One night I had a few friends over for some beers. Now, I live out in the country where it takes very little to loose 'lectricity. A couple of us were outside whilst the other fellow was inside playing Doom3, since as a console gamer he had not played yet. At some point the power went out, but I do have roughly 1.5kVa worth of battery backup so the computer, monitor and other stuff was still on. It happened at just that point one of the baddies was in the process of jumping out from a hidden panel, as they are wont to do in D3.
Said friend had a couple beers in him and wasn't the brightest to begin with so he thought it was part of the game and came running outside looking as though he had seen a ghost. It was worth a few laughs, though it's a pitty he hadn't pissed himself.
Yes, I have a legitimate copy of XP Pro and the last time I reinstalled, I had to deal with WGA no less than 3 times. That's three times after I successfully registered my copy of XP with MS after the install. It's a minor annoyance, but ffs, how many times do I have to prove I'm not a goddamned criminal before they actually believe me?
I'm no MS hater, but I very much dislike being treated like a criminal.
Abouta year or two ago, I was having serious problems with comment spam, with hundreds a day coming from a single IP address. I banned the IP for 7 days and put various protection schemes in place to prevent further abuse. Once the 7 days was up, there were literally thousands of attempts, but now each one was stopped and logged in an easier to understand format. With this in hand, I looked up the address to find it originated from one of The Planet's customers. Even after sending reports with links to the logfiles, months (and tens of thousands of attempts to spam my comments) went before I received any response whatsoever. That response was as a direct result of speaking to one of The Planet's higher profile customers who I've worked with in the past to try to get some help in the situation.
Only after doing an end-run around the abuse department did I see some *real* action taken on behalf of The Planet. Previously all they seem to have done was moved the customer to a different IP address, which would have been very counter-productive had I just kept blocking the original IP address.
Even better is the 3 to 6 weeks it is to take for the replacement to arrive. Now I need to go out and buy another battery just in case the current one decides to asplode and take my naughty bits with it.
Well, I do have a couple of affected Acer laptops, and so far the process is painfull. The operators on the other end answer the phone in a language unknown to me, though they promptly switched to very understandable english after I spoke. However, the line quality is so horrible that my call was dropped 3 times so far, and I still haven't processed a replacement request.
It was an abusive relationship that had been going on for a couple of years, unknown to my sisters and I. The reason she left is because the abuse was becoming more and more directed at my sisters and I. She tried a number of things to help him through this including our pastor, a man my father did respect greatly. I suppose it is possible there may have been abandonment issues, but my wife of 9 years (whom I dated for 4 years prior) and my daughter would beg to differ. You do a lot of assuming, but it's not accomplishing much.
Still, I would rather abandonment issues than learning to become a verbally & mentally abusive drunk and passing that along to my children. I won't deny that there were issues to overcome, but I feel I'm better off for the divorce. I also won't deny that there were some things that my father instilled upon me at an early age and I won't deny that I benefitted from havinghim around for those twelve years.
By the way, he did, slowly, hit bottom and eventually started on the road to recovery and even remarrying, though that unfortunatly didn't last very long as they were a nice family. He had made strides in re-establishing contact with myself and repeatedly said that Mom leaving him was what finally showed him he was throwing his life away. Unfortunatly, it was all for not as the alcohol really fucked his system, and he died shortly thereafter.
Let's play hypothetical. Woman & man hook up, everything is great. They get along amazingly and they get married. Two years into the relationship they have a child. 3 years after that, Dad looses his job and, even after intervensions from the wife, becomes a drunk. He can't find another meaningful job, he becomes more and more depressed. Let's say this happens over the span of a year. As he travels further down, he starts showing signs of physical and mental abuse, and the signs keep getting worse and worse. She tries to get the family into couceling, tries to intervene with the help of family and he has nothing to do with it. He gets more and more abusive towards het and is starting to become abusive with the child.
