Are they trying to deter visitors with $$ from visiting?
My SO is 30 next year and I thought that now Bush has gone etc, I could lift my own personal no visit status of the US. Do it big, splurge lots of cash on casinos, shopping, nice hotels etc
Now there is NO chance I am coming. Why should I give them my fingerprints when I am leaving the place FFS. I wouldn't ne a troublemaker, but its a point of principle. What business does the US gvt have with my foreign fingerprints ? None that is reasonable!
So in real terms (and I am sure any other geeks will feel similar) I am not visiting your ever increasing police state! This means that they won't get our tourism $ and we will just party somewhere else instead and the economys that would have benefited in a time of need, don't.
Unfortunatly, the morons that do disneyland won't care. So the potential effect is minimal, but still noticable.
I got my current job partly based on the energy savings calculator I created http://cleverwatt.com/calc.php and I work for one of the most enviromentally savvy organisations in the country and yet we still have arguments over the cost savings.
See the realise issue is that a lot of machines (Dell, I am looking at you here) even when in the off state, still draw up to 40 Watts, for doing nothing. We spent a few weeks evaluating them and basically its a joke. The cost savins with a certain version of dell is so small that it makes no real diff.
However if anyone really is interested, im more than happy to dispense advice!
I have personally tried a few of these VPNs for just this purpose.
It was mostly slow and unreliable.
However TPB has a USP: They deal with I suspect some huge ass pipes. They will be able to buy a lot of bandwidth at prices most small and even medium sized ISPs would love to get.
I suspect they will have some large support from certain anonymous people with financial clout
Also think about it this way, if you torrent just a few torrents, you may only get 100K/s per torrent, so combined you are running 200K/s. You can fit 4-5 of them per MBit. Then. Wholesale price I suspect is a lot lower than $28-32 per Mbit, when buying multiple GBit pipes, obviously you have to include cost of encryption hardware, support etc but I suspect they will do ok.
Another idea that I think would be great is to offer a per MBit price, so you pay for upto 5MBit, you get 5Mbits worth of pipe. Then for $4 or whatever you can do.5Mbit- Appeals to a wider audience.
I recently started a new job in local government, who is actually quite pro open source. BSD, Solaris, Linux all welcome.
However, I realised, as you may, it is about the bigger picture.
It is all very well putting forward new solutions, but you need think about it in this way:
How much would it cost to retrain all the users. Retraining several thousand users won't be cheap. Would the users accept such a notion, or are they very anti change What is in there at present is a known quantity. It works. Why should they change. Do the IT people have the skillset across the board to support any new system. Who can provide support for the application? That is huge in large companies. Deployments have to be thought out, designed, planned, tested. You need to realise this takes resource, resource that is not always readily available. Breaking several thousand (or even several dozen) will turn people right off your solution PDQ
Thats not to say you can't do it. The way I would play it, is single out a single app to start with. One where the OSS solution is a real good one. Perhaps offer Firefox alongside IE as a start. Design, package and test it well. Then deploy it to a few guinea pigs who are willing to try it. Get feedback, incorporate feedback, re-release to more people etc etc.
Over time you may get a foothold, but bare in mind you will have a huge fight with Exchange and Office. You will find those almost impossible to replace, at least with current OSS solutions. Fancy retraining 4000 users to use thunderbird and IMAP rather than monkey click, monkey do style exchange chimps. My close friend who works, lives and breathes OSS isn't even attempting to change the Exchange setup at the Uni network he inherited.
Also bear in mind management fear change. They may get MS in to talk to you, aka give you the FUD talk.
We have enough issues migrating from Suse to Debian to make us think very carefully about what we are doing and this is only one server.
I'm in the UK and I can't access the page. I am not so bothered about that more than the fact that it provides no mention of why its blocked. I would have no problem with them saying "It's blocked because of..." but to just blank it totally, is crap.
To view it, just google virgin killers and then look at the cached version. When will the idiots learn that this is the internet. There is always a way round it.
Also I think the strysand effect may well be helping the sales skyrocket.
Firstly, if you do get a degree it can be useful. If you have the time do it, and you will have fun too.
