Requiem... Yeah, that was a good movie if you wanted to put a gun in your mouth the next day....)
Programming:
Someone picked up a pile of these for $1 at a garage sale.
As he perused through them, he took notes.
From it we got
The Fugitive
Good movie, but loses points for standing on the shoulders of an ok tv show
Addams Family
Flintstones
Beverly Hillbillies Good Lord, why
Rocky & Bullwinkle ibid
Mod Squad Still, the same
Incredible Hulk It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a tanking movie!
Spiderman Ok, really a comic. With all the character development sam raimi's ever done
Charlie's Angels We're started to drag belly on the ground here
George Of the Jungle ok, I'm a sucker 'cause I loved this show. When I was 3
I Spy
Lost in Space
Mission Impossible
Well, mission improbable. She's 25, uber-babe, has 4 PhDs and can barely pronounce the technical terms she's been given.
I leave off Jose and the Pussycats because it was self referencial about movies only made to reach commercialism for nostalgia's sake.
This is PATHETIC!!
We have some interesting and creative people coming up with screen plays and ideas who are utterly being quashed by these lame-ass studio execs who wouldn't know a good idea if it kicked 'em in the nuts.
A separate but related thread is people remaking moves that, really, we done right the first time. Remake the movies that were good ideas but SUCKED! Like perhaps most of the ones in the last 20 years.
Jack: People aren't avoiding movies because we're pirating them, we're avoiding movies BECAUSE THEY SUCK!
Re:Depends on the time for which you want to store
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 1
I have probably 2 terrabytes worth of tape.
Much of the data isn't DIFFERENT, but it means I can reproduce my machine from years ago. And a year ago. And a month ago. And last week.
Oh, I periodically take a set of tapes and box it up and mail it across the country to a friend (who then recycles the tapes I've previously sent and occasionally sends them to me).
I can drop a tape off a desk and I won't even ding the little plastic case.
I've had tapes fail. But when it's a full backup from 2 months ago, and I have 1 and 3 months ago, I can recover.
I've currently got QIC 150, 8mm (5gb), DAT4 and want a DLT, but it's too costly for home.
Oh, and the QIC60 tapes from 1989 work just fine.
(burned 30+ QIC tapes to a DVD a while back. Then made another copy.).
Right, and when IPNG was being discussed, 48 bit and 64 bit were likely contenders. Plenty of address space.
Then folks from the utility industries got involved. A phrase I'll recall is "plan it so that every electrical outlet could have an address"
256 hosts used to be enough.
And who would want a computer in their HOUSE!?
(and yes, I have the address space for 64k INTERNETS (that's 64k^3) in my chunk of IPv6 space. The goal is to deal with routing better than density. Most of the use is suffixed with the MAC address tagged at the end.
Yup. I'm one of those. Because on the nights that the windows downstairs are open and it cools off between 80 degree days and hits 60, the heat comes on.
Do I *need* heat at 4:30AM when I'm snug in my bed?
Sure, if it's winter. But when it's gonna be 70 by 8AM and 85 by 11AM, no. I can suck it up and survive the house being colder than I'd tolerate when it's generally cold.
In fact, if I get my butt out of bed and close the windows while it's still 60, my house stays colder through the morning.
Actually, I've got a RCS thermometer so I *COULD* kick the heat on (from bed via X10/IR/PDABrowser-> computer -> thermostat) were I motivated to setup the trigger.
But having done the "you have to get up and stick wood in the wood stove, but the glass of water next to your bed is cracked because it froze last night" ride, I think I can survive a 55 degree morning in a pinch.
by "strong password", we presume you mean a trivial dictionary attack won't work. But as we've learned with windows and their very quick algorithm (rc4?), brute force is quicker than smart attacks.
and when users use a windows password as a pass phrase to 2048 bit pgp, it's given up.
And you presume that the
web server is secure
ip stack is solid
other assumptions (that most of us make and rely on too
Project Athena was an MIT project to put unix workstations in public areas where there was NOT hardware security (someone could single boot) and the networks were NOT secure (someone could tap in and sniff) and basically a public network with no transport or host security. (they also came up with Instant Messaging via zephyr).
Its goal was to limit the "soft chewy center" of networks' security. In 1988. And we've backslid a WHOLE lot in the last 10 years (windows got networking built in).
I'll recall an admin at an ex company who was aghast that I typed "telnet myInternetbox"
He: "You use Telnet! It's SO unsecure. ssh (newish then) is MUCH better!"
Me: "did you notice where I also typed no username/password? And ponder that my telnet != your telnet?"
A point being that its best to act as though your wires are unsecure (people are insecure), as though everything between the computers in untrusted, ideally as though the computer is untrusted (toehold checked the checksums of several binaries and did a "netboot" when, for example, I replaced login with a trojaned one in a test).
Hoping that your netgear nat box doesn't have a backdoor (accidental or not) or that people on the Wireless network are who their machines claim they are is just a really bad habit.
(and yeah, I allow people to connect to my wireless, but they can't USE much more than a limited port 80/443 like that. Port 25 is ALWAYS blocked and 587 demands smtp auth.
Mediocre to bad software backed by really poor customer support.
What made strong impressions on me was events line:
client has 10 xenix boxes. Client gets some network cards because they FINALLY want them to talk to each other. So they spent several hundred $$$/machine for cards, a bunch of Coax and 10 copies of Xenix TCP/IP software. I got to install.
I spend the day working on the boxes, I'd pull the software, install, do the licensing, leave the license card. A little waiting for machines, so I run wires, and it's getting done.
Oh, but the machines (all?) spew an "alert" that there is a duplicate key in use.
Somewhere, I put the same key in twice.
We call SCO. We get told (on Mon) that someone will "call you back before Thursday."
Uh... no. surrounded by shrink wrap and a someone upset client...
No love. I have to uninstall everything, reinstall. Another several hours.
Next day, things network! Woo hoo! but...
They login by project name. But they can't RCP. or rlogin. We put on passwords (isolated network in a secure room, no passwords). Kinda a PITA.
Oh, project "pacific1" won't rsh/rlogin still. Nor a couple others. Still waiting for the "brand new customer" + VAR support call back.
The CAD support people come through (ArrisCAD rules!). Seems "8 letter login names won't work. We know, it's stupid; we agree. Oh, and you can't extract the TCP software license key," so if I keep waiting for support, they'll tell me to do what I did.
-----
This sort of action was repeated over and over. When, later, UnixWare (1992ish) was foisten on me, the hole bad hack of YP and mounting NFS and every painful step just burned into my brain more and more that this was a Unix half owned by Microsoft and its sole purpose was to make people like DOS and Windows 3.0
As soon as BSDI could run SCO binaries, I called the remaining (former clients) who still were stuck with SCO for some software lockin.
