HP Scanjet 4p used to do this, and this was back in 95 or so. I tried a brand new crisp bill and it would only scan gray scale. For a scanner that was capable of millions of colors I was perplexed. It wasn't until we tried a slightly worn bill that we finally got the scanner to scan in the color of money. The test was consistently repeatable with new and slightly worn money. Note for government type reading this, I had no printer, so I couldn't have printed it if I wanted to.
Article is an ad for a tow truck based in space, that is all. That being said, there probably is a fair and justifiable market for a space based tow truck, as well as a spaced based garbage truck. That being said, why are we getting advertisements linked as articles?
If they weren't so damn obnoxious, people wouldn't be installing popup blockers. Give them an inch, they take a mile. When will they learn that they don't have a right to be heard? Make reasonable ads that don't flash, take over the screen etc and people will stop killing them at the source.
How much longer until someone makes an free program that installs a hosts file that kills ads at the source for Joe Sixpack? If such a program were to be become prolific much of the present Internet ad model would collapse. For that matter, are there any flash stoppers for IE (use at work)?
It would seem the uncivilized chaps over at this government office haven't yet gotten something called email. That or they're deathly afraid of getting mailbombed by spammers.
Regardless, they need snail mail, AKA a written letter for public input. Since the statistical odds are that many here have forgotten how to implement this outdated technology, I have a how to:
Write your email, explaining why the death penalty for spammers is warranted.
Instead of sending your email, print it out on your printer.
Remove printed email from printer and ask an older colleague for something called an "envelope".
Insert statement of reasoning for the death penalty for spammers into the envelope. Crumpling does not work as well as folding it 3 evenly spaced times perpindicular to the vertical axis of the paper. Make sure you seal envelope after inserting letter, avoid temptation to use duct tape to make sure it doesn't fall out.
Print an envelope in your printer with the envelope feed slot. If you can't find one of those you'll have to hand print the address on the envelope.
At the top left corner of the side without the flap write your name on the first line. Write your street address on the second line. On the third line write your city followed immeadiately by a comma. Follow this with the two letter acronym for your state or residence and then your zip code.
In the middle of the same flap of the envelope put the following in the same format.
United States Sentencing Commission One Columbus Circle, NE. Suite 2-500 Washington, DC 20002-8002 Attention: Public Affairs
Then travel to a post office, you can locate one off the Internet by going here. At this post office give the person your letter and explain you want to buy a "stamp". This will cost you 39 cents. Pu this at the top right corner of the envelope on the same side as the writing. The people at the post office will then take care of delivery. Pop3 not available.
Dumb question, why no wiper blades? I've heard it said that wiper blades would damage the solar panels. However if the solar panels are too dust covered to work anyways, what's the loss? It's not like they're going back for warranty repair.
I was working level 2 for a company that had software that started at 6 figures and easily went into millions. Got a call from a state library system. Contract for the entire state (paid for by Bill Gates charity btw) for our software. Customer told me that previous tech had told her to do something that wiped out all data. She told me what he said, and I couldn't believe it. So I asked her if she had this in an email or something.
She did. In plain text, to be turned into a.bat file meant to be run on the server was the command:
del q:\allimportantdatadirectory\*.*
I got the email within seconds of when she said she'd send it to me (she had mine from previous calls, 16 million dollars gets a few privelages). I then spent the next week over the phone helping her recover what had been done. The mistake - not lobotomizing the flatworm who did this. Two weeks later he was found to be hosting kiddyporn off the corp servers (we were an educational software co). Only then did they finally fire the idiot. I did mention that it was Bill Gates that paid the 16 million, right?
Were going to start seeing new megacorps out of India soon. We've even setup their back offices for them. We trained their accountants, their technologist, and we even set up their R&D for them. They have their call centers taken care of, everything except the front office. Some of these companies are going to start refusing to renew contracts with our megacorps and are just going to start their own with their fully trained staffs. Their getting the back office profit, how much is left for a front office? Perhaps they'll turn around and outsource that to the originating corp?
On top of this, can someone please explain how sending good paying jobs out of this company is good for the economy? Competitive advantage doesn't mean anything if all the competition is doing it. The jobs that are replacing these are the low wage jobs in fields like retail that don't have things like health insurance.
The only time I've ever seen something like that was when I used to work security in a high profile skyscraper. %50 fresh air through the baffles, I've never heard of that, it's impressive. Sounds like a pretty tight ship, just curious, was the sup an ex-navy guy?
