Lexmark announced the other day that they are closing their Orlando Florida call and service center. I have no knowledge of where the jobs are going, of if business down turn has eliminated the jobs completely.
Make that 400 people less to listen to you
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-bizl ex mark26022603feb26.story
This could be good news for telecommuting. I just wish that more U.S. companies would allow telecommuting. I do not mean 100% of the time, but I could do my job from home just as well as I can do it from work. When I NEED to drive in and do something, I can do it. If there is an emergency, find I can drive -- I will probably miss the rush hours and it won't take me more than 20 minutes to get there. And if it was that important, then why didn't I get the approval to have a redundant system in place?
(ANSWER: because you are our little IT bitch! you have to work 50 hours min every week on salary)
As time goes on, something is going to have to give. More cities, more spread out, new transit systems that do not exist today, or something.
I would take a 10% - 20% pay cut to telecommute, and I mean REAL telecommuting with a Cisco 1750, VWIC, DS1, IP Phone, everything.
If you want to install any non standard driver with Microsoft Windows 2000, or even XP, you have to do it off of a floppy. Yes, it is absurd, and a pain, but what are you going to do when you find out that your Dell with Windows XP has a special IDE controller and you need to install the driver while loading your OS. Oops!
If you have an old 3.5" disk drive laying around that you don't care about, plug in the power and let it spin up, then move it around like you might a video camera.
The first thing you will notice is the gyro action. For the modern small video cameras, this would be very noticeable.
Now, bump it against something. You might be lucky and hear a "whack", "clang" or a sound like a circular saw ringing. You just killed that disk drive.
The result of that spinning movements and the heads being pressed against them is not good. Your average IDE and SCSI hard drives are not meant to be moved while running. This is why you should not move your computer while it is powered on -- there is the possibility of skimming the heads against the disk drive platters.
Laptop disk drives are not only smaller for size and weight purposes, but the decreased weight of the platter system reduces problems related the spinning motion and movement of the system. The heads, swingarm, and swingarm actuator are also designed to handle external movement during operation.
The conclusion is that there is not a chance that you will find a standard disk drive in any video camera recorder any time soon. A laptop IDE drive might happen, but I doubt that even they would be able to put up with the punishment that the consumers would put them though.
Let's take a little look at his website... http://www.jwz.org/
Holy shit, what is this supposed to be? It looks like he was trying to do some Matrix look with a bunch of green code and a black background in a hex editor mode kind of thing. I had to scroll down a page just to find the first link. Apparently he is putting presentation ahead of content in his web design.
I think he needs a little lesson in human interfaces and usability -- maybe he should read this; http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/in dex_fra me.html?cp=dev01mmgz&content=archive/archivelist.h tml#humaninterface
Now, having slandered this guy up and down the street, I thought his rant was great and he is completely right about these stupid interfaces. I like this guy, even if I think his home page sucks.
I crazy about my home network firewall configuration, and when it is under my authority, the firewall rules of the business to which I am employed at any time.
An important but often left out part of a firewall's configuration is logging. Attempts to do things that should never be done should not just be dropped, they should be logged and then brought to your attention.
Some examples;
If your local network is 192.168.2.128/29 then any outgoing packet that does not have a source within the range of 192.168.2.129 and 192.168.2.134 should be dropped AND logged. Someone on YOUR network is either stupid or trying to spoof someone!
The same thing goes for ports and protocols that should not be outgoing on your network.
Okay, so getting probed on TCP 80 is getting annoying now that you are logging everything that is not allowed. Fine, explicitly drop it without logging.
Conform to RFC1918 -- don't route IP private space to or from the Internet. Route it to/dev/null or null0 AND filter it. AND if it came from YOUR network, log it. The quantity of ISPs that fail to conform to this is astounding and scary. You don't need this traffic moving around your ISP -- use GRE or MPLS tunneling instead.
Also, conform to BCP38 ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/bcp/bcp38.txt
After tuning your firewall logging filters, you will find that when new attacks occur or something is up, you notice. Otherwise, you are blind and dumb to what your firewall is doing, which means that you are blind and dumb to what your network is doing.
"Information can be updated with a handheld reader."
Who is going to be the first to lay down a strip on a major metro street with some little wires in it that updates everyone's tires as they drive by with stuff like "0wnzored" and "Michelin Sux!"
In my opinion, this is a terrible idea, for a number of reasons. The first reason is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This would inhibit free speech by anyone who wants to send mail to anyone else.
Sorry, the First Amendment says CONGRESS shall pass no law... A private ISP can restrict your speech as much as they want when you use their service (within the bounds of contracts, etc).
--
You are right. It is not illegal. It is unethical, to me. My statement was vauge in that I was trying to specify the spirit of the First Amendment.
Technically an ISP can give it to you up the butt. Does that mean you want it that way?
"I think the key problem is ISPs that do not block egress traffic on port 25. If you need to send mail through a different SMTP server than provided by your ISP, the admin of that server ought to provide you with a means of using it with authentication on a port other than 25 (you do have permission to use that SMTP server, don't you?). It is not too tough to set up an SMTP server to require authentication, or at a minimum to run off a different port. I am suprised that this is never mentioned as a cure for spam. If just AOL blocked port 25, this could reduce spam by 50% (I base this figure on close examination of the headers of the spam I receive)."
In my opinion, this is a terrible idea, for a number of reasons.
The first reason is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This would inhibit free speech by anyone who wants to send mail to anyone else. You know how you love to have port 80 blocked to your computer, don't you? This would continue the terrible trend of allowing read-only Internet access. You can read all you want, but if you want to upload anything or enjoy the pleasure of having unfettered bidirectional Internet access, you are going to have to pay $10 a month for an IP address, plus a BS charge of $300.
