"We haven't had any issues with the laptops, besides having one delivered with a CPU that had popped out of its socket. Of course, the box it was shipped in looking like it had been run over by the carrier service... So, that wasn't a big deal."
That's nothing;-)
One person I know told me about how, one time, he was working at an Apple reseller/service centre and they received a powerbook shipped via Fedex and it had TIRE TRACKS on it. That would be on the actual machine, not on the box. The Fedex people claimed that it was that way when it was shipped and they had nothing to do with it...
" Wow, I registered that account only today, and they took my very first submission! I guess that proves Slashdot really is un-biased in more ways then one."
Let's just say that in 'slashdot time,' you're too young to be cynical;-) I suggest you research the 'first troll post investigation' and the associated fallout.
I submitted this story too and it was rejected, probably only slightly after you submitted it. That gives me a 3/41 acceptance rate for submissions.
"Depending on your age, it may just be a matter of waiting a little longer. I see exactly that happening all around me. The bullies who gave me such a hard time in middle school have wound up in jail, rehab, or some kind of probation. The jocks have either matured into working adults and gone on to lead fairly successful lives (and still have a hot chick), or have attempted to stay jocks forever and ended up in jobs with the local janitorial services."
That is pretty much what I saw as well. The jocks and such were at their worst in grade 7-8. In high school they eventually got the idea that they needed to get their act together to get into university, and everything was reversed. The 'geeks' and folks like me were where it was at at the jocks were playing catch-up.
The 'bullies' did end up getting arrested for doing drugs or vandalism, although one did get his act together and became a technician for GM.
It's all a matter of time before before the jocks get it. But will Microsoft ever get it? I don't know.
"It's a fucking forwarding alias. I CANNOT SEND MAIL FROM IT. Therefore I never opted in. But K-Mart won't unsubscribe without an email specifically from that address."
Are you aware that the 'from' address in e-mails is an arbitrary string you enter into your e-mail client software? Just change that string to equal the forwarding address, send the 'remove' message, and then change it back. Piece 'o cake.
"Don't kid yourselves. You can't trust the unsubscribe from a so-called "legitimate" business any more than you can the one from the spammers."
I am in partial agreement with this. I purchased something from the Indigo.ca online bookstore one time and I kept getting their targetting marketing spam. The message specifically said that since I purchased a programming book, they were sending me information about other books that they thought I might enjoy. Fortunately I used a dedicated @mydomain.org forwarding address for that purchase so I reported the spam and then nuked the forwarded. Problem solved.
PS: Don't EVER give out a real address, postal or e-mail for anything related to comdex. You'll get loaded with spam and junk-mail.
Re:The most important item was missed in this stor
on
Mozilla 1.4RC2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"The most important item was missed in this story. [...]
NTLM Support."
Actually the support to use Windows' built-in NTLM function was added in RC1, not RC2. I am currently blissfully using Mozilla 1.4RC1 at work now through the silly Microsoft proxy thanks to this NTLM support. Previously, I was forced to use MSIE since nothing else would work!
Most of those things in the release notes are things that were added in earlier 1.4a/b/rc1 releases. NTLM, overhauled bookmarks, composer dynamic resizing, smooth scrolling and numerous others were in previous release notes too.
"I'm uploading faster than I'm downloading. I've uploaded 4.5 MiB but only downloaded 3.2. What's going on? Is my mac using HyperTransport to send data that doesn't exist yet?"
You can upload the same data to more than one peer in the swarm;-) The lopsided transfers are only a temporary effect at the start of the download. See my explanation here.
So what percent of them have WEP disabled and SSID-broadcast enabled by default? Can I now wardrive to find 120% more open APs? Ironically, Microsoft branded routers are some of the few that do have WEP enabled out of the box.
But these shipment numbers made sense. I bought both a wireless router and AirPort card for my iBook this year.
"Of course, given the source is available, all you need to do is hack the source a bit to fool the system iunto *thinking* you hgave done loads of uploads, and you can then download full-speed and not bother wasting your bandwidth with pointless torrent uploads:-)"
Foolish AC;-) Go back to your Kazaa Lite. Bram (Cohen, creator or bittorrent) already thought of this. Feel free to send outrageous upload statistics to the tracker. That information is not used to determine how much people upload to you. Other clients only consider the upload rates they experience directly. The ONLY way to get high download rates on bittorrent while not uploading is to connect to a swarm with high seed:leecher ratio.
