For that matter, if it's programmed not to shoot down planes without serious override, just loada Cessna with TNT and crash it into the laser complex itself.
Yes, there is a difference in percentages, but you can't compare them straight across in percentages because the Google system requires you to buy advertising via AdWords. PayPal has no such requirement, they just deal with percentages. So if you're a zero-cash start-up, like me, I don't want to buy AdWords.
In effect, I'm buying my own discount. Whether or not the purchase of AdWords would increase my sales is a subject of debate, not of immediate and obvious benefit.
I have a small game company called Spare Brains Games, the shoestring upon which it runs is so thin that AdWords is not a possibility. I'm advertising strictly through a large number of friends and gaming communities to which I belong.
Access can work, the issue is whether or not you have a good database designer. Speaking from experience as someone who is a good database designer, you need someone who knows about normalizing, relationships, splitting and linking Access apps, rules of good front-end design, etc. Access is an excellent database, but it can be abused so horribly, such as buttons that look like fields and fields that are buttons.
Your company is large enough for a full-time database guy and a copy of SQL Server. Access can make a fine front-end for SQL and it can save you a lot of development time.
One very important thing to do when you have multiple people hitting the same Access DB is to split it: have an MDB that has only tables (and relationships, indexes, etc. The front-end app has no tables, just links to the second. Access handles resource management much better in such a configuration.
But there is no silver bullet. Database design is a skill and art, and Access should not be deployed across a business because you'll just run into the nightmare that you're experiencing. 99% of users out there (well, slap a few.9's on it) can't do proper database design. I'd yank it until they demonstrate a need for Access and have attended training on it, that would reduce, but not eliminate, your nightmares.
I haven't been a fan of HP for ages, except for possibly their servers and larger computers. I've never liked their micros, and I won't touch one of their laptops if I can avoid it. Then their merger with Compaq? Two companies that I have little regard for forming an even larger company that I have less regard for.
There's no doubt that they're going to lose a lot of talent, and a lot of other companies will benefit from that. It will be interesting to see who picks up the most HP emigrees.
I telecommuted for seven months, I live 500 miles away from the office and they had no problem with that. I was contract, and the contract was winding down, we'd gotten the core of the project out of the way so it wasn't an absolute that I had to be in the office daily. As my parents live in the town of my then-employer, I drove down about once a month for a couple of days in the office and everyone was happy.
It's definitely a good way to do things, but I can appreciate management's paranoia of not being able to manage what they can't see.
They were publishing DIY solo adventures for Tunnels & Trolls in the mid 70's. You had actual combat, and it was a great way to play an RPG when there was no one around to play with.
I got hit for a couple of days, then I got the "I'm the evil spammer king, roll over and die" message, then the flood stopped. I've been at a normal level of spam for over a week now.
Shortcuts, my friend! I almost never use the Start menu in Win2K or XP. Ctrl-Alt-D for a command prompt (hangover from Dos days for a Dos window), Ctrl-Alt-W for my word processor, Ctrl-Alt-T for TextPad, Ctrl-Alt-F for Firefox, etc.
All of my "daily use" software is assigned a shortcut on my desktop, laptop, and work desktop. The only time I use the start menu is when I need to do something that I rarely do. And I try to keep my start menu cleaned up so there's no more than 10 or so items on the first program level.
I can understand and appreciate the previously made point that his parole officer has no way of knowing if the hair and fingernail clippins are his. I don't have enough of a science background to say whether or not a good genetic fingerprint could be made from those. But why not a cheek swab?
Right now, our standard poodle has been diagnosed with an early form of Addison's Disease, it's a people disease but also affects purebreds like ours. UC Davis is doing a research project in partnership with AKC. They'll send you a free test kit so that you can sample your dog and send it back for them to do whatever with it. The sample collection instrument? Cheek swabs.
I've been using BlueFrog for a month or two now. Normally my Yahoo account will receive no more than a half dozen spam emails daily. Yesterday I left for dinner at about 4:30, no spam. Got back to my computer about 8pm, 44 spam messages! Yahoo's spam filter caught them all, something that I cannot say for my Gmail account. It had some 15 messages in the spam folder, but a half dozen in my inbox had gotten past BlueFrog.
