Virus/worm rejection is easy - just reject any mail with an attachment which is a Microsoft executable. I have a simple Exim system filter that does this job at the server level. Sending Windows executables in email is such a seldom legitimate task that it's easier to blanket reject them all, and tell any legitimate sender (I've not had one yet) to rename the executable to something else.
I should have been clearer - I wrote the scale driver for the systems the *clerks* use (not the kiosk) unless that's been changed since 2002 (which to my knowledge it hasn't). The scale is different hardware (or at least it was in the incarnation I was involved in) and the drivers had no commonality with what the counter clerks used. (Since other things have changed and I've not been involved with that part of the project since 1998, I'm not even sure if the software is still based on a kioskified version of what the clerks use).
As a former H1-B worker who returned home 2 years ago, I think the resentment has a lot to do with skin colour and being Indian.
How can I tell? Well, I never once faced any resentment at all, despite all the vitriol pointed at Indian immigrants.
But then again, I don't have dark skin and most people think I'm American until I speak. You see it all the time in Slashdot - it seems like it's OK to be racist towards Indians for "taking our jobs".
No idea. If the kiosk runs the same software that it did when I worked on it (I suspect it did - it was basically a kioskified version of the software the counter clerks use) it's certainly CAPABLE of doing it. However, USPS management often wants various functions turned off. (The vast majority of the work I did was with the system used by the counter clerks - we implemented quite a few requirements from the USPS which were ultimately not enabled - I have no idea whether they are now since I left the project in 2002 when I moved out of the USA). There's a lot of politics in the USPS - for example, they had us design, code, test and they also acceptance tested functions to offer Pack and Send services. However, companies like Mailboxes Etc. complained to the politicians who then told the USPS they couldn't do it.
Many of the problems with the USPS stem from being pushed around by the government rather than within the USPS itself.
Actually, the scales deliberately UNDERweigh to give the customer the benefit of the doubt (IIRC, 0.1oz for every 5lb).
It was something the testers brought up time and time and time again. Every time we got a new tester, they'd write a defect about the scale under-weighing in a normal mails transaction, but showing exactly the right weight during calibration (the underweigh feature is a hardware feature - and for calibration it's turned off). I think I returned that defect as "As designed" in CMVC at least a dozen times (with an increasingly sardonic comment about reading the system requirements where it was clearly documented - and the testers were supposed to be testing to these requirements - along with a long string of links to duplicates of the defect).
I worked on the software (the retail bit of it, not the bit that takes photographs - when I was on the project, that bit wasn't even there) for this piece of kit.
We had some great fun with the coin machine. We had bags of coins plus the coin/bill acceptor for testing. When work had been going on too long, I used to like emptying the acceptor of everything but pennies, then buying a 1c stamp with a $20 bill. The thing went off like a machine gun firing out pennies, it was friggin' cool.
It also did a bit of a Las Vegas style jackpot dispense with all of them full - in change it could give (IIRC, it was 1998 when I worked on the software for the pilot) quarters, nickels, pennies and Susan B dollars. (It didn't dispense dimes. I was told because dime dispensing is unreliable, and the machine tended to choke on them). Again, 1c stamp with a $20 bill, and Ker-ching - it simultaneously fired coins from all four coin stores.
At least I worked out what to do with surfeit pennies - instead of keeping them in a jar or bagging them up and paying one of those machines to count them, you can spend 1c coins in the postal vending machines (or could when I was working on them). Great way of getting rid of your shrapnel.
BTW: Whenever you take a package to a post office, if it's got IBM kit, you're using my code. I wrote the scale driver (amongst other things).
Just enclose them in a <URL:....> tag. It's quick. It's easy. It gives a working link without spurious spaces. Look at the example in "URLs" below the text box when you next post a Slashdot message.
The EU is about as democratic as the former Soviet Union. The European Parliament is almost powerless, and the national governments are almost powerless against new European legislation. Those in the US who are thinking Europe's getting it right are sadly wrong.
That would be all well and good - but the RIP act makes forgetting a password a criminal offence. If you can't remember your passphrase, and your private key is demanded, you can be prosecuted for that instead.
Fortunately, although I live in the British Isles, I don't live in the UK - and the RIP act was never passed here.
For me, having a nice set of useful tools plus Perl THAT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE INSTALLED (i.e. need Administrator privileges).
There are many things that I encounter in every day work environments which are fixed by a trivially short perl script (which are a monumental pain in the ass in VBScript or impossible with a batch file). I might not have the freedom of being able to install Perl, or bash or grep/sed/awk etc. on $RANDOM_PERSON's Windows system to fix a problem. However, most people won't have an objection to me running a toolkit off a CD that doesn't actually get installed on their computer. Gettin useful utilities without having to install anything is extremely valuable - it's one of the reason I love the PuTTY tools (psftp, putty and related ones like winscp) because they run standalone without needing administrator privileges or installation.
It's just something else for the armoury (along with a Knoppix disk, which has been incredibly useful for recovering data from machines that won't boot).
Guess what...Pink Floyd are a band who started out creating stuff themselves, just like you're telling the parent poster NOT to. The best bands out there are not the manufactured bands like 'Take That' and their ilk - but the people who decided to create not consume.
Actually, from having watched plenty of live acts, I'd say (certainly in music) musical ability is an extremely common trait in the human population. Mass media is basically the cult of the personality.
Security? Go to Windowsupdate.com once a month and install all the patches. I wish I had as straight forward a solution for my Linux boxes.
What, you mean like clicking the little red ! icon on Fedora/RedHat to run the update tool? Or running apt-get update on Debian? Funny, I thought they were pretty easy to use, but then again I'm a geek so perhaps it's not beyond me to click the little ! icon...
Is it me, or was the web page refered to by this story an absolute carbuncle on the face of the Internet? Most of it was advertisments crammed in, colourfully flashing. You had to scroll down half way before the article even started. Remove the ads, and the entire content would probably fit in a single browser window without the need to scroll... at 640x480.
A total waste of bandwidth. I'd have been very disappointed had I visited this page when I was on the move using GPRS (which you pay for by the kilobyte).
I, personally, know several practising homosexuals
What, haven't they perfected it yet?
Sorry. Lame joke, I know. Seriously, it is an absolute tragedy what Britain did to Alan Turing - he made a huge contribution to saving Britain from the Nazis, and they repay him by driving him to suicide.
I thought the same thing, and took a deep breath, and thought:
"Right I'm going to blow away the Windows XP partition. I'm going to take a hard line - I don't buy a game unless it's supported either on Linux or Mac OS X (my laptop)."
The most recent game I bought was Doom 3. Runs great on Linux - took all of 5 minutes to set up following the instructions, and unlike the Windows version, you don't have to put the CD in every time you want to play it.
And I don't miss Windows one bit. (I use both Windows and *BSD at work, and I find myself gagging for Expose's F9 key on Windows - the desktop gets so cluttered so quickly...)
I've not used Xandros, but I regularly use Fedora Core (and I've used RH since 8.0 - prior to that, I typically ran Debian or Slack).
IMHO, the fonts in RH/Fedora are better than in Windows. The whole Bluecurve theme works very well for both KDE and Gnome. "Ugly fonts" were a complaint that went away at least 2 years ago. I use Linux on both CRTs (Sony 21in) and LCDs (laptops).
The best font support on any OS though is without a question OS X.
Better still, move to a country which isn't so anally retentive to have 21 as a drinking age. 18 is a much better age. After all, if you're considered old enough to die for your country you are old enough to drink beer.
If you're not going to be using OS X, you're hardly the type of person Apple is trying to sell to anyway.
Personally, having used multi-button moused laptops for a long time, and now having the PowerBook with an interface designed for a single button mouse, I have come to the (surprise) conclusion that a single button mouse is superior on a laptop. There's limited space when you're using the laptop's keyboard, for example, in the seat back tray of a train, and a big single button is far easier to get with the heel of your hand whilst you're typing - rather than getting the right button of two which are half the size.
At home, you can always plug in any old USB mouse (and keyboard).
But the point is many sloppily-written emails DO NOT get the point across to co-workers. Far more than 20 seconds can be wasted by not proof reading. For example:
I will send my fiends around to pick up the diamonds
has a very different meaning to:
I will send my friends around to pick up the diamonds
despite only one letter difference. Sure, this is a fairly absurd example to illustrate the point, but I'm sure plenty of time has been wasted following false instructions or interpreting messages wrongly because the author didn't bother to at least re-read the message before hitting Send.
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Virus/worm rejection is easy - just reject any mail with an attachment which is a Microsoft executable. I have a simple Exim system filter that does this job at the server level. Sending Windows executables in email is such a seldom legitimate task that it's easier to blanket reject them all, and tell any legitimate sender (I've not had one yet) to rename the executable to something else.
I once looked up the charges for the phone on an international flight. US$10/minute. You could operate a Bell 206 helicopter for less than that rate.
If PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, does PHP stand for Pretty Hopeless Privacy?
I should have been clearer - I wrote the scale driver for the systems the *clerks* use (not the kiosk) unless that's been changed since 2002 (which to my knowledge it hasn't). The scale is different hardware (or at least it was in the incarnation I was involved in) and the drivers had no commonality with what the counter clerks used. (Since other things have changed and I've not been involved with that part of the project since 1998, I'm not even sure if the software is still based on a kioskified version of what the clerks use).
As a former H1-B worker who returned home 2 years ago, I think the resentment has a lot to do with skin colour and being Indian.
How can I tell? Well, I never once faced any resentment at all, despite all the vitriol pointed at Indian immigrants.
But then again, I don't have dark skin and most people think I'm American until I speak. You see it all the time in Slashdot - it seems like it's OK to be racist towards Indians for "taking our jobs".
No idea. If the kiosk runs the same software that it did when I worked on it (I suspect it did - it was basically a kioskified version of the software the counter clerks use) it's certainly CAPABLE of doing it. However, USPS management often wants various functions turned off. (The vast majority of the work I did was with the system used by the counter clerks - we implemented quite a few requirements from the USPS which were ultimately not enabled - I have no idea whether they are now since I left the project in 2002 when I moved out of the USA). There's a lot of politics in the USPS - for example, they had us design, code, test and they also acceptance tested functions to offer Pack and Send services. However, companies like Mailboxes Etc. complained to the politicians who then told the USPS they couldn't do it.
Many of the problems with the USPS stem from being pushed around by the government rather than within the USPS itself.
Actually, the scales deliberately UNDERweigh to give the customer the benefit of the doubt (IIRC, 0.1oz for every 5lb).
It was something the testers brought up time and time and time again. Every time we got a new tester, they'd write a defect about the scale under-weighing in a normal mails transaction, but showing exactly the right weight during calibration (the underweigh feature is a hardware feature - and for calibration it's turned off). I think I returned that defect as "As designed" in CMVC at least a dozen times (with an increasingly sardonic comment about reading the system requirements where it was clearly documented - and the testers were supposed to be testing to these requirements - along with a long string of links to duplicates of the defect).
I worked on the software (the retail bit of it, not the bit that takes photographs - when I was on the project, that bit wasn't even there) for this piece of kit.
We had some great fun with the coin machine. We had bags of coins plus the coin/bill acceptor for testing. When work had been going on too long, I used to like emptying the acceptor of everything but pennies, then buying a 1c stamp with a $20 bill. The thing went off like a machine gun firing out pennies, it was friggin' cool.
It also did a bit of a Las Vegas style jackpot dispense with all of them full - in change it could give (IIRC, it was 1998 when I worked on the software for the pilot) quarters, nickels, pennies and Susan B dollars. (It didn't dispense dimes. I was told because dime dispensing is unreliable, and the machine tended to choke on them). Again, 1c stamp with a $20 bill, and Ker-ching - it simultaneously fired coins from all four coin stores.
At least I worked out what to do with surfeit pennies - instead of keeping them in a jar or bagging them up and paying one of those machines to count them, you can spend 1c coins in the postal vending machines (or could when I was working on them). Great way of getting rid of your shrapnel.
BTW: Whenever you take a package to a post office, if it's got IBM kit, you're using my code. I wrote the scale driver (amongst other things).
How to avoid breakage on links on Slashdot:
Just enclose them in a <URL:....> tag. It's quick. It's easy. It gives a working link without spurious spaces. Look at the example in "URLs" below the text box when you next post a Slashdot message.
The EU is about as democratic as the former Soviet Union. The European Parliament is almost powerless, and the national governments are almost powerless against new European legislation. Those in the US who are thinking Europe's getting it right are sadly wrong.
That would be all well and good - but the RIP act makes forgetting a password a criminal offence. If you can't remember your passphrase, and your private key is demanded, you can be prosecuted for that instead.
Fortunately, although I live in the British Isles, I don't live in the UK - and the RIP act was never passed here.
Well at least you won't sit on the point, then :-)
For me, having a nice set of useful tools plus Perl THAT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE INSTALLED (i.e. need Administrator privileges).
There are many things that I encounter in every day work environments which are fixed by a trivially short perl script (which are a monumental pain in the ass in VBScript or impossible with a batch file). I might not have the freedom of being able to install Perl, or bash or grep/sed/awk etc. on $RANDOM_PERSON's Windows system to fix a problem. However, most people won't have an objection to me running a toolkit off a CD that doesn't actually get installed on their computer. Gettin useful utilities without having to install anything is extremely valuable - it's one of the reason I love the PuTTY tools (psftp, putty and related ones like winscp) because they run standalone without needing administrator privileges or installation.
It's just something else for the armoury (along with a Knoppix disk, which has been incredibly useful for recovering data from machines that won't boot).
Guess what...Pink Floyd are a band who started out creating stuff themselves, just like you're telling the parent poster NOT to. The best bands out there are not the manufactured bands like 'Take That' and their ilk - but the people who decided to create not consume.
Actually, from having watched plenty of live acts, I'd say (certainly in music) musical ability is an extremely common trait in the human population. Mass media is basically the cult of the personality.
Dunno whether it's a Java chip (I suspect not) but my diminutive Nokia 6820 phone runs only Java applications.
What, you mean like clicking the little red ! icon on Fedora/RedHat to run the update tool? Or running apt-get update on Debian? Funny, I thought they were pretty easy to use, but then again I'm a geek so perhaps it's not beyond me to click the little ! icon...
Also, according to the US's own figures, the UK has slighly lower unemployment than the US.
Pity about the rest of the EU, though.
The name you want for the visual guidance system is "suicide bomber".
Is it me, or was the web page refered to by this story an absolute carbuncle on the face of the Internet? Most of it was advertisments crammed in, colourfully flashing. You had to scroll down half way before the article even started. Remove the ads, and the entire content would probably fit in a single browser window without the need to scroll... at 640x480.
A total waste of bandwidth. I'd have been very disappointed had I visited this page when I was on the move using GPRS (which you pay for by the kilobyte).
What, haven't they perfected it yet?
Sorry. Lame joke, I know. Seriously, it is an absolute tragedy what Britain did to Alan Turing - he made a huge contribution to saving Britain from the Nazis, and they repay him by driving him to suicide.
I'd imagine at least PPTP and ipsec, since pptp support has been around for at least 3 years and ipsec is built into the 2.6 kernel series.
I thought the same thing, and took a deep breath, and thought:
"Right I'm going to blow away the Windows XP partition. I'm going to take a hard line - I don't buy a game unless it's supported either on Linux or Mac OS X (my laptop)."
The most recent game I bought was Doom 3. Runs great on Linux - took all of 5 minutes to set up following the instructions, and unlike the Windows version, you don't have to put the CD in every time you want to play it.
And I don't miss Windows one bit. (I use both Windows and *BSD at work, and I find myself gagging for Expose's F9 key on Windows - the desktop gets so cluttered so quickly...)
I've not used Xandros, but I regularly use Fedora Core (and I've used RH since 8.0 - prior to that, I typically ran Debian or Slack).
IMHO, the fonts in RH/Fedora are better than in Windows. The whole Bluecurve theme works very well for both KDE and Gnome. "Ugly fonts" were a complaint that went away at least 2 years ago. I use Linux on both CRTs (Sony 21in) and LCDs (laptops).
The best font support on any OS though is without a question OS X.
Better still, move to a country which isn't so anally retentive to have 21 as a drinking age. 18 is a much better age. After all, if you're considered old enough to die for your country you are old enough to drink beer.
If you're not going to be using OS X, you're hardly the type of person Apple is trying to sell to anyway.
Personally, having used multi-button moused laptops for a long time, and now having the PowerBook with an interface designed for a single button mouse, I have come to the (surprise) conclusion that a single button mouse is superior on a laptop. There's limited space when you're using the laptop's keyboard, for example, in the seat back tray of a train, and a big single button is far easier to get with the heel of your hand whilst you're typing - rather than getting the right button of two which are half the size.
At home, you can always plug in any old USB mouse (and keyboard).
But the point is many sloppily-written emails DO NOT get the point across to co-workers. Far more than 20 seconds can be wasted by not proof reading. For example:
I will send my fiends around to pick up the diamonds
has a very different meaning to:
I will send my friends around to pick up the diamonds
despite only one letter difference. Sure, this is a fairly absurd example to illustrate the point, but I'm sure plenty of time has been wasted following false instructions or interpreting messages wrongly because the author didn't bother to at least re-read the message before hitting Send.