I set up one last year, mainly to allow me mail access when working away from home. I deliberatly chose a jumble of alpha-numerics, yet got spammed almost instantly. There is no way they could have guessed this account, unless they tried every 6 character alphanumeric string possible.
Oddly my main ISP email address got on a Chinese spam list a few days after joining, and I still get chinese spam to this address two or three times a week.
I now use this email address for all web activity where security is not needed.
The BBC has a network of around 30-40 local radio stations, serving different areas of England (Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland have a different setup).
These stations are mainly spoken word or specialist music, but they do play music. They appear to have some form of MP3 system, as they are able to play songs by request if they are in their on-line library of around 1000 tracks. I may be able to visit the studio in the future to see how this works in practice.
This being the BBC, everything is 100% legal. The BBC have always adapted to new technology. They used to store their old vinyl collection on DAT, and broadcast a lot of their in-house recordings from MD (as opposed to proper tape a few years ago.).
Whenever there's a major news story in the UK, the major UK news sites (such as the BBC) are inaccessible.
This has been most evident during a couple of fatal train crashes. When these occurred, the BBC website would be effectivly slashdotted, not serving pages, or even serving older pages than before.
Benchmarks for almost every hardware device never seem to measure CPU utilisation when the tested hardware is being used.
Some devices, either due to poor or obsolete design practices, or badly written drivers, consume large amounts of CPU time during utilisation, making the device almost useless in a CPU intensive environment.
There's more to hardware than just the throughput.
Re:Novell's not going anywhere anytime soon...
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 2
hell, even Banyan is still around in some form
Banyan are now trading as ePresence, effectivly no more than a M$ reseller, dealing in web services.
The old VINES product has just about been discontinued, the last version (8.6) is still being sold, but not activly developed. Most sites that I worked with have migrated elsewhere.
Banyan had many failings - zero marketing, launching new products (Netware and Unix ports) too early, poor tech-support (particularly in the last few years) and some ghastly bugs (file system corruption from clients running codepage 850 was a really nasty one).
I live in the UK. I had a boss who did this (and more) 2 years ago.
Every account on the LAN had a blank password, which we were not allowed to change. The purpose of this was to allow the boss access to any email account when he pleased. Security on the network just didn't exist.
What was really annoying was that this was an isolated office network. Email access to the outside world was via a separate PC, situated next to the boss. If we needed to access a web-sire or news for support work purposes we had to do it from home.
Whilst I worked there one collegue had some personal mail delivered c/o the office, as he didn't have a permament address in the area. The boss opened this private mail and read it. I should have walked out then - I was already pissed off by the fact that I'd been standing outside in the rain for 45 minutes, waiting for the boss to turn up to open the place.
I only worked there for 2 days (I'd have not come back from lunch on the second day if I hadn't left some possessions in my desk). It was the work place I'd ever worked at.
I once had to. I was visiting a customer site and work neglected to give me my own laptop for the job. I hit an unforseen snag and needed pull some files off a puplic ftp site, from a well known directory, and quickly.
All I had was someones AOL setup. Finding the files took around 10 times as long as usual, and then actually downloading them was even more horrible, not telling me where it had downloaded these files.
Probably the most painful experience I've ever had with a modem, and that includes pulling files down with kermit over a 2400 baud link (ouch!).
Since trying it I've seen quite a few segfaults just running the base applications, particularly when attempting to set a JPEG as the background wallpaper. I'll have a look at the code tonight.
Kmail also refuses to contact my pop3 account. I havn't yet looked into this in detail, but it doesn't even appear to attempt to contact my ISP. Pity, as I receive an HTML formatted email once a week and need to be able to read it, and I wonder if it renders it better than Netscape Communicator.
I've not yet tried the other packages (games, admin, office). Probably need to wait for the weekend for this.
I stuck it out for around 8 years at one place doing 3rd line support. I knew just too much about our core product, and was able to resolve more problems than the UK office of the software manufacturer. I was irreplacable - they just couldn't find anyone else who both understood the product and was able to fix it quickly when things went badly wrong, as was proved when I was off sick and confined to bed for a week.
Unfortunately the product we sold began to die off a couple of years ago, and my employer went into publishing their own product, which was clearly inferior to competing products. I ended up doing first line support for this junk, and I also had all kinds of *crap* landed on me by the head of this software team, such as trying to get document conversion libraries to to what they were clearly not designed to do.
