My personal favorite is the "must be first" drivers... the ones who see you coming and still try to cram in front of you when no car is behind you. (had one today, speeding up on the acceleration ramp but still cutting me off). The ones who change into your lane for no reason, even though they're driving 20 under the limit (forcing me to slam on the brakes, lane change, pass, and lane change back).
There are valid times to accelerate in front of another car, but these aren't them.
1. when they ask for a voice line give them a fax number. 2. Get to know a fax broadcasting service. Offer to sell them a list of numbers (which just happen to be the incoming lines of telemarketers).
Nothing like squealing modem!
(using this trick in reverse... had to put up with some broadcaster faxing my home line, which does not have a fax, for two months)
My LCD's (2 identical units) have no lag over DVI or VGA.
With NTSC video, the delay is noticable. Any video with motion will blur (rolling credits, hockey ads around the edge of the ice - not that it's a problem now.) Audio is completely out of sync, and I need an audio delay somewhere to make things line up.
FWIW, the NTSC input is directly into the monitors, not through an external converter.
Toronto has a GIS/Map feature on their web site, which includes Satellite maps (you need to zoom in first, then it will appear). The maps are from 2002, iirc.
As much as I hate to say this, if you can't make it work for you make it work against you. Spammers are already including domains which have nothing to do with the spam, in an effort to make it totally useless (ie: increasing false positives).
Of course, no content filtering helps if you get your spam as an image attachment, which seems to be the new trick.
Go after the source - zombies, and ideally their servers. I can use spamassassin to block dynamic ip's, but those aren't always zombies. Message sent from a zombie, +20 points, goodbye.
My BSD box, running on a P75, hasn't had a problem with anything I've thrown at it, including P2P sessions from multiple computers.
The only "failure" I've had was when I recently had a client's computer which was infected with one of those "spreads-over-port-445" viruses. The resulting traffic actually overloaded the NIC's buffer, along with lighting up my switch like a Christmas tree.
To me, it's a good safety feature as I'd rather lose my connection internally than have a box spew its crap across the net. Once the problem box was isolated (thank you Nortel managed switch), the box returned to normal without a reboot. I don't know how many consumer routers would handle that kind of abuse, or even warning you that there is a problem somewhere.
Then give me an ad where I expect to find it. Get a banner ad. Buy a google adword. Etc.
Don't go spidering my email address and sending me everything you can, because you can. And, don't purposely alter your message in an attempt to get past my filters. If my filter gets it, then I didn't want to read it anyways. If it doesn't, do you really think I'm actually going to read your mail? (for marketing idiots: no)
Other advertising forms indirectly pay me by subsidizing what I'm doing. Email (and now voicemail) spam forces me to pay for the services, and ultimately pay more so that you can send me ads that I don't want at no cost to you and at no benefit to me.
Even better... trip a threshold, and the machine is automatically thrown onto a restricted VLAN. Capture all http traffic and redirect it to a "You're infected" web page with various cleanup tools. Probably would want to pass through updates for things like definition files. Allow them back once the threshold drops, or the tools clear the machine.
Of course, this only works if it's easily removable with spybot/ad-aware/housecall/etc. The persistent stuff would be trickier... maybe a "send hijack-this log here" option would be needed as well.
E-mail in the workplace, for example, can be very destructive to productivity. There is such a thing as too much mail, and it's because people fall into the same trap as spammers - there's no cost to email so send as much as you can!
When I worked for a school board, everyone received notices from Communications on a regular basis, for things most of us didn't really want to read - retirement/death notices, etc. Some of the notices were useful to some people in the board, but the weekly newsletter would have been more effective. I just setup a rule to delete that mail, but I doubt the teachers could manage that.
Meanwhile, the company I just left used email for EVERYTHING. I'd easily get hundreds of messages a day, and I couldn't make them stop! I'd get everything from all service calls across a 3 hour drive (most of which I couldn't actually take), notification that someone else had a repeat customer (why do I care?), and tech support requests from cow-orkers (instead of using the forums setup for that purpose, and/or UAFSE (using a "fantastic" search engine"). Oh, and clients are supposed to use the same email box and I was supposed to see those messages too.