In it's most expensive form, an IPv4 address from ARIN costs about 7 cents per month. Granted you have to buy in bulk, but all ISPs do. So why can't you have a routed allocation if you meet the requirements for BCP12/RFC2050? Network operators are lazy and arrogant -- I know, I used to be one. I used to be an engineer at Global Center and GlobalCrossing.
It is absolutely not an ISP's responsibility to filter packets or frames based upon any protocol or service -- that is your job. Furthermore, most Internet routers simply could not perform with such requirements. If you want to pay your ISP to waste clock cycles and memory to block ports for you, you may ask. Or maybe just you could just get a firewall instead.
The reason that your suggestions are never mentioned as a cure for spam is because they would not work.
If you want to isolate yourself from the Internet and prevent yourself from ever being able to run your own DNS, STMP, HTTP, IMAP, and other servers off of your Internet connection (like I do), you may do so upon your own discretion. But please don't give the (dis)service providers any new ideas. Things are bad enough as it is.
"'NASA's unbroken string of cancelled vehicle programs' going back 20 years makes it a good bet that OSP will also fail. Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important U.S. aerospace contractors?""
You just figured it out.
I live in Orlando Florida, on the east side of town where there are a lot of government contractors, including Lockheed Martin's big IT and research center just down the street. Orlando is all about two words, "cheap labor." The people who live here are cheap labor for Disney, the other theme parks, gas stations, food related, lodging related, and for the few companies that have built offices here that has resulted in some call centers and paper filing mills. A few other businesses lay in the area, but it is nothing like any other major metro area. The rest of the jobs just don't exist here in Orlando. The cost of living is high like Denver Colorado, but the standard of living is much lower for most people.
Orlando has only one freeway, and it is terrible. The rest are toll roads -- toll roads like I have seen in no other city anywhere in the U.S. There are no bridges here to go over or anything, they just feel like taxing the local public since Florida does not have a state income tax (stupid). I have been told many times that the toll road just south of my home is the most expensive toll road in the U.S. per mile. If you have ever been in traffic in Seattle, think of that, on the city streets, but worse -- and there is no bad weather here.
The one exception to all of this is the government contractors. They drive around here in their luxury cars and SUVs. There are a lot of nice houses (mansions) just north and just south of the government contractor center. I have had the opportunity to talk to many of them since I moved here about nine months ago, including an MCSE neighbor of mine who works as support staff for Lockheed Martin. I have been told by nearly all of them that they are very happy with their jobs, they have great job security, and that they mostly sit around and do nothing, working on meaningless projects and get paid for it by the U.S. Government.
To quote one of them who worked for L3, "...To work in government contracting you just have to get a contract, then sit back and do nothing. Don't complain, just be late with your project and you will get even more money in hopes that it might ever get done."
A few of the government contractors that I have spoken with have expressed that the new wave of security related contracts will benefit them a lot and that their shops are trying desperately to land some of those. One of these shops was a flight simulation shop that was trying to change it's image over night to be a "security software" shop, so that they could land a contract. This came from one of their software developers.
There may be some shops that are doing something good that gets used by the government or eventually by the U.S. population, but I have generally attributed the technology workers around here as being old fat do-nothing's with no ambition or drive to have pride in their work. It is nothing like the western U.S. technology social environment where there are mostly young and middle aged workers who want to be proud of their work and have lots of ambition. I don't see this from the government contractors around here at all. They are all middle aged or older and almost always bitter.
I was the author of question number 10, "What do you think about Linux BIOS?". Thank you very much for your answers.
You appropriately split up this question into two parts, which was great. Novell is not much of a player anymore, but Microsoft is, and of course you have to support them. But I am happy to hear that you test for BSD and Linux comparability too. My preferences are Debian GNU/Linux, and FreeBSD.
When I think of the possibilities of LinuxBIOS, I think of my Sun SparcSTATION 10 which I have here at home. It was built in 1993, and has an EEPROM BIOS, called the PROM in the Sun world. It uses Forth and has a lot of cool features. Basically, it is a small OS built into the BIOS which allows you to modify settings, boot from CDROM, tape, and other devices, you can configure the network interfaces without booting into the OS, have pretty logos and such, shunt the CLI to a serial port (ding ding ding!), and much much more, all from a little CLI. This computer is ten years old!
Of course, Sun is like Apple -- they don't have all of the crazy hardware that we deal with on the PC platform. This is why the PC had to wait so long to get all of this support.
When I spoke about LinuxBIOS, I did not necessarily mean to imply the GPL licensing. If there was a FreeBSD-BIOS, I would be just as happy. This would allow you to keep the source to yourself. The true utility in my mind is the CLI interface, versus a simple GUI. I am after the utility. BIOS has gotten better over the years, but there are still some things that I desire. This is especially true of serial port control IO, remote power and reset control, diagnostics, and a few other little things. Being able to do a 'cat/proc/pci' would make me dance.
Of course, if this LinuxBIOS or FreeBSD-BIOS ever came into being real, would they have to support booting from Microsoft's operating systems? Absolutely they would. Doing otherwise would be as bad as,... Microsoft.
At first, I was going to ask you about how you have cooperated, if at all, with the Linux BIOS project. After all, you often have historically cooperated with Microsoft and Novell. What are you doing to help Linux?
But then it occurred to me, if Linux BIOS was successful, it would put AMI out of the BIOS software development business. Linux BIOS is a competitor of AMI.
What is your personal perspective about Linux BIOS, and what does AMI think about it?
Thank you
The LinuxBIOS Home Page http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/
Slashdot | Linux BIOS http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/14/211020 9.shtm l
# Jesse Molina
VeriSign, Network Solutions, The Incompetent NIC
on
Network Solutions Take 2
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· Score: 5, Informative
I own three domain names, one of them under VeriSign/Network Solutions. Recently I had to make changes to the records for my domain names. It was a hassle.
