"You could advertise your pc tinkering/fixing skills in the local newspaper. Plenty of people buy computers and do not have a clue - the going rate in the UK is 10-15UKP an hour or part of, approx 15-22 USD. Some of it's going to be routine and mundane ("I can't find my Bonzi Buddy...") but you get to meet loads of people and cut loose from the house for an hour at a time and i'd suspect most customers would come back again if you were good - i've never met anybody yet who only had an hours worth of questions about their computer..."
Good idea... this is how I payed for my first year university textbooks. Once you help out a few people, your name gets around and you get referrals. This is when you start making some respectable money. It's nice to be able to go out for 2.5 hours to someone's house, run ad-aware, virus scan, reinstall an app or two, have a nice little chat about computer safety and come back $60 richer. If it's a business, you come back $100-150 richer. It's good money if you are a jack of all trades in PC tinkering.
"Does *anyone* ever use the toolbar icons for cut/paste/new file?"
Your mom probably uses them. And your boss.
I am sure you and I find them redundant and excessively slow, but most people cannot use a program or feature of a program without some sort of on-screen signal to be associated with it. If they can't see it, as far as they're concerned, it doesn't exist.
"Besides, as I said earlier, OSS projects have security holes all the time. They just tend to be patched faster and have a smaller impact (due to smaller, more savvy audiences)"
Agreed... absolutely. This is one of the real, genuine, fundamental, non-fanatical reasons why OSS has super advantages over closed source.
"Last, I have trouble understanding how so many of these bugs come from a company with many of the brightest programmers. Is it a largely problem of scale and bureaucracy?"
Keep in mind that the guiding purpose of Microsoft is to increase shareholder value. If they can sell millions of copies of a product, even if it happens to be a bug ridden piece of garbage, then that is good for them. They have probably found that devoting resources to fix those bugs before release would not be as good for profits than just releasing the dang thing and fixing the high profile bugs later. Remember, it's about shareholder value. They must find the best medium between a competent product and a product that actually gets released on schedule and under budget.
From the point of view of increasing shareholder value, releasing a secure, bug free OS is bad for business. They have proven time and time again that people will buy their product for whatever reason, even if it is not at all secure. Now that they have a monopoly, user satisfaction is not part of the equation at all.
Of course when there is no shareholder value to increase, priorities change. For examples of how this system works, please observe GNU/Linux.
"So, now when the users are afraid because of having virii in their mp3s, they are not stupid anymore?"
It's a good argument to get your friends to finally switch to ogg vorbis. I haven't encoded an mp3 since vorbis beta 3 (which was well before RC3) anyway.
"This is more of a curiosity than any sort of danger. Most of us, when we get a new mp3 file, give it a listen to make sure it's not mislabeled, doesn't cut off in the middle of the song, and sounds okay. We throw out or fix the ones that aren't up to our standards. So the number of people who would let one of these dangerous mp3s just sit there and be scanned is probably pretty small."
That average person does not notice when a backdoor app is covertly installed on their machine. As long as the mp3 is actually what they wanted, chances are they will keep sharing it.
The even more dangerous part is that someone could be downloading mp3s and LOOKING for these trojans. And as soon as they find one, they can just go back to the IP of the machine they got the file from and have an instant DDOS zombie!
Or even better, if I am an RIAA employed disturber-of-the-peace, I could create a bunch of these trojaned mp3s share them, and then whenever someone downloads it from my machine I could instantly use the backdoor to destroy their music collection. (But I'm sure the RIAA has already thought of that.)
"Did you know that it's actually against the Visa contract to charge the consumer +3% on the purchase? The seller is suppose to eat this charge - I think it was mentioned on an earlier slashdot post/thread."
I was not aware aof this, but now that I think about it, dealers have a sly way of getting around it.
If you look carefully at pricelists, they say that the listed prices are marked down 3% for cash purchases. They are not surcharging your for visa, they give you a discount if you pay cash. It's pretty much the same effect, though.
"Just another reason NOT to get a fancy phone with internet abilities - Phone Spam."
Sneakemail and other aliasing services can be used to avoid this as well. Instead of sending the mail to 5551234567@sms.phoneprovider.com you can send it to a sneakemail address which will bounce it to your SMS. This way you can kill off the sneakemail address if necessary and stop the spam easily.
"How come it is so easy for a thug to make money, but a unemployed software engineer cant do it? Why is that? Does crime take a special function in the brain? is it like a complicated SQL database?"
Watch the movie "Office Space" to find the answer to this:-)
"I've had other times when companies tried to hose me, one sent me the wrong part and I rangled with them for refund for 3 months, before getting smart and calling Visa (Visa had a little talk with them, my refund came very quickly after without needing chargeback)."
I agree that using credit card payment is a smart way of avoiding getting screwed. Whenver I am buying computer hardware at an 'exchange only if defective' shop as opposed to a 'reseller/dealer' that normally deals in credit cards/cheques, I pay with the credit card and eat teh 3% non-cash markup. This way if the seller wants to get sticky about return policies for semi-functional equipment, I can get VISA on their back for charging me without giving me the proper working product.
Now I have not been burned yet but it is very good for safety compared to handing out hundreds of dollars in cash for hardware.
"Could be worse - I've had accounts deleted BEFORE I was let go. In fact, thats how I found out I was terminated - my login no longer worked."
Dilbert Comic:
'Ted the Generic Guy' walks into the office and complains to the boss: Jeez, my security card access wouldn't work so I had to tailgate into the building. Then my phone mail refuses to let me in and my network password was refused! Is it possible for anything *else* to stop working today?
"I know of a scam where people would get a phonecall where somebody would claim to work for a bank, and ask them their PIN-code (4-digit auth. code for ATM-machines...), because some administrative error had occurred. A lot of people fell for it because the guy sounded sincere, or make up your own excuse here..."
This sounds pretty obvious but when it comes to phoning people, you can get amazing info out of people when you phone early in the morning (before some have had their coffee.)
One time, my dad was running this computer VAR/consulting business out of our home and our home number was listed on the website as the contact. One morning, totally unexpectedly we got a call from a Markham (Toronto) company called "RAMPlus Electronics" and I stumbled out of bed and picked it up. They asked for confirmation of the business e-mail address and I unthinkingly gave it to them. After that, we got spammed pricelists for months regardless of my unsubscribe pleas. Eventually they left us alone after I sent a 700k image with nothing but the word 'REMOVE' in it.
The moral of the story is that we can all be vulnerable to these obvious things so we have to build defenced into our psyches as opposed to paying lip service to it. The other moral of the story is that one 700k message is worth more than 700 x 1k messages.
Re:Spam the spammer - ... and write down his name.
on
HOWTO: Annoy a Spammer
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· Score: 1
"This effort could be combined to the creation of a database grouping and rating (by qty) the companies that uses spam services and their associated friendly SSP (Spam Service Provider), if it can be found. With these info in hand, the now "enlightened" consummer can now choose to boycot, take revenge or at least know who to hate most.;) ____ "Il faut confronter des idées vagues avec des images claires." -Godard"
" Let me start with something that seems trollish....Reviewers (in general) are full of CRAP. Reviewers hardly ever seem to review a movie in a way that reflects public opinion.
They have thier reputation at stake, and that reputation is among a snobbie group of follow-the-common-review-sentiment."
I agree. In fact I just saw Nemesis a few hours ago and thought it was a very enjoyable film.
"I use Tiny Personal Firewall 2.0 [tinysoftware.com] to stop this sort of crap under Windows. It'll block any application from 'reporting' back home via the internet."
Of course like a lot of spyware, it could use MSIE to do its dirty work via HTTP and use whatever proxy setting you have in place. If you have allowed MSIE to access the internet, then TPF (which I also run, btw) will not stop the spying.
"It's Mom-ready after it has been installed, but the geeks who know how to install it also know how to find it online.:-)"
True, but not all people who know where to download it have a fat broadband connection;-)
It is for this reason, plus the five other CDs of goodies that I bought the Mandrake Powerpack 8.2 edition. Even if all CDs were available online, it would take me ages to download it over my measly 28.8 connection. (There is nothing better where I live.)
"However, next time anyone is in a situation like this, I might suggest that the second place you contact (after the service provider) are whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction over fraud cases such as these. Shutting them down is one thing, but getting them put behind bars guarantees that they'll have to wait a while before starting up a new scam."
I don't know how competent the law enforcement people are where you are located, but one time I was actually questioned by the police in my town because someone was e-mailbombing a school and the police assumed it was from me because the person had put my e-mail address in the 'from' line! I would not trust these people to track down the owners of a fraudulent web site if it was hosted in their jurisdiction. (The officer actually admitted that she didn't even own a computer.)
Slashdot Mirror
...will your post get modded as funny ;-)
Good idea ... this is how I payed for my first year university textbooks. Once you help out a few people, your name gets around and you get referrals. This is when you start making some respectable money. It's nice to be able to go out for 2.5 hours to someone's house, run ad-aware, virus scan, reinstall an app or two, have a nice little chat about computer safety and come back $60 richer. If it's a business, you come back $100-150 richer. It's good money if you are a jack of all trades in PC tinkering.
Your mom probably uses them. And your boss.
I am sure you and I find them redundant and excessively slow, but most people cannot use a program or feature of a program without some sort of on-screen signal to be associated with it. If they can't see it, as far as they're concerned, it doesn't exist.
It's about streaming media mobile-to-mobile communication over 3G networks (i.e. videophone stuff) on which they are hedging their bets.
Yes, and you can play Qt and 2X speed. Try this with the trailer for 'The Two Towers" . When you hear the chipmunk voices, it is hilarious!
Agreed ... absolutely. This is one of the real, genuine, fundamental, non-fanatical reasons why OSS has super advantages over closed source.
Keep in mind that the guiding purpose of Microsoft is to increase shareholder value. If they can sell millions of copies of a product, even if it happens to be a bug ridden piece of garbage, then that is good for them. They have probably found that devoting resources to fix those bugs before release would not be as good for profits than just releasing the dang thing and fixing the high profile bugs later. Remember, it's about shareholder value. They must find the best medium between a competent product and a product that actually gets released on schedule and under budget.
From the point of view of increasing shareholder value, releasing a secure, bug free OS is bad for business. They have proven time and time again that people will buy their product for whatever reason, even if it is not at all secure. Now that they have a monopoly, user satisfaction is not part of the equation at all.
Of course when there is no shareholder value to increase, priorities change. For examples of how this system works, please observe GNU/Linux.
It's a good argument to get your friends to finally switch to ogg vorbis. I haven't encoded an mp3 since vorbis beta 3 (which was well before RC3) anyway.
That average person does not notice when a backdoor app is covertly installed on their machine. As long as the mp3 is actually what they wanted, chances are they will keep sharing it.
The even more dangerous part is that someone could be downloading mp3s and LOOKING for these trojans. And as soon as they find one, they can just go back to the IP of the machine they got the file from and have an instant DDOS zombie!
Or even better, if I am an RIAA employed disturber-of-the-peace, I could create a bunch of these trojaned mp3s share them, and then whenever someone downloads it from my machine I could instantly use the backdoor to destroy their music collection. (But I'm sure the RIAA has already thought of that.)
The original is here. At least they waited some weeks before reposting it.
As long as she has machine-gun jubblies, I'm in!
I was not aware aof this, but now that I think about it, dealers have a sly way of getting around it.
If you look carefully at pricelists, they say that the listed prices are marked down 3% for cash purchases. They are not surcharging your for visa, they give you a discount if you pay cash. It's pretty much the same effect, though.
Sneakemail and other aliasing services can be used to avoid this as well. Instead of sending the mail to 5551234567@sms.phoneprovider.com you can send it to a sneakemail address which will bounce it to your SMS. This way you can kill off the sneakemail address if necessary and stop the spam easily.
Watch the movie "Office Space" to find the answer to this :-)
I agree that using credit card payment is a smart way of avoiding getting screwed. Whenver I am buying computer hardware at an 'exchange only if defective' shop as opposed to a 'reseller/dealer' that normally deals in credit cards/cheques, I pay with the credit card and eat teh 3% non-cash markup. This way if the seller wants to get sticky about return policies for semi-functional equipment, I can get VISA on their back for charging me without giving me the proper working product.
Now I have not been burned yet but it is very good for safety compared to handing out hundreds of dollars in cash for hardware.
"And in English, that would be...?"
It means that your boss is preparing to fire you.
Dilbert Comic:
'Ted the Generic Guy' walks into the office and complains to the boss: Jeez, my security card access wouldn't work so I had to tailgate into the building. Then my phone mail refuses to let me in and my network password was refused! Is it possible for anything *else* to stop working today?
The Boss: Tee hee hee ...
Were they ads for hotjobs.com? If so, it is possible that a sysadmin is warning you (via hosts mapping) that your boss may set up your job the bomb!
This sounds pretty obvious but when it comes to phoning people, you can get amazing info out of people when you phone early in the morning (before some have had their coffee.)
One time, my dad was running this computer VAR/consulting business out of our home and our home number was listed on the website as the contact. One morning, totally unexpectedly we got a call from a Markham (Toronto) company called "RAMPlus Electronics" and I stumbled out of bed and picked it up. They asked for confirmation of the business e-mail address and I unthinkingly gave it to them. After that, we got spammed pricelists for months regardless of my unsubscribe pleas. Eventually they left us alone after I sent a 700k image with nothing but the word 'REMOVE' in it.
The moral of the story is that we can all be vulnerable to these obvious things so we have to build defenced into our psyches as opposed to paying lip service to it. The other moral of the story is that one 700k message is worth more than 700 x 1k messages.
That is part of what spamcop does.
I agree. In fact I just saw Nemesis a few hours ago and thought it was a very enjoyable film.
Of course like a lot of spyware, it could use MSIE to do its dirty work via HTTP and use whatever proxy setting you have in place. If you have allowed MSIE to access the internet, then TPF (which I also run, btw) will not stop the spying.
True, but not all people who know where to download it have a fat broadband connection ;-)
It is for this reason, plus the five other CDs of goodies that I bought the Mandrake Powerpack 8.2 edition. Even if all CDs were available online, it would take me ages to download it over my measly 28.8 connection. (There is nothing better where I live.)
And there were some very very good reviews of nemesis as well!
I don't know how competent the law enforcement people are where you are located, but one time I was actually questioned by the police in my town because someone was e-mailbombing a school and the police assumed it was from me because the person had put my e-mail address in the 'from' line! I would not trust these people to track down the owners of a fraudulent web site if it was hosted in their jurisdiction. (The officer actually admitted that she didn't even own a computer.)