On the surface, AOL looks like the good guys here. However, their draconian spam policy can be as harmful as the span it's trying to prevent.
Here's how it works: AOL receives N complaints calling something spam after users click on the "mark this as spam" button. So AOL looks at the previous link in the received-from chain and blocks that entire network.
Sounds good right? Wrong.
Say Joe User works at my company part-time from home. Instead of another pop account, he has a forwarding address with our company that forwards to his AOL account. Joe gets spam, and reports it to AOL. AOL looks to see who sent it, sees my company in the "received-from" chain, and blocks not only us, but every other company hosted with our ISP. Thousands of legitimate emails now can't get to AOL addresses.
It gets worse. Many people use the "spam" button like the "delete" key to get rid of stuff they just don't want right now. AOL doesn't educate its users to realize that reporting something as spam has real consequences, and so people mark real email they requested as spam just because it's easier than deleting around it.
Our fabulous domain host FutureQuest has had to ban forwarding to AOL addresses as a result. AOL has been completely unreasonable in accepting any responsibility for intelligent spam blocking, and their users and legitimate businesses are suffering.
At least they're trying, but they're far from the good guys here.
I'm not sure if you mean "Low Cost" as in "Free with a lot of my time installing/configuring" or "Low Cost" as in "Under $1000 plug-and-play," but our company recently bought a Symantec 200R VPN Server and firewall. You can get them for about $500 online. (Make sure you get the 200R, as the 100 and 200 don't have the actual VPN endpoint.)
Setup and installation was a breeze. I had it working out of the box in about an hour, including mucking around with the client they provide. I have a Debian Samba box as my Windows domain/WINS server, and it's been pretty smooth sailing.
I'd highly recommend it for a small shop. Yeah, I could have made something work with just the Debian box, but the amount of my time needed to make that happen would have added up to way more than $500 in lost productivity.
Our company recently created a mess for ourselves trying to ship something to Canada when a critical shipment was returned to us because we didn't have the proper customs forms filled out. We do low-volume, high-cost sales, so we just double the shipping costs now to Canada just like for other foreign countries, but I can see a large-volume, low-margin company deciding not to deal with any of it.
The whole thing surprised me. I figured what with NAFTA and crossing the border so easily that shipments wouldn't be a problem. I mean, their phone numbers even look like ours.
Unfortunately this an N64 game, so it's not much help for you and your PS2, but a friend and I had hours of fun playing this together.
It's a first-person shooter with an X-Files-esque storyline that we found quite interesting, and the graphics and gameplay were great. It only took us a few games to get up to speed.
You can also play with one person as the lead and the other as one of the bad guys. The split screen kills the view and graphics a bit compared to one-player, but the game was so much more enjoyable as a dynamic duo that I've hardly played in one-player mode.
This is by the same group (Rareware) that did Goldeneye, also for N64. I'm not sure if it had the same 2-player mode.
I had a Linksys WAP11 wireless access point with WPC11 cards at the office, and they were horribly unreliable no matter what I did. I was about to give up when I found a firmware update for the WAP on Linksys' support site. With that installed and all of the drivers updated to latest versions everything works like a charm.
I'd suggest looking to see if there are firmware updates for your wireless router. Depending on how long your retailer had it sitting in their warehouse you may not have the latest and greatest versions of everything.
The newer technologies are much harder to learn from than the older ones. The speeds are much higher, the protocols are more complicated, and the tools are more expensive. For a beginner learning this stuff, you never want to work with the latest technologies.
This applies to all sorts of things. The idea of the class is not to learn RS-232 or RS-485 or RS-3.14159 or whatever. The idea is to learn serial computer-to-computer communication, and the best way to do that is to minimize time on the nuances of the protocol and get the general concepts down. RS-*** is simple, so you can get the mechanics out of the way quickly.
The best electronics class I ever took (Physics 123 at Harvard from the creators of The Art of Electronics) had us building a computer from individual chips based around a 68000 processor. Nothing modern and useful like VGA cards or PCI, but now I have a good understanding of the general concepts behind microcomputer design. Never could have done that in 1/2 a semester with current technology.
