Something is quite wrong with the Canadian military. First they de-commission Multics. Now I hear that they are getting new helicopters to replace the Sea-Kings. What's next? Our diesel submarine getting replaced? I am starting to see a conspiracy.
Actually, I don't begrudge the millitary for getting new helicopters. They are really needed.
Don't know about Nova Scotia I live on the other side of the country. Here in Calgary Radio Shack stores are not as plentyful as they used to be. Used to be able to find stand-alone Radio Shacks easily. The only ones left in the city now are located exclusivly in the shopping malls.
These mall stores suck now. Their selection of parts has all but disappeared. Seems their focus now is selling computers, stereos, phones etc. Lord help you if you want to ask a radio shack employee a question. "You got questions...We've got blank stares".
Back in the good old days of the stand-alone Radio Shack there were quite a few hobbiests around. Does not seem to be the same these days.
Recently got a new contract. Part of it requires that I have to visit every remote location for this company (that's the only thing interesting about this job BTW).
As I am a contractor they won't give me voice mail at home office or even a phone that can dial an outside line. I decided to get a pay-as-you-go phone (I can deduct this as a business expense IANATA [1]).
Fo my use, prepaid cellular is working out great. $25 canadian for 75 minutes of airtime or 90 days whichever comes first. Prepaid is great if you don't use it much, like me. If your worried that 75 minutes is not enough you can buy in $50 increments. $50 gives you 175 minutes IIRC.
The only drawback to my prepaid is that the phone will only work in Alberta or British Columbia. But I do not have to travel outside Alberta for my job.
1. I am not a tax accountant. Will be deducting the phone anyway.
Why? So Cretin[1] and his cronies can spend another four years doing absolutely nothing?!? Maybe they can find more protesters to pepper spray in the next term. I seem to remember the statement "I will get rid of da GST". Well, I'm still waiting. Real tax cuts are needed. Good old Cretin did announce some just before the election. Then he dissolved parliment for the election, so the tax cuts are not law yet they are nothing more than a promise. Are you actually naive enough to believe that this asshole will follow through on this promise?
We need a change. Even Joe Who would be a better choice (not voting for him either).
Sound like you have Shaw@home. My Shaw cable connection was just horrible. A friend who has it said it seems to be getting worse. Switching to xDSL was a great move for me. No more high ping times.
I have basically the same luck with floppy fisks. It's almost impossible for me to format a floppy and not end up with bad sectors. I'm in the habit of throwing out the disk if even one bad sector shows up. Interesting though, my low density floppys from my Commodore 1581 are still in great shape. The floppys I use in the PC OTOH...
Cannot recommend Iomega at all. My opinion of that company is that they are lower than both pond scum and lawyers. I had a Jaz drive. Of course, it broke after a while. Since it was out of warranty I took it apart. What I found was that those bastages sold me a remanufactured drive! There was a second layer of do not remove tape that had been cut through. There was nothing on the box to indicate the drive was remanufactured. I had bought the drive from a reputable store. It came in a factory shrink wrapped Iomega box. In fact there was nothing to indicate that this was not a new drive.
Even iomega phone support sucks. Get out the credit card and give us the number before you can speak to anyone. Good luck downloading drivers for their tape drives. They charge you for them. Bottom line? Do not do business with Iomega.
I know this won't help...If you have BeOS you can get a driver for the Rio that allows you to ftp[1] files to and from the Rio.
How can DARE possibly be effective these days? If you have watched any TV in the last year you will have seen advertising for various drug companies. Got a headache? We got a pill for that. Bladder control problem? Pill for that too. Problem socializing? No problem, here's a pill. Problem sleeping? Have a pill. Etcetera etcetera etcetera...
Now you have all this advertising that essentially says "Feel bad? Here, take a pill". It would not surprise me that when kids see all this they may say. I feel bad, think I'll take something for it.
Makes no difference to me that the advertised stuff is government approved. All drugs are essentially bad (ever listened to the side effects of the advertised drugs?). Medically some have good uses but I find advertising for drugs to be reprehensible. If you have a problem go to the doctor. Work with that doctor too. Do not just blindly take that prescription to be filled without asking questions first.
No one gets fired for choosing Microsoft.
on
Is Novell Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
That is not true at my company. I'm the only employee though...
