Rewind to 1990. Install Windows 3.0 on your Banyan VINES file server. Then prepare a boot floppy with DOS, the Banyan drivers and nothing else. Remove the hard drive from a 386SX with 4MB RAM, boot said machine with the floppy and start Windows from the file server.
In this configuration, Windows will happily page to the floppy, that being the only local storage available.:-)
If experience is any indication at the sites I've worked at recently, IT does very little orientation (and then gets to pay for it later).
Avoid anything computerized. New users may not be able to view wikis or movies, etc. especially if they don't yet have an account or have not been told how to access it.
I use a plain paper employee guide which describes everything and provides sufficient information to use all services (email, Unix, Windows, voice mail). I print a copy and give it to new hires. (Alternatively, if the new hire has a personal email address that they already have access to and it is clear that they know how to use it, as evidenced by receipt of email from that address, then I can email the document to them.) If you dare, the guide should include simple troubleshooting procedures/common problems so that the new hires can determine that perhaps the reason that something doesn't work is that the account hasn't been created yet and time will solve the problem.
Your goal is to be sufficiently complete that in the normal case, a new hire never has to call the helpdesk. The amount of time you spend fielding help calls for common questions will exceed any time spent training, esp. if no training is required because all procedures are documented in the employee guide.
Re:Still not too bad
on
Crypto Snake Oil
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The real reason? I couldn't use it very well even if I wanted to pay.
Given how US airlines pack you in like sardines, I can't open up my notebook larger than 60 degrees. That's not enough to see the display properly. The last thing I'm gonna do in this configuration is connect to the Internet.
AlarmForce is a security company doing business in Canada with just such a setup: if the system detects a break-in, then the burglar is put on intercom with the monitoring station. If he can't convince the folks at monitoring that he should be there, then they just wait for the cops to come.
"X" alone is not a word. Had you attempted "AX", "EX", "XI", "OX" or "XU" through the center square then the play would have been acceptable, but I have to summon the word judge for "X" alone.
I've had a problem with Vonage, and I don't even subscribe!
A few weeks ago Vonage had a promotion in the U.S. where select individuals received a solicitation in the mail to sign up with Vonage, and giving them a special 1-800 number to do so.
Only one problem: it wasn't Vonage's 1-800 number.... It was mine.
I think my business received over 1000 calls. At some times, all three incoming lines were in use. Since my business sells IC design consulting and training services, callers were confused with our call routing tree. But, the director of sales, director of training, and the admin clerk got their share of irate callers, many of whom tried to call multiple times.
And Vonage? Their legal department is pretty hard to get hold of. We tried. The president of the company finally got through to them, only to be told that nothing could be done. Which is likely true - it would have been too expensive to due.
Anyway, the calls have abated now and all is well again. But I'll never subscribe to Vonage.
Are there any products on the market that can identify a DRAM vendor by using the data scramble patterns? Such a tool might be useful to flush out crappy DRAM.
DRAM is just a bunch of capacitors on a chip. When the chip is powered down for a while, the voltage on the caps leaks towards ground. When the DRAM is powered up, all caps are at ground. Discharge to this state can be accelerated by exposing the die to light.
Here's where it gets interesting: just because a cap is at ground on the die does not mean that you will read a zero out of the chip. With modern folded bitline architectures, half of the cells will read out as zero, and the other half as one. The pattern of 1/0 forms a definite pattern, called the "data scramble" which is a function of the chip architecture, and which will differ from vendor to vendor. Provided that few cells have been overwritten by the PC bootup, you can recover the scramble pattern and possibly identify the vendor.
Remember your old Commodore 64? Power it up, cold, and POKE 53265,59. That will slam the video chip into graphics mode. See the pattern? It's not random. That's the data scramble.
Two DRAM chips having different data scrambles are definitely not the same design. The converse is not true: two DRAM chips having identical data scrambles might be made by the same vendor, but there is a slight chance that two different vendors just happened on the same pattern. I don't know how much variation there is in scramble patterns, but this might be a useful way to trace chips to vendors.