I will maintain that the ONLY reason SCO classic sold stuff through the late 80s was because of software that only ran on it. And those people got locked in because it was the only unix that could run on a 286 back in the day.
Move forward and the way to make money from SCO is to "pump and dump" - lawsuits about non-existent intellectual IP and the price goes up enough to sell a bunch of stock and pocket some cabbage.
Sure, the JFS that IBM brought from OS/2 came from SCO. Right, I'll get on that. And the rest of the rot.
Bad company that became obsolete (not EVERYBODY stopped innovating, mr sco) and got bought by a genius from Novell (remember when Novell I ruled the world doing the equiv of a stateful NFS and lpr for $10,000).
And yes, I had lots of clients that used Xenix. And after a LOT of pain, they figured out that SunOS on a $15k sun was cheaper than Xenix on a $3000 386/25.
My friend still hates me for making him setup an early Unixware and it's NIS/YP "implementation"
(rsh to master, copy files over, merge with local ones, done. That's like NIS, right mr customer?)
We tossed it for being grossly unsecure, even on a trusted LAN; slow and bad.
Oh, and the switch was set to Evil (but we didn't know it then).
They say "PV-TV can generate 3.8 watts of electricity per square foot, an above-average level of efficiency"
I gotta look at my 165 W sharps which are about 8sq feet and wonder at that. But my panels are not clear. Which is a plus as the also shade the roof and make that part of the house cooler. (if only they had 1/2" pipes wired under them so I could water cool them and run the warmed water into a tank).
And yes, the windows are mounted vertically. In math, that's at 90 degrees.
The ideal mounting angle is your latitude (eg the Bay Area and DC are around 37 degrees).
So these will be most efficient at Sunrise/Sunset. When the sun is at its weakest (lots of atmosphere to get through).
On the other hand, if they are good projection screens, you aim your projector at it, that causes it to generate power which you can use to plug the projector into!! Perpetual energy!!!
or something.
Bottom line:
If they work and don't cost a lot more than regular windows (such that in 10 years they save more in power costs than they cost), then great!
If every house with a decent roof exposure between 10 and 3 has even 4 solar panels on and generated even 20% of their own power, and there was enough to knock 5% of power use down in our country (world?), then it's a win.
There's no need to "go off grid" and raise your own goats for food and knit you're own underwear to use solar.
(Now, if you switch from CRT to LCD, you save having to buy $500 of solar panels...)
You validly bring up that MORE things are possible and easy with faster computers. Yes, clearly.
But what I find (esp on non-true Unix/X machines) is that doing the SAME tasks is no faster.
Great, closing a window makes a pretty little animation kick off. Joy! MS Word has every feature in it that was every suggested by anyone including MS programmers on their first drunk trying to impress a girl.
And yes, when the 4.77MHz XTs came out, I *was* playing on a 1.5Mb/s line on the Vax (with 1MB of RAM).
Is PPPoE there because it's BEST and EFFICIENT? Or is it in use because, well, we could get it out quick, our vendor for modems supports it and people have CPU to burn?
SUV think.
Yes, any 486/66 can handle current broadband speeds just fine (I firewall/route 2 WiFi + 3mb/s cable with an 8 watt 486/133 that's as silent as my 8 port netgear switch).
You bring up gaming, but gaming is the leading factor in video and machine acceleration in home machines. DDR Ram is largely motivated by gamers. (hell, I've spent $30,000 on a bleeding edge SGI video card that as fast as the $30 "deal bin" card I tossed in a friend's machine).
RE: Old machines?
I was asked to recover a BUNCH of (well preserved and stored) disks from a Z80 CP/M system. I found a program that would run (and read/write) CP/M programs under DOS and found DOS disks.
Shoved a 5 1/4" drive into an (old) 800MHz machine and kicked up WordStar. Somehow the fingers remembered.
The friend was stunned at the speed as I whipped through the files looking for something. "How come my new windows machine isn't this fast?"
Well, wordstar can't send email or do bad grammar checking as you type can it?
That said, a friend's mom is a novelist and using WordPerfect 5.1 to write in.
A simple electronic typewriter that doesn't annoy her with underlines or other visual crud while she's focusing on composition and tying together plot lines and developing characters. A spelling mistake should not interrupt the train of thought. That's why you spell check afterwards (or have Jr Editors at the publishing house).
The overall point is that app programmers and OS writers are giving us crap - lots of little fluff without, by and large, much innovation.
Star/Open Office seek to emulate MS Office for acceptance sake, but non of them offer any new ways of trying to come to me, the user, to help me in my tasks.
My mom still has to remember to "Save" a file.
- but it's right there, why is it MY job to do this when the computer that's really 3 orders of magnitude more powerful is not doing anything.
Radical research into user interface design, operating systems and in specific Human Computer Interface design within apps is pathetic.
AutoCAD, by and large, is the same program I ran on SPARC 1s in 1991.
There are few (mainstream and findable) "idea managers" like Think!
Apple *used* to encourage and offer a forum for interesting new ideas in computing,but at this point they're scrambling to keep any ISVs and backfilling holes in their portfolio (see addressbook, iTunes, etc).
The 8088 sucked. Z80 with better carburators.
Segments.
The 68000 came out soon after and would have spared us YEARS of working around stupid ickiness that Intel foisted on us (like bank switching which should have died with the Apple//.) I was delighted to move from 68000->68040 without having to redesign software. Microcontroller makers passing them off as microprocessors.
4.77MHz.
Skipping predictive branching, caching up the kazoo and that current chips are closer to RISC than CISC classic, etc:
Is your 2000MHz Athlon 400 times more useful than the XT? (adding in variables, and DDR it's several THOUSAND times more powerful).
I still find that my 30MHz Sparc 2 running fvwm wasn't a ton less useful than my current FreeBSD setup.
I *know* that my 40MHz NeXT (in the office) isn't 1/20th the speed of my 867MHz (RISC) PPC.
The issue with really fast systems is really bad and bloated software is allowed.
Yes, about 10 people use IrDA. Remember when it would give us near wireless computers? We'd always print using IrDA, sync things, etc.
It's possible, but it's not common by any means.
In that model of replace less useful with more useful, if Palm or competitors would figure out that with a consumer IR emitter*
that for $120, they have a billion low end palms that are perfect Remotes (with a little simple software) and happen to hold address books and appts, etc.