What happened? I'd often miss the stuff I needed to see/act on because I was spending too much time deleting the crap I didn't want. Nobody had ever adjusted the service area to deal with expansion (so 90% of the emails sent were to people who couldn't act on them). Nobody seemed to understand this, even after I specifically mentioned these points in a support ticket.
All I could do was setup rules to delete about 1/2 my incoming mail, and flag the important messages (ie: anything sent from a domain other than the company's). Of course, the more advanced my rules became, the less information the emails actually contained (ie: dropping postal code so that I could no longer filter requests geographically)
Mailing lists CAN work - I'm on the Mac Managers mailing list. Rules are simple - use it as a last resort, don't post things without showing some research, the readers are just as busy as you are, and direct replies to the poster (question and summary only go to the list). And, the list admins are quick to jump on anyone breaking the rules. It's always worked well.
Unlike Apple's iTunes Music Store, which offers music that is only compatible with Apple's iPod portable player, WMP 10 will work with songs from virtually any other online music store.
Huh? Why is WMP being compared to ITMS? Apples to Oranges (no pun intended). WMP = iTunes/Quicktime. MSN Music = ITMS. Either somebody meant to say iTunes somewhere (but it still doesn't make sense), or this is an attempt to misinform the reader.
Given that Paul Thorrott is behind this, I'm not suprized. (go ahead and search for him. Find something where he hasn't found some way to manipulate things to put MS on top. If he isn't on Microsoft's payroll, he should be)
Got back from vacation, and lost my notebook's travelstar and a few days later a deskstar in my desktop (which had already failed under warranty 9 months earlier). One week, unplugged from everything, should not kill a drive (and they don't run 24x7).
Well you should always use the tool that fits the need best.
Agreed, went into that in another comment.
And all web apps can scale, have limited permissions and you can build the GUI to look however you want it to look. What I was trying to emphasize is that the most I can really do is enforce security through userid/password and the url (and I have built apps which use different url's for different functionality). With a custom client, if you don't have the client, you're not getting in at all (unless you can fake it and know the specifics)
The unpopular reason that hasn't been posted yet is due to the circus involved in making a GUI application under UNIX. First you fight about KDE/GNOME, then GTK/Qt, packaging, installation, on and on and on.
Split the app into a client app which handles presentation of the gui elements/db connectivity, and a set of UI layouts/app functionality. Go nuts and create a MacOS app, a Windows app, KDE/Gnome/GTK/Qt/Curses/whatever versions. The app itself handles platform issues, the UI layout handles common functionality.
Basically, a cross between Filemaker and the web/html.
My biggest complaint with web apps is that sometimes, the user model is just wrong and is way too limited. There are many UI things I just can't enforce with a web app. And, sometimes I want to limit who can access what - it's a lot harder to access something with a custom client than with a web interface.
Maybe if somebody figures out how to make a web site behave more like a regular app, fine. Until then I'll use whatever tool fits the need the best. If I need a large number of clients I'll have limited functionality with a web app. If I need more control, I'll use a FIlemaker solution.
I just finished putting together a system for a client in Filemaker. While a web gui would have been easier in certain cases, I didn't feel that the gui was as flexable. With Filemaker I can scale the solution from a single machine to a client/server system. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it was the best choice.
Now, if Filemaker could come out with a product that keeps the gui, but uses an external db, they may have something.
I went one step farther. My notebook backpack is yellow.
1. If backpack doesn't look like a notebook bag, then yellow definitely does not look like a notebook bag. 2. If it *does* go anywhere, hopefully I'd have a better chance spotting it.
But above all, do not leave it unattended. The only times I've left my notebook is with people I trust, or (while working at a secondary school) in a secure room (locked security cabinet in the A/V lockup room with a camera 24x7 and many other expensive items, or in the "vault" which has exactly 2 keys and I know who has them)
Credit cards aren't exactly rocket science. Pay the bill on time, or don't use the card. You only get interest charges if you haven't paid within 30 days. The bank hasn't made any money from me.
I purposely kept a small limit on my card for years. Some months, all I had was a $10 charge from my ISP. I only bumped it up recently for work (to pay for inventory from my suppliers, giving me time to collect from clients), but also because I knew I could pay it off.