The more technical explanation for scramble patterns: the sense amplifiers in a DRAM chip are essentially differential. The inputs to the sense amp are two bitlines. Each bitline is connected to a different physical column in the memory array. Between cycles, the bitlines are pre-charged to VDD/2. When a row of DRAM is read, one bitline is connected to the cell capacitor and receives an offset charge while the other bitline is held at the reference. The sense amp then "pulls apart" the bitlines, driving the higher one to VDD and the lower one to ground. Depending on which bitline a zero-charged capacitor is connected to, the sense amp can swing one way or the other. The exact connection depends highly on the cell geometry and fabrication process.
Past the sense amp, more fun happens. DRAMs are so dense that the signal from the sense amp requires one or two more levels of amplification before being suitable to drive to pins. To diminish crosstalk effects, the data buses are "twisted" like twisted-pair, which creates further address-dependent inversions in the pattern.
The combination of cell geometry and data bus twist create a vendor-unique pattern. It's unlikely that two vendors with two different designs will happen on the same scramble pattern.
We are told that the ceramic material has an index of refraction of 2.08 and is more durable than other glasses.
Being highly myopic, I am interested in ophthalmic applications of new materials. Right now, I am wearing a Nikon 1.74 index plastic lens, which is quite thin for its power.
The highest-index material that I am aware of currently being marketed for eyeglass use is the Zeiss Lantal 1.9 index glass. However, this material is quite shatter-prone, having only 1mm center thickness. I am told that one can poke a finger through a Lantal lens.
In addition to refractive power, for eyeglass use one must consider other optical properties, in particular the Abbe value. The Abbe value characterizes the chromatic aberration of a lens. The lower the Abbe number, the worse color fringing will be; some eyeglass wearers cannot tolerate high-index lenses because they typically have lower Abbe values than plain plastic.
Interestingly, Abbe is potentially irrevelant in a digital camera, because any chromatic aberration can be digitally removed. Effectively, you treat the R/G/B images from the sensor as three independent images and size them individually to compensate for the aberration. This cannot easily be done with a film camera, and is not possible at all with eyeglasses.
QAT, QAID, QOPH, QINDAR QINTAR, QANAT, SHEQEL, QWERTY, SUQ, UMIAQ. These are all nouns, and with the exception of SHEQEL, all take an S at the back. The plural of SHEQEL is SHEQALIM. Also, QINDAR takes an alternate plural QINDARKA.
The real problem is that there are no two letter words containing Q or Z (yet). The same can be said for C and V.
The foregoing applies to the Official Club and Tournament Word List used in North America. In most of the rest of the world, clubs and tournaments use the union of the North American list and the Official Scrabble Words used in Britain. For those locales, you are permitted to play many more words than I have listed here.
The North American list is available to members of the National Scrabble Association; an expurgated version can be purchased at your local bookstore in the form of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD).
With the next release of the OSPD, QI and ZA are expected to be allowed, making the Z and Q much easier to play.
Yes, you get a 50 point bonus for using all seven.
In competitive Scrabble circles, this is called a "bingo" in North America, and a "bonus" in the U.K.
The highest scores arise by playing all seven tiles through another tile such that two triple word score squares are covered simultaneously. You get the tile values, multiplied by 9, plus 50. You can easily score 149 or more points for a single word this way.
Pay attention: for U.S. programming, there is typically a 1/2 second transition period between the show and the commercials, where the screen is black and the audio silent.
My VCR uses this indication to detect, mark and skip commercials. Look for the feature "Commercial>>Advance". After recording a show, it rewinds the tape and scans the show looking for these blank intervals. When it finds one, it rewinds the tape and marks the spot. Upon playback, the VCR fast-forwards between the marks.
Being a mechanical system, it is not 100% accurate, but it's pretty darn good. The blank intervals are typically not seen during scene changes (those are shorter) but I have seen a false-trigger where the picture is dark and quiet at the same time.
During the municipal election in Ottawa, I got a call from Alex Cullen, a candidate for council. Well, I got an ADAD; couldn't even tell him off (maybe I could have if I waited until the end of the spiel, but...) OK, I was going to vote for Blatherwick anyway.
The day before election day, I got an ADAD call from Blatherwick. Oh well, just gotta hold my nose and vote.