*consumer IR is a slightly different wavelength, but it's fungeable with IrDA - but more important, it's modulated at between around 35k and 40k.
Smart folks have used the audio outputs of decent quality devices (unfo Wince based, usu) with a frequency doubler or tripler. Throw wave forms at it and it spits IR out.
RE: the desires of the parent post:
Mac OS X will certainly let Apple Script control its programs. It's almost "mom-able" to let a bluetooth (phone, say) trip macros.
any bt or WiFi device that talks to your computer can emit events. You're job is to xlate the event into a control signal to your program(s). Eg. "Next Song" or "pause".
Perhaps when you and your BT phone get out of range (30' typically), the music will pause.
Why would you allow you or someone you know to run windows?
"Windows: The OS for the rich and stupid"
Barring a simple PDA with consumer IR and $50 of software, there's the hackers way which is WAY overkill (but isn't that how we started? Computer controlled model railroads when most kids were happy with a transformer and $70 of train+track?)
This isn't hard. It's not even rocket science.
Just computer science.
My
adicon ocelot is a $150-$200 device that speaks and hears IR, X10 and can expand to A/D, DA and digital IO.
And serial.
To my BSD box (and bsd is dying, yeah... yeah...)
It's got the single worst Windows interface to program it (macros: IF event then action1, action2, action3 perhaps GOTO another thing. I borrowed a windows laptop to get it to do something before I got the Unix tools so I could use vi to edit my "programs".
X10 or IR button (or with IO hardwired button) trips of a macro that can be as fancy as you want.
Webpage emits a command to a TTY to the Ocelot serial port to make a command.
$200 PDA speaks to Webpage via WiFI, I press "movie time" and the lights dim, the TV, DVD, amp and amp to subwoofer disguised as couch turn on.
Cost?
$100-$200 (or more) for WiFi aware PDA.
$175 for Ocelot.
$300 Unix box that also runs mail for 60 people, etc, etc
--------
Profit!
I think there's something even more nice about having the server break down, and being able to fix the machine yourself, but maybe that's just me.
I'll point out the different between being able to fix the server and having to be the one to fix the server.
We've installed, say, SAP. The company relies on it. It's software that using 5000 databases, a 14 million line code base and for some reason everyone has been given a random number of extra years on their hire date.
Fix it.
Oh, United's reservation system is wrong. It seems the "inconvience the passenger flag" is set for EVERYONE. Can you look into that? By the way, if it's not fixed by tomorrow, you and you're team are fired (and you just transferred to indianapolis and have no money to move back home).
I see that OSS often falls down on really complex and really large bits of complex software. That a lot of OSS people have never dealt with a software package that takes a year to get installed and running.
*I* try to stay away from those, but I deal with massive CRM stuff all the time. But most Unix and, dare I offer, 99.999% of/. readers don't deal with hard core change managment systems or really large software systems.
In crises with smaller systems that I've represented, we needed a couple people just for customer management while a gang tore through code to fine a the bug.
Again, it's naive to assume that OSS fills every role. (and yes, I've commercially supported OSS and brought it into places that you'd not expect it to be, LONG before linux had networking code.).
I *can* and *have* booted Linux on 32 processor systems. It worked. Mr Miller got dmesgs.
But it was the wrong answer.
Now I'm on an unusual side of the table for me. I'm furious that building PHP with LDAP and SNMP and MySQL and gettext on solaris in a PACKAGED environment requires a full moon, two virgin goats (I said stay away from her!), 'scuse me, I'm back. That most of userland in Solaris, AIX, HPUX and other proprietary Unixes dates from the 80s. I tire of solving problems that we've solved already. Well.
cd/usr/ports/lang/php4 && make install package clean
But finding a large support organization that will take my money and bust their butts when our servers crash running a huge mission critical (it dies, we go out of business, 25,000 people become unemployed, a town becomes a wasteland) database and web back end system is pretty easy to get with the big players. I've caused Sun patches.
I've also caused Linux patches. Why were people responsive to problems? Because they chose to be. That's tough for a business to count on. "OH, sorry, Alan's on holiday; Linus is moving to Oregon, David Miller's training for the olympics. The redhat folks don't really know the details of the E10k and haven't got a 48 processor one to test on..."
OSS is great where people tread regularly.
It's great where 100% of your support can be local to your organization.
But it's naive to preach that all problems can be solved by replacing your systems with OSS systems (windows being the exception).
Right, and being reasonable works - esp when you're a small company and people override processes.
But we did work fronting 5 machines on OC48s that were beating on the our program and making them buckets of money.
So is it wrong to want/expect to be paid more when the product is used more and harder and making more money?
"per unit" pricing won't work. "Oh, sorry the commerce site shut down at 2PM, you hit you're thousanth sale".
Lets establish that this *is* ok:
And lets look at Support. If you were powering the commerce site for a Borders vs your neighborhood 1000 square foot book store, you'd expect to charge Borders more. I'm hoping folks don't have qualms with this.
They use it more. We can measure usage by clicks, or "sessions" or bandwidth, but then a robot gone mad on $local_place could raise their threshold.
Ideally, we'd be in conversation with them, but that doesn't scale and nobody wants to buy software whose price might change - that would be 1970's and 80's Computer Associates model. And why every mainframe shop, current and former, STILL hate CA.
Now for support...this is the same in the OSS world. If I'm supporting, say, an Apache/PHP driven site management suite...
If we have one contact and an install at (say) GM and one contact and an install at the single Soda & Pet Food City store, should we charge GM the same as SPFC for support?
Per incident isn't realistic, but "you have X incidents" packages ARE coming along.
Sigh, it's kinda moot for the product I'm thinking of. Frankly, at this point, they've priced the product out of the range of anyone smaller than Fortune-Notable numbers, which is too bad. My stock my be worth something if it was in the reach of the 95% of companies that are considered Small Businesses.
But Per CPU pricing gives us a notion of how big the install is. Human sanity intercedes when, (as happened) a site had a single 32 CPU box that was their everything box. Our product was there to aid 50 people. And on that box. And no, it wasn't worth $20k (or whatever) to them. MOST of that CPU usage was for database and other work - they just used a mainframe mentality to have 200 terminals around a warehouse, database, web server for internal use, file service for 50 office workers, etc. I spoke with them and we charged the 1-2 CPU price since that's how they were using it.
In reality, a lot of licenses aren't locked hard to a machine. I've scrambled when a new sparc mobo (and NVRAM) suddenly made Lotus die in a Very Production Environment. But then I run into people who insist on using MS Office/Photoshop/what have you, but for personal use won't pay. And they don't understand why I think this theft. Me? I send them Open Office formatted files of important documents:) Or TeX.