How long has this company been at domain name handling? While they finally have a completely web based interface for the majority of functions related to domain names, you still have to use the eMail to hostmaster@networksolutions.com to change hosts records -- that is, your domain name's domain name servers. This shows blatant incompetency in regards to automation and their engineering staff.
How hard is it to make a little web form that is attached to a database? It's not.
Password, what password? I had been using the old crypt-password scheme for modifications to my domain names though the old eMail change method. When I went to use their website, I found that my account required a password. What password? It was not my old password, and they never asked me to modify my account. So I had to call up and get a password assigned to my domain name account.
And how long did it take for changed to propagate? For everything other than the hosts records, 24 hours or less. For the hosts modifications, it took over four days, and intervention by engineers because their system apparently was dropping the request for change. That would be four days of downtime for a website. Holy crap.
Trouble ticketing system for issues? They don't really have one as far as I can tell. I had to harass the support phone-droid to give me something to track the issue by, and she gave me some tracking number that they use in their database, but she seemed to indicate that they did not have any kind of trouble ticketing system.
If you are in business, you can't afford to do business with VeriSign/Network Solutions.
This is not a troll. The validity of these statements, however, is in question, but would not surprise me if true. History, like all reality, is always interpreted. At least this is one more major conspiracy theory.
The attack upon Pearl Harbor, which triggered the United States to enter World War II, was quite possibly provocated by the United States. The Unites States knew that an attacking force was headed towards Pearl Harbor and let them attack. It is likely that this was done in order to enrage American citizens and encourage American Involvement in World War II.
The United States government at the time allowed many military and non military citizens to be killed, willingly.
In 1940, Arthur McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence submitted a memo to Navy Captains Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox which detailed an 8 step plan to provoke Japan into attacking the United States.
President Roosevelt, over the course of 1941, implemented all 8 of the recommendations contained in the McCollum memo.
Following the eighth provocation, Japan attacked. The public was told that it was a complete surprise, an "intelligence failure", and America entered World War II.
The McCollum Memo, authored 1940, was not publicly released until 1994, 54 years later.
Washington D.C. intelligence apparently knew of the impending attack long before, but did not inform Hawaii local intelligence. They even moved most valuable military assets away from Pearl Harbor before the attack and left old ships there to take the damage.
References;
The McCollum Memo: The Smoking Gun of Pearl Harbor http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/McCollum /
Pearl Harbor, Internment, and Hiroshima: Historical Lessons http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Civil_L iberties/ Pearl%20Harbor_Internment.html
Documentary, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor The Government Knew! http://www.indybay.org/news/2002/09/144578. php
The McCollum Memo http://salc.wsu.edu/fair_s02/fs7/(pearl%20ha rbor%2 0group)/mccollum.htm
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai l/-/0743 201299/qid=1041294781/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-445305 1-6449521?v=glance&s=books
My Girl Friend'S Decision Not To Be A Doctor
on
Complications
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· Score: 2
My mate is currently attending a four year university with a direction in biology and chemistry. She has considered directions such as pharmaceutical industry work, chemistry related product development, research, and anywhere in related fields of biology and chemistry.
One thing that she has said that she would like to do, but will not do, is be any sort of general practitioner of medicine -- that is, be a doctor. She references her previous experiences when following around a doctor at work in a hospital. While the idea of helping people and practicing upon the human system, which she likes a lot, is positive, the surrounding circumstances that doctors are put under are totally negative.
This negativity comes from the long hours of required work (don't work 12+ hours a day = get fired), the average pay in comparison with the work output required, the possibility of being sued out of existence (unless you practice in California), and most of all, the treatment decision making process is put into the hands of "Heath Medical Operators" (HMO) and other individuals who have no medical qualification to be making such decisions.
You get to work with the patient, make a decision about their condition, make a recommendation for treatment, and then someone out of state by means of fax, eMail, or phone (who was probably selling insurance or flipping burgers in their previous job) gets to tell you what to do -- with an absolute underlying interest in their own companies's profits rather than the patient's health.
The system of government and corporate intervention in it's attempt to force down costs for those who need medical attention has had the exact effect that one would expect it to -- pay less, get less. The quality of care that a doctor can give is greatly diminished because of the terrible American health system.
The result is that she has no intentions of going into the field of being a doctor. This perspective that she has is not a rare one, and individuals in the general populous are also understanding that being a doctor is a bad job because of the insane work requirements and terrible politics involved.
Who would want to be a doctor in the United States?
Nobody.
I suspect this is going to be a problem for a long time.
One Slashdot reader wrote;... On a side note, due to the asynchrous nature of most cable modem service, as well as the fact that a node is essentially a LAN, I can certainly understand the concern about people constantly uploading files. Saturating the forward path can cause problems with download traffic as TCP requires ACK packets to be sent stating that a packet has reached it's destination, if the ACK packet is not recieved the packet needs to be re-transmited. So the next time you think your not causing any problems for anyone when you spent the last 2 weeks on Kazaa allowing people to leech files think again.
--
Another Slashdot reader wrote;... The discretionary cap was put into place because users were clogging upstream channels with p2p uploads. It got so bad that DHCP requests on some nodes (mine in particular) could not be recieved within even a 17 second ack window. It does NOT have to do with pressure from the RIAA.
Here's why: The cap is not a new portblock (they already block 80 to discourage webhosting), but simply a different cable modem config file with a lower upstream maximum. The ordinary config for OOL is 10 megabits down and 1 megabit up. the altered config file is 10 megabits down and only 150 kilobits up.
