Amusingly, I ran in to almost this exact scenario last month. A former co-worker went to her doctor, her doctor's practice had just been slammed by TWO ransomware hits. Their server was totally screwed. She gave them my name, I contacted them the next day. They never asked my price, I only charged them $30 an hour for 15 hours over two days, didn't even charge them for the time it took to put together a four page report describing what happened to them and the additional steps they needed to take.
They decided they didn't need my further services the next week or since.
When I lived in the Big City, my consulting rate was $50-125, and that was over a decade ago. But here, wages are horribly suppressed, and then people wonder why there's no good talent in the area. I'll discount my services depending on what I'm doing and how charitable I'm feeling, but no, I do not work for free.
They were running Windows Server 2008 R2 and unpatched SQL Server 2008 R2 with a CenturyLink-provided DSL router without an external firewall appliance, so it was pretty much child's play for the malware to root the server. Among the things that I was going to do the next week was inspect the 18 PCs (running Win 7 Home to Win 10 Pro -- but no domain model: it was all one big workgroup) with a bootable CD, but apparently they're happy with what they'll have. It would've been interesting to see what was lurking there. I wonder who is going to configure their brand-new Cisco firewall: I offered to help them find someone qualified to do it as it's outside of my area of expertise, haven't heard word one.
It's a sliding scale, I don't know the exact numbers and it may vary depending on the movie/contract. Chances are that the bigger the (anticipated) blockbuster, the higher the ticket gross goes to the production house/distributor for longer. So when hopeful epic blockbusters like King Arthur or the Emoji Movie become epic failures, companies get screwed up and down the line. The longer the movie stays in the theater, the lower down the scale it slides and the more the theater makes per ticket. And the theater always keeps concessions.
This is one of the best things about digital projection: no print degradation when movies stay in a theater for a long time. I had heard that the production/distribution house can get 100% of ticket sales for the first week or two of a really big release of something like Star Wars, but it's pretty hush-hush. Who knows, with all of the shady bookkeeping tricks that Hollywood practices.
The service will definitely lose money on me, IF my local chain buys in to it -- I just sent them an email inquiring. I've seen approx 75 movies in '16/'17. That would be $170 under their model. Let's call it an average of $12 a ticket, that's $900 in ticket prices, a savings to me of $730, ignoring concessions since we're just talking ticket prices. Add my wife in, and the savings are YUUUUGE.
I just don't see how this would be long-term viable, especially since I'd create a new email address just for this service and would buy a debit card and/or set up a new PayPal account just to lightly fox their attempt at gathering info on me. Some info I'd willingly give them, but not all. I guess their money would be made in people who sign up but aren't smart enough to maximize the value, like paying for a gym membership and letting them hit your bank account every month, yet never using it. Still, I just can't see them lasting long-term. But if my local chain buys-in, I'll use it.
And Vox and his slate all finished below No Award. I was quite happy to see that. They may be able to game the DragonCon award, I'm not bothering with that one.
I still have my 24k Model 100, aside from some corrosion on the battery contacts it works fine. I also have the disk/video interface and the 3.5" floppy somewhere.
Wonderful computer. I understand they're still very popular in marine biology: easy to seal in a big Ziploc and you've got a great keyboard to type on. I was discussing it just recently and someone pointed me to an M100 emulator: why would I want to bother with an emulator when I have the real thing?
As I recall, Bezos is pumping money back in to acquisitions and expanding the company and pumping the stock price, but are the actually profitable yet? I don't know that lowering prices (substantially) at WF is the move to make, but what do I know. The nearest WF is hundreds of miles away, so it's rare that I get to shop there.
I've had Yahoo Mail since before '02, and I'm not sure I'm going to give it up now. I could put it on my own server, but I just haven't committed to that yet. I absolutely hate the UI on Gmail, even though I maintain three accounts there for various purposes. I think I'm just going to wait and see what Verizon does. Maybe they'll give me a price break on my cell bill (yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt).
We had a reviewer in the Arizona Republic who was pretty much diametrically-opposed to my tastes: if he hated a film, I usually liked it, and vice-versa. I was never going to see the new Baywatch regardless, and I had no desire to see the new Pirates movie: I enjoyed the first one, but every one subsequent was a waste of time and money for me.
Maybe I should pay more attention to Rotten Tomatoes.
I did that when I flew to Europe in '15, bought a Chromebook for the trip. But the purpose was weight saving and leaving my MacBook Air at home so I wouldn't risk it being damaged or stolen. All I needed was something for email and transferring photos from SD cards to USB sticks. And I'm quite happy with the Chromebook, I just wish mine had a keyboard light.