I've run Linux on S/390s. DASD presented disks suck. (ok, take the 400GB Shark array that's presented as 2some GB volumes and paste 40 of them back together with VLM to get an 80G partition).
Need big iron? No, Sybase ran ok on SPARC 2s and well on 690s. So does PostgreSQL. But Sybase or Oracle or DB2 do some things now that PostgreSQL will do, I'm sure, in a few years. But doesn't do at this time.
So yeah, I'm an OSS advocate at work and push it where it's appropriate.
But I also understand where it's not appropriate. This view that every problem can be solved with Linux and Postgres is both naive and, really, harms the credibility of people who have actual success getting Linux and BSD into data centers.
Yeah, postgres and linux do well on a pair of redundant 32CPU machine that's being HAMMERED, running with 32GB of memory in use and more waiting.
I love the view that Linux can replace all machines. There's no place for proprietary software.
Now, I'll mostly agree with Windows because too often Windows is being cobbled together and shoved into the data center (my servers need a windowing system just to boot? I have machines I've never seen or touched that I've installed from 12000 miles away and run for years.
And yeah, BSD fills lots of places in the infrastructures, but BSD and Linux didn't come up with CrayLink or NUMA. And there's something kind of nice about when your $10million company has a problem with the $100,000 server that I can make a call and have a bunch of people answer who are PAID to run around and make my problem their high priority.
But yeah, that my PDA runs Postgres and smokes the trading floor servers I used put up 10 years ago is pretty cool.
I worked at a company and we busted our butts making software that was core-enterprise type software.
To help envision it, lets say its a firewall - the firewall has no concept of "users" really, it routes packets. (it's not a firewall, but the situation is close enough).
Now our basic question, which we reluctantly answered with per-processor licensing, was how to charge for it.
If you buy our software and your company of 20,000 people is RELYING on it you'd pay more than if your company of 50 people was RELYING on it.
We could have priced into the middle - but then companies under 2,000 people would feel (rightly) ripped off, while the GMs are getting a steal.
Charge per "user behind it"?
Charge by your corporate revenue?
"Pay what you feel is about right"?
On not so minor goal was to be able to make a living for 40 people and continue to develop a product that had, by and large, come up pretty short in the open source arena.
So what models of licensing do you WANT that will keep the vendor and the buyer in business and happy?
(and yes, I've slipped in a 4CPU license for 1-2 CPU price at a place with old, slow machines in use. We tried to do "right".)
You don't admin a domain with "vi" [where by vi I mean all editors].
Task: Add this printer to 200 machines. You have 5 different un*xes (and different versions of each of those around).
We need to change the sudo file on 200 servers. no, nfs is not used
Update/etc/mail/access on 6 machines in 4 locations (and 3 continents). Oh, we forgot this, do it again.
Make sure $THIS is in the sybase's crontab on all the sybase server.
Patch all the Solaris 7 machines with this new patch cluster. It's urgent. (and we have 50 of those machines scattered around the world).
Change the (locally stored) root password on all the machines we take care of because X just got fired, but we couldn't tell you till now).
Rebuild the 2 HA database servers (one at a time) and make sure they have the current patches and access to the new partitions on the SAN
vi! webmin. heh.
My partner took the Solaris Advanced Certification tests (someone else was paying and what the hell). She screwed up the parts about AdminTool. Someone who'd been using Unix since the 80s. She came home raging: AdminTool!! If I ever hired a senior admin and they kicked up admin tool, I'd fire them before the windows finished opening.
I find these single machine solutions quite quaint.
No, I'm delighted to have my cfengine scripts that go through/etc/ and make sure that inetd.conf is stripped, and that rpcbind and nfs aren't running on standalone servers and that the Right Stuff is in the Right Config files and that permissions are correct.
Best part is that I can run it again anytime later to redo that (or with '-n' to just show me what's changed).
And if it uses CVS to pull down $Today's configs, then so be it.
Discussed this with a buddy who's an ex army "sharpshooter" (that's sniper if he's on the other side).
My thought was to trigger a taser wired up under your shirt. His was bullets.
Perhaps rubber bullets. (but the taser thing would work with video games).
So you get hit, your in a big boatload of pain for a while and fall and thrash on the floor for a while. So what? You wanna "play war" little boys? Then stop pretending that's it's blood and pain free.
Ok, forget lasers. Use rocks.
This army recruitment crap of paintball/laser tag/video games is just sick. I'll take my bugs bunny and itchy and scratchy any day than the sanitized faux-violence on the TV and in these "games".
Wanna play? Join the services. If you lose and you're lucky, you still might have 3 limbs and some of your hearing.
or do others recall that this guy (mitnick) is an asswipe?
Yes, I had problems with police imprisoning him with little recourse as they did.
Yes, Tsutomu Shimomura is a yahoo who did a lot of stupid and bad things. The greatest was probably his aweful book written with "journalist" John Markoff (I enquote that because as he was ghost writing with Shimora, he was also writing articles that were supposedly objective yet never mentioned doing a book with one of the particpants of the story).
[Shimomura was terribly impressed with his (own) computer security abilities, yet ran tools that had long been sources of security holes because it was convenient. ("I am a master of securing houses; all the world leaders come to me. So imagine my shock and outrage when I'd found that someone had lifted up my welcome mat and used the key I keep there to get in. I must hunt down this bastard and have my revenge.").]
I was appalled that national ISPs would so readily turn over logs and access to their networks and their users information to a vigilant/yahoo.
But no, I wasn't sorry that Mr Mitnick got his ass busted. He was no kiddie using youth as an excuse for poor judgement. He was a thief who rationalized stealing from people and companies by its electronic abstraction.
No, I don't think Kevin's "cool". That he is someone who would steal my personal information because the people I had to give it to are idiots about securing it doesn't make it ok to do so. And it's felony when he then uses that information to buy things. I don't want him in the room when I pull out a credit card. I don't want him in a hotel where I use a credit card.
Should the hotel be smarter? Sure. But the people who decry identity theft cannot also embrace Kevin Mitnick as one to be admired.
what's wrong with an all-in-one box? you can still upgrade stuff, it's just a laptop mobo in a monitor case with a modified power
1) cost.
2) monitor that I'm paying for (and have better of).
3) I'll pass on muttering about upgrade of MoBos that I can't do in the future.
In a large part, I struggle with people who pick up the paper and see a festival of $500 machines or $600 machines with color printers etc.
Or you can have a sort of clunky looking i^H eMac. Without the cool colors that introduced color into a lot of industrial design in the first place!