One of the first things that George Bush did when he entered the White House was to lock down the automatic release of presidential papers. Guess whose papers were coming up to be released? Reagan/Bush, followed by Bush/Quayle. Which means that (currently) his papers are also locked, at least until the next Democratic president takes over and reverses his decree.
So how much do people want to bet that all the Bush/Cheney White House data is intact and that the current administration is obeying its own rules? It will be very interesting to see that. Ollie North was hoist by his own petard because of email, as have several other politicos. Unless, of course, some future president comes along and gives Bush/Cheney blanket pardons.
I wonder if the current administration might be looking at bringing in a l337 hax0r d00d to do a number on their email system and launch a worm to delete certain messages....
I agree. I see it slightly differently, at least for fixing it.
I've felt for a long time that the \Windows directory should only be writeable by the OS. Period. Only the OS can write there. Have a seperate directory structure for program installation, and they get their own registry in something like \Program Files\3rd Party Reg. Anything that requires inter-process communications like cut & paste between applications is handled through there. This also simplifies removing old programs - just delete the freakin' directory like we did in the MS/PC-DOS days.
This could, theoretically, help slow-down malware or at least simplify cleanup if nothing is allowed to write to the \Windows directory, assuming that the OS Write permission cannot be given to other users/programs.
Personally, I'd like to get ahold of the person who thought spaces in file and directory names was a good idea and introduce him to a clue-by-four.
I've owned their products before but never much cared for them, I prefer Linksys & Cisco. But I know consulting people who do like their products, and I'm going to be talking to them today and tomorrow.
I just sent them the following email:
"I am a networking consultant, Cisco certified, and I talk to a lot of people about home wireless networking. I will not recommend D-Link products and today will begin actively campaigning against them for the unethical access and trouble that you have given to the GPS.dix.dk NTP server. When you have patched your products and made amends to the owner of the NTP server, then I will consider recommending your products again."
Their feedback link is on the bottom of their index page.
Actually, according to histories of Microsoft, Dos, IBM, and the early PC revolution that I've read, Microsoft did want to sell MS-Dos outright to IBM. They wanted IBM to buy their company, too. But IBM didn't want it and licensed it instead.
It was probably a good thing, considering that IBM has never figured out how to market personal computers. It could have killed the PC market before it ever formed.
I don't like messenger bags, they require either a hand to be occupied or a shoulder to be disproportionately burdened. I use a Camelbak Alpine backpack. It will hold my laptop, charger, two USB cables for my Palm and my digital voice recorder, plus books for one class. I can squeeze in my Eos Digital Rebel if need be, and it'll still hold two 1-liter bottles of water. It is now carrying its second laptop and I see no problem with it lasting indefinitely.
And when I'm at a convention or something, the laptop stays in the hotel room hidden in luggage and I add the liter bottle of water back to it.
What I want is a Swiss Gear bag, but I'm kind of severely underemployed right now. I think the compartments would work better for the stuff that I need to keep around, the only problem with it is that it won't hold the one liter bottles of water that I prefer.
I use a Panasonic digital voice recorder to recorder lectures while taking paper notes. Unfortunately it downloads in WAV format, so I have to convert to MP3. No big deal, just an extra step.
I have yet to re-listen to a lecture, but I have produced CDs for classmates and offered them to other classes in case someone is out sick.
My wife has a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics. She's not an uber computer geek, but lives in unix for her work environment, so she has an Apple laptop. She has major addictions in Harry Potter and now Stargate: Atlantis, not to mention renaissance festival fan.
We met online at a dating site called eMode, now operating under a different name, and were married 18 months later. We have our first anniversary coming up in June, and have yet to have a fight or even cross words.
And you'll never find Carlson, CNN, or Fox News on at our house. We get our news online, from Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert, and NPR. We have this horrible habbit of wanting to form our own opinions, not having them forced upon us by the likes of Limbaugh.
The III was a great machine and my first Palm. I loved the simple clamshell case, a brilliant, simple, solution to protecting the unit. Bummer about your new unit dying so quickly. I have not yet determined how long I can go between charges, but I'm keeping a sync cable in my laptop bag (which is almost always with me) so I can snarf some juice for it in an emergency.