So what happened to planet X that was in the news so many years ago?
Duck Dogers and Marvin the Martian got into to a dispute about property ownership and blew the planet to smithereens. It is said this happened in the twenty-first and one-half century but it seemed like it was 1950 something.
Re:Um, because it burns up too much electricity?
on
VIC20 As Wap Client
·
· Score: 1
Actually it's not the CPU/keboard unit thats at fault here. The Vic (C64 too) do get warm but the fault is in the power supply.
The power supplies on Vics and C64s were external transformers in a block that sat under the desk. The transformer, and its related components, were totally encased in a block of white epoxy with a plastic shell. One of the components of the transformer was a sub-standard rectifier. Depending on how the rectifier blew, you had one of two situations happen. One, you would get no voltage to the computer. Two, you would get over-voltage/current supplied to the computer. IIRC - it has been a while:) . C128s and newer C64s (C64 with white case) were supplied with a better power supply. My C128 still gets quite warm but I have had it running for hours with no problems (except speed;) ).
I'm not really sure why spam annoys us more than junk mail...
My reason:
Spam is theft.
With paper junk mail the sender pays for the postage. E-mail is the inverse. The E-mailbox owner ends up paying for all that spam. Besides, I can use that paper junk mail in my wood stove in the winter:)
Besides, I enjoy smashing spammers. A little header analysis, a little nslookup, a little traceroute, a little whois, and a note to postmaster@whatever.net, and away goes a spammer's account, even if it is a game of whack-a-mole.
Agreed! This is fun. Recently switched from @home to a DSL provider. I get very little spam at $NEWISP so I miss on on some of the above fun. I'd rather have a clean e-mail box though so I'm not bitching. The e-mail address I use to post here has been harvested[1] so I do get some spam. Funny that. You'd think they would purge domains like suespammers from the lists. Rule two I guess.[2]
Spamazon is a royal pain to deal with for e-mail issues. I remember I had one heck of a hard time trying to get off their **** mailing list. Recently started a new account on Spamazon. This time I made damn sure I unchecked every option I could find. It seems to have worked as I have not received any unwanted mail from spamazon in a long time.
Another address I use is me@privacy.net. This address generates a bounce message when an e-mail is sent to it. Have not signed up at sneakemail yet. Looks like a great concept.
[1] Harvested from Slashdot. Only used this address here.
[2]. Rules AFAIR: (from nanae)
0. Spam is theft.
1. Spammers are lie.
2. Spammers are stupid.
3. See rule one.
You can have all the Canadian script you want. It's worthless. Real Canadians use the money printed by Canadian Tire for all their purchases.
Re:Black Ice Software != Network ICE
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 1
That should have been clearer in the article. I myself thought WTF is Network ICE doing?!? At first.
Cheers.
Re:Is spam also free speech?
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 1
Spam is free (frea[1]) speach? Don't think so Tim. In the case of spam the cost of receiving this drivel is paid for by the recipient. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. In this case my nose == my e-mail box. I'm paying for my e-mail box[2]. I have the right to decide what gets put in that box. The way it works now is that I pay a fee for each piece of e-mail that gets delivered. I have the right to refuse mail I do not want especially since I'm paying the freight.
If you want to market, put up a web page. Start an opt-in mailing list. I don't have a problem with either of these two methods. Just do not force me to receive stuff I do not want.[3] For marketers check out the following link on www.spamfree.org
1. Inside joke - news.admin.net-abuse.email
2. Paying twice. Once for my ISP and another fee to a spam filtering service.
3. Do not mind junk mail as the cost of this is paid for by the sender. Plus I can use all the paper to heat my house in the winter.
Does not matter. All MAPS does is provide a list of outfits that do not - in MAPS opinion - adhere to proper internet mail standards.
It is the individual ISP's decision to use the MAPS data to filter e-mail. Nobody is forcing anyone to use MAPS. It's just a list.
How someone could possibly think that could win a suit like this is beyond me. Since when were opinions actionable? Slander of course, but I do not see that here. If companys that were on the list would co-operate[1] they would find it very easy to get off the RBL. As an added plus the amount of unwanted mail processed would decrease.