Much as I hate to abuse a cliche; the best life saver in all these cases is education. Motorcyclists have to observe proper safety precautions, and cars have to be told that no, you can NOT share a lane space with a motorcycle
While I agree with the concept of educating cars and bikers, the issue here has nothing to do with lane sharing.
Enclosed vehicles (i.e. cars) are designed to withstand collisions. It is this design that makes airbags and seatbelts an effective combination in case of an accident.
On a motorcycle, the only safety in collision is to avoid it in the first place, which can only be done while moving. Sitting still in traffic is quite dangerous -- think of how many times you observed (or been a participant) in one car lightly rear-ending another. On a motorcycle such a minor collision can be very dangerous.
Outside of the morons who lane-split at 80mph between stopped traffic, you are actually less likely to get in an accident while lane sharing than while trying to occupy an entire space and hoping you're not hit from behind or the side by a car that doesn't notice you.
Airbags work fine in conjunction with a seat belt and a steel cage. On a motorcycle where you are separated from the vehicle in essentially any accident, an airbag will only protect you in a small subset of circumstances. The number where it could actually be a problem, not to mention proper detection of the crash in the first place, is likely to be higher, IMO.
How about this - retroactive corporal punishment for any driver who causes an accident due to stupidity
An excellent plan, especially seeing as if a biker is guilty of driving while stupid (s)he is likely to end up in a wheelchair or a box. If a driver is guilty of DWS (s)he is likely to put someone else in a wheelchair or box.
Personally, I'm more in favor of bringing back public stoning...
I'm finding a significant number of posts praising the various Apple laptops that note the ease of running LinuxPPC, DebianPPC, and other such distributions. I'm interested, but what have all of you Apple Laptop Linux people done about buttons? It's easy enough to just use a different mouse with a desktop, but I'd hate using a bunch of modifier keys with a trackpad. Has anyone managed to actually hack an Apple notebook to make a 2-3 button machine? If not, what's the preferred method for dealing with this problem?
Don't salvage working systems and then give them
to a school, rather teach school kids (especially disadvantaged inner city ones) to do this work themselves.
Then handling the situation on mass becomes simply an exercise in collecting the systems
and returning the useless parts to the company for disposal (yes, don't let them stick you or the school with disposal costs!)
I recently bought the Targus Stowaway keyboard for my Handspring Visor. (That's the folding one.) I had tried the GoType, but its keys were a bit small and cramped for my taste, while the Stowaway was regular size with better key travel when unfolded. It will move if you try just putting it in your lap, and you by far get the best performance on a book, table, airline tray, etc., but it folds the "right" way so that it doesn't collapse on itself if you don't have it on something solid.
The other issue, however, is why on earth anyone would want one of these things. Even the Stowaway is too big folded up to carry comfortably in a normal pocket. A coat pocket or cargo pants pocket yes, but I refuse to plan my wardrobe around my PDA. If you have a laptop you probably carry that most places you would use a PDA keyboard, so when are these things any more than just geek toys?
Well, I don't have a laptop. I had notes I wanted to write, and Graffiti is only good for a quick note or phone number. I've heard there are some decent document editors out there that work quite well with an external keyboard, but I haven't used any. I don't use Palm email, but a keyboard would be nice there. The one thing the GoType has is an external USB port so that you could conceivably stick your PDA in the GoType and use it as a serial terminal for a rackmount server, portable datalogger, or some other such thing.
