IANALT (I am not a laptop thief), but, if I were to steal one, the first thing I'd do is a reformat/install of my favorite OS, after disconnecting the battery for a few days to take care of any CMOS passwords. Quite a bunch of laptops these days store the bios password on a eeprom which is non-volatile. You can leave the battery unplugged all you want but the bios password will stick around.
That wouldn't work so well over here. Timesheets go through three approvals: Immediate manager, director of the department, and then HR. It wouldn't make it past the first approval with random looking numbers in the comments, heh.
That's why you need dual monitors, multiple desktops on each monitor, and your own proxy server:0)
Seriously, dual monitors allow people to work and play a lot better than a single-monitor setup. That's probably one reason why people are more productive with 2 monotirs - you can shove all the "personal stuff" to one side, and keep an ey on it without actually having to stop working on what you're doing.
Damn right. I brought in a pc from home so I could have two computers at my desk. I've had two on my desk at home for years and it's pretty painful for me to work without having two these days. We are an all linux shop (except for workstations). Why we don't have linux workstations is beyond me. So I just had to bring in a linux desktop for the orfice. My pc has an openvpn connection to my home router which is also running squid. It's the perfect setup.
I've been slacking at my job a *lot* lately. We even have this retarded timesheet system where you itemize every 15 minute block of your day to some project. If you don't book your 8 hours, it's deducted from your pay (even though we are all on salary), so naturally you book your time even if you aren't doing anything. Lately I've been doing about an hour of real work per day, and spending about 10 minutes filling out my timesheet. It really goes to show that no matter what system is in place, if someone wants to slack, they will slack, and get away with it. My brother is even a better slacker than I am. He got awards from his company and bonuses and everything. Mostly he played robotron and choplifter in mame. Oh, and xblast, and crack-attack are fun too.
I was expanding upon a previous comment: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=276679&c id=20319951
and also because FreeBSD doesn't base it's core OS on a fluxating set of packages that can -and do- hose your system on a regular basis if you try to keep it up to date (meaning FreeBSD has a binary patch mechanism instead of "make 'fuck up my system with the latest packages from sourceforge -k?' ". The rusty nails are the bugs in the latest and greatest packages.
Sticking with a Linux-system-as-meal analogy, I would suggest a fairer one would be to compare Gentoo to cooking a meal yourself from pre-prepared ingredients and a recipe to going to a restaurant for a meal.
With Gentoo (cooking yourself) you can choose precisely what meal you want, made from precisely what ingredients, but you do have to go to the effort of cooking it yourself. With binary distributions (going out to a restaurant) you make a selection from whatever they happen to have on the menu, but yes, it is less effort and less time-consuming on your part.
Gentoo may not be the best choice of you, but why go out of your way to criticise those who have a different point of view ? Ah, but the proper analogy goes like this:
Gentoo is like heading over to the local food shop and asking "okay, give me some pasta, some tomato sauce and some garlic". The guy behind the counter hands you packaged black boxes with the aforementioned labels. You get home to make your meal and you open the pasta box. it looks okay, so you cook it up. You open the sauce box and that looks a little weird, but you start cooking it anyway. You then open the box of garlic and dump it in the sauce. You then realize that the garlic also contains rusty nails and little critters. Your meal is ruined.
I obviously haven't seen the code you're talking about and hove no opinion of it. However, I've heard this crap from new programmers for years. So let me through some ideas your way.
1. it isn't garbage and spaghetti because you have difficulty following the technique, there are a thousand ways to do anything. It's garbage and spaghetti when it doesn't work well, and when it's under documented. While I do agree with this, I also will say that a large percentage of code in big companies is actually garbage and spaghetti. My current company being no exception.
5. lets say that there were five programmers on the code before you, one after another. The first four might have been gods gift to programming, it only takes one pretentious newbie in the chain to really screw up pretty code. This is the golden statement. This seems to happen more often than not with large companies and big projects.
I had a project come up recently where we were given the task of doing a rewrite of an old web interface to our system. The team was three guys, myself, a new guy, and the guy who wrote the original web interface. There was a rewrite of the backend daemon. I was looking at the code before I actually knew the daemon was also being rewritten. The code looked worse than the first version, and it was new spaghetti code by a senior guy. The guy just can't code. The new guy was much worse. He wrote the initial version of the new web interface. I found a series of scripts handling displaying code tables. Five different scripts for handling five types of code tables with 100 lines copied and pasted between each script and a one line difference between then.
In conclusion, sometimes there just isn't any difference between a "senior" and a "junior" programmer. Crap code is crap code no matter who writes it.
