I'm pretty sure that the idea of suing was just a rumor, anyway, and that the apology was merely issued for political reasons. Then again, I read the article...:)
I saw a similar but much better band (several of them, in fact) at House on the Rock in Wisconsin. That crazy guy (Alex Jordan?) managed to collect several completely mechanical orchestra / music machine thingies before he faked his own death to hide underneath the screwy house. Or, that's my theory.:)
Agreed, but the parent was not saying this was Bush's doing, merely that it fell in line with the Bush agenda as he sees it.
There was a definite implication there, which I may have read in due to the general population blaming the whole government's screwups on theone man. Sure, Bush is there to lead and guide (which is a mildly frightening thought), but the ultimate decisions aren't wholly his. Hence, my point.:)
To get back on topic, I have to agree with the parent that this is something that fits in the category of "We are doing this in the name of Homeland Security but it actually doesn't help the situation."
That part I do agree with. The whole "Homeland Security" thing is pretty oviously just a giant power grab with the minor side effect of occasionally helping security a little. If we'd all just think about the children, though, I'm sure we'd have no problems with it.;)
Ironically, thinking before posting was my general point. More specifically, I was suggesting the gov. of CA would have more relevence than teh prez, whoever happens to currently be in either of those positions. Not living in Crazyfornia, though, I'll admit to not knowing exactly who is presently governer. *That* part of my post was in error, and I appreciate it being corrected.:)
I think you may mean one of Arnold Schwarzenegger (governer of the *state* testing this stuff) or Tom Ridge (secretary/director of Homeland Security). Bush is the *president*, and generally would not be involved in creating new bills for the California Assembly or for general Homeland Security. The president does things like approve stuff that the Senate and House agree on first. The senate and House *were* elected by the popular vote, if you'll recall, and they are arguably *more* responsible for the laws that our president have signed... If you're a US citizen, you probably oughtta vote in those elections too - if you plan to complain about the direction we're heading.
If you meant *government* say "government" - not "Bush". He's only one step in a distributed system designed to prevent one person from having absolute power. That system mostly works, BTW.
But, our population is perfectly diverse, so our workforce should reflect that. What? Our population is mostly white males? Huh, I thought our population was mostly black and hispanic women, since those groups have special recognitions and opportunities, while white males have no special exceptions granted to them. That'd be racist and/or sexist, after all.
Then again, I'm glad that I can't get a job based on anything but my qualifications for that job - I'd be annoyed if my skin and gender put me above someone else.
Perhaps they have no current reason to be critical of the current administration - I haven't heard any praise for them recently either. All the people want to hear about is who's cheating on whom anyway, and appearently our present administration is either a) not doing that or b) better at hiding it than the previous admin. The war's several months old now, so no one cares about that crap anymore. One would think that, with the vocal minority of people still pissed off that "the wrong guy" won, there's be plenty of muck to rake. Maye Bush isn't so bad after all?:)
You can install rsync for windows, which is easily done using cygwin. Write a little shell script (since you're pro *nix) and set it up to run on boot. That oughtta be fairly easy.
When I was working computer labs, my preferred solution was linux + vmware, BTW. The machines ran linux (with everything mounted read-only - I'd netboot if I did it again), started up X, and then fired up a VMWare instance that ran full screen. The virtual disk image was on a remote machine (though it could just as easily be pushed to the client machines when it was updated), and was opened read-only on the clients. If anything happened, they'd just "restart", which just threw away any local changes that they'd made. It was great for the net admin classes, as we could give the users full control of the windows machine without worry of them actually screwing anything up. Also, you can update the install at any time by simply opening the disk image with "save changes" enabled. If you set the file system permissions so that normal users can't write to the image even if they do manage to change the vmware settings, you're pretty well set.