So I can by a tower with a printer and get windows (ick, theory only) for $500 and have a range of choices, or I can get an eMac for more.
here's a thought: Put it in a lucite Pizza Box (a SparcStation 2 with a new cover;) with no monitor and the stuff stuff and drop the price $300. Built in video or... better... an AGP slot!
Slashdot Mirror
Requiem... Yeah, that was a good movie if you wanted to put a gun in your mouth the next day....)
Programming:
Someone picked up a pile of these for $1 at a garage sale.
As he perused through them, he took notes.
From it we got
- The Fugitive
- Addams Family
- Flintstones
- Beverly Hillbillies
- Rocky & Bullwinkle
- Mod Squad
- Incredible Hulk
- Spiderman
- Charlie's Angels
- George Of the Jungle
- I Spy
- Lost in Space
- Mission Impossible
I leave off Jose and the Pussycats because it was self referencial about movies only made to reach commercialism for nostalgia's sake.Good movie, but loses points for standing on the shoulders of an ok tv show
Good Lord, why
ibid
Still, the same
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a tanking movie!
Ok, really a comic. With all the character development sam raimi's ever done
We're started to drag belly on the ground here
ok, I'm a sucker 'cause I loved this show. When I was 3
Well, mission improbable. She's 25, uber-babe, has 4 PhDs and can barely pronounce the technical terms she's been given.
This is PATHETIC!!
We have some interesting and creative people coming up with screen plays and ideas who are utterly being quashed by these lame-ass studio execs who wouldn't know a good idea if it kicked 'em in the nuts.
A separate but related thread is people remaking moves that, really, we done right the first time. Remake the movies that were good ideas but SUCKED! Like perhaps most of the ones in the last 20 years.
Jack: People aren't avoiding movies because we're pirating them, we're avoiding movies BECAUSE THEY SUCK!
see also this about "piracy ads" because it's a great idea.
I have probably 2 terrabytes worth of tape. Much of the data isn't DIFFERENT, but it means I can reproduce my machine from years ago. And a year ago. And a month ago. And last week. Oh, I periodically take a set of tapes and box it up and mail it across the country to a friend (who then recycles the tapes I've previously sent and occasionally sends them to me). I can drop a tape off a desk and I won't even ding the little plastic case. I've had tapes fail. But when it's a full backup from 2 months ago, and I have 1 and 3 months ago, I can recover. I've currently got QIC 150, 8mm (5gb), DAT4 and want a DLT, but it's too costly for home. Oh, and the QIC60 tapes from 1989 work just fine. (burned 30+ QIC tapes to a DVD a while back. Then made another copy.).
Then folks from the utility industries got involved. A phrase I'll recall is "plan it so that every electrical outlet could have an address"
256 hosts used to be enough.
And who would want a computer in their HOUSE!?
(and yes, I have the address space for 64k INTERNETS (that's 64k^3) in my chunk of IPv6 space. The goal is to deal with routing better than density. Most of the use is suffixed with the MAC address tagged at the end.
Do I *need* heat at 4:30AM when I'm snug in my bed?
Sure, if it's winter. But when it's gonna be 70 by 8AM and 85 by 11AM, no. I can suck it up and survive the house being colder than I'd tolerate when it's generally cold.
In fact, if I get my butt out of bed and close the windows while it's still 60, my house stays colder through the morning.
Actually, I've got a RCS thermometer so I *COULD* kick the heat on (from bed via X10/IR/PDABrowser-> computer -> thermostat) were I motivated to setup the trigger.
But having done the "you have to get up and stick wood in the wood stove, but the glass of water next to your bed is cracked because it froze last night" ride, I think I can survive a 55 degree morning in a pinch.
and when users use a windows password as a pass phrase to 2048 bit pgp, it's given up.
And you presume that the
- web server is secure
- ip stack is solid
- other assumptions (that most of us make and rely on too
Project Athena was an MIT project to put unix workstations in public areas where there was NOT hardware security (someone could single boot) and the networks were NOT secure (someone could tap in and sniff) and basically a public network with no transport or host security. (they also came up with Instant Messaging via zephyr).Its goal was to limit the "soft chewy center" of networks' security. In 1988. And we've backslid a WHOLE lot in the last 10 years (windows got networking built in).
I'll recall an admin at an ex company who was aghast that I typed "telnet myInternetbox"
He: "You use Telnet! It's SO unsecure. ssh (newish then) is MUCH better!"
Me: "did you notice where I also typed no username/password? And ponder that my telnet != your telnet?"
A point being that its best to act as though your wires are unsecure (people are insecure), as though everything between the computers in untrusted, ideally as though the computer is untrusted (toehold checked the checksums of several binaries and did a "netboot" when, for example, I replaced login with a trojaned one in a test).
Hoping that your netgear nat box doesn't have a backdoor (accidental or not) or that people on the Wireless network are who their machines claim they are is just a really bad habit.
(and yeah, I allow people to connect to my wireless, but they can't USE much more than a limited port 80/443 like that. Port 25 is ALWAYS blocked and 587 demands smtp auth.
Nor an undetected breakin!
along with BSD.
Guess I'm doomed.
(DOOMED!)
What made strong impressions on me was events line:
client has 10 xenix boxes. Client gets some network cards because they FINALLY want them to talk to each other. So they spent several hundred $$$/machine for cards, a bunch of Coax and 10 copies of Xenix TCP/IP software. I got to install.
I spend the day working on the boxes, I'd pull the software, install, do the licensing, leave the license card. A little waiting for machines, so I run wires, and it's getting done.
Oh, but the machines (all?) spew an "alert" that there is a duplicate key in use.
Somewhere, I put the same key in twice.
We call SCO. We get told (on Mon) that someone will "call you back before Thursday."
Uh... no. surrounded by shrink wrap and a someone upset client...
No love. I have to uninstall everything, reinstall. Another several hours.
Next day, things network! Woo hoo! but...
They login by project name. But they can't RCP. or rlogin. We put on passwords (isolated network in a secure room, no passwords). Kinda a PITA.
Oh, project "pacific1" won't rsh/rlogin still. Nor a couple others. Still waiting for the "brand new customer" + VAR support call back.
The CAD support people come through (ArrisCAD rules!). Seems "8 letter login names won't work. We know, it's stupid; we agree. Oh, and you can't extract the TCP software license key," so if I keep waiting for support, they'll tell me to do what I did.