Now, if I ever fly out of the country again, it's going to be to Mexico or Canada, then to my destination. I can read a paperback until I get my devices back.
There have been bitterly-fought DUI cases in similar circumstances where the person knew they were too drunk to drive but it it was too cold to just wait in the car to sober up, so they started the car to run the heater to warm up. I don't know the outcome of such cases, but it does show that officer judgement should be a factor.
in '94, I had amateur radio. Someone cut-off the car in front of me, instant three car collision with the car that caused it skating away free. It's the last car on car accident that I've had. The people whom I was on the radio with said it was quite impressive to hear.
Yes, I use my phone while driving, exceedingly carefully, and only while in a straight line with no traffic and not while approaching a light. I don't live in a city, so I think it's not too dangerous to do this. When I use the phone part, I use the speakerphone and voice dialing, or I wait until I'm at a destination or I can pull over. I'll use voice to text to read texts to me (I'm job hunting, so it's mildly important), but I'll pull over to reply. Otherwise I'm just listening to music or podcasts and don't need to touch the thing.
TRS-80 Model 100. 4xAA batteries for power, 24k RAM, 7 line 40 column LCD display, 300 baud modem, 3.5" AND 5.25" floppy drives, in addition to the cassette tape interface. It's in the next room and it still works, though it has a little battery corrosion damage. Love that beast! It got me my first computer job: I was hanging out at a game store, typing up my homework, when the owner saw me typing and offered me a job entering data for a commercial mailing list.
I always enjoyed the Model 1 and 3, never had one though. I do have an Apple Newton sitting in a nice leather portfolio case in the other room, works just fine.
I remember the joy of switching from Windows 3.whatever to NT 3.1 and Access going from crashing every couple of hours to crashing never. That was such a wonderful thing and showed precisely where the problem was.
My wife is an astronomer, and their computer room is entirely linux, so almost all of their front-end computers and worker laptops are Mac. I switched about ten years ago, and it is SO NICE having the increased reliability. One day at work many years ago my micromanaging pinhead of a boss was bugging me at lunch while I was trying to work (I took late lunches). I had my MacBook Pro sitting next to me, I used it as a music player. He was giving me a ration of shit about Macs, I turned around, ran uptime on it, then said "Yeah, you're right, Don. Macs are absolute garbage. This one's only been up for 57 days without a reboot." He left without another word.
I generally don't get more than two months of uptime, for one reason or another (laptop battery crash, etc.) Still, it is so nice not having to reboot seemingly every other day due to a driver or other software update. It's better now under Win 7 and 10, but I have no plans to go back. (typed on 2015 27" iMac)
I remember the PITB of trying to squeeze out that 384k of memory from Compaqs, and IIRC, HPs. I loathed their computers then, and I loathe them now. Loved QEMM-386, though. When I bought my first 386, that was perhaps my first purchase.
While I don't like Pence, I have to agree with you, Gameboy. He at least understands how government works. But here's the scary bit -- Paul Ryan would be promoted to Veep....
When we went to Germany two years ago, upon arrival we bought a cheap low-end smart phone for my wife and a new SIM for my iPhone 6. No big deal. In fact, I chose our first hotel partly based on proximity to a good electronics store (and equally close to the U-bahn and S-bahn). Now, I'd buy a low-end smart phone for myself, load some critical contacts and use it for a few weeks before leaving and I'd lock my iPhone in my house and leave it. Last trip I took a Chromebook instead of my MacBook Air, I'll do the same in the future.
My wife and I flew to/from Germany two years ago for a river cruise from Prague to Berlin, taking a train to Prague. It was MUCH easier getting in/out of Germany and absolutely no problem crossing the border in to Czechoslovakia (only had to present our train ticket) than it was returning to the USA via the New Jersey hellhole Newark. If I had any choice where I retire, I wouldn't hesitate to choose Berlin or Dresden. Housing in Bad Schandau seemed quite affordable and it was a very pretty place.
SO MANY problems I have seen when devs have admin rights on their boxes! If you want more reliable software, I think the first step is to make the devs run under the same OS permissions as the users. As far as selecting your own tools, I can't comment on that. Maybe the company is multi-platform. Myself, there are my preferred editors and such that I want, but that's no big deal.
