There are many options for going to a college or university. In-state tuition in places like Arizona, at about $1200 per semester or so, can work out very nicely.
As I said before, I went on the 10-year plan, and I'll be completely paid off on the student loans in October.
Since getting the degree, I switched jobs for an *immediate* 22% increase in pay.
I left a job quite some time ago when they told me my salary and raises were "capped" because I didn't have a degree, despite the fact that I was doing better than any other employee at that level on a *nationwide* basis. So, I found a job with more flexible hours, went back to school, and carried 6 credits per semester at a State school until I finished out the degree.
Finishing the degree got me a raise with a signing bonus, which went into the downpayment on my house. Since the interest rate on the student loans was lower than the mortgage interest rate, it made more sense to me to carry the student loans while paying down the principal on the mortgage, thus reducing that payment.
Don't go back into your studies for the sole purpose of getting a sheepskin, though. It's far easier to get a degree in something that interests you *outside* of stuff you just need to know for work, and it looks good to potential employers that you have experience in a field with a degree in a different field. "Well-rounded" is the term they'll use.
These days, I can pretty much guarantee you that a degree of any kind will get your resume looked at much faster than those without degrees listed.
In the whole dot-bomb craze, a lot of people dropped out of high school and college, and went to work for obscene amounts of money. Now, many companies have realized that it take more than a working knowledge of whatever field is popular - it doesn't matter if you're the world's greatest genius in a particular field if you can't do the *other* parts of the job, like interacting with customers, making clear notes about what you've done for the runbook, and generally communicating with your co-workers.
I got my degree on the ten-year plan. It's not in a computer-related field, but having it means that more doors are open to me.
Re:Best Buy's management
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 1
You really think the store manager is going to know (or care) about the difference between "Indian" as a person of southeastern Asian descent vs. "Indian" as Native American?
To a yokel like that, "injun" would simply be his pronunciation of the epithet, without any additional meaning but "non-white."
Yes, I'm a bit cynical about this - locally, a Sikh gentleman who owned a gas station was shot and killed after the Sept. 11th attacks because the shooter thought he was a Muslim (because of the turban, despite the fact that local Muslims don't wear turbans - they wear the little caps that look like a yarmulke but a little taller...)
Bullets are in the 1cm range, and travel at considerably slower than orbital velocities, but don't seem to have much trouble disabling vehicles on Earth, as well as disabling the circulatory systems of various terrestrial creatures.
How'd you like a.5cm hole through your body, in one side and out the other?
So, someone might go driving by and spot the transmitted image of my mailman? Unless, of course, the ham operator neighbor's keying up again, and obliterating the signal. Or the other neighbor's using his 2.4GHz cordless phone. Or the neighbor on the other side is trying his 802.11 gateway again.
I have only one question for anyone who's actually trying this - why bother? The picture generated by an XCam is *crap,* and useless for anything but really grainy and poorly-saturated "surveillance" (and half the time it's useless for that, too!)
The CMOS module that the XCam uses is crap. The optics are plastic (or really crappy glass), and generate some really funky chromatic distortion, so I replaced the module with a Panasonic CCD module. Much better picture, but you still have to deal with the really nasty interference.
Not exactly. The use of a mobile scanner is limited to amateur and professional radio operators in some areas of the U.S., because the legislators in those areas fear that criminals could use them to snoop on police frequencies during the commission of the crime. Regular desktop radio scanners, I'm not sure.
Big hint to any legislators that might read this (yeah, right!): if they're planning on robbing a bank, and they want to listen to the police frequencies while they do it, the fact that it's illegal in that locale is not going to stop them, or even intimidate them.
In their later iterations, they *did* cross-post. They specifically cross-posted to regional newsgroups from global newsgroups, so that their messages would get propagated to other servers and also pollute the regional newsgroups.
I was a user on Internet Direct at the time. It was the deciding factor in moving off of their server, as most of the internet blackholed them for some time after that...
I don't recall that the smoothwall runs any web services, does it?
Your rule #1 of having the webserver and CGIs run as a non-root user should be backed up with a rule #0 of not running a firewall *on* the webserver...
