CD and USB boot disabled, password on the BIOS, padlock on the case.
My 10-year-old would probably defeat that in around 15 minutes. He's seen me crack locked laptops I've rescued from recycling bins, after all. He'll tell your kids how to do it, too, if they ask him.
any questions?
Yeah. How are you going to padlock every single device your kid comes into contact with? The school and library administrators where I live frown on that sort of thing. Are you going to police your neighbor's system security too? Maybe set up a Skinner box? You'll need to keep your kids completely away from books and other children, after all, or they might learn to get around your blockades...
Alternatively, you could actually teach your children your values instead of trying to lock up their options.
Unless, of course, you prefer your kids to be stupid and helpless.
40%? My time to find a job went up more than 5200%- from 2 weeks to 2 years.
Well, Marxism isn't so popular now that we've got a bunch of dime-store Stalins running the US government. With that handle, you should consider it a success not to be in Bagram or Gitmo.
Non-satirical use of the words virii or boxen is considered flamebait.
Gee, thanks for making Google less useful to tens of thousands of researchers. I'm sure Tom Christiansen will give you a teabag of delight.
Having worked in an infrastructure where virii were causing corruption of files dealing with viruses, I was thankful to have a concise way of distinguishing between a biological virus and a computer virus.
But I guess it's more important that a bunch of puffed-up wannabe etymologists should get a self-righteous feeling about their latin roots. People who actually do REAL WORK with BOTH KINDS of virus don't matter, after all, who cares if their data mines are polluted? Fuck them, it's more important that we demonstrate our mastery of language! Let's make the web less useful to feed our egos!
If you are wondering about the tone of this post, well, if I'm going to get modded flamebait I figure I should deserve it.
At least in my area, Comcast doesn't block any ports. It's the only reason I have them instead of Verizon (well, that and Verizon's tech support insisted that they don't block any ports).
That's just incompetence. They have port 80 blocked in my (worm and virus riddled) segment and they think they have it blocked everywhere. But since they are criminally inept you got lucky.
I suggested to a comcast tech that they monitor DNS MX requests and if a single host does more than 500 per minute they assume a mail-borne worm or a spammer and automatically move the user to a special segment where they can't do anything except download antiviruses. He looked at me like I'd grown three heads, probably because he didn't understand what an MX RR was... Comcast's regional monopoly allows them to be totally incompetent and still make money. Verizon only has to be half-competent and they will eat Comcast's lunch.
Sorry, just finished my tasty free lunch. Free to me, anyway.
I was just looking at the family ration books for sugar, gas, and tires the other night. We had extra gas tickets because Daddy Chuck was a preacher.
Oh, wait, you're talking about the 1970s pseudo-rationing, that anyone with half a brain cell could easily subvert. Our neighbors used to share their license plates with us.
The tax is only on oil pumped in California. If the oil companies aren't allowed to pass the cost on to consumers, they'll stop pumping here. All our oil will be brought in from the outside, and they'll have every right to pass the extra transportation costs on to us. In the end, all this will do is raise gas prices at the pump, one way or another.
So, Californians will have greener alternatives (from the funding) and reason to buy them (from rising gas prices) and their oil will be left in the ground for future generations (because Big Oil won't be pumping it out). Entrepreneurs who can adapt to the new realities will flourish and old money will get spent. Is that what you're saying?
Where's the bad part?
Oh, and have you noticed that there are no requirements for oversight on how the money is spent, or any requirements that the money spent do anything at all about providing other forms of energy?
No, I haven't noticed that. It seems to me that the requirements are pretty clearly stated, as in many another similar self-funding legislation all over the world, and why should "oversight" be required? Laws against murder don't have "oversight" provisions and it hasn't resulted in formerly honest citizens murdering people right and left. Are you seriously proposing that this law is being set up so that evildoers pretending to be green can steal all the tax dollars without really being green? C'mon, that's less believable than a congressional toupee.
it's just another tax and spend bill, with no real limits on how the money is spent.
Are you complaining that the bill actually provides taxation to cover its spending, or just trotting out an old tired meme to pre-empt critical thought? Would a "spend and spend and spend and spend" bill be better?