Obviously this is a solution that was implemented to control bandwidth, not specific applications. If OOL were to start battling p2p apps, it would come in the form of a portblock or traffic shaper - NOT an upload throttle.
--
Suggesting that upload or download saturation is a problem which users are responsible for is, in my professional opinion, of questionable judgement.
If the network operations of this organization does not control their own network transit traffic, then there is no hope for them at all. Why are they limiting the upstream on cable bridges? (please don't call it a router unless it complies with RFC1812, or a modem because it is neither) The answer is, because the local layer 2 medium (the neighborhood cable) allocated spectrum is saturated. It is saturated because they have failed to segment the layer 2 network -- this is Optimum Online's failure, not it's users. This is how it was done in the old days of Ethernet and Token Ring when you had a long RG-8 cable and many users. You had to buy a bridge (a switch is a multiport bridge). Optimum Online does not want to buy new equipment, so you get to pay the price for their profit.
It is terrible (should be illegal) that Optimum Online Cablevision prohibits users from using any kind of server (Terms of Service part 21(a)). Most other cable Internet service providers have the same terms of use. Many DSL Internet service providers allow servers either implicitly or explicitly in their service terms.
In my professional opinion, all cable Internet service providers provide nothing more than read-only Internet access, which is not Internet access at all. You should not be able to post on Slashdot to complain at all. You may have already experienced this 'issue' as caused by your cable Internet service provider's upstream bandwidth issues.
Don't complain about being on a Cable teleInternet provider's network. Just switch to a different medium.
Have any of you actually gone to DSL reports and gotten help from message boards? You post a problem and you get 200 answers about "it's your CDROM drivers" and, "your MTU window size is too small!".
Most of these techs may be enthusiastic about their jobs and helping people, but they are also not very technically inclined to help the customers. How many of them are actually qualified to do anything on the ISPs systems? Does that tech know about ATM VPI/VCI addressing, am I supposed to be using 0/32 or something else? The difference between AAL3 and AAL5? What about PPP components and how laying PPP over Ethernet is such a bad idea? Can they tell you why they use PAP instead of CHAP authentication? Do they know half a DINK about RADIUS? Ask them what the frequency ranges are for CAP and DMT. Do they even know how IPv4 addressing works? Hell, ask them how many pairs DSL runs on and you may be surprised at the answers that you get. They couldn't lay out a static route on a Cisco if their jobs depended on it -- which is why they don't get exec, or even login access.
At first I was disappointed when I turned to DSL reports to see what their message boards looked like. Then I realized that it was a good thing. DSL Reports is a idiot magnet, keeping all of those screaming kids and adults away from... ME.
I am still against the big ISPs, telcos, and cable Internet providers. This was a good move but done in classic big-stupid teclo tradition. They are to blame for the fact that these customers need technical support in the first place. Your network operator is stupid from top to bottom.
Yes, if you like. I am not going to post it here though. eMail me at sharaharass@yahoo.com if you would like to get a hold on my resume.
Sistina LVM Is Awesome!
on
IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Holy cow. Sistina LVM (Logical Volume Manager) rocks. It is a partition system/file system of the future that really makes RAID sort of unnecessary. It is true that it is done by the host OS, but when integrated right it does not matter.
Documentation for LVM is great. It is stable and works without quirks. It does all of the things that I would typically desire from a RAID 0,1,5 setup. Administration tools are awesome and give output just as I hoped. Expand partition sizes LIVE (ext2resize needs to unmount though, that is not LVM's problem), move a file system to another physical drive, mirror partitions, spread partitions over various devices. LVM is NUTSO!
It is built into the Linux kernel past 2.4.7 (or somewhere around there), though I have heard that it was inspired from LVM for HPUX. I can't say much about this.
Understanding the concept of how LVM works can be a little hard at first, but once you get past that and then actually use it on a system, you will be totally blown away by what it does and the performance.
Here is the website for LVM http://www.sistina.com/products_lvm.htm
I personally use Sistina LVM on a Debian Gnu/Linux system that has two IDE 60GB hard disks. I can change the sizes of partitions, move data around, move to a new hard drive on the fly, and tons of things that I don't even think I could do with the highest end of RAID controllers. As for performance, it is software RAID, but it does not have any of the typical software RAID slowness or cruft factor. I initially chose LVM as a cheap alternative to buying an IDE RAID card. Now, I don't even want an IDE RAID controller.
I went reading through some of your older posts like you said to. From this I gather that you are a student at one of the various schools in the Orlando metro area, or are pretty early on in your career.
I have the terribly obvious advice that unless you really have it made somehow with something local, and even if you do, get the hell out of the Orlando metro area as soon as you can. You seem to have a clue, so I should not have to say this.
I recently moved here after having lived in most major western U.S. metro cities and I have to say that Orlando was not my choice. I am here because of a special situation that is only temporary, a few years, and then I am gone. Orlando is a death trap for someone like yourself who wants to get into computer game development on the coding side. Orlando is about the toll roads, cheap labor, and the college kid schools.
In Orlando;
I don't expect to get paid anywhere near my market value in other metro areas.
I don't expect that any job I find here will provide me with much technological related experience.
I plan to spend the time teaching myself new things with my lab equipment and on my own time.
I don't expect the Orlando metro area to get any better in the next five years.
Even if you have to flip burgers in Denver, San Francisco, or Seattle, it will be much better than flipping them here. Fortunately for you, I think your burger flippin days, if they came, are near over.
I had looked into them, and I sent my resume over, just in case they might be interested. I have heard nothing, and I really don't expect to. IS/IT is really disrespected in gaming companies. They either outsource it or have the sound guy flip up a T1 and some desktop box to host their website. Though they do take the website development pretty seriously -- just not the infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Lexmark announced the other day that they are closing their Orlando Florida call and service center. I have no knowledge of where the jobs are going,
l ex mark26022603feb26.story
of if business down turn has eliminated the jobs completely.