No, I don't "hang out" with my co-workers. We get together on Sunday mornings out at the local shooting range. Between the four or five of us that go, we usually have around eight different calibers of weapon:
Unlike going out and drinking, we can blow off a LOT of stress at the range.
Of course, the Employee Handbook says we can't bring the weapons to work, so we can't really go to the range before or after - it needs to be a day when none of us are working.
Speaking as someone who had SprintBBD/SpeedChoice for over two years:
1) SprintBBD's AUP specifically prohibits running servers on their connection.
2) The uplink "cap" isn't 30k. It's more like 200k/sec on a good day.
3) SprintBBD spent a lot of time "scanning" their subnets for open ports on 12345, 31337, and 27374. Too bad they didn't actually *do* anything but send snail-mail letters to customers with open ports - I got one because I was running FakeBO on mine...
I agree - as long as people are installing Win2K server without understanding that it leaves port 80 open BY DEFAULT, this kind of thing is going to continue.
Of course, most of the commercial Linux distros do exactly the same thing, leaving boatloads of ports open to exploit.
My favorite was the blurb on CNet telling the world that the "random seed" was a piece of code that would enable a variant of the worm to attack whitehouse.gov even if the IP address changed...
If CNet can't get it right (since they supposedly cater to the digiliterati), how can you expect a "regular" "news" "service" to get it right?
Re:Make a decision, folks
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 1
You stated that this "is not simply a war on censorship."
It isn't a war about censorship, and doesn't involve censorship of any kind.
I run a mail server. I choose not to allow others to use my mail server to relay *anything* that didn't originate with one of my users.
This is not censorship, any more that it would be censorship for a local newspaper to refuse to allow you to use their presses and paper for free.
It also isn't censorship when a municipality refuses to allow "sound trucks" to roll through their neighborhoods, especially at odd hours of the day.
It isn't censorship to refuse to allow someone to nail an advertisement to your front door, or put a bumper sticker on your car.
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you can force other people to pass your message along.
I built my first homemade hot-air balloon after reading a story about the Mad Scientists' Club. One light plastic dry cleaning bag and a tea candle, some Scotch tape, two pieces of balsa wood and off it went.
Of course, the small fire that resulted when the wind gusted and blew the bag over onto the candle wasn't so much fun, but at least the thing *flew*.
Looked pretty bizarre from the ground, too - the candlelight gave some pretty weird reflections from the inside of the bag, and the whole thing sort of glowed.
Those were the days. I wonder how long it'll be before someone else duplicates that, starts another fire, and sues the people who're republishing the books?
The infamous "flowers.com" case from Texas provides clear precedent for damages resulting from the use of someone else's e-mail address (or domain.)
Here's a good URL to print out and hand to your lawyer:
http://www.isoc.org/whatsnew/parkerjudgement.htm l
Other commentary from ZDNet:
http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/opinion/1201/01isigh. ht ml
"The judgment is interesting not just for the monetary damages (which seem small to me), but for the reasoning used by the judge: "The defendant's unauthorized use of that address constitutes a common-law nuisance and trespass," wrote Travis County District Judge Suzanne Covington. She also found that the reputation of flowers.com would be permanently damaged if "the hated practice" wasn't stopped immediately."
It's been my experience that few webhosting providers will take any responsibility or initiative in protecting their customers. Managed hosting, however, seems to imply that the "manager" would be responsible for maintaining a secure server. Kind of like a Mailboxes, Etc. remaining responsible for theft of mail from a rented drop box...
The answer I have won't help if you're already stuck in a six-month contract - the contract needs to spell out who is responsible for applying patches, and what the timeline for applying those patches should be, among other things (turnaround time for a request to add an account to a server would be another sticky point for "managed hosting.")
...shown in their "artist's concept" that make me wonder:
1) The "slot" in the car looks like it would make the chassis of the vehicle *really* weak.
2) The same "slot" forces a complete redesign of any current vehicle's chassis *and* drivetrain. Driveshaft? Cross-body bracing? Hello? Even the current "hybrid" and "alternative fuel" vehicles use the same chassis designs that have been in use for the last fifty years or so. We all know how much the automakers *love* to innovate with their main structural details - NOT!
