It does not represent a decision by the computer's owner as to whether you had a right to request the file and whether they should supply it to you. If I walked up to your computer and started deleting files, would the fact that your computer deleted the files mean that I had your permission to do so?
You find a poster on a wall, and read the details of a meeting being held by some cultural group. When attending the cultural group meeting, you're told to go away because you weren't invited.
Unless measures have been taken to grant and enforce permission to access a web page, that web page is effectively posted on a billboard in the town park.
There are no "rules" on the Internet. The only way to make people behave the way you want them to, is to enact technical measures to enforce your rules. Any time your rules of behaviour on a site connected to the Internet differ from total anarchy, you have to provide the technical measures to prevent your rules from being broken.
How do you value damages caused to your company by someone downloading images that are posted in a publically accessible web-site?
Okay, now sit your pansy lamerican arse back on your seat for a moment.
Who pays for the link from Australia to the United States? Give you a clue - Australians. Whatever infrastructure corporate USA has sunk into your soil is irrelevant. We pay for all the traffic to and from Australia. When some lamerican skript kiddy ping floods an Australian server, that's Australian dollars footing the bill.
Having an anywhere-centric Internet is bad, since that means there are fewer Governments that need to be corrupted to spoil the Internet. Having a USA centric Internet is especially bad, since the USA doesn't respect the rights of foreign persons or corporations. Let's see - the USA brought us Echelon and Spam. The good old US of A, mate - they take with one hand, and serve crap with the other.
D'oh! Don't you hate it when you put the decimal point a few too many places to the left?
5.7 Petabytes per load.
916 Megabits per second average throughput.
So maybe it is that awesome after all:)
You could take a week to write the tapes and load them, and another week to unload and read them, and you'd still have damned good throughput for an international link. I'm impressed.
Just goes to show - the calculator got the number right, but it's the nut behind the wheel who has got to get the units right.
A 747 full of DAT's has truly awsome bandwidth, but the latency is deadly.
A 747 freighter has a cargo capacity of 777.9 cubic metres, or 109,800kg (ie: whichever you hit first). By volume, it could carry 8 million DDS3 tapes, equivalent to approximately 96 Terabytes per load. However, it can only carry approximately 481,000 DDS3 tapes by weight (box of 5 weighs 228g), which is only equivalent to 5.7 Terabytes per load.
Assuming you can load the data on and read the data off those tapes instantaneously, and assuming you had a perfect 14 hour flight from Sydney (Australia) to Los Angeles (United States), your maximum bandwidth is close to 916 bits per second.
Just ask the Brits about the utility of this kind of law. After all, over there if the police demand you release your crypto keys, you're not allowed to say that you don't have them.
The example that someone actually implemented was to write a confession to a crime, encrypt it with a PGP key that claimed to belong to the Minister backing the stupid law. Then they destroyed the keys.
In addition, this stupid kind of law adds more burden to foreign nationals. Say I use strong crypto to post a message to a discussion group. Say that discussion group is hosted in the good old USA. If I ever take a trip to the USA - or even just stop over in Hawaii en-route somewhere else - I'll get arrested by US forces for breach of US laws, a la Dimitri Sklyarov.
The minor benefit gained by this kind of policy is totally undermined by the amount of evil that can be performed. Imagine for a second that bureaucrats weren't paid enough to do their jobs. Imagine for a moment that some bureaucrats weren't the exemplars of moral integrity that they are. Just say it was possible for a large corporation, intent on stealing some other companies ideas, to bribe a bureaucrat to hand over (sorry, accidentally leave untended) the escrow keys for a competitor (or competitors). Is that the kind of world you want to live in?
Note that Chile's Military Dictatorship gave way to an elected president in 1990. The CIA report makes it sound like Pinochet (the military leader) was a "good guy". But read stuff like this, and you might think twice.
There are two sides to every story, I guess. But I digress - how would a Military Dictatorship have helped the USA prevent these suicide hijackings? Are you wishing that there could be some "Big Brother" who could watch every move of the "bad people" and control them absolutely, while still allowing you total freedom?
I can't believe I'm responding to a post by Jamie TheWhingeSki.
However, it's useful to note that cultural differences and the lack of modulation in text mean that often one must use creative punctuation to convey the intent of humour.
The various types of humour include:
wit,
satire,
sarcasm,
irony,
farce,
slapstick and buffoonery,
parody and burlesque, and
mimicry.
Of these, the kinds generally understood by the People of the United States of America are... anything accompanied by a laugh track.
That's because Perl is a text-processing language that knows how to do math, not because Perl is especially prone to S1G bugs! Yes, your comment is a cheap shot, because due to your Python bigotry you assume that anything that isn't Python is flawed.
The easiest answer I can think of is "keyboard buffers", like you'll find in applications like Z-Term - a serial console for the Macintosh that supports X, Y and Z-term file transfers.
Disabling the Nagle algorithm in telnet clients is fairly common because the character you see on the screen is usually echoed to you by the server. Having to wait 200ms for the characters to appear on your screen in clumps would be very distracting.
Having a keyboard buffer means that you will no longer use the built-in scroll-back buffer of shells such as bash or zsh. If the keyboard buffer is implemented well, it should provide you with similar functionality. In a GUI environment, you have the added advantage of copy/paste. Ideally, all keyboard interaction would be handled by a local shell (CLI or GUI), with data only sent over the network when Enter is pressed.
A big advantage of keyboard buffers is that keystroke timing over the network becomes impossible (unless, of course, you're running the terminal application under the X11 Windows System over a network). Attackers would have to resort to measuring the length of your command lines or passwords, to try to guess what you're typing (great! we know that the root password on that host is 7 characters long!).
As far as typing analysis in general is concerned, there's a mention in The Code Book by Simon Singh. He talks about traffic analysis during World War II. The French Resistance was apparently able to track Panzer divisions by the location of their radio transmissions. They could uniquely identify the Panzer division by the "fist" (tapping characteristics) of the morse-code operator, even though they couldn't decrypt the actual message.
Using a keyboard buffer helps overcome congestion (in a friendlier way than the Nagle algorithm does), avoids people identifying you through biometrics, and especially prevents hostiles using biometrics to find out what you're typing in your SSH session.
One of the memorable quotes from alt.sysadmin.recovery:
For their next act, they'll no doubt be buying a firewall running under NT, which makes about as much sense as building a prison out of meringue.
-- Tanuki
How many people are going to listen to the advice "get a firewall" when they're out shopping? They have a budget of, say, $1000 for a computer. Are they going to buy a $300 firewall, and only spend $700 on their desktop computer? No, at best they're going to spend $925 on their computer, and buy a "Personal Firewall" product for $50.
I recently purchased a Logiteceh Cordless Freedom Navigator - this is their iTouch Keyboard and a Wireless mouse with a dual-receiver. However, the combined receiver has two plugs - in the older models, these were PS/2 plugs. The newer model has two USB plugs, with those funky USB->PS/2 adaptors.
It really puzzles me why you'd put two USB plugs on the device. After all, the iTouch keyboard is already a "composite device" - the keyboard, the iTouch keys and the multimedia buttons. Would it really have been so hard to make the USB controller provide the composite keyboard/keys/button set up and mouse information through one USB plug?
With the corded options, you're better off - the mouse plugs into one of the two low-power USB ports on the keyboard, and keyboard plugs into the computer's USB port.
I ended up having to buy a 4-port hub so that I could have my keyboard/mouse plugged in at the same time as my Keyspan USB adaptor. The iMac only has 2 USB ports (same for most ATX motherboards).
I expect the problems causing the power outages in California are due to management decisions, not lossy transmission. New transmission technology, coupled with the new lossless cables, will just result in the same brownouts. The management, in their race to make as much profit for the shareholders as possible, will just shutdown the 20% extra generation that they no longer need.
How do you create new wealth without taking from someone else?
If you're talking about money (the tokens we use as the value-unit in our Kapitalist society), then there is no way of "creating" wealth without taking it from someone else.
The only way of "creating" "new wealth" is to invent a new medium of exchange - for example inventing your own barter system, or using "reputation" as a rating of wealth.
If I take $100 worth of goods (I know they're worth $100, because things are only worth what you pay for them, and I paid $100 for this stuff), and make a desk out of those goods, I have not "created" wealth. What I have created is the potential to get someone else to give me more money than I spent to get the goods that I used. If I can get someone else to pay me $500 for the desk, then I could value my effort at $400.
The point is, that $500 didn't just magically appear from somewhere - that $500 has changed hands. Regardless of whether it's physical currency tokens or virtual currency such as a cheque or credit card. The net money in the system is the same (it's a zero sum system). Certainly, the treasury can print more money - that just means that all the money that's out there right now becomes smaller slices of the pie.
"Creating new wealth" is the classic Capitalist lie. "Parting the proletariat from their value-unit" is the reality.
Anyone with half a clue has already used the Windows key as "Meta4", to complement Alt, Shift and Ctrl. So now you can get close to a Quadruple Bucky on a commercial-off-the-shelf keyboard!
But seriously, I use the Windows key for changing workspaces (Windows+1..9), cycling windows (Windows+Tab), Iconising/Restoring windows (Windows+'-'/Windows+'='), etc.
The standard I've seen for companies where I work is that "on call" hours are paid at about 20-25% of normal hours, and there is a minimum call-out time of 3 hours.
Thus if I'm on a salary equivalent to $25/hr, when "on call" I'd be paid equivalent to $5/hr. On the weekends, that goes up to about $7/hr. After all, when you're "on call", you can't do what you want with your time (go fishing, see a movie).
The minimum call-out time means that even if a problem only takes 15 minutes to fix, I'd still be paid 3 hours - though I'm also expected to spend that time in the office, perhaps catching up on other stuff and waiting to see if the repaired system keels over again.
In my experience though, the hardest part about being on-call is not solving the "how much do I get paid" question - it's having a partner who realises that he/she is relegated to second place behind work.
Time-Stealing from Advertisers?
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 1
I don't think JCD had a VHS video recorder at all, did he? Waaay back in about 1987 or so, there was a (can't remember the brand - AKAI? Sharp?) video recorder that would detect the volume change between regular programme and advertisments, and pause the recording. Then it would detect the 1/2 second blackout between the last ad and the regular programme, and start recording again.
It worked great, except for movies which had quiet bits (suspense builders) followed by really loud bits (big bass and lots of girly screaming).
I don't mind ads at all. I usually turn the volume down and my friends and I do our own version of the voice-overs:
"Hi, I'm a sexy big-busted blonde. My physique has nothing to do with the really cheap car that we're advertising, but the marketing guys realise that you'll drool over me long enough to get the name of the vehicle hammered into your subconscious because we present it in 5 different fonts and colours."
Or even:
"See these beautiful sunsets over crystal blue waters? Well, they're nowhere near our holiday resort. We know that you're only coming here to entertain the fantasy of having a real holiday sometime. But even though the holiday is all in your mind, rest assured the bill is 100% geniuine:)"
Ads can be as entertaining as the main show. That's why there's shows about the World's worst/best advertisments. I regularly have the pleasure of ticking the "TV Advertising" box on feedback forms to tell companies that I found out/was reminded about them through the ads they put on TV. I want my free-to-air TV dammit! Even if it is just for Buffy and Beyond 2000.
I've used it for about 12 months now, and it's helped me track my expenses quite well. It does get a little slow after you've got a thousand odd records in it, but that usually doesn't happen until end of year anyway.
A "trusted path" is a computer-age "holy grail". It doesn't exist.
The greatest problem with "trusted path" is that the hardware is no longer under your control. The moment a "secure" computer leaves your shop, you have no guarantee whatsoever that the machine will remain "secure".
Software authentication and access control comes to naught when the hardware can be diddled.
The access controls in Unix-like O/Ses and even Windows NT (to a limited extent) should be enough to prevent virus-like software behaviour. How many people are prepared to put the effort in to making their system secure though?
Copy prevention mechanisms aren't going to stop viruses. They will, however, stop you from making backup copies of your Thesis or Dissertation the night before your machine gets struck by lightning.
The fuss isn't about Microsoft stopping people from pirating Microsoft software. The fuss is about this being the "thin edge of the wedge".
First, you have to "activate" your (legitimately purchased) licence in order to finish installing it on your machine. You say, "Okay... it doesn't hurt to do that."
Then, you get the.NET equivalent of Internet Explorer. This product "suggests" that you check the Microsoft Windows Update page every week. You say "Okay... sounds sensible to me."
After that, you get the latest version of IE.NET. Due to increased exploits involving unpatched Windows(tm) installations, this product forces you to use Microsoft Windows Update, otherwise you can't continue running Windows(tm). You say "Dammit! I just wanted to browse the web for a couple of minutes.".
Then when that update is done, you open Word.NET. It informs you that you have to connect to the Microsoft Product Activation site to check your licence for this week. You say "This is getting a little annoying."
On connecting to the Microsoft Product Activation site, Word.NET informs you that Microsoft Corp has changed the licencing model for Word.NET: now you have to pay $5/month to keep using Word.NET.
All the fuss is about nipping this in the bud.
Imagine if the USS Yorktown was running on Windows XP? In the middle of an intense Naval battle, the sonar system pops up a dialog box, "Sorry, your Sonar Tracking System Software licence has expired. Please connect to the Microsoft Product Activation site to up date your licence. This should only take a few minutes. [Renew Licence] [Stop Using STSS]"
I am personally of the opinion that "causal copying" is somewhat beneficial to commercial software developers - PHBs get exposure to new products at home (the copy of Microsoft Project 2000 that they borrowed from their Wife's friend's husband), and go back to work thinking, "Gee, that was cool". Two months later, that company has bought Microsoft Project 2000 and Microsoft Project Central (and its supporting software).
Basically, Windows XP will probably do stuff like check the processor you're using, serial or model numbers from your hard drives, what PCI or (shudder) ISA cards are installed, BIOS manufacturer and version number, etc. From this it'll make a "fingerprint", which gets sent off to Microsoft.
Microsoft then sends back an "activation code" - as long as you write this down somewhere, you'll be fine.
However, Microsoft doesn't define how much of your machine has to stay the same when you do an upgrade. Does my machine need a new activation code when I:
"In some instances, if a user extensively overhauls a machine, reactivation will likely be required."
The thing that bugs me is - how much is "extensively"? Why is that sentence written to be intentionally vague? My guess is that Microsoft is hoping to keep Product Activation secure through obscurity. If you don't know how it works, you can't go breaking it, right?
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That is a flawed example. A strawman argument even.
A better example would be:
You find a poster on a wall, and read the details of a meeting being held by some cultural group. When attending the cultural group meeting, you're told to go away because you weren't invited.
Unless measures have been taken to grant and enforce permission to access a web page, that web page is effectively posted on a billboard in the town park.
There are no "rules" on the Internet. The only way to make people behave the way you want them to, is to enact technical measures to enforce your rules. Any time your rules of behaviour on a site connected to the Internet differ from total anarchy, you have to provide the technical measures to prevent your rules from being broken.
How do you value damages caused to your company by someone downloading images that are posted in a publically accessible web-site?
Why are you correcting me based on DDS4, when I specified DDS3?
And as I posted about half an hour ago - oops, I a 10^3 error. Then oops, I did it again!
Okay, now sit your pansy lamerican arse back on your seat for a moment.
Who pays for the link from Australia to the United States? Give you a clue - Australians. Whatever infrastructure corporate USA has sunk into your soil is irrelevant. We pay for all the traffic to and from Australia. When some lamerican skript kiddy ping floods an Australian server, that's Australian dollars footing the bill.
Having an anywhere-centric Internet is bad, since that means there are fewer Governments that need to be corrupted to spoil the Internet. Having a USA centric Internet is especially bad, since the USA doesn't respect the rights of foreign persons or corporations. Let's see - the USA brought us Echelon and Spam. The good old US of A, mate - they take with one hand, and serve crap with the other.
D'oh! Don't you hate it when you put the decimal point a few too many places to the left?
5.7 Petabytes per load.
916 Megabits per second average throughput.
So maybe it is that awesome after all :)
You could take a week to write the tapes and load them, and another week to unload and read them, and you'd still have damned good throughput for an international link. I'm impressed.
Just goes to show - the calculator got the number right, but it's the nut behind the wheel who has got to get the units right.
A 747 freighter has a cargo capacity of 777.9 cubic metres, or 109,800kg (ie: whichever you hit first). By volume, it could carry 8 million DDS3 tapes, equivalent to approximately 96 Terabytes per load. However, it can only carry approximately 481,000 DDS3 tapes by weight (box of 5 weighs 228g), which is only equivalent to 5.7 Terabytes per load.
Assuming you can load the data on and read the data off those tapes instantaneously, and assuming you had a perfect 14 hour flight from Sydney (Australia) to Los Angeles (United States), your maximum bandwidth is close to 916 bits per second.
Not that awesome at all, really.
Just ask the Brits about the utility of this kind of law. After all, over there if the police demand you release your crypto keys, you're not allowed to say that you don't have them.
The example that someone actually implemented was to write a confession to a crime, encrypt it with a PGP key that claimed to belong to the Minister backing the stupid law. Then they destroyed the keys.
My biggest beef with Key Escrow or compulsory back-doors is as discussed in Cryptography, Privacy and Crypto-Anarchism.
In addition, this stupid kind of law adds more burden to foreign nationals. Say I use strong crypto to post a message to a discussion group. Say that discussion group is hosted in the good old USA. If I ever take a trip to the USA - or even just stop over in Hawaii en-route somewhere else - I'll get arrested by US forces for breach of US laws, a la Dimitri Sklyarov.
The minor benefit gained by this kind of policy is totally undermined by the amount of evil that can be performed. Imagine for a second that bureaucrats weren't paid enough to do their jobs. Imagine for a moment that some bureaucrats weren't the exemplars of moral integrity that they are. Just say it was possible for a large corporation, intent on stealing some other companies ideas, to bribe a bureaucrat to hand over (sorry, accidentally leave untended) the escrow keys for a competitor (or competitors). Is that the kind of world you want to live in?
How would a military dictatorship have prevented the attacks?
Let's hava a look at military dictatorships around the world:
Military dictatorships can be good, too:
Note that Chile's Military Dictatorship gave way to an elected president in 1990. The CIA report makes it sound like Pinochet (the military leader) was a "good guy". But read stuff like this, and you might think twice.
There are two sides to every story, I guess. But I digress - how would a Military Dictatorship have helped the USA prevent these suicide hijackings? Are you wishing that there could be some "Big Brother" who could watch every move of the "bad people" and control them absolutely, while still allowing you total freedom?
Zork, from infogames.
You can apparently get the old Zork stuff from the Infocom web site.
Involves getting eaten by grues, trolls with weapons, that kind of stuff, but no humans are harmed (apart from the player).
See... even Geeks have violent fantasies. We kill imaginary creatures for fun. And profit.
I can't believe I'm responding to a post by Jamie TheWhingeSki.
However, it's useful to note that cultural differences and the lack of modulation in text mean that often one must use creative punctuation to convey the intent of humour.
The various types of humour include:
Of these, the kinds generally understood by the People of the United States of America are... anything accompanied by a laugh track.
You got moderated to 3 without providing any examples?
Perl does distinguish between strings and integers. Just try using ("foo" == "foo") in a comparison and see how far you get.
Please supply an example of where Perl's "non-string-discriminatory" behaviour gets it into trouble.
Sometimes you have to be specific, and tell Perl to do comparisons as numeric operations:
my %hash;
$hash{23} = "first";
$hash{126} = "second";
$hash{246} = "third";
foreach my $item (sort {$a <=> $b} keys %hash) {
print $hash{$item} . " ($item)\n";
}
That's because Perl is a text-processing language that knows how to do math, not because Perl is especially prone to S1G bugs! Yes, your comment is a cheap shot, because due to your Python bigotry you assume that anything that isn't Python is flawed.
Or just use ISO-8601 format dates, and your problems won't show up until 10000AD :)
2001-09-10T18:36:40
You're talking about the Nagel Algorithm. It's described in RFC 896.
The easiest answer I can think of is "keyboard buffers", like you'll find in applications like Z-Term - a serial console for the Macintosh that supports X, Y and Z-term file transfers.
Disabling the Nagle algorithm in telnet clients is fairly common because the character you see on the screen is usually echoed to you by the server. Having to wait 200ms for the characters to appear on your screen in clumps would be very distracting.
Having a keyboard buffer means that you will no longer use the built-in scroll-back buffer of shells such as bash or zsh. If the keyboard buffer is implemented well, it should provide you with similar functionality. In a GUI environment, you have the added advantage of copy/paste. Ideally, all keyboard interaction would be handled by a local shell (CLI or GUI), with data only sent over the network when Enter is pressed.
A big advantage of keyboard buffers is that keystroke timing over the network becomes impossible (unless, of course, you're running the terminal application under the X11 Windows System over a network). Attackers would have to resort to measuring the length of your command lines or passwords, to try to guess what you're typing (great! we know that the root password on that host is 7 characters long!).
As far as typing analysis in general is concerned, there's a mention in The Code Book by Simon Singh. He talks about traffic analysis during World War II. The French Resistance was apparently able to track Panzer divisions by the location of their radio transmissions. They could uniquely identify the Panzer division by the "fist" (tapping characteristics) of the morse-code operator, even though they couldn't decrypt the actual message.
Using a keyboard buffer helps overcome congestion (in a friendlier way than the Nagle algorithm does), avoids people identifying you through biometrics, and especially prevents hostiles using biometrics to find out what you're typing in your SSH session.
Nagle Algorithm References:
Traffic Analysis references:
One of the memorable quotes from alt.sysadmin.recovery:
For their next act, they'll no doubt be buying a firewall running under NT, which makes about as much sense as building a prison out of meringue.
-- Tanuki
How many people are going to listen to the advice "get a firewall" when they're out shopping? They have a budget of, say, $1000 for a computer. Are they going to buy a $300 firewall, and only spend $700 on their desktop computer? No, at best they're going to spend $925 on their computer, and buy a "Personal Firewall" product for $50.
I recently purchased a Logiteceh Cordless Freedom Navigator - this is their iTouch Keyboard and a Wireless mouse with a dual-receiver. However, the combined receiver has two plugs - in the older models, these were PS/2 plugs. The newer model has two USB plugs, with those funky USB->PS/2 adaptors.
It really puzzles me why you'd put two USB plugs on the device. After all, the iTouch keyboard is already a "composite device" - the keyboard, the iTouch keys and the multimedia buttons. Would it really have been so hard to make the USB controller provide the composite keyboard/keys/button set up and mouse information through one USB plug?
With the corded options, you're better off - the mouse plugs into one of the two low-power USB ports on the keyboard, and keyboard plugs into the computer's USB port.
I ended up having to buy a 4-port hub so that I could have my keyboard/mouse plugged in at the same time as my Keyspan USB adaptor. The iMac only has 2 USB ports (same for most ATX motherboards).
I expect the problems causing the power outages in California are due to management decisions, not lossy transmission. New transmission technology, coupled with the new lossless cables, will just result in the same brownouts. The management, in their race to make as much profit for the shareholders as possible, will just shutdown the 20% extra generation that they no longer need.
How do you create new wealth without taking from someone else?
If you're talking about money (the tokens we use as the value-unit in our Kapitalist society), then there is no way of "creating" wealth without taking it from someone else.
The only way of "creating" "new wealth" is to invent a new medium of exchange - for example inventing your own barter system, or using "reputation" as a rating of wealth.
If I take $100 worth of goods (I know they're worth $100, because things are only worth what you pay for them, and I paid $100 for this stuff), and make a desk out of those goods, I have not "created" wealth. What I have created is the potential to get someone else to give me more money than I spent to get the goods that I used. If I can get someone else to pay me $500 for the desk, then I could value my effort at $400.
The point is, that $500 didn't just magically appear from somewhere - that $500 has changed hands. Regardless of whether it's physical currency tokens or virtual currency such as a cheque or credit card. The net money in the system is the same (it's a zero sum system). Certainly, the treasury can print more money - that just means that all the money that's out there right now becomes smaller slices of the pie.
"Creating new wealth" is the classic Capitalist lie. "Parting the proletariat from their value-unit" is the reality.
An Australian band called Frenzal Rhomb actually wrote a song a long time ago, which must have been based on premonitions of this very case:
You Can't Move Into My House.
Just be careful - Frenzal Rhomb are very liberal with their use of the F*** word and derivatives.
I wonder who was the poor fool that GraceNote suckered into creating the entry for that album in the CDDB.
Anyone with half a clue has already used the Windows key as "Meta4", to complement Alt, Shift and Ctrl. So now you can get close to a Quadruple Bucky on a commercial-off-the-shelf keyboard!
But seriously, I use the Windows key for changing workspaces (Windows+1..9), cycling windows (Windows+Tab), Iconising/Restoring windows (Windows+'-'/Windows+'='), etc.
The standard I've seen for companies where I work is that "on call" hours are paid at about 20-25% of normal hours, and there is a minimum call-out time of 3 hours.
Thus if I'm on a salary equivalent to $25/hr, when "on call" I'd be paid equivalent to $5/hr. On the weekends, that goes up to about $7/hr. After all, when you're "on call", you can't do what you want with your time (go fishing, see a movie).
The minimum call-out time means that even if a problem only takes 15 minutes to fix, I'd still be paid 3 hours - though I'm also expected to spend that time in the office, perhaps catching up on other stuff and waiting to see if the repaired system keels over again.
In my experience though, the hardest part about being on-call is not solving the "how much do I get paid" question - it's having a partner who realises that he/she is relegated to second place behind work.
I don't think JCD had a VHS video recorder at all, did he? Waaay back in about 1987 or so, there was a (can't remember the brand - AKAI? Sharp?) video recorder that would detect the volume change between regular programme and advertisments, and pause the recording. Then it would detect the 1/2 second blackout between the last ad and the regular programme, and start recording again.
It worked great, except for movies which had quiet bits (suspense builders) followed by really loud bits (big bass and lots of girly screaming).
I don't mind ads at all. I usually turn the volume down and my friends and I do our own version of the voice-overs:
"Hi, I'm a sexy big-busted blonde. My physique has nothing to do with the really cheap car that we're advertising, but the marketing guys realise that you'll drool over me long enough to get the name of the vehicle hammered into your subconscious because we present it in 5 different fonts and colours."
Or even:
"See these beautiful sunsets over crystal blue waters? Well, they're nowhere near our holiday resort. We know that you're only coming here to entertain the fantasy of having a real holiday sometime. But even though the holiday is all in your mind, rest assured the bill is 100% geniuine :)"
Ads can be as entertaining as the main show. That's why there's shows about the World's worst/best advertisments. I regularly have the pleasure of ticking the "TV Advertising" box on feedback forms to tell companies that I found out/was reminded about them through the ads they put on TV. I want my free-to-air TV dammit! Even if it is just for Buffy and Beyond 2000.
Have you tried PocketMoney?
I've used it for about 12 months now, and it's helped me track my expenses quite well. It does get a little slow after you've got a thousand odd records in it, but that usually doesn't happen until end of year anyway.
A "trusted path" is a computer-age "holy grail". It doesn't exist.
The greatest problem with "trusted path" is that the hardware is no longer under your control. The moment a "secure" computer leaves your shop, you have no guarantee whatsoever that the machine will remain "secure".
Software authentication and access control comes to naught when the hardware can be diddled.
The access controls in Unix-like O/Ses and even Windows NT (to a limited extent) should be enough to prevent virus-like software behaviour. How many people are prepared to put the effort in to making their system secure though?
Copy prevention mechanisms aren't going to stop viruses. They will, however, stop you from making backup copies of your Thesis or Dissertation the night before your machine gets struck by lightning.
The fuss isn't about Microsoft stopping people from pirating Microsoft software. The fuss is about this being the "thin edge of the wedge".
First, you have to "activate" your (legitimately purchased) licence in order to finish installing it on your machine. You say, "Okay... it doesn't hurt to do that."
Then, you get the .NET equivalent of Internet Explorer. This product "suggests" that you check the Microsoft Windows Update page every week. You say "Okay... sounds sensible to me."
After that, you get the latest version of IE.NET. Due to increased exploits involving unpatched Windows(tm) installations, this product forces you to use Microsoft Windows Update, otherwise you can't continue running Windows(tm). You say "Dammit! I just wanted to browse the web for a couple of minutes.".
Then when that update is done, you open Word.NET. It informs you that you have to connect to the Microsoft Product Activation site to check your licence for this week. You say "This is getting a little annoying."
On connecting to the Microsoft Product Activation site, Word.NET informs you that Microsoft Corp has changed the licencing model for Word.NET: now you have to pay $5/month to keep using Word.NET.
All the fuss is about nipping this in the bud.
Imagine if the USS Yorktown was running on Windows XP? In the middle of an intense Naval battle, the sonar system pops up a dialog box, "Sorry, your Sonar Tracking System Software licence has expired. Please connect to the Microsoft Product Activation site to up date your licence. This should only take a few minutes. [Renew Licence] [Stop Using STSS]"
I am personally of the opinion that "causal copying" is somewhat beneficial to commercial software developers - PHBs get exposure to new products at home (the copy of Microsoft Project 2000 that they borrowed from their Wife's friend's husband), and go back to work thinking, "Gee, that was cool". Two months later, that company has bought Microsoft Project 2000 and Microsoft Project Central (and its supporting software).
Basically, Windows XP will probably do stuff like check the processor you're using, serial or model numbers from your hard drives, what PCI or (shudder) ISA cards are installed, BIOS manufacturer and version number, etc. From this it'll make a "fingerprint", which gets sent off to Microsoft.
Microsoft then sends back an "activation code" - as long as you write this down somewhere, you'll be fine.
However, Microsoft doesn't define how much of your machine has to stay the same when you do an upgrade. Does my machine need a new activation code when I:
According to Microsoft's Product Activation Fact Sheet:
The thing that bugs me is - how much is "extensively"? Why is that sentence written to be intentionally vague? My guess is that Microsoft is hoping to keep Product Activation secure through obscurity. If you don't know how it works, you can't go breaking it, right?