Here's a couple of choices for you:
1) After doing what she can do before she realises that the safety of the child is in danger and leaves. 2) Doesn't leave, the mother and child are physically abused on a regular basis, the child grows up more and more violent because of the violence the child has grown up with. The child starts to model the fathers behaviour. 2a) As in two, but childrens aid (or protection service, whatever you may have in yourcountry) gets involved and puts the child in a foster home. Dad still beats mom on a regular basis. 3) The wife decides, too late, that it's time to leave and when the father finds out, he beats the living fuck out of her and the child, to show them a lesson
Of course, it is very possible that in options 2, 2A and 3, the child passes this along to his/her children. It's also possible, but not as, that the child grows up to be a mostly normal member of society, but any child that sees that sort of abuse on a regular basis is going to be just a little fucked up.
Naw man, as I said in my post, my father failed at parenting, but my mother did not as she got my sisters and I out of the situation. Had she kept us in that situation, she would have failed as well. Therefore, by staying in that situation, my parents would have failed. By getting us out, my mother did not fail. The post that I was responding to stated that divorced parents fail their children and my post was to contradict that not all divorced parents fail their children.
He had a stepmother. Which means broken home. Which means his parents already failed him before stepmother got on the scene. Which was most likely "not their fault" either, just like my kid being from a broken home is of course not my fault either, but society's fault, or Jesus's fault, or something. Which is also completely irrelevant to the "how do we stop kids from killing people" problem.
Wait, so if the parents get divorced, they fail their children? Stop and think, for a second, that occasionally the broken home is a far better situation. My parents got divorced when I was twelve, due mostly to my father constantly falling off the wagon and coming home shit-stinking drunk and yelling at anything and everything in sight.
Yup, my mom divorcing him was A Good Thing. My father had already failed, but the only way my mother would have failed is by keeping my sisters and I in that situation. By removing us from that situation, she in fact saved us. My father wouldn't discover the error of his ways until roughly 12 years later.
So, not all divorced parents fail their children, arse. I'm quite certain I wouldn't be where I am today if I was kept in that situation. A good many are for the good of the children. The fact that the father was given custody of the child in the first place is a telling thing, since dollars to donuts the mother will get custody unless she's all kinds of fucked up.
My father in law in a truck driver and apparently they've put new rules into place that state that for every 13 days of driving you have to take 6 or 7 days off now. He's a long-haul driver for Scheider, on the 2 week on 1 week off rotation for the past few years.
I never understood the logic of that. We as a society will not let, for example, a truck driver drive for more than x number of hours in a day before they have to take a mandatory amount of time off. I forget what x equals, but it's 8-10 hours max. Yet, we'll stick a doctor into an emergency ward for days on end with said doctor only catching sleep when things are slow.
I don't give any training in office applications or on the OS that they are using. I do have a ~ 20 page booklet that I give each new hire for intructions on using our rather antiquated ERM software, but that's the only real training they get. If they need help on more basic practices, I help them when they need it and when I feel like it.
Going back and reading it again, I see you're right and I did jump to the conclusion that your response was nothing more than the average slashdot kid that insists on spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign, without good reason.
I've been in charge of dozens of Unix server ranging from AIX to Solaris, SCO as well as the BSD and Linux alternatives, in the server room and on the desktop. I'll grant you that Windows has its problems but guess what, it works and in many cases there is just no alternative. In my current job, we have applications that are specific to our vendor (hydraulic pump, valve sizing and such) that works only with windows. WINE nor crossover office are able to bring it to Linux. Sure, I suppose I or one of the other admins there could develop our own system, but we do have other things to do.
7 years in my current job and I've had less than 5 infections on my windows machines.
Might I suggest you go into a company as an admin or general IT staffer and get some damned real world experience? Experience that will show you that Linux isn't the answer for everything and Windows isn't necessarily the devil.
I picked up a couple HP laptops for a small business and they did not come with vanilla XP discs. Hell, it didn't come with any discs, I had to burn my own with their built-in program for doing just that. Way to pass the buck, HP.
