Neither does my 79 Dodge Truck (which probably pollutes more then the Cougar). OTOH, why don't we calculate me driving that truck for 10 more years, vs the pollution produced by manufacturing a brand new vehicle. I think I come out ahead.
Of course, the Dodge also has the advantage of being pretty clean under the hood and easy to work on, which is my biggest complaint about new vehicles.
So, in some parts of the world (the Far East, for example), we have a lot of pirated windows. Which means, with no security updates, we have a fertile breading ground for worms, viruses, and other fun things.
In Norton AV Corp, you set up one machine on the network as a server, let that one grab the updates, then distribute it to the clients. Best thing is, Corp doesn't need to reboot when it gets updates.
The problem with piracy is not now, but in the future. At the moment, due to bandwidth and hard disk size, most videos have noticable artifacts and have lost details in compression.
Now imagine the future. Bigger hard disk, more bandwidth. Now imagine high quality video piracy.
For example: at the moment I'm addicted to a series on UPN. Locally, UPN is unavailable to me, and due to living constrants, a DSS feed is unworkable. So, I go to a certain IRC channel and download the latest eps. They might be poorer quality, and it takes awhile to download, but at least I can watch the show. OTOH, there is no commercials and no trailers.
Now imagine the world 10 years from now. I'll probably find a different show to be addicted to, and there will be other changes. If I wait for DVD, I'm probably waiting years between when the show airs and when the DVDs are pressed. With the DVD I get trailers that some players won't skip over, and I have the problem of copywrite protection and the whole region-x hassle. OTOH, if I go online, I'll find the show within hours of it airing, it will be without commercials, and in a choice of formats that will play on any computer and probably easily be burned to a DVD.
So, for a mental exercize, assume that the DVD is $20, and the online stuff cost $25 for, er, bandwidth costs. What would you rather buy? Now, realize that a broadband connection is less then $100 bucks, which means our $25 figure is rather inflated.
Piracy is a problem, but it is partially because the pirated stuff is a better product. Else, why would I spend hours downloading/burning when I could just walk into Walmart and pick up a copy? I'm not *that* cheap.
You diss the arm chairs in the back, but let me tell you, nothing beats backing up to the local river or lake, turning those chairs around, putting a cooler between them, and fishing for a few hours in all the comfort of home...
Re:XML is an uglier version of s-expressions!
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 2
Take apart a standard AT or PS/2 keyboard. Now, inside of most of them are a few layers of plastic with electronic traces, and a small bit of circuit board with one big chip (the encoder). How a keyboard works is that the keys are arranged in a grid of wires, and when you press down on a key, you connect two wires in a grid. With a little bit of work recording the electronic traces, you can figure out what keys connect what pins on the encoder. Congradulations, you now have a 101 button method of input.
Now, if you want to be lazy, then here's this link: Happs Controls, which has less inputs, and only works on win9x/NT/Mac, but saves you from wiring. Even if you go with the homebuilt solution, Happs sells a variety of buttons, and gives a price discount for large quantities. (I believe the price drops happen at 10 and 100 unit quantities.)
Assume that the person is John Doe, and their extension is #1234. Then you'd take first initial, last initial, and the extension - jd1234. Should be basically unique, and if you know the person's name and phone number, its easy to guess the email address.
My emu of choice (win32) is NeoRageX, a nice little Neo Geo emulator that is fast enough to be playable on a 266mhz machine. In addition, it seems to handle sound better then MAME.
OTOH, the poor bastards who think emulation leads to piracy and thus lack of sales are deluding themselves - I find that emulation works more like a library, as soon as you find something you like, you want a hardcopy for yourself. But that's me, and probably there are a lot of people just like me who are "collectors". And then there are a lot of people who are cheap, or have a casual interest, and only collect roms because they are "free". The sales lost to the emus are more then made up by the sales made because of the emus. However, I do hold to the notion that old emus lead to lost sales of new consoles, since new games seem to be repackaged crap with shiny bits included.
Btw, the NeoGeo was also an arcade game. Standardized controls across the game, and it was easy to swap out games in cabinets.