However, as a network manager (having done my fair share of grunt work on the way) I knew of a person at the local LUG who was looking for a job, without any formal qualifications. I needed help, so I hired him, on a reasonable wage (ie not far off a full permie) and now he is loving it. He is hard working, enthusiastic, and doesn't mind the crappy jobs so much. He is learning on the job.
The thing is, you need to find someone who is looking for you. Thats the issue. It's about building networks, and these networks can open doors that you just couldn't open by yourself. ie If I had not met this guy through the lug, then I wouldn't have offered him a job if he called on the off chance.
Here in the uk, there is a certain website that is red hot on picking up what are obvious price mixups (moneysavingexpert.com). I once got a Dell 2400 for less than 30% of the real price. Also picked up a celeron for less than £100 all in to make a little profit. They usually honour the screwups, but the current climate must be biting hard for them to not honour it. They may well cave as the adverse publicity is worth more than a few machines at cost(ish).
Having said that, if you spend big, there is nothing dell won't give you. Just the other day Dell gave us a $50,000 blade setup for free, on the hope we would buy some more high spec blades of em (we are totally a HP shop server wise, but desktop is a different story)
Instead of just scraping, why not see if you can get a deal to get a copy of the data, updated as needed. This will cause much less traffic, cpu resources etc and the other party may just get a little cash !
Has it occured to anyone that although their underlying os is windows, who in their right mind would run MS SQL or similar when trying to model complex maths.
I try to imagine MS SQL running the complex db, but I can't really see it.
At our place, we run a *LOT* of sun kit (we have like 2 windows boxes) and when we are changing out the sun hardware, we are replacing it with Intel i386 boxes and Redhat.
Compare the cost of i386 and redhat and support compared to a "proper" sun box, it still works out a LOT cheaper. This is important, especially if you are the one paying for it.
I downloaded the last beta download (ie not release code) and the experience was quite shocking.
I run 10.3 on my 2GB Thinkpad T60p and its rock solid. Now I tried 11 and it was like going from XP to Vista. Slow as anything and it kept crashing badly, on a machine that is Suse certified.
I may download and try the new version but a work to the wise, make sure your backups are good.
However if you are wanting to have a mess around with Xen, its now built right in, so its not all bad.
It's so funny it ain't funny. You will soon be able to buy a production openmoko handset, to work without simlocks or DRM, and have complete control, even down to reflashing the BIOS if you really really want. How does this fit with your bloated DRM'd crapware handsets. These are the handsets that make it difficult to find a contacts phone number, hoping you wont use that cheap POTS phone, rather the mobile, and therefore pay mobile rates for your call. Incidious at best.
Now, tell me, what drugs where you smoking when you thought us people that stand for the following would say yeah, dude, take away my liberties to own stuff I paid for, I don't mind being done over.
Freedom, Free as in beer, Techno geeks who just love to rip gadgets/code apart without fear of some arsehole company (ahem apple and nokia, im looking at you) threatening us.
Well this may be considered flame bate, but there are ways to fix them, and give it to the man at the same time. We all hate hatch the disney mouthpiece for hire.
Firstly, try a Linux distro, for example, try Opensuse 10.3,(http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org) it just works. People sometimes have a bad image of Linux. My parents recently converted to it (well I did it for them) and they have no issues at all. Codecs etc available online legitimately . Paying for an opensuse package. Not heard of anyone paying for software if they didn't want to, as in, no law against passing it round, i.e. libre (free) software.
It's free to use and free to mess around with. True software freedom, as it was meant to be.
Secondly, we all like music. Try jamendo.com for some really good music of all styles and tastes. It's legal and free to download, and IF, *IF* you like an album or a song, you can pay the artist direct from the site. You are not compelled to pay for any of it. I believe you can even share it around, encouraged even. Put that on a p2p net and wait (and pray) that they pick on you. You would laugh them outta court.
Thirdly, vote with your dollars. If you don't like it, don't go paying for stuff that puts money in the enemies pocket. There used to be a site run by 2600.com that told you which companies owned which so you could check to see where your $$ were going.
Well so far we are finding that the amount of maintainance is a lot, lot less. Whereas windows you have multiple install and reboots to set it all up, just turn on the suse update repos, and do a zypper up, and press y several times and bingo you have a patched os.