Thinking about it, I stand corrected on the coils being on seen on the outside of the units, that would more with residential units. As for cleaning, I'm not an HVAC person, I just provided tech support (first tech job) for them. Although I did get sent to Trane for additional night training. All the HVAC was networked and we would dial up to program and diagnose the units and help guide the contractors.
The contractors I talked to on the phone indicated that coil cleaning was very common in the spring for the newbies or grunts who did just that. As for filters, the contractors I talked too all swore they worked better dirty - never did understand that one. I would hear horror stories about places like Kmart that let everything go to pot, used 80 degree set points and the like, but from what I understand most places are not like Kmart.
New turbotax version does not appear to do this. I carefully read their EULA and it does not have the draconian stuff of last years. They appear to have learned their lesson. They even let you save your taxes as PDF files for future reference on other computers. Incidently, it sounds like they are writing to the mbr, that's why a normal format won't do it, but a low level will. They might even be marking a bad sector on the mbr that isn't really bad.
I used to work for a rather large and well known national (US) retailer in their store operations division. One of my responsibilities was to deal with stores that were slated to close for any number of reasons, perhaps up to 30 a year. If a facility is due to close or upper management is thinking about this (ignore what they tell you - trust me), the one thing they will inevitably do is try to save money on something that won't be around. Executives simply can't resist the allure of saving these costs when they can "get away with it".
The first place to save said money for a closing or may be closing facility is operational maintenence. These are the kinds of things that can function for a while before their lack of maintenence can be noticed. On a routine basis, it makes economic sense to do certain preventative and aesthetic work on a schedule. Maintenence and building engineers know this, and they know what tends to be put off in the event a building will be closing. While they may not get the official word first, they will almost always know that a facility is closing before someone like the executive secretary.
Here is what to look for, even if you know your company is in healthy financial shape and that your facility is not about to close. Pay attention to these because the good times are not always so good.
Parking lots striping, is the parking lot badly in need of painting those lines that tell everyone where to park? Parking lot potholes, are the only potholes that are fixed the massive ones?
Paint on the walls, most businesses will paint their walls every x number of years, it saves money on electricity (brighter walls allows less light ergo less electric), and this is one of those subconcsious things that can reduce or enhance worker productivity.
Electrician, does your facility have a dedicated electrian, and if it does, has he been deemed unneccasary? This is a big one, electricians aren't cheap, but their vital to maintaining a smooth facility.
Light bulbs, most businesses don't wait for those overhead lights to burn out to change them. It costs too much in terms of time when you have thousands of them. It's cheaper to change them all at once over the holidays or the like before they burn out. This is done on a schedule, learn what this schedule is, for this is also a big one that is easily overlooked.
HVAC, heating ventilation air conditioning. Preventative maintenence like coil cleaning can be put off for a while if you know the facility will be closing, but would never be put off otherwise. Coils are typicaly cleaned at least once a year in the spring, and you can seem them from the outside. HVAC equipment is extremely expensive to service and even more expensive to fix. This is a big one, pay attention to if units are working properly (not if your hot or cold).
Carpet, this is less obvious since it can last longer, and sometimes a really cheap company is perfectly content to let 15 year old carpet remain in place regardless. This can be a red herring, but it bears watching.
It is not uncommon for maintenence and building engineering people to feel that the people in their building are stuck up and pretentious, and as a result they will probably feel no need to warn the occupants of the coming closure. While the facilities people probably want nothing to do with you, your security and janitorial staff aren't so biased. They work with facility maintenence on a daily basis and they can often also get wind of what is coming up.
True enough on the whole, India doesn't do much for manufacturing, but China is a manufacturing powerhouse. Indian companies are already outsourcing some manufacturing to China to a small degree. China and India don't really like each other, but are they willing to look past this for profit? Question is will companies in India be willing to outsource to China? The Indian government is protectionist of/their/ jobs - and complains bitterly about any other government that is protectionist of their citizens jobs.
My point on Mexico wasn't that Mexicans are inherintly inferior or the like, my point was that India has all the components in place to create the instant-megacorp. Mexico simply doesn't get much other than manufacturing, and that they are competing against China for. In a race to the bottom, Mexico will lose, so they have to differentiate themselves to avoid losing those manufacturing jobs that they do have. Japan once had a deplorable reputation for quality, that certainly changed, witness as well Tawains reputation for quality is much better than it was. How will the US compete against India and Mexico compete against China, that's the real question.