My current employer was listed on SPEWS for this very reason. However, my provider did deal with the issue in a very quick and timely manner, IMHO, by shutting down the spammers account within 24 hours of my bringing it to their attention, but SPEWS took their damned time removing the block. It caused some rather large headaches for a week or two as our primary vendor supplying 80% of our stock was utilizing SPEWS.
SPEWS is bad. SORBS isn't horrible. The problem with many block lists is that they are, more often than not, staffed by anti-spam militants and really don't give a rats ass if their lists cause problems as long as they themselves do not get spam. They, somewhat understandably, spout "If you don't like it, you don't have to use it", which I can't argue with.
First, I am not a programmer but I do play one on TV. Second, as someone who just had his PHPNuke site (running since sometime in late 2000) attacked, crippled and corupted data, I can certainly understand the bitterness. It was a good motivation to finally move away from phpnuke.
I do, however, believe that some quality applications can, and are, done up in PHP. The problem with PHP is that it is such an easy and (too) flexible language that those who don't necessarily understand the finer concepts & practices in programming are bringing their inexperience into the mix. This inexperience in proper practices is what the major problem is in PHP.
Of course, people who do have the necessary skillset to utilize PHP in a safe and "efficient" manner will likely use a different language anyways.
Now I would set them up with Ubuntu or a Mac (they're footing the bill on it, though!) but back then Ubuntu was but a glimmer in Shuttleworth's eye and OS 9 on Mac was.... *shudder*
A rather elitist and patronizing view of the elderly.
Author needs to be whacked with a cane.
Oh dear God, no!
My grandmother/grandfather both have a hard time in simply shutting down Windows properly. Even after adding 5 icons all lined up on one side of the screen that are labeled 'SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER'. This after I sat with them for the better part of the day trying to explain how to connect to the internet (setup behind a router, there is no 'connect' icon, just double click FireFox) and how to reply to an email.
I'm certain that there are people out there in their age bracket that are quite proficient at using a "computer television machine" but I'd be willing to bet that a good portion do need the added protection that the subby is trying to give them.
You should suggest it, but don't try to convince them unless they ask for more information. Put together a sheet comparing the two operating systems and give them a live CD, but I would leave it at that. Besides, if they come back afterwards and say, I like this live CD, can you put it on the drive, you get more cashish.
Technicians can play a role in getting the word out on FOSS and you seem to be doing a good job with FF and OO. Just remember that you don't know how they use their computer and perhaps Linux just is not right for that user.
When I was young and naive enough to do this sort of thing, I started out charging far less than the other companies thinking that customers would seek me out. While I did have a couple calls, it wasn't until I raised my prices to be a little closer to the level of the competitors that I started to get more calls.
If you charge too little you run the risk of a couple of things. First, you're going to put your competitors on the defensive, something you don't want to do until you are established with a solid reputation and customer base. Secondly, prospective customers may look at the gap between your prices and those of your competitors and conclude that there must be a reason you're charging so litte, perhaps you're not as qualified or don't have as much experience.
A little while ago, a couple of employees at the company I work for as the sole IT person decided to strike out on their own in a competing business. At the time we had no non-comp agreements or things like that.
These employees were'nt able to take data directly from the CRM/ERM software, but what they were able to do was take screenshots and email them to their personal email accounts. Alas, we were naive and believed these employees when they said that them starting a competing business was baseless rumours so we didn't discover this until after the fact as I was searching through the employees archived email.
As a result of the email search, I had a small binder full of evidence complete with message headers of this as well as their discussions with various lawyers and accountants. Amazingly, even though they had hotmail accounts that they could access from work, they used their work-provided email for this purpose.
The local cops didn't return our calls and the district attorneys said that while a crime was comitted, it wasn't worth their time to prosecute.
TweakXP should do that for ya. Buy a new copy and key the serial number you get over the old one. Unless, of course, your parents have a volume license copy right now, and they buy a home version. Then you have to do a repair install.
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One night I had a few friends over for some beers. Now, I live out in the country where it takes very little to loose 'lectricity. A couple of us were outside whilst the other fellow was inside playing Doom3, since as a console gamer he had not played yet. At some point the power went out, but I do have roughly 1.5kVa worth of battery backup so the computer, monitor and other stuff was still on. It happened at just that point one of the baddies was in the process of jumping out from a hidden panel, as they are wont to do in D3.