For me the Stowaway was a worthwhile purchase. I'll use it enough that I'll be glad I bought it, but it's certainly not necessary for most people yet.
okay, I know as a good little linux user microsoft is evil, etc., but I'm psyched to think this would finally happen. as it is, I dual-boot my machine between win98 and debian, where I primarily need windows so that I can use office at full power. (I have yet to see a "compatible" program that didn't botch subtle formatting things. of course, one winbox to another can botch things, but the probability is lower.)
like it or not, office has become the default standard for file formats, and after using it for 10 years, I don't want to learn another software package. I don't mind learning a new operating system, e.g. linux, but when I need to buckle down and get some work done, I want to know that I can still use everything I've learned thus far.
besides, I haven't seen any real attempt to create a good presentation development package, which means it's powerpoint or nothing. the entire free software movement seems to spurn such "corporate" practices such as ties, suits, and fancy presentations, which imho is one of the reasons linux et. al. haven't already risen to a more prominent level, but that's another topic for another time.
There's a utility called Power Boot (www.blueskyinnovations.com) that does on purpose what you did accidentally. You install as many OSes as you want on various partitions, and then Power Boot lets you pick which partition to boot from. Very simple and clever, and I've had no problems with it. You can also hide partitions from each other, which is useful if you're installing from an OEM cd. (Not that you would of course. That would be stealing.;) It even will rename partitions to c: if that helps your os. I sound like a commercial, but I've been very impressed. I had Win95, DOS/Win31, and WinNT for a while, and now I just use Win98 and Debian.
There are sort of two levels to this discussion. The first is about Microsoft servers and mail systems and Outlook, Messaging, etc. The second is the Office Suite, meaning what the average consumer might buy, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and maybe Outlook for their Email and Front Page for Web stuff. I've used Word/Excel/PPoint since 1991, and I frankly have no desire to learn something new. I would much prefer to learn a new operating system than learn a new office suite. The M$ apps are big and clunky, but I'm now quite good at using their bigness and clunkiness, and I've never really run into stability problems with them. But enough about me. The issue isn't as much what people know how to use, since most M$Office users only use a small subset of the programs' full functionalities. The issue is compatibility and availability. The business industry standard is M$Office. You just can't survive if you can't read and write those formats, and getting access to what those are for developers just ain't easy. What I would want would be versions of Word/etc. for Linux. Give me the stability and flexibility of the OS with the office suite I already know and like to use. If the feds would just make Microsoft give up their source code. If you _really_ make a better product, then you have nothing to worry about...
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Um, Harvard's between 223 and 229 years older than MIT, depending on how pedantic you want to get about dates.
On the surface, AOL looks like the good guys here. However, their draconian spam policy can be as harmful as the span it's trying to prevent.
Here's how it works: AOL receives N complaints calling something spam after users click on the "mark this as spam" button. So AOL looks at the previous link in the received-from chain and blocks that entire network.
Sounds good right? Wrong.
Say Joe User works at my company part-time from home. Instead of another pop account, he has a forwarding address with our company that forwards to his AOL account. Joe gets spam, and reports it to AOL. AOL looks to see who sent it, sees my company in the "received-from" chain, and blocks not only us, but every other company hosted with our ISP. Thousands of legitimate emails now can't get to AOL addresses.
It gets worse. Many people use the "spam" button like the "delete" key to get rid of stuff they just don't want right now. AOL doesn't educate its users to realize that reporting something as spam has real consequences, and so people mark real email they requested as spam just because it's easier than deleting around it.
Our fabulous domain host FutureQuest has had to ban forwarding to AOL addresses as a result. AOL has been completely unreasonable in accepting any responsibility for intelligent spam blocking, and their users and legitimate businesses are suffering.
At least they're trying, but they're far from the good guys here.
I'm not sure if you mean "Low Cost" as in "Free with a lot of my time installing/configuring" or "Low Cost" as in "Under $1000 plug-and-play," but our company recently bought a Symantec 200R VPN Server and firewall. You can get them for about $500 online. (Make sure you get the 200R, as the 100 and 200 don't have the actual VPN endpoint.)
Setup and installation was a breeze. I had it working out of the box in about an hour, including mucking around with the client they provide. I have a Debian Samba box as my Windows domain/WINS server, and it's been pretty smooth sailing.
I'd highly recommend it for a small shop. Yeah, I could have made something work with just the Debian box, but the amount of my time needed to make that happen would have added up to way more than $500 in lost productivity.