-----
This sort of action was repeated over and over. When, later, UnixWare (1992ish) was foisten on me, the hole bad hack of YP and mounting NFS and every painful step just burned into my brain more and more that this was a Unix half owned by Microsoft and its sole purpose was to make people like DOS and Windows 3.0
As soon as BSDI could run SCO binaries, I called the remaining (former clients) who still were stuck with SCO for some software lockin.
I will maintain that the ONLY reason SCO classic sold stuff through the late 80s was because of software that only ran on it. And those people got locked in because it was the only unix that could run on a 286 back in the day.
Move forward and the way to make money from SCO is to "pump and dump" - lawsuits about non-existent intellectual IP and the price goes up enough to sell a bunch of stock and pocket some cabbage.
Sure, the JFS that IBM brought from OS/2 came from SCO. Right, I'll get on that. And the rest of the rot.
Bad company that became obsolete (not EVERYBODY stopped innovating, mr sco) and got bought by a genius from Novell (remember when Novell I ruled the world doing the equiv of a stateful NFS and lpr for $10,000).
Evil company; costly yet mediocre software.
And yes, I had lots of clients that used Xenix. And after a LOT of pain, they figured out that SunOS on a $15k sun was cheaper than Xenix on a $3000 386/25.
My friend still hates me for making him setup an early Unixware and it's NIS/YP "implementation" (rsh to master, copy files over, merge with local ones, done. That's like NIS, right mr customer?)
We tossed it for being grossly unsecure, even on a trusted LAN; slow and bad.
Oh, and the switch was set to Evil (but we didn't know it then).
I gotta look at my 165 W sharps which are about 8sq feet and wonder at that. But my panels are not clear. Which is a plus as the also shade the roof and make that part of the house cooler. (if only they had 1/2" pipes wired under them so I could water cool them and run the warmed water into a tank).
And yes, the windows are mounted vertically. In math, that's at 90 degrees.
The ideal mounting angle is your latitude (eg the Bay Area and DC are around 37 degrees).
So these will be most efficient at Sunrise/Sunset. When the sun is at its weakest (lots of atmosphere to get through).
On the other hand, if they are good projection screens, you aim your projector at it, that causes it to generate power which you can use to plug the projector into!! Perpetual energy!!!
or something.
Bottom line:
If they work and don't cost a lot more than regular windows (such that in 10 years they save more in power costs than they cost), then great!
If every house with a decent roof exposure between 10 and 3 has even 4 solar panels on and generated even 20% of their own power, and there was enough to knock 5% of power use down in our country (world?), then it's a win.
There's no need to "go off grid" and raise your own goats for food and knit you're own underwear to use solar.
(Now, if you switch from CRT to LCD, you save having to buy $500 of solar panels...)
But what I find (esp on non-true Unix/X machines) is that doing the SAME tasks is no faster.
Great, closing a window makes a pretty little animation kick off. Joy! MS Word has every feature in it that was every suggested by anyone including MS programmers on their first drunk trying to impress a girl.
And yes, when the 4.77MHz XTs came out, I *was* playing on a 1.5Mb/s line on the Vax (with 1MB of RAM).
Is PPPoE there because it's BEST and EFFICIENT? Or is it in use because, well, we could get it out quick, our vendor for modems supports it and people have CPU to burn?
SUV think.
Yes, any 486/66 can handle current broadband speeds just fine (I firewall/route 2 WiFi + 3mb/s cable with an 8 watt 486/133 that's as silent as my 8 port netgear switch).
You bring up gaming, but gaming is the leading factor in video and machine acceleration in home machines. DDR Ram is largely motivated by gamers. (hell, I've spent $30,000 on a bleeding edge SGI video card that as fast as the $30 "deal bin" card I tossed in a friend's machine).
RE: Old machines?
I was asked to recover a BUNCH of (well preserved and stored) disks from a Z80 CP/M system. I found a program that would run (and read/write) CP/M programs under DOS and found DOS disks.
Shoved a 5 1/4" drive into an (old) 800MHz machine and kicked up WordStar. Somehow the fingers remembered.
The friend was stunned at the speed as I whipped through the files looking for something. "How come my new windows machine isn't this fast?"
Well, wordstar can't send email or do bad grammar checking as you type can it?
That said, a friend's mom is a novelist and using WordPerfect 5.1 to write in.
A simple electronic typewriter that doesn't annoy her with underlines or other visual crud while she's focusing on composition and tying together plot lines and developing characters. A spelling mistake should not interrupt the train of thought. That's why you spell check afterwards (or have Jr Editors at the publishing house).
The overall point is that app programmers and OS writers are giving us crap - lots of little fluff without, by and large, much innovation.
Star/Open Office seek to emulate MS Office for acceptance sake, but non of them offer any new ways of trying to come to me, the user, to help me in my tasks.
My mom still has to remember to "Save" a file. - but it's right there, why is it MY job to do this when the computer that's really 3 orders of magnitude more powerful is not doing anything.
Radical research into user interface design, operating systems and in specific Human Computer Interface design within apps is pathetic.
AutoCAD, by and large, is the same program I ran on SPARC 1s in 1991.
There are few (mainstream and findable) "idea managers" like Think!
Apple *used* to encourage and offer a forum for interesting new ideas in computing,but at this point they're scrambling to keep any ISVs and backfilling holes in their portfolio (see addressbook, iTunes, etc).
We live in a time of Unnovation.
- The 8088 sucked. Z80 with better carburators.
//.) I was delighted to move from 68000->68040 without having to redesign software. Microcontroller makers passing them off as microprocessors.
- 4.77MHz.
I still find that my 30MHz Sparc 2 running fvwm wasn't a ton less useful than my current FreeBSD setup.Segments.
The 68000 came out soon after and would have spared us YEARS of working around stupid ickiness that Intel foisted on us (like bank switching which should have died with the Apple
Skipping predictive branching, caching up the kazoo and that current chips are closer to RISC than CISC classic, etc:
Is your 2000MHz Athlon 400 times more useful than the XT? (adding in variables, and DDR it's several THOUSAND times more powerful).
I *know* that my 40MHz NeXT (in the office) isn't 1/20th the speed of my 867MHz (RISC) PPC.
The issue with really fast systems is really bad and bloated software is allowed.
It's possible, but it's not common by any means.
In that model of replace less useful with more useful, if Palm or competitors would figure out that with a consumer IR emitter* that for $120, they have a billion low end palms that are perfect Remotes (with a little simple software) and happen to hold address books and appts, etc.
*consumer IR is a slightly different wavelength, but it's fungeable with IrDA - but more important, it's modulated at between around 35k and 40k.
Smart folks have used the audio outputs of decent quality devices (unfo Wince based, usu) with a frequency doubler or tripler. Throw wave forms at it and it spits IR out.