We must have a different definition of the word "business". I call places that sell things businesses - you know, like the places that sell hamburgers and toilet paper? I see computers in all those places. Every day. Almost never Macs, though... the PICK OS has better penetration than MACos. So does IBM PC-DOS 3.0 for that matter. If, as you claim, it's more profitable to use Macs, how come nobody does?
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest." -- Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line" (1939)
If Apple laptops are not "business machines," then why is it so common to see them being used for business?
It's not particularly common, as I would use that term. I can go for months or years without ever seeing an Apple product being used in a profit-generating context; it would be impossible for me to avoid seeing an NCR or IBM-PC-type product in business use over the same time period.
What quality are you referring to that makes them not suitable for business?
ROI (Return On Investment). Except in particular niche businesses there are cheaper solutions than Apple, so using Apple is less cost effective than other means, and a well-run business will restrict use of Apples to those niches where it provides good ROI. Most businesses have no such niches, of course. Perhaps you enjoy such a niche yourself; if so, your experience is not representative of the norm, as any examination of Apple's product sales will show.
For anything non-trivial, it would probably be quicker and cheaper to have the "pro" write the code in the first place than to pay him for his time to read, understand, and correct a steaming pile of turd spaghetti.
If you pay me enough money, I'll write new code and claim that what I did was correct the old codebase.
You could probably take a random blob of ones and zeros, run multiple instances of it as an executable image while randomly tweaking bits until you evolved a real executable, far faster than you could analyze some of the code I've had to replace over the years.
I built mine out of old junk. I use linux soft raid and an Adaptec U160 card (which I actually had to purchase, along with the cable modem, but you can get SCSI cards on eBay pretty cheap). Very fast and reliable with RAID5 on everything but the boot partition, which is mirrored, and the swap volume, which is not RAIDed at all.
You probably may as well stop reading, since the rest is unlikely to be useful, but anyway:
It's in a 1950s era Honeywell DPS6 enclosed half-rack (with lovely solid tires) I found in a dumpster, with a gigantic APC SmartUPS 3000 RM3u in the top slot powering an RCA cable modem, a 100bT switch, the core server and a dedicated firewall as well as an extension cord running up two floors to an old Intel wireless pro 5000 802.11A/B access point (I use 802.11a, but guests use the b generally). The UPS I got from a dentist's office when the batteries went bad, and I got new batteries for free due to a complicated mistake another small business made that ended up with them having two sets. The AP was a demo unit that the local Intel sales office threw out. The 3com switch is from the county recycling bin. The core server is in a rack-mount 4U case my employers got rid of when they switched to 1Us, with a fairly generic dual-processor motherboard (overkill for NAS). It serves netatalk to the macs, samba to the PCs, apache to the outside world, and handles DHCP, DNS, and NTP inside. The RAID array is seven SCSI disks (an ISP that went out of business gave me a case of 16 U160 disks still in the wrappers) screwed to that expanded metal mesh stuff you use to keep your dog from jumping through the screen door, along with a couple of fans and an old cabinet handle. I had to do something with a paperclip to a small PC powersupply to get it to run the disks without a motherboard attached, but I don't remember offhand which pins I had to bridge. The firewall is running the free version of smoothwall with the AP on the orange interface and the cable modem on the red, with crossover cables as needed to avoid having an extra hub. I've got cat5 where I need it (I don't let the kids use wireless, so that they have to be in public areas of the house to use the Internet) and I've been running the rig for about eight years, I guess.
Total cost of the system between $300 and $700, mostly for the SCSI card and a fancy cable. But lots and lots of hours dumpster-diving to get the bits, I have to admit. And I already had linux OS experience before I started, and I'm reasonably competent with metalworking.
I hear the linksys NSLU2 is a bit slow but cheap and easy to set up and use.
If USB at 12 MBPS isn't fast enough for you, how about full-duplex 100bT? Choose your network file system and away you go... if you don't want the traffic on your main switch, spring an extra $10 for another port on the NAS and use a Cat-5 crossover wire.
I would't want drives on a box like the Neuros, personally; I keep my drives in a big ol' RAID array in my nice cool basement instead of pumping out extra heat in my A/V center.
I'm not drinking the Kool-aid just because you have a snappy comeback line, sorry.
Care to provide any counter-examples, where the Bush administration has done something other than favor corporations and big government over the little guy?
I am familiar with the definitions of facism that the people who invented the word used. Perhaps you are not.