After 3 months of this new regime I just walked out of the place, never to return.
I'm sure the rotors were exchangeable, and that a 4 rotor model was supplied with more than 4 rotors.
I saw a documentary on television last year featuring a 3-rotor model. It was supplied with at least 5 different rotors, each numbered with a sequential roman numeral. The rotors used, and the order that they were used in, was changed regualarly, as was the intial setting of the rotors.
Re:The lack of documentation is a big problem
on
Shortcomings Of OSS?
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· Score: 2
What's even worse is finding commented source code you can't understand.
One piece of old broken code I looked at was full of unfathomable abbreviations, both in the comments and debug code. One of the developers was a native French speaker, another spoke a Eastern European language, whilst another spoke english. The abbreviations came from one of the first two languages, but I wasn't sure which one. None of the developers responded via email. The code was a mess, and needed a re-write to get it to compile on my current system. I just couldn't work out what was supposedly going on to get this re-write to work.
Eventually someone else picked up the code and slowly got it to compile and then work, but by that time my needs had changed.
Sky Sports, a digital satellite broadcaster, broadcast some football (soccer to the heathens) in interactive format. Although I havn't used it myself (I refuse to pay Murdoch a penny) it allows you to choose which camera angle to view from. As I believe that it needs telephone access, and calls over here are not free, very few choose to use the service.
Personally I attend the games - more atmosphere, and pies! My team hasn't been on live television for at least 5 years, apart from a pre-season friendly game on a subscription only channel, so it doesn't affect me anyway.
Simiilar things happen in the UK, with the county names Essex, Sussex and Middlesex, and the historic region of Wessex. Various regionally named web-sites get blocked for the same reason.
There was also was a well document issue of people from the town of Scunthorpe having difficulty with AOL.
I agree. Last year I attended an interview with a local ISP. I'd spent 9 years working in 3rd line support with an NOS that was no longer used, but had a lot of Unix experience in that time. My role was essentially distance sysadminning, working with up to 50 sites at once. I was perfect for the role, but HR turned me down on the spot as I didn't pass their psycho-babble tests.
They were still looking for someone to fill the position 4 months later, and had lost the ISP market in that City to 2 other companies. I later heard that the head of HR had been dismissed by the head of the parent company.
I had another odd experience with another organisation. Again my skills were sound, but I was also turned down. Co-incidentally I had been talking to someone who worked at that company on a newsgroup, and discovered that they didn't want to take on anyone too skilled as they feared for their own positions.
I now test financial systems for a living. Still not sysadminining. I'm totally out of my depth when it comes to development work, only having worked in Pascal and some 4GLs. OOP wasn't really around when I started.
I'm talking about anti-aliasing - removing the jaggedness around fonts by using grey-scales. AFAIK StarOffice doesn't do this at the moment, and the results, particularly in the presentation module, are awful.
Earlier this week I attended a local LUG and sat through a couple of presentations made with Star Office.
Both used really jagged fonts and looked horrible, particularly the second one which was unreadable in places. The display that was being used definitly had the resolution, as some bitmaps were very clear. Smooth fonts would have made it a lot better. When using Windows for Work I always ensure that this option is enabled.
May be a good time for someone to add anti-alias support. Maybe I'll give it a go once I can pull it down!
I had a position that at times was really stressful. I worked in third-line support, with customers that were mainly IT shops of large companies. Looking back, I don't know how I coped. The main problesm were:
No-one else in my team was really capable of handling the serious calls. I was often left to these calls on my own, and would frequently have to work extra hours.
No thanks off the customers for resolving problems, just under intense pressure from them whenever things did go wrong.
The supplier of the software I dealt with lost a lot of staff, and were often unable to handle problems. The local office was hopeless, and the main office would take days to resolve issues, if at all. I often knew more about the software than those at the manufacturers.
Some customers couldn't think for themselves, and required my company to fix everything. I once had to make an 8-hour journey and then work all night to perform a simple, but time consuming, OS re-install, just because the customer couldn't be bothered to read a manual.
Management changed, mainly due to a merger. The new Boss didn't understand what I did, and assumed that major fixes could be implemented in seconds. He also wanted to dump the technology I was dealing with, feeling that we were a hindranced to his department, yet we earnt a vast amount of revenue. He also tried to change the department into first line support.
The environment was all wrong. There were up to 6 of us in a fairly small room, with no partitions, headsets or other comforts. There wasn't much space, particularly if running test equipment. I needed some peace when dealing with major problems, but it never happened. We were due to move to a much larger office, but it never materialised.