A few months ago I took a guess as to what the misappropriated IP was, and the only thing I could come up with is errno.h, signal.h and syscall.h.
Linux was/is a derivative of Minix. There is no real Minix code left in Linux, but back in the 0.9x days, Linux was still evolving. You can still download Minix from here.
Now, here's the key point: although the NAMES of the various system calls, IOCTLs, error numbers and signals are part of the POSIX standard, their numeric assignments are not. The implementor is left to define them. Not all implementations define these the same way - take a look at the Linux/FreeBSD/SYSV emulation code in NetBSD to see the kinds of translations that need to be done to provide cross-platform compatibility.
Now compare the Minix include files with those of Linux and FreeBSD. You will notice very much the same error code and signal numbers. The Linux code dates from 1991 and is pre-ATT/BSDI settlement. It's likely that Tannenbaum is also in violation of AT&T's IP, and Linux has just inherited it. Of course, there's no money in SCO suing Tannenbaum.
Does this damage SCO? Not really. Is it worth US$699/seat? Definitely not. Can SCO collect damages? Probably, knowing the U.S. legal system.
Long ago I ran OpenBSD with IPfilter and NAT on a 486 box as my firewall.
I now run a LinkSys BEFSR411. Not as secure - it cannot do both SPI and redirect, and it does not do VPN.
Why the switch? I wanted to get away from an old PC with moving parts that could fail, and I wanted the four-port 10/100 switch, which finally gave me the ability to run 100 Mbps between the computers that supported it.
Recent issues with business clients have brought security back to mind, and after looking at the popular canned products (LinkSys/NetGear, etc.) I conclude that the old roll-your-own approach OF TEN YEARS AGO is more secure.
I want a roll-your-own solution (possibly SmoothWall, possibly something else) that runs on the equivalent of LinkSys hardware:
- No moving parts. Preferably not even a fan. - Flash memory for filesystem. - Multiple 10/100 ports, preferably independently controllable so you can set up a DMZ, or different rules for different machines.
Does such a beast exist, in a relatively user-friendly form and without being more expensive than the old desktop that would otherwise be used?
You know, maybe if they put up a simple HTML page to introduce you to the service instead of streaming video using Flash 6, the site would not be so heavily loaded...
Kinda reminds me of the Ontario Electricity Market Operator www.theimo.com. During the post-blackout period, they posted the current Ontario demand hourly. It was useful to check their site to determine if rolling blackouts were required. One problem: they ship you a 100KB background bitmap which for some reason wasn't cached by MSIE. During peak use, the server failed to keep up with the load. I wonder what they could have done had they simply dropped the bitmap for that week...
Citrix is traditionally known for connecting X to Windows desktops, but they make a product that compresses X11-to-X11 as well.
The good news? It kicks butt. You can feel a lag, but it works far better than anything else I've tried in the speed department. In particular, Acrobat reader renders VERY quickly, and that program is a pig with bitmaps.
The bad news? It kicks butt by compressing the event stream... in a lossy manner. I have seen all sorts of minor glitches, such as menus opening up underneath their parent windows. But some programs are unusable - the Sun Java machine is an example - certain dialogs require a triple-click to select something because somehow Citrix consumes the other clicks.
The bottom line? If you want a solution for the office environment, then this is worth looking into. (Not free, however.) When evaluating, check ALL of your apps to see how bad their lossy event handling will bite you.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, with gcc you _can_ access DCR on a PowerPC from C.
:-)
It's something like:
#define mtdcr(r,v) asm("mtdcr %0,%1" : "r", "v")
(I can't remember the exact syntax, but I'm doing this at work. It's funny putting things like isync in your C code
Windows can do the funnniest things...
:-)
Rewind to 1990. Install Windows 3.0 on your Banyan VINES file server. Then prepare a boot floppy with DOS, the Banyan drivers and nothing else. Remove the hard drive from a 386SX with 4MB RAM, boot said machine with the floppy and start Windows from the file server.
In this configuration, Windows will happily page to the floppy, that being the only local storage available.
If experience is any indication at the sites I've worked at recently, IT does very little orientation (and then gets to pay for it later).