These two points alone make me think that the company's going to have a *lot* of convincing to do in Detroit and Japan before any auto manufacturer even *considers* building to this spec.
I was in a class at Camelback High School in Phoenix, Arizona, titled "Science Seminar."
For one class period per day, we did essentially whatever we wanted to do, but we had to report on it once per week.
I submitted a paper to the SSIP (Student Space Involvement Program) on the design and construction of a magnetohydrodynamic generator for use in low Earth orbit. For that, I won a trip to Ames AFB, Palo Alto, CA.
Fifteen years ago today, I was sitting in a classroom with six or seven other people, all of whom were also involved in the program.
We watched the Shuttle go up, and saw it explode. And with it, all of our hopes for our *own* projects went up in smoke.
When I was *little*, I wanted to be an astronaut. As I got older, I learned that being asthmatic, flat-footed, and having 20/800 vision are all red flags against me - so I did what I thought would be the "next best," and tried to have one of my own experiments sent up. Obviously, that's not going to happen now - the space that used to be set aside for student projects has been taken over by commercial ventures.
The Shuttle program still isn't anywhere near what it used to be.
I have hopes for the ISS, or Freedom, or whatever they're calling the space station this week, but it's not the same.
There's very little about the SprintBBD TOS that's different from any other TOS you'll find.
What *is* different about SprintBBD is that they won't provide you with e-mail or news access. For that, you're required to depend on their "partner," Earthlink.
Earthlink spams their own users. Their "status" webpage *always* indicates "online and operational" no matter what the server status really is (and when you can telnet to port 25 on the mailserver and get "connection refused," that's a fairly good indication that the mailserver is *down*.) Their news servers have poor retention, abysmal speed, and regularly "belch" old messages that are marked as "new."
Should you call Earthlink's tech support personnel, prepare to be walked through a script that includes the reinstall of Windows (even if you didn't have it installed in the first place) and Earthlink's own proprietary package (even if you didn't have *it* installed, either.)
There are more reasons to avoid SprintBBD than their TOS - like the fact that they're partnered with a company populated by people who make AOL users look *bright*.
I haven't been able to find any information about whether the VisorPhone is simply a cellphone with a PDA, or whether the Visor can use the VisorPhone for wireless communication.
Has anyone else managed to get any information about it? Sales personnel at Handspring don't seem to have that information available...
There seems to be some confusion in all of the responses to the article.
Is the author referring to "wireless" as "companion to cellular/PCS/digital phone service?" Or is the author referring to "wireless" as "high-speed or broadband service delivered without wires?"
I've been a user of SpeedChoice (now Sprint Broadband) for about a year and a half. Sure, the MMDS connection has its problems compared to DSL or cable, but it has one *distinct* advantage: I don't have to deal with US West (now Qwest) or Cox Communications, two of the least customer-friendly corporations in the world, staffed with the most incredibly inept personnel.
US West (now Qwest) was the deciding factor in my realization that unions exist to insure that stupid people have jobs, too.
In going with a wireless service, I don't have to deal with the fact that US West went *decades* without upgrading their physical plant (I'm in Arizona) and has yet to discover that wrapping copper in something called "insulation" will prevent increased line noise during a rainstorm.
In addition, nobody offers DSL or cable in my current location, and in all probability will *not* offer such for at least another two years.
As such, Sprint's Broadband Wireless service is *perfect* for me.
Noise-cancelling headphones, and a *lot* of that wonderful "egg-crate" anechoic foam.
Problem solved.
And the foam could be shipped up as packing material for other equipment, saving space and mass.
Just make sure that the foam won't off-gas as time goes on - chemical pollution of the life-support system is a real issue, and certain cements, glues, plastics, and other synthetics really put out a *lot* of gaseous pollution as they age.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many options for going to a college or university. In-state tuition in places like Arizona, at about $1200 per semester or so, can work out very nicely.
As I said before, I went on the 10-year plan, and I'll be completely paid off on the student loans in October.
Since getting the degree, I switched jobs for an *immediate* 22% increase in pay.
I left a job quite some time ago when they told me my salary and raises were "capped" because I didn't have a degree, despite the fact that I was doing better than any other employee at that level on a *nationwide* basis. So, I found a job with more flexible hours, went back to school, and carried 6 credits per semester at a State school until I finished out the degree.