That is an excellent strategy, buying "obsolete" units off eBay. Great way to recycle viable tech, and to help prevent increased landfill usage, albeit in a very small amount.;-)
I considered the cheaper ones, but I really liked the larger screen of the T|X and I wanted the add'l memory. Being a serious photographer in addition to a database/computer geek, it would be nice to have a small number of photos in my pocket. And I will definitely be exploiting the additional ram for loading in more books. I have a feeling I could put entire O'Reilly libraries on it....
When I was server admin at a police dept, I had IP addresses and obscure passwords all stored in CryptoPad files. It was a great handy reference. When I leave the house any morning, I check for three things: Palm Pilot, digital voice recorder, and cell phone. And I wouldn't have a problem if I left the cell phone at home.
Excellent point about referencing your Palm while on the phone. I've done it many times myself, and I have no idea what you'd do if you had a smartphone.
I'm doing things with my home WiFi such as tkip, I don't think my Palm is going to handle that. It's also possible that I need to upgrade the OS from the factory-shipped as it won't sync at school either, and that's an open network.
My problem with integrated smart phones is that if one side dies, while the other side is indeed still functional, you're going to lose it when you send the unit in for repair. Yes, if you want to pay for a service contract, you can get it replaced more rapidly, but as rural as my location is, I would never count on local cell providers to have replacements on hand. I like to get LOTS of time out of my Palms, and cell phone life (for me) is much shorter than PDA life.
I agree that there is a market for the Bluetooth/WiFi/WiMax capability of PDAs, it's just not a selling point for me. I tend to be a bit of a luddite when it comes to persistant connectivity.
Agreed. Three days ago I got fed up with the failing handwriting recognition of my old Palm Vx, Wednesday I bought a brand-new T|X (I was going to buy it with this year's tax refund but I was pushed beyond the point of endurance).
I want something that I can put in my pant's pocket. With long battery life. With a good display. That doesn't crash.
I don't want something with a cell phone, it will violate the size issue and also gives me a single point of failure depriving me of two devices if one fails or the unit is lost. I don't want an MP3 player in it, the fidelity will suck and it will suck more memory that I don't want to give over to it. I don't want Bluetooth, I don't want WiFi (it can't get onto my home network because of my security restrictions). I definitely don't want a digital camera as I'd like to do some DoD consulting at some point.
And I don't want something from HP/Compaq: two B companies that merged to form a bigger B company (except their servers, I like Compaq servers).
Sorry, I've been using Palm Pilots for over a decade and will not give it up until they pry my cold dead fingers from around it.
The economics of air travel is that they need as close to 100% occupancy as possible. If they demarc a section for cell phone users you'll have (a) under-utilization of the dedicated section and (b) people who will use their cell phone in the cabin anyway.
What they ought to do is like they did in the Old West (allegedly): before you get on a plane, you have to surrender your cell phone to the flight attendant. You get a claim ticket, and you get it back at the end of your flight. That, or Get Smart's Cone of Silence.
Unfortunately trains aren't much of an option out here, I'm in rural New Mexico.
I'm not sure about the "listening post outside my office and read it all through the wall at 10m". These passports must be passive, otherwise the passport office is going to have a bitch of a time when these batteries die. They are read by a "contactless" reader, which means the reader must be physically proximate to the passport. The reader emits a radio signal which gives enough energy to the passive data store to power it and transmit the data dump, which the reader then reads.
The impression that I got from the article was that they intercepted the data while it is being transmitted to the reader, saved it, then cracked it two hours later. So my question is: can a person with the intercept equipment "activate" a passport and tell it to dump? Is it enough to transmit a certain amount of power on a certain frequency to make it dump? And now you're operating a transmitter in addition to a receiver, making your equipment marginally more complicated.
I don't know exactly how passive RFID systems work, hopefully someone with better knowledge can expand upon this.
And since your passport will require a transmitter to be dumped, a gov't could set up discreet receivers in gov't or major business areas looking for transmissions on said frequency, when they start getting hits, they send out radio direction finding cars and you're busted if you're sloppy.
Slashdot Mirror
For that matter, if it's programmed not to shoot down planes without serious override, just loada Cessna with TNT and crash it into the laser complex itself.
Yes, there is a difference in percentages, but you can't compare them straight across in percentages because the Google system requires you to buy advertising via AdWords. PayPal has no such requirement, they just deal with percentages. So if you're a zero-cash start-up, like me, I don't want to buy AdWords.