It wasn't my best job, but a very enjoyable one when I was just starting out let me work 10am to 7pm. No rush hour traffic, two hours every night undisturbed, and usually no problems with crowds when I went out for lunch. Sheer bliss. But the company promoted idiots and allowed nepotistic hiring practices, so I left and continued my career elsewhere.
I worked for an org and was issued a purchase card, it was a credit card from a bank that I could use on trips, etc. Except all purchases had to be put on a req and approved in advance. So what it did was de-centralize the purchasing department, to no benefit of the people throughout the org. There was no such thing as petty cash, and if you bought something out of pocket that you needed without the p-card approval, odds of getting reimbursed were not high. So if you needed to outfit an office, you'd go to Staples and write down the catalog number and price for everything, then plug it in to a Word document, print it on the correct color paper (automatic rejection if on the wrong color paper) and run it up the chain. For a very long time I have made it a personal standard of buying almost all of my own supplies and taking them with me when I leave to avoid shite like this.
A friend in the same org went to spend several hundred dollars on a load of paper (she ran the print shop). When the credit card statement arrived for the purchase, all hell broke loose because there had been an error in calculating tax on one side or the other (vendor was in a different state) and there was a sub-ten cent difference between the PO and the actual purchase.
I had a boss who would schedule meetings at 4:30 when I left at 5, or at 8am when that was the time that I typically arrived, and the first thing that I did every morning was to check the health of all of my database servers, which took some time. I found a very simple solution: in Outlook, create a daily meeting from 8-9am and from 4-5pm, and mark it private. Boss goes to schedule a meeting at an inappropriate time, and so sad -- I'm not available. It was never a problem for me in the future.
It doesn't help against bosses that walk in, but in this case he was sort of in another part of the building and didn't come in to programmer space routinely. He once came in during lunch, when I was working (I prefer late lunches) and started talking about incredibly strange things, ruining my workflow. Then he starts giving me ration of shit about Mac computers. My MacBook Pro was on the desktop, I used it as a music player. Finally I turned to it, ran uptime, and said to him: 'You're right, Bob. Mac's are total shit. Mine's only been up for 49 days without a reboot.' He left without saying another word.
Slashdot Mirror
There are airplane graveyards in the New Mexico deserts. The location were chosen specifically because of the dry air.
Pray tell, where? I've seen several in Arizona and California, but never in NM, and I live there.
Amusingly, I ran in to almost this exact scenario last month. A former co-worker went to her doctor, her doctor's practice had just been slammed by TWO ransomware hits. Their server was totally screwed. She gave them my name, I contacted them the next day. They never asked my price, I only charged them $30 an hour for 15 hours over two days, didn't even charge them for the time it took to put together a four page report describing what happened to them and the additional steps they needed to take.
They decided they didn't need my further services the next week or since.
When I lived in the Big City, my consulting rate was $50-125, and that was over a decade ago. But here, wages are horribly suppressed, and then people wonder why there's no good talent in the area. I'll discount my services depending on what I'm doing and how charitable I'm feeling, but no, I do not work for free.
They were running Windows Server 2008 R2 and unpatched SQL Server 2008 R2 with a CenturyLink-provided DSL router without an external firewall appliance, so it was pretty much child's play for the malware to root the server. Among the things that I was going to do the next week was inspect the 18 PCs (running Win 7 Home to Win 10 Pro -- but no domain model: it was all one big workgroup) with a bootable CD, but apparently they're happy with what they'll have. It would've been interesting to see what was lurking there. I wonder who is going to configure their brand-new Cisco firewall: I offered to help them find someone qualified to do it as it's outside of my area of expertise, haven't heard word one.
It's a sliding scale, I don't know the exact numbers and it may vary depending on the movie/contract. Chances are that the bigger the (anticipated) blockbuster, the higher the ticket gross goes to the production house/distributor for longer. So when hopeful epic blockbusters like King Arthur or the Emoji Movie become epic failures, companies get screwed up and down the line. The longer the movie stays in the theater, the lower down the scale it slides and the more the theater makes per ticket. And the theater always keeps concessions.
This is one of the best things about digital projection: no print degradation when movies stay in a theater for a long time. I had heard that the production/distribution house can get 100% of ticket sales for the first week or two of a really big release of something like Star Wars, but it's pretty hush-hush. Who knows, with all of the shady bookkeeping tricks that Hollywood practices.
The service will definitely lose money on me, IF my local chain buys in to it -- I just sent them an email inquiring. I've seen approx 75 movies in '16/'17. That would be $170 under their model. Let's call it an average of $12 a ticket, that's $900 in ticket prices, a savings to me of $730, ignoring concessions since we're just talking ticket prices. Add my wife in, and the savings are YUUUUGE.