Finishing the degree got me a raise with a signing bonus, which went into the downpayment on my house. Since the interest rate on the student loans was lower than the mortgage interest rate, it made more sense to me to carry the student loans while paying down the principal on the mortgage, thus reducing that payment.
Don't go back into your studies for the sole purpose of getting a sheepskin, though. It's far easier to get a degree in something that interests you *outside* of stuff you just need to know for work, and it looks good to potential employers that you have experience in a field with a degree in a different field. "Well-rounded" is the term they'll use.
Specialization is for insects.
These days, I can pretty much guarantee you that a degree of any kind will get your resume looked at much faster than those without degrees listed.
In the whole dot-bomb craze, a lot of people dropped out of high school and college, and went to work for obscene amounts of money. Now, many companies have realized that it take more than a working knowledge of whatever field is popular - it doesn't matter if you're the world's greatest genius in a particular field if you can't do the *other* parts of the job, like interacting with customers, making clear notes about what you've done for the runbook, and generally communicating with your co-workers.
I got my degree on the ten-year plan. It's not in a computer-related field, but having it means that more doors are open to me.
You mean, like SPEWS? http://www.spews.org
I am not SPEWS.
You really think the store manager is going to know (or care) about the difference between "Indian" as a person of southeastern Asian descent vs. "Indian" as Native American?
To a yokel like that, "injun" would simply be his pronunciation of the epithet, without any additional meaning but "non-white."
Yes, I'm a bit cynical about this - locally, a Sikh gentleman who owned a gas station was shot and killed after the Sept. 11th attacks because the shooter thought he was a Muslim (because of the turban, despite the fact that local Muslims don't wear turbans - they wear the little caps that look like a yarmulke but a little taller...)
Bullets are in the 1cm range, and travel at considerably slower than orbital velocities, but don't seem to have much trouble disabling vehicles on Earth, as well as disabling the circulatory systems of various terrestrial creatures.
.5cm hole through your body, in one side and out the other?
How'd you like a
With any luck, it'd be a clean hole.
...who thinks The Rock looks like Rob Schneider (of SNL fame, as well as Judge Dredd) on steroids?
Especially with the raised-eyebrow face?
I can just picture him saying something like, "Of course I can defeat you, Mr. 'Ah em de Law!'" to Stallone's Judge Dredd.
So, someone might go driving by and spot the transmitted image of my mailman? Unless, of course, the ham operator neighbor's keying up again, and obliterating the signal. Or the other neighbor's using his 2.4GHz cordless phone. Or the neighbor on the other side is trying his 802.11 gateway again.
I have only one question for anyone who's actually trying this - why bother? The picture generated by an XCam is *crap,* and useless for anything but really grainy and poorly-saturated "surveillance" (and half the time it's useless for that, too!)
The CMOS module that the XCam uses is crap. The optics are plastic (or really crappy glass), and generate some really funky chromatic distortion, so I replaced the module with a Panasonic CCD module. Much better picture, but you still have to deal with the really nasty interference.
Not exactly. The use of a mobile scanner is limited to amateur and professional radio operators in some areas of the U.S., because the legislators in those areas fear that criminals could use them to snoop on police frequencies during the commission of the crime. Regular desktop radio scanners, I'm not sure.
Big hint to any legislators that might read this (yeah, right!): if they're planning on robbing a bank, and they want to listen to the police frequencies while they do it, the fact that it's illegal in that locale is not going to stop them, or even intimidate them.
In their later iterations, they *did* cross-post. They specifically cross-posted to regional newsgroups from global newsgroups, so that their messages would get propagated to other servers and also pollute the regional newsgroups.
I was a user on Internet Direct at the time. It was the deciding factor in moving off of their server, as most of the internet blackholed them for some time after that...
I don't recall that the smoothwall runs any web services, does it?
Your rule #1 of having the webserver and CGIs run as a non-root user should be backed up with a rule #0 of not running a firewall *on* the webserver...
No, I don't "hang out" with my co-workers. We get together on Sunday mornings out at the local shooting range. Between the four or five of us that go, we usually have around eight different calibers of weapon:
.45, .40 S&W, 12 gauge, 20 gauge, .308 rifle, and .22LR rifle and handgun.