You will need that credit someday. You may not need a car loan, but I don't know of too many people who buy a house without a mortgage.
Does your mobile carrier offer a service to change your outgoing CallerID info? I'm not sure if a mobile carrier would do it, but my landline company has (companies with multiple lines often do this).
With my hard drive luck, a year seems like a "longer lasting" drive. I've lost more hard drives in the last year than ever - Just being away on vacation (with the computers unplugged), I lost 2 hard drives! (not a complete loss, but the systems acted funny enough that I suspected total failure if I didn't replace the drives quickly)
One week of being off, for a drive that is not used 24x7, should not kill a drive. I've had drives sitting on a shelf for a year that still work fine. I should not need to setup a 3-drive RAID array simply to get the level of reliability we had a few years ago.
IIRC (I haven't read the link), these systems actually require 2 tanks - one with vegetable oil, one with regular diesel. In colder climates especially, the car won't start from vegetable oil, and you need to switch it over after the car has been started from diesel. It might be an issue if you have a small trunk.
I wonder if a blend of vegetable oil and diesel would work as biodiesel is basically just that, and my tdi ran just fine on it (actually, it ran even better than on regular diesel - it felt very close to gas)
I worked as a technician at a secondary school a few years ago, and ran into this a few times. One time, I remember being called into the vice-principal's office and meeting with a police officer, who actually asked me how to proceed (obviously, this person didn't have any experience with internet investigations - when my experience was that the only group that *can* do anything is the police).
In any case, I think they knew who it was but were just looking for a way to connect this person to the site, especially when a geocities site can be created anonymously. My knowledge was limited to attempting to get the various logs and tracing through them, and I'm not sure if the police had any internal resources for this type of investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
My personal favorite is the "must be first" drivers... the ones who see you coming and still try to cram in front of you when no car is behind you. (had one today, speeding up on the acceleration ramp but still cutting me off). The ones who change into your lane for no reason, even though they're driving 20 under the limit (forcing me to slam on the brakes, lane change, pass, and lane change back).
There are valid times to accelerate in front of another car, but these aren't them.
The bezel surrounding the LCD on my TiBook has split (thanks, stuck hinge!). Can anyone recommend something to glue it back together?
It's a stress point, but it was glued at the factory so it must be possible.
Even better:
1. when they ask for a voice line give them a fax number.
2. Get to know a fax broadcasting service. Offer to sell them a list of numbers (which just happen to be the incoming lines of telemarketers).
Nothing like squealing modem!
(using this trick in reverse... had to put up with some broadcaster faxing my home line, which does not have a fax, for two months)
DV video is approx 1GB for every 5 minutes. Fire up a capture session (even if it's color bars or something), slice it up and email away.
Bonus points if you have access to something that does even less compression.
I doubt my broadband provider would like me though.
My LCD's (2 identical units) have no lag over DVI or VGA.
With NTSC video, the delay is noticable. Any video with motion will blur (rolling credits, hockey ads around the edge of the ice - not that it's a problem now.) Audio is completely out of sync, and I need an audio delay somewhere to make things line up.
FWIW, the NTSC input is directly into the monitors, not through an external converter.
Toronto has a GIS/Map feature on their web site, which includes Satellite maps (you need to zoom in first, then it will appear). The maps are from 2002, iirc.
I don't have enough of a load on the machines, so P75-200's are more than enough to handle routing, apache, file serving, etc.
Why have a P4 using the extra power and generating extra heat? I don't think my P75 even has a cpu fan.
I thought Telus (dominant landline carrier in Western Canada) implemented this recently as well.
As much as I hate to say this, if you can't make it work for you make it work against you. Spammers are already including domains which have nothing to do with the spam, in an effort to make it totally useless (ie: increasing false positives).
Of course, no content filtering helps if you get your spam as an image attachment, which seems to be the new trick.
Go after the source - zombies, and ideally their servers. I can use spamassassin to block dynamic ip's, but those aren't always zombies. Message sent from a zombie, +20 points, goodbye.
My BSD box, running on a P75, hasn't had a problem with anything I've thrown at it, including P2P sessions from multiple computers.
The only "failure" I've had was when I recently had a client's computer which was infected with one of those "spreads-over-port-445" viruses. The resulting traffic actually overloaded the NIC's buffer, along with lighting up my switch like a Christmas tree.