Also we are getting better uptime, those little "glitches" you get with windows. Not that they were a major things but annoyance.
More proof? We needed a new lookup only DNS server. So we dug out a low spec Dell box and used openseuse with yast to install the correct programs, and bingo, within an hour, we had one free, fast, functional dns server. No needing to find a key, or worse, trying to convince some jumped up rep that yes you really did purchase a Windows 2003 license, or even worse still , sorry we cant sell you w2k3 anymore, just windows 2008.
We are late arrivals in linux land. However we are deploying a new suse server a week to replace NT servers. We have gone from zero to 35% in little over 3 months. It really is linux for the enterprise made easy. And whats even better, the toolsets are free, opensuse is free, and no shitty activation codes. It's all gravy, to use a bad term;)
The company I work for has had one bad sales rep after another. For example I wanted a quote for a server that came in at $5000 as i costed it on the site (The second such server inside 2 weeks) and I emailed the rep to ask for our price. Not only did I have to chase them for almost a week, with nag phone calls to voice mail, and email but put up with the we really couldn't give a t@ss about your $150,000 a year account. Ok small by some standards, but the indies and VARs would snap your hand off for that.
So we are slowly going HP, ok more expensive but at least the sales people actually want to sell us kit.
Why not partner with a mobile company and offer a special service (for non pdas;) ) and offer a "text to book your place" type thing. Could make the whole park thing a lot more pleasurable AND generate advertising for mobile company. Then it could text you 10 minutes before your ride is ready.
That one thing is loyalty, ok brand loyalty I guess. However for myself I use it because it's a no nonsense approach from Google, and you can trust Google to give you the results you should get. Would you trust MS to give it you straight if they could make a dollar off you?
Also the biggest thing is I am loyal to Google because of the good they have done for OSS, being a (fairly) good net citizen, and trying on the whole to do the right thing.
That to me is worth way more than a few $ off a book, that in reality you could probabily get cheaper elsewhere.
To my mind, this smells of utter desperation on Microsofts part.
Will these people never learn. We learnt only a few weeks ago that MS is turning off their music store activation rubbish. How long will this incarnation live on. Ie who keeps the database up to date in 10 years time.
Just to add to that, rather than failsafe, ie if unsure, then let it play, it will not failsafe, so someone is going to loose access to content somewhere along the line.
Ok so I may be a hardcore SM freak and like similar pictures, but whose business is it except mine and my partners. It's not like im gonna go yeah lets go and fuck up this old granny or whatever. I was brought up to know right and wrong (and thats all this is really, or more accuratly the difference between reality and make believe) I can seperate reality from make believe.
However, one interesting question is this. If I take photographs of my hardcore S/M activities with Girlfriend, and get raided by the filth, whats the point because I have already gone one better than merely looking at pictures, i've actually done the deed. Man, if the law catches me, im screwed. Time for double rot encryption i think;)
We (as in the company I work for) had a laptop stolen. It happens, so we thought, and bought a new lappy, restored the data etc.
However, we use logmein.com to control our pcs remotely for support. The old machine turned up online. We were dumbstruck. To avoid giving the game away we didn''t log onto to it, but we did get the IP. The ip belonged to one of the largest ISPs in the UK. They were no use, so I got a friend who works for Computer Crimes Unit to take a look. We did this because after 3 hours of trying to explain what an IP address was- "They stole your IP addess?" - ROFL we gave up.
Turns out that it was sold to a student, by the looks of it by the thief. We saw the large mp3 collection, the TI calc software etc.
Really stupid thing is police just were not interested at all. So peeps if your laptop is stolen, odds on you won't get it back.
I recently removed XP and put OpenSuse 10.3 on it. As people before have said, the packman repository makes everything work re:mulitmedia.
The real nice thing is, it just works. I tried Ubuntu before, and Fedora etc etc but went back because a lot of it didn't work or i couldnt be bothered messing around for hours. OpenSuse is so good that I now just have Opensuse on it, and can do all my sysadmin work just as easily. It is THE distro that converted me to Linux full time, so much so im about to take my CLP exam in a few weeks. Windows really is becoming a has been to me, at least.