While enormous amounts of goods are manufactured in Mexico, I can't recall hearing anything about call centers, programming or much of anything other than manufacturing transplanted to Mexico. India has the inherint advantage in that English is commonly taught there, certainly to a higher rate than in Mexico.
India also has about 1 person in 6 on the planet living there. In the race to the bottom, only China can compete with India. They have the population to absorb all manufacturing jobs not just from the US, but Mexico, Japan, Tawain (laptops already manufactured there that used to be made in Tawain) and the rest of the developed world. Manufacturing jobs have been moving from country to country as populations absorbed capacity and wages raised. Fundamentaly there is no reason for Mexico to be inherintly immune to this, just look at the recession in large parts of Asia.
How long until the pseudo companies in India decide to simple become full fledged name brands in themselves? Not only are we training them how to do our customer service, programming, back office, and research, but were also teaching them how to run fortune 500 class companies. They already have the expertise, how long can it be before we start seeing Indian versions of our established corporations.
They can skip the normal growing stages of setting up the megacorp, because they already have it. Offices, research, staff, software, it, they lack everything but the name - right now. Once some of these companies lose a contract with our corps, theirs nothing to keep them from setting up their own shop under their own name. This is the next trend in outsourcing - megacorps themselves.
There is NO compelling reason for these companies not to do this. They are making large profit from back of the house, it's inevitable they'll want the profit from the front of the house as well. The irony is that these large corporations are training the competition and replacements and most dont even see it coming. Is it arrogance that causes people to overlook this inevitability?
Reality check, the dot com bust, H1B visa influx, mass outsourcing and overall failure of the tech industray has resulted in many highly skilled, educated, certified and talented people having to take jobs outside of the field. I know people with 20+ years experience that can't land any job in tech whatsoever. It is supremely naive to think that jobs are available for those who are willing to simply go get them.
From the voice of experience I have lots of practical advice for both home users and administrators. I have had to get rid of a pretty fair chunk of hardware as a systems administrator so I have had to research this.
First: I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet so I'll say it. Wipe the drives with a wipe program. Don't just format them, it's too easy to get around. This is a good job for a pfy if you have one. If you give away information that leads to identity theft or the like your in for a world of trouble.
Do NOT donate old hardware that is obsolete to schools, goodwill or another charity. They all have to pay for the disposal costs, and people's charity in this area costs these institutions very real dollars. I speak from working with schools for a couple of years, experience as a systems administrator and having known people in charity work.
You can reuse / recycle them into continued use or dispose of them properly. Old Pentium class up computers make great firewalls. Between a friend and I we have probably gotten proper Linux firewalls to nearly a dozen households. Especially good when most of these people are not exactly full disclosure subscribers. If you don't have the skill to do this, you can always use something horribly mangled like the mandrake 9.2 firewall, but something is better than nothing.
You can do a basic enough breakdown for recycling if the box as a whole is propietary enough (Dell, Compaq, HP) that it isn't upgradable. Take out the disks and set these into your spare parts pile. This is very useful when someones firewall hard disk craps out as they are invariably led to do since the are almost always really old hard drives. The motherboard and old cards can be removed. If you don't have a recycle center that can take the circuit cards than throw those away. You can still recycle the case itself, just remove the plastics and the sheet metal shell will be taken by almost any recycling place.
If your doing this for an employer - don't just throw them away. If there new enough you can sell them to a wholesaler, give them away to employees (make sure you clear this high up to avoid the appearance of impropriety that can cost you your job). You can also sell almost anything on Ebay, some say this as a joke, but whoever is buying it is putting it back into use so you have recycled this. Save your receipts though and print out those auction pages. This is your proof that you have NOT thrown these away.
Important note about throwing away. Old circuit boards are full of a really nasty cocktail of bad for the environment chemicals. Old monitors are full of a pretty fair amount of lead. Both of these have the capacity to get your company in trouble for the future. In my case, working at the time for a company that once had a deplorable environmental record (nicely cleaned themselves up by the way), the costs for cleanup in the future for improperly disposed of company products was well known.
Since our old stuff (I had three facilities) was so old as to be no good to anyone, I scrapped what might be usable and found an environmentaly certified recycler for the old equipment. I paid them about 80 cents a pound, they gave me a shiny certificate absolving my company of environmental responsbility for those products.