To me, it's a good safety feature as I'd rather lose my connection internally than have a box spew its crap across the net. Once the problem box was isolated (thank you Nortel managed switch), the box returned to normal without a reboot. I don't know how many consumer routers would handle that kind of abuse, or even warning you that there is a problem somewhere.
I'm using a P75 and a P-Pro 150 for my servers. I've even been considering clocking down the machines since the load is fairly low.
Just don't do this with windows. That machine doubles as my electric heater, and does a lot less.
Then give me an ad where I expect to find it. Get a banner ad. Buy a google adword. Etc.
Don't go spidering my email address and sending me everything you can, because you can. And, don't purposely alter your message in an attempt to get past my filters. If my filter gets it, then I didn't want to read it anyways. If it doesn't, do you really think I'm actually going to read your mail? (for marketing idiots: no)
Other advertising forms indirectly pay me by subsidizing what I'm doing. Email (and now voicemail) spam forces me to pay for the services, and ultimately pay more so that you can send me ads that I don't want at no cost to you and at no benefit to me.
Even better... trip a threshold, and the machine is automatically thrown onto a restricted VLAN. Capture all http traffic and redirect it to a "You're infected" web page with various cleanup tools. Probably would want to pass through updates for things like definition files. Allow them back once the threshold drops, or the tools clear the machine.
Of course, this only works if it's easily removable with spybot/ad-aware/housecall/etc. The persistent stuff would be trickier... maybe a "send hijack-this log here" option would be needed as well.
E-mail in the workplace, for example, can be very destructive to productivity.
There is such a thing as too much mail, and it's because people fall into the same trap as spammers - there's no cost to email so send as much as you can!
When I worked for a school board, everyone received notices from Communications on a regular basis, for things most of us didn't really want to read - retirement/death notices, etc. Some of the notices were useful to some people in the board, but the weekly newsletter would have been more effective. I just setup a rule to delete that mail, but I doubt the teachers could manage that.
Meanwhile, the company I just left used email for EVERYTHING. I'd easily get hundreds of messages a day, and I couldn't make them stop! I'd get everything from all service calls across a 3 hour drive (most of which I couldn't actually take), notification that someone else had a repeat customer (why do I care?), and tech support requests from cow-orkers (instead of using the forums setup for that purpose, and/or UAFSE (using a "fantastic" search engine"). Oh, and clients are supposed to use the same email box and I was supposed to see those messages too.
What happened? I'd often miss the stuff I needed to see/act on because I was spending too much time deleting the crap I didn't want. Nobody had ever adjusted the service area to deal with expansion (so 90% of the emails sent were to people who couldn't act on them). Nobody seemed to understand this, even after I specifically mentioned these points in a support ticket.
All I could do was setup rules to delete about 1/2 my incoming mail, and flag the important messages (ie: anything sent from a domain other than the company's). Of course, the more advanced my rules became, the less information the emails actually contained (ie: dropping postal code so that I could no longer filter requests geographically)
Mailing lists CAN work - I'm on the Mac Managers mailing list. Rules are simple - use it as a last resort, don't post things without showing some research, the readers are just as busy as you are, and direct replies to the poster (question and summary only go to the list). And, the list admins are quick to jump on anyone breaking the rules. It's always worked well.
Unlike Apple's iTunes Music Store, which offers music that is only compatible with Apple's iPod portable player, WMP 10 will work with songs from virtually any other online music store.
Huh? Why is WMP being compared to ITMS? Apples to Oranges (no pun intended). WMP = iTunes/Quicktime. MSN Music = ITMS. Either somebody meant to say iTunes somewhere (but it still doesn't make sense), or this is an attempt to misinform the reader.
Given that Paul Thorrott is behind this, I'm not suprized.
(go ahead and search for him. Find something where he hasn't found some way to manipulate things to put MS on top. If he isn't on Microsoft's payroll, he should be)
Got back from vacation, and lost my notebook's travelstar and a few days later a deskstar in my desktop (which had already failed under warranty 9 months earlier). One week, unplugged from everything, should not kill a drive (and they don't run 24x7).
Well you should always use the tool that fits the need best.