RE: the desires of the parent post:
- Mac OS X will certainly let Apple Script control its programs. It's almost "mom-able" to let a bluetooth (phone, say) trip macros.
- any bt or WiFi device that talks to your computer can emit events. You're job is to xlate the event into a control signal to your program(s). Eg. "Next Song" or "pause".
- Why would you allow you or someone you know to run windows?
Barring a simple PDA with consumer IR and $50 of software, there's the hackers way which is WAY overkill (but isn't that how we started? Computer controlled model railroads when most kids were happy with a transformer and $70 of train+track?)Perhaps when you and your BT phone get out of range (30' typically), the music will pause.
"Windows: The OS for the rich and stupid"
This isn't hard. It's not even rocket science.
Just computer science.
My adicon ocelot is a $150-$200 device that speaks and hears IR, X10 and can expand to A/D, DA and digital IO.
And serial.
To my BSD box (and bsd is dying, yeah... yeah...)
It's got the single worst Windows interface to program it (macros: IF event then action1, action2, action3 perhaps GOTO another thing. I borrowed a windows laptop to get it to do something before I got the Unix tools so I could use vi to edit my "programs".
X10 or IR button (or with IO hardwired button) trips of a macro that can be as fancy as you want.
Webpage emits a command to a TTY to the Ocelot serial port to make a command.
$200 PDA speaks to Webpage via WiFI, I press "movie time" and the lights dim, the TV, DVD, amp and amp to subwoofer disguised as couch turn on.
Cost?
$100-$200 (or more) for WiFi aware PDA.
$175 for Ocelot.
$300 Unix box that also runs mail for 60 people, etc, etc
--------
Profit!
I'll point out the different between being able to fix the server and having to be the one to fix the server.
We've installed, say, SAP. The company relies on it. It's software that using 5000 databases, a 14 million line code base and for some reason everyone has been given a random number of extra years on their hire date.
Fix it.
Oh, United's reservation system is wrong. It seems the "inconvience the passenger flag" is set for EVERYONE. Can you look into that? By the way, if it's not fixed by tomorrow, you and you're team are fired (and you just transferred to indianapolis and have no money to move back home).
I see that OSS often falls down on really complex and really large bits of complex software. That a lot of OSS people have never dealt with a software package that takes a year to get installed and running.
*I* try to stay away from those, but I deal with massive CRM stuff all the time. But most Unix and, dare I offer, 99.999% of /. readers don't deal with hard core change managment systems or really large software systems.
In crises with smaller systems that I've represented, we needed a couple people just for customer management while a gang tore through code to fine a the bug.
Again, it's naive to assume that OSS fills every role. (and yes, I've commercially supported OSS and brought it into places that you'd not expect it to be, LONG before linux had networking code.).
I *can* and *have* booted Linux on 32 processor systems. It worked. Mr Miller got dmesgs.
But it was the wrong answer.
Now I'm on an unusual side of the table for me. I'm furious that building PHP with LDAP and SNMP and MySQL and gettext on solaris in a PACKAGED environment requires a full moon, two virgin goats (I said stay away from her!), 'scuse me, I'm back. That most of userland in Solaris, AIX, HPUX and other proprietary Unixes dates from the 80s. I tire of solving problems that we've solved already. Well.
cd /usr/ports/lang/php4 && make install package clean
But finding a large support organization that will take my money and bust their butts when our servers crash running a huge mission critical (it dies, we go out of business, 25,000 people become unemployed, a town becomes a wasteland) database and web back end system is pretty easy to get with the big players. I've caused Sun patches.
I've also caused Linux patches. Why were people responsive to problems? Because they chose to be. That's tough for a business to count on. "OH, sorry, Alan's on holiday; Linus is moving to Oregon, David Miller's training for the olympics. The redhat folks don't really know the details of the E10k and haven't got a 48 processor one to test on..."
OSS is great where people tread regularly.
It's great where 100% of your support can be local to your organization.
But it's naive to preach that all problems can be solved by replacing your systems with OSS systems (windows being the exception).
Right, and being reasonable works - esp when you're a small company and people override processes.
But we did work fronting 5 machines on OC48s that were beating on the our program and making them buckets of money.
So is it wrong to want/expect to be paid more when the product is used more and harder and making more money?
"per unit" pricing won't work. "Oh, sorry the commerce site shut down at 2PM, you hit you're thousanth sale". Lets establish that this *is* ok:
And lets look at Support. If you were powering the commerce site for a Borders vs your neighborhood 1000 square foot book store, you'd expect to charge Borders more. I'm hoping folks don't have qualms with this.
They use it more. We can measure usage by clicks, or "sessions" or bandwidth, but then a robot gone mad on $local_place could raise their threshold.
Ideally, we'd be in conversation with them, but that doesn't scale and nobody wants to buy software whose price might change - that would be 1970's and 80's Computer Associates model. And why every mainframe shop, current and former, STILL hate CA.
Now for support...this is the same in the OSS world. If I'm supporting, say, an Apache/PHP driven site management suite...
If we have one contact and an install at (say) GM and one contact and an install at the single Soda & Pet Food City store, should we charge GM the same as SPFC for support?
Per incident isn't realistic, but "you have X incidents" packages ARE coming along.
Sigh, it's kinda moot for the product I'm thinking of. Frankly, at this point, they've priced the product out of the range of anyone smaller than Fortune-Notable numbers, which is too bad. My stock my be worth something if it was in the reach of the 95% of companies that are considered Small Businesses.
But Per CPU pricing gives us a notion of how big the install is. Human sanity intercedes when, (as happened) a site had a single 32 CPU box that was their everything box. Our product was there to aid 50 people. And on that box. And no, it wasn't worth $20k (or whatever) to them. MOST of that CPU usage was for database and other work - they just used a mainframe mentality to have 200 terminals around a warehouse, database, web server for internal use, file service for 50 office workers, etc. I spoke with them and we charged the 1-2 CPU price since that's how they were using it.
In reality, a lot of licenses aren't locked hard to a machine. I've scrambled when a new sparc mobo (and NVRAM) suddenly made Lotus die in a Very Production Environment. But then I run into people who insist on using MS Office/Photoshop/what have you, but for personal use won't pay. And they don't understand why I think this theft. Me? I send them Open Office formatted files of important documents :) Or TeX.
- I've run Linux on S/390s. DASD presented disks suck. (ok, take the 400GB Shark array that's presented as 2some GB volumes and paste 40 of them back together with VLM to get an 80G partition).
- Need big iron? No, Sybase ran ok on SPARC 2s and well on 690s.