.270 rifle, 9mm handgun,
Unlike going out and drinking, we can blow off a LOT of stress at the range.
Of course, the Employee Handbook says we can't bring the weapons to work, so we can't really go to the range before or after - it needs to be a day when none of us are working.
Speaking as someone who had SprintBBD/SpeedChoice for over two years: 1) SprintBBD's AUP specifically prohibits running servers on their connection. 2) The uplink "cap" isn't 30k. It's more like 200k/sec on a good day. 3) SprintBBD spent a lot of time "scanning" their subnets for open ports on 12345, 31337, and 27374. Too bad they didn't actually *do* anything but send snail-mail letters to customers with open ports - I got one because I was running FakeBO on mine... I agree - as long as people are installing Win2K server without understanding that it leaves port 80 open BY DEFAULT, this kind of thing is going to continue. Of course, most of the commercial Linux distros do exactly the same thing, leaving boatloads of ports open to exploit.
My favorite was the blurb on CNet telling the world that the "random seed" was a piece of code that would enable a variant of the worm to attack whitehouse.gov even if the IP address changed... If CNet can't get it right (since they supposedly cater to the digiliterati), how can you expect a "regular" "news" "service" to get it right?
You stated that this "is not simply a war on censorship."
It isn't a war about censorship, and doesn't involve censorship of any kind.
I run a mail server. I choose not to allow others to use my mail server to relay *anything* that didn't originate with one of my users.
This is not censorship, any more that it would be censorship for a local newspaper to refuse to allow you to use their presses and paper for free.
It also isn't censorship when a municipality refuses to allow "sound trucks" to roll through their neighborhoods, especially at odd hours of the day.
It isn't censorship to refuse to allow someone to nail an advertisement to your front door, or put a bumper sticker on your car.
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you can force other people to pass your message along.
I built my first homemade hot-air balloon after reading a story about the Mad Scientists' Club. One light plastic dry cleaning bag and a tea candle, some Scotch tape, two pieces of balsa wood and off it went.
Of course, the small fire that resulted when the wind gusted and blew the bag over onto the candle wasn't so much fun, but at least the thing *flew*.
Looked pretty bizarre from the ground, too - the candlelight gave some pretty weird reflections from the inside of the bag, and the whole thing sort of glowed.
Those were the days. I wonder how long it'll be before someone else duplicates that, starts another fire, and sues the people who're republishing the books?
The infamous "flowers.com" case from Texas provides clear precedent for damages resulting from the use of someone else's e-mail address (or domain.)
m l
. ht ml
Here's a good URL to print out and hand to your lawyer:
http://www.isoc.org/whatsnew/parkerjudgement.ht
Other commentary from ZDNet:
http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/opinion/1201/01isigh
"The judgment is interesting not just for the monetary damages (which seem small to me), but for the reasoning used by the judge: "The defendant's unauthorized use of that address constitutes a common-law nuisance and trespass," wrote Travis County District Judge Suzanne Covington. She also found that the reputation of flowers.com would be permanently damaged if "the hated practice" wasn't stopped immediately."
It's been my experience that few webhosting providers will take any responsibility or initiative in protecting their customers. Managed hosting, however, seems to imply that the "manager" would be responsible for maintaining a secure server. Kind of like a Mailboxes, Etc. remaining responsible for theft of mail from a rented drop box...
The answer I have won't help if you're already stuck in a six-month contract - the contract needs to spell out who is responsible for applying patches, and what the timeline for applying those patches should be, among other things (turnaround time for a request to add an account to a server would be another sticky point for "managed hosting.")
If it's just a co-located box, you're SOL.
...shown in their "artist's concept" that make me wonder:
1) The "slot" in the car looks like it would make the chassis of the vehicle *really* weak.
2) The same "slot" forces a complete redesign of any current vehicle's chassis *and* drivetrain. Driveshaft? Cross-body bracing? Hello? Even the current "hybrid" and "alternative fuel" vehicles use the same chassis designs that have been in use for the last fifty years or so. We all know how much the automakers *love* to innovate with their main structural details - NOT!