Agreed, went into that in another comment.
And all web apps can scale, have limited permissions and you can build the GUI to look however you want it to look.
What I was trying to emphasize is that the most I can really do is enforce security through userid/password and the url (and I have built apps which use different url's for different functionality). With a custom client, if you don't have the client, you're not getting in at all (unless you can fake it and know the specifics)
The unpopular reason that hasn't been posted yet is due to the circus involved in making a GUI application under UNIX. First you fight about KDE/GNOME, then GTK/Qt, packaging, installation, on and on and on.
Split the app into a client app which handles presentation of the gui elements/db connectivity, and a set of UI layouts/app functionality. Go nuts and create a MacOS app, a Windows app, KDE/Gnome/GTK/Qt/Curses/whatever versions. The app itself handles platform issues, the UI layout handles common functionality.
Basically, a cross between Filemaker and the web/html.
My biggest complaint with web apps is that sometimes, the user model is just wrong and is way too limited. There are many UI things I just can't enforce with a web app. And, sometimes I want to limit who can access what - it's a lot harder to access something with a custom client than with a web interface.
Maybe if somebody figures out how to make a web site behave more like a regular app, fine. Until then I'll use whatever tool fits the need the best. If I need a large number of clients I'll have limited functionality with a web app. If I need more control, I'll use a FIlemaker solution.
I just finished putting together a system for a client in Filemaker. While a web gui would have been easier in certain cases, I didn't feel that the gui was as flexable. With Filemaker I can scale the solution from a single machine to a client/server system. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it was the best choice.
Now, if Filemaker could come out with a product that keeps the gui, but uses an external db, they may have something.
I went one step farther. My notebook backpack is yellow.
1. If backpack doesn't look like a notebook bag, then yellow definitely does not look like a notebook bag.
2. If it *does* go anywhere, hopefully I'd have a better chance spotting it.
But above all, do not leave it unattended.
The only times I've left my notebook is with people I trust, or (while working at a secondary school) in a secure room (locked security cabinet in the A/V lockup room with a camera 24x7 and many other expensive items, or in the "vault" which has exactly 2 keys and I know who has them)
Credit cards aren't exactly rocket science. Pay the bill on time, or don't use the card. You only get interest charges if you haven't paid within 30 days. The bank hasn't made any money from me.
I purposely kept a small limit on my card for years. Some months, all I had was a $10 charge from my ISP. I only bumped it up recently for work (to pay for inventory from my suppliers, giving me time to collect from clients), but also because I knew I could pay it off.
You will need that credit someday. You may not need a car loan, but I don't know of too many people who buy a house without a mortgage.
Does your mobile carrier offer a service to change your outgoing CallerID info? I'm not sure if a mobile carrier would do it, but my landline company has (companies with multiple lines often do this).
With my hard drive luck, a year seems like a "longer lasting" drive. I've lost more hard drives in the last year than ever - Just being away on vacation (with the computers unplugged), I lost 2 hard drives! (not a complete loss, but the systems acted funny enough that I suspected total failure if I didn't replace the drives quickly)
One week of being off, for a drive that is not used 24x7, should not kill a drive. I've had drives sitting on a shelf for a year that still work fine. I should not need to setup a 3-drive RAID array simply to get the level of reliability we had a few years ago.
IIRC (I haven't read the link), these systems actually require 2 tanks - one with vegetable oil, one with regular diesel. In colder climates especially, the car won't start from vegetable oil, and you need to switch it over after the car has been started from diesel. It might be an issue if you have a small trunk.
I wonder if a blend of vegetable oil and diesel would work as biodiesel is basically just that, and my tdi ran just fine on it (actually, it ran even better than on regular diesel - it felt very close to gas)
I worked as a technician at a secondary school a few years ago, and ran into this a few times. One time, I remember being called into the vice-principal's office and meeting with a police officer, who actually asked me how to proceed (obviously, this person didn't have any experience with internet investigations - when my experience was that the only group that *can* do anything is the police).
In any case, I think they knew who it was but were just looking for a way to connect this person to the site, especially when a geocities site can be created anonymously. My knowledge was limited to attempting to get the various logs and tracing through them, and I'm not sure if the police had any internal resources for this type of investigation.