- Keep in mind folks that this is the cost you inflict on charities when you donate obsolete hardware on them.
Important lesson here for companies - just because it's legal to throw away today doesn't mean your of the hook if it's deemed to have neccesitated an environementaly cleanup tomorrow.
How about a simple enough protest of the can spam law? Buy a can of Spam and mail it to your congress critter or the Direct Marketing Association.
Direct Marketing Association Washington D. C. Office 1111 19th Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036-3603 Telephone: 202.955.5030 Fax: 202.955.0085
This website will give you the address of your congress critters address when you put in your zip code. Just to play it safe I went to the USPS website and checked their prohibited items list(warning PDF) and canned meat isn't on it.
Points are given out based on how many people you can get suckered into paying to download a license for these files. Payments for getting friends and family to spend money on a third party product, how long until you get more points for getting them to also become a distributor. Tis nothing more than a pyramid marketing scheme. Pyramid schemes were once known for things like filter queen and herbalife. Perhaps we should call this marketing program "needalife"?
If they were being honest about they could just market to the masses with commercials and have honest downloads like itunes or the like. Instead they are trying to get the masses to go astroturfing on their behalf. Expose this for the lie that it is.
They want me to host the files that will link to their servers and get them paid! This is nothing more than a distributed bandwidth reduction process. In return you get these imaginary points with no cash value. This isn't file sharing people, this is bandwidth redistribution.
His "hobby" was a several times more expensive than most people hobbies, going to a movie or buying clothing. As for cable or cd's, if someone is facing bankruptcy they really should have higher priorities.
Point was he owed taxes, didn't pay them, and was obviously flaunting what he was putting a fair bit of money into on a worldwide forum. How could they not act?
Before donning tinfoil hats here, remember that all governments like to get paid. Whilst what he was doing had very high hack value, it certainly wasn't cheap. When their local tax people saw that he was prominently spending money on a world famous endeavour rather than paying his back taxes, they acted. No conspiracy here folks, just a tax authority doing what tax authorities worldwide do on a daily basis. That being said, I watched his project with high interest.
Slashdot Mirror
HP Scanjet 4p used to do this, and this was back in 95 or so. I tried a brand new crisp bill and it would only scan gray scale. For a scanner that was capable of millions of colors I was perplexed. It wasn't until we tried a slightly worn bill that we finally got the scanner to scan in the color of money. The test was consistently repeatable with new and slightly worn money. Note for government type reading this, I had no printer, so I couldn't have printed it if I wanted to.
Article is an ad for a tow truck based in space, that is all. That being said, there probably is a fair and justifiable market for a space based tow truck, as well as a spaced based garbage truck. That being said, why are we getting advertisements linked as articles?
And people wonder why Mozilla is so unpopular.
If they weren't so damn obnoxious, people wouldn't be installing popup blockers. Give them an inch, they take a mile. When will they learn that they don't have a right to be heard? Make reasonable ads that don't flash, take over the screen etc and people will stop killing them at the source.
How much longer until someone makes an free program that installs a hosts file that kills ads at the source for Joe Sixpack? If such a program were to be become prolific much of the present Internet ad model would collapse. For that matter, are there any flash stoppers for IE (use at work)?
It would seem the uncivilized chaps over at this government office haven't yet gotten something called email. That or they're deathly afraid of getting mailbombed by spammers.
Regardless, they need snail mail, AKA a written letter for public input. Since the statistical odds are that many here have forgotten how to implement this outdated technology, I have a how to:
Write your email, explaining why the death penalty for spammers is warranted.
Instead of sending your email, print it out on your printer.
Remove printed email from printer and ask an older colleague for something called an "envelope".
Insert statement of reasoning for the death penalty for spammers into the envelope. Crumpling does not work as well as folding it 3 evenly spaced times perpindicular to the vertical axis of the paper. Make sure you seal envelope after inserting letter, avoid temptation to use duct tape to make sure it doesn't fall out.
Print an envelope in your printer with the envelope feed slot. If you can't find one of those you'll have to hand print the address on the envelope.
At the top left corner of the side without the flap write your name on the first line. Write your street address on the second line. On the third line write your city followed immeadiately by a comma. Follow this with the two letter acronym for your state or residence and then your zip code.
In the middle of the same flap of the envelope put the following in the same format.