But I'm really not interested in redefining terms until it somehow magically becomes OK for the Federal Government to steal the Delaware river from the state of Delaware and give it to New Jersey for the benefit of a foreign corporation. That just doesn't work for me, so I'm not going to argue with you about what you think a facist is. I'll just stop using the term if you don't like the way I use it (which is the way Mussolini used it).
Perhaps you'd care to address the issue, which is that Bush rhetoric and Bush administration actions are completely contradictory? Can you explain how a so-called "conservative" administration can toss aside hundreds of years of precedent in order to accomodate British Petroleum?
It amazes me how the Bush administration can spout rhetoric in total opposition to its actions, and people will still buy in.
In case you haven't noticed, there have been several "State's Rights" issues during the Bush Interregnum. In all these cases, the Bush administration has come down solidly in favor of increased federal authority.
In one of the more egregious cases, the Federal Government is in favor of redrawing the boundaries of the state of Delaware so that a large foreign-owned oil company can construct a LNG pier serving the state of New Jersey. In that case, the Bush administration is actually championing the "rights" of British Petroleum, with collusion from corrupt New Jersey authorities, to override the demonstrated will of the citizenry of the US state of Delaware.
When will US conservatives realize they've been betrayed by a pack of radical facists, who favor any corporation from any nation over the rights of any individual anywhere?
I'm willing to watch their Flash ads in order to read an article, but I've never been able to get past the endless loop of "watch this ad for access!!" despite trying a dozen or more times.
I've even tried turning off adblock, noscript, flashblock and accepting all their cookies. Still just an endless loop of ads.
I'm sort of assuming that the page can't handle mozilla-based browsers at this point.
Too bad for Salon; I might have subscribed, but if their site can't handle my browser and plug-ins of choice I guess I'll have to give my money to somebody else...
...you tell them that they blacklisted your IP address and you can vouche that you don't spam, but they won't do anything because you belong to a/16 where somewhere sombody is spamming. blacklisting might be a good idea, but organizations like spamhaus make it bad in practice.
You are misunderstanding the function and purpose of organizations that publish spam listings. Individual site administrators choose which lists to use, and for what purpose - for example, Spamhaus's lists are commonly used to assign extra positive modifiers in SpamAssassin rulesets, and Spamhaus has nothing to do with this. You haven't got any right to tell them what lists they publish, or how granular they should be (personally I'm fine with blocking a/16 if there are spammers in it - I don't want to receive your mail if you are part of a spam-friendly address block, end-of-story, and that's my personal choice NOT yours to make). Spamhaus hasn't any right to tell you how you ought to post to Slashdot, either, and you notice they aren't complaining about your post or demanding the CmdrTaco pull it down.
The Internet is made up of individual sites run by individual people who agree on certain things (like for instance RFC822 and the Internet Protocol). Nowhere in these agreements is there anything that says a site administrator has to provide mail delivery on the terms of the remote sender; it's the right of any recipient to refuse any mail for any reason as long as they are SMTP-compliant in that rejection, and it is the right of the site administration to negotiate users' terms of service with those users.
You can always vote with your feet, either by getting a new service provider (I recommend Gmail) or by getting your correspondents to get a new one. At some point we have to take responsibility for the world we inhabit...
as being as functional as a desktop email client (such as Outlook)
So, how's it compare with a decent email system, such as Scalix? Or a desktop client that's not a single-OS, closed source virus farm, such as Thunderbird?
Comparing to outlook, man, that's like comparing your product to a painful rectal itch.
Slashdot Mirror
I might have some dead bodies I'd like to shoot into space.
I'll pay $200 each, no sweat.
Hell, I'll pay $2000 as long as nobody opens the coffins before launch!
Yeah. How are you going to padlock every single device your kid comes into contact with? The school and library administrators where I live frown on that sort of thing. Are you going to police your neighbor's system security too? Maybe set up a Skinner box? You'll need to keep your kids completely away from books and other children, after all, or they might learn to get around your blockades...
Alternatively, you could actually teach your children your values instead of trying to lock up their options.
Unless, of course, you prefer your kids to be stupid and helpless.
The dastardly liberals are giving jobs to BROWN PEOPLE IN FOREIGN LANDS!!!
Yeah, I know, I'm going to be modded into oblivion. But really, the whole "Indians taking our jobs" meme is so tiresome.