Avoid anything computerized. New users may not be able to view wikis or movies, etc. especially if they don't yet have an account or have not been told how to access it.
I use a plain paper employee guide which describes everything and provides sufficient information to use all services (email, Unix, Windows, voice mail). I print a copy and give it to new hires. (Alternatively, if the new hire has a personal email address that they already have access to and it is clear that they know how to use it, as evidenced by receipt of email from that address, then I can email the document to them.) If you dare, the guide should include simple troubleshooting procedures/common problems so that the new hires can determine that perhaps the reason that something doesn't work is that the account hasn't been created yet and time will solve the problem.
Your goal is to be sufficiently complete that in the normal case, a new hire never has to call the helpdesk. The amount of time you spend fielding help calls for common questions will exceed any time spent training, esp. if no training is required because all procedures are documented in the employee guide.
Room A.
And I'll bring my own lock.
The real reason? I couldn't use it very well even if I wanted to pay.
Given how US airlines pack you in like sardines, I can't open up my notebook larger than 60 degrees. That's not enough to see the display properly. The last thing I'm gonna do in this configuration is connect to the Internet.
Already done.
AlarmForce is a security company doing business in Canada with just such a setup: if the system detects a break-in, then the burglar is put on intercom with the monitoring station. If he can't convince the folks at monitoring that he should be there, then they just wait for the cops to come.
Challenge!
"X" alone is not a word. Had you attempted "AX", "EX", "XI", "OX" or "XU" through the center square then the play would have been acceptable, but I have to summon the word judge for "X" alone.
I've had a problem with Vonage, and I don't even subscribe!
A few weeks ago Vonage had a promotion in the U.S. where select individuals received a solicitation in the mail to sign up with Vonage, and giving them a special 1-800 number to do so.
Only one problem: it wasn't Vonage's 1-800 number.... It was mine.
I think my business received over 1000 calls. At some times, all three incoming lines were in use. Since my business sells IC design consulting and training services, callers were confused with our call routing tree. But, the director of sales, director of training, and the admin clerk got their share of irate callers, many of whom tried to call multiple times.
And Vonage? Their legal department is pretty hard to get hold of. We tried. The president of the company finally got through to them, only to be told that nothing could be done. Which is likely true - it would have been too expensive to due.
Anyway, the calls have abated now and all is well again. But I'll never subscribe to Vonage.
It's easy.
First, learn to play bridge. Well.
Second, enter an open event at one of the three North American Bridge Championships.
Chances are good that you'll sit down and play a few boards against the Great One Himself.
Are there any products on the market that can identify a DRAM vendor by using the data scramble patterns? Such a tool might be useful to flush out crappy DRAM.
DRAM is just a bunch of capacitors on a chip. When the chip is powered down for a while, the voltage on the caps leaks towards ground. When the DRAM is powered up, all caps are at ground. Discharge to this state can be accelerated by exposing the die to light.
Here's where it gets interesting: just because a cap is at ground on the die does not mean that you will read a zero out of the chip. With modern folded bitline architectures, half of the cells will read out as zero, and the other half as one. The pattern of 1/0 forms a definite pattern, called the "data scramble" which is a function of the chip architecture, and which will differ from vendor to vendor. Provided that few cells have been overwritten by the PC bootup, you can recover the scramble pattern and possibly identify the vendor.
Remember your old Commodore 64? Power it up, cold, and POKE 53265,59. That will slam the video chip into graphics mode. See the pattern? It's not random. That's the data scramble.
Two DRAM chips having different data scrambles are definitely not the same design. The converse is not true: two DRAM chips having identical data scrambles might be made by the same vendor, but there is a slight chance that two different vendors just happened on the same pattern. I don't know how much variation there is in scramble patterns, but this might be a useful way to trace chips to vendors.
The more technical explanation for scramble patterns: the sense amplifiers in a DRAM chip are essentially differential. The inputs to the sense amp are two bitlines. Each bitline is connected to a different physical column in the memory array. Between cycles, the bitlines are pre-charged to VDD/2. When a row of DRAM is read, one bitline is connected to the cell capacitor and receives an offset charge while the other bitline is held at the reference. The sense amp then "pulls apart" the bitlines, driving the higher one to VDD and the lower one to ground. Depending on which bitline a zero-charged capacitor is connected to, the sense amp can swing one way or the other. The exact connection depends highly on the cell geometry and fabrication process.