I read an article not too long ago where the conclusion was that printer and paper usage has gone up along with email and im usage. People tend to print out their two line emails.
I just don't get it. If I send my boss a two page software design spec, the first thing he does is print it out, read it at his desk, and email me back any changes that are needed.
I had some scaling issues about 2 years ago. I can't go into much detail since I no longer have the install. We had about 10,000 tickets on a dual 1ghz machine with 4 gigs of ram. The server wasn't used for much else other than some small, low traffic websites. Loading the all tickets screen would take a good 40-50 seconds. Loading the queues (I forgot what they are called... the per person assignments) took about the same time as well. Our guys (3 users) were getting really slowed down waiting almost a minute per page load.
We switched to the free version of Cerberus and things have been great since then.
Sorry we couldn't stick with RT, it is a damn powerful system. I suppose lots of stuff has been fixed in 2 years.
You needed an update to do that? That happened all by itself for me. A friend of mine popped one my hard drives into his XP box and booted. Check Disk came up and "fixed" mostly everything. Fixed as in... 200 gigs of data was now 80 gigs of data. No filename mismatches, no weird corrupt stuff, just files GONE. I ran a ton of recovery tools and it didn't find any dangling files anywhere. This drive was maxed out completely when I last shut down. And I had shut down multiple times and everything was fine and dandy.
It wasn't completely terrible though since the data on there was from the quakecon direct connect and we had one more day left. But still, if that was real data... god damn.
At one point I found an screenshot of qmail vs. postfix code in similar areas for handling some condition. The qmail code was hardcoded, had nasty loops and was just plain unbearable. The postfix version, however, was exceedingly elegant and I knew right away what the code was doing.
The place I work has gobs and gobs of legacy code. The code reminds me of the qmail code with it's hard coded stuff everywhere, loops upon loops upon loops right in the middle of main(). Hell, some 1000+ line programs only have just a main().
It's actually been getting better throughout the years. People who really know how to program have been rewriting the cruft, organizing common things into libs, etc. The idea is that when you get a project, leave it better than your found it. New code should never have cruft.
So here we are, in 2007. Myself and two others get a project which is a rewrite of a web interface to our system in php. I did the web frontend, one guy did the daemon backend that sends out xml data for requests, and then the other guy did the xml schemas and xml processing on the frontend.
I started working on the frontend a little late since I was involved in other projects so I missed out on guiding the other frontend guy, and man was that a big mistake. This guy obviously doesn't know how to code properly, and he also likes to copy and paste. I found some code that handled displaying some codetables. There were four 100 line files that were identical except for one line which handled the different types of codes to be displayed... WTF!
The application was running incredibly slow, around 40-50 seconds per request. My manager tells us we can't ship this pos, fix it. I notice that the other web guy was doing xslt on the xml. He was generating more xslt based on the xml, and then would run the second xslt on another xml file. He would then convert the xml to csv and then did a serialize on the csv into a session variable, He would then convert it into an array of objects, and then into an array of label=value to pass to my code that used a template engine. For each set of xslt processing, he would do an exec("java") from within php. Two exec's to java per page load, no wonder this thing is slow. I ripped out all of his xml code, all 1000 lines or so, rewrote it in about 300 of pure php, and now we have.2-.3 seconds per page load. Bloody hell, what was this guy thinking.
During the process I ripped out gems like this:
$lutfile = fopen($server_lut, "r"); if ($lutfile) while (!feof($lutfile)) {
$line = fgets($lutfile);
if (preg_match("/^$customer_number/", $line))
{
$read_customer_number = strtok($line, ",");
if ($customer_number == $read_customer_number)
{
$this->ip_address = strtok(",");
$this->port = strtok(",");
}
else
display_error_die('DEBUG!!: Bad regex in lookup_connection');
} } fclose($lutfile);
Here in New York, a friend of mine had a car that kept getting broken into and he was tired of having to replace the glass. He took everything out and left the car unlocked. The next thing that happened was someone stole the distributor. Not the distributor cap, the actual distributor. Bastards.
They also gave out free (although horribly admin-locked) laptops to students. I don't know about you guys, but i had mine unlocked after the first week after I asked a buddy at the helpdesk for the bios password. I had linux up and going even before I had the bios password. Those things weren't as locked down as they appeared to be.
Since I lacked pci wireless cards I used my now linux lappy as a router for the rest of the computers in my room. That worked out quite well. And if you really needed to get into the bios, you used the control panel irq config to set all the irq's on the board to "none". Reboot. The bios now says, irq failure, entering bios config... done and done. I can't take credit for that one though, someone else had tried that to see what would happen and noticed that the bios wouldnt ask for a password.