Salesmen selling products to customers that clearly wern't suitable for the task they were sold.
We also had to deal with the problems of other departments, such as one which sold firewalls but wasn't able to configure them.
Embrace and Extend - sounds like Share and Enjoy to me!
Microsoft are gradually becoming the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. They already made, in the form of Actimates, 'Your Plastic Pal That's Fun To Be With'. All we need now is someone to utter 'Go Stick Your Head Up a Pig!'
Without the ECU (EISA Configuration Utility) disk an EISA board is useless. Unless I can locate a ECU disk (or any ECU and the relevant ADF file) I won't be able to write correct values to the EISA CMOS, and won't be able to get the machine past the POST error.
I acquired the board when some servers were being scrapped. The servers were new at the end of 1993. I've not been able to locate an ECU to download for this board.
Fixed release dates are the biggest scourge of the software industry. I worked on a smaller project that suffered in the same way - release x.y was promised for a certain day, and yet a serious shortcoming was discovered in the software that made it unusable. Ended up releasing the junk.
What ever happened to releasing software when it was ready. Is Debian the only distribution that does this?
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly my main ISP email address got on a Chinese spam list a few days after joining, and I still get chinese spam to this address two or three times a week.
I now use this email address for all web activity where security is not needed.
These stations are mainly spoken word or specialist music, but they do play music. They appear to have some form of MP3 system, as they are able to play songs by request if they are in their on-line library of around 1000 tracks. I may be able to visit the studio in the future to see how this works in practice.
This being the BBC, everything is 100% legal. The BBC have always adapted to new technology. They used to store their old vinyl collection on DAT, and broadcast a lot of their in-house recordings from MD (as opposed to proper tape a few years ago.).
This has been most evident during a couple of fatal train crashes. When these occurred, the BBC website would be effectivly slashdotted, not serving pages, or even serving older pages than before.
And I'll legislate for PI to be 8E+16 ^ (1/34), which is a close approximation, although as another irrational, not very useful.
Some devices, either due to poor or obsolete design practices, or badly written drivers, consume large amounts of CPU time during utilisation, making the device almost useless in a CPU intensive environment.
There's more to hardware than just the throughput.
Banyan are now trading as ePresence, effectivly no more than a M$ reseller, dealing in web services.
The old VINES product has just about been discontinued, the last version (8.6) is still being sold, but not activly developed. Most sites that I worked with have migrated elsewhere.
Banyan had many failings - zero marketing, launching new products (Netware and Unix ports) too early, poor tech-support (particularly in the last few years) and some ghastly bugs (file system corruption from clients running codepage 850 was a really nasty one).
Every account on the LAN had a blank password, which we were not allowed to change. The purpose of this was to allow the boss access to any email account when he pleased. Security on the network just didn't exist.
What was really annoying was that this was an isolated office network. Email access to the outside world was via a separate PC, situated next to the boss. If we needed to access a web-sire or news for support work purposes we had to do it from home.
Whilst I worked there one collegue had some personal mail delivered c/o the office, as he didn't have a permament address in the area. The boss opened this private mail and read it. I should have walked out then - I was already pissed off by the fact that I'd been standing outside in the rain for 45 minutes, waiting for the boss to turn up to open the place.
I only worked there for 2 days (I'd have not come back from lunch on the second day if I hadn't left some possessions in my desk). It was the work place I'd ever worked at.
All I had was someones AOL setup. Finding the files took around 10 times as long as usual, and then actually downloading them was even more horrible, not telling me where it had downloaded these files.
Probably the most painful experience I've ever had with a modem, and that includes pulling files down with kermit over a 2400 baud link (ouch!).
Kmail also refuses to contact my pop3 account. I havn't yet looked into this in detail, but it doesn't even appear to attempt to contact my ISP. Pity, as I receive an HTML formatted email once a week and need to be able to read it, and I wonder if it renders it better than Netscape Communicator.
I've not yet tried the other packages (games, admin, office). Probably need to wait for the weekend for this.
I stuck it out for around 8 years at one place doing 3rd line support. I knew just too much about our core product, and was able to resolve more problems than the UK office of the software manufacturer. I was irreplacable - they just couldn't find anyone else who both understood the product and was able to fix it quickly when things went badly wrong, as was proved when I was off sick and confined to bed for a week.
