Santa Barbara's Premier IT Solutions Provider
“Windows XP, the zombie operating system that refuses to die, may be about to finally receive a killing blow to the head by the company that spawned it eleven years ago. So what will put XP out of its undead misery? Buyers of PCs running Windows 8 Pro will have the ability to downgrade to Windows 7 and Vista, but not all the way to Windows XP.”
Read the full story over at ReadWriteWeb
I don’t know about you, but I watched a LOT of the Olympics coverage. I was on vacation in Montana with family and we were totally into it.
With more gold than a well balanced portfolio, Usain Bolt is without question a champion. He got some static by declaring his intent to solidify his legendary status at this year’s games. It got me thinking. How do you set goals and measure your success without sounding like an ego maniac?
At Anchor Point, we are striving to be the Premier Managed Services Provider in the area. How do we measure that? We look at the groups we successfully serve. So far, so good. Are we legends? No. Are we serving our Partners well? Yes! I believe we are. It feels good, but we are still motivated to do more. We don’t ever want to get caught casually crossing the finish line:)
Please let me know if there are other groups we can serve!
Where were you born?I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in a pink hospital (Tripler Army Hospital). We moved to Santa Barbara when I was only 6 months when my Dad finished his active duty in the Navy. When I was 10 my grandmother took my cousin and I on a cruise around the Islands. I remember our driver getting out and cutting fresh sugar cane from the fields. I would love to go back some day and explore the Islands as an adult.
My life when I am not working is pretty mellow: Most of my time is spent with home improvement projects, spending time with my husband Mike, or reading a good book. Looking forward to camping more and taking hikes with the dogs once the weather in the SY Valley cools off a bit.
Ladyhawk, The Princess Bride and Indiana Jones 1-3
I have pretty wide spread tastes. Paul Simon, Huey Lewis and the News, Bebo Norman, Burlap to Cashmere, Janiva Magness, Harry Connick, Jr., Marc Broussard, Michael Buble, Santana, Dave Matthews Band, Fleetwood Mac, Jason Aldean, Zac Brown Band, Jimmy Buffet, Carrie Underwood
With the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system rapidly approaching (it’s scheduled for general availability in October) we’d like to take a moment to encourage cautious treatment of this significantly changed and updated operating system. Here’s a quick rundown of the industry’s (and Anchor Point’s) top concerns:
In the new interface formerly known as Metro (a legal dispute prevents Microsoft from continuing to use that name,) the start menu has been removed, and the Windows 8 equivalent is activated by hovering over a non-descript area of the screen. Designed for tablet users, this translates very poorly to the desktop, and is unable to be disabled or altered easily. We find this new interface confusing and unnecessary… and have found that a lot of others do, as well.
There’s a bit of a storm is brewing on this one. Essentially, every time you install an application, uniquely identifiable information is sent to Microsoft informing them of your activities (and done so in a potentially insecure fashion.) While Microsoft says “don’t worry about it,” there are clearly some serious privacy issues with this implemented as a default setting.
Windows applications that may be critical to your business have likely not yet been fully tested on Windows 8 in production environments. As a matter of best practice, we always require a waiting period for new releases – to allow early adopters and other folks to suffer the slings and arrows of unproven technology, and so that we can learn from what they have discovered. For instance, our remote monitoring and management systems are not yet compatible with Windows 8 (we expect an update in the next month or so.) There are certain to be many more instances of incompatible software and plenty of bugs to be worked out.
The problems don’t stop there… and the industry is left wondering if Windows 8 will be the next Windows Vista. Given these concerns, we are strongly discouraging the purchase or installation of Windows 8 until later next year, if ever. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us for additional information.
I am a huge soccer fan. I was watching a recent game and it struck me that the role that the center referee plays in a soccer match is similar to what we do as your IT partner. If you have not noticed the center referee by the end of the match, but instead the emphasis is on the players and the “flow of the game” it probably means that the center referee has done an outstanding job.
Similarly, our role as your provider of IT services should be that your technology stuff works and you have minimal disruptions so you can focus on the things that you do well.