United States Sentencing Commission
One Columbus Circle, NE. Suite 2-500
Washington, DC 20002-8002
Attention: Public Affairs
Then travel to a post office, you can locate one off the Internet by going here. At this post office give the person your letter and explain you want to buy a "stamp". This will cost you 39 cents. Pu this at the top right corner of the envelope on the same side as the writing. The people at the post office will then take care of delivery. Pop3 not available.
Informative.
Dumb question, why no wiper blades? I've heard it said that wiper blades would damage the solar panels. However if the solar panels are too dust covered to work anyways, what's the loss? It's not like they're going back for warranty repair.
I was working level 2 for a company that had software that started at 6 figures and easily went into millions. Got a call from a state library system. Contract for the entire state (paid for by Bill Gates charity btw) for our software. Customer told me that previous tech had told her to do something that wiped out all data. She told me what he said, and I couldn't believe it. So I asked her if she had this in an email or something.
.bat file meant to be run on the server was the command:
She did. In plain text, to be turned into a
del q:\allimportantdatadirectory\*.*
I got the email within seconds of when she said she'd send it to me (she had mine from previous calls, 16 million dollars gets a few privelages). I then spent the next week over the phone helping her recover what had been done. The mistake - not lobotomizing the flatworm who did this. Two weeks later he was found to be hosting kiddyporn off the corp servers (we were an educational software co). Only then did they finally fire the idiot. I did mention that it was Bill Gates that paid the 16 million, right?
Were going to start seeing new megacorps out of India soon. We've even setup their back offices for them. We trained their accountants, their technologist, and we even set up their R&D for them. They have their call centers taken care of, everything except the front office. Some of these companies are going to start refusing to renew contracts with our megacorps and are just going to start their own with their fully trained staffs. Their getting the back office profit, how much is left for a front office? Perhaps they'll turn around and outsource that to the originating corp?
On top of this, can someone please explain how sending good paying jobs out of this company is good for the economy? Competitive advantage doesn't mean anything if all the competition is doing it. The jobs that are replacing these are the low wage jobs in fields like retail that don't have things like health insurance.
Hm, at least they can't outsource city hall to India...
The only time I've ever seen something like that was when I used to work security in a high profile skyscraper. %50 fresh air through the baffles, I've never heard of that, it's impressive. Sounds like a pretty tight ship, just curious, was the sup an ex-navy guy?
Thinking about it, I stand corrected on the coils being on seen on the outside of the units, that would more with residential units. As for cleaning, I'm not an HVAC person, I just provided tech support (first tech job) for them. Although I did get sent to Trane for additional night training. All the HVAC was networked and we would dial up to program and diagnose the units and help guide the contractors.
The contractors I talked to on the phone indicated that coil cleaning was very common in the spring for the newbies or grunts who did just that. As for filters, the contractors I talked too all swore they worked better dirty - never did understand that one. I would hear horror stories about places like Kmart that let everything go to pot, used 80 degree set points and the like, but from what I understand most places are not like Kmart.
New turbotax version does not appear to do this. I carefully read their EULA and it does not have the draconian stuff of last years. They appear to have learned their lesson. They even let you save your taxes as PDF files for future reference on other computers. Incidently, it sounds like they are writing to the mbr, that's why a normal format won't do it, but a low level will. They might even be marking a bad sector on the mbr that isn't really bad.
I used to work for a rather large and well known national (US) retailer in their store operations division. One of my responsibilities was to deal with stores that were slated to close for any number of reasons, perhaps up to 30 a year. If a facility is due to close or upper management is thinking about this (ignore what they tell you - trust me), the one thing they will inevitably do is try to save money on something that won't be around. Executives simply can't resist the allure of saving these costs when they can "get away with it".
The first place to save said money for a closing or may be closing facility is operational maintenence. These are the kinds of things that can function for a while before their lack of maintenence can be noticed. On a routine basis, it makes economic sense to do certain preventative and aesthetic work on a schedule. Maintenence and building engineers know this, and they know what tends to be put off in the event a building will be closing. While they may not get the official word first, they will almost always know that a facility is closing before someone like the executive secretary.
Here is what to look for, even if you know your company is in healthy financial shape and that your facility is not about to close. Pay attention to these because the good times are not always so good.
Parking lots striping, is the parking lot badly in need of painting those lines that tell everyone where to park? Parking lot potholes, are the only potholes that are fixed the massive ones?
