"That's a great suggestion, but I gotta ask - is there seriously no other way to disable 'autorun' on Windows? (I'm in front of a Mac right now so I can't try it). That's kind of amazing if you really do need a 3rd party thingummy to turn it off."
Depending on the version of windows, there may or may not be a GUI for it. You can always do it manually through the registry. I always install TweakUI so I can fine tune icon settings and menu pop-up speeds that you simply can't tune with any of the GUI that comes with windows. (FYI I have a mac too and I certainly prefer the way OS X does it.)
"Next, follow these additional steps to disable MediaMax:"
Or just hold down the shift key when you put the disc in and the autorun won't install their mediamax trash to begin with.
Or do what I do. Just get TweakUI and prevent autorun for CDs to begin with. It is quite useful when you don't want your new game or whatever to autorun its installer when you put the disc in.
"And what happens when your backup system is suddenly discovered to have been corrupted, perhaps intentionally, perhaps weeks prior to the loss?"
Exactly... one time a client's business got broken into. Their computers were never recovered. Fortunately we had already set up the client with a good backup strategy. They were back up and running with all data restored (from zip disks) as soon as the new computers were in.
Well... almost. The one admin assist was backing up these critical accounting files on a box of floppies he had bought. Never told us anything about it. Of course when it came to restore, it turns out that all the floppies in the box were defective and came from a bad batch. Yes, that is when we had to use a data recovery service.
(In the end, most (but not all) of the data was recovered.)
When the Pentium Pro came out, Intel actually stopped shipping the high end Pentiums because they were faster than the PPro's for integer calculations.
"beh, gel ink is the worst of the worst. It's thick and it smudges easily. Just get a standard ballpoint Bic if that's all you can afford."
Depends on the gel pen. I now exclusively use the Pilot GTec C4 for my main writing. They're not cheap. CDN$2.99 per unit and I don't know of any USA source for them. You can only buy them in packs of ONE unless you are a supplier. (Thanks to my cousin I got a box of them for cheap.) You can get them at Staples in Canada and at numerous places in the UK and across Europe.
The advantages of these pens are:
- They actually do write a very very fine line. The rating is 0.2 mm and they actually do live up to it. I've seen a lot of pens that claim 0.5 mm and such but they write a very thick line. These C4's actually live up to the claim.
- No blotching at all. I am student and I have to write very quickly in lectuers. With my Sanford Uni-Ball Vision (micro-tip) pens (which are the best IMO in terms of reliability and overall feel) when I move my hand to the start of the next line, the ink was still slightly wet and it smudged. But with the C4, it dries VERY quickly. The only time I've had them smudge is when I deliberately tried to smudge them or got water on the paper.
The only problems are that the design of the lid is a little weak and if you like to play with the clip it can break off. ALso, when the pen is new the ink cuts off occasionally in the first couple of days. But after that it's very smooth, almost as smooth as the aforementioned Uniball Vision Micro.
Gel ink can be your best friend, as long as you find the right implementation.
"For external Drives they sure as hell do. But even then why not just fo Firewire."
Exactly right. About 5 weeks ago I copied a lot of files (more than 40G) from my friend's computer onto my USB 2.0 / Firewire external drive. My friend's machine did not have FW but it did have USB 2.0.
If it wasn't for the USB 2.0 connection on his machine, I might be still there at this place waiting for the files to transfer.
Other options for external USB 2.0 devices are video capture devices. You just can't fit a true DV compliant stream into 11 Mbit without lossy compression (and then it's not DV anymore.) Of course this is where firewire shines as well.
"Any method of munging the address must still be clickable within the visitor's browser. If it is clickable, it can be harvested. Javascript and html encoding may stop most of the bots, but bots exist that can slurp the address no matter how much javascript you wrap it in."
Check out this freeware windows program called Mailto Encrypter. It doesn't actually use encryption. Basically is uses hex codes to represent the mailto link so spambots cannot read it as plaintext.
I have had very good success using this tool. Addresses that get put up on the company web page in the encoded format NEVER get spam unless the owner actively does something stupid.
My true real actual e-mail address can be found on a limited number of places on the internet and it is encoded like this in every instance. I don't remember the last time I have gotten a spam message outside one of my spam accounts thanks to this tool.
If you have told ZoneAlarm that your Kazaa is allowed to act as a server then it will allow external connections coming into ports that Kazaa has opened, even if those connection are from Icarus. Kazaa will only filter based on programs, not statically defined IP blocks. Thus Kazaa will NOT stop such a scan.