Used to have @home and full cable TV service. I got PO'd with our darn government forcing us to pay ever-increasing cable fees for channels neither you or I would ever watch. So, canceled the cable TV. Cable company said my @home service would then increase to $49.95 per month. I told them where to put the fee increase and signed up for ADSL. I was happy with my @home service and I would have kept it if the monthly charge remained the same. ADSL costs the same as @home did $39.95.
My observations are that ADSL is consistantly faster than @home. I will not get the tremendous bursts of speed on ADSL that I sometimes got on @home. I'll take consistanty faster any time over a few rare, 5am surfing time, bursts of speed. Telusplanet (aka the local phone company) offers excellent service and I have yet to have an outage. Get good bandwidth too. 1.5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up.
The best part? I still have full cable TV for free. Phoned the cable company back in May to let them know I was not disconnected but they have not pulled the plug yet. Fsck 'em, bloody monopoly.
Due, in part, to the hub-bub surrounding this barcode reader I decided to order one.[1] Also want to code a grocery/CD/DVD/Book database. If they think I will be installing the CRQ software they have got another think coming.
I found two interesting things on their web site. One, there is no mention of a EULA or any other contractual commitment you must make when you place the order. Two, they are going to sell some kind of service that lets you have barcodes on you company business cards. For the small fee of about $400 (I don't remember the exact price) per year they will redirect traffic to your web site.
1. Don't think RS in Canada has these things. Besides what is this mall place? Oh yeah, that evil crowded place I go once a year to buy Christmas gifts.
Toronto Dominion Bank's website [snip] just introduced a bug in the javascript code which makes it not work unless you're using windows or a mac.
That's nasty.
Bank of Nova Scotia uses an add on program called Entrust. Entrust works as a proxy to encrypt everything sent/received from the bank. Of course there is no Linux, BeOS, BSD, etc version of Entrust. Windoze & Mac only.
When you write a linux driver, you bypass all the secret sending of private info to their servers, which means they can't make money off you.
So, Digital Convergence Inc. is not going to make any money me because I'm using their device without their software. I'm real broken up about that - more like ROTFLMAO.
The above is a similar idea to the fellow that made a program to remove cascading style sheets from HTML pages. He called it DECSS. IIRC he also got a letter from our friends. Think the university where this was hosted did pull the page. For a little while.
Kaplin's ruling just sucked. How soon is that appeal? MPAA and DVDCCA really need to grab a clue. All I want to to view my legaly pruchased DVDs on a platform other than Windoze.
Here's an idea. We could all start linking to DeMPAA.zip or Claddvd. The latter works much better than the original DeCSS.
Shameless plug:
Join the Cafe mailing list at eff.org. This has been the most worthwile mailing list I have ever subscribed to. It's low traffic, informative and exclusivly deals with RIAA, MPAA, DVDCCA, and Sony vs Conectix, etc. cases.
If I got a treat for holding the magazine up, or scanning the barcode in, the company would certainly have one foot in the door as far as attracting my attention.
In Mandrake if you cannot use the "default install mode"[1] of 800x600 you do not see any check boxes at all on the package selection screen. I thought 7.1's text mode install sucked. The text mode install was way better one or two versions ago.
Mandrake's default install is okay but I wish some Q.A. was done on the alternate modes.
[1] I have an old crappy monitor[2] I only use for installing - use an Xterminal to do work on the box.
[2] It only does 640x480 and 1024x768. 800x600 wonks out.
In my humble experience yes. A lot depends on who is supplying your ADSL. My ISP is Telus (Alberta, Canada) and their service rocks compared to Shaw@home (Shaw Cable).
The ADSL line was tested to 1.55 down and.5 up. I get these speeds more often that not. When I was on @home I was usually only getting.7 down on average - most of the time it was.5 down. My latency on ADSL has been very good as well.
Additionally @Home's USENET servers suck. The retension is about 1 day, or less, on the binary groups.
One drawback. My ADSL line will never exceed 1.55 down. Sometimes (at 4:30 am, with a full moon) I did manage to get 4.7 down over cable (downloading the latest Mandrake ISOs). But that sure did not happen very often.
Slashdot Mirror
Something is quite wrong with the Canadian military. First they de-commission Multics. Now I hear that they are getting new helicopters to replace the Sea-Kings. What's next? Our diesel submarine getting replaced? I am starting to see a conspiracy.