The other really nice thing about Suse is that it has all the packages one could reasonably expect ready to install. Unlike some other distros that have broken RPMs of such important software as MySQL. Best thing is, it takes literally 3 or 4 clicks to install MySQL onto a system in a usable.
Try it, it really does rock. It's slick, all the packages work! Ok so their alliance to another company sucks but hey, cant win em all.
It has kind of peed me off a little, press not being allowed in. It used to be everyone can see anything if they so wish. Now the suits are taking over and playing partisan games. It sucks. Linux used to be about freedom. How can this be freedom behind closed doors?
I am a customer of these idiots. Now I am as annoyed as the rest of you. In two years time, you wont be able to get a vanilla connection. It will be
* phorm infected * Traffic Shaped * Prioritised on a who pays the most scenario, rather than which packets need timely delivery.
To top it all off, it wouldn't be that bad if our *ahem* 20MBit connection did more than 5K/s modem style speeds before dying about 18 times every weekend.
It sucks donkey balls. To add insult to injury this idiot is in effect dissing his customers. TBH Id rather pay more and have a nice fast, stable 5Mbit connection. It's not even as if we are big BW hogs. Between the two of us we maybe use 5 GB total per month. Sometimes less than 500Mb (Depends on when new Linux ISOs come out)
I'm going to write to both my MP and the HJIC - Head Joker In Charge and tell them they can cram their broadband and v+ where the sun doesn't shine when the contract is up.
Also now, when you have a problem, ie the cable modem looses sync, you have to ring premium rate tech support who insist on going through there BS checks, when you know its their issue not yours.
It has been said before, but this has cost them dear.
Our company (50 Mill turnover a year) used to be completely Microsoft all the way, including eOpen Office licenses etc and no Linux servers. Now we have rolled out a lot of linux backroom machines. Not because of cost, just because MS is becoming harder and harder to work with. Add to that the fact that i've become a very big supporter of OSS and the ethics of OSS.
Our next decision is not "do we upgrade to Vista +1" but "Which business linux distro best suits our requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they trying to deter visitors with $$ from visiting?
My SO is 30 next year and I thought that now Bush has gone etc, I could lift my own personal no visit status of the US. Do it big, splurge lots of cash on casinos, shopping, nice hotels etc
Now there is NO chance I am coming. Why should I give them my fingerprints when I am leaving the place FFS. I wouldn't ne a troublemaker, but its a point of principle. What business does the US gvt have with my foreign fingerprints ? None that is reasonable!
So in real terms (and I am sure any other geeks will feel similar) I am not visiting your ever increasing police state! This means that they won't get our tourism $ and we will just party somewhere else instead and the economys that would have benefited in a time of need, don't.
Unfortunatly, the morons that do disneyland won't care. So the potential effect is minimal, but still noticable.
I got my current job partly based on the energy savings calculator I created http://cleverwatt.com/calc.php and I work for one of the most enviromentally savvy organisations in the country and yet we still have arguments over the cost savings.
See the realise issue is that a lot of machines (Dell, I am looking at you here) even when in the off state, still draw up to 40 Watts, for doing nothing. We spent a few weeks evaluating them and basically its a joke. The cost savins with a certain version of dell is so small that it makes no real diff.
However if anyone really is interested, im more than happy to dispense advice!
I have personally tried a few of these VPNs for just this purpose.
It was mostly slow and unreliable.
However TPB has a USP: They deal with I suspect some huge ass pipes. They will be able to buy a lot of bandwidth at prices most small and even medium sized ISPs would love to get.
I suspect they will have some large support from certain anonymous people with financial clout
Also think about it this way, if you torrent just a few torrents, you may only get 100K/s per torrent, so combined you are running 200K/s. You can fit 4-5 of them per MBit. Then. Wholesale price I suspect is a lot lower than $28-32 per Mbit, when buying multiple GBit pipes, obviously you have to include cost of encryption hardware, support etc but I suspect they will do ok.
Another idea that I think would be great is to offer a per MBit price, so you pay for upto 5MBit, you get 5Mbits worth of pipe. Then for $4 or whatever you can do .5Mbit- Appeals to a wider audience.