To avoid it, I would block incoming connection university-owned IP blocks for ports owned by your favourite file sharing system. Of course you'll be cutting yourself off from downloading from other people on resnet. If I wanted to get fancy, I would set up a honeypot system to log scans and then keep track of the Icarus source IP. Then this could be used to block their scanning technique while allowing network connections with the rest of resnet.
All you have to do is get your phone number listed under the maiden name of yourself (if you're female and married) or the maiden name of your wife/mother as appropriate. Then whenever anyone calls for that name you know it's a phone spam and you can legitimately tell them there's nobody there by that name and hang up.
"One student could buy the textbook and share it with the whole class - or even world+dog. So they have no reason to put things in a digital format, as much easier as that would be.
Anybody have any ideas about how we might get around this?"
You'd think so... but for some reason it doesn't seem to work this way. In one electrical devices course I took about 1 year ago, the textbook came with a CD. This CD had the entire textbook's contents on it stored in 23 MB of unencrypted PDF files.
Nevertheless, almost everyone bought the textbook. But when it came to sell them the next semester, everyone just took a copy of those PDF files and passed the book on to the next buyer.
In some small way this probably does reduce sales because the PDFs make it more likely that someone will sell the used book, making it less likely for other people to get new copies. But I still forsee that with e-textbooks, the main source of textbook sales will remain the same: New revisions of the book and courses just starting up that the book.
The only way I forsee this changing is if EVERY textbook had an e-format. If everyone got used to the idea of textbooks being distributed like this, then I could see a new use for filesharing networks popping up rather quickly.
"Most professors love real books, and they wish you loved them too."
Really? How do you know?
"It makes them sad when they see you not making notations in the margins of your books."
Professors don't have to sell their current batch of books to be able to pay for the next semester's batch of books. Writing on the pages reduces the resale value. To get a textbook, all the professor has to do is phone the publisher, mention that they are considering using the book in a course and the publisher immediately couriers over some free copies. (Sales in the textbooks to students, assuming the book is used in the course, recoup this cost.)
I find in general that professors are often out-to-lunch on the realities of the textbook market. I've heard professors claim that they would be appalled if the books for their course cost more than $60 yet the book itself is $90 and the workbook is another $30 to 40. I'm a 4th year engineering student now and I can count on the fingers one hand the number of professors I've had that actually knew the cost of the books used in their courses because they always get it for free.
"Thats why a lot of monitors used to have 72 as a refresh rate. Beyond that, there aren't many people who can tell the difference."
It depends on how accustomed you are to higher resolutions. I spend many hours every day looking at a monitor at 85 Hz. Whenever I have to use a machine that is at 75, 72 or 60Hz refresh rate, it's very noticeable to me. But if I turn up the refresh rate on someone who is used to 75 Hz, they can't see any difference.
A better test would be to get someone at 75 up to 85 Hz, and then after 2 weeks turn it back down and see if they notice.
Re:Regional encoding strikes again
on
The Borg MegaCube
·
· Score: 3, Informative
" most drives are firmware upgradeable to a region free mode. Also, for Windows users, there is "DVD-region free"."
Just get the Free media player VLC which works on windows, os x, linux and some others as well. It will play all regions even if you don't have a region free DVD drive.
If the person is leaving the machine unlocked, then set up the scrolling text screen saver with a password. The text should say that they have to come see you to get the password.
The annoyance of having to do this and the fact that they have to admit to you that they messed up every time might make them to remember to lock the machine from now on.
I remember an admin at one place I worked would send e-mails from that person's account. Bizzare things, like "I'd like to meet you for lunch so we can discuss your choice of attire." Or messages asking other people out on dates. Or offers to buy them coffee, etc. As the number of unlocked incidents increased, the messages would go up the office chain of management so higher and higher-ups would realise what's going on.
"Email is complicated. While most telemarketers seem to call from inside the US, email comes from all over the world."
Not necessarily. There is a lot of Telemarketing targetting the USA that is based in Eastern Canada. This is because of the higher than average unemployment rates in the area so more people are willing to accept minimum wage for drugery-style work. The (somewhat) bilingual population allows them to telemarket to french Canada as well. I knew one guy who once worked there and they were instructed to lie to Americans if asked about their location, saying that they were actually in North Carolina.
"My 17 inch powerbook was rendered useless overnight. Upon rebooting, the video display renedered the grey screen of death. Hopefully, doing an 'archive and install' and going back to 10.2.6 will fix my woes... At least they are doing the responsible thing and pulling the plug on it."
If you look carefully at the linked board, one person solved it by booting from the diagnostic CD and doing the extended test. After that it *should* boot normally again.
A lot of games are written using DirectX APIs. Perhaps someone who knows more about it can elaborate on this: Does writing a game in DirectX make it easier to port to the X-Box? I do believe the answer is yes.
Also, if games came on bootable CD images, how would you patch them? Or add mods or other editing capabilities? Game distros that just come on a disc are what consoles are for to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it appears to be a javascript type thing. I have flash disabled in mozilla (due to stupid flash ads) and I can still see it.
I expect Gates, McBride and Bernard Shifman would all place near the top.
Depending on the version of windows, there may or may not be a GUI for it. You can always do it manually through the registry. I always install TweakUI so I can fine tune icon settings and menu pop-up speeds that you simply can't tune with any of the GUI that comes with windows. (FYI I have a mac too and I certainly prefer the way OS X does it.)
Or just hold down the shift key when you put the disc in and the autorun won't install their mediamax trash to begin with.
Or do what I do. Just get TweakUI and prevent autorun for CDs to begin with. It is quite useful when you don't want your new game or whatever to autorun its installer when you put the disc in.
Exactly ... one time a client's business got broken into. Their computers were never recovered. Fortunately we had already set up the client with a good backup strategy. They were back up and running with all data restored (from zip disks) as soon as the new computers were in.
Well ... almost. The one admin assist was backing up these critical accounting files on a box of floppies he had bought. Never told us anything about it. Of course when it came to restore, it turns out that all the floppies in the box were defective and came from a bad batch. Yes, that is when we had to use a data recovery service.
(In the end, most (but not all) of the data was recovered.)
What is the colour of a movie sucking?
When the Pentium Pro came out, Intel actually stopped shipping the high end Pentiums because they were faster than the PPro's for integer calculations.
Depends on the gel pen. I now exclusively use the Pilot GTec C4 for my main writing. They're not cheap. CDN$2.99 per unit and I don't know of any USA source for them. You can only buy them in packs of ONE unless you are a supplier. (Thanks to my cousin I got a box of them for cheap.) You can get them at Staples in Canada and at numerous places in the UK and across Europe.
The advantages of these pens are:
- They actually do write a very very fine line. The rating is 0.2 mm and they actually do live up to it. I've seen a lot of pens that claim 0.5 mm and such but they write a very thick line. These C4's actually live up to the claim.
- No blotching at all. I am student and I have to write very quickly in lectuers. With my Sanford Uni-Ball Vision (micro-tip) pens (which are the best IMO in terms of reliability and overall feel) when I move my hand to the start of the next line, the ink was still slightly wet and it smudged. But with the C4, it dries VERY quickly. The only time I've had them smudge is when I deliberately tried to smudge them or got water on the paper.
The only problems are that the design of the lid is a little weak and if you like to play with the clip it can break off. ALso, when the pen is new the ink cuts off occasionally in the first couple of days. But after that it's very smooth, almost as smooth as the aforementioned Uniball Vision Micro.
Gel ink can be your best friend, as long as you find the right implementation.
No, but if someone took a 11 MBit device and labelled it as USB 2.0 then I would not like that at all.
(Now with the new asinine naming convention, USB 2.0 "Full Speed" is actually 11 MBit, so it might not be false advertising.)
You have to look for the "USB 2.0 High Speed" marking to be sure that it's 480 MBit/s.
Exactly right. About 5 weeks ago I copied a lot of files (more than 40G) from my friend's computer onto my USB 2.0 / Firewire external drive. My friend's machine did not have FW but it did have USB 2.0.
If it wasn't for the USB 2.0 connection on his machine, I might be still there at this place waiting for the files to transfer.
Other options for external USB 2.0 devices are video capture devices. You just can't fit a true DV compliant stream into 11 Mbit without lossy compression (and then it's not DV anymore.) Of course this is where firewire shines as well.
I prefer not to do that as I like to keep my pages accessible to visually impaired people.
Check out this freeware windows program called Mailto Encrypter. It doesn't actually use encryption. Basically is uses hex codes to represent the mailto link so spambots cannot read it as plaintext.
I have had very good success using this tool. Addresses that get put up on the company web page in the encoded format NEVER get spam unless the owner actively does something stupid.
My true real actual e-mail address can be found on a limited number of places on the internet and it is encoded like this in every instance. I don't remember the last time I have gotten a spam message outside one of my spam accounts thanks to this tool.
To avoid it, I would block incoming connection university-owned IP blocks for ports owned by your favourite file sharing system. Of course you'll be cutting yourself off from downloading from other people on resnet. If I wanted to get fancy, I would set up a honeypot system to log scans and then keep track of the Icarus source IP. Then this could be used to block their scanning technique while allowing network connections with the rest of resnet.
As I understand it, if you search for the names of political figures from a chinese internet connection, you'll be cut off for a short period.
All you have to do is get your phone number listed under the maiden name of yourself (if you're female and married) or the maiden name of your wife/mother as appropriate. Then whenever anyone calls for that name you know it's a phone spam and you can legitimately tell them there's nobody there by that name and hang up.
You'd think so... but for some reason it doesn't seem to work this way. In one electrical devices course I took about 1 year ago, the textbook came with a CD. This CD had the entire textbook's contents on it stored in 23 MB of unencrypted PDF files.
Nevertheless, almost everyone bought the textbook. But when it came to sell them the next semester, everyone just took a copy of those PDF files and passed the book on to the next buyer.
In some small way this probably does reduce sales because the PDFs make it more likely that someone will sell the used book, making it less likely for other people to get new copies. But I still forsee that with e-textbooks, the main source of textbook sales will remain the same: New revisions of the book and courses just starting up that the book.
The only way I forsee this changing is if EVERY textbook had an e-format. If everyone got used to the idea of textbooks being distributed like this, then I could see a new use for filesharing networks popping up rather quickly.
Really? How do you know?
"It makes them sad when they see you not making notations in the margins of your books."
Professors don't have to sell their current batch of books to be able to pay for the next semester's batch of books. Writing on the pages reduces the resale value. To get a textbook, all the professor has to do is phone the publisher, mention that they are considering using the book in a course and the publisher immediately couriers over some free copies. (Sales in the textbooks to students, assuming the book is used in the course, recoup this cost.)
I find in general that professors are often out-to-lunch on the realities of the textbook market. I've heard professors claim that they would be appalled if the books for their course cost more than $60 yet the book itself is $90 and the workbook is another $30 to 40. I'm a 4th year engineering student now and I can count on the fingers one hand the number of professors I've had that actually knew the cost of the books used in their courses because they always get it for free.
It depends on how accustomed you are to higher resolutions. I spend many hours every day looking at a monitor at 85 Hz. Whenever I have to use a machine that is at 75, 72 or 60Hz refresh rate, it's very noticeable to me. But if I turn up the refresh rate on someone who is used to 75 Hz, they can't see any difference.
A better test would be to get someone at 75 up to 85 Hz, and then after 2 weeks turn it back down and see if they notice.
Just get the Free media player VLC which works on windows, os x, linux and some others as well. It will play all regions even if you don't have a region free DVD drive.
The annoyance of having to do this and the fact that they have to admit to you that they messed up every time might make them to remember to lock the machine from now on.
I remember an admin at one place I worked would send e-mails from that person's account. Bizzare things, like "I'd like to meet you for lunch so we can discuss your choice of attire." Or messages asking other people out on dates. Or offers to buy them coffee, etc. As the number of unlocked incidents increased, the messages would go up the office chain of management so higher and higher-ups would realise what's going on.
Not necessarily. There is a lot of Telemarketing targetting the USA that is based in Eastern Canada. This is because of the higher than average unemployment rates in the area so more people are willing to accept minimum wage for drugery-style work. The (somewhat) bilingual population allows them to telemarket to french Canada as well. I knew one guy who once worked there and they were instructed to lie to Americans if asked about their location, saying that they were actually in North Carolina.
If you look carefully at the linked board, one person solved it by booting from the diagnostic CD and doing the extended test. After that it *should* boot normally again.
This is just so delicious. Year 2000 USA Election Statistics
National Popular Vote for Gore: 50,996,116
National Popular Vote for Bush: 50,456,169
The question of course is WHICH 50 million was 'wrong' ;-)
Trillian 2.0 (for win32) uses the new MSN messenger protocol so I can still talk to people over MSN even though I didn't install microsoft's client.
A lot of games are written using DirectX APIs. Perhaps someone who knows more about it can elaborate on this: Does writing a game in DirectX make it easier to port to the X-Box? I do believe the answer is yes.
Also, if games came on bootable CD images, how would you patch them? Or add mods or other editing capabilities? Game distros that just come on a disc are what consoles are for to begin with.