Paint on the walls, most businesses will paint their walls every x number of years, it saves money on electricity (brighter walls allows less light ergo less electric), and this is one of those subconcsious things that can reduce or enhance worker productivity.
Electrician, does your facility have a dedicated electrian, and if it does, has he been deemed unneccasary? This is a big one, electricians aren't cheap, but their vital to maintaining a smooth facility.
Light bulbs, most businesses don't wait for those overhead lights to burn out to change them. It costs too much in terms of time when you have thousands of them. It's cheaper to change them all at once over the holidays or the like before they burn out. This is done on a schedule, learn what this schedule is, for this is also a big one that is easily overlooked.
HVAC, heating ventilation air conditioning. Preventative maintenence like coil cleaning can be put off for a while if you know the facility will be closing, but would never be put off otherwise. Coils are typicaly cleaned at least once a year in the spring, and you can seem them from the outside. HVAC equipment is extremely expensive to service and even more expensive to fix. This is a big one, pay attention to if units are working properly (not if your hot or cold).
Carpet, this is less obvious since it can last longer, and sometimes a really cheap company is perfectly content to let 15 year old carpet remain in place regardless. This can be a red herring, but it bears watching.
It is not uncommon for maintenence and building engineering people to feel that the people in their building are stuck up and pretentious, and as a result they will probably feel no need to warn the occupants of the coming closure. While the facilities people probably want nothing to do with you, your security and janitorial staff aren't so biased. They work with facility maintenence on a daily basis and they can often also get wind of what is coming up.
True enough on the whole, India doesn't do much for manufacturing, but China is a manufacturing powerhouse. Indian companies are already outsourcing some manufacturing to China to a small degree. China and India don't really like each other, but are they willing to look past this for profit? Question is will companies in India be willing to outsource to China? The Indian government is protectionist of /their/ jobs - and complains bitterly about any other government that is protectionist of their citizens jobs.
My point on Mexico wasn't that Mexicans are inherintly inferior or the like, my point was that India has all the components in place to create the instant-megacorp. Mexico simply doesn't get much other than manufacturing, and that they are competing against China for. In a race to the bottom, Mexico will lose, so they have to differentiate themselves to avoid losing those manufacturing jobs that they do have. Japan once had a deplorable reputation for quality, that certainly changed, witness as well Tawains reputation for quality is much better than it was. How will the US compete against India and Mexico compete against China, that's the real question.
While enormous amounts of goods are manufactured in Mexico, I can't recall hearing anything about call centers, programming or much of anything other than manufacturing transplanted to Mexico. India has the inherint advantage in that English is commonly taught there, certainly to a higher rate than in Mexico.
India also has about 1 person in 6 on the planet living there. In the race to the bottom, only China can compete with India. They have the population to absorb all manufacturing jobs not just from the US, but Mexico, Japan, Tawain (laptops already manufactured there that used to be made in Tawain) and the rest of the developed world. Manufacturing jobs have been moving from country to country as populations absorbed capacity and wages raised. Fundamentaly there is no reason for Mexico to be inherintly immune to this, just look at the recession in large parts of Asia.
How long until the pseudo companies in India decide to simple become full fledged name brands in themselves? Not only are we training them how to do our customer service, programming, back office, and research, but were also teaching them how to run fortune 500 class companies. They already have the expertise, how long can it be before we start seeing Indian versions of our established corporations.
They can skip the normal growing stages of setting up the megacorp, because they already have it. Offices, research, staff, software, it, they lack everything but the name - right now. Once some of these companies lose a contract with our corps, theirs nothing to keep them from setting up their own shop under their own name. This is the next trend in outsourcing - megacorps themselves.
There is NO compelling reason for these companies not to do this. They are making large profit from back of the house, it's inevitable they'll want the profit from the front of the house as well. The irony is that these large corporations are training the competition and replacements and most dont even see it coming. Is it arrogance that causes people to overlook this inevitability?
Reality check, the dot com bust, H1B visa influx, mass outsourcing and overall failure of the tech industray has resulted in many highly skilled, educated, certified and talented people having to take jobs outside of the field. I know people with 20+ years experience that can't land any job in tech whatsoever. It is supremely naive to think that jobs are available for those who are willing to simply go get them.
From the voice of experience I have lots of practical advice for both home users and administrators. I have had to get rid of a pretty fair chunk of hardware as a systems administrator so I have had to research this.