In order to do that, providing reliability and security are two of the most critical components of Anchor Point’s service to its Partners. The methods we use to ensure your infrastructure is up and running and that your data is protected have been refined and improved through years of experience in supporting technology. Pro-activity is the central key to providing reliability and security at Anchor Point. Here are some examples of proactive things we do for you on a regular basis:
Each month every Partner’s servers and workstations are updated with the latest windows security patches which is the best way to protect systems as these prevent known exploits in operating systems and software. On the same evening these updates occur, we defragment hard drives and run virus and malware scans. This allows us to clean up issues before they slow performance.
Our team is tasked with our own education plans which sharpen us professionally and prepare us to create intelligent network designs and troubleshoot issues when they show up. In the last few months, we have added certifications in Mac, Sonicwall, Allworx and Microsoft.
Our goal is to keep you as informed as possible on all this stuff. Over the next several months, we will be rolling out our Technology Business Reviews where we review statuses on these things as well as a Partner Road Map and a technology budget.
As a team, we meet once per week in order to identify technical trends we are experiencing so that we can proactively address them across all Partner networks.
For Partners with email servers, we verify that mail is flowing. We also keep track of mailbox database size and watch the mail queues to make sure nothing abnormal is occurring on the network like someone sending a 100MB video to their buddies.
We watch for errors on your servers and workstations. This allows us to learn about hard drives going bad or important services that are in need of a kick start like DHCP failure that would stop IP addresses from being handed out.
Every night your backups are verified and once a month we test the virtual image in your offsite backup so we know that we can recover a failed server locally or from the Internet cloud.
We review firewall logs to ensure there is no malicious activity from outsiders. We also backup up configurations and update them to recent firmware to address new exploits.
Every month our spam firewalls stop millions of spam from getting to your inbox. So if you receive one or two, remember that is an excellent percentage compared to the thousands that were blocked.
Partner servers are configured to notify us when they are not on the Internet. Our team can then determine whether the server is hung up or if it is up but the ISP is down or power is out. This is often the reason we call the Partner office or show up before we are notified by the people using these servers.
Most of the time, your experience with Anchor Point is limited to the service that we provide with you over the phone or remote connections resolving issues. Hopefully, this helps you better understand some of the things that we do proactively to ensure you experience exceptional reliability and sound security.
Like the good center referees in soccer, we want to make certain that we are helping you to enjoy the “flow of the game” with minimal interruptions.
“Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc.
Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s successor, as the man who led them astray.”
More reassuring news today, as another Java zero-day vulnerability is disclosed to the internet. The malware makers already have plugins to use this with their tech. If you don’t need Java, get rid of it. We’ll have to wait for an update from Oracle in order to patch this. Java 1.6.X and 1.7.X both vulnerable.
“New Java zero-day vulnerability has been spotted in the wild. We have seen this unpatched exploit being used in limited targeted attacks. Most of the recent Java run-time environments i.e., JRE 1.7x are vulnerable. In my lab environment, I was able to successfully exploit my test machine against latest version of FireFox with JRE version 1.7 update 6 installed.”
Read the full post over at the FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab.
For the uninformed, frame interpolation involves taking choppy video and rendering the missing frames in-between (based on context) in order to improve the framerate. Someone was kind enough to take the four-frame-per-second descent footage and fill it out to 25-frames-per-second, creating this incredible piece of video.
No one is immune to ‘cyber attacks’ – wonder what it costs to clean up 30,000 workstations…(!?)
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“Saudi Arabia-based, industry leader Saudi Aramco released a statement confirming that roughly 30,000 workstations were affected via cyber attack in mid-August. Details beyond that were scarce—Saudi Aramco said the virus “originated from external sources” and that its investigation into the matter was ongoing.”
The Atlantic reports on some onerous statistics regarding spammers:
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“Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the “‘externality ratio’ of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1. Spammers are dumping a lot on society and reaping fairly little in return.” In case it’s not clear, this is a suboptimal situation.”