Granted, it costs some money, but it works real well - if you don't need direct hardware access to devices not supported by the host OS. That's the VMWare solution's catch - not all hardware is perfectly supported by linux, and using Win32 as a host is rather pointless.:(
The last American "new" car I had was a Ford Focus ZX3 - it had a 2 liter 4 cylinder, got around 30 MPG, and ran at about 3500RPM at 75MPH. That was 10 MPH over the interstate highway speed limit, and 20 MPH over the highway limit. My daily driver is an '80 Chevy Caprice (a rare "sport coupe", even) with a 5.7L engine and the high factory rear gears. It cruises at about 2500RPMs at 75 MPH, and has enough torque to accelerate pleasingly quickly, despite weighing a ton and a half, and could fit a spare small car in the trunk. The price? It drinks gas relatively quickly (about 20MPG) - but it's also got 260K miles on the odometer. I should rebuild the engine, but I'm lazy.
American speed limits have been 55 and 65 MPH for years, which is probably why the cars are designed to run in the engine's powerband (which is most efficient) at those speeds.
Howver, you're missing that most older american cars did not use an overdrive gear, which means they had to choose between acceptable acceleration or low cruise RPMs - or poor economy due to the fuel consumption required to have speed and acceleration. Slow acceleration is not acceptable to most American drivers. It's been my experience that even most lightweight UK sports cars have no torque and crummy acceleration - but I imagine they can cruise at high speeds easily...
I think that speed limits should be based on driver ability, as well. The roads that I drive on were designed 30+ years ago, with speed limits 20 MPH higher than they are now, for cars that were much less capable at speed than modern cars. The limits were dropped to conserve gas, but the roads stayed *the same*.
Thi accident hapend in a city, where people oughtta be driving safely. That means maintaining a relatively low speed. Recording everyone's driving habits, though, also applies on open roads with no other traffic, and interstates that are designed to move traffic quickly. I get the impression that most people who are *for* data recorders have never been outside of "the city," where you can drive for miles without seeing anyone. I've been ticketed for speeding outside fo the city, but never in an area where it was dangerous to exceed the speed limit, and never in an area where people were around (except for a cop hidden behind a sign or driving in the opposite direction). I was driving a "safe" speed, but wasn't fixated on driving precisely 55.0 MPH, for example. Maybe +5 over the limit, which at those speeds doesn't significantly affect my ability to maneuver. The tickets were issued to make the county + state money, not to protect the public.
If I drove 10-20 MPH under the limit, I'd be just as dangerous for obstructing traffic, but no one argues that *those* people should be ticketed and barred from driving.
Anyway, I'm all for strict policing in populated areas, but the people who live out "in the hills" shouldn't have the same restrictions because the situation is vastly different.
Several credit card companies will issue a new credit card number for online transactions - a number with a pre-set limit and a limited number of uses before it expires. Not only is that useful for pretty much stopping theft, it also would be fairly handy for scraping this amazon service.
As far as tracking the IP, a quick google search for "public anonymizing proxy" will pretty handily take care of hiding your access to anything over standard http.
I guess that puts this post in the violation of the DMCA, as it describes a method for circumventing Amazon's copy protection scheme, right?:)
I do dislike minimum balance requirements, though, as they're essentially a fee since you can't access those last few dollars without a penalty. I suppose a direct deposit restriction would be ok, though that also wouldn't have worked out well for me when I worked on the farm.;)
Yeah, I'm in the "$9.50 in all other states" bracket. 3 stamps cost less than $1, and PayPal's billpay service is free. I'm real strongly against paying someone else to pay my bills for me, esp. since electronic payments cut down on the recipient's workload more than it does mine. They save money by not having to pay as many people to open envelopes, and they gain accuracy. I just get to be a little more lazy - and I'm too cheap to pay for that...:)
Reading "PC Magazine" looking for current news or in-depth tech articles is just about as bad as reading it for articles on "the war in Iraq," as far as I could tell last time I picked up an issue.:)
Lot's o' banks don't offer free visa/mc debit cards - several still charge (and several charge for online banking, etc, which causes me to wonder why anyone would go there).
Anyway, I have a paypal account set up for my employer to pay for domain purchases and to sell old hardware on eBay. It'se set up with *only* a credit card. Sure, paypal asks for checking account info all the time, but the account works just as well with just a credit card. There's like a few thousand dollar spending limit (goes away after getting verified with a checking account), but that's generally not an issue.