"Also, it could be that the tracker is overloaded. It's the bittorrent equivalent to a 404 error."
Actually this is not entirely true. My bad. A 404 error means that it can't be found, which is different from being overloaded.
So basically 'problem connection to tracker' can sometimes be the same as 404, but other times it can mean the same as 'server too busy' but I don't know if there's a surefire way to tell which one it is.
"BitTorrent defaults to using ports 6881-6889 for transfers. Forward ports 6881-6889 from your firewall to the machine that's downloading the torrent, and everything will be fine."
Note: This step is highly recommended for getting the best performance, although clients can still run when *incoming* connections cannot be accepted on these ports. But if you can't make outgoing and accept incoming connections, then you're hosed.
"You will all have the benefit of the uplink of my 2400 baud modem! Torrent away!"
That's not so funny to me! I was actually seeding three torrents on a lame 28.8 connection last weekend!
My downloads (collectively about 500 MB) were between 86 and 96 percent done, transferring over a lovely cable connection. But I was planning to go to my parents' place on the weekend where the best internet available is 28.8 dialup due to the remoteness of the location and bad phone loops.
I was pretty annoyed when my ride arrived early and I had to close up these torrents that were seeded again for the first time in several days. (Note: Only seeded torrents can finish downloading.) So I grumbled and closed up everything.
But on the saturday, I opened up the laptop, started the torrents on the 28.8 connection shared over a 5 machine LAN and lo and behold, it worked! After about 4 hours the files completely finished and I actually seeded them for a while until my brother started grumbling about me hogging the connetion. Yes, the other downloaders had the benefit of the file being seeded over a 28.8 connection.
"I know *nothing* about bittorrent, this is the first thing out there that makes me want to try it. So I installed the Windows client (I'm at work), but I keep getting the message: "Error, Problem connecting to tracker - 10060 - operation timed out".... is this common?"
Firstly, this is a demo for a mac game so you might not want to download it if you only have a windows machine.
Your office firewall might be blocking outbound connections on ports other than common ones (80,21, etc.) so you can't connect to the tracker.
Also, it could be that the tracker is overloaded. It's the bittorrent equivalent to a 404 error. (The tracker keeps track of what IPs are downloading so clients will know whom they should connect to in order to get parts of the file, and they also keep track of many transfer statistics. Bandwidth used by the tracker tends to be between 1/1,000th and 1/10,000th of the overall transfer used to upload and download the file. But with VERY popular files, even a tracker can get swamped just like a slashdotted site.)
" Sadly, I'm uploading faster then I'm downloading:("
To undertand this, you've gotta realise that clients will upload to YOU based on the upload rates they directly experience from you.
When you join the torrent swarm, you initally have no pieces so the download is slow at less than 5 K/s. Eventually you will have one chunk (about 1 MB) and then, in an effort to boost your node's 'ranking' with other nodes, it uploads furiously, making the upload rate faster than the download rate.
But then your node will rise in priority among other nodes because you are uploading, thus they will upload more data to you. In the long run, your upload and download rate will be equal unless you already start with a chunk of the file you got elsewhere that can be shared, or there are a lot of seeds (nodes with the complete file that are uploading only) and bandwidth to spare.
At the end, look at the count for data uploaded and downloaded. They should be quite similar.
"I'm glad to hear this, as SP3 wrecked havoc on my machine at work. Apparently Windows Upbreak decided to update a bunch of stuff that required the new video driver before it updated the video driver itself."
Never use drivers from Windows Update. I have never seen a case where an 'updated' driver from Windows Update did not cause some problem with the system! I've had their sound card drivers hose the sound, mouse drivers reduce the functionality of the mouse, video drivers cause havoc that needs safe mode and network drivers cause problems where the machine looses all network access during large file transfers.
I have fallen in love with Tony Quarrington and Friends - Group of Seven Suite from CBC records. I heard it playing in the store and snapped it up immediately. It was actually presented and recorded live, although it does not sound like a live recording on the CD. (There is no clapping and such.)
It reminds me of Kind of Blue, but 'sweeter' and more 'earthy.' It is one of my favourite modern jazz albums to date.
"...and much, much more. These are just the ones off the top of my head. I watched just the costume segment alone on the extended DVD and marvelled at all the "authentic" throwaway stuff that nobody will ever, ever see in the movie."