Past the sense amp, more fun happens. DRAMs are so dense that the signal from the sense amp requires one or two more levels of amplification before being suitable to drive to pins. To diminish crosstalk effects, the data buses are "twisted" like twisted-pair, which creates further address-dependent inversions in the pattern.
The combination of cell geometry and data bus twist create a vendor-unique pattern. It's unlikely that two vendors with two different designs will happen on the same scramble pattern.
We are told that the ceramic material has an index of refraction of 2.08 and is more durable than other glasses.
Being highly myopic, I am interested in ophthalmic applications of new materials. Right now, I am wearing a Nikon 1.74 index plastic lens, which is quite thin for its power.
The highest-index material that I am aware of currently being marketed for eyeglass use is the Zeiss Lantal 1.9 index glass. However, this material is quite shatter-prone, having only 1mm center thickness. I am told that one can poke a finger through a Lantal lens.
In addition to refractive power, for eyeglass use one must consider other optical properties, in particular the Abbe value. The Abbe value characterizes the chromatic aberration of a lens. The lower the Abbe number, the worse color fringing will be; some eyeglass wearers cannot tolerate high-index lenses because they typically have lower Abbe values than plain plastic.
Interestingly, Abbe is potentially irrevelant in a digital camera, because any chromatic aberration can be digitally removed. Effectively, you treat the R/G/B images from the sensor as three independent images and size them individually to compensate for the aberration. This cannot easily be done with a film camera, and is not possible at all with eyeglasses.
You need to learn the short Q and Z words.
...
For a Q with no U, try any of:
QAT, QAID, QOPH, QINDAR QINTAR, QANAT, SHEQEL, QWERTY, SUQ, UMIAQ. These are all nouns, and with the exception of SHEQEL, all take an S at the back. The plural of SHEQEL is SHEQALIM. Also, QINDAR takes an alternate plural QINDARKA.
For a Z, you need to know:
ZAX, ZEK, ZOA, AZO, FEZ, LEZ, BIZ, WIZ, FEZ, FIZ, ZIN, ZIT, ZOO
And then MOZO, ORZO, ZOON, ZARF, ZERK,
The real problem is that there are no two letter words containing Q or Z (yet). The same can be said for C and V.
The foregoing applies to the Official Club and Tournament Word List used in North America. In most of the rest of the world, clubs and tournaments use the union of the North American list and the Official Scrabble Words used in Britain. For those locales, you are permitted to play many more words than I have listed here.
The North American list is available to members of the National Scrabble Association; an expurgated version can be purchased at your local bookstore in the form of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD).
With the next release of the OSPD, QI and ZA are expected to be allowed, making the Z and Q much easier to play.
Yes, you get a 50 point bonus for using all seven.
In competitive Scrabble circles, this is called a "bingo" in North America, and a "bonus" in the U.K.
The highest scores arise by playing all seven tiles through another tile such that two triple word score squares are covered simultaneously. You get the tile values, multiplied by 9, plus 50. You can easily score 149 or more points for a single word this way.
MaXiMuM
You'll need to use a blank for that one.
Pay attention: for U.S. programming, there is typically a 1/2 second transition period between the show and the commercials, where the screen is black and the audio silent.
My VCR uses this indication to detect, mark and skip commercials. Look for the feature "Commercial>>Advance". After recording a show, it rewinds the tape and scans the show looking for these blank intervals. When it finds one, it rewinds the tape and marks the spot. Upon playback, the VCR fast-forwards between the marks.
Being a mechanical system, it is not 100% accurate, but it's pretty darn good. The blank intervals are typically not seen during scene changes (those are shorter) but I have seen a false-trigger where the picture is dark and quiet at the same time.
During the municipal election in Ottawa, I got a call from Alex Cullen, a candidate for council. Well, I got an ADAD; couldn't even tell him off (maybe I could have if I waited until the end of the spiel, but...) OK, I was going to vote for Blatherwick anyway.