Make that 400 people less to listen to you
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-biz
This could be good news for telecommuting. I just wish that more U.S. companies would allow telecommuting. I do not mean 100% of the time, but I could do my job from home just as well as I can do it from work. When I NEED to drive in and do something, I can do it. If there is an emergency, find I can drive -- I will probably miss the rush hours and it won't take me more than 20 minutes to get there. And if it was that important, then why didn't I get the approval to have a redundant system in place?
(ANSWER: because you are our little IT bitch! you have to work 50 hours min every week on salary)
As time goes on, something is going to have to give. More cities, more spread out, new transit systems that do not exist today, or something.
I would take a 10% - 20% pay cut to telecommute, and I mean REAL telecommuting with a Cisco 1750, VWIC, DS1, IP Phone, everything.
If you want to install any non standard driver with Microsoft Windows 2000, or even XP, you have to do it off of a floppy. Yes, it is absurd, and a pain, but what are you going to do when you find out that your Dell with Windows XP has a special IDE controller and you need to install the driver while loading your OS. Oops!
If you have an old 3.5" disk drive laying around that you don't care about, plug in the power and let it spin up, then move it around like you might a video camera.
The first thing you will notice is the gyro action. For the modern small video cameras, this would be very noticeable.
Now, bump it against something. You might be lucky and hear a "whack", "clang" or a sound like a circular saw ringing. You just killed that disk drive.
The result of that spinning movements and the heads being pressed against them is not good. Your average IDE and SCSI hard drives are not meant to be moved while running. This is why you should not move your computer while it is powered on -- there is the possibility of skimming the heads against the disk drive platters.
Laptop disk drives are not only smaller for size and weight purposes, but the decreased weight of the platter system reduces problems related the spinning motion and movement of the system. The heads, swingarm, and swingarm actuator are also designed to handle external movement during operation.
The conclusion is that there is not a chance that you will find a standard disk drive in any video camera recorder any time soon. A laptop IDE drive might happen, but I doubt that even they would be able to put up with the punishment that the consumers would put them though.
Some info from my perspective;
I am at 66.192.31.140
First logged packet at Jan 25 00:30:47 EST
Last logged packet at Jan 25 12:17:40 EST (15 minutes ago)
Number of hits, only 136.
grep PROTO=UDP
136
Darn Slashdot, breaking up my links
http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/index_fra me.html?cp=dev01mmgz&content=archive/archivelist.h tml#humaninterface
So, this guy is bitching about usability?
Let's take a little look at his website... http://www.jwz.org/
Holy shit, what is this supposed to be? It looks like he was trying to do some Matrix look with a bunch of green code and a black background in a hex editor mode kind of thing. I had to scroll down a page just to find the first link. Apparently he is putting presentation ahead of content in his web design.
I think he needs a little lesson in human interfaces and usability -- maybe he should read this;
http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/i
Now, having slandered this guy up and down the street, I thought his rant was great and he is completely right about these stupid interfaces. I like this guy, even if I think his home page sucks.
I crazy about my home network firewall configuration, and when it is under my authority, the firewall rules of the business to which I am employed at any time.
An important but often left out part of a firewall's configuration is logging. Attempts to do things that should never be done should not just be dropped, they should be logged and then brought to your attention.
Some examples;
If your local network is 192.168.2.128/29 then any outgoing packet that does not have a source within the range of 192.168.2.129 and 192.168.2.134 should be dropped AND logged. Someone on YOUR network is either stupid or trying to spoof someone!
The same thing goes for ports and protocols that should not be outgoing on your network.
Okay, so getting probed on TCP 80 is getting annoying now that you are logging everything that is not allowed. Fine, explicitly drop it without logging.
Conform to RFC1918 -- don't route IP private space to or from the Internet. Route it to
Also, conform to BCP38 ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/bcp/bcp38.txt
After tuning your firewall logging filters, you will find that when new attacks occur or something is up, you notice. Otherwise, you are blind and dumb to what your firewall is doing, which means that you are blind and dumb to what your network is doing.
"Information can be updated with a handheld reader."
Who is going to be the first to lay down a strip on a major metro street with some little wires in it that updates everyone's tires as they drive by with stuff like "0wnzored" and "Michelin Sux!"
In my opinion, this is a terrible idea, for a number of reasons. The first reason is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This would inhibit free speech by anyone who wants to send mail to anyone else.
Sorry, the First Amendment says CONGRESS shall pass no law... A private ISP can restrict your speech as much as they want when you use their service (within the bounds of contracts, etc).
--
You are right. It is not illegal. It is unethical, to me. My statement was vauge in that I was trying to specify the spirit of the First Amendment.
Technically an ISP can give it to you up the butt. Does that mean you want it that way?
"I think the key problem is ISPs that do not block egress traffic on port 25. If you need to send mail through a different SMTP server than provided by your ISP, the admin of that server ought to provide you with a means of using it with authentication on a port other than 25 (you do have permission to use that SMTP server, don't you?). It is not too tough to set up an SMTP server to require authentication, or at a minimum to run off a different port. I am suprised that this is never mentioned as a cure for spam. If just AOL blocked port 25, this could reduce spam by 50% (I base this figure on close examination of the headers of the spam I receive)."
In my opinion, this is a terrible idea, for a number of reasons.
The first reason is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This would inhibit free speech by anyone who wants to send mail to anyone else. You know how you love to have port 80 blocked to your computer, don't you? This would continue the terrible trend of allowing read-only Internet access. You can read all you want, but if you want to upload anything or enjoy the pleasure of having unfettered bidirectional Internet access, you are going to have to pay $10 a month for an IP address, plus a BS charge of $300.