So yeah, I'm an OSS advocate at work and push it where it's appropriate.So does PostgreSQL. But Sybase or Oracle or DB2 do some things now that PostgreSQL will do, I'm sure, in a few years. But doesn't do at this time.
But I also understand where it's not appropriate. This view that every problem can be solved with Linux and Postgres is both naive and, really, harms the credibility of people who have actual success getting Linux and BSD into data centers.
I love the view that Linux can replace all machines. There's no place for proprietary software.
Now, I'll mostly agree with Windows because too often Windows is being cobbled together and shoved into the data center (my servers need a windowing system just to boot? I have machines I've never seen or touched that I've installed from 12000 miles away and run for years.
And yeah, BSD fills lots of places in the infrastructures, but BSD and Linux didn't come up with CrayLink or NUMA. And there's something kind of nice about when your $10million company has a problem with the $100,000 server that I can make a call and have a bunch of people answer who are PAID to run around and make my problem their high priority.
But yeah, that my PDA runs Postgres and smokes the trading floor servers I used put up 10 years ago is pretty cool.
To help envision it, lets say its a firewall - the firewall has no concept of "users" really, it routes packets. (it's not a firewall, but the situation is close enough).
Now our basic question, which we reluctantly answered with per-processor licensing, was how to charge for it.
If you buy our software and your company of 20,000 people is RELYING on it you'd pay more than if your company of 50 people was RELYING on it.
We could have priced into the middle - but then companies under 2,000 people would feel (rightly) ripped off, while the GMs are getting a steal.
Charge per "user behind it"?
Charge by your corporate revenue?
"Pay what you feel is about right"?
On not so minor goal was to be able to make a living for 40 people and continue to develop a product that had, by and large, come up pretty short in the open source arena.
So what models of licensing do you WANT that will keep the vendor and the buyer in business and happy?
(and yes, I've slipped in a 4CPU license for 1-2 CPU price at a place with old, slow machines in use. We tried to do "right".)
If I need to make sure that a config file has a certain value, shell ain't the way to do it.
Most likely is "cd /var/www/conf;cvs update"
and pull down from the CVS server the entire setup I want.
Actually, I usually want to not merge, so "sup" is your friend there.
If I want to make sure a certain line is (or isn't) in a config, cfengine is your friend.
Given the chance to screw it up, someone will. Shell scripts and sed does that nicely.
-
Task: Add this printer to 200 machines. You have 5 different un*xes (and different versions of each of those around).
- We need to change the sudo file on 200 servers.
- Update
/etc/mail/access on 6 machines in 4 locations (and 3 continents). Oh, we forgot this, do it again.
- Make sure $THIS is in the sybase's crontab on all the sybase server.
- Patch all the Solaris 7 machines with this new patch cluster. It's urgent. (and we have 50 of those machines scattered around the world).
- Change the (locally stored) root password on all the machines we take care of because X just got fired, but we couldn't tell you till now).
- Rebuild the 2 HA database servers (one at a time) and make sure they have the current patches and access to the new partitions on the SAN
vi! webmin. heh.no, nfs is not used
My partner took the Solaris Advanced Certification tests (someone else was paying and what the hell). She screwed up the parts about AdminTool. Someone who'd been using Unix since the 80s. She came home raging: AdminTool!! If I ever hired a senior admin and they kicked up admin tool, I'd fire them before the windows finished opening.
I find these single machine solutions quite quaint.
No, I'm delighted to have my cfengine scripts that go through /etc/ and make sure that inetd.conf is stripped, and that rpcbind and nfs aren't running on standalone servers and that the Right Stuff is in the Right Config files and that permissions are correct.
Best part is that I can run it again anytime later to redo that (or with '-n' to just show me what's changed).
And if it uses CVS to pull down $Today's configs, then so be it.
My thought was to trigger a taser wired up under your shirt. His was bullets.
Perhaps rubber bullets. (but the taser thing would work with video games).
So you get hit, your in a big boatload of pain for a while and fall and thrash on the floor for a while. So what? You wanna "play war" little boys? Then stop pretending that's it's blood and pain free.
Ok, forget lasers. Use rocks.
This army recruitment crap of paintball/laser tag/video games is just sick. I'll take my bugs bunny and itchy and scratchy any day than the sanitized faux-violence on the TV and in these "games".
Wanna play? Join the services. If you lose and you're lucky, you still might have 3 limbs and some of your hearing.
Tomatoes, Potatoes? lets call the whole thing off.
Yes, I had problems with police imprisoning him with little recourse as they did.
Yes, Tsutomu Shimomura is a yahoo who did a lot of stupid and bad things. The greatest was probably his aweful book written with "journalist" John Markoff (I enquote that because as he was ghost writing with Shimora, he was also writing articles that were supposedly objective yet never mentioned doing a book with one of the particpants of the story).
[Shimomura was terribly impressed with his (own) computer security abilities, yet ran tools that had long been sources of security holes because it was convenient. ("I am a master of securing houses; all the world leaders come to me. So imagine my shock and outrage when I'd found that someone had lifted up my welcome mat and used the key I keep there to get in. I must hunt down this bastard and have my revenge.").]
I was appalled that national ISPs would so readily turn over logs and access to their networks and their users information to a vigilant/yahoo.
But no, I wasn't sorry that Mr Mitnick got his ass busted. He was no kiddie using youth as an excuse for poor judgement. He was a thief who rationalized stealing from people and companies by its electronic abstraction.
No, I don't think Kevin's "cool". That he is someone who would steal my personal information because the people I had to give it to are idiots about securing it doesn't make it ok to do so. And it's felony when he then uses that information to buy things. I don't want him in the room when I pull out a credit card. I don't want him in a hotel where I use a credit card.
Should the hotel be smarter? Sure. But the people who decry identity theft cannot also embrace Kevin Mitnick as one to be admired.
He's an asswipe.
--
1) cost.
2) monitor that I'm paying for (and have better of).
3) I'll pass on muttering about upgrade of MoBos that I can't do in the future.
In a large part, I struggle with people who pick up the paper and see a festival of $500 machines or $600 machines with color printers etc.
Or you can have a sort of clunky looking i^H eMac. Without the cool colors that introduced color into a lot of industrial design in the first place!
So I can by a tower with a printer and get windows (ick, theory only) for $500 and have a range of choices, or I can get an eMac for more.
here's a thought: Put it in a lucite Pizza Box (a SparcStation 2 with a new cover ;) with no monitor and the stuff stuff and drop the price $300. Built in video or... better... an AGP slot!
Make the damn sub-$600 Mac already.