The day before election day, I got an ADAD call from Blatherwick. Oh well, just gotta hold my nose and vote.
Linux was/is a derivative of Minix. There is no real Minix code left in Linux, but back in the 0.9x days, Linux was still evolving. You can still download Minix from here.
Now, here's the key point: although the NAMES of the various system calls, IOCTLs, error numbers and signals are part of the POSIX standard, their numeric assignments are not. The implementor is left to define them. Not all implementations define these the same way - take a look at the Linux/FreeBSD/SYSV emulation code in NetBSD to see the kinds of translations that need to be done to provide cross-platform compatibility.
Now compare the Minix include files with those of Linux and FreeBSD. You will notice very much the same error code and signal numbers. The Linux code dates from 1991 and is pre-ATT/BSDI settlement. It's likely that Tannenbaum is also in violation of AT&T's IP, and Linux has just inherited it. Of course, there's no money in SCO suing Tannenbaum.
Does this damage SCO? Not really. Is it worth US$699/seat? Definitely not. Can SCO collect damages? Probably, knowing the U.S. legal system.
Dark?
At this time of year, Antarctica is actually pretty bright.
I'm not sure I understand...
Go to www.shoprbc.com and you can get a similar system for CAD$1259. Given that they're in my hometown...
BTW, RB Computing rocks! I ordered an Athlon 2600+ system from them a couple of months ago and it works beautifully.
Long ago I ran OpenBSD with IPfilter and NAT on a 486 box as my firewall.
I now run a LinkSys BEFSR411. Not as secure - it cannot do both SPI and redirect, and it does not do VPN.
Why the switch? I wanted to get away from an old PC with moving parts that could fail, and I wanted the four-port 10/100 switch, which finally gave me the ability to run 100 Mbps between the computers that supported it.
Recent issues with business clients have brought security back to mind, and after looking at the popular canned products (LinkSys/NetGear, etc.) I conclude that the old roll-your-own approach OF TEN YEARS AGO is more secure.
I want a roll-your-own solution (possibly SmoothWall, possibly something else) that runs on the equivalent of LinkSys hardware:
- No moving parts. Preferably not even a fan.
- Flash memory for filesystem.
- Multiple 10/100 ports, preferably independently controllable so you can set up a DMZ, or different rules for different machines.
Does such a beast exist, in a relatively user-friendly form and without being more expensive than the old desktop that would otherwise be used?
At what point does an FPGA become a circumvention device?
Certainly, current FPGA proto boards are much cheaper than $1500, and will strip any copy-protection bits from a serial bit stream just fine.
If I reply to an email, will I be permitted to edit the quoted material (say, to cut down on the quoted material?)
If so, to what extent will cut & paste work?
Kinda reminds me of the Ontario Electricity Market Operator www.theimo.com. During the post-blackout period, they posted the current Ontario demand hourly. It was useful to check their site to determine if rolling blackouts were required. One problem: they ship you a 100KB background bitmap which for some reason wasn't cached by MSIE. During peak use, the server failed to keep up with the load. I wonder what they could have done had they simply dropped the bitmap for that week...
This could very well be the phone. Nokia is shit. I had a Nokia 6188 (CDMA) on Telus that did exactly that - exhibited all three of your dysfunctions.
My problems went away when I bought an Audiovox phone.
Granted, you are on GSM and not CDMA, but Nokia could very well be using common components that give rise to these problems.
Citrix MetaFrame/ICA.
Citrix is traditionally known for connecting X to Windows desktops, but they make a product that compresses X11-to-X11 as well.
The good news? It kicks butt. You can feel a lag, but it works far better than anything else I've tried in the speed department. In particular, Acrobat reader renders VERY quickly, and that program is a pig with bitmaps.
The bad news? It kicks butt by compressing the event stream... in a lossy manner. I have seen all sorts of minor glitches, such as menus opening up underneath their parent windows. But some programs are unusable - the Sun Java machine is an example - certain dialogs require a triple-click to select something because somehow Citrix consumes the other clicks.
The bottom line? If you want a solution for the office environment, then this is worth looking into. (Not free, however.) When evaluating, check ALL of your apps to see how bad their lossy event handling will bite you.