They most definitely did not do a good job in deploying the first gen wireless 802.11a wireless network that they had. They did a deployment of wireless for all dorms instead of running cat5. Exactly why is beyond me. Cat5 would have been a heck of a lot cheaper since now they are replacing the entire wireless system.
Each dorm was four floors, two wings (one male one female). Two access points per floor about 50 feet apart. If I remember correctly there are about 10 dorms. That's 160 access points total for just the dorms. There was an ap hopping program that was available and preinstalled on all the school laptops. It was a joke. It would crash almost every time you went out of range of your current ap. Either that or suck up 100% cpu until it was killed, most people would just remove it.
All the standard hangout places had ethernet anyway (the campus center, the food court under the old gym) There is really no reason to have 900 access points for such a small campus.
The main problem was not even the wireless connectivity and range (even 802.11a was not that bad at 1mbit). The main problem was the school's internet bandwidth (which was one t1 for the residential network used by all students on campus)
I too went to SUNY Morrisville. I was there from 01-03 as a Computer Science major. If you think you guys had it bad for bandwidth. You should have seen the status in 01. Anyone who got a laptop as part of the required laptop program had to go to that orientation. At the orientation I ethernetted in and I was all happy to test out the blazing fast campus internet. It had to be better than cable at home... right? I busily downloaded firefox and some other tools using console ftp (ftp in ie was broken on the campus standard laptop windows install). The orientation instructor walked by and immediately asked "hey, what are you trying to find out over there". I'm like uhh, I'm just downloading some stuff. I was getting around 100k/sec. Not terrible, but not what I expected. As the lecture went on my download speed dropped. At the end I was getting about 10k/sec... wtf?
I figured this was a fluke and I was all excited to try out this new fangled wireless since I had never used a wireless network before. I plug in my 1mbit raylink 802.11a wireless card and dI boot up and go to google. Timeout while resolving host... hmm, that's odd... reload. Timeout again. Repeat 10 times. Oh there it is finnaly. I do a quick search for my favorite mozilla plugins. Waiting for remote host... timeout... wtf? The results page finnaly starts loading at 200 bytes a second. This was the residential internet for 6 months. The academic network was a bit better, during the day at class I could actually get my email and do a google search or two. I later found out that the residential got it's very own t1 (for 3500 students). The academic network was also on a lonely t1. Many people in my building bought dialup accounts just so they can get their email.
Second semester I got a sysadmin position for the computer science department. That was quite nice since now I can use the academic network from my room (especially after class and get a full t1).
At the end of the first semester they got one more t1 for resnet and one more t1 for the academic network. Now I was able to get about 5-10k/sec on a good day on resnet. Second semester I moved off campus to what they called the honors house (which was kinda like a low key frat house). We had ethernet! And by this time the school got 8 more t1's for resnet and 8 more for the academic network. I kept my tunnel to the servers I was admining and would get a whopping 600k/sec during off peak hours. By the end of my second year they put in qos so that no one could chew up the entire pipe, and by now I have a feeling they finally have adequate bandwidth and qos for everyone.
seriously, there's no point getting into a bidding war on any item on ebay and this is the approach i take... Throughout the duration of the auction there would be no "current bid" on display, just the start price and the number of bidders. If person A bids $10 max and person B bids $15 max person B will still win with $10.01 but they'd both have to wait and see. Ebay wouldn't even make half the money it does now if they adopted that approach.
I write "ASK FOR ID" on the back of all my credit cards. The credit card company's don't like that. Your agreement with the credit card company when you opened the account dictates that the card is not valid until signed. Additionally, if it's blank or says "See ID" on the back of your card, merchants are contractually required to have you sign it before accepting the card. Yeah. There was one post office that gave me some trouble. "We're not supposed to accept cards that aren't signed, so make sure you have a signed card next time"
The signature panel is really worthless. So they say if it's not signed that the patron must sign it and then sign the bill. How worthless is that? If someone is using your stolen identity and signs it, obviously the signature is going to match what they write on the bill. I think all credit cards should be required to be accompanied by an official ID. This doesn't solve the identity theft problem, but it adds another bump in the road for someone who finds/steals someone else's credit card and starts buying stuff.
Ideally credit cards should be accompanied with a pin of some such or some biometric, or something. One should not be able to charge an account with just a swipe.
UGH! WHY DOES THE SIGNATURE THING MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SAFER!?!?