In effect, I'm buying my own discount. Whether or not the purchase of AdWords would increase my sales is a subject of debate, not of immediate and obvious benefit.
I have a small game company called Spare Brains Games, the shoestring upon which it runs is so thin that AdWords is not a possibility. I'm advertising strictly through a large number of friends and gaming communities to which I belong.
Access can work, the issue is whether or not you have a good database designer. Speaking from experience as someone who is a good database designer, you need someone who knows about normalizing, relationships, splitting and linking Access apps, rules of good front-end design, etc. Access is an excellent database, but it can be abused so horribly, such as buttons that look like fields and fields that are buttons.
.9's on it) can't do proper database design. I'd yank it until they demonstrate a need for Access and have attended training on it, that would reduce, but not eliminate, your nightmares.
Your company is large enough for a full-time database guy and a copy of SQL Server. Access can make a fine front-end for SQL and it can save you a lot of development time.
One very important thing to do when you have multiple people hitting the same Access DB is to split it: have an MDB that has only tables (and relationships, indexes, etc. The front-end app has no tables, just links to the second. Access handles resource management much better in such a configuration.
But there is no silver bullet. Database design is a skill and art, and Access should not be deployed across a business because you'll just run into the nightmare that you're experiencing. 99% of users out there (well, slap a few
I haven't been a fan of HP for ages, except for possibly their servers and larger computers. I've never liked their micros, and I won't touch one of their laptops if I can avoid it. Then their merger with Compaq? Two companies that I have little regard for forming an even larger company that I have less regard for.
There's no doubt that they're going to lose a lot of talent, and a lot of other companies will benefit from that. It will be interesting to see who picks up the most HP emigrees.
I telecommuted for seven months, I live 500 miles away from the office and they had no problem with that. I was contract, and the contract was winding down, we'd gotten the core of the project out of the way so it wasn't an absolute that I had to be in the office daily. As my parents live in the town of my then-employer, I drove down about once a month for a couple of days in the office and everyone was happy.
It's definitely a good way to do things, but I can appreciate management's paranoia of not being able to manage what they can't see.
They were publishing DIY solo adventures for Tunnels & Trolls in the mid 70's. You had actual combat, and it was a great way to play an RPG when there was no one around to play with.
I got hit for a couple of days, then I got the "I'm the evil spammer king, roll over and die" message, then the flood stopped. I've been at a normal level of spam for over a week now.
That sucks that they're throwing in the towel.
Shortcuts, my friend! I almost never use the Start menu in Win2K or XP. Ctrl-Alt-D for a command prompt (hangover from Dos days for a Dos window), Ctrl-Alt-W for my word processor, Ctrl-Alt-T for TextPad, Ctrl-Alt-F for Firefox, etc.
All of my "daily use" software is assigned a shortcut on my desktop, laptop, and work desktop. The only time I use the start menu is when I need to do something that I rarely do. And I try to keep my start menu cleaned up so there's no more than 10 or so items on the first program level.
I can understand and appreciate the previously made point that his parole officer has no way of knowing if the hair and fingernail clippins are his. I don't have enough of a science background to say whether or not a good genetic fingerprint could be made from those. But why not a cheek swab?
Right now, our standard poodle has been diagnosed with an early form of Addison's Disease, it's a people disease but also affects purebreds like ours. UC Davis is doing a research project in partnership with AKC. They'll send you a free test kit so that you can sample your dog and send it back for them to do whatever with it. The sample collection instrument? Cheek swabs.
I've been using BlueFrog for a month or two now. Normally my Yahoo account will receive no more than a half dozen spam emails daily. Yesterday I left for dinner at about 4:30, no spam. Got back to my computer about 8pm, 44 spam messages! Yahoo's spam filter caught them all, something that I cannot say for my Gmail account. It had some 15 messages in the spam folder, but a half dozen in my inbox had gotten past BlueFrog.
So yeah, I'd say something is up.
You don't make a 32GB partition. Make a 5 or 10GB partition, install Vista on it and nothing else. Install all other programs on other partitions.
Should be doable.