Those things might not be seen in the movie but they're still important and worth big money because of exhibits. I remember going to the Lord of the Rings exhibit in Toronto before TTT came out and getting to scrutinze up close the witch-king's gauntlets, the Sting dagger, Eowyn's dress, the elven jewellry and weapons, and practically every costume, armour, weapon, prop, etc. And there were huge line-ups paying something like $12 per person to see all this.
Sure, you don't see it in the movie but it pays back big-time for exhibits.
"They kindof did -- IE 6.1 is the last standalone release version of IE for Windows."
I think that these are all pieces of a bigger picture. I say that MSFT is using Safari as an excuse for something that was part of their business plan all along.
I say they don't want to release more standalone IE for Windows or Mac because their next 'integrated-with-OS' version of IE will contain proprietary and hard to duplicate features that will complement features in the next major MS SQL Server and IIS releases. I expect them to campaign hard for banks and other 'security conscious' entities to make the online access to their services exclusively use the new 'advanced security features' of the latest Microsoft products. They're hoping the ignorant bank managers would fall into the trap.
MSFT plans to try to get everyone hooked on these server products, thus requiring the Windows Longhorn OS to access the services because that's the only way you'll be able to get a browser that speaks the appropriate language. Essentially, they would be trying to force everyone to use Windows if they want to access the secure online features of their bank or stock broker. They way they would be using an operating system monopoly to marginalise other web browsing products in an effort for people to buy their own product.
And I'm quoting myself here: Wasn't this what Microsoft was sued for before? Using their Monopoly on OSs to marginalise the web browser industry? Haven't they learned anything?
Well yes, they have learned that they can get away with it.
Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 1
"I say do it grassroots style. Send out flyers explaining your situation. Tell them what it would cost based on the number of people signed up."
Absolutely. This is already in my plan. I was talking about this to my manager at my last job and she suggested a campaign of this type too and I agree with her.
"Prepare yourself for lots of questions, prepare to make this your fulltime job (and charge accordingly, you'll get 1000 "I can't check my email" "Why won't msn.com come up" questions)."
I've been doing tech support type jobs on and off since I was 14 so I am well prepared for user stupidity;-) But it will definitely be a full time job. I am a student at the moment and I plan to run it full time on my next co-op work term as long as I can sell it to the co-op office and the School of Engineering. When September comes I'm gonna send out some feelers to see if other ENGG students are willing to make it a joint venture.
"However, wireless technology is very crappy during storms and weather. Latency is terrible. This means you'll get lots of complaints from gamers, because their pings will suffer terribly if they don't have a straight shot to the wireless access point."
True enough, although I am looking into 900 MHz technology. These are more resistant to signal problems associated with trees, buildings, etc and the range is better than 802.11x. This is important since I live in a rural area and sometimes houses on a road are 1 km apart and in the middle of thick sections of coniferous (pine) trees. There are some mature solutions already in existance.
"You could also petition your local telecom to put a CO within distance of your residence(s). If you get enough signatures they will take notice, and make sure you get that list to those who matter."
Bell Canada? Ha! They are pompous and arrogant, and have no reason to listen to their customers because they have a monopoly on local service. Reminds me of MSFT. Bell will never extend service to where I live because the population density is too low for them to make money from it. I would prefer to compete with them.
Most access points now have web interfaces, right? You point your web browser to the AP's IP address, enter the login and password and then you get to administrate the device.
Well you could just create a script to scan port 80 for all IPs on the network. If you find an open port that is not a known web server and connecting to it asks for authentication, then you may have found yourself an AP.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing ;-)
One person I know told me about how, one time, he was working at an Apple reseller/service centre and they received a powerbook shipped via Fedex and it had TIRE TRACKS on it. That would be on the actual machine, not on the box. The Fedex people claimed that it was that way when it was shipped and they had nothing to do with it...
Let's just say that in 'slashdot time,' you're too young to be cynical ;-) I suggest you research the 'first troll post investigation' and the associated fallout.
I submitted this story too and it was rejected, probably only slightly after you submitted it. That gives me a 3/41 acceptance rate for submissions.
"Full speed should be enough for anyone!"
Good point. This is the way I am looking at it - Which headline would you like to see?
1. Microsoft loses anti-spam lawsuit. Spammers rejoice.
2. Microsoft wins anti-spam lawsuit. Collects millions in damages.
I would personally prefer to see #2.