I could write "mickey Mouse" in cursive and they wouldn't notice. What does that have to do with ANYTHING? The only secure thing is a card with a REQUIRED pin, which basically don't exist since debit cards can be run as credit cards these days. I really wish they'd make cards that require the pin for the transaction, that would curb 95% of the cc theft out there.
I write "ASK FOR ID" on the back of all my credit cards. 9 out of 10 shops do not ask for id. Credit cards are the epitome of insecure financial transactions.
The aforementioned news story from the town this occurred in says this woman encouraged children to have personal contact with her outside of school. That's a no-no for any school district
Uhh, I don't know where your from, but where I went to high school it was pretty common (for me anyway) to get a teachers home phone if you were very friendly with them. Although this wasn't some random teacher, they were people I had known for a number of years who shared very similar interests and happened to make very good friends with. So I wouldn't say it would be "common sense" for a teacher to avoid that type of thing. But I would say they should use common sense during interactions. There is nothing inherently wrong with teachers interacting with students outside of class.
I've had teachers throw barbeque's after the semester ended, hold little parties if they were moving away... although only students who had a personal rapport would have been invited.
I don't see any reason for a broad thing against teachers having personal interaction with students outside of school as long as the teacher isn't molesting or anything.
Those uses aside, I look forward to the day webcams look like a DV camera hooked up to a computer and fed through a real-time MPEG4 encoder. While they have gotten a lot better, I still find many webcams frankly painful to watch. Looking at that jerky motion as if you were at the disco with a strobe light, I find it very annoying. It's just not natural motion, it's like watching a CG character that's almost, but still clearly not human.
That's pretty funny, but there are webcams that already do this. The problem is if you want to take advantage of the web part of webcam you need some fat pipes on both ends to have real time high quality video. Cablemodems and etc where you get something like 30k/sec upstream just isn't going to cut it.
I've never found cleartype to be helpful either, I much rather not have cleartype as on every single display device I've enabled it on it looks like crap. I've tried it on high and low end crts and high and low end lcds, it all looks much better (and more readable) without cleartype.
If you're looking for the latest drivers/kernel tweaks, it seems like Debian is perpetually behind. Every so often I try installing it (and Ubuntu/Kubuntu also), but with any new hardware it breaks and I end up re-installing SuSE again. Not that SuSE is perfect but at least it works with my hardware better than Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
I run debian exclusively on my home desktop, on my work desktop, on my laptop, on 3 servers at home, and on a few at work. I have never had a system just "break" without being touched. I have absolutely no problem keeping up with new drivers and all that stuff. Want to play with the latest and greatest on your development box? Change your release to unstable, lftpget ftp..kernel.org/, untar, make menuconfig, make bzImage.. etc etc. Not once have I reinstalled a linux distro "to get hardware to work". Why not? because it's not needed, and only someone who is unfamiliar with linux would take that route
Believe it or not many of the packages in unstable are actually stable to use. Unstable just means stuff is changing constantly. If you use an unstable package on your test box and it performs flawlessly under rigorous testing, feel free to move it into a production system.
I don't need any magical installer to find what hardware I have, lspci does the trick, and if the kernel supports it, no problem (if not, you bought the wrong hardware). Yeah, it would be great if out of the box everything worked with linux, but it doesn't, and people need to accept that and work to improve it. All this talk about "well linux doesn't do X" doesn't help too much. Get out gdb and start fixing stuff (sorry non-coders, but there's not much you can do except make suggestions as to what the coders should be doing).
Look back at first generation linux systems, go check out kernel 1.0.x (or pre 1.0 if you're brave) and beta versions of xfree while you're at it. Look how far we have come, and (mostly) everything is open source and free to boot!
Linux isn't going to be just plug and chug like windows for a long time (hell even windows isn't so friendly many times). All we can do is work to improve the system, and one of the best ways of doing that is to use the thing you are having trouble with, find it's problems and report them (or fix them).
I'm replying to my own post since apparently the mod didn't who didn't like my post just clicked instead of replied. How could my post possibly be redundant since I was the first to bring up that particular topic in this story?
Let's got through a short list:
* Lipitor -- Umm, gee, most docs consider this the mainstay, the gold standard. What generic drug is better than Lipitor?
* Crestor -- Often used when Lipitor fails. Lots of side effects. What generic is better than Crestor?
* Nexium -- Probably the only drug on the list I'd be inclined to agree with you. But can you name a generic prescription that is better?
* Prilosec -- Tums would probably work better for most. Can you name a generic that is better?
* Viagra -- You're lying if you know of a generic.
