I bought a Panasonic that cost me like $20CAD, it's still going strong and it has a 5 year warranty.
Next I installed this other brand in 3-packs around the house, those have 7 year warranties. The warranty is based on 4-6 hours daily average usage.
Yours may have been early releases?
I know with these bulbs costing me a fair bit compared to the 6/$2.50 I can get regular bulbs I'd certainly take them up on the warranty if it is offered with the product:)
I think the spammer viruses depend on the viewpoint, I'm sure spammers see it as the best tech advancement:)
I just wish law enforcement would make some kind of effort to get the gangs using the trojan network for spamming (or anything else!), I setup my own RBL for my server and I add the IPs from all incoming spam I get and it is doing very little to slow down the flow of daily crap.
What really makes me mad is that the stuff that seems to make it through the most is the porn, enlargement and other nonsense. All of it deliberately crafted to fool SpamAssassin and get past any blocks we put up. Can't they take a hint?
If the spammers would just realize that if they only sent to the people who wanted it we'd all leave them alone, but when they are trying to reach kids with porn ads then we have no choice but to fight them.
I contract out to a small cable ISP in the BC interior, a year ago we imposed 5GB up/dn caps on the customers, it was painful at first convincing the ones using too much but they caught on.
We helped overcome the anger a bit by allowing overnight uncapped downloads that didn't count towards the monthly totals, they have 6 hours a day to download at no charge. This works for all though since the regular users now have more bandwidth during peak periods.
Once we managed to tame the users a bit we increased their speeds since we now had more spare bandwidth to play with.
One of the analogies we used on them was the highway system, stating that they also have unlimited use of the highways but they can't use both lanes at top speed either.
This is a small cable system with around 250 users and a max market of likely 400 users once more get online. Obviously such a small user base cannot afford a OC3 or anything and they share a 5mbit pipe now, this is also delivered via wireless through the mountains which is another story entirely:)
While SpamAssassin works well I am finding it is starting to miss more and more, this always happens until a new version comes out which catches most and then slowly drops off as spammers figure out ways around it.
The spam problem is getting worse, I MRTG my local ISPs incoming mail server I built for them, it basically runs all mail through SA and virus checking. The graphs don't lie, incoming spam is growing at an alarming rate.
We're already looking at doing TDMA next and offering that to the users, with a domain name that has existed since 1996 and users using that since then as well there is a lot of incoming junk, more than we like to see.
The spammers use of the trojaned network is making it impossible to fight them right now, we already use RBLs of dynamic addresses with some success but there are still a ton of unlisted cable/dsl boxes.
We recently tried requiring reverse DNS just as AOL started doing, well today we had to drop that requirement as it was causing too much blocked mail due to bonehead admins not having reverse lookup setup yet, apparently none of their users email AOL.com but do contact our little 1400 user ISP.
If we use reverse DNS and the RBLs we are turning away 75% of the connecting smtp sessions.
A competing ISP locally has started using SA at the smtp level, you score more than 6 and they don't accept the message.
I think the issue with the recent solar activity is we haven't charted the sun's activities long enough to know if this is abnormal behaviour or just some random burping.
I definitely agree with you that we need to start developing our long-range space transport systems, we are advanced enough to at least do some deep explorations of our solar system within a hundred years. By that point we'd likely be ready to start sending sub-light speed probes out that can get to nearby stars within a few decades.
Now the thing I find interesting in all this, IF we are close to this level of technology it means there is a chance other beings have reached this level and beyond, I have trouble believing we are the only intelligence in the universe just by looking at the sheer diversity and longevity of life on this planet.
There are also "hints" in our history that are interesting in themselves, unexplained relics, the age of the Sphynx, ancient Greek records of wars in the heavens, etc. Surely any outside intelligence would be seen as "Gods" to our ancestors.
If life on our own planet is as pervasive as it seems to be then I get a feeling life may be a universal norm where DNA seeding is a constant event throughout the universe. If life can spring up wherever the conditions are right and those conditions are plentiful (doesn't always have to be Earth like either) then the universe will be a very interesting place indeed.
OTOH, there really is a case for lack of evidence as well, most of the relics could very well be Earth originated or just fables entirely. With us being quite close to creating machine intelligence ourselves it should really only take one or two other races to do the same before it is released on the galaxy and machines could definintely spread themselves far and wide much easier than us meat based organisms.
We haven't searched our own solar system enough yet, the Mars face is an area that needs investigating even if to just debunk the whole thing but if there's even the slightest possibility it needs to be checked out thoroughly.
My gut feeling, we're not alone and they've probably been here, might not have been recently but it only takes one race to figure out interstellar travel, even if it is by machines at sub-light speed. Any race that does figure it out will have had to survive long enough to not blow themselves up, so a better chance they are benevolent and may act more as observers than interacting/interfering with alien lifeforms.
"however if the American sattelite companies 'broadcast' into Canada, it is perfectly legal for people to receive them."