These two points alone make me think that the company's going to have a *lot* of convincing to do in Detroit and Japan before any auto manufacturer even *considers* building to this spec.
It wasn't routine for me.
I was in a class at Camelback High School in Phoenix, Arizona, titled "Science Seminar."
For one class period per day, we did essentially whatever we wanted to do, but we had to report on it once per week.
I submitted a paper to the SSIP (Student Space Involvement Program) on the design and construction of a magnetohydrodynamic generator for use in low Earth orbit. For that, I won a trip to Ames AFB, Palo Alto, CA.
Fifteen years ago today, I was sitting in a classroom with six or seven other people, all of whom were also involved in the program.
We watched the Shuttle go up, and saw it explode. And with it, all of our hopes for our *own* projects went up in smoke.
When I was *little*, I wanted to be an astronaut. As I got older, I learned that being asthmatic, flat-footed, and having 20/800 vision are all red flags against me - so I did what I thought would be the "next best," and tried to have one of my own experiments sent up. Obviously, that's not going to happen now - the space that used to be set aside for student projects has been taken over by commercial ventures.
The Shuttle program still isn't anywhere near what it used to be.
I have hopes for the ISS, or Freedom, or whatever they're calling the space station this week, but it's not the same.
There's very little about the SprintBBD TOS that's different from any other TOS you'll find.
What *is* different about SprintBBD is that they won't provide you with e-mail or news access. For that, you're required to depend on their "partner," Earthlink.
Earthlink spams their own users. Their "status" webpage *always* indicates "online and operational" no matter what the server status really is (and when you can telnet to port 25 on the mailserver and get "connection refused," that's a fairly good indication that the mailserver is *down*.) Their news servers have poor retention, abysmal speed, and regularly "belch" old messages that are marked as "new."
Should you call Earthlink's tech support personnel, prepare to be walked through a script that includes the reinstall of Windows (even if you didn't have it installed in the first place) and Earthlink's own proprietary package (even if you didn't have *it* installed, either.)
There are more reasons to avoid SprintBBD than their TOS - like the fact that they're partnered with a company populated by people who make AOL users look *bright*.
That *is* odd. If it were GSM-data compliant, it would be immensely more useful to me than if it emulates an analog modem.
I haven't been able to find any information about whether the VisorPhone is simply a cellphone with a PDA, or whether the Visor can use the VisorPhone for wireless communication.
Has anyone else managed to get any information about it? Sales personnel at Handspring don't seem to have that information available...
The point that Nace has missed entirely is that "spam" isn't a term that specifies the *content* of a message.
"Spam" denotes *any* e-mail sent blindly to people who didn't request it.
Whether it's penny stocks, pornography, or "SyberSchool" advertising - if I didn't ask for it, it's spam.
There seems to be some confusion in all of the responses to the article.
Is the author referring to "wireless" as "companion to cellular/PCS/digital phone service?" Or is the author referring to "wireless" as "high-speed or broadband service delivered without wires?"
I've been a user of SpeedChoice (now Sprint Broadband) for about a year and a half. Sure, the MMDS connection has its problems compared to DSL or cable, but it has one *distinct* advantage: I don't have to deal with US West (now Qwest) or Cox Communications, two of the least customer-friendly corporations in the world, staffed with the most incredibly inept personnel.
US West (now Qwest) was the deciding factor in my realization that unions exist to insure that stupid people have jobs, too.
In going with a wireless service, I don't have to deal with the fact that US West went *decades* without upgrading their physical plant (I'm in Arizona) and has yet to discover that wrapping copper in something called "insulation" will prevent increased line noise during a rainstorm.
In addition, nobody offers DSL or cable in my current location, and in all probability will *not* offer such for at least another two years.
As such, Sprint's Broadband Wireless service is *perfect* for me.
Noise-cancelling headphones, and a *lot* of that wonderful "egg-crate" anechoic foam.
Problem solved.
And the foam could be shipped up as packing material for other equipment, saving space and mass.
Just make sure that the foam won't off-gas as time goes on - chemical pollution of the life-support system is a real issue, and certain cements, glues, plastics, and other synthetics really put out a *lot* of gaseous pollution as they age.