Hell, you think that's bad? I just saw the news that our entire power grid is controlled by the internet making it totally vulnerable to hackers and terrorists. They performed hacker tests that were run on current model generators which suggested 30 percent generator failure with some areas being without electricity for months. Suggest every one get a generator as without electricity we are dead. The tests hacked into the generator control systems giving phony information on loads causing the generators to speed up and burn up. Controlling the power grid from the internet is the most stupid thing I have ever heard of.
JJK

Simple solution:

--- Get Acronis True Image for under USD $40, do regular drive backups, hence avoiding the need to do clean OS re-installs which are a huge pain in the derrière for a slew of reasons.. System restores aren't good except for certain things.

I have two TI backup folders on separate extra drives: SYS BU ONE and TWO. I alternate the TI drive backups to them so that I always have the preceding backup just in case.

TI has saved me a lot of headaches and time.
A solid, easy to use program used by others here..

Going this route, the "stealth" issue becomes totally moot and harmless.

I just saw the news that our entire power grid is controlled by the internet making it totally vulnerable to hackers and terrorists. They performed hacker tests that were run on current model generators which suggested 30 percent generator failure with some areas being without electricity for months.

it's been like that for decades. now with all the "everybody's a terrorist!" propaganda going around they're publicizing it. Now they'll target computer programmers, enthusiasts, etc. as potential terrorists.

Did you expect anything else? MS is starting to "fight the good fight" from what I can tell because this paranoia doesn't benefit them either. :)

And on a more general level, news programs and all kinds of other outlets these days by definition make ratings with fear-based, fear-inducing content. It's wired into our DNA through long human history.

But so is choice.

There will always be "the next" thing to worry about that's going on "out there."
Unless it actually affects us or those we know, it's not worth one's attention.

I'm not suggesting not caring about others or not paying attention to things. Just choosing where one's attention goes in a productive way.

Life often offers us workarounds even when things do happen.

I guess Die Hard 4 was closer to reality than I thought!!

If anyone is interested, here is a link to solutions to this issue, from the originating article.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=817

Peace,

marks

"The tests hacked into the generator control systems giving phony information on loads causing the generators to speed up and burn up"

Generators don't speed up to meet demand, real or fake!
On top of that there's a huge number of interlocks on every generation system I've worked on, many of them electromechanical and quite immune to any hacking. Not to say that the USA's power grid is very reliable, it wouldn't take much for it to knock itself out.

Of course if anyone wanted to knock out anything coal fired there's a way as old as WWII that the British developed. Unfortunately it seems they didn't think through the long term effects and there's some suggestion that even this late things are still being destroyed by their 'devices'. Seems we still haven't learnt from that experience either.

Bob.

farss:
You have re-assured me.
JJK

"Yes, I suppose if there were actually any decent video software than ran on it, it might look pretty good. When Vegas gets ported over, I might have a look at it. (The would also be the same day that hell freezes over.)

John"

John:
You seem to be knocking Ubuntu. I'm wondering why? I yearn for the day when applications from my three favorite vendors will run in Linux, particularly Ubuntu. Granted, hell may, indeed, need to freeze over, but not because Ubuntu isn't worthy of the vendor attention. We all know that the issues are complicated and have little to do with the technical capability of Linux/Ubuntu.

Anyone who has already bothered to give Ubuntu a "look" will probably tell you what a pleasure it is to operate in a system that is free of all the trappings inherent in any WinOS that grow out of the suspicion with which MS regards its customers at all tiers and the determination on the part of MS to dominate the computer world by any means (legal or not, ethical or not).

Bill Gates scores few points with me in his new-found altruism given some of the extreme measures to which he resorted to come out on top. The positive effects of MS's dominance are many - anyone who uses Windows, I believe, would have to admit that. Those effects are why you can state that you won't be moving to Ubuntu anytime soon. But, in my view, the pendulum swung too far in the wrong direction a long time ago, and has become stuck there. We are in a Microsoft-generated catch-22 where vendors will not port or develop for Linux because of that dominance, and consumers won't migrate away from MS because too many really good aps aren't available or won't run on Linux.

I dual boot XP and Ubuntu and can testify to Ubuntu's ease of use, low overhead, excellent inherent security (no third-party virus protection required, not in the past, now now, probably not ever), and rock solid no-crash operation. It never bogs down, period. If you decide to force kill an ap, you do so and the ap is gone. None of the waiting that often affects that process in XP.

You would never, ever receive a surreptitious update from Ubuntu. The system is designed so that such an update could never get by you, could never be installed without your permission.

I see that Vista is incorporating some copied version of this feature (good for them), but that OS comes with such bloat and such a newly thickened layer of features to further enhance Microsoft's security (at generally no benefit to the user), that I doubt I would ever consider running that system until they succeed in crippling XP to the point where it will no longer run.

You are certainly right that there exists no decent video ap in the Linux world. I hope that changes someday, not because I wouldn't gladly continue to pay for multimedia aps like Vegas, Wavelab, Nuendo, Sound Forge, Photoshop, InDesign and the like, but, because I'd love to use them (or their equivalent) in an operating system that doesn't regard me as the enemy and potential theif.

Del

First of all, I knew Bill Gates quite well when he came here to Albuquerque with Paul Allen after they had developed the first, viable OS for the Altair 8800 computer. Micro Soft (as it was originally known) started here and I was peripherally involved. I happen to be a big fan of Bill Gates and Microsoft. I also don't think he's evil, in fact, quite the opposite. Having known him back when he was nothing, the stuff he talked was never about making money, it was about how computer technology was going empower people and change the world. I can absolutely assure you from first-hand knowledge that his altruism is not "new-found." He was (and still is) a nerd that has been primarily driven by the desire to make people's lives better. The fact that he (and thousands of others) became incredibly wealthy was an unavoidable by-product of success. The Gates Foundation has become the largest philanthropic organization in the world. He still wants to make the world a better place and he has the money to do it.

As far as Windows security is concerned, if Ubuntu were the dominate OS, then the thousands of kiddie hackers which are writing viruses to attack Windows would turn their attention to Ubuntu. Every OS has potential security holes, the fact that Ubuntu hasn't been a target is the same reason that no major software company will invest the time and money to write any software for it. The Apple OS and the multitude of flavors of Linux will never achieve critical mass.

While Ubuntu may be a "pleasure to operate", I can't make television with it and if I can't make television, I can't make any money. My computers are tools. If I were a mechanic, I'd need a screwdriver and a wrench. If I were a carpenter, I'd need a saw and a hammer. But I'm not, I'm a video producer/editor and I have chosen to run Vegas and a bunch of other stuff and it all runs under Windows. I have a dozen machines here, they never crash and I get a lot of work done. Windows works perfectly well for me.

John

(To see what Bill looked like back when I knew him Click Here. Now, does this guy look evil?)

Very well put John. It's kind of funny how the world turns and how soon we forget. It wasn't that long ago that IBM were the Goliath and Microsoft the David that slew them.
If you want to get freaked out about big business's that want to take over the planet I think Google are far more of a worry than uSoft. As for an 'evil' head of a company Jobs is way more of a worry than bumbling Bill.
As for the Linux, Unix, OSX, Windows thing, once you dig deep into the OS they're all built on the same core concepts anyway. You want an OS without all the baggage of XP, from the little I've seen of it, XPe is worth a look.

Bob.