It's only legal to receive them if they are FTA (free to air), if they are encrypted you are not allowed to decrypt them with any method including paying them via a US postal address.
"The upshot is if you have a 'pirate' receiver, it's perfectly legal to receive signals from American transmitters"
Nope, the Supreme Court shot that one down to, it is illegal to decrypt any signal, foreign or domestic, without proper authority from the signal distributor (ie, you need their receiver, dss card and a valid account), in essence this closed the loophole that was used to pirate signals.
While closing said loophole they also pointed out that it was also illegal to actually subscribe to the US services via US proxy addresses which thousand of Canadians do.
There was going to be a Charter of Rights challenge on this very issue but the money fell through or something. Basically our Charter does give us free access to the media which I for one feel gives us the right to choose our own news channels and not have the government dictate what is allowed. As it stands now it is illegal to subscribe to Fox News Channel for example.
Some folks bring up the "broadcast rights" issue where many productions are purchased by Canadian broadcasters for our market, this is understandable but still does not explain the fact we cannot subscribe to channels where broadcast rights are a non-issue.
This is the first I'd heard SOCAN had gotten this far and quite frankly I'm pissed. I don't even have a P2P app installed in my computer, my MP3 collection consists solely of my own CD collection and is in that format for ease of access.
What's next? Royalties on showerheads, shower curtains and bathtubs in case we happen to mumble out a tune while showering?
The problem with our Supreme Court is they'll likely side with SOCAN and we'll end up paying. This is the same court who sided with our domestic DTH satellite providers and outright made it illegal to subscribe to US services in our country, yup for years we did our darndest to broadcast signals behind the iron curtain but when it comes to protecting a few broadcasting monopolies it's ok to ban foreign signals.
Shit we don't get to vote for a new government until next spring but the media have all pretty much named the new PM who is just the guy taking over from the retiring PM, lucky for us in the rest of the country it only takes Ontario and Quebec to vote in the same idiots time after time, the new guy is very pro big business, heck in his private career he made an effort to get around Canadian tax laws by using ships registerd at foreign ports, just the guy to put in charge!
I've been working from home for the last 2 years, my previous employer went for the big office, fat internet pipe, etc. and ended up with big bills and broke (and also dead in his case, freakin' guy off'd himself!).
While there are times when yes it is nice to just get away from the home/office you do get used to working at your schedule. Then again usually your schedule ends up with you still working late at night, but if you enjoy your work then why not.
If you know others locally in the same type of work or just working from home then arrange lunch every couple of weeks, I do this with an old co-worker from the last job and it helps having someone to talk to who understands your work.
Being married helps a bit, spouses can help provide some of the needed human interaction, heck some can provide more than enough in one package!:)
When you do work do it in 3-4 hour "shifts", then take a hour or so to do your own thing. This is especially important if you tend to be on the computer 12 hours a day anyway.
Take some gaming time, either online or offline but it does help unwind if you have some types of games you enjoy. I have a wireless network linked with the neighbour and we race Nascar Racing 2003 on the weekends. Oh yeah, get to know your neighbours if possible, I am lucky as one of mine is a long time friend into computers and stuff.
You can also socialize with business people at Chamber of Commerce events and other functions that might be available in your area.
Really, after working for others for years I am much happier on my own, working from home also helps keep costs to a minimum and your internet connection is a tax write-off!:)
I own my house, well the bank owns its fair share right now, but really. I'm bright enough to realize I'm really only RENTING this chunk of land because I really don't think my descendents will own the same chunk of land 1,000 years from now.
"Ownership" is really a human illusion, how can we possibly "own" something that existed well before we came along and will be here long after we expire (as a individual and as a race).
Sure we get all warm and fuzzy after working 10-30 years to finally be mortgage free, but in the end we are still going to die and at that point it matters little which chunk of dirt you "owned", your kids might get it but I notice that in most cases they are already on the way to "owning" their own chunks of dirt. Besides that, the house you spent years paying for is ready to be torn down and rebuilt since wooden houses have a finite lifespan (ours when new was listed as 65 years).
The reality is you are still really renting your property, heck I don't even get mineral rights on my land and the railway can come along any time they want and build tracks through my yard and only have to pay me fair market value.
I contract to a small cable ISP, their policy is simple, your machine is infected we drop your IP from network until such time as it is fixed. Upon further infestations by the same user they require them to install a hardware cable router/firewall solution before letting them back on the network.
We also treat those who run P2P in "supernode" mode the very same way, as a small network with 200 users they can only afford a 5mbit pipe to the net, a few guys in supernode mode and the network becomes very ugly. In essence any home user with 5000+ connections in a couple minutes gets tossed until they learn to play nice.
After the users know they rules they settle down nicely it seems, we also block the common worm ports at the headend so there is less chance of our users becoming infected in the first place.
"Our entire society is based around petrochemicals."
Only for the last 100 years or so, we did quite well for a LONG time before that.
Let's face facts here, we've been using the "oil reserves" for at best 150 years and we already realize this finite resource will NOT last us indefinitely, indeed some estimates are it won't last us another 100 years (when you factor in expanding population and demand, yada yada)
We as a species have a LOT to learn I think, we suffer from abusing our own enviroment neglecting the very fact that our existence depends on a very thin sheet of atmosphere that covers this ball of rock we call home.
I dunno, some days I think I understand why we haven't heard from other intelligent species, very few probably make it far enough to get off their planet. If we can use up a resource in 200-300 years while letting that resource dicated our economy during that time it doesn't bode well.
Amen! There's another reason to buy the boxed CPU... WARRANTY! You get 3 years direct from Intel (not sure about AMD) whereas the OEM versions are 1 year if you're lucky from the distributor, I've seen some outlets only offer 30 days on OEM CPUs.
I somewhat agree, although the electronica musicians could likely still make somewhat of a living being DJs on tour or something.
The main point is none of them should *expect* to get stinking rich which is the problem these days, it's not enough for some of them to create music, they expect gazillions in profits in return for what amounts to little work.
Pre-recording days the musicians of the world did earn their keep by playing live music, very few got rich doing so but I'm sure the majority made an adequate living just like the rest of society.
Todays music industry is not run by musicians, its being ran by lawyers and suits looking out for only one thing, putting more money in their pockets. They could care less about the quality of the music just as long as they can convince enough folks that it is a "hit".
It is the same way in the sports industry these days, does anyone really deserve $20m/year for playing a game they loved enough to become good at? Can they not understand the harm in asking for such huge salaries when their average fan is likely only making $50k/year? There is a building backlash against these players/owners coming, it will take a few years but what will happen is there will be much fewer fans of the games because the fans simply can't afford to watch them play anymore.
The outright greed exhibited by some in society needs to stop.
"They never have a decent explanation for exinct creatures"
Hey, I once read someone in these very/. forums stating they were put there by his god for mankind to find! Just in case we were bored or something, maybe something to trip over in the woods.
I have no time for religious believers who can't come to terms with exsistance without imaginary beings to guide them.
If the god they worship existed, their pope wouldn't be suffering from Parkinson's disease. There's as much evidence for the tooth fairy being real as there is for a god.
Welcome to reality, we are born unto this earth, we live for a while and then we die. Before we're born we did't exist yet, after we die we no longer exist, simple enough eh? You're gonna feel the same about life as you did pre-birth once you die.
Don't be too envious, we also have very low budget versions of the good US services. For example, our TV Land buys one or two seasons of each show at a time and airs those for 12 months straight.
Our MTV couldn't afford the rights to The New Tom Green Show, Tom's parents in Ottawa couldn't legally watch his show (it's illegal for us to subscribe to DirecTV/Dish).
We get Stargate SG1 a full year behind the US airing, and it's filmed here!
Witchblade was filmed in Toronto, it is just appearing on a domestic channel here.
Oh, and the most brilliant part, there's supposed to be a good percentage of Canadian content on our channels, so BBC Canada in a few years will be 50% made-in-Canada stuff rather than solely BBC material, and believe me, most made-in-Canada programming is little more than filler to remain within quotas. This filler usually airs across every channel owned by the same corporation.
Needless to say, I subscribe to US and Canadian services. I use a BUD for the US services and that is still quasi-legit or at least we aren't being targeted as bad guys rather folks who enjoy better picture quality.
Heck ya! When I was a youngster (and living in the UK) a family trip to Blackpool included a visit to the Doctor Who exhibit which you entered via a blue call box like the tardis.
I REFUSED to enter it, too scared of the Daleks that awaited me at the bottom I think.
Yeah now that I'm older I realize how stupid it was to be scared of some plastic/cardboard prop but hey, I was young then and that toilet plunger at the top looked deadly to me!:)
Then again my dad almost fainted at the wax museums surgery display too. Funny part is now he's working in a hospital (mechanic) and has at time had to enter the mortuary and labs.
The funny thing is, up here in Canada we have BBC Canada and BBC Kids, BBC Kids carries WHO with up to 4 episodes back to back a few times a week, most of the time its complete 4 part story lines too.
With BBC Kids being one of our newer digital stations the subscriber count is likely less than 10,000 too. Some of our Canadian digital stations number per minute viewers in the LOW hundreds.
http://www.bbckids.ca/ has the full schedule, looks like 2 eps most days repeated twice, I think it's weekends where they'll show the 4 episode blocks.
I'm admin for a small cableco in the BC interior, we had to impose 5gb/2gb limits to control the P2P traffic which was killing the network but was being caused by only a few users.
This small town system is fed by a 5mbit internet pipe, which is plently for the size of their system when everyone plays fair, but it only takes a few users to make it ugly.
Their maximum client base is around 300 subs, so they cannot afford to bring in an OC3 for such a small market base, this is purely an economical problem for them.
After the limits where imposed and we'd pissed off enough of the leechers (there is no competition either:)), we then turned around and offered unlimited downloading between midnight and 6am so that in the end we looked very good in the customers eyes.