Actually, I don't begrudge the millitary for getting new helicopters. They are really needed.
Don't know about Nova Scotia I live on the other side of the country. Here in Calgary Radio Shack stores are not as plentyful as they used to be. Used to be able to find stand-alone Radio Shacks easily. The only ones left in the city now are located exclusivly in the shopping malls.
These mall stores suck now. Their selection of parts has all but disappeared. Seems their focus now is selling computers, stereos, phones etc. Lord help you if you want to ask a radio shack employee a question. "You got questions...We've got blank stares".
Back in the good old days of the stand-alone Radio Shack there were quite a few hobbiests around. Does not seem to be the same these days.
Recently got a new contract. Part of it requires that I have to visit every remote location for this company (that's the only thing interesting about this job BTW).
As I am a contractor they won't give me voice mail at home office or even a phone that can dial an outside line. I decided to get a pay-as-you-go phone (I can deduct this as a business expense IANATA [1]).
Fo my use, prepaid cellular is working out great. $25 canadian for 75 minutes of airtime or 90 days whichever comes first. Prepaid is great if you don't use it much, like me. If your worried that 75 minutes is not enough you can buy in $50 increments. $50 gives you 175 minutes IIRC.
The only drawback to my prepaid is that the phone will only work in Alberta or British Columbia. But I do not have to travel outside Alberta for my job.
1. I am not a tax accountant. Will be deducting the phone anyway.
VOTE LIBERAL!
Why? So Cretin[1] and his cronies can spend another four years doing absolutely nothing?!? Maybe they can find more protesters to pepper spray in the next term. I seem to remember the statement "I will get rid of da GST". Well, I'm still waiting. Real tax cuts are needed. Good old Cretin did announce some just before the election. Then he dissolved parliment for the election, so the tax cuts are not law yet they are nothing more than a promise. Are you actually naive enough to believe that this asshole will follow through on this promise?
We need a change. Even Joe Who would be a better choice (not voting for him either).
1. Yes, I know I misspelled his name.
Sound like you have Shaw@home. My Shaw cable connection was just horrible. A friend who has it said it seems to be getting worse. Switching to xDSL was a great move for me. No more high ping times.
I have basically the same luck with floppy fisks. It's almost impossible for me to format a floppy and not end up with bad sectors. I'm in the habit of throwing out the disk if even one bad sector shows up. Interesting though, my low density floppys from my Commodore 1581 are still in great shape. The floppys I use in the PC OTOH...
Cannot recommend Iomega at all. My opinion of that company is that they are lower than both pond scum and lawyers. I had a Jaz drive. Of course, it broke after a while. Since it was out of warranty I took it apart. What I found was that those bastages sold me a remanufactured drive! There was a second layer of do not remove tape that had been cut through. There was nothing on the box to indicate the drive was remanufactured. I had bought the drive from a reputable store. It came in a factory shrink wrapped Iomega box. In fact there was nothing to indicate that this was not a new drive.
Even iomega phone support sucks. Get out the credit card and give us the number before you can speak to anyone. Good luck downloading drivers for their tape drives. They charge you for them. Bottom line? Do not do business with Iomega.
I know this won't help...If you have BeOS you can get a driver for the Rio that allows you to ftp[1] files to and from the Rio.
1. Or copy? Do not exactly remember the method.
I did mean to say 24th and one half. Didn't bother posting a correction. Gotta learn to use preview :).
Wasn't there another version of this cartoon where planet X was the only source of yo-yo polish?
How can DARE possibly be effective these days? If you have watched any TV in the last year you will have seen advertising for various drug companies. Got a headache? We got a pill for that. Bladder control problem? Pill for that too. Problem socializing? No problem, here's a pill. Problem sleeping? Have a pill. Etcetera etcetera etcetera...
Now you have all this advertising that essentially says "Feel bad? Here, take a pill". It would not surprise me that when kids see all this they may say. I feel bad, think I'll take something for it.
Makes no difference to me that the advertised stuff is government approved. All drugs are essentially bad (ever listened to the side effects of the advertised drugs?). Medically some have good uses but I find advertising for drugs to be reprehensible. If you have a problem go to the doctor. Work with that doctor too. Do not just blindly take that prescription to be filled without asking questions first.
That is not true at my company. I'm the only employee though...
So what happened to planet X that was in the news so many years ago?
Duck Dogers and Marvin the Martian got into to a dispute about property ownership and blew the planet to smithereens. It is said this happened in the twenty-first and one-half century but it seemed like it was 1950 something.
Actually it's not the CPU/keboard unit thats at fault here. The Vic (C64 too) do get warm but the fault is in the power supply.
:) . C128s and newer C64s (C64 with white case) were supplied with a better power supply. My C128 still gets quite warm but I have had it running for hours with no problems (except speed ;) ).
The power supplies on Vics and C64s were external transformers in a block that sat under the desk. The transformer, and its related components, were totally encased in a block of white epoxy with a plastic shell. One of the components of the transformer was a sub-standard rectifier. Depending on how the rectifier blew, you had one of two situations happen. One, you would get no voltage to the computer. Two, you would get over-voltage/current supplied to the computer. IIRC - it has been a while
I suspect number two is what happened.
I'm not really sure why spam annoys us more than junk mail...
:)
My reason:
Spam is theft.
With paper junk mail the sender pays for the postage. E-mail is the inverse. The E-mailbox owner ends up paying for all that spam. Besides, I can use that paper junk mail in my wood stove in the winter
Besides, I enjoy smashing spammers. A little header analysis, a little nslookup, a little traceroute, a little whois, and a note to postmaster@whatever.net, and away goes a spammer's account, even if it is a game of whack-a-mole.
Agreed! This is fun. Recently switched from @home to a DSL provider. I get very little spam at $NEWISP so I miss on on some of the above fun. I'd rather have a clean e-mail box though so I'm not bitching. The e-mail address I use to post here has been harvested[1] so I do get some spam. Funny that. You'd think they would purge domains like suespammers from the lists. Rule two I guess.[2]
Spamazon is a royal pain to deal with for e-mail issues. I remember I had one heck of a hard time trying to get off their **** mailing list. Recently started a new account on Spamazon. This time I made damn sure I unchecked every option I could find. It seems to have worked as I have not received any unwanted mail from spamazon in a long time.
Another address I use is me@privacy.net. This address generates a bounce message when an e-mail is sent to it. Have not signed up at sneakemail yet. Looks like a great concept.
[1] Harvested from Slashdot. Only used this address here.
[2]. Rules AFAIR: (from nanae)
0. Spam is theft.
1. Spammers are lie.
2. Spammers are stupid.
3. See rule one.
You can have all the Canadian script you want. It's worthless. Real Canadians use the money printed by Canadian Tire for all their purchases.
That should have been clearer in the article. I myself thought WTF is Network ICE doing?!? At first.
Cheers.
Spam is free (frea[1]) speach? Don't think so Tim. In the case of spam the cost of receiving this drivel is paid for by the recipient. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. In this case my nose == my e-mail box. I'm paying for my e-mail box[2]. I have the right to decide what gets put in that box. The way it works now is that I pay a fee for each piece of e-mail that gets delivered. I have the right to refuse mail I do not want especially since I'm paying the freight.
If you want to market, put up a web page. Start an opt-in mailing list. I don't have a problem with either of these two methods. Just do not force me to receive stuff I do not want.[3] For marketers check out the following link on www.spamfree.org
How to market on the Internet
1. Inside joke - news.admin.net-abuse.email
2. Paying twice. Once for my ISP and another fee to a spam filtering service.
3. Do not mind junk mail as the cost of this is paid for by the sender. Plus I can use all the paper to heat my house in the winter.
Does not matter. All MAPS does is provide a list of outfits that do not - in MAPS opinion - adhere to proper internet mail standards.
It is the individual ISP's decision to use the MAPS data to filter e-mail. Nobody is forcing anyone to use MAPS. It's just a list.
How someone could possibly think that could win a suit like this is beyond me. Since when were opinions actionable? Slander of course, but I do not see that here. If companys that were on the list would co-operate[1] they would find it very easy to get off the RBL. As an added plus the amount of unwanted mail processed would decrease.
1. Example: Implementing a confirmed opt-in.
Used to have @home and full cable TV service. I got PO'd with our darn government forcing us to pay ever-increasing cable fees for channels neither you or I would ever watch. So, canceled the cable TV. Cable company said my @home service would then increase to $49.95 per month. I told them where to put the fee increase and signed up for ADSL. I was happy with my @home service and I would have kept it if the monthly charge remained the same. ADSL costs the same as @home did $39.95.
My observations are that ADSL is consistantly faster than @home. I will not get the tremendous bursts of speed on ADSL that I sometimes got on @home. I'll take consistanty faster any time over a few rare, 5am surfing time, bursts of speed. Telusplanet (aka the local phone company) offers excellent service and I have yet to have an outage. Get good bandwidth too. 1.5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up.
The best part? I still have full cable TV for free. Phoned the cable company back in May to let them know I was not disconnected but they have not pulled the plug yet. Fsck 'em, bloody monopoly.
Due, in part, to the hub-bub surrounding this barcode reader I decided to order one.[1] Also want to code a grocery/CD/DVD/Book database. If they think I will be installing the CRQ software they have got another think coming.
I found two interesting things on their web site. One, there is no mention of a EULA or any other contractual commitment you must make when you place the order. Two, they are going to sell some kind of service that lets you have barcodes on you company business cards. For the small fee of about $400 (I don't remember the exact price) per year they will redirect traffic to your web site.
1. Don't think RS in Canada has these things. Besides what is this mall place? Oh yeah, that evil crowded place I go once a year to buy Christmas gifts.
Toronto Dominion Bank's website [snip] just introduced a bug in the javascript code which makes it not work unless you're using windows or a mac.
That's nasty.
Bank of Nova Scotia uses an add on program called Entrust. Entrust works as a proxy to encrypt everything sent/received from the bank. Of course there is no Linux, BeOS, BSD, etc version of Entrust. Windoze & Mac only.
When you write a linux driver, you bypass all the secret sending of private info to their servers, which means they can't make money off you.
So, Digital Convergence Inc. is not going to make any money me because I'm using their device without their software. I'm real broken up about that - more like ROTFLMAO.
The above is a similar idea to the fellow that made a program to remove cascading style sheets from HTML pages. He called it DECSS. IIRC he also got a letter from our friends. Think the university where this was hosted did pull the page. For a little while.
Kaplin's ruling just sucked. How soon is that appeal? MPAA and DVDCCA really need to grab a clue. All I want to to view my legaly pruchased DVDs on a platform other than Windoze.
Here's an idea. We could all start linking to DeMPAA.zip or Claddvd. The latter works much better than the original DeCSS.
Shameless plug:
Join the Cafe mailing list at eff.org. This has been the most worthwile mailing list I have ever subscribed to. It's low traffic, informative and exclusivly deals with RIAA, MPAA, DVDCCA, and Sony vs Conectix, etc. cases.
If I got a treat for holding the magazine up, or scanning the barcode in, the company would certainly have one foot in the door as far as attracting my attention.
I'm thinking Pavlov(sp?) and the canine here.
In Mandrake if you cannot use the "default install mode"[1] of 800x600 you do not see any check boxes at all on the package selection screen. I thought 7.1's text mode install sucked. The text mode install was way better one or two versions ago.
Mandrake's default install is okay but I wish some Q.A. was done on the alternate modes.
[1] I have an old crappy monitor[2] I only use for installing - use an Xterminal to do work on the box.
[2] It only does 640x480 and 1024x768. 800x600 wonks out.
@Home sucks. Is ADSL any better?
.5 up. I get these speeds more often that not. When I was on @home I was usually only getting .7 down on average - most of the time it was .5 down. My latency on ADSL has been very good as well.
In my humble experience yes. A lot depends on who is supplying your ADSL. My ISP is Telus (Alberta, Canada) and their service rocks compared to Shaw@home (Shaw Cable).
The ADSL line was tested to 1.55 down and
Additionally @Home's USENET servers suck. The retension is about 1 day, or less, on the binary groups.
One drawback. My ADSL line will never exceed 1.55 down. Sometimes (at 4:30 am, with a full moon) I did manage to get 4.7 down over cable (downloading the latest Mandrake ISOs). But that sure did not happen very often.