). The best part is when the customer emails to complain, I reply with their order details, then a few days later they forward the same complaint email with "2nd notice" added to the subject line. If I do reach the customer, not once has the deleted order receipt email been in their spam/junk/bulk email folders. ISPs just accept email for delivery and delete it it seems.

I had this same issue with Time Warner a while back, they created a filter that would drop SMTP sessions on any mail with our company's 800 number in it going outbound through their SMTP servers, which several of our reps were using. They also were dropping any inbound mail with our 800 number in it, into their customer's spam folders. Since most ISP mail users don't even use webmail and set up crappy POP access with the mail client (or smartphone) of their choice, they don't even see this spam folder. This was a serious problem since 90% of the company has the 800 number listed in their email sig and all of our order and delivery status notifications have it as well. I went back and forth with their postmaster group and got useless responses like this...

Our services are not meant for business use, if you are a business class customer there are different sets of servers you may use. Oherwise you may upgrade your account. If you are a road runner user and you require sending of your own 800 number or url in your emails, you may use your own mail server for that business purpose or your business' mail server to send the message to bypass our system. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

and this...

Our spam filters used on our mail system is somewhat automated. So the short answer is yes, if it doesn’t like a link or a phone number or a webpage or some of the contents in the message, the message gets filtered. Then the message goes to the junk mail folder of our clients automatically by default. They are not lost or deleted. The customers can only see those messages if they access their mail on WEBMAIL and visit the junk folder. Now, customers can further filter by chosing the option to auto delete all messages in that folder whithout them ever seeing it. If that's the case they may have accidently or intentionally not receive emails that they are expecting. To get around this you can resend the message and remove the culprit, or offending characters. Like spelling out a phone number five five five twelve twelve instead of 555-1212 or tina dot com instead of tina.com. There have been ingenious ways to do this by customers we have seen in the past.

There were around 100 customers in our DB with *.rr.com email addresses at the time, so we just had to tell them to call their Roadrunner support and ask why they couldn't receive email from us. They were also advised to stop using ISP mail accounts and open a free mail account with Gmail or Yahoo.

Comment Re:Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score 1) 440

They're biggest selling product was BES which was plagued with bugs and issues.

In my years in IT I've been least impressed with the usability of the BES. When it's installed properly and configured correctly it generally just works, and I really appreciate its integration with corporate mail systems, but actually getting in and using the product could not be less intuitive. It's just an ugly and horribly designed piece of software, and their new version 5, which went mostly web based is even worse than their older non-web based app.

FTA, "We plan to refocus on the enterprise business and capitalize on our leading position in this segment." If that truly is the case, they need to seriously attend to BES and its usability because that's really the biggest thing that differentiates BlackBerry from other smart phone experiences in the enterprise.

I agree, our BES server has been pretty reliable for the most part, though it is a resource hog. Their support has always been top notch the few times I've needed it over the years. They certainly provide better software and support than FedEx, UPS and the other carriers do, their stuff is garbage loaded with legacy cruft and the support is average at best. I have job set up to automatically do an iisreset three times a day on our Progistics (UPS) server to keep that shoddy application going, this issue has persisted for years over 3 major upgrades, their support has no insight beyond the iisreset.

We only have a handfull of BB users left, they all will be switching to iPhones when their contracts are up though, all but two are welcoming the change. The two resistant to change are only concerned about the lack of physical keys, they aren't attached to the BB OS functionality.

Microsoft

Submission + - How do I convince Sales and Marketing that PowerPoint isn't a Page Layout tool?

EXrider writes: I'm the Sysadmin at a mid sized company. Amongst other departments, I support a small group of content creation folks who primarily utilize Adobe Creative Suite software.

Increasingly, these graphics folks are getting requests from Sales and Marketing people to supply electronic copies of marketing materials and even catalog pages in PowerPoint and Word format, so that they can edit them which seems like an entirely bad idea in and of itself. Obviously, these are ridiculous requests as PowerPoint and Word are simply the wrong tools for the job. Our entire catalog with all of it's image assets wouldn't even fit in a 16GB PowerPoint file.

Convincing the technically inept that this is not feasible has been difficult, as all they know is that they personally can place images in slides and wrap text around them all day long, and they've seen tools available to convert^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmangle PDFs into DOC or PPT files available online. Simply telling them its the wrong tool for the job isn't working. Telling them to try using a trial copy of InDesign or Acrobat to edit the files didn't convince them either.

I've scoured google and can't find any examples of non-graphic design people running up against others who think they can do their job with Powerpoint. I'm trying to come up with some arguments, but so far everything I have come up with would go over their head anyways. Example: the PPT binary format size limit is 2GB, the PPTX file format size limit is up in the Exabytes, but you would need enough RAM to load the entire file without swapping. Bet you didn't know that, but who in their right mind ever would try such a ridiculous thing anyways?

Comment Re:California (Score 1) 398

I take this shit with a grain of salt, practically EVERYTHING in excess can harm you. Expose yourself to too much sun, you burn or get skin cancer. Drink too much water, die of electrolytic shock. Breathe too much concentrated oxygen, suffer from hyperoxia. Consume too much caffeine, suffer from caffeine overdose. Consuming too much of any food items can be toxic, or health averse at least.

Common sense folks, everything in moderation. I know that's hard for people to understand these days, but why the fuck are we wasting tax money creating a nanny state to tell us something that every other (undomesticated) animal on the planet has already evolved enough to figure out? We can either thrust ourselves back to the stone-ages to protect ourselves from all these modern refined foods, CO2 and cancer spewing machines, or we can continue to advance and find ways to deal with it.

Comment Re:Emissions (Score 1, Flamebait) 196

Your other point is right on target, too - old locomotives are often rebuilt and reused, which is probably better for the environment than building a new one would be, even if the new one is more fuel efficient or runs cleaner.

In people's zeal for going green by cutting emissions, I think they often overlook the fact that decommissioning (recycling) an old vehicle, or piece of outdoor power equipment and manufacturing a replacement for it, is likely a net loss for the environment. It consumes a large amount of energy and resources to do so.

Why haven't I ever seen a study done on this? Oh, probably because there's a whole market (and political party) around guilting certain consumers into buying these products.

Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 1) 382

Hmm, I could be wrong, but I would think per person, prison is much cheaper than gov't funded housing, food cards (to buy whatever they want) and medicaid. Or, it sure as hell SHOULD be. Institutionalized living should be way more efficient and cost effective if it's done properly, I realize that's not necessarily the case in many prisions in the US.

Realistically, a lot of drug abusers are self-medicating and should probably be in mental institutions, not prison.

Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 1) 382

Yeah, except for the part where you have strung out drug addicts that refuse to get a job or do anything remotely productive for society. Instead, they expect to sit on their asses and collect government assistance, maybe have some more children to increase their earnings. Or worse, they steal everything they can get their hands on to fund their addictions.

I realize that this isn't the case for functioning addicts, or all recreational drug users, but society definitely doesn't need any more of the former kind of addicts I mentioned above, and there will be more of them if these substances are easy for everyone to obtain. Explain how we deal with those problems once we open the floodgates of drugs to everyone? Don't tell me that they'll suddenly change their ways because their drugs suddenly become more affordable (doubtful when you look at how the prescription drug industry operates), because we all know how rational these types of people are with budgets and how they'd allocate additional income.

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