In it's most expensive form, an IPv4 address from ARIN costs about 7 cents per month. Granted you have to buy in bulk, but all ISPs do. So why can't you have a routed allocation if you meet the requirements for BCP12/RFC2050? Network operators are lazy and arrogant -- I know, I used to be one. I used to be an engineer at Global Center and GlobalCrossing.
It is absolutely not an ISP's responsibility to filter packets or frames based upon any protocol or service -- that is your job. Furthermore, most Internet routers simply could not perform with such requirements. If you want to pay your ISP to waste clock cycles and memory to block ports for you, you may ask. Or maybe just you could just get a firewall instead.
The reason that your suggestions are never mentioned as a cure for spam is because they would not work.
If you want to isolate yourself from the Internet and prevent yourself from ever being able to run your own DNS, STMP, HTTP, IMAP, and other servers off of your Internet connection (like I do), you may do so upon your own discretion. But please don't give the (dis)service providers any new ideas. Things are bad enough as it is.
"'NASA's unbroken string of cancelled vehicle programs' going back 20 years makes it a good bet that OSP will also fail. Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important U.S. aerospace contractors?""
You just figured it out.
I live in Orlando Florida, on the east side of town where there are a lot of government contractors, including Lockheed Martin's big IT and research center just down the street. Orlando is all about two words, "cheap labor." The people who live here are cheap labor for Disney, the other theme parks, gas stations, food related, lodging related, and for the few companies that have built offices here that has resulted in some call centers and paper filing mills. A few other businesses lay in the area, but it is nothing like any other major metro area. The rest of the jobs just don't exist here in Orlando. The cost of living is high like Denver Colorado, but the standard of living is much lower for most people.
Orlando has only one freeway, and it is terrible. The rest are toll roads -- toll roads like I have seen in no other city anywhere in the U.S. There are no bridges here to go over or anything, they just feel like taxing the local public since Florida does not have a state income tax (stupid). I have been told many times that the toll road just south of my home is the most expensive toll road in the U.S. per mile. If you have ever been in traffic in Seattle, think of that, on the city streets, but worse -- and there is no bad weather here.
The one exception to all of this is the government contractors. They drive around here in their luxury cars and SUVs. There are a lot of nice houses (mansions) just north and just south of the government contractor center. I have had the opportunity to talk to many of them since I moved here about nine months ago, including an MCSE neighbor of mine who works as support staff for Lockheed Martin. I have been told by nearly all of them that they are very happy with their jobs, they have great job security, and that they mostly sit around and do nothing, working on meaningless projects and get paid for it by the U.S. Government.
To quote one of them who worked for L3, "...To work in government contracting you just have to get a contract, then sit back and do nothing. Don't complain, just be late with your project and you will get even more money in hopes that it might ever get done."
A few of the government contractors that I have spoken with have expressed that the new wave of security related contracts will benefit them a lot and that their shops are trying desperately to land some of those. One of these shops was a flight simulation shop that was trying to change it's image over night to be a "security software" shop, so that they could land a contract. This came from one of their software developers.
There may be some shops that are doing something good that gets used by the government or eventually by the U.S. population, but I have generally attributed the technology workers around here as being old fat do-nothing's with no ambition or drive to have pride in their work. It is nothing like the western U.S. technology social environment where there are mostly young and middle aged workers who want to be proud of their work and have lots of ambition. I don't see this from the government contractors around here at all. They are all middle aged or older and almost always bitter.
Dear Brian
I was the author of question number 10, "What do you think about Linux BIOS?". Thank you very much for your answers.
You appropriately split up this question into two parts, which was great. Novell is not much of a player anymore, but Microsoft is, and of course you have to support them. But I am happy to hear that you test for BSD and Linux comparability too. My preferences are Debian GNU/Linux, and FreeBSD.
When I think of the possibilities of LinuxBIOS, I think of my Sun SparcSTATION 10 which I have here at home. It was built in 1993, and has an EEPROM BIOS, called the PROM in the Sun world. It uses Forth and has a lot of cool features. Basically, it is a small OS built into the BIOS which allows you to modify settings, boot from CDROM, tape, and other devices, you can configure the network interfaces without booting into the OS, have pretty logos and such, shunt the CLI to a serial port (ding ding ding!), and much much more, all from a little CLI. This computer is ten years old!
Of course, Sun is like Apple -- they don't have all of the crazy hardware that we deal with on the PC platform. This is why the PC had to wait so long to get all of this support.
When I spoke about LinuxBIOS, I did not necessarily mean to imply the GPL licensing. If there was a FreeBSD-BIOS, I would be just as happy. This would allow you to keep the source to yourself. The true utility in my mind is the CLI interface, versus a simple GUI. I am after the utility. BIOS has gotten better over the years, but there are still some things that I desire. This is especially true of serial port control IO, remote power and reset control, diagnostics, and a few other little things. Being able to do a 'cat
Of course, if this LinuxBIOS or FreeBSD-BIOS ever came into being real, would they have to support booting from Microsoft's operating systems? Absolutely they would. Doing otherwise would be as bad as,... Microsoft.
I appreciate your positive competition attitude!
Take care
Hi again
My apologies for the introduction of "Developer". It is my understanding that Brian Richardson's current title is that of a Sales Engineer.
A better term would have been, "representative."
My bad!
Dear AMI BIOS Developer
At first, I was going to ask you about how you have cooperated, if at all, with the Linux BIOS project. After all, you often have historically cooperated with Microsoft and Novell. What are you doing to help Linux?
But then it occurred to me, if Linux BIOS was successful, it would put AMI out of the BIOS software development business. Linux BIOS is a competitor of AMI.
What is your personal perspective about Linux BIOS, and what does AMI think about it?