* Levitra -- Ditto.
* Claritin -- Hell, it may go OTC, and you still can't name a generic.
* Herpes anti-viral (name I can't remember) -- Yeah, you don't know, do you.
If this was 5 years ago you would be more accurate. Nexium is the best in it's class? I would like to see some citations. There are plenty of competitors that work just as well. I suffer from acid reflux and pretty much every competitor to nexium works just fine.
Claritin? Last time I looked it was quite readily available otc as well as about 5 generics next to it.
I can't comment on the others, but I'm sure someone else can
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That wouldn't work so well over here. Timesheets go through three approvals: Immediate manager, director of the department, and then HR. It wouldn't make it past the first approval with random looking numbers in the comments, heh.
That's why you need dual monitors, multiple desktops on each monitor, and your own proxy server
Damn right. I brought in a pc from home so I could have two computers at my desk. I've had two on my desk at home for years and it's pretty painful for me to work without having two these days. We are an all linux shop (except for workstations). Why we don't have linux workstations is beyond me. So I just had to bring in a linux desktop for the orfice. My pc has an openvpn connection to my home router which is also running squid. It's the perfect setup.Seriously, dual monitors allow people to work and play a lot better than a single-monitor setup. That's probably one reason why people are more productive with 2 monotirs - you can shove all the "personal stuff" to one side, and keep an ey on it without actually having to stop working on what you're doing.
I've been slacking at my job a *lot* lately. We even have this retarded timesheet system where you itemize every 15 minute block of your day to some project. If you don't book your 8 hours, it's deducted from your pay (even though we are all on salary), so naturally you book your time even if you aren't doing anything. Lately I've been doing about an hour of real work per day, and spending about 10 minutes filling out my timesheet. It really goes to show that no matter what system is in place, if someone wants to slack, they will slack, and get away with it. My brother is even a better slacker than I am. He got awards from his company and bonuses and everything. Mostly he played robotron and choplifter in mame. Oh, and xblast, and crack-attack are fun too.
Sticking with a Linux-system-as-meal analogy, I would suggest a fairer one would be to compare Gentoo to cooking a meal yourself from pre-prepared ingredients and a recipe to going to a restaurant for a meal.
With Gentoo (cooking yourself) you can choose precisely what meal you want, made from precisely what ingredients, but you do have to go to the effort of cooking it yourself. With binary distributions (going out to a restaurant) you make a selection from whatever they happen to have on the menu, but yes, it is less effort and less time-consuming on your part.
Gentoo may not be the best choice of you, but why go out of your way to criticise those who have a different point of view ? Ah, but the proper analogy goes like this:
Gentoo is like heading over to the local food shop and asking "okay, give me some pasta, some tomato sauce and some garlic". The guy behind the counter hands you packaged black boxes with the aforementioned labels. You get home to make your meal and you open the pasta box. it looks okay, so you cook it up. You open the sauce box and that looks a little weird, but you start cooking it anyway. You then open the box of garlic and dump it in the sauce. You then realize that the garlic also contains rusty nails and little critters. Your meal is ruined.
1. it isn't garbage and spaghetti because you have difficulty following the technique, there are a thousand ways to do anything. It's garbage and spaghetti when it doesn't work well, and when it's under documented. While I do agree with this, I also will say that a large percentage of code in big companies is actually garbage and spaghetti. My current company being no exception. 5. lets say that there were five programmers on the code before you, one after another. The first four might have been gods gift to programming, it only takes one pretentious newbie in the chain to really screw up pretty code. This is the golden statement. This seems to happen more often than not with large companies and big projects.
I had a project come up recently where we were given the task of doing a rewrite of an old web interface to our system. The team was three guys, myself, a new guy, and the guy who wrote the original web interface. There was a rewrite of the backend daemon. I was looking at the code before I actually knew the daemon was also being rewritten. The code looked worse than the first version, and it was new spaghetti code by a senior guy. The guy just can't code. The new guy was much worse. He wrote the initial version of the new web interface. I found a series of scripts handling displaying code tables. Five different scripts for handling five types of code tables with 100 lines copied and pasted between each script and a one line difference between then.
In conclusion, sometimes there just isn't any difference between a "senior" and a "junior" programmer. Crap code is crap code no matter who writes it.
I read an article not too long ago where the conclusion was that printer and paper usage has gone up along with email and im usage. People tend to print out their two line emails.
I just don't get it. If I send my boss a two page software design spec, the first thing he does is print it out, read it at his desk, and email me back any changes that are needed.
I had some scaling issues about 2 years ago. I can't go into much detail since I no longer have the install. We had about 10,000 tickets on a dual 1ghz machine with 4 gigs of ram. The server wasn't used for much else other than some small, low traffic websites. Loading the all tickets screen would take a good 40-50 seconds. Loading the queues (I forgot what they are called... the per person assignments) took about the same time as well. Our guys (3 users) were getting really slowed down waiting almost a minute per page load.
We switched to the free version of Cerberus and things have been great since then.
Sorry we couldn't stick with RT, it is a damn powerful system. I suppose lots of stuff has been fixed in 2 years.
You needed an update to do that? That happened all by itself for me. A friend of mine popped one my hard drives into his XP box and booted. Check Disk came up and "fixed" mostly everything. Fixed as in... 200 gigs of data was now 80 gigs of data. No filename mismatches, no weird corrupt stuff, just files GONE. I ran a ton of recovery tools and it didn't find any dangling files anywhere. This drive was maxed out completely when I last shut down. And I had shut down multiple times and everything was fine and dandy.
It wasn't completely terrible though since the data on there was from the quakecon direct connect and we had one more day left. But still, if that was real data... god damn.
At one point I found an screenshot of qmail vs. postfix code in similar areas for handling some condition. The qmail code was hardcoded, had nasty loops and was just plain unbearable. The postfix version, however, was exceedingly elegant and I knew right away what the code was doing.
The place I work has gobs and gobs of legacy code. The code reminds me of the qmail code with it's hard coded stuff everywhere, loops upon loops upon loops right in the middle of main(). Hell, some 1000+ line programs only have just a main().
.2-.3 seconds per page load. Bloody hell, what was this guy thinking.
It's actually been getting better throughout the years. People who really know how to program have been rewriting the cruft, organizing common things into libs, etc. The idea is that when you get a project, leave it better than your found it. New code should never have cruft.
So here we are, in 2007. Myself and two others get a project which is a rewrite of a web interface to our system in php. I did the web frontend, one guy did the daemon backend that sends out xml data for requests, and then the other guy did the xml schemas and xml processing on the frontend.
I started working on the frontend a little late since I was involved in other projects so I missed out on guiding the other frontend guy, and man was that a big mistake. This guy obviously doesn't know how to code properly, and he also likes to copy and paste. I found some code that handled displaying some codetables. There were four 100 line files that were identical except for one line which handled the different types of codes to be displayed... WTF!
The application was running incredibly slow, around 40-50 seconds per request. My manager tells us we can't ship this pos, fix it. I notice that the other web guy was doing xslt on the xml. He was generating more xslt based on the xml, and then would run the second xslt on another xml file. He would then convert the xml to csv and then did a serialize on the csv into a session variable, He would then convert it into an array of objects, and then into an array of label=value to pass to my code that used a template engine. For each set of xslt processing, he would do an exec("java") from within php. Two exec's to java per page load, no wonder this thing is slow. I ripped out all of his xml code, all 1000 lines or so, rewrote it in about 300 of pure php, and now we have
During the process I ripped out gems like this:
$lutfile = fopen($server_lut, "r");
if ($lutfile) while (!feof($lutfile)) {
$line = fgets($lutfile);
if (preg_match("/^$customer_number/", $line))
{
$read_customer_number = strtok($line, ",");
if ($customer_number == $read_customer_number)
{
$this->ip_address = strtok(",");
$this->port = strtok(",");
}
else
display_error_die('DEBUG!!: Bad regex in lookup_connection');
}
}
fclose($lutfile);
and this:
$this->payments_cnt = (integer)$line;
for ($i = 0; $i payments_cnt; $i++)
{
if (feof($infile))
{
trigger_error("Debtor Display Cache Corrupted");
exit;
}
$line = fgets($infile);
rtrim($line);
$flag = strtok($line, ";");
$label =
Here in New York, a friend of mine had a car that kept getting broken into and he was tired of having to replace the glass. He took everything out and left the car unlocked. The next thing that happened was someone stole the distributor. Not the distributor cap, the actual distributor. Bastards.
Since I lacked pci wireless cards I used my now linux lappy as a router for the rest of the computers in my room. That worked out quite well. And if you really needed to get into the bios, you used the control panel irq config to set all the irq's on the board to "none". Reboot. The bios now says, irq failure, entering bios config... done and done. I can't take credit for that one though, someone else had tried that to see what would happen and noticed that the bios wouldnt ask for a password.
I went to SUNY Morrisville from 01-03 (see http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=239809&cid= 19607305)
They most definitely did not do a good job in deploying the first gen wireless 802.11a wireless network that they had. They did a deployment of wireless for all dorms instead of running cat5. Exactly why is beyond me. Cat5 would have been a heck of a lot cheaper since now they are replacing the entire wireless system.
Each dorm was four floors, two wings (one male one female). Two access points per floor about 50 feet apart. If I remember correctly there are about 10 dorms. That's 160 access points total for just the dorms. There was an ap hopping program that was available and preinstalled on all the school laptops. It was a joke. It would crash almost every time you went out of range of your current ap. Either that or suck up 100% cpu until it was killed, most people would just remove it.
All the standard hangout places had ethernet anyway (the campus center, the food court under the old gym) There is really no reason to have 900 access points for such a small campus.
The main problem was not even the wireless connectivity and range (even 802.11a was not that bad at 1mbit). The main problem was the school's internet bandwidth (which was one t1 for the residential network used by all students on campus)
I too went to SUNY Morrisville. I was there from 01-03 as a Computer Science major. If you think you guys had it bad for bandwidth. You should have seen the status in 01. Anyone who got a laptop as part of the required laptop program had to go to that orientation. At the orientation I ethernetted in and I was all happy to test out the blazing fast campus internet. It had to be better than cable at home... right? I busily downloaded firefox and some other tools using console ftp (ftp in ie was broken on the campus standard laptop windows install). The orientation instructor walked by and immediately asked "hey, what are you trying to find out over there". I'm like uhh, I'm just downloading some stuff. I was getting around 100k/sec. Not terrible, but not what I expected. As the lecture went on my download speed dropped. At the end I was getting about 10k/sec... wtf?
I figured this was a fluke and I was all excited to try out this new fangled wireless since I had never used a wireless network before. I plug in my 1mbit raylink 802.11a wireless card and dI boot up and go to google. Timeout while resolving host... hmm, that's odd... reload. Timeout again. Repeat 10 times. Oh there it is finnaly. I do a quick search for my favorite mozilla plugins. Waiting for remote host... timeout... wtf? The results page finnaly starts loading at 200 bytes a second. This was the residential internet for 6 months. The academic network was a bit better, during the day at class I could actually get my email and do a google search or two. I later found out that the residential got it's very own t1 (for 3500 students). The academic network was also on a lonely t1. Many people in my building bought dialup accounts just so they can get their email.
Second semester I got a sysadmin position for the computer science department. That was quite nice since now I can use the academic network from my room (especially after class and get a full t1).
At the end of the first semester they got one more t1 for resnet and one more t1 for the academic network. Now I was able to get about 5-10k/sec on a good day on resnet. Second semester I moved off campus to what they called the honors house (which was kinda like a low key frat house). We had ethernet! And by this time the school got 8 more t1's for resnet and 8 more for the academic network. I kept my tunnel to the servers I was admining and would get a whopping 600k/sec during off peak hours. By the end of my second year they put in qos so that no one could chew up the entire pipe, and by now I have a feeling they finally have adequate bandwidth and qos for everyone.
The signature panel is really worthless. So they say if it's not signed that the patron must sign it and then sign the bill. How worthless is that? If someone is using your stolen identity and signs it, obviously the signature is going to match what they write on the bill. I think all credit cards should be required to be accompanied by an official ID. This doesn't solve the identity theft problem, but it adds another bump in the road for someone who finds/steals someone else's credit card and starts buying stuff.
Ideally credit cards should be accompanied with a pin of some such or some biometric, or something. One should not be able to charge an account with just a swipe.
UGH! WHY DOES THE SIGNATURE THING MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SAFER!?!?
I could write "mickey Mouse" in cursive and they wouldn't notice. What does that have to do with ANYTHING? The only secure thing is a card with a REQUIRED pin, which basically don't exist since debit cards can be run as credit cards these days. I really wish they'd make cards that require the pin for the transaction, that would curb 95% of the cc theft out there.
I write "ASK FOR ID" on the back of all my credit cards. 9 out of 10 shops do not ask for id. Credit cards are the epitome of insecure financial transactions.
The aforementioned news story from the town this occurred in says this woman encouraged children to have personal contact with her outside of school. That's a no-no for any school district
Uhh, I don't know where your from, but where I went to high school it was pretty common (for me anyway) to get a teachers home phone if you were very friendly with them. Although this wasn't some random teacher, they were people I had known for a number of years who shared very similar interests and happened to make very good friends with. So I wouldn't say it would be "common sense" for a teacher to avoid that type of thing. But I would say they should use common sense during interactions. There is nothing inherently wrong with teachers interacting with students outside of class.