Speaking of the PayPal credit card (not the debit card - though I have both), the bank the credit card's issued through sucks. I can pay all of my credit card bills online using paypal's billpay service - *except* for my paypal credit card! The stupid bank that issues the paypal credit card *does not accept paypal*! I have to make out a check and mail it in for 3 bills - house, garbage collection, and my credit card that says "PayPal" right on the front.
The only reason that I applied in the first place was to make go away the stupid ads asking me to apply every time I log in to my PayPal account - but then I found out that the ad generating engine has no knowledge of whether or not you already have a paypal credit card (offered by Providian). So, in short, it's the stupidest credit card ever.
The debitcard, though, and the cashback it results in, is pretty cool. I like PayPal, but dislike Providian.
Why would they need to be "on the internet" with ports open? No one can connect to our machines, our machines connect to the registration server which then replies, over the same connection, with an activation - just like getting a web page.
That could fail, potentially, if the registration system was written with bad assuptions. It could also fail if some over-zealous network admin blocked internal access to external ports other than 80 and maybe 443, but there's almost no reason to do that, and nearly no *good* reasons to do so.
I do agree that not every machine is even capable of getting to the internet, which may have been the point,:) and yeah, phone support should really be an option. I was mostly speaking to the idea that a firewall woudl prevent registration, and that, while I think the people at Quark are idiots, I don't think they would make their registration system any more difficult than "connect to web site and download activation code after uploading serial number"...
As far as Adobe's downtime, I waited until the next day. The programs work for several days without registration. The same's true of Macromedia's stuff - they're fully-functioning demos for 30 days (identical to the download version, AFAICT), at which point the activation needs to happen. 30-day downtime is pretty unlikely in any event that won't render the ability to create flash movies moot.;)
I've personally installed Quark 6 on several (5 or 6, I guess) Macs at my place of employment. Following the initial startup of the installed program, a little window comes up asking if I want to activate over the internet or some other way. I pick "internet", and click OK. Then, a few seconds later, the product is activated and running.
Those machines are all behind a firewall (Linux iptables nat, in this case). Your firewall sucks.:)
Adobe's online registration has been pretty good for me so far (on the same macs), except for the period where their web server was down. I expect similar performance from their registration system (if we ever upgrade, which isn't likely to happen soon).
If the first thing you think of when you see "K9" is "an obscure klingon warship" rather than "dog" (or "crappy movie"), you, my friend, are a true geek.:)
It is a relatively small environment, but I think most of my success with this particular network is the level of technical competence of my users. They generally know enough to get themselves out of the most common problems, and I make it a point to teach them what steps I've used to solve the problems that do come up - hopefuly making them more educated users.
At my previous employer, a medium-sized community college, I had slightly worse luck with user incompetence. I was running a combination of linux (and a couple of BSD boxes) in a pair of labs and windows workstations on desktops and in lab situations. The campus-wide file services were Novell, but my lab-local fileservers were linux. The nodes that I was exclusively responsible for had very few problems, though the workstations that I shared responsibility for did keep the other techs somewhat busy. Again, I kept my workload fairly light by educating my users.
This mostly works in situations where the users are receptive to learning, though. I've managed to minimize problems in general by choosing operating systems that allow restriction of user access. The key, in general, is to restrict access enough that the users feel like they have to ask you before installing crap, while at the same time allowing enough freedom that they feel mostly in control. Even at other larger scale employers, though, most days have left me a fair amount of free (away from users) time. I like to think that attention to detail in initial deployment combined with some well placed education, and general trust-building, have worked together to make my networks behave nicely. Challenging environments seem to result from things like legacy support, which usually is a result of tech people not being trusted to make decisions. I haven't had that problem.
When it's all said and done, though, nothing will compensate for idiot users. I've been blessed with very few of those, too.:)
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I'm pretty sure that the idea of suing was just a rumor, anyway, and that the apology was merely issued for political reasons. Then again, I read the article... :)
I saw a similar but much better band (several of them, in fact) at House on the Rock in Wisconsin. That crazy guy (Alex Jordan?) managed to collect several completely mechanical orchestra / music machine thingies before he faked his own death to hide underneath the screwy house. Or, that's my theory. :)
There was a definite implication there, which I may have read in due to the general population blaming the whole government's screwups on theone man. Sure, Bush is there to lead and guide (which is a mildly frightening thought), but the ultimate decisions aren't wholly his. Hence, my point. :)
That part I do agree with. The whole "Homeland Security" thing is pretty oviously just a giant power grab with the minor side effect of occasionally helping security a little. If we'd all just think about the children, though, I'm sure we'd have no problems with it. ;)
Ironically, thinking before posting was my general point. More specifically, I was suggesting the gov. of CA would have more relevence than teh prez, whoever happens to currently be in either of those positions. Not living in Crazyfornia, though, I'll admit to not knowing exactly who is presently governer. *That* part of my post was in error, and I appreciate it being corrected. :)
mmm, pseudo-science... :)
I think you may mean one of Arnold Schwarzenegger (governer of the *state* testing this stuff) or Tom Ridge (secretary/director of Homeland Security). Bush is the *president*, and generally would not be involved in creating new bills for the California Assembly or for general Homeland Security. The president does things like approve stuff that the Senate and House agree on first. The senate and House *were* elected by the popular vote, if you'll recall, and they are arguably *more* responsible for the laws that our president have signed... If you're a US citizen, you probably oughtta vote in those elections too - if you plan to complain about the direction we're heading.
If you meant *government* say "government" - not "Bush". He's only one step in a distributed system designed to prevent one person from having absolute power. That system mostly works, BTW.
HTH.
But, our population is perfectly diverse, so our workforce should reflect that. What? Our population is mostly white males? Huh, I thought our population was mostly black and hispanic women, since those groups have special recognitions and opportunities, while white males have no special exceptions granted to them. That'd be racist and/or sexist, after all.
Then again, I'm glad that I can't get a job based on anything but my qualifications for that job - I'd be annoyed if my skin and gender put me above someone else.
Perhaps they have no current reason to be critical of the current administration - I haven't heard any praise for them recently either. All the people want to hear about is who's cheating on whom anyway, and appearently our present administration is either a) not doing that or b) better at hiding it than the previous admin. The war's several months old now, so no one cares about that crap anymore. One would think that, with the vocal minority of people still pissed off that "the wrong guy" won, there's be plenty of muck to rake. Maye Bush isn't so bad after all? :)
You can install rsync for windows, which is easily done using cygwin. Write a little shell script (since you're pro *nix) and set it up to run on boot. That oughtta be fairly easy.
:(
When I was working computer labs, my preferred solution was linux + vmware, BTW. The machines ran linux (with everything mounted read-only - I'd netboot if I did it again), started up X, and then fired up a VMWare instance that ran full screen. The virtual disk image was on a remote machine (though it could just as easily be pushed to the client machines when it was updated), and was opened read-only on the clients. If anything happened, they'd just "restart", which just threw away any local changes that they'd made. It was great for the net admin classes, as we could give the users full control of the windows machine without worry of them actually screwing anything up. Also, you can update the install at any time by simply opening the disk image with "save changes" enabled. If you set the file system permissions so that normal users can't write to the image even if they do manage to change the vmware settings, you're pretty well set.
Granted, it costs some money, but it works real well - if you don't need direct hardware access to devices not supported by the host OS. That's the VMWare solution's catch - not all hardware is perfectly supported by linux, and using Win32 as a host is rather pointless.
The last American "new" car I had was a Ford Focus ZX3 - it had a 2 liter 4 cylinder, got around 30 MPG, and ran at about 3500RPM at 75MPH. That was 10 MPH over the interstate highway speed limit, and 20 MPH over the highway limit. My daily driver is an '80 Chevy Caprice (a rare "sport coupe", even) with a 5.7L engine and the high factory rear gears. It cruises at about 2500RPMs at 75 MPH, and has enough torque to accelerate pleasingly quickly, despite weighing a ton and a half, and could fit a spare small car in the trunk. The price? It drinks gas relatively quickly (about 20MPG) - but it's also got 260K miles on the odometer. I should rebuild the engine, but I'm lazy.
American speed limits have been 55 and 65 MPH for years, which is probably why the cars are designed to run in the engine's powerband (which is most efficient) at those speeds.
Howver, you're missing that most older american cars did not use an overdrive gear, which means they had to choose between acceptable acceleration or low cruise RPMs - or poor economy due to the fuel consumption required to have speed and acceleration. Slow acceleration is not acceptable to most American drivers. It's been my experience that even most lightweight UK sports cars have no torque and crummy acceleration - but I imagine they can cruise at high speeds easily...
Oh, good, so you get a picture of everyone who didn't do it, and a big flash of light covering the car who did? Hooray!
I think that speed limits should be based on driver ability, as well. The roads that I drive on were designed 30+ years ago, with speed limits 20 MPH higher than they are now, for cars that were much less capable at speed than modern cars. The limits were dropped to conserve gas, but the roads stayed *the same*.
Thi accident hapend in a city, where people oughtta be driving safely. That means maintaining a relatively low speed. Recording everyone's driving habits, though, also applies on open roads with no other traffic, and interstates that are designed to move traffic quickly. I get the impression that most people who are *for* data recorders have never been outside of "the city," where you can drive for miles without seeing anyone. I've been ticketed for speeding outside fo the city, but never in an area where it was dangerous to exceed the speed limit, and never in an area where people were around (except for a cop hidden behind a sign or driving in the opposite direction). I was driving a "safe" speed, but wasn't fixated on driving precisely 55.0 MPH, for example. Maybe +5 over the limit, which at those speeds doesn't significantly affect my ability to maneuver. The tickets were issued to make the county + state money, not to protect the public.
If I drove 10-20 MPH under the limit, I'd be just as dangerous for obstructing traffic, but no one argues that *those* people should be ticketed and barred from driving.
Anyway, I'm all for strict policing in populated areas, but the people who live out "in the hills" shouldn't have the same restrictions because the situation is vastly different.
SUVs are specifically for paved freeways
Actually, most SUVs sold now are not suited for driving anywhere *but* paved freeways - they'd berak if they were really driven off-road...
Several credit card companies will issue a new credit card number for online transactions - a number with a pre-set limit and a limited number of uses before it expires. Not only is that useful for pretty much stopping theft, it also would be fairly handy for scraping this amazon service.
:)
As far as tracking the IP, a quick google search for "public anonymizing proxy" will pretty handily take care of hiding your access to anything over standard http.
I guess that puts this post in the violation of the DMCA, as it describes a method for circumventing Amazon's copy protection scheme, right?
Oh - I thought that was an "and" not an "or"... :)
;)
I do dislike minimum balance requirements, though, as they're essentially a fee since you can't access those last few dollars without a penalty. I suppose a direct deposit restriction would be ok, though that also wouldn't have worked out well for me when I worked on the farm.
Yeah, I'm in the "$9.50 in all other states" bracket. 3 stamps cost less than $1, and PayPal's billpay service is free. I'm real strongly against paying someone else to pay my bills for me, esp. since electronic payments cut down on the recipient's workload more than it does mine. They save money by not having to pay as many people to open envelopes, and they gain accuracy. I just get to be a little more lazy - and I'm too cheap to pay for that... :)
Yeah, but the X10 protocol is used by a whole bunch of other home automation products and systems - not just those made by the X10 company.
Reading "PC Magazine" looking for current news or in-depth tech articles is just about as bad as reading it for articles on "the war in Iraq," as far as I could tell last time I picked up an issue. :)
Lot's o' banks don't offer free visa/mc debit cards - several still charge (and several charge for online banking, etc, which causes me to wonder why anyone would go there).
Anyway, I have a paypal account set up for my employer to pay for domain purchases and to sell old hardware on eBay. It'se set up with *only* a credit card. Sure, paypal asks for checking account info all the time, but the account works just as well with just a credit card. There's like a few thousand dollar spending limit (goes away after getting verified with a checking account), but that's generally not an issue.
Speaking of the PayPal credit card (not the debit card - though I have both), the bank the credit card's issued through sucks. I can pay all of my credit card bills online using paypal's billpay service - *except* for my paypal credit card! The stupid bank that issues the paypal credit card *does not accept paypal*! I have to make out a check and mail it in for 3 bills - house, garbage collection, and my credit card that says "PayPal" right on the front.
The only reason that I applied in the first place was to make go away the stupid ads asking me to apply every time I log in to my PayPal account - but then I found out that the ad generating engine has no knowledge of whether or not you already have a paypal credit card (offered by Providian). So, in short, it's the stupidest credit card ever.
The debitcard, though, and the cashback it results in, is pretty cool. I like PayPal, but dislike Providian.
Why would they need to be "on the internet" with ports open? No one can connect to our machines, our machines connect to the registration server which then replies, over the same connection, with an activation - just like getting a web page.
:) and yeah, phone support should really be an option. I was mostly speaking to the idea that a firewall woudl prevent registration, and that, while I think the people at Quark are idiots, I don't think they would make their registration system any more difficult than "connect to web site and download activation code after uploading serial number"...
;)
That could fail, potentially, if the registration system was written with bad assuptions. It could also fail if some over-zealous network admin blocked internal access to external ports other than 80 and maybe 443, but there's almost no reason to do that, and nearly no *good* reasons to do so.
I do agree that not every machine is even capable of getting to the internet, which may have been the point,
As far as Adobe's downtime, I waited until the next day. The programs work for several days without registration. The same's true of Macromedia's stuff - they're fully-functioning demos for 30 days (identical to the download version, AFAICT), at which point the activation needs to happen. 30-day downtime is pretty unlikely in any event that won't render the ability to create flash movies moot.
I've personally installed Quark 6 on several (5 or 6, I guess) Macs at my place of employment. Following the initial startup of the installed program, a little window comes up asking if I want to activate over the internet or some other way. I pick "internet", and click OK. Then, a few seconds later, the product is activated and running.
:)
Those machines are all behind a firewall (Linux iptables nat, in this case). Your firewall sucks.
Adobe's online registration has been pretty good for me so far (on the same macs), except for the period where their web server was down. I expect similar performance from their registration system (if we ever upgrade, which isn't likely to happen soon).
If the first thing you think of when you see "K9" is "an obscure klingon warship" rather than "dog" (or "crappy movie"), you, my friend, are a true geek. :)
I prefer to blame sendmail, which is the cause of all historical problems.
It is a relatively small environment, but I think most of my success with this particular network is the level of technical competence of my users. They generally know enough to get themselves out of the most common problems, and I make it a point to teach them what steps I've used to solve the problems that do come up - hopefuly making them more educated users.
:)
At my previous employer, a medium-sized community college, I had slightly worse luck with user incompetence. I was running a combination of linux (and a couple of BSD boxes) in a pair of labs and windows workstations on desktops and in lab situations. The campus-wide file services were Novell, but my lab-local fileservers were linux. The nodes that I was exclusively responsible for had very few problems, though the workstations that I shared responsibility for did keep the other techs somewhat busy. Again, I kept my workload fairly light by educating my users.
This mostly works in situations where the users are receptive to learning, though. I've managed to minimize problems in general by choosing operating systems that allow restriction of user access. The key, in general, is to restrict access enough that the users feel like they have to ask you before installing crap, while at the same time allowing enough freedom that they feel mostly in control. Even at other larger scale employers, though, most days have left me a fair amount of free (away from users) time. I like to think that attention to detail in initial deployment combined with some well placed education, and general trust-building, have worked together to make my networks behave nicely. Challenging environments seem to result from things like legacy support, which usually is a result of tech people not being trusted to make decisions. I haven't had that problem.
When it's all said and done, though, nothing will compensate for idiot users. I've been blessed with very few of those, too.