Our company recently created a mess for ourselves trying to ship something to Canada when a critical shipment was returned to us because we didn't have the proper customs forms filled out. We do low-volume, high-cost sales, so we just double the shipping costs now to Canada just like for other foreign countries, but I can see a large-volume, low-margin company deciding not to deal with any of it.
The whole thing surprised me. I figured what with NAFTA and crossing the border so easily that shipments wouldn't be a problem. I mean, their phone numbers even look like ours.
Unfortunately this an N64 game, so it's not much help for you and your PS2, but a friend and I had hours of fun playing this together.
It's a first-person shooter with an X-Files-esque storyline that we found quite interesting, and the graphics and gameplay were great. It only took us a few games to get up to speed.
You can also play with one person as the lead and the other as one of the bad guys. The split screen kills the view and graphics a bit compared to one-player, but the game was so much more enjoyable as a dynamic duo that I've hardly played in one-player mode.
This is by the same group (Rareware) that did Goldeneye, also for N64. I'm not sure if it had the same 2-player mode.
I had a Linksys WAP11 wireless access point with WPC11 cards at the office, and they were horribly unreliable no matter what I did. I was about to give up when I found a firmware update for the WAP on Linksys' support site. With that installed and all of the drivers updated to latest versions everything works like a charm.
I'd suggest looking to see if there are firmware updates for your wireless router. Depending on how long your retailer had it sitting in their warehouse you may not have the latest and greatest versions of everything.
This applies to all sorts of things. The idea of the class is not to learn RS-232 or RS-485 or RS-3.14159 or whatever. The idea is to learn serial computer-to-computer communication, and the best way to do that is to minimize time on the nuances of the protocol and get the general concepts down. RS-*** is simple, so you can get the mechanics out of the way quickly.
The best electronics class I ever took (Physics 123 at Harvard from the creators of The Art of Electronics) had us building a computer from individual chips based around a 68000 processor. Nothing modern and useful like VGA cards or PCI, but now I have a good understanding of the general concepts behind microcomputer design. Never could have done that in 1/2 a semester with current technology.
Much as I hate to abuse a cliche; the best life saver in all these cases is education. Motorcyclists have to observe proper safety precautions, and cars have to be told that no, you can NOT share a lane space with a motorcycle
While I agree with the concept of educating cars and bikers, the issue here has nothing to do with lane sharing.
Enclosed vehicles (i.e. cars) are designed to withstand collisions. It is this design that makes airbags and seatbelts an effective combination in case of an accident.
On a motorcycle, the only safety in collision is to avoid it in the first place, which can only be done while moving. Sitting still in traffic is quite dangerous -- think of how many times you observed (or been a participant) in one car lightly rear-ending another. On a motorcycle such a minor collision can be very dangerous.
Outside of the morons who lane-split at 80mph between stopped traffic, you are actually less likely to get in an accident while lane sharing than while trying to occupy an entire space and hoping you're not hit from behind or the side by a car that doesn't notice you.
Airbags work fine in conjunction with a seat belt and a steel cage. On a motorcycle where you are separated from the vehicle in essentially any accident, an airbag will only protect you in a small subset of circumstances. The number where it could actually be a problem, not to mention proper detection of the crash in the first place, is likely to be higher, IMO.
How about this - retroactive corporal punishment for any driver who causes an accident due to stupidity
An excellent plan, especially seeing as if a biker is guilty of driving while stupid (s)he is likely to end up in a wheelchair or a box. If a driver is guilty of DWS (s)he is likely to put someone else in a wheelchair or box.
Personally, I'm more in favor of bringing back public stoning...
I'm finding a significant number of posts praising the various Apple laptops that note the ease of running LinuxPPC, DebianPPC, and other such distributions. I'm interested, but what have all of you Apple Laptop Linux people done about buttons? It's easy enough to just use a different mouse with a desktop, but I'd hate using a bunch of modifier keys with a trackpad. Has anyone managed to actually hack an Apple notebook to make a 2-3 button machine? If not, what's the preferred method for dealing with this problem?