Unfortunately the product we sold began to die off a couple of years ago, and my employer went into publishing their own product, which was clearly inferior to competing products. I ended up doing first line support for this junk, and I also had all kinds of *crap* landed on me by the head of this software team, such as trying to get document conversion libraries to to what they were clearly not designed to do.
After 3 months of this new regime I just walked out of the place, never to return.
In other words cheaply produced hardware relying upon CPU resources to perform the same functionality as more expensive 100% hardware solutions.
I saw a documentary on television last year featuring a 3-rotor model. It was supplied with at least 5 different rotors, each numbered with a sequential roman numeral. The rotors used, and the order that they were used in, was changed regualarly, as was the intial setting of the rotors.
One piece of old broken code I looked at was full of unfathomable abbreviations, both in the comments and debug code. One of the developers was a native French speaker, another spoke a Eastern European language, whilst another spoke english. The abbreviations came from one of the first two languages, but I wasn't sure which one. None of the developers responded via email. The code was a mess, and needed a re-write to get it to compile on my current system. I just couldn't work out what was supposedly going on to get this re-write to work.
Eventually someone else picked up the code and slowly got it to compile and then work, but by that time my needs had changed.
Personally I attend the games - more atmosphere, and pies! My team hasn't been on live television for at least 5 years, apart from a pre-season friendly game on a subscription only channel, so it doesn't affect me anyway.
There was also was a well document issue of people from the town of Scunthorpe having difficulty with AOL.
They were still looking for someone to fill the position 4 months later, and had lost the ISP market in that City to 2 other companies. I later heard that the head of HR had been dismissed by the head of the parent company.
I had another odd experience with another organisation. Again my skills were sound, but I was also turned down. Co-incidentally I had been talking to someone who worked at that company on a newsgroup, and discovered that they didn't want to take on anyone too skilled as they feared for their own positions.
I now test financial systems for a living. Still not sysadminining. I'm totally out of my depth when it comes to development work, only having worked in Pascal and some 4GLs. OOP wasn't really around when I started.
I'm talking about anti-aliasing - removing the jaggedness around fonts by using grey-scales. AFAIK StarOffice doesn't do this at the moment, and the results, particularly in the presentation module, are awful.
Both used really jagged fonts and looked horrible, particularly the second one which was unreadable in places. The display that was being used definitly had the resolution, as some bitmaps were very clear. Smooth fonts would have made it a lot better. When using Windows for Work I always ensure that this option is enabled.
May be a good time for someone to add anti-alias support. Maybe I'll give it a go once I can pull it down!
That's the funniest thing I've read for a long, long, time.
No-one else in my team was really capable of handling the serious calls. I was often left to these calls on my own, and would frequently have to work extra hours.
No thanks off the customers for resolving problems, just under intense pressure from them whenever things did go wrong.
The supplier of the software I dealt with lost a lot of staff, and were often unable to handle problems. The local office was hopeless, and the main office would take days to resolve issues, if at all. I often knew more about the software than those at the manufacturers.
Some customers couldn't think for themselves, and required my company to fix everything. I once had to make an 8-hour journey and then work all night to perform a simple, but time consuming, OS re-install, just because the customer couldn't be bothered to read a manual.
Management changed, mainly due to a merger. The new Boss didn't understand what I did, and assumed that major fixes could be implemented in seconds. He also wanted to dump the technology I was dealing with, feeling that we were a hindranced to his department, yet we earnt a vast amount of revenue. He also tried to change the department into first line support.
The environment was all wrong. There were up to 6 of us in a fairly small room, with no partitions, headsets or other comforts. There wasn't much space, particularly if running test equipment. I needed some peace when dealing with major problems, but it never happened. We were due to move to a much larger office, but it never materialised.
Salesmen selling products to customers that clearly wern't suitable for the task they were sold.
We also had to deal with the problems of other departments, such as one which sold firewalls but wasn't able to configure them.
Microsoft are gradually becoming the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. They already made, in the form of Actimates, 'Your Plastic Pal That's Fun To Be With'. All we need now is someone to utter 'Go Stick Your Head Up a Pig!'
Not just the Government - the European Union are after him as well.
I acquired the board when some servers were being scrapped. The servers were new at the end of 1993. I've not been able to locate an ECU to download for this board.
See - it is junk!
It does appear, though, that SuSE allow these developers to do whatever they want.
What ever happened to releasing software when it was ready. Is Debian the only distribution that does this?