First: I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet so I'll say it. Wipe the drives with a wipe program. Don't just format them, it's too easy to get around. This is a good job for a pfy if you have one. If you give away information that leads to identity theft or the like your in for a world of trouble.
Do NOT donate old hardware that is obsolete to schools, goodwill or another charity. They all have to pay for the disposal costs, and people's charity in this area costs these institutions very real dollars. I speak from working with schools for a couple of years, experience as a systems administrator and having known people in charity work.
You can reuse / recycle them into continued use or dispose of them properly. Old Pentium class up computers make great firewalls. Between a friend and I we have probably gotten proper Linux firewalls to nearly a dozen households. Especially good when most of these people are not exactly full disclosure subscribers. If you don't have the skill to do this, you can always use something horribly mangled like the mandrake 9.2 firewall, but something is better than nothing.
You can do a basic enough breakdown for recycling if the box as a whole is propietary enough (Dell, Compaq, HP) that it isn't upgradable. Take out the disks and set these into your spare parts pile. This is very useful when someones firewall hard disk craps out as they are invariably led to do since the are almost always really old hard drives. The motherboard and old cards can be removed. If you don't have a recycle center that can take the circuit cards than throw those away. You can still recycle the case itself, just remove the plastics and the sheet metal shell will be taken by almost any recycling place.
If your doing this for an employer - don't just throw them away. If there new enough you can sell them to a wholesaler, give them away to employees (make sure you clear this high up to avoid the appearance of impropriety that can cost you your job). You can also sell almost anything on Ebay, some say this as a joke, but whoever is buying it is putting it back into use so you have recycled this. Save your receipts though and print out those auction pages. This is your proof that you have NOT thrown these away.
Important note about throwing away. Old circuit boards are full of a really nasty cocktail of bad for the environment chemicals. Old monitors are full of a pretty fair amount of lead. Both of these have the capacity to get your company in trouble for the future. In my case, working at the time for a company that once had a deplorable environmental record (nicely cleaned themselves up by the way), the costs for cleanup in the future for improperly disposed of company products was well known.
Since our old stuff (I had three facilities) was so old as to be no good to anyone, I scrapped what might be usable and found an environmentaly certified recycler for the old equipment. I paid them about 80 cents a pound, they gave me a shiny certificate absolving my company of environmental responsbility for those products.
- Keep in mind folks that this is the cost you inflict on charities when you donate obsolete hardware on them.
Important lesson here for companies - just because it's legal to throw away today doesn't mean your of the hook if it's deemed to have neccesitated an environementaly cleanup tomorrow.
How about a simple enough protest of the can spam law? Buy a can of Spam and mail it to your congress critter or the Direct Marketing Association.
Direct Marketing Association
Washington D. C. Office
1111 19th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036-3603
Telephone: 202.955.5030
Fax: 202.955.0085
This website will give you the address of your congress critters address when you put in your zip code. Just to play it safe I went to the USPS website and checked their prohibited items list(warning PDF) and canned meat isn't on it.
Because we dread the day when the EULA attached to our new DRM trusted Pheonix BIOS requires the same.
Points are given out based on how many people you can get suckered into paying to download a license for these files. Payments for getting friends and family to spend money on a third party product, how long until you get more points for getting them to also become a distributor. Tis nothing more than a pyramid marketing scheme. Pyramid schemes were once known for things like filter queen and herbalife. Perhaps we should call this marketing program "needalife"?
If they were being honest about they could just market to the masses with commercials and have honest downloads like itunes or the like. Instead they are trying to get the masses to go astroturfing on their behalf. Expose this for the lie that it is.
They want me to host the files that will link to their servers and get them paid! This is nothing more than a distributed bandwidth reduction process. In return you get these imaginary points with no cash value. This isn't file sharing people, this is bandwidth redistribution.
His "hobby" was a several times more expensive than most people hobbies, going to a movie or buying clothing. As for cable or cd's, if someone is facing bankruptcy they really should have higher priorities.
Point was he owed taxes, didn't pay them, and was obviously flaunting what he was putting a fair bit of money into on a worldwide forum. How could they not act?
Before donning tinfoil hats here, remember that all governments like to get paid. Whilst what he was doing had very high hack value, it certainly wasn't cheap. When their local tax people saw that he was prominently spending money on a world famous endeavour rather than paying his back taxes, they acted. No conspiracy here folks, just a tax authority doing what tax authorities worldwide do on a daily basis. That being said, I watched his project with high interest.