Oh, er, never mind.
Having worked in an infrastructure where virii were causing corruption of files dealing with viruses, I was thankful to have a concise way of distinguishing between a biological virus and a computer virus.
But I guess it's more important that a bunch of puffed-up wannabe etymologists should get a self-righteous feeling about their latin roots. People who actually do REAL WORK with BOTH KINDS of virus don't matter, after all, who cares if their data mines are polluted? Fuck them, it's more important that we demonstrate our mastery of language! Let's make the web less useful to feed our egos!
If you are wondering about the tone of this post, well, if I'm going to get modded flamebait I figure I should deserve it.
I suggested to a comcast tech that they monitor DNS MX requests and if a single host does more than 500 per minute they assume a mail-borne worm or a spammer and automatically move the user to a special segment where they can't do anything except download antiviruses. He looked at me like I'd grown three heads, probably because he didn't understand what an MX RR was... Comcast's regional monopoly allows them to be totally incompetent and still make money. Verizon only has to be half-competent and they will eat Comcast's lunch.
I always write-in my Mom's name. She could do any of those jobs, hell, she'd make a great President.
There's a Mr. Gonzalez at the door to see you; something about taking you waterboarding? Is that what you kids call surfing nowadays?
Sorry, just finished my tasty free lunch. Free to me, anyway.
I was just looking at the family ration books for sugar, gas, and tires the other night. We had extra gas tickets because Daddy Chuck was a preacher.
Oh, wait, you're talking about the 1970s pseudo-rationing, that anyone with half a brain cell could easily subvert. Our neighbors used to share their license plates with us.
Never mind.
Where's the bad part?
No, I haven't noticed that. It seems to me that the requirements are pretty clearly stated, as in many another similar self-funding legislation all over the world, and why should "oversight" be required? Laws against murder don't have "oversight" provisions and it hasn't resulted in formerly honest citizens murdering people right and left. Are you seriously proposing that this law is being set up so that evildoers pretending to be green can steal all the tax dollars without really being green? C'mon, that's less believable than a congressional toupee.
Are you complaining that the bill actually provides taxation to cover its spending, or just trotting out an old tired meme to pre-empt critical thought? Would a "spend and spend and spend and spend" bill be better?
We must have a different definition of the word "business". I call places that sell things businesses - you know, like the places that sell hamburgers and toilet paper? I see computers in all those places. Every day. Almost never Macs, though... the PICK OS has better penetration than MACos. So does IBM PC-DOS 3.0 for that matter. If, as you claim, it's more profitable to use Macs, how come nobody does?
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest." -- Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line" (1939)
ROI (Return On Investment). Except in particular niche businesses there are cheaper solutions than Apple, so using Apple is less cost effective than other means, and a well-run business will restrict use of Apples to those niches where it provides good ROI. Most businesses have no such niches, of course. Perhaps you enjoy such a niche yourself; if so, your experience is not representative of the norm, as any examination of Apple's product sales will show.
"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."
You could probably take a random blob of ones and zeros, run multiple instances of it as an executable image while randomly tweaking bits until you evolved a real executable, far faster than you could analyze some of the code I've had to replace over the years.
I built mine out of old junk. I use linux soft raid and an Adaptec U160 card (which I actually had to purchase, along with the cable modem, but you can get SCSI cards on eBay pretty cheap). Very fast and reliable with RAID5 on everything but the boot partition, which is mirrored, and the swap volume, which is not RAIDed at all.
You probably may as well stop reading, since the rest is unlikely to be useful, but anyway:
It's in a 1950s era Honeywell DPS6 enclosed half-rack (with lovely solid tires) I found in a dumpster, with a gigantic APC SmartUPS 3000 RM3u in the top slot powering an RCA cable modem, a 100bT switch, the core server and a dedicated firewall as well as an extension cord running up two floors to an old Intel wireless pro 5000 802.11A/B access point (I use 802.11a, but guests use the b generally). The UPS I got from a dentist's office when the batteries went bad, and I got new batteries for free due to a complicated mistake another small business made that ended up with them having two sets. The AP was a demo unit that the local Intel sales office threw out. The 3com switch is from the county recycling bin. The core server is in a rack-mount 4U case my employers got rid of when they switched to 1Us, with a fairly generic dual-processor motherboard (overkill for NAS). It serves netatalk to the macs, samba to the PCs, apache to the outside world, and handles DHCP, DNS, and NTP inside. The RAID array is seven SCSI disks (an ISP that went out of business gave me a case of 16 U160 disks still in the wrappers) screwed to that expanded metal mesh stuff you use to keep your dog from jumping through the screen door, along with a couple of fans and an old cabinet handle. I had to do something with a paperclip to a small PC powersupply to get it to run the disks without a motherboard attached, but I don't remember offhand which pins I had to bridge. The firewall is running the free version of smoothwall with the AP on the orange interface and the cable modem on the red, with crossover cables as needed to avoid having an extra hub. I've got cat5 where I need it (I don't let the kids use wireless, so that they have to be in public areas of the house to use the Internet) and I've been running the rig for about eight years, I guess.
Total cost of the system between $300 and $700, mostly for the SCSI card and a fancy cable. But lots and lots of hours dumpster-diving to get the bits, I have to admit. And I already had linux OS experience before I started, and I'm reasonably competent with metalworking.
I hear the linksys NSLU2 is a bit slow but cheap and easy to set up and use.
Whatever the market will bear, if you're an air producer. Why do you hate capitalism?
If USB at 12 MBPS isn't fast enough for you, how about full-duplex 100bT? Choose your network file system and away you go... if you don't want the traffic on your main switch, spring an extra $10 for another port on the NAS and use a Cat-5 crossover wire.
I would't want drives on a box like the Neuros, personally; I keep my drives in a big ol' RAID array in my nice cool basement instead of pumping out extra heat in my A/V center.
I'm not drinking the Kool-aid just because you have a snappy comeback line, sorry.
Care to provide any counter-examples, where the Bush administration has done something other than favor corporations and big government over the little guy?
I am familiar with the definitions of facism that the people who invented the word used. Perhaps you are not.
But I'm really not interested in redefining terms until it somehow magically becomes OK for the Federal Government to steal the Delaware river from the state of Delaware and give it to New Jersey for the benefit of a foreign corporation. That just doesn't work for me, so I'm not going to argue with you about what you think a facist is. I'll just stop using the term if you don't like the way I use it (which is the way Mussolini used it).
Perhaps you'd care to address the issue, which is that Bush rhetoric and Bush administration actions are completely contradictory? Can you explain how a so-called "conservative" administration can toss aside hundreds of years of precedent in order to accomodate British Petroleum?
It amazes me how the Bush administration can spout rhetoric in total opposition to its actions, and people will still buy in.
In case you haven't noticed, there have been several "State's Rights" issues during the Bush Interregnum. In all these cases, the Bush administration has come down solidly in favor of increased federal authority.
In one of the more egregious cases, the Federal Government is in favor of redrawing the boundaries of the state of Delaware so that a large foreign-owned oil company can construct a LNG pier serving the state of New Jersey. In that case, the Bush administration is actually championing the "rights" of British Petroleum, with collusion from corrupt New Jersey authorities, to override the demonstrated will of the citizenry of the US state of Delaware.
When will US conservatives realize they've been betrayed by a pack of radical facists, who favor any corporation from any nation over the rights of any individual anywhere?
I'm willing to watch their Flash ads in order to read an article, but I've never been able to get past the endless loop of "watch this ad for access!!" despite trying a dozen or more times.
I've even tried turning off adblock, noscript, flashblock and accepting all their cookies. Still just an endless loop of ads.
I'm sort of assuming that the page can't handle mozilla-based browsers at this point.
Too bad for Salon; I might have subscribed, but if their site can't handle my browser and plug-ins of choice I guess I'll have to give my money to somebody else...
The Internet is made up of individual sites run by individual people who agree on certain things (like for instance RFC822 and the Internet Protocol). Nowhere in these agreements is there anything that says a site administrator has to provide mail delivery on the terms of the remote sender; it's the right of any recipient to refuse any mail for any reason as long as they are SMTP-compliant in that rejection, and it is the right of the site administration to negotiate users' terms of service with those users.
You can always vote with your feet, either by getting a new service provider (I recommend Gmail) or by getting your correspondents to get a new one. At some point we have to take responsibility for the world we inhabit...
Comparing to outlook, man, that's like comparing your product to a painful rectal itch.
I won't be moving to China any time soon.