Not only did we succeed in making prime-time hours managable but we also gave those that needed to download a window each day where they could do so without racking up download charges.
The toughest part is explaining to people that the network isn't unlimited and that it cannot take unlimited traffic from unlimited users. It also helped to explain how much their connection will cost them if we were to bring an OC3 into the picture, none liked the idea of $150/month connection costs.
I'd be interested in hearing what kind of speeds you're getting with this. I live 1 mile from a cable plant with a couple friends right at the end of the plant I could convince into building a link.
We have a couple hundred feet of old growth forest to blast past but after that it's mostly clear sailing with the poles high enough, we're higher up already so at an advantage.
My worry is 2 days after we get the thing going DSL shows up at the door:/
No offence to your age, I was just pointing out that this guy has had a few "2 minutes" when it comes to anti-virus software. F-Prot is more popular in Europe that here now I believe.
They've always seemed like a more reasonable company to deal with compared to McAffee/Norton/etc. That and a general good attitude towards system admins since they know those are the people who recommend good stuff to others and those others tend to trust someone who knows computers in general.
This guy does have a valid point, as soon as I saw the damage SoBig.F was causing I turned off my scanner notifications on all servers, seems useless to leave it on any longer since most of the recent viruses have been using false return addresses anyway. I kept the admin notification on for monitoring.
I remember using the F-Prot Antivirus software back in my DOS days for scanning files on my BBS, this was back in 1992, they've been around since 1986 I believe.
Just because you're too young to know them doesn't mean they haven't always been there. Indeed, just go to their site and you will be able to download a FREE DOS version of their virus scanner to this day.
They also offer a Linux version which is FREE for personal workstations, it's command line based.
Oh, and when I was using it on the BBS, it was FREE for us SysOps as well as long as we offered the shareware version for download to help promote.
Our steps are only to enhance the internet experience for our users, anyone who requests to be let past the proxy will get routed around it without issue and for no charge.
We had little choice in blocking 135, etc as it was bringing the network to a crawl with our own clients infected, we also completely blocked those clients from accessing the internet until they cleaned their machines. They could download the patch from our website which was still accessable to them.
Our squid proxy does nothing but caching, we do no filtering or blocking of websites with it and it is there for bandwidth saving and speed enhancement of the service. Rather than make it a manual setup which most clients would never figure out we chose the transparent route with the option of opt-out always available to those who don't wish to use it.
In the 12 months that this has been in place almost none of the regular clients have even noticed it there, those that have needed direct access have been accomodated as soon as they ask.
It's a small system (around 200 in one plant, 100 in the other) in a small town, it really has enhanced the users surfing experience for the most part.
I understand that there will always be those who want unfiltered access, is residential ISP services the solution or should these people be looking at T1 service or something instead? If residential ISP services blocked these worm ports by default it would sure make propogation of these worms much tougher wouldn't it?
As admin at 2 cable headend routers after Blaster arrived the new policy has become blocking of ports 135, 137:139 and 445. We also use transparent squid at those routers and route port 80 through it.
We will let those ports pass-thru for anyone who requests it, so far a couple of clients have been routed around the squid proxy but nobody has asked to have the other ports opened up.
Instead I think the customers are happier knowing that we've largely eliminated worm outbreaks on these ports and additionally have eliminated messenger spammers as well.
Sorry, but the majority of customers outweighs the minority who may wish to open those ports for some reason, considering a good percentage of clients are clueless on updating Windows and are easy targets it is the best method.
The mail server drops.pif/.scr on detection with the rest passing through a virus scanner, all by default. Those 2 extensions can still be sent via.zip if they are legitimately sending those files.
Essentially we got tired of the cost of cleanup after the outbreaks, the attachment stripping for email was because the AV vendors were hours behind the Sobig.F outbreak.
As someone managing 2 cable plants with dialup and wireless pools mixed in I couldn't agree more. As soon as we saw our routers get wonky I investigated to see what it was, saw more than a dozen cable clients spewing garbage like crazy and promptly blocked them at the routers.
Next I investigated what the worm was, it was Blaster and it was brand new, we noticed it before the virus companies released a thing. I found out what ports they were using and blocked those, those ports are now permanently closed since they have no use on the public internet and can easily be handled with a VPN connection.
Then came SoBig.F, our mail servers became bogged down as infected hosts would send a message per minute or so, so now I have instructed the mail scanner to simply discard any incoming email with a.pif/.bat/.scr attachment, everything else is still clear and still goes through a virus scanner. The blocked extensions can be legitimately sent via.zip if someone really does want to send such a file.
Oh, our users, appreciate the steps being taken to ultimately protect their systems and to help keep the network stable as possible.
More broadband services need to actively block certain ports and strip attachments at the door. For those that don't want blocking then feel free to get your own T1 instead.
Slashdot Mirror
No warranty on those bulbs?
:)
I bought a Panasonic that cost me like $20CAD, it's still going strong and it has a 5 year warranty.
Next I installed this other brand in 3-packs around the house, those have 7 year warranties. The warranty is based on 4-6 hours daily average usage.
Yours may have been early releases?
I know with these bulbs costing me a fair bit compared to the 6/$2.50 I can get regular bulbs I'd certainly take them up on the warranty if it is offered with the product
I think the spammer viruses depend on the viewpoint, I'm sure spammers see it as the best tech advancement :)
I just wish law enforcement would make some kind of effort to get the gangs using the trojan network for spamming (or anything else!), I setup my own RBL for my server and I add the IPs from all incoming spam I get and it is doing very little to slow down the flow of daily crap.
What really makes me mad is that the stuff that seems to make it through the most is the porn, enlargement and other nonsense. All of it deliberately crafted to fool SpamAssassin and get past any blocks we put up. Can't they take a hint?
If the spammers would just realize that if they only sent to the people who wanted it we'd all leave them alone, but when they are trying to reach kids with porn ads then we have no choice but to fight them.
I contract out to a small cable ISP in the BC interior, a year ago we imposed 5GB up/dn caps on the customers, it was painful at first convincing the ones using too much but they caught on.
:)
We helped overcome the anger a bit by allowing overnight uncapped downloads that didn't count towards the monthly totals, they have 6 hours a day to download at no charge. This works for all though since the regular users now have more bandwidth during peak periods.
Once we managed to tame the users a bit we increased their speeds since we now had more spare bandwidth to play with.
One of the analogies we used on them was the highway system, stating that they also have unlimited use of the highways but they can't use both lanes at top speed either.
This is a small cable system with around 250 users and a max market of likely 400 users once more get online. Obviously such a small user base cannot afford a OC3 or anything and they share a 5mbit pipe now, this is also delivered via wireless through the mountains which is another story entirely
While SpamAssassin works well I am finding it is starting to miss more and more, this always happens until a new version comes out which catches most and then slowly drops off as spammers figure out ways around it.
The spam problem is getting worse, I MRTG my local ISPs incoming mail server I built for them, it basically runs all mail through SA and virus checking. The graphs don't lie, incoming spam is growing at an alarming rate.
We're already looking at doing TDMA next and offering that to the users, with a domain name that has existed since 1996 and users using that since then as well there is a lot of incoming junk, more than we like to see.
The spammers use of the trojaned network is making it impossible to fight them right now, we already use RBLs of dynamic addresses with some success but there are still a ton of unlisted cable/dsl boxes.
We recently tried requiring reverse DNS just as AOL started doing, well today we had to drop that requirement as it was causing too much blocked mail due to bonehead admins not having reverse lookup setup yet, apparently none of their users email AOL.com but do contact our little 1400 user ISP.
If we use reverse DNS and the RBLs we are turning away 75% of the connecting smtp sessions.
A competing ISP locally has started using SA at the smtp level, you score more than 6 and they don't accept the message.
I think the issue with the recent solar activity is we haven't charted the sun's activities long enough to know if this is abnormal behaviour or just some random burping.
I definitely agree with you that we need to start developing our long-range space transport systems, we are advanced enough to at least do some deep explorations of our solar system within a hundred years. By that point we'd likely be ready to start sending sub-light speed probes out that can get to nearby stars within a few decades.
Now the thing I find interesting in all this, IF we are close to this level of technology it means there is a chance other beings have reached this level and beyond, I have trouble believing we are the only intelligence in the universe just by looking at the sheer diversity and longevity of life on this planet.
There are also "hints" in our history that are interesting in themselves, unexplained relics, the age of the Sphynx, ancient Greek records of wars in the heavens, etc. Surely any outside intelligence would be seen as "Gods" to our ancestors.
If life on our own planet is as pervasive as it seems to be then I get a feeling life may be a universal norm where DNA seeding is a constant event throughout the universe. If life can spring up wherever the conditions are right and those conditions are plentiful (doesn't always have to be Earth like either) then the universe will be a very interesting place indeed.
OTOH, there really is a case for lack of evidence as well, most of the relics could very well be Earth originated or just fables entirely. With us being quite close to creating machine intelligence ourselves it should really only take one or two other races to do the same before it is released on the galaxy and machines could definintely spread themselves far and wide much easier than us meat based organisms.
We haven't searched our own solar system enough yet, the Mars face is an area that needs investigating even if to just debunk the whole thing but if there's even the slightest possibility it needs to be checked out thoroughly.
My gut feeling, we're not alone and they've probably been here, might not have been recently but it only takes one race to figure out interstellar travel, even if it is by machines at sub-light speed. Any race that does figure it out will have had to survive long enough to not blow themselves up, so a better chance they are benevolent and may act more as observers than interacting/interfering with alien lifeforms.
"however if the American sattelite companies 'broadcast' into Canada, it is perfectly legal for people to receive them."
It's only legal to receive them if they are FTA (free to air), if they are encrypted you are not allowed to decrypt them with any method including paying them via a US postal address.
"The upshot is if you have a 'pirate' receiver, it's perfectly legal to receive signals from American transmitters"
Nope, the Supreme Court shot that one down to, it is illegal to decrypt any signal, foreign or domestic, without proper authority from the signal distributor (ie, you need their receiver, dss card and a valid account), in essence this closed the loophole that was used to pirate signals.
While closing said loophole they also pointed out that it was also illegal to actually subscribe to the US services via US proxy addresses which thousand of Canadians do.
There was going to be a Charter of Rights challenge on this very issue but the money fell through or something. Basically our Charter does give us free access to the media which I for one feel gives us the right to choose our own news channels and not have the government dictate what is allowed. As it stands now it is illegal to subscribe to Fox News Channel for example.
Some folks bring up the "broadcast rights" issue where many productions are purchased by Canadian broadcasters for our market, this is understandable but still does not explain the fact we cannot subscribe to channels where broadcast rights are a non-issue.
... I feel like freakin' moving!
This is the first I'd heard SOCAN had gotten this far and quite frankly I'm pissed. I don't even have a P2P app installed in my computer, my MP3 collection consists solely of my own CD collection and is in that format for ease of access.
What's next? Royalties on showerheads, shower curtains and bathtubs in case we happen to mumble out a tune while showering?
The problem with our Supreme Court is they'll likely side with SOCAN and we'll end up paying. This is the same court who sided with our domestic DTH satellite providers and outright made it illegal to subscribe to US services in our country, yup for years we did our darndest to broadcast signals behind the iron curtain but when it comes to protecting a few broadcasting monopolies it's ok to ban foreign signals.
Shit we don't get to vote for a new government until next spring but the media have all pretty much named the new PM who is just the guy taking over from the retiring PM, lucky for us in the rest of the country it only takes Ontario and Quebec to vote in the same idiots time after time, the new guy is very pro big business, heck in his private career he made an effort to get around Canadian tax laws by using ships registerd at foreign ports, just the guy to put in charge!
I've been working from home for the last 2 years, my previous employer went for the big office, fat internet pipe, etc. and ended up with big bills and broke (and also dead in his case, freakin' guy off'd himself!).
:)
:)
While there are times when yes it is nice to just get away from the home/office you do get used to working at your schedule. Then again usually your schedule ends up with you still working late at night, but if you enjoy your work then why not.
If you know others locally in the same type of work or just working from home then arrange lunch every couple of weeks, I do this with an old co-worker from the last job and it helps having someone to talk to who understands your work.
Being married helps a bit, spouses can help provide some of the needed human interaction, heck some can provide more than enough in one package!
When you do work do it in 3-4 hour "shifts", then take a hour or so to do your own thing. This is especially important if you tend to be on the computer 12 hours a day anyway.
Take some gaming time, either online or offline but it does help unwind if you have some types of games you enjoy. I have a wireless network linked with the neighbour and we race Nascar Racing 2003 on the weekends. Oh yeah, get to know your neighbours if possible, I am lucky as one of mine is a long time friend into computers and stuff.
You can also socialize with business people at Chamber of Commerce events and other functions that might be available in your area.
Really, after working for others for years I am much happier on my own, working from home also helps keep costs to a minimum and your internet connection is a tax write-off!
I own my house, well the bank owns its fair share right now, but really. I'm bright enough to realize I'm really only RENTING this chunk of land because I really don't think my descendents will own the same chunk of land 1,000 years from now.
"Ownership" is really a human illusion, how can we possibly "own" something that existed well before we came along and will be here long after we expire (as a individual and as a race).
Sure we get all warm and fuzzy after working 10-30 years to finally be mortgage free, but in the end we are still going to die and at that point it matters little which chunk of dirt you "owned", your kids might get it but I notice that in most cases they are already on the way to "owning" their own chunks of dirt. Besides that, the house you spent years paying for is ready to be torn down and rebuilt since wooden houses have a finite lifespan (ours when new was listed as 65 years).
The reality is you are still really renting your property, heck I don't even get mineral rights on my land and the railway can come along any time they want and build tracks through my yard and only have to pay me fair market value.
I contract to a small cable ISP, their policy is simple, your machine is infected we drop your IP from network until such time as it is fixed. Upon further infestations by the same user they require them to install a hardware cable router/firewall solution before letting them back on the network.
We also treat those who run P2P in "supernode" mode the very same way, as a small network with 200 users they can only afford a 5mbit pipe to the net, a few guys in supernode mode and the network becomes very ugly. In essence any home user with 5000+ connections in a couple minutes gets tossed until they learn to play nice.
After the users know they rules they settle down nicely it seems, we also block the common worm ports at the headend so there is less chance of our users becoming infected in the first place.
"Our entire society is based around petrochemicals."
Only for the last 100 years or so, we did quite well for a LONG time before that.
Let's face facts here, we've been using the "oil reserves" for at best 150 years and we already realize this finite resource will NOT last us indefinitely, indeed some estimates are it won't last us another 100 years (when you factor in expanding population and demand, yada yada)
We as a species have a LOT to learn I think, we suffer from abusing our own enviroment neglecting the very fact that our existence depends on a very thin sheet of atmosphere that covers this ball of rock we call home.
I dunno, some days I think I understand why we haven't heard from other intelligent species, very few probably make it far enough to get off their planet. If we can use up a resource in 200-300 years while letting that resource dicated our economy during that time it doesn't bode well.
"Always buy the BOXED CPU"
... WARRANTY! You get 3 years direct from Intel (not sure about AMD) whereas the OEM versions are 1 year if you're lucky from the distributor, I've seen some outlets only offer 30 days on OEM CPUs.
Amen! There's another reason to buy the boxed CPU
I somewhat agree, although the electronica musicians could likely still make somewhat of a living being DJs on tour or something.
The main point is none of them should *expect* to get stinking rich which is the problem these days, it's not enough for some of them to create music, they expect gazillions in profits in return for what amounts to little work.
Pre-recording days the musicians of the world did earn their keep by playing live music, very few got rich doing so but I'm sure the majority made an adequate living just like the rest of society.
Todays music industry is not run by musicians, its being ran by lawyers and suits looking out for only one thing, putting more money in their pockets. They could care less about the quality of the music just as long as they can convince enough folks that it is a "hit".
It is the same way in the sports industry these days, does anyone really deserve $20m/year for playing a game they loved enough to become good at? Can they not understand the harm in asking for such huge salaries when their average fan is likely only making $50k/year? There is a building backlash against these players/owners coming, it will take a few years but what will happen is there will be much fewer fans of the games because the fans simply can't afford to watch them play anymore.
The outright greed exhibited by some in society needs to stop.
"They never have a decent explanation for exinct creatures"
/. forums stating they were put there by his god for mankind to find! Just in case we were bored or something, maybe something to trip over in the woods.
Hey, I once read someone in these very
I have no time for religious believers who can't come to terms with exsistance without imaginary beings to guide them.
If the god they worship existed, their pope wouldn't be suffering from Parkinson's disease. There's as much evidence for the tooth fairy being real as there is for a god.
Welcome to reality, we are born unto this earth, we live for a while and then we die. Before we're born we did't exist yet, after we die we no longer exist, simple enough eh? You're gonna feel the same about life as you did pre-birth once you die.
Don't be too envious, we also have very low budget versions of the good US services. For example, our TV Land buys one or two seasons of each show at a time and airs those for 12 months straight.
Our MTV couldn't afford the rights to The New Tom Green Show, Tom's parents in Ottawa couldn't legally watch his show (it's illegal for us to subscribe to DirecTV/Dish).
We get Stargate SG1 a full year behind the US airing, and it's filmed here!
Witchblade was filmed in Toronto, it is just appearing on a domestic channel here.
Oh, and the most brilliant part, there's supposed to be a good percentage of Canadian content on our channels, so BBC Canada in a few years will be 50% made-in-Canada stuff rather than solely BBC material, and believe me, most made-in-Canada programming is little more than filler to remain within quotas. This filler usually airs across every channel owned by the same corporation.
Needless to say, I subscribe to US and Canadian services. I use a BUD for the US services and that is still quasi-legit or at least we aren't being targeted as bad guys rather folks who enjoy better picture quality.
Heck ya! When I was a youngster (and living in the UK) a family trip to Blackpool included a visit to the Doctor Who exhibit which you entered via a blue call box like the tardis.
:)
I REFUSED to enter it, too scared of the Daleks that awaited me at the bottom I think.
Yeah now that I'm older I realize how stupid it was to be scared of some plastic/cardboard prop but hey, I was young then and that toilet plunger at the top looked deadly to me!
Then again my dad almost fainted at the wax museums surgery display too. Funny part is now he's working in a hospital (mechanic) and has at time had to enter the mortuary and labs.
The funny thing is, up here in Canada we have BBC Canada and BBC Kids, BBC Kids carries WHO with up to 4 episodes back to back a few times a week, most of the time its complete 4 part story lines too.
With BBC Kids being one of our newer digital stations the subscriber count is likely less than 10,000 too. Some of our Canadian digital stations number per minute viewers in the LOW hundreds.
http://www.bbckids.ca/ has the full schedule, looks like 2 eps most days repeated twice, I think it's weekends where they'll show the 4 episode blocks.
I agree, I watched the US version last night and then turned to BBC America to watch the original UK pilot, the UK version is much funnier.
I've been a Coupling fan since the first time I saw it, I didn't hold much hope the US remake would be as good though. I'll stick to the original.
I'm admin for a small cableco in the BC interior, we had to impose 5gb/2gb limits to control the P2P traffic which was killing the network but was being caused by only a few users.
:)), we then turned around and offered unlimited downloading between midnight and 6am so that in the end we looked very good in the customers eyes.
This small town system is fed by a 5mbit internet pipe, which is plently for the size of their system when everyone plays fair, but it only takes a few users to make it ugly.
Their maximum client base is around 300 subs, so they cannot afford to bring in an OC3 for such a small market base, this is purely an economical problem for them.
After the limits where imposed and we'd pissed off enough of the leechers (there is no competition either
Not only did we succeed in making prime-time hours managable but we also gave those that needed to download a window each day where they could do so without racking up download charges.
The toughest part is explaining to people that the network isn't unlimited and that it cannot take unlimited traffic from unlimited users. It also helped to explain how much their connection will cost them if we were to bring an OC3 into the picture, none liked the idea of $150/month connection costs.
I'd be interested in hearing what kind of speeds you're getting with this. I live 1 mile from a cable plant with a couple friends right at the end of the plant I could convince into building a link.
:/
We have a couple hundred feet of old growth forest to blast past but after that it's mostly clear sailing with the poles high enough, we're higher up already so at an advantage.
My worry is 2 days after we get the thing going DSL shows up at the door
No offence to your age, I was just pointing out that this guy has had a few "2 minutes" when it comes to anti-virus software. F-Prot is more popular in Europe that here now I believe.
They've always seemed like a more reasonable company to deal with compared to McAffee/Norton/etc. That and a general good attitude towards system admins since they know those are the people who recommend good stuff to others and those others tend to trust someone who knows computers in general.
This guy does have a valid point, as soon as I saw the damage SoBig.F was causing I turned off my scanner notifications on all servers, seems useless to leave it on any longer since most of the recent viruses have been using false return addresses anyway. I kept the admin notification on for monitoring.
I remember using the F-Prot Antivirus software back in my DOS days for scanning files on my BBS, this was back in 1992, they've been around since 1986 I believe.
Just because you're too young to know them doesn't mean they haven't always been there. Indeed, just go to their site and you will be able to download a FREE DOS version of their virus scanner to this day.
They also offer a Linux version which is FREE for personal workstations, it's command line based.
Oh, and when I was using it on the BBS, it was FREE for us SysOps as well as long as we offered the shareware version for download to help promote.
Our steps are only to enhance the internet experience for our users, anyone who requests to be let past the proxy will get routed around it without issue and for no charge.
We had little choice in blocking 135, etc as it was bringing the network to a crawl with our own clients infected, we also completely blocked those clients from accessing the internet until they cleaned their machines. They could download the patch from our website which was still accessable to them.
Our squid proxy does nothing but caching, we do no filtering or blocking of websites with it and it is there for bandwidth saving and speed enhancement of the service. Rather than make it a manual setup which most clients would never figure out we chose the transparent route with the option of opt-out always available to those who don't wish to use it.
In the 12 months that this has been in place almost none of the regular clients have even noticed it there, those that have needed direct access have been accomodated as soon as they ask.
It's a small system (around 200 in one plant, 100 in the other) in a small town, it really has enhanced the users surfing experience for the most part.
I understand that there will always be those who want unfiltered access, is residential ISP services the solution or should these people be looking at T1 service or something instead? If residential ISP services blocked these worm ports by default it would sure make propogation of these worms much tougher wouldn't it?
As admin at 2 cable headend routers after Blaster arrived the new policy has become blocking of ports 135, 137:139 and 445. We also use transparent squid at those routers and route port 80 through it.
.pif/.scr on detection with the rest passing through a virus scanner, all by default. Those 2 extensions can still be sent via .zip if they are legitimately sending those files.
:)
We will let those ports pass-thru for anyone who requests it, so far a couple of clients have been routed around the squid proxy but nobody has asked to have the other ports opened up.
Instead I think the customers are happier knowing that we've largely eliminated worm outbreaks on these ports and additionally have eliminated messenger spammers as well.
Sorry, but the majority of customers outweighs the minority who may wish to open those ports for some reason, considering a good percentage of clients are clueless on updating Windows and are easy targets it is the best method.
The mail server drops
Essentially we got tired of the cost of cleanup after the outbreaks, the attachment stripping for email was because the AV vendors were hours behind the Sobig.F outbreak.
We don't however block port 80, 25, etc, yet
As someone managing 2 cable plants with dialup and wireless pools mixed in I couldn't agree more. As soon as we saw our routers get wonky I investigated to see what it was, saw more than a dozen cable clients spewing garbage like crazy and promptly blocked them at the routers.
.pif/.bat/.scr attachment, everything else is still clear and still goes through a virus scanner. The blocked extensions can be legitimately sent via .zip if someone really does want to send such a file.
Next I investigated what the worm was, it was Blaster and it was brand new, we noticed it before the virus companies released a thing. I found out what ports they were using and blocked those, those ports are now permanently closed since they have no use on the public internet and can easily be handled with a VPN connection.
Then came SoBig.F, our mail servers became bogged down as infected hosts would send a message per minute or so, so now I have instructed the mail scanner to simply discard any incoming email with a
Oh, our users, appreciate the steps being taken to ultimately protect their systems and to help keep the network stable as possible.
More broadband services need to actively block certain ports and strip attachments at the door. For those that don't want blocking then feel free to get your own T1 instead.