I recently started a new job in local government, who is actually quite pro open source. BSD, Solaris, Linux all welcome.
However, I realised, as you may, it is about the bigger picture.
It is all very well putting forward new solutions, but you need think about it in this way:
How much would it cost to retrain all the users. Retraining several thousand users won't be cheap.
Would the users accept such a notion, or are they very anti change
What is in there at present is a known quantity. It works. Why should they change.
Do the IT people have the skillset across the board to support any new system.
Who can provide support for the application? That is huge in large companies.
Deployments have to be thought out, designed, planned, tested. You need to realise this takes resource, resource that is not always readily available. Breaking several thousand (or even several dozen) will turn people right off your solution PDQ
Thats not to say you can't do it. The way I would play it, is single out a single app to start with. One where the OSS solution is a real good one. Perhaps offer Firefox alongside IE as a start. Design, package and test it well. Then deploy it to a few guinea pigs who are willing to try it. Get feedback, incorporate feedback, re-release to more people etc etc.
Over time you may get a foothold, but bare in mind you will have a huge fight with Exchange and Office. You will find those almost impossible to replace, at least with current OSS solutions. Fancy retraining 4000 users to use thunderbird and IMAP rather than monkey click, monkey do style exchange chimps. My close friend who works, lives and breathes OSS isn't even attempting to change the Exchange setup at the Uni network he inherited.
Also bear in mind management fear change. They may get MS in to talk to you, aka give you the FUD talk.
We have enough issues migrating from Suse to Debian to make us think very carefully about what we are doing and this is only one server.
Be careful!
I'm in the UK and I can't access the page. I am not so bothered about that more than the fact that it provides no mention of why its blocked. I would have no problem with them saying "It's blocked because of..." but to just blank it totally, is crap.
To view it, just google virgin killers and then look at the cached version. When will the idiots learn that this is the internet. There is always a way round it.
Also I think the strysand effect may well be helping the sales skyrocket.
I feel am able to comment on this.
Firstly, if you do get a degree it can be useful. If you have the time do it, and you will have fun too.
However, as a network manager (having done my fair share of grunt work on the way) I knew of a person at the local LUG who was looking for a job, without any formal qualifications. I needed help, so I hired him, on a reasonable wage (ie not far off a full permie) and now he is loving it. He is hard working, enthusiastic, and doesn't mind the crappy jobs so much. He is learning on the job.
The thing is, you need to find someone who is looking for you. Thats the issue. It's about building networks, and these networks can open doors that you just couldn't open by yourself. ie If I had not met this guy through the lug, then I wouldn't have offered him a job if he called on the off chance.
Just my two pence worth.
Here in the uk, there is a certain website that is red hot on picking up what are obvious price mixups (moneysavingexpert.com). I once got a Dell 2400 for less than 30% of the real price. Also picked up a celeron for less than £100 all in to make a little profit. They usually honour the screwups, but the current climate must be biting hard for them to not honour it. They may well cave as the adverse publicity is worth more than a few machines at cost(ish).
Having said that, if you spend big, there is nothing dell won't give you. Just the other day Dell gave us a $50,000 blade setup for free, on the hope we would buy some more high spec blades of em (we are totally a HP shop server wise, but desktop is a different story)
Instead of just scraping, why not see if you can get a deal to get a copy of the data, updated as needed. This will cause much less traffic, cpu resources etc and the other party may just get a little cash !
Has it occured to anyone that although their underlying os is windows, who in their right mind would run MS SQL or similar when trying to model complex maths.
I try to imagine MS SQL running the complex db, but I can't really see it.
At our place, we run a *LOT* of sun kit (we have like 2 windows boxes) and when we are changing out the sun hardware, we are replacing it with Intel i386 boxes and Redhat.
Compare the cost of i386 and redhat and support compared to a "proper" sun box, it still works out a LOT cheaper. This is important, especially if you are the one paying for it.
I downloaded the last beta download (ie not release code) and the experience was quite shocking.
I run 10.3 on my 2GB Thinkpad T60p and its rock solid. Now I tried 11 and it was like going from XP to Vista. Slow as anything and it kept crashing badly, on a machine that is Suse certified.