Thank you
The LinuxBIOS Home Page
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/
Slashdot | Linux BIOS
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/14/21102
# Jesse Molina
I own three domain names, one of them under VeriSign/Network Solutions. Recently I had to make changes to the records for my domain names. It was a hassle.
How long has this company been at domain name handling? While they finally have a completely web based interface for the majority of functions related to domain names, you still have to use the eMail to hostmaster@networksolutions.com to change hosts records -- that is, your domain name's domain name servers. This shows blatant incompetency in regards to automation and their engineering staff.
How hard is it to make a little web form that is attached to a database? It's not.
Password, what password? I had been using the old crypt-password scheme for modifications to my domain names though the old eMail change method. When I went to use their website, I found that my account required a password. What password? It was not my old password, and they never asked me to modify my account. So I had to call up and get a password assigned to my domain name account.
And how long did it take for changed to propagate? For everything other than the hosts records, 24 hours or less. For the hosts modifications, it took over four days, and intervention by engineers because their system apparently was dropping the request for change. That would be four days of downtime for a website. Holy crap.
Trouble ticketing system for issues? They don't really have one as far as I can tell. I had to harass the support phone-droid to give me something to track the issue by, and she gave me some tracking number that they use in their database, but she seemed to indicate that they did not have any kind of trouble ticketing system.
If you are in business, you can't afford to do business with VeriSign/Network Solutions.
This is not a troll. The validity of these statements, however, is in question, but would not surprise me if true. History, like all reality, is always interpreted. At least this is one more major conspiracy theory.
The attack upon Pearl Harbor, which triggered the United States to enter World War II, was quite possibly provocated by the United States. The Unites States knew that an attacking force was headed towards Pearl Harbor and let them attack. It is likely that this was done in order to enrage American citizens and encourage American Involvement in World War II.
The United States government at the time allowed many military and non military citizens to be killed, willingly.
In 1940, Arthur McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence submitted a memo to Navy Captains Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox which detailed an 8 step plan to provoke Japan into attacking the United States.
President Roosevelt, over the course of 1941, implemented all 8 of the recommendations contained in the McCollum memo.
Following the eighth provocation, Japan attacked. The public was told that it was a complete surprise, an "intelligence failure", and America entered World War II.
The McCollum Memo, authored 1940, was not publicly released until 1994, 54 years later.
Washington D.C. intelligence apparently knew of the impending attack long before, but did not inform Hawaii local intelligence. They even moved most valuable military assets away from Pearl Harbor before the attack and left old ships there to take the damage.
References;
The McCollum Memo: The Smoking Gun of Pearl Harbor
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/McCollu
Pearl Harbor, Internment, and Hiroshima: Historical Lessons
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Civil_
Documentary, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor The Government Knew!
http://www.indybay.org/news/2002/09/144578
The McCollum Memo
http://salc.wsu.edu/fair_s02/fs7/(pearl%20h
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/deta
My mate is currently attending a four year university with a direction in biology and chemistry. She has considered directions such as pharmaceutical industry work, chemistry related product development, research, and anywhere in related fields of biology and chemistry.
One thing that she has said that she would like to do, but will not do, is be any sort of general practitioner of medicine -- that is, be a doctor. She references her previous experiences when following around a doctor at work in a hospital. While the idea of helping people and practicing upon the human system, which she likes a lot, is positive, the surrounding circumstances that doctors are put under are totally negative.
This negativity comes from the long hours of required work (don't work 12+ hours a day = get fired), the average pay in comparison with the work output required, the possibility of being sued out of existence (unless you practice in California), and most of all, the treatment decision making process is put into the hands of "Heath Medical Operators" (HMO) and other individuals who have no medical qualification to be making such decisions.
You get to work with the patient, make a decision about their condition, make a recommendation for treatment, and then someone out of state by means of fax, eMail, or phone (who was probably selling insurance or flipping burgers in their previous job) gets to tell you what to do -- with an absolute underlying interest in their own companies's profits rather than the patient's health.
The system of government and corporate intervention in it's attempt to force down costs for those who need medical attention has had the exact effect that one would expect it to -- pay less, get less. The quality of care that a doctor can give is greatly diminished because of the terrible American health system.
The result is that she has no intentions of going into the field of being a doctor. This perspective that she has is not a rare one, and individuals in the general populous are also understanding that being a doctor is a bad job because of the insane work requirements and terrible politics involved.
Who would want to be a doctor in the United States?
Nobody.
I suspect this is going to be a problem for a long time.
One Slashdot reader wrote; ... On a side note, due to the asynchrous nature of most cable modem service, as well as the fact that a node is essentially a LAN, I can certainly understand the concern about people constantly uploading files. Saturating the forward path can cause problems with download traffic as TCP requires ACK packets to be sent stating that a packet has reached it's destination, if the ACK packet is not recieved the packet needs to be re-transmited. So the next time you think your not causing any problems for anyone when you spent the last 2 weeks on Kazaa allowing people to leech files think again.
... The discretionary cap was put into place because users were clogging upstream channels with p2p uploads. It got so bad that DHCP requests on some nodes (mine in particular) could not be recieved within even a 17 second ack window. It does NOT have to do with pressure from the RIAA.
--
Another Slashdot reader wrote;
Here's why: The cap is not a new portblock (they already block 80 to discourage webhosting), but simply a different cable modem config file with a lower upstream maximum. The ordinary config for OOL is 10 megabits down and 1 megabit up. the altered config file is 10 megabits down and only 150 kilobits up.
Obviously this is a solution that was implemented to control bandwidth, not specific applications. If OOL were to start battling p2p apps, it would come in the form of a portblock or traffic shaper - NOT an upload throttle.