I just don't see how this would be long-term viable, especially since I'd create a new email address just for this service and would buy a debit card and/or set up a new PayPal account just to lightly fox their attempt at gathering info on me. Some info I'd willingly give them, but not all. I guess their money would be made in people who sign up but aren't smart enough to maximize the value, like paying for a gym membership and letting them hit your bank account every month, yet never using it. Still, I just can't see them lasting long-term. But if my local chain buys-in, I'll use it.
And Vox and his slate all finished below No Award. I was quite happy to see that. They may be able to game the DragonCon award, I'm not bothering with that one.
I still have my 24k Model 100, aside from some corrosion on the battery contacts it works fine. I also have the disk/video interface and the 3.5" floppy somewhere. Wonderful computer. I understand they're still very popular in marine biology: easy to seal in a big Ziploc and you've got a great keyboard to type on. I was discussing it just recently and someone pointed me to an M100 emulator: why would I want to bother with an emulator when I have the real thing?
As I recall, Bezos is pumping money back in to acquisitions and expanding the company and pumping the stock price, but are the actually profitable yet? I don't know that lowering prices (substantially) at WF is the move to make, but what do I know. The nearest WF is hundreds of miles away, so it's rare that I get to shop there.
I use the phrase "people with more dollars than sense".
I've had Yahoo Mail since before '02, and I'm not sure I'm going to give it up now. I could put it on my own server, but I just haven't committed to that yet. I absolutely hate the UI on Gmail, even though I maintain three accounts there for various purposes. I think I'm just going to wait and see what Verizon does. Maybe they'll give me a price break on my cell bill (yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt).
We had a reviewer in the Arizona Republic who was pretty much diametrically-opposed to my tastes: if he hated a film, I usually liked it, and vice-versa. I was never going to see the new Baywatch regardless, and I had no desire to see the new Pirates movie: I enjoyed the first one, but every one subsequent was a waste of time and money for me.
Maybe I should pay more attention to Rotten Tomatoes.
I did that when I flew to Europe in '15, bought a Chromebook for the trip. But the purpose was weight saving and leaving my MacBook Air at home so I wouldn't risk it being damaged or stolen. All I needed was something for email and transferring photos from SD cards to USB sticks. And I'm quite happy with the Chromebook, I just wish mine had a keyboard light.
Now, if I ever fly out of the country again, it's going to be to Mexico or Canada, then to my destination. I can read a paperback until I get my devices back.
There have been bitterly-fought DUI cases in similar circumstances where the person knew they were too drunk to drive but it it was too cold to just wait in the car to sober up, so they started the car to run the heater to warm up. I don't know the outcome of such cases, but it does show that officer judgement should be a factor.
in '94, I had amateur radio. Someone cut-off the car in front of me, instant three car collision with the car that caused it skating away free. It's the last car on car accident that I've had. The people whom I was on the radio with said it was quite impressive to hear.
Yes, I use my phone while driving, exceedingly carefully, and only while in a straight line with no traffic and not while approaching a light. I don't live in a city, so I think it's not too dangerous to do this. When I use the phone part, I use the speakerphone and voice dialing, or I wait until I'm at a destination or I can pull over. I'll use voice to text to read texts to me (I'm job hunting, so it's mildly important), but I'll pull over to reply. Otherwise I'm just listening to music or podcasts and don't need to touch the thing.
I used to sell those at LaBelle's, always wanted one but couldn't really afford it. They were fun to play with, though.
TRS-80 Model 100. 4xAA batteries for power, 24k RAM, 7 line 40 column LCD display, 300 baud modem, 3.5" AND 5.25" floppy drives, in addition to the cassette tape interface. It's in the next room and it still works, though it has a little battery corrosion damage. Love that beast! It got me my first computer job: I was hanging out at a game store, typing up my homework, when the owner saw me typing and offered me a job entering data for a commercial mailing list.
I always enjoyed the Model 1 and 3, never had one though. I do have an Apple Newton sitting in a nice leather portfolio case in the other room, works just fine.
I remember the joy of switching from Windows 3.whatever to NT 3.1 and Access going from crashing every couple of hours to crashing never. That was such a wonderful thing and showed precisely where the problem was.