One of the first things that George Bush did when he entered the White House was to lock down the automatic release of presidential papers. Guess whose papers were coming up to be released? Reagan/Bush, followed by Bush/Quayle. Which means that (currently) his papers are also locked, at least until the next Democratic president takes over and reverses his decree.
So how much do people want to bet that all the Bush/Cheney White House data is intact and that the current administration is obeying its own rules? It will be very interesting to see that. Ollie North was hoist by his own petard because of email, as have several other politicos. Unless, of course, some future president comes along and gives Bush/Cheney blanket pardons.
I wonder if the current administration might be looking at bringing in a l337 hax0r d00d to do a number on their email system and launch a worm to delete certain messages....
I agree. I see it slightly differently, at least for fixing it.
I've felt for a long time that the \Windows directory should only be writeable by the OS. Period. Only the OS can write there. Have a seperate directory structure for program installation, and they get their own registry in something like \Program Files\3rd Party Reg. Anything that requires inter-process communications like cut & paste between applications is handled through there. This also simplifies removing old programs - just delete the freakin' directory like we did in the MS/PC-DOS days.
This could, theoretically, help slow-down malware or at least simplify cleanup if nothing is allowed to write to the \Windows directory, assuming that the OS Write permission cannot be given to other users/programs.
Personally, I'd like to get ahold of the person who thought spaces in file and directory names was a good idea and introduce him to a clue-by-four.
I can't help looking at the block haircut and the glasses and start thinking "If Drew Carrey went to the gym and took steroids...."
"Whose line is it anyway, suckers!"
I've owned their products before but never much cared for them, I prefer Linksys & Cisco. But I know consulting people who do like their products, and I'm going to be talking to them today and tomorrow.
I just sent them the following email:
"I am a networking consultant, Cisco certified, and I talk to a lot of people about home wireless networking. I will not recommend D-Link products and today will begin actively campaigning against them for the unethical access and trouble that you have given to the GPS.dix.dk NTP server. When you have patched your products and made amends to the owner of the NTP server, then I will consider recommending your products again."
Their feedback link is on the bottom of their index page.
Actually, according to histories of Microsoft, Dos, IBM, and the early PC revolution that I've read, Microsoft did want to sell MS-Dos outright to IBM. They wanted IBM to buy their company, too. But IBM didn't want it and licensed it instead.
It was probably a good thing, considering that IBM has never figured out how to market personal computers. It could have killed the PC market before it ever formed.
I don't like messenger bags, they require either a hand to be occupied or a shoulder to be disproportionately burdened. I use a Camelbak Alpine backpack. It will hold my laptop, charger, two USB cables for my Palm and my digital voice recorder, plus books for one class. I can squeeze in my Eos Digital Rebel if need be, and it'll still hold two 1-liter bottles of water. It is now carrying its second laptop and I see no problem with it lasting indefinitely.
And when I'm at a convention or something, the laptop stays in the hotel room hidden in luggage and I add the liter bottle of water back to it.
What I want is a Swiss Gear bag, but I'm kind of severely underemployed right now. I think the compartments would work better for the stuff that I need to keep around, the only problem with it is that it won't hold the one liter bottles of water that I prefer.
I use a Panasonic digital voice recorder to recorder lectures while taking paper notes. Unfortunately it downloads in WAV format, so I have to convert to MP3. No big deal, just an extra step.
I have yet to re-listen to a lecture, but I have produced CDs for classmates and offered them to other classes in case someone is out sick.
The instructor knows and approves.
My wife has a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics. She's not an uber computer geek, but lives in unix for her work environment, so she has an Apple laptop. She has major addictions in Harry Potter and now Stargate: Atlantis, not to mention renaissance festival fan.
We met online at a dating site called eMode, now operating under a different name, and were married 18 months later. We have our first anniversary coming up in June, and have yet to have a fight or even cross words.
And you'll never find Carlson, CNN, or Fox News on at our house. We get our news online, from Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert, and NPR. We have this horrible habbit of wanting to form our own opinions, not having them forced upon us by the likes of Limbaugh.
The III was a great machine and my first Palm. I loved the simple clamshell case, a brilliant, simple, solution to protecting the unit. Bummer about your new unit dying so quickly. I have not yet determined how long I can go between charges, but I'm keeping a sync cable in my laptop bag (which is almost always with me) so I can snarf some juice for it in an emergency.