Said friend had a couple beers in him and wasn't the brightest to begin with so he thought it was part of the game and came running outside looking as though he had seen a ghost. It was worth a few laughs, though it's a pitty he hadn't pissed himself.
Yes, I have a legitimate copy of XP Pro and the last time I reinstalled, I had to deal with WGA no less than 3 times. That's three times after I successfully registered my copy of XP with MS after the install. It's a minor annoyance, but ffs, how many times do I have to prove I'm not a goddamned criminal before they actually believe me?
I'm no MS hater, but I very much dislike being treated like a criminal.
Abouta year or two ago, I was having serious problems with comment spam, with hundreds a day coming from a single IP address. I banned the IP for 7 days and put various protection schemes in place to prevent further abuse. Once the 7 days was up, there were literally thousands of attempts, but now each one was stopped and logged in an easier to understand format. With this in hand, I looked up the address to find it originated from one of The Planet's customers. Even after sending reports with links to the logfiles, months (and tens of thousands of attempts to spam my comments) went before I received any response whatsoever. That response was as a direct result of speaking to one of The Planet's higher profile customers who I've worked with in the past to try to get some help in the situation.
Only after doing an end-run around the abuse department did I see some *real* action taken on behalf of The Planet. Previously all they seem to have done was moved the customer to a different IP address, which would have been very counter-productive had I just kept blocking the original IP address.
Even better is the 3 to 6 weeks it is to take for the replacement to arrive. Now I need to go out and buy another battery just in case the current one decides to asplode and take my naughty bits with it.
Well, I do have a couple of affected Acer laptops, and so far the process is painfull. The operators on the other end answer the phone in a language unknown to me, though they promptly switched to very understandable english after I spoke. However, the line quality is so horrible that my call was dropped 3 times so far, and I still haven't processed a replacement request.
Great jorb, Acer!
It was an abusive relationship that had been going on for a couple of years, unknown to my sisters and I. The reason she left is because the abuse was becoming more and more directed at my sisters and I. She tried a number of things to help him through this including our pastor, a man my father did respect greatly. I suppose it is possible there may have been abandonment issues, but my wife of 9 years (whom I dated for 4 years prior) and my daughter would beg to differ. You do a lot of assuming, but it's not accomplishing much.
Still, I would rather abandonment issues than learning to become a verbally & mentally abusive drunk and passing that along to my children. I won't deny that there were issues to overcome, but I feel I'm better off for the divorce. I also won't deny that there were some things that my father instilled upon me at an early age and I won't deny that I benefitted from havinghim around for those twelve years.
By the way, he did, slowly, hit bottom and eventually started on the road to recovery and even remarrying, though that unfortunatly didn't last very long as they were a nice family. He had made strides in re-establishing contact with myself and repeatedly said that Mom leaving him was what finally showed him he was throwing his life away. Unfortunatly, it was all for not as the alcohol really fucked his system, and he died shortly thereafter.
Let's play hypothetical. Woman & man hook up, everything is great. They get along amazingly and they get married. Two years into the relationship they have a child. 3 years after that, Dad looses his job and, even after intervensions from the wife, becomes a drunk. He can't find another meaningful job, he becomes more and more depressed. Let's say this happens over the span of a year. As he travels further down, he starts showing signs of physical and mental abuse, and the signs keep getting worse and worse. She tries to get the family into couceling, tries to intervene with the help of family and he has nothing to do with it. He gets more and more abusive towards het and is starting to become abusive with the child.
Here's a couple of choices for you:
1) After doing what she can do before she realises that the safety of the child is in danger and leaves.
2) Doesn't leave, the mother and child are physically abused on a regular basis, the child grows up more and more violent because of the violence the child has grown up with. The child starts to model the fathers behaviour.
2a) As in two, but childrens aid (or protection service, whatever you may have in yourcountry) gets involved and puts the child in a foster home. Dad still beats mom on a regular basis.