That being said, it seems that you have lost a potential job due to 'X Solutions, Inc' falsely and (I would assume) illegally representing you as their client. I say, find a nice bloodthirsty
lawyer to sic on them. You might get some financial compensation, and maybe your lawsuit would prevent this from happening again.
You forgot that it also allows you more non-work time while you wait for the damned thing to load and it increases computer memory sales, helping other geeks out there.
Seriously, Moz is a great browser, but its *bloated*. Horribly so. Opera has a brief loadtime on my Win98SE/AMD 1.33Ghz/256M memory home machine, but Moz takes a relatively long time to load. In fact, I'm guessing if I decouple IE from Explorer, IE would still load faster.
Sure, I'm patient enough to wait for Moz to load, but OTOH, I don't expect bloat from any of my web browsers.
And no, I don't want to use the quick launch. I like to conserve my memory.
I'd say no. Not because its a bad idea, but because you're asking.
If you can't tally in your head the pros and cons of a homebuilt vs an OEM
solution, I have to doubt that you have the knowledge and experience
needed to build and maintain 50 machines on your own. From the sound of
your article, you seem to be very price driven, and buying cheaper parts
is usually hell in the long run. (Well, 'cept the cheap cnet nics for
$9 apeice. Won't run under linux, and the performance isn't great, but
they are rock stable under windows and I've never seen one go out).
That being said, if I had to homebuild machines for the office, here's
what I'd do. First of all, everyone doesn't need the latest and greatest.
Break the office into 2 or 3 groups. First group gets the highend stuff,
second group gets the average stuff, and the third group gets whatever will
run a basic wordproc and email client. Thus, you have a machine rotation path,
first->second->third. Those 400 mhz machines sound great for the third
group, and maybe even the second, with a memory upgrade. Btw, this is a great
lesson for you: a lack of memory and slow hard drives will make even the
fastest machine seem slow - thus don't skimp on memory to buy a faster CPU and
don't stick a 3 gig HDD into a 1700+ Athlon XP.
For the machines, but a quality motherboard. You don't want to go for the
top performer, but for stability. Right now, I've had great experiences with
the Gigabyte GA-7VTXH+ (Socket A DDR, 100/133 mhz bus, built in creative
sound, realtek nic) and the Tyan S2390B (Socket A, 100/133 mhz bus, no
sound/lan). Buy memory from a trusted supplier (mushkin & crucial seem nice),
and use memtest86 for a few hours per machine for testing, and burncpu from a
floppy (I'd suggest tomsrbt). Since you will support these machines, you
want them to be stable. Also, grab yourself a large (locking) file cabinet,
give a number to each machine, and store all manuals/cds/floppys/software
in the file cabinet in a folder with the machine's number. That way, software
audits are easy, users won't be able to install software on unauthorized
machines, and you'll always have the documentation. For hard drives, use 40
giggers. They won't need the room (since they'll be putting all essential
data on the server), but a 40 gig seems to be the optimal price/size
ratio. Throw a cheap 8 or 32 meg vid card in with good 2D support and no
history in the usenet archives of having problems with 9x/NT/2k/XP, use
a quality floppy/cd drive, and you're set. All windows installations are
scriptable, or else you can ghost the drives, and make sure you install a
good antivirus client (Norton AV Corp is expensive, but nice).
The advantage is, you get a machine that's built your way, without all the
added crap software OEMs throw on them. The disadvantage is that you lose
tech support, so you probably need to develope the skills to type in
"groups.google.com" in your browser and search for problems. Anyone with
an A+ and half a brain in their head can maintain their machines, which
doesn't make it easy, since there is a severe lack of people out there with
at least half a brain in their head. (And don't get me started about
"teach to the test" A+ courses...)
I'll bite. The reason why I'll flame you for
leaving a machine plugged in while you work on it
is that the ATX motherboard spec gives power to
the motherboard while the machine is off. Even if
it didn't, you still have a great ground to the
machine, which leaves in the slight possibility
of electrocuting yourself if you find a power
source (why do you think that the static wrist
straps have resistors in them?). The trick should
be, ground the chassis (with the resister), then make sure
your are touching the chassis while you are working
on the machine.