Then handling the situation on mass becomes simply an exercise in collecting the systems and returning the useless parts to the company for disposal (yes, don't let them stick you or the school with disposal costs!)
I recently bought the Targus Stowaway keyboard for my Handspring Visor. (That's the folding one.) I had tried the GoType, but its keys were a bit small and cramped for my taste, while the Stowaway was regular size with better key travel when unfolded. It will move if you try just putting it in your lap, and you by far get the best performance on a book, table, airline tray, etc., but it folds the "right" way so that it doesn't collapse on itself if you don't have it on something solid.
The other issue, however, is why on earth anyone would want one of these things. Even the Stowaway is too big folded up to carry comfortably in a normal pocket. A coat pocket or cargo pants pocket yes, but I refuse to plan my wardrobe around my PDA. If you have a laptop you probably carry that most places you would use a PDA keyboard, so when are these things any more than just geek toys?
Well, I don't have a laptop. I had notes I wanted to write, and Graffiti is only good for a quick note or phone number. I've heard there are some decent document editors out there that work quite well with an external keyboard, but I haven't used any. I don't use Palm email, but a keyboard would be nice there. The one thing the GoType has is an external USB port so that you could conceivably stick your PDA in the GoType and use it as a serial terminal for a rackmount server, portable datalogger, or some other such thing.
For me the Stowaway was a worthwhile purchase. I'll use it enough that I'll be glad I bought it, but it's certainly not necessary for most people yet.
okay, I know as a good little linux user microsoft is evil, etc., but I'm psyched to think this would finally happen. as it is, I dual-boot my machine between win98 and debian, where I primarily need windows so that I can use office at full power. (I have yet to see a "compatible" program that didn't botch subtle formatting things. of course, one winbox to another can botch things, but the probability is lower.)
like it or not, office has become the default standard for file formats, and after using it for 10 years, I don't want to learn another software package. I don't mind learning a new operating system, e.g. linux, but when I need to buckle down and get some work done, I want to know that I can still use everything I've learned thus far.
besides, I haven't seen any real attempt to create a good presentation development package, which means it's powerpoint or nothing. the entire free software movement seems to spurn such "corporate" practices such as ties, suits, and fancy presentations, which imho is one of the reasons linux et. al. haven't already risen to a more prominent level, but that's another topic for another time.
There's a utility called Power Boot (www.blueskyinnovations.com) that does on purpose what you did accidentally. You install as many OSes as you want on various partitions, and then Power Boot lets you pick which partition to boot from. Very simple and clever, and I've had no problems with it. You can also hide partitions from each other, which is useful if you're installing from an OEM cd. (Not that you would of course. That would be stealing. ;) It even will rename partitions to c: if that helps your os. I sound like a commercial, but I've been very impressed. I had Win95, DOS/Win31, and WinNT for a while, and now I just use Win98 and Debian.
There are sort of two levels to this discussion. The first is about Microsoft servers and mail systems and Outlook, Messaging, etc. The second is the Office Suite, meaning what the average consumer might buy, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and maybe Outlook for their Email and Front Page for Web stuff. I've used Word/Excel/PPoint since 1991, and I frankly have no desire to learn something new. I would much prefer to learn a new operating system than learn a new office suite. The M$ apps are big and clunky, but I'm now quite good at using their bigness and clunkiness, and I've never really run into stability problems with them. But enough about me. The issue isn't as much what people know how to use, since most M$Office users only use a small subset of the programs' full functionalities. The issue is compatibility and availability. The business industry standard is M$Office. You just can't survive if you can't read and write those formats, and getting access to what those are for developers just ain't easy. What I would want would be versions of Word/etc. for Linux. Give me the stability and flexibility of the OS with the office suite I already know and like to use. If the feds would just make Microsoft give up their source code. If you _really_ make a better product, then you have nothing to worry about...