I may download and try the new version but a work to the wise, make sure your backups are good.
However if you are wanting to have a mess around with Xen, its now built right in, so its not all bad.
It's so funny it ain't funny. You will soon be able to buy a production openmoko handset, to work without simlocks or DRM, and have complete control, even down to reflashing the BIOS if you really really want. How does this fit with your bloated DRM'd crapware handsets. These are the handsets that make it difficult to find a contacts phone number, hoping you wont use that cheap POTS phone, rather the mobile, and therefore pay mobile rates for your call. Incidious at best.
Now, tell me, what drugs where you smoking when you thought us people that stand for the following would say yeah, dude, take away my liberties to own stuff I paid for, I don't mind being done over.
Freedom,
Free as in beer,
Techno geeks who just love to rip gadgets/code apart without fear of some arsehole company (ahem apple and nokia, im looking at you) threatening us.
Well this may be considered flame bate, but there are ways to fix them, and give it to the man at the same time. We all hate hatch the disney mouthpiece for hire.
Firstly, try a Linux distro, for example, try Opensuse 10.3,(http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org) it just works. People sometimes have a bad image of Linux. My parents recently converted to it (well I did it for them) and they have no issues at all. Codecs etc available online legitimately . Paying for an opensuse package. Not heard of anyone paying for software if they didn't want to, as in, no law against passing it round, i.e. libre (free) software.
It's free to use and free to mess around with. True software freedom, as it was meant to be.
Secondly, we all like music. Try jamendo.com for some really good music of all styles and tastes. It's legal and free to download, and IF, *IF* you like an album or a song, you can pay the artist direct from the site. You are not compelled to pay for any of it. I believe you can even share it around, encouraged even. Put that on a p2p net and wait (and pray) that they pick on you. You would laugh them outta court.
Thirdly, vote with your dollars. If you don't like it, don't go paying for stuff that puts money in the enemies pocket. There used to be a site run by 2600.com that told you which companies owned which so you could check to see where your $$ were going.
Well so far we are finding that the amount of maintainance is a lot, lot less. Whereas windows you have multiple install and reboots to set it all up, just turn on the suse update repos, and do a zypper up, and press y several times and bingo you have a patched os.
Also we are getting better uptime, those little "glitches" you get with windows. Not that they were a major things but annoyance.
More proof? We needed a new lookup only DNS server. So we dug out a low spec Dell box and used openseuse with yast to install the correct programs, and bingo, within an hour, we had one free, fast, functional dns server. No needing to find a key, or worse, trying to convince some jumped up rep that yes you really did purchase a Windows 2003 license, or even worse still , sorry we cant sell you w2k3 anymore, just windows 2008.
We are late arrivals in linux land. However we are deploying a new suse server a week to replace NT servers. We have gone from zero to 35% in little over 3 months. It really is linux for the enterprise made easy. And whats even better, the toolsets are free, opensuse is free, and no shitty activation codes. It's all gravy, to use a bad term ;)
The company I work for has had one bad sales rep after another. For example I wanted a quote for a server that came in at $5000 as i costed it on the site (The second such server inside 2 weeks) and I emailed the rep to ask for our price. Not only did I have to chase them for almost a week, with nag phone calls to voice mail, and email but put up with the we really couldn't give a t@ss about your $150,000 a year account. Ok small by some standards, but the indies and VARs would snap your hand off for that.
So we are slowly going HP, ok more expensive but at least the sales people actually want to sell us kit.
Why not partner with a mobile company and offer a special service (for non pdas ;) ) and offer a "text to book your place" type thing. Could make the whole park thing a lot more pleasurable AND generate advertising for mobile company. Then it could text you 10 minutes before your ride is ready.
That one thing is loyalty, ok brand loyalty I guess. However for myself I use it because it's a no nonsense approach from Google, and you can trust Google to give you the results you should get. Would you trust MS to give it you straight if they could make a dollar off you?
Also the biggest thing is I am loyal to Google because of the good they have done for OSS, being a (fairly) good net citizen, and trying on the whole to do the right thing.
That to me is worth way more than a few $ off a book, that in reality you could probabily get cheaper elsewhere.
To my mind, this smells of utter desperation on Microsofts part.