If people can give away their works for little or
no cost, then the incentive to make new works is
ruined. Thus, to preserve the urge to create,
we must have a system of rewarding the creators,
preferrably through a system of IP controlled by
the corporations.
Just think, those vile people who are releasing
GPL software are destroying our way of life! It
needs to be outlawed! Just like the ability to
share files and the ability for local artists to
release their music over the internet for free!
Having read a few books here and there on various
types of computer crimes, there are a lot of cases
where access to a system was gained through a
person giving out confidential information to an
unauthorized person? In this light, any security
audit should include tests of how easy it is to
get confidential information from employees and
any third party services. For example, there are
many small businesses out there in my town that
use dialup accounts for internet access and
email. Most of these companies will give out
the user name and password over tech support if
you only supply the account holder's name. This
leads to anyone being able to access the company's
email. In a big corporation, I'm guessing a
few users would give out name/passwords to a
call claiming to be from the IT department, if
the company has a modem pool, I'm sure its
trivial to get that number too ("Hello, Jane Doe?
Its John from the IT department. Were doing
some work with the phone company, and we're
wondering, what number do you use for dialing up?
Is it 555-1111? No, you use, 555-1234? Thank
you!"
Any good audit should include the social engineering factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Addict her to muds. It worked for me.
Five Putty Sessions, or just 1 Putty Session with 1 instance of Screen?
For wires outside of the wall, there are surface
mount connectors for RJ-45 (like the RJ-11
telephone connectors) that don't look too bad.
What features do you find linux most lacking in?
(If we don't examine our weaknesses, we will be crippled)Neither does my 79 Dodge Truck (which probably pollutes more then the Cougar). OTOH, why don't we calculate me driving that truck for 10 more years, vs the pollution produced by manufacturing a brand new vehicle. I think I come out ahead.
Of course, the Dodge also has the advantage of being pretty clean under the hood and easy to work on, which is my biggest complaint about new vehicles.
So, in some parts of the world (the Far East, for example), we have a lot of pirated windows. Which means, with no security updates, we have a fertile breading ground for worms, viruses, and other fun things.
In Norton AV Corp, you set up one machine on the network as a server, let that one grab the updates, then distribute it to the clients. Best thing is, Corp doesn't need to reboot when it gets updates.
Great for lowbandwidth sites.
The problem with piracy is not now, but in the future. At the moment, due to bandwidth and hard disk size, most videos have noticable artifacts and have lost details in compression.
Now imagine the future. Bigger hard disk, more bandwidth. Now imagine high quality video piracy.
For example: at the moment I'm addicted to a series on UPN. Locally, UPN is unavailable to me, and due to living constrants, a DSS feed is unworkable. So, I go to a certain IRC channel and download the latest eps. They might be poorer quality, and it takes awhile to download, but at least I can watch the show. OTOH, there is no commercials and no trailers.
Now imagine the world 10 years from now. I'll probably find a different show to be addicted to, and there will be other changes. If I wait for DVD, I'm probably waiting years between when the show airs and when the DVDs are pressed. With the DVD I get trailers that some players won't skip over, and I have the problem of copywrite protection and the whole region-x hassle. OTOH, if I go online, I'll find the show within hours of it airing, it will be without commercials, and in a choice of formats that will play on any computer and probably easily be burned to a DVD.
So, for a mental exercize, assume that the DVD is $20, and the online stuff cost $25 for, er, bandwidth costs. What would you rather buy? Now, realize that a broadband connection is less then $100 bucks, which means our $25 figure is rather inflated.
Piracy is a problem, but it is partially because the pirated stuff is a better product. Else, why would I spend hours downloading/burning when I could just walk into Walmart and pick up a copy? I'm not *that* cheap.
Just my $.02
I hate to say this, but in my experience, few people know what a directory tree is.
Which can be explained away be being ignorant, but most people don't want to know what a directory tree is.
Sigh.
I wonder how far you'd get if you just called Star Office/Open Office the upgraded version of Microsoft Office....
Whats a nice free (GPL preferred, Beer otherwise) Shogi varient for Win32 and Linux?
You diss the arm chairs in the back, but let me tell you, nothing beats backing up to the local river or lake, turning those chairs around, putting a cooler between them, and fishing for a few hours in all the comfort of home...
Shouldn't the shirts say XML?
Take apart a standard AT or PS/2 keyboard. Now, inside of most of them are a few layers of plastic with electronic traces, and a small bit of circuit board with one big chip (the encoder). How a keyboard works is that the keys are arranged in a grid of wires, and when you press down on a key, you connect two wires in a grid. With a little bit of work recording the electronic traces, you can figure out what keys connect what pins on the encoder. Congradulations, you now have a 101 button method of input.
Now, if you want to be lazy, then here's this link: Happs Controls, which has less inputs, and only works on win9x/NT/Mac, but saves you from wiring. Even if you go with the homebuilt solution, Happs sells a variety of buttons, and gives a price discount for large quantities. (I believe the price drops happen at 10 and 100 unit quantities.)
(Happs, btw, is a supplier of arcade game parts.)
Well none of these are "traditional" textbooks, they are all usefull sources of information.
Throw in a book about the GNU philosophy & history of linux, add another about linux security, and you're set.
Assume that the person is John Doe, and their extension is #1234. Then you'd take first initial, last initial, and the extension - jd1234. Should be basically unique, and if you know the person's name and phone number, its easy to guess the email address.
My emu of choice (win32) is NeoRageX, a nice little Neo Geo emulator that is fast enough to be playable on a 266mhz machine. In addition, it seems to handle sound better then MAME.
OTOH, the poor bastards who think emulation leads to piracy and thus lack of sales are deluding themselves - I find that emulation works more like a library, as soon as you find something you like, you want a hardcopy for yourself. But that's me, and probably there are a lot of people just like me who are "collectors". And then there are a lot of people who are cheap, or have a casual interest, and only collect roms because they are "free". The sales lost to the emus are more then made up by the sales made because of the emus. However, I do hold to the notion that old emus lead to lost sales of new consoles, since new games seem to be repackaged crap with shiny bits included.
Btw, the NeoGeo was also an arcade game. Standardized controls across the game, and it was easy to swap out games in cabinets.
First off, lets start out with the famous IANAL.
That being said, it seems that you have lost a potential job due to 'X Solutions, Inc' falsely and (I would assume) illegally representing you as their client. I say, find a nice bloodthirsty lawyer to sic on them. You might get some financial compensation, and maybe your lawsuit would prevent this from happening again.
Just my $.02
You forgot that it also allows you more non-work time while you wait for the damned thing to load and it increases computer memory sales, helping other geeks out there.
Seriously, Moz is a great browser, but its *bloated*. Horribly so. Opera has a brief loadtime on my Win98SE/AMD 1.33Ghz/256M memory home machine, but Moz takes a relatively long time to load. In fact, I'm guessing if I decouple IE from Explorer, IE would still load faster.
Sure, I'm patient enough to wait for Moz to load, but OTOH, I don't expect bloat from any of my web browsers.
And no, I don't want to use the quick launch. I like to conserve my memory.
Where I learned that light flows like water....
I'd say no. Not because its a bad idea, but because you're asking.
If you can't tally in your head the pros and cons of a homebuilt vs an OEM solution, I have to doubt that you have the knowledge and experience needed to build and maintain 50 machines on your own. From the sound of your article, you seem to be very price driven, and buying cheaper parts is usually hell in the long run. (Well, 'cept the cheap cnet nics for $9 apeice. Won't run under linux, and the performance isn't great, but they are rock stable under windows and I've never seen one go out).
That being said, if I had to homebuild machines for the office, here's what I'd do. First of all, everyone doesn't need the latest and greatest. Break the office into 2 or 3 groups. First group gets the highend stuff, second group gets the average stuff, and the third group gets whatever will run a basic wordproc and email client. Thus, you have a machine rotation path, first->second->third. Those 400 mhz machines sound great for the third group, and maybe even the second, with a memory upgrade. Btw, this is