3) The wife decides, too late, that it's time to leave and when the father finds out, he beats the living fuck out of her and the child, to show them a lesson
Of course, it is very possible that in options 2, 2A and 3, the child passes this along to his/her children. It's also possible, but not as, that the child grows up to be a mostly normal member of society, but any child that sees that sort of abuse on a regular basis is going to be just a little fucked up.
Naw man, as I said in my post, my father failed at parenting, but my mother did not as she got my sisters and I out of the situation. Had she kept us in that situation, she would have failed as well. Therefore, by staying in that situation, my parents would have failed. By getting us out, my mother did not fail. The post that I was responding to stated that divorced parents fail their children and my post was to contradict that not all divorced parents fail their children.
My apologies if I wasn't clear.
He had a stepmother. Which means broken home. Which means his parents already failed him before stepmother got on the scene. Which was most likely "not their fault" either, just like my kid being from a broken home is of course not my fault either, but society's fault, or Jesus's fault, or something. Which is also completely irrelevant to the "how do we stop kids from killing people" problem.
Wait, so if the parents get divorced, they fail their children? Stop and think, for a second, that occasionally the broken home is a far better situation. My parents got divorced when I was twelve, due mostly to my father constantly falling off the wagon and coming home shit-stinking drunk and yelling at anything and everything in sight.
Yup, my mom divorcing him was A Good Thing. My father had already failed, but the only way my mother would have failed is by keeping my sisters and I in that situation. By removing us from that situation, she in fact saved us. My father wouldn't discover the error of his ways until roughly 12 years later.
So, not all divorced parents fail their children, arse. I'm quite certain I wouldn't be where I am today if I was kept in that situation. A good many are for the good of the children. The fact that the father was given custody of the child in the first place is a telling thing, since dollars to donuts the mother will get custody unless she's all kinds of fucked up.
Ahh, I did not know this. I assumed that if there was a pileup that the docs would be elbow deep in the carnage.
My father in law in a truck driver and apparently they've put new rules into place that state that for every 13 days of driving you have to take 6 or 7 days off now. He's a long-haul driver for Scheider, on the 2 week on 1 week off rotation for the past few years.
I never understood the logic of that. We as a society will not let, for example, a truck driver drive for more than x number of hours in a day before they have to take a mandatory amount of time off. I forget what x equals, but it's 8-10 hours max. Yet, we'll stick a doctor into an emergency ward for days on end with said doctor only catching sleep when things are slow.
in which I made $50K for 80 hour weeks + overnight in hospital calls and every third weekend on call.
Oh, so you worked for EA while you attended medical school?
I don't give any training in office applications or on the OS that they are using. I do have a ~ 20 page booklet that I give each new hire for intructions on using our rather antiquated ERM software, but that's the only real training they get. If they need help on more basic practices, I help them when they need it and when I feel like it.
Going back and reading it again, I see you're right and I did jump to the conclusion that your response was nothing more than the average slashdot kid that insists on spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign, without good reason.
My apologies for jumping the gun.
*sigh*
I've been in charge of dozens of Unix server ranging from AIX to Solaris, SCO as well as the BSD and Linux alternatives, in the server room and on the desktop. I'll grant you that Windows has its problems but guess what, it works and in many cases there is just no alternative. In my current job, we have applications that are specific to our vendor (hydraulic pump, valve sizing and such) that works only with windows. WINE nor crossover office are able to bring it to Linux. Sure, I suppose I or one of the other admins there could develop our own system, but we do have other things to do.
7 years in my current job and I've had less than 5 infections on my windows machines.
Might I suggest you go into a company as an admin or general IT staffer and get some damned real world experience? Experience that will show you that Linux isn't the answer for everything and Windows isn't necessarily the devil.
I picked up a couple HP laptops for a small business and they did not come with vanilla XP discs. Hell, it didn't come with any discs, I had to burn my own with their built-in program for doing just that. Way to pass the buck, HP.
This was in Canada, for what it matters.
My current employer was listed on SPEWS for this very reason. However, my provider did deal with the issue in a very quick and timely manner, IMHO, by shutting down the spammers account within 24 hours of my bringing it to their attention, but SPEWS took their damned time removing the block. It caused some rather large headaches for a week or two as our primary vendor supplying 80% of our stock was utilizing SPEWS.
SPEWS is bad. SORBS isn't horrible. The problem with many block lists is that they are, more often than not, staffed by anti-spam militants and really don't give a rats ass if their lists cause problems as long as they themselves do not get spam. They, somewhat understandably, spout "If you don't like it, you don't have to use it", which I can't argue with.
First, I am not a programmer but I do play one on TV. Second, as someone who just had his PHPNuke site (running since sometime in late 2000) attacked, crippled and corupted data, I can certainly understand the bitterness. It was a good motivation to finally move away from phpnuke.
I do, however, believe that some quality applications can, and are, done up in PHP. The problem with PHP is that it is such an easy and (too) flexible language that those who don't necessarily understand the finer concepts & practices in programming are bringing their inexperience into the mix. This inexperience in proper practices is what the major problem is in PHP.
Of course, people who do have the necessary skillset to utilize PHP in a safe and "efficient" manner will likely use a different language anyways.
Now I would set them up with Ubuntu or a Mac (they're footing the bill on it, though!) but back then Ubuntu was but a glimmer in Shuttleworth's eye and OS 9 on Mac was .... *shudder*
A rather elitist and patronizing view of the elderly.
Author needs to be whacked with a cane.
Oh dear God, no!
My grandmother/grandfather both have a hard time in simply shutting down Windows properly. Even after adding 5 icons all lined up on one side of the screen that are labeled 'SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER'. This after I sat with them for the better part of the day trying to explain how to connect to the internet (setup behind a router, there is no 'connect' icon, just double click FireFox) and how to reply to an email.
I'm certain that there are people out there in their age bracket that are quite proficient at using a "computer television machine" but I'd be willing to bet that a good portion do need the added protection that the subby is trying to give them.
Now, get off my lawn.
You should suggest it, but don't try to convince them unless they ask for more information. Put together a sheet comparing the two operating systems and give them a live CD, but I would leave it at that. Besides, if they come back afterwards and say, I like this live CD, can you put it on the drive, you get more cashish.
Technicians can play a role in getting the word out on FOSS and you seem to be doing a good job with FF and OO. Just remember that you don't know how they use their computer and perhaps Linux just is not right for that user.
When I was young and naive enough to do this sort of thing, I started out charging far less than the other companies thinking that customers would seek me out. While I did have a couple calls, it wasn't until I raised my prices to be a little closer to the level of the competitors that I started to get more calls.
If you charge too little you run the risk of a couple of things. First, you're going to put your competitors on the defensive, something you don't want to do until you are established with a solid reputation and customer base. Secondly, prospective customers may look at the gap between your prices and those of your competitors and conclude that there must be a reason you're charging so litte, perhaps you're not as qualified or don't have as much experience.
A little while ago, a couple of employees at the company I work for as the sole IT person decided to strike out on their own in a competing business. At the time we had no non-comp agreements or things like that.
These employees were'nt able to take data directly from the CRM/ERM software, but what they were able to do was take screenshots and email them to their personal email accounts. Alas, we were naive and believed these employees when they said that them starting a competing business was baseless rumours so we didn't discover this until after the fact as I was searching through the employees archived email.
As a result of the email search, I had a small binder full of evidence complete with message headers of this as well as their discussions with various lawyers and accountants. Amazingly, even though they had hotmail accounts that they could access from work, they used their work-provided email for this purpose.
The local cops didn't return our calls and the district attorneys said that while a crime was comitted, it wasn't worth their time to prosecute.
Nice.
Wise guy, eh? /stooges.
TweakXP should do that for ya. Buy a new copy and key the serial number you get over the old one. Unless, of course, your parents have a volume license copy right now, and they buy a home version. Then you have to do a repair install.
http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakutility/