Apple computers score 81% in customer satisfaction, followed closely by by Dell at 79%, according to CNet. Gateway comes in third at 74%.
Source: American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI)
Of course, Apple marketing has been saying this all along, but then again, they’re biased.
When I worked at a computer lab in college, the main security focus was preventing lab visitors from screwing around too much with the computers. We just ran Windows NT and locked it down as hard as possible. The worst network-based threat I remember facing was WinNuke, and that was just as likely to be another lab tech. Some of the early email viruses started circulating while I was there, but since it was a public lab, we didn’t provide any email programs; people would telnet into the mail server and use Pine. (This was pre-Hotmail, too.)
In my wired-for-ethernet campus housing, however, all bets were off. I watched people remotely controlling each others’ computers as pranks, or discovering hackers had gotten onto their systems from halfway across the planet, and figured it was safer to use Linux most of the time. This actually got me in trouble with the network admin at one point, who decided I must be running a server and shut off my port. It did at least teach me to disable services that were turned on by default, though I saw no indication that anything on there was actually being abused.*
Then there were firewalled environments. Still back in college, we rigged up my parents’ house for a home network. My brother put together a Linux box to dial into the Internet and act as a gateway, and effectively everything inside the network was safe from direct attacks. No point in internal firewalls, and since everyone was savvy enough to avoid the really nasty stuff (which was easier at the time), virus scanners were only a precaution, rather than a necessity.
For the past few years I’ve mainly worked with Continue reading
I should’ve written this up when we bought it, but there are two main reasons I went with the Netgear WGT624 router over another brand with similar features.
First: familiarity. Since I hadn’t researched specific models, I wanted a brand I knew or had used before. This meant Netgear, Linksys, or Belkin.
Belkin was out of the question. In fact, I was muttering about how I’d never buy a Belkin router, when I was approached by a Belkin representative who proceeded to explain about how much better their product was than any of the others. The problem is that Belkin lost my trust last year when they set their routers to redirect web requests to their own advertisement page. (Basically one every eight hours until you bought the filtering service or clicked on an opt-out link on that web page). Aside from the annoyance factor, there’s a lot of web traffic that isn’t actually trying to load a web page. It could be your antivirus program trying to download new definitions, or your news reader updating an RSS or Atom feed. It could be Windows Update. Sure, they eventually disabled the “feature”, but come on!
So at that point it basically a toss-up between Netgear and Linksys. The Netgear packaging was more focused on the networking capabilities, and the Linksys packaging was more focused on the parental controls, so I went with the Netgear.
I just came across an article on non-password authentication that refers back to an April 2004 survey of office workers which found that “71% were willing to part with their password for a chocolate bar.”
Wow. I know they say everyone has their price, but this is ridiculous.
It reminds me of the comic book Underworld Unleashed, in which a demon approached various DC villains offering to give them enhanced powers in exchange for their souls. The Joker sold his soul in exchange for… a box of cigars. “They’re cubans!” he explained.
Another good one: “I work in a financial call centre, our password changes daily, but I do not have a problem remembering it as it is written on the board so that every one can see it.”
Un. be. lievable.
Another gem from Joshua Tree (actually Yucca Valley), courtesy of Jason, who first spotted it:
