Same things go for everywhere. I spent 7 years working in the USA. Same thing went on there, too. Except they talked about American football, or pick up trucks, or conservative politics.
Personally, I found my most productive hours was if I came in very early (5:30 am). I could get more work done between 5:30am and 9am than I could usually get done between 9am and 6pm due to lack of pointless meetings and lack of interruptions.
Give me trains any day - you can read, sleep, finish that last minute report...
Now I'm a train buff, and I like trains...but...
(Disclaimer: I don't live in the UK, only occasionally visit) It really depends on where you need to go on the trains. If you're going anywhere served by Connex trains it's pretty miserable for commuting. Although I like the old 4VEP EMUs that Connex run (from an enthusiast's point of view), they really suck hard when it comes to commuting. They are cramped, sweltering in the summer, have very narrow corridors so people jog your elbows as they go by. They are fairly rough-riding machines too. I could not sleep on or read or do a report on one of those things!
It's not that bad everywhere of course - if you're on South West Trains on the Waterloo - Exeter line, they have nice low density airconditioned DMU stock with air suspension. A very civilized way to travel. Nice big windows to look out of if you just want to relax. Good ride quality, and enough space to read/use a laptop/go to sleep. Same comment goes for the HSTs out of Paddington (not to mention they do PAD - RDG in 23 minutes) or the Wessex Electrics that run down to Poole. Thames trains also got rid of the old "bog units" about 10 years ago - but the new units are high-density stock (i.e. cramped in the rush hour) and are not airconditioned (i.e. sweltering in the summer) apart from the new units they used to replace the loco hauled services they had running up to Oxford (which are low density seating and airconditioned).
Add to this that a traditional switched network gets really noise after a few switches and digital networks will....
This kind of switching hasn't been done for years. Electronic phone exchanges have existed for decades, and digital phone exchanges (at least where I live) have made up the entire network for over 10 years.
The electromechanical exchanges did manage to hang on into the early 1990s in many places though. Good old Strowger. (An excellent site about the phone network in days gone by is Light Straw. If you are ever in a position to visit the London Science Museum, they have a good-sized portion of a Strowger phone exchange that you can play with - makes lovely clattering noises!)
The network will still be switched at a local level, I suspect (even if the future telephone exchange, instead of switching analogue circuits, works more like an Ethernet switch). With so much copper going from the home/office to the exchange, it's likely to continue to be in use for the last mile for some time to come.
Trunk switching has been multiplexed for decades already. Previously, it might have been multiplexed by FDMA (frequency division), and now it looks like they are moving to IP based (or similar) to route calls through exchanges. The end user won't notice the difference. It's unlikely that the call routing will be done over the public Internet.
The trunk network can already run out of capacity - you do not now have dedicated bandwitdth and never had dedicated bandwidth over the trunk network (ever got the 'All circuits are busy' message?) A packet based trunk network is no less secure than the existing trunk networks. Packet switching != routing over the public internet.
Avoiding CBs is all very well - if you're flying under VFR (visual flight rules) you can just look out for the clouds, and steer around them.
Embedded CBs are another kettle of fish. If you're already in another, otherwise benign cloud, you may not see the CB you're about to wander through. Airliners have weather radar to mitigate the risk of flying through a cell, but it does happen (limitations of the instrument, equipment failure, pilot error - radar pointed at the wrong thing etc). If you look through the NTSB reports, you'll find one or two airliners or corporate aircraft that encounter hail every year. Light GA planes encounter it (usually an embedded thunderstorm) a bit more often as they generally don't have expensive radar installations - although most GA pilots simply don't fly IFR when there are thunderstorms around.
That's precisely why the french trust the State: if the State tries to screw them (such as now, with their pensions), the State workers arise in defense of the public service (such as in 1995 with the huge rail strikes). And if things go to far, they simply have a revolution.
Ah, I get it, it's like:
"In order to save the village, we had to destroy it!"
Now I know I shouldn't reply to trolls, but your message is so factually incorrect I'll just have to bite. If you'd actually taken time to read my article, you will have noticed that I don't live in England. I am separated from England by 60 miles of tempestuous salt water (the Irish Sea). I don't even live in the UK or European Union.
Funny how you say the French trust the state when in my experience the French are the first to break the rules, and French state workers are the first to go on strike! Let's not mention the recent air traffic controller's strike that shut down air traffic over France, shall we? Damned cheese-eating, wine swilling surrender monkeys!
If you think private telco monopolies are bad, you haven't seen anything yet until you've seen government-owned monopolies.
Our electricity monopoly here is government owned. I am overhauling my house right now, and a friend of ours, who works for the electricity company, mentioned it'd make his job a lot easier if the meter was in a box on the outside of the house, rather than inside (meaning the meter reader can read the meter at his convenience, rather than when I'm available to let him in). I agreed.
The first hurdle was trying to acquire the plastic box to put the meter in. We went to the Manx Electricity Authority shop and asked for one. We were told to fill in a confetti-like shower of forms, and we'd have to wait a couple of weeks for it to show up. The guy behind the desk wouldn't budge. He had them in stock, and available, but no, he couldn't give us one. He terminated the argument by announcing, "Well, we ARE the government, you know".
Finally, we get the box. I did all the work myself to install it (cut the hole in the wall, secured and set it in the wall, concreted the hole etc.) at my expense. All we needed was to have the MEA move the meter from its present position to the new box. We fill in yet another form to tell them what we want to do.
A couple of weeks later their guy shows up and says, "Nah, I can't do that, you need a jointer to do that. And you need to fill out these forms".
Yet more forms. We had already told them exactly what needed doing, and they sent the wrong type of person out.
"Oh, you're on a six-week waiting list for a jointer" they then said, after filling out yet more forms. I escalated the matter, and had a long debate with a guy about it and told him all our woes. He tried to wriggle out of it.
"What electrician's qualifications do you have to do the installation?" he asked, trying to pry open an "excuse hole" he could exploit. "It's a plastic box set in a wall. You are telling me you have to be a qualified electrician to cut a hole in a wall, put a plastic box in, screw in the supplied screws, and re-render around the hole?" "Well, what about all the cabling?" "There _IS_ no cabling! That's the point! This is why we've been filling out a confetti-like shower of forms to get your guy to come out, move the meter, and recable!" Finally, sensing he was on a loser (and about to receive a LARTing) he gave up on that tack.
We first asked for the meter box in January. It is now late May, and the meter STILL hasn't been moved. We are only doing this to benefit the municipal electricity company, and at our expense. I keep explaining this to them but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Even Texas-New Mexico Power was never that bad.
Government is almost NEVER the answer. A government monopoly is orders of magnitudes worse than a private one in my experience.
Manx Telecom (the private telecom monopoly we have) despite their faults are a joy to work with by comparison. They have even acquired a clue when it comes to running an ADSL network. We did a similar job relocating the telephone line, to have it run underground. No forms to fill out - we just asked them to lay a new cable and they did it when they said they'd do it - no waiting lists and no bullshit.
- A Bjork album whose name escapes me and I haven't listened to for a while because it's so horrible. Only one good song on that one. - Manic Street Preachers "This is my truth tell me yours" - Oasis "What's the Story Morning glory" - not only are many of the tracks ho-hum, but the recordings are bad (sounds like someone left the gain too high on the guitars, resulting in very harsh sounding music) - Radiohead 'Kid-A' - Thom Whatshisname was just indulging himself on this album, I think. - Pink Floyd "A momentary lapse of reason" - two great songs, the rest are sort of very ho-hum and I wouldn't have bought if you could buy the tracks individually.
Of course the majority of albums I've bought generally aren't two good songs and the rest horrible. Out of the rest, about 40% or so whilst being mostly good, have tracks so dire I skip them or I've burned a CD-R of the album with the tracks removed (to my ear, the best example of this is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers 'Californication' which has some superb tracks but two really crap ones, including some rap-like "music" which I definitely wouldn't have bought had I been able to buy each track on its own).
I found the good 'ol virtual desktop my best ally. I arranged my kit so that my screen couldn't be seen from the door. If someone came in whilst I was trawling the web or reading USENET or chatting on irc, I'd switch virtual desktop before they were in visual range of my display. I'd also do all of this over an ssh link to my own server so any snoopy-drawers on the network would just see the odd encrypted packet go past rather than the latest alt.sysadmin.recovery article.
My second defence was of course tiny fonts in case someone 'jumped' me and I couldn't switch desktops fast enough.
The magnetos DO produce electricity. The spark is an electrical one. The mags are basically self-enclosed generators/coils/points/distributors. The main thing is that they are separate from the aircraft's non-ignition electrical systems (unlike a car) and there are two ignition circuits per engine.
Having said that, I doubt EMP unless it was *really* powerful would have a noticeable effect on the mags.
In any case, 2 crashes in 20 years is a very very good record. You'd be hard pressed to make the airline industry perform so well.
That statement has me gobsmacked it is just so wrong. The airline industry is *orders of magnitude* better than the Shuttle. Even Aeroflot and Asiana are orders of magnitude better than the Shuttle's record.
Ignoring that - your earlier comment about people not considering someone an adult until they are around 26 + the general risk-averse culture is something I'm well aware of. I spent 7 years in the US, and I could never get used to still being treated as a child even though I'd left my home country and moved abroad. I found it a bit bizarre to be referred to as a "kid" at age 23 after having being treated as an adult back home since 18 years old. By the time I was 28 and still being looked at as a "kid" by many it had gone from bizarre to plain just patronizing.
I think the way people are referred to in the news is very telling: at home, if an 18-year old makes the news, they are described as a man or a woman - in the US, they are described as a teenager. It seems to be lost on many that if you're responsible enough to die for your country as an 18 year old, you should be treated as responsible enough to buy a beer!
What a studio runs is largely irrelevant to the home. The studio needs perfection - the home doesn't. My living room isn't a sound-insulated anechoic chamber: there are plenty of other sounds coming from outside (maybe the washing machine is running, possibly a bus goes by outside) - and with that, I'm probably not going to notice any artifacts a not-quite-optimum piece of cable puts in.
1. The use of automated calling systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines), facsimile machines (fax) or electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing may only be allowed in respect of subscribers who have given their prior consent....which would not affect someone who sat down and typed in a personal message for you (even commercial).
NTP (http://www.ntp.org) Slashdot slashcode (http://www.slashdot.org) Perl, Python, PHP Apache Mosaic I dare say even Mozilla, since it's the base for Netscape rather than a clone. Pine, elm, mutt et al. SSH (original SSH1, before it went commercial) rsync Those are just ones I use every day. There are plenty of others.
Government is almost *never* the answer. Where I live, we have a non-government telecom monopoly (Manx Telecom) and a government-owned electricity monopoly (the MEA).
Although Manx Telecom aren't exactly a model of inexpensiveness (they are a bit of a rip-off to be honest) they are an order of magnitude easier to deal with than the MEA. We wanted to move the electricity meter outside to help the meter reader. So far, it's taken a confetti-like shower of forms and we've been waiting since January for the MEA to actually do the work. They sent one guy out who said he couldn't do it, and gave out yet more forms. We are now going to have to wait another six weeks for them to send out a jointer. It took a lot of pain to just get the plastic meter box off them. It's now May and we first asked for the meter box in January - and we are only doing this so they can read my meter at their convenience instead of mine - i.e. to help them. They even tried to insist that you had to be a qualified electrician to cement a plastic box into the wall. Be careful what you ask for - Government monopolies are *hell* compared to private ones. I wouldn't wish a Government-run telecoms to my worst enemy.
Manx Telecom on the other hand will get your phone line in or ADSL switched on pretty quickly. They still have monopoly-like inefficiencies, but they are a positive joy to deal with compared to the MEA.
...and remember, every local root hole is almost certainly remote rootable too.
It's a good job I stopped the Linux =2.4.19 ptrace kmod local root hole, or I'd have been rooted on Sunday morning (see my journal).
Ironically, the skript kiddie hasn't been too careful, and he has left the PHP shell unpassworded and unprotected on his system. Running a uname -a through it shows that he's running a vulnerable kernel. I now face a terrible internal struggle - do I play ethical and just email abuse@chello.nl again with more evidence if his system still hasn't been pulled in a week's time, or shall I do a Simonly-BOFH trick to him as payback? Maybe like modify his bindshell so that instead of starting a shell on the target machine, it connects to a bindshell on his machine so he just roots his own box when he tries to hack his next victim:-)
You tell him to keep trying harder than anyone else. But that is impossible--"him" is everyone. What you are REALLY saying is that in our red of tooth and claw system, you had better keep working ever harder and harder until you die.....
A couple of points - in musical chairs, there is always one left out: but not if you add a chair. I've 'added a chair' twice now. I didn't think things like that happen, but they do.
Times are harder now than they were in 2000. But these things are cyclical. At the moment, you DO need to work harder at getting jobs, but that doesn't mean you'll have to keep working harder and harder until you die. Besides, doing a bit of networking is not what I call working harder and harder - going out to the club and having a pint of beer or two is quite nice in fact, especially if you get to meet new people who are bitching about how crap their computer network's running and can offer to fix it for them.
Sooner or later, the gross oversupply of IT people compared to jobs will cease, barring civilization-threatening disasters. Maybe it will never be like the dot-bomb boom, but then again, the whole dot-bomb thing was bogus to start with. Even with my business acumen (which resembles the business acumen of a concussed rattlesnake) I could tell most of the dot-bombs had a bad business model and were going to go tits up even during their meteoric rise.
Slashdot Mirror
They could be exploits against your IRC client, especially if you're running a ubiquitous, scriptable one (can you say mIRC?)
Try a different IRC client, such as XChat for Windows, and see if it keeps happening. If it magically goes away you've found the culprit.
Same things go for everywhere. I spent 7 years working in the USA. Same thing went on there, too. Except they talked about American football, or pick up trucks, or conservative politics.
Personally, I found my most productive hours was if I came in very early (5:30 am). I could get more work done between 5:30am and 9am than I could usually get done between 9am and 6pm due to lack of pointless meetings and lack of interruptions.
Give me trains any day - you can read, sleep, finish that last minute report...
Now I'm a train buff, and I like trains...but...
(Disclaimer: I don't live in the UK, only occasionally visit)
It really depends on where you need to go on the trains. If you're going anywhere served by Connex trains it's pretty miserable for commuting. Although I like the old 4VEP EMUs that Connex run (from an enthusiast's point of view), they really suck hard when it comes to commuting. They are cramped, sweltering in the summer, have very narrow corridors so people jog your elbows as they go by. They are fairly rough-riding machines too. I could not sleep on or read or do a report on one of those things!
It's not that bad everywhere of course - if you're on South West Trains on the Waterloo - Exeter line, they have nice low density airconditioned DMU stock with air suspension. A very civilized way to travel. Nice big windows to look out of if you just want to relax. Good ride quality, and enough space to read/use a laptop/go to sleep. Same comment goes for the HSTs out of Paddington (not to mention they do PAD - RDG in 23 minutes) or the Wessex Electrics that run down to Poole. Thames trains also got rid of the old "bog units" about 10 years ago - but the new units are high-density stock (i.e. cramped in the rush hour) and are not airconditioned (i.e. sweltering in the summer) apart from the new units they used to replace the loco hauled services they had running up to Oxford (which are low density seating and airconditioned).
But the Apple iTunes music store tracks DO allow fair use. You can burn them onto CD.
Add to this that a traditional switched network gets really noise after a few switches and digital networks will....
This kind of switching hasn't been done for years. Electronic phone exchanges have existed for decades, and digital phone exchanges (at least where I live) have made up the entire network for over 10 years.
The electromechanical exchanges did manage to hang on into the early 1990s in many places though. Good old Strowger. (An excellent site about the phone network in days gone by is Light Straw. If you are ever in a position to visit the London Science Museum, they have a good-sized portion of a Strowger phone exchange that you can play with - makes lovely clattering noises!)
The network will still be switched at a local level, I suspect (even if the future telephone exchange, instead of switching analogue circuits, works more like an Ethernet switch). With so much copper going from the home/office to the exchange, it's likely to continue to be in use for the last mile for some time to come.
Trunk switching has been multiplexed for decades already. Previously, it might have been multiplexed by FDMA (frequency division), and now it looks like they are moving to IP based (or similar) to route calls through exchanges. The end user won't notice the difference. It's unlikely that the call routing will be done over the public Internet.
The trunk network can already run out of capacity - you do not now have dedicated bandwitdth and never had dedicated bandwidth over the trunk network (ever got the 'All circuits are busy' message?) A packet based trunk network is no less secure than the existing trunk networks. Packet switching != routing over the public internet.
Avoiding CBs is all very well - if you're flying under VFR (visual flight rules) you can just look out for the clouds, and steer around them.
Embedded CBs are another kettle of fish. If you're already in another, otherwise benign cloud, you may not see the CB you're about to wander through. Airliners have weather radar to mitigate the risk of flying through a cell, but it does happen (limitations of the instrument, equipment failure, pilot error - radar pointed at the wrong thing etc). If you look through the NTSB reports, you'll find one or two airliners or corporate aircraft that encounter hail every year. Light GA planes encounter it (usually an embedded thunderstorm) a bit more often as they generally don't have expensive radar installations - although most GA pilots simply don't fly IFR when there are thunderstorms around.
That's precisely why the french trust the State: if the State tries to screw them (such as now, with their pensions), the State workers arise in defense of the public service (such as in 1995 with the huge rail strikes). And if things go to far, they simply have a revolution.
Ah, I get it, it's like:
"In order to save the village, we had to destroy it!"
Now all they need is G# (or Ab) and you can play the blues with Microsoft languages. Somewhat appropriate :-)
Now I know I shouldn't reply to trolls, but your message is so factually incorrect I'll just have to bite. If you'd actually taken time to read my article, you will have noticed that I don't live in England. I am separated from England by 60 miles of tempestuous salt water (the Irish Sea). I don't even live in the UK or European Union.
Funny how you say the French trust the state when in my experience the French are the first to break the rules, and French state workers are the first to go on strike! Let's not mention the recent air traffic controller's strike that shut down air traffic over France, shall we? Damned cheese-eating, wine swilling surrender monkeys!
If you think private telco monopolies are bad, you haven't seen anything yet until you've seen government-owned monopolies.
Our electricity monopoly here is government owned. I am overhauling my house right now, and a friend of ours, who works for the electricity company, mentioned it'd make his job a lot easier if the meter was in a box on the outside of the house, rather than inside (meaning the meter reader can read the meter at his convenience, rather than when I'm available to let him in). I agreed.
The first hurdle was trying to acquire the plastic box to put the meter in. We went to the Manx Electricity Authority shop and asked for one. We were told to fill in a confetti-like shower of forms, and we'd have to wait a couple of weeks for it to show up. The guy behind the desk wouldn't budge. He had them in stock, and available, but no, he couldn't give us one. He terminated the argument by announcing, "Well, we ARE the government, you know".
Finally, we get the box. I did all the work myself to install it (cut the hole in the wall, secured and set it in the wall, concreted the hole etc.) at my expense. All we needed was to have the MEA move the meter from its present position to the new box. We fill in yet another form to tell them what we want to do.
A couple of weeks later their guy shows up and says, "Nah, I can't do that, you need a jointer to do that. And you need to fill out these forms".
Yet more forms. We had already told them exactly what needed doing, and they sent the wrong type of person out.
"Oh, you're on a six-week waiting list for a jointer" they then said, after filling out yet more forms. I escalated the matter, and had a long debate with a guy about it and told him all our woes. He tried to wriggle out of it.
"What electrician's qualifications do you have to do the installation?" he asked, trying to pry open an "excuse hole" he could exploit.
"It's a plastic box set in a wall. You are telling me you have to be a qualified electrician to cut a hole in a wall, put a plastic box in, screw in the supplied screws, and re-render around the hole?"
"Well, what about all the cabling?"
"There _IS_ no cabling! That's the point! This is why we've been filling out a confetti-like shower of forms to get your guy to come out, move the meter, and recable!"
Finally, sensing he was on a loser (and about to receive a LARTing) he gave up on that tack.
We first asked for the meter box in January. It is now late May, and the meter STILL hasn't been moved. We are only doing this to benefit the municipal electricity company, and at our expense. I keep explaining this to them but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
Even Texas-New Mexico Power was never that bad.
Government is almost NEVER the answer. A government monopoly is orders of magnitudes worse than a private one in my experience.
Manx Telecom (the private telecom monopoly we have) despite their faults are a joy to work with by comparison. They have even acquired a clue when it comes to running an ADSL network. We did a similar job relocating the telephone line, to have it run underground. No forms to fill out - we just asked them to lay a new cable and they did it when they said they'd do it - no waiting lists and no bullshit.
"Yellow Peril" was another nickname.
Ones I've bought with only one or two good songs:
- A Bjork album whose name escapes me and I haven't listened to for a while because it's so horrible. Only one good song on that one.
- Manic Street Preachers "This is my truth tell me yours"
- Oasis "What's the Story Morning glory" - not only are many of the tracks ho-hum, but the recordings are bad (sounds like someone left the gain too high on the guitars, resulting in very harsh sounding music)
- Radiohead 'Kid-A' - Thom Whatshisname was just indulging himself on this album, I think.
- Pink Floyd "A momentary lapse of reason" - two great songs, the rest are sort of very ho-hum and I wouldn't have bought if you could buy the tracks individually.
Of course the majority of albums I've bought generally aren't two good songs and the rest horrible. Out of the rest, about 40% or so whilst being mostly good, have tracks so dire I skip them or I've burned a CD-R of the album with the tracks removed (to my ear, the best example of this is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers 'Californication' which has some superb tracks but two really crap ones, including some rap-like "music" which I definitely wouldn't have bought had I been able to buy each track on its own).
I found the good 'ol virtual desktop my best ally. I arranged my kit so that my screen couldn't be seen from the door. If someone came in whilst I was trawling the web or reading USENET or chatting on irc, I'd switch virtual desktop before they were in visual range of my display. I'd also do all of this over an ssh link to my own server so any snoopy-drawers on the network would just see the odd encrypted packet go past rather than the latest alt.sysadmin.recovery article.
My second defence was of course tiny fonts in case someone 'jumped' me and I couldn't switch desktops fast enough.
The magnetos DO produce electricity. The spark is an electrical one. The mags are basically self-enclosed generators/coils/points/distributors. The main thing is that they are separate from the aircraft's non-ignition electrical systems (unlike a car) and there are two ignition circuits per engine.
Having said that, I doubt EMP unless it was *really* powerful would have a noticeable effect on the mags.
In any case, 2 crashes in 20 years is a very very good record. You'd be hard pressed to make the airline industry perform so well.
That statement has me gobsmacked it is just so wrong. The airline industry is *orders of magnitude* better than the Shuttle. Even Aeroflot and Asiana are orders of magnitude better than the Shuttle's record.
Ignoring that - your earlier comment about people not considering someone an adult until they are around 26 + the general risk-averse culture is something I'm well aware of. I spent 7 years in the US, and I could never get used to still being treated as a child even though I'd left my home country and moved abroad. I found it a bit bizarre to be referred to as a "kid" at age 23 after having being treated as an adult back home since 18 years old. By the time I was 28 and still being looked at as a "kid" by many it had gone from bizarre to plain just patronizing.
I think the way people are referred to in the news is very telling: at home, if an 18-year old makes the news, they are described as a man or a woman - in the US, they are described as a teenager. It seems to be lost on many that if you're responsible enough to die for your country as an 18 year old, you should be treated as responsible enough to buy a beer!
What a studio runs is largely irrelevant to the home. The studio needs perfection - the home doesn't. My living room isn't a sound-insulated anechoic chamber: there are plenty of other sounds coming from outside (maybe the washing machine is running, possibly a bus goes by outside) - and with that, I'm probably not going to notice any artifacts a not-quite-optimum piece of cable puts in.
The directive says:
...which would not affect someone who sat down and typed in a personal message for you (even commercial).
Article 13
Unsolicited communications
1. The use of automated calling systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines), facsimile machines (fax) or electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing may only be allowed in respect of subscribers who have given their prior consent.
Let's see...
NTP (http://www.ntp.org)
Slashdot slashcode (http://www.slashdot.org)
Perl, Python, PHP
Apache
Mosaic
I dare say even Mozilla, since it's the base for Netscape rather than a clone.
Pine, elm, mutt et al.
SSH (original SSH1, before it went commercial)
rsync
Those are just ones I use every day. There are plenty of others.
Government is almost *never* the answer. Where I live, we have a non-government telecom monopoly (Manx Telecom) and a government-owned electricity monopoly (the MEA).
Although Manx Telecom aren't exactly a model of inexpensiveness (they are a bit of a rip-off to be honest) they are an order of magnitude easier to deal with than the MEA. We wanted to move the electricity meter outside to help the meter reader. So far, it's taken a confetti-like shower of forms and we've been waiting since January for the MEA to actually do the work. They sent one guy out who said he couldn't do it, and gave out yet more forms. We are now going to have to wait another six weeks for them to send out a jointer. It took a lot of pain to just get the plastic meter box off them. It's now May and we first asked for the meter box in January - and we are only doing this so they can read my meter at their convenience instead of mine - i.e. to help them. They even tried to insist that you had to be a qualified electrician to cement a plastic box into the wall. Be careful what you ask for - Government monopolies are *hell* compared to private ones. I wouldn't wish a Government-run telecoms to my worst enemy.
Manx Telecom on the other hand will get your phone line in or ADSL switched on pretty quickly. They still have monopoly-like inefficiencies, but they are a positive joy to deal with compared to the MEA.
Ah, if Slashdot were gonna enthuse about Windows, it'd not be /. - it'd be \.
Sorry to be pedantic...
That's exactly why the DCMA should be repealed
It's the DMCA, not DCMA. (DCMA would be Digital Copyright Millennium Act)
Sometimes I wish there was the equivalent of Windows Update for Linux
There is: if you use RedHat, there's up2date. If you use Debian there's apt.
...and remember, every local root hole is almost certainly remote rootable too.
:-)
It's a good job I stopped the Linux =2.4.19 ptrace kmod local root hole, or I'd have been rooted on Sunday morning (see my journal).
Ironically, the skript kiddie hasn't been too careful, and he has left the PHP shell unpassworded and unprotected on his system. Running a uname -a through it shows that he's running a vulnerable kernel. I now face a terrible internal struggle - do I play ethical and just email abuse@chello.nl again with more evidence if his system still hasn't been pulled in a week's time, or shall I do a Simonly-BOFH trick to him as payback? Maybe like modify his bindshell so that instead of starting a shell on the target machine, it connects to a bindshell on his machine so he just roots his own box when he tries to hack his next victim
A couple of points - in musical chairs, there is always one left out: but not if you add a chair. I've 'added a chair' twice now. I didn't think things like that happen, but they do.
Times are harder now than they were in 2000. But these things are cyclical. At the moment, you DO need to work harder at getting jobs, but that doesn't mean you'll have to keep working harder and harder until you die. Besides, doing a bit of networking is not what I call working harder and harder - going out to the club and having a pint of beer or two is quite nice in fact, especially if you get to meet new people who are bitching about how crap their computer network's running and can offer to fix it for them.
Sooner or later, the gross oversupply of IT people compared to jobs will cease, barring civilization-threatening disasters. Maybe it will never be like the dot-bomb boom, but then again, the whole dot-bomb thing was bogus to start with. Even with my business acumen (which resembles the business acumen of a concussed rattlesnake) I could tell most of the dot-bombs had a bad business model and were going to go tits up even during their meteoric rise.