I've had teachers throw barbeque's after the semester ended, hold little parties if they were moving away... although only students who had a personal rapport would have been invited.
I don't see any reason for a broad thing against teachers having personal interaction with students outside of school as long as the teacher isn't molesting or anything.
Those uses aside, I look forward to the day webcams look like a DV camera hooked up to a computer and fed through a real-time MPEG4 encoder. While they have gotten a lot better, I still find many webcams frankly painful to watch. Looking at that jerky motion as if you were at the disco with a strobe light, I find it very annoying. It's just not natural motion, it's like watching a CG character that's almost, but still clearly not human.
That's pretty funny, but there are webcams that already do this. The problem is if you want to take advantage of the web part of webcam you need some fat pipes on both ends to have real time high quality video. Cablemodems and etc where you get something like 30k/sec upstream just isn't going to cut it.
I use IMAP and Thunderbird - and so do all my customers. POP3 is just way too insecure, Outlook is sucky and Thunderbird is the perfect solution.
I don't know about you, but my pop3 server has SSL/TLS support (Courier). But mostly I use SSL IMAP anyway.
I couldn't agree more.
I've never found cleartype to be helpful either, I much rather not have cleartype as on every single display device I've enabled it on it looks like crap. I've tried it on high and low end crts and high and low end lcds, it all looks much better (and more readable) without cleartype.
If you're looking for the latest drivers/kernel tweaks, it seems like Debian is perpetually behind. Every so often I try installing it (and Ubuntu/Kubuntu also), but with any new hardware it breaks and I end up re-installing SuSE again. Not that SuSE is perfect but at least it works with my hardware better than Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
I run debian exclusively on my home desktop, on my work desktop, on my laptop, on 3 servers at home, and on a few at work. I have never had a system just "break" without being touched. I have absolutely no problem keeping up with new drivers and all that stuff. Want to play with the latest and greatest on your development box? Change your release to unstable, lftpget ftp..kernel.org/, untar, make menuconfig, make bzImage.. etc etc. Not once have I reinstalled a linux distro "to get hardware to work". Why not? because it's not needed, and only someone who is unfamiliar with linux would take that route
Believe it or not many of the packages in unstable are actually stable to use. Unstable just means stuff is changing constantly. If you use an unstable package on your test box and it performs flawlessly under rigorous testing, feel free to move it into a production system.
I don't need any magical installer to find what hardware I have, lspci does the trick, and if the kernel supports it, no problem (if not, you bought the wrong hardware). Yeah, it would be great if out of the box everything worked with linux, but it doesn't, and people need to accept that and work to improve it. All this talk about "well linux doesn't do X" doesn't help too much. Get out gdb and start fixing stuff (sorry non-coders, but there's not much you can do except make suggestions as to what the coders should be doing).
Look back at first generation linux systems, go check out kernel 1.0.x (or pre 1.0 if you're brave) and beta versions of xfree while you're at it. Look how far we have come, and (mostly) everything is open source and free to boot!
Linux isn't going to be just plug and chug like windows for a long time (hell even windows isn't so friendly many times). All we can do is work to improve the system, and one of the best ways of doing that is to use the thing you are having trouble with, find it's problems and report them (or fix them).
I'm replying to my own post since apparently the mod didn't who didn't like my post just clicked instead of replied. How could my post possibly be redundant since I was the first to bring up that particular topic in this story?
I have a feeling that this will die a quick painful death just like sitefinder did.
Let's got through a short list:
* Lipitor -- Umm, gee, most docs consider this the mainstay, the gold standard. What generic drug is better than Lipitor?
* Crestor -- Often used when Lipitor fails. Lots of side effects. What generic is better than Crestor?
* Nexium -- Probably the only drug on the list I'd be inclined to agree with you. But can you name a generic prescription that is better?
* Prilosec -- Tums would probably work better for most. Can you name a generic that is better?
* Viagra -- You're lying if you know of a generic.
* Levitra -- Ditto.
* Claritin -- Hell, it may go OTC, and you still can't name a generic.
* Herpes anti-viral (name I can't remember) -- Yeah, you don't know, do you.
If this was 5 years ago you would be more accurate. Nexium is the best in it's class? I would like to see some citations. There are plenty of competitors that work just as well. I suffer from acid reflux and pretty much every competitor to nexium works just fine.
Claritin? Last time I looked it was quite readily available otc as well as about 5 generics next to it.
I can't comment on the others, but I'm sure someone else can
Haha, you got modded troll.