My wife is an astronomer, and their computer room is entirely linux, so almost all of their front-end computers and worker laptops are Mac. I switched about ten years ago, and it is SO NICE having the increased reliability. One day at work many years ago my micromanaging pinhead of a boss was bugging me at lunch while I was trying to work (I took late lunches). I had my MacBook Pro sitting next to me, I used it as a music player. He was giving me a ration of shit about Macs, I turned around, ran uptime on it, then said "Yeah, you're right, Don. Macs are absolute garbage. This one's only been up for 57 days without a reboot." He left without another word.
I generally don't get more than two months of uptime, for one reason or another (laptop battery crash, etc.) Still, it is so nice not having to reboot seemingly every other day due to a driver or other software update. It's better now under Win 7 and 10, but I have no plans to go back. (typed on 2015 27" iMac)
I remember the PITB of trying to squeeze out that 384k of memory from Compaqs, and IIRC, HPs. I loathed their computers then, and I loathe them now. Loved QEMM-386, though. When I bought my first 386, that was perhaps my first purchase.
While I don't like Pence, I have to agree with you, Gameboy. He at least understands how government works. But here's the scary bit -- Paul Ryan would be promoted to Veep....
When we went to Germany two years ago, upon arrival we bought a cheap low-end smart phone for my wife and a new SIM for my iPhone 6. No big deal. In fact, I chose our first hotel partly based on proximity to a good electronics store (and equally close to the U-bahn and S-bahn). Now, I'd buy a low-end smart phone for myself, load some critical contacts and use it for a few weeks before leaving and I'd lock my iPhone in my house and leave it. Last trip I took a Chromebook instead of my MacBook Air, I'll do the same in the future.
My wife and I flew to/from Germany two years ago for a river cruise from Prague to Berlin, taking a train to Prague. It was MUCH easier getting in/out of Germany and absolutely no problem crossing the border in to Czechoslovakia (only had to present our train ticket) than it was returning to the USA via the New Jersey hellhole Newark. If I had any choice where I retire, I wouldn't hesitate to choose Berlin or Dresden. Housing in Bad Schandau seemed quite affordable and it was a very pretty place.
SO MANY problems I have seen when devs have admin rights on their boxes! If you want more reliable software, I think the first step is to make the devs run under the same OS permissions as the users. As far as selecting your own tools, I can't comment on that. Maybe the company is multi-platform. Myself, there are my preferred editors and such that I want, but that's no big deal.
It wasn't my best job, but a very enjoyable one when I was just starting out let me work 10am to 7pm. No rush hour traffic, two hours every night undisturbed, and usually no problems with crowds when I went out for lunch. Sheer bliss. But the company promoted idiots and allowed nepotistic hiring practices, so I left and continued my career elsewhere.
I worked for an org and was issued a purchase card, it was a credit card from a bank that I could use on trips, etc. Except all purchases had to be put on a req and approved in advance. So what it did was de-centralize the purchasing department, to no benefit of the people throughout the org. There was no such thing as petty cash, and if you bought something out of pocket that you needed without the p-card approval, odds of getting reimbursed were not high. So if you needed to outfit an office, you'd go to Staples and write down the catalog number and price for everything, then plug it in to a Word document, print it on the correct color paper (automatic rejection if on the wrong color paper) and run it up the chain. For a very long time I have made it a personal standard of buying almost all of my own supplies and taking them with me when I leave to avoid shite like this.
A friend in the same org went to spend several hundred dollars on a load of paper (she ran the print shop). When the credit card statement arrived for the purchase, all hell broke loose because there had been an error in calculating tax on one side or the other (vendor was in a different state) and there was a sub-ten cent difference between the PO and the actual purchase.
We once had a user copy all of the files in the Windows directory in to alphabetical subdirs. For some reason the computer didn't boot after that.
I had a boss who would schedule meetings at 4:30 when I left at 5, or at 8am when that was the time that I typically arrived, and the first thing that I did every morning was to check the health of all of my database servers, which took some time. I found a very simple solution: in Outlook, create a daily meeting from 8-9am and from 4-5pm, and mark it private. Boss goes to schedule a meeting at an inappropriate time, and so sad -- I'm not available. It was never a problem for me in the future.
It doesn't help against bosses that walk in, but in this case he was sort of in another part of the building and didn't come in to programmer space routinely. He once came in during lunch, when I was working (I prefer late lunches) and started talking about incredibly strange things, ruining my workflow. Then he starts giving me ration of shit about Mac computers. My MacBook Pro was on the desktop, I used it as a music player. Finally I turned to it, ran uptime, and said to him: 'You're right, Bob. Mac's are total shit. Mine's only been up for 49 days without a reboot.' He left without saying another word.