Will these people never learn. We learnt only a few weeks ago that MS is turning off their music store activation rubbish. How long will this incarnation live on. Ie who keeps the database up to date in 10 years time.
Just to add to that, rather than failsafe, ie if unsure, then let it play, it will not failsafe, so someone is going to loose access to content somewhere along the line.
Ok so I may be a hardcore SM freak and like similar pictures, but whose business is it except mine and my partners. It's not like im gonna go yeah lets go and fuck up this old granny or whatever. I was brought up to know right and wrong (and thats all this is really, or more accuratly the difference between reality and make believe) I can seperate reality from make believe.
;)
However, one interesting question is this. If I take photographs of my hardcore S/M activities with Girlfriend, and get raided by the filth, whats the point because I have already gone one better than merely looking at pictures, i've actually done the deed. Man, if the law catches me, im screwed. Time for double rot encryption i think
We (as in the company I work for) had a laptop stolen. It happens, so we thought, and bought a new lappy, restored the data etc.
However, we use logmein.com to control our pcs remotely for support. The old machine turned up online. We were dumbstruck. To avoid giving the game away we didn''t log onto to it, but we did get the IP. The ip belonged to one of the largest ISPs in the UK. They were no use, so I got a friend who works for Computer Crimes Unit to take a look. We did this because after 3 hours of trying to explain what an IP address was- "They stole your IP addess?" - ROFL we gave up.
Turns out that it was sold to a student, by the looks of it by the thief. We saw the large mp3 collection, the TI calc software etc.
Really stupid thing is police just were not interested at all. So peeps if your laptop is stolen, odds on you won't get it back.
I recently removed XP and put OpenSuse 10.3 on it. As people before have said, the packman repository makes everything work re:mulitmedia.
The real nice thing is, it just works. I tried Ubuntu before, and Fedora etc etc but went back because a lot of it didn't work or i couldnt be bothered messing around for hours. OpenSuse is so good that I now just have Opensuse on it, and can do all my sysadmin work just as easily. It is THE distro that converted me to Linux full time, so much so im about to take my CLP exam in a few weeks. Windows really is becoming a has been to me, at least.
The other really nice thing about Suse is that it has all the packages one could reasonably expect ready to install. Unlike some other distros that have broken RPMs of such important software as MySQL. Best thing is, it takes literally 3 or 4 clicks to install MySQL onto a system in a usable.
Try it, it really does rock. It's slick, all the packages work! Ok so their alliance to another company sucks but hey, cant win em all.
It has kind of peed me off a little, press not being allowed in. It used to be everyone can see anything if they so wish. Now the suits are taking over and playing partisan games. It sucks. Linux used to be about freedom. How can this be freedom behind closed doors?
I am a customer of these idiots. Now I am as annoyed as the rest of you. In two years time, you wont be able to get a vanilla connection. It will be
* phorm infected
* Traffic Shaped
* Prioritised on a who pays the most scenario, rather than which packets need timely delivery.
To top it all off, it wouldn't be that bad if our *ahem* 20MBit connection did more than 5K/s modem style speeds before dying about 18 times every weekend.
It sucks donkey balls. To add insult to injury this idiot is in effect dissing his customers. TBH Id rather pay more and have a nice fast, stable 5Mbit connection. It's not even as if we are big BW hogs. Between the two of us we maybe use 5 GB total per month. Sometimes less than 500Mb (Depends on when new Linux ISOs come out)
I'm going to write to both my MP and the HJIC - Head Joker In Charge and tell them they can cram their broadband and v+ where the sun doesn't shine when the contract is up.
Also now, when you have a problem, ie the cable modem looses sync, you have to ring premium rate tech support who insist on going through there BS checks, when you know its their issue not yours.
It has been said before, but this has cost them dear.
Our company (50 Mill turnover a year) used to be completely Microsoft all the way, including eOpen Office licenses etc and no Linux servers. Now we have rolled out a lot of linux backroom machines. Not because of cost, just because MS is becoming harder and harder to work with. Add to that the fact that i've become a very big supporter of OSS and the ethics of OSS.
Our next decision is not "do we upgrade to Vista +1" but "Which business linux distro best suits our requirements.