That is pretty much what I saw as well. The jocks and such were at their worst in grade 7-8. In high school they eventually got the idea that they needed to get their act together to get into university, and everything was reversed. The 'geeks' and folks like me were where it was at at the jocks were playing catch-up.
The 'bullies' did end up getting arrested for doing drugs or vandalism, although one did get his act together and became a technician for GM.
It's all a matter of time before before the jocks get it. But will Microsoft ever get it? I don't know.
Too bad Alan Ralsky is not in the list of defendants.
Are you aware that the 'from' address in e-mails is an arbitrary string you enter into your e-mail client software? Just change that string to equal the forwarding address, send the 'remove' message, and then change it back. Piece 'o cake.
"Don't kid yourselves. You can't trust the unsubscribe from a so-called "legitimate" business any more than you can the one from the spammers."
I am in partial agreement with this. I purchased something from the Indigo.ca online bookstore one time and I kept getting their targetting marketing spam. The message specifically said that since I purchased a programming book, they were sending me information about other books that they thought I might enjoy. Fortunately I used a dedicated @mydomain.org forwarding address for that purchase so I reported the spam and then nuked the forwarded. Problem solved.
PS: Don't EVER give out a real address, postal or e-mail for anything related to comdex. You'll get loaded with spam and junk-mail.
Actually the support to use Windows' built-in NTLM function was added in RC1, not RC2. I am currently blissfully using Mozilla 1.4RC1 at work now through the silly Microsoft proxy thanks to this NTLM support. Previously, I was forced to use MSIE since nothing else would work!
Most of those things in the release notes are things that were added in earlier 1.4a/b/rc1 releases. NTLM, overhauled bookmarks, composer dynamic resizing, smooth scrolling and numerous others were in previous release notes too.
You can upload the same data to more than one peer in the swarm ;-) The lopsided transfers are only a temporary effect at the start of the download. See my explanation here.
But these shipment numbers made sense. I bought both a wireless router and AirPort card for my iBook this year.
Foolish AC ;-) Go back to your Kazaa Lite. Bram (Cohen, creator or bittorrent) already thought of this. Feel free to send outrageous upload statistics to the tracker. That information is not used to determine how much people upload to you. Other clients only consider the upload rates they experience directly. The ONLY way to get high download rates on bittorrent while not uploading is to connect to a swarm with high seed:leecher ratio.
Actually this is not entirely true. My bad. A 404 error means that it can't be found, which is different from being overloaded.
So basically 'problem connection to tracker' can sometimes be the same as 404, but other times it can mean the same as 'server too busy' but I don't know if there's a surefire way to tell which one it is.
Note: This step is highly recommended for getting the best performance, although clients can still run when *incoming* connections cannot be accepted on these ports. But if you can't make outgoing and accept incoming connections, then you're hosed.
That's not so funny to me! I was actually seeding three torrents on a lame 28.8 connection last weekend!
My downloads (collectively about 500 MB) were between 86 and 96 percent done, transferring over a lovely cable connection. But I was planning to go to my parents' place on the weekend where the best internet available is 28.8 dialup due to the remoteness of the location and bad phone loops.
I was pretty annoyed when my ride arrived early and I had to close up these torrents that were seeded again for the first time in several days. (Note: Only seeded torrents can finish downloading.) So I grumbled and closed up everything.
But on the saturday, I opened up the laptop, started the torrents on the 28.8 connection shared over a 5 machine LAN and lo and behold, it worked! After about 4 hours the files completely finished and I actually seeded them for a while until my brother started grumbling about me hogging the connetion. Yes, the other downloaders had the benefit of the file being seeded over a 28.8 connection.
Firstly, this is a demo for a mac game so you might not want to download it if you only have a windows machine.
Your office firewall might be blocking outbound connections on ports other than common ones (80,21, etc.) so you can't connect to the tracker.
Also, it could be that the tracker is overloaded. It's the bittorrent equivalent to a 404 error. (The tracker keeps track of what IPs are downloading so clients will know whom they should connect to in order to get parts of the file, and they also keep track of many transfer statistics. Bandwidth used by the tracker tends to be between 1/1,000th and 1/10,000th of the overall transfer used to upload and download the file. But with VERY popular files, even a tracker can get swamped just like a slashdotted site.)
To undertand this, you've gotta realise that clients will upload to YOU based on the upload rates they directly experience from you.
When you join the torrent swarm, you initally have no pieces so the download is slow at less than 5 K/s. Eventually you will have one chunk (about 1 MB) and then, in an effort to boost your node's 'ranking' with other nodes, it uploads furiously, making the upload rate faster than the download rate.
But then your node will rise in priority among other nodes because you are uploading, thus they will upload more data to you. In the long run, your upload and download rate will be equal unless you already start with a chunk of the file you got elsewhere that can be shared, or there are a lot of seeds (nodes with the complete file that are uploading only) and bandwidth to spare.
At the end, look at the count for data uploaded and downloaded. They should be quite similar.
<Picard Voice>The line must be drawn HERE! This far and NO farther!</Picard>
I hope your scissors have rubber hand-grips!
Never use drivers from Windows Update. I have never seen a case where an 'updated' driver from Windows Update did not cause some problem with the system! I've had their sound card drivers hose the sound, mouse drivers reduce the functionality of the mouse, video drivers cause havoc that needs safe mode and network drivers cause problems where the machine looses all network access during large file transfers.
NEVER trust the drivers from Windows Update.
It reminds me of Kind of Blue, but 'sweeter' and more 'earthy.' It is one of my favourite modern jazz albums to date.
That is nothing compared to the benefits and ease of use you can gain from using New AOL Version 2321238. Download it today!
Those things might not be seen in the movie but they're still important and worth big money because of exhibits. I remember going to the Lord of the Rings exhibit in Toronto before TTT came out and getting to scrutinze up close the witch-king's gauntlets, the Sting dagger, Eowyn's dress, the elven jewellry and weapons, and practically every costume, armour, weapon, prop, etc. And there were huge line-ups paying something like $12 per person to see all this.
Sure, you don't see it in the movie but it pays back big-time for exhibits.
I think that these are all pieces of a bigger picture. I say that MSFT is using Safari as an excuse for something that was part of their business plan all along.
I say they don't want to release more standalone IE for Windows or Mac because their next 'integrated-with-OS' version of IE will contain proprietary and hard to duplicate features that will complement features in the next major MS SQL Server and IIS releases. I expect them to campaign hard for banks and other 'security conscious' entities to make the online access to their services exclusively use the new 'advanced security features' of the latest Microsoft products. They're hoping the ignorant bank managers would fall into the trap.
MSFT plans to try to get everyone hooked on these server products, thus requiring the Windows Longhorn OS to access the services because that's the only way you'll be able to get a browser that speaks the appropriate language. Essentially, they would be trying to force everyone to use Windows if they want to access the secure online features of their bank or stock broker. They way they would be using an operating system monopoly to marginalise other web browsing products in an effort for people to buy their own product.
And I'm quoting myself here: Wasn't this what Microsoft was sued for before? Using their Monopoly on OSs to marginalise the web browser industry? Haven't they learned anything?
Well yes, they have learned that they can get away with it.
Absolutely. This is already in my plan. I was talking about this to my manager at my last job and she suggested a campaign of this type too and I agree with her.
"Prepare yourself for lots of questions, prepare to make this your fulltime job (and charge accordingly, you'll get 1000 "I can't check my email" "Why won't msn.com come up" questions)."
I've been doing tech support type jobs on and off since I was 14 so I am well prepared for user stupidity ;-) But it will definitely be a full time job. I am a student at the moment and I plan to run it full time on my next co-op work term as long as I can sell it to the co-op office and the School of Engineering. When September comes I'm gonna send out some feelers to see if other ENGG students are willing to make it a joint venture.
"However, wireless technology is very crappy during storms and weather. Latency is terrible. This means you'll get lots of complaints from gamers, because their pings will suffer terribly if they don't have a straight shot to the wireless access point."
True enough, although I am looking into 900 MHz technology. These are more resistant to signal problems associated with trees, buildings, etc and the range is better than 802.11x. This is important since I live in a rural area and sometimes houses on a road are 1 km apart and in the middle of thick sections of coniferous (pine) trees. There are some mature solutions already in existance.
"You could also petition your local telecom to put a CO within distance of your residence(s). If you get enough signatures they will take notice, and make sure you get that list to those who matter."
Bell Canada? Ha! They are pompous and arrogant, and have no reason to listen to their customers because they have a monopoly on local service. Reminds me of MSFT. Bell will never extend service to where I live because the population density is too low for them to make money from it. I would prefer to compete with them.
Well you could just create a script to scan port 80 for all IPs on the network. If you find an open port that is not a known web server and connecting to it asks for authentication, then you may have found yourself an AP.