;-)
That is an excellent strategy, buying "obsolete" units off eBay. Great way to recycle viable tech, and to help prevent increased landfill usage, albeit in a very small amount.
I considered the cheaper ones, but I really liked the larger screen of the T|X and I wanted the add'l memory. Being a serious photographer in addition to a database/computer geek, it would be nice to have a small number of photos in my pocket. And I will definitely be exploiting the additional ram for loading in more books. I have a feeling I could put entire O'Reilly libraries on it....
When I was server admin at a police dept, I had IP addresses and obscure passwords all stored in CryptoPad files. It was a great handy reference. When I leave the house any morning, I check for three things: Palm Pilot, digital voice recorder, and cell phone. And I wouldn't have a problem if I left the cell phone at home.
Excellent point about referencing your Palm while on the phone. I've done it many times myself, and I have no idea what you'd do if you had a smartphone.
I'm doing things with my home WiFi such as tkip, I don't think my Palm is going to handle that. It's also possible that I need to upgrade the OS from the factory-shipped as it won't sync at school either, and that's an open network.
My problem with integrated smart phones is that if one side dies, while the other side is indeed still functional, you're going to lose it when you send the unit in for repair. Yes, if you want to pay for a service contract, you can get it replaced more rapidly, but as rural as my location is, I would never count on local cell providers to have replacements on hand. I like to get LOTS of time out of my Palms, and cell phone life (for me) is much shorter than PDA life.
I agree that there is a market for the Bluetooth/WiFi/WiMax capability of PDAs, it's just not a selling point for me. I tend to be a bit of a luddite when it comes to persistant connectivity.
Excellent idea, backing it up to the CF card daily. I don't think my data changes enough for that, but it's something that I'll have to keep in mind.
Agreed. Three days ago I got fed up with the failing handwriting recognition of my old Palm Vx, Wednesday I bought a brand-new T|X (I was going to buy it with this year's tax refund but I was pushed beyond the point of endurance).
I want something that I can put in my pant's pocket. With long battery life. With a good display. That doesn't crash.
I don't want something with a cell phone, it will violate the size issue and also gives me a single point of failure depriving me of two devices if one fails or the unit is lost. I don't want an MP3 player in it, the fidelity will suck and it will suck more memory that I don't want to give over to it. I don't want Bluetooth, I don't want WiFi (it can't get onto my home network because of my security restrictions). I definitely don't want a digital camera as I'd like to do some DoD consulting at some point.
And I don't want something from HP/Compaq: two B companies that merged to form a bigger B company (except their servers, I like Compaq servers).
Sorry, I've been using Palm Pilots for over a decade and will not give it up until they pry my cold dead fingers from around it.
The economics of air travel is that they need as close to 100% occupancy as possible. If they demarc a section for cell phone users you'll have (a) under-utilization of the dedicated section and (b) people who will use their cell phone in the cabin anyway.
What they ought to do is like they did in the Old West (allegedly): before you get on a plane, you have to surrender your cell phone to the flight attendant. You get a claim ticket, and you get it back at the end of your flight. That, or Get Smart's Cone of Silence.
Unfortunately trains aren't much of an option out here, I'm in rural New Mexico.
I'm not sure about the "listening post outside my office and read it all through the wall at 10m". These passports must be passive, otherwise the passport office is going to have a bitch of a time when these batteries die. They are read by a "contactless" reader, which means the reader must be physically proximate to the passport. The reader emits a radio signal which gives enough energy to the passive data store to power it and transmit the data dump, which the reader then reads.
The impression that I got from the article was that they intercepted the data while it is being transmitted to the reader, saved it, then cracked it two hours later. So my question is: can a person with the intercept equipment "activate" a passport and tell it to dump? Is it enough to transmit a certain amount of power on a certain frequency to make it dump? And now you're operating a transmitter in addition to a receiver, making your equipment marginally more complicated.
I don't know exactly how passive RFID systems work, hopefully someone with better knowledge can expand upon this.
And since your passport will require a transmitter to be dumped, a gov't could set up discreet receivers in gov't or major business areas looking for transmissions on said frequency, when they start getting hits, they send out radio direction finding cars and you're busted if you're sloppy.