--
Suggesting that upload or download saturation is a problem which users are responsible for is, in my professional opinion, of questionable judgement.
If the network operations of this organization does not control their own network transit traffic, then there is no hope for them at all. Why are they limiting the upstream on cable bridges? (please don't call it a router unless it complies with RFC1812, or a modem because it is neither) The answer is, because the local layer 2 medium (the neighborhood cable) allocated spectrum is saturated. It is saturated because they have failed to segment the layer 2 network -- this is Optimum Online's failure, not it's users. This is how it was done in the old days of Ethernet and Token Ring when you had a long RG-8 cable and many users. You had to buy a bridge (a switch is a multiport bridge). Optimum Online does not want to buy new equipment, so you get to pay the price for their profit.
It is terrible (should be illegal) that Optimum Online Cablevision prohibits users from using any kind of server (Terms of Service part 21(a)). Most other cable Internet service providers have the same terms of use. Many DSL Internet service providers allow servers either implicitly or explicitly in their service terms.
In my professional opinion, all cable Internet service providers provide nothing more than read-only Internet access, which is not Internet access at all. You should not be able to post on Slashdot to complain at all. You may have already experienced this 'issue' as caused by your cable Internet service provider's upstream bandwidth issues.
Don't complain about being on a Cable teleInternet provider's network. Just switch to a different medium.
The cost of IPs
For a small ISP, each IP address costs no more than 67 cents per year. For a larger ISP, each IP costs as little as 7 cents per year.
Divide by 12 to compare to monthly pricing.
And how many let you configure the reverse DNS?
Feel raped yet?
Have any of you actually gone to DSL reports and gotten help from message boards? You post a problem and you get 200 answers about "it's your CDROM drivers" and, "your MTU window size is too small!".
Most of these techs may be enthusiastic about their jobs and helping people, but they are also not very technically inclined to help the customers. How many of them are actually qualified to do anything on the ISPs systems? Does that tech know about ATM VPI/VCI addressing, am I supposed to be using 0/32 or something else? The difference between AAL3 and AAL5? What about PPP components and how laying PPP over Ethernet is such a bad idea? Can they tell you why they use PAP instead of CHAP authentication? Do they know half a DINK about RADIUS? Ask them what the frequency ranges are for CAP and DMT. Do they even know how IPv4 addressing works? Hell, ask them how many pairs DSL runs on and you may be surprised at the answers that you get. They couldn't lay out a static route on a Cisco if their jobs depended on it -- which is why they don't get exec, or even login access.
At first I was disappointed when I turned to DSL reports to see what their message boards looked like. Then I realized that it was a good thing. DSL Reports is a idiot magnet, keeping all of those screaming kids and adults away from... ME.
I am still against the big ISPs, telcos, and cable Internet providers. This was a good move but done in classic big-stupid teclo tradition. They are to blame for the fact that these customers need technical support in the first place. Your network operator is stupid from top to bottom.
Yes, if you like. I am not going to post it here though. eMail me at sharaharass@yahoo.com if you would like to get a hold on my resume.
Holy cow. Sistina LVM (Logical Volume Manager) rocks. It is a partition system/file system of the future that really makes RAID sort of unnecessary. It is true that it is done by the host OS, but when integrated right it does not matter.
Documentation for LVM is great. It is stable and works without quirks. It does all of the things that I would typically desire from a RAID 0,1,5 setup. Administration tools are awesome and give output just as I hoped. Expand partition sizes LIVE (ext2resize needs to unmount though, that is not LVM's problem), move a file system to another physical drive, mirror partitions, spread partitions over various devices. LVM is NUTSO!
It is built into the Linux kernel past 2.4.7 (or somewhere around there), though I have heard that it was inspired from LVM for HPUX. I can't say much about this.
Understanding the concept of how LVM works can be a little hard at first, but once you get past that and then actually use it on a system, you will be totally blown away by what it does and the performance.
Here is the website for LVM
http://www.sistina.com/products_lvm.htm
I personally use Sistina LVM on a Debian Gnu/Linux system that has two IDE 60GB hard disks. I can change the sizes of partitions, move data around, move to a new hard drive on the fly, and tons of things that I don't even think I could do with the highest end of RAID controllers. As for performance, it is software RAID, but it does not have any of the typical software RAID slowness or cruft factor. I initially chose LVM as a cheap alternative to buying an IDE RAID card. Now, I don't even want an IDE RAID controller.
Hi again
I went reading through some of your older posts like you said to. From this I gather that you are a student at one of the various schools in the Orlando metro area, or are pretty early on in your career.
I have the terribly obvious advice that unless you really have it made somehow with something local, and even if you do, get the hell out of the Orlando metro area as soon as you can. You seem to have a clue, so I should not have to say this.
I recently moved here after having lived in most major western U.S. metro cities and I have to say that Orlando was not my choice. I am here because of a special situation that is only temporary, a few years, and then I am gone. Orlando is a death trap for someone like yourself who wants to get into computer game development on the coding side. Orlando is about the toll roads, cheap labor, and the college kid schools.
In Orlando;
I don't expect to get paid anywhere near my market value in other metro areas.
I don't expect that any job I find here will provide me with much technological related experience.
I plan to spend the time teaching myself new things with my lab equipment and on my own time.
I don't expect the Orlando metro area to get any better in the next five years.
Even if you have to flip burgers in Denver, San Francisco, or Seattle, it will be much better than flipping them here. Fortunately for you, I think your burger flippin days, if they came, are near over.
I had looked into them, and I sent my resume over, just in case they might be interested. I have heard nothing, and I really don't expect to. IS/IT is really disrespected in gaming companies. They either outsource it or have the sound guy flip up a T1 and some desktop box to host their website. Though they do take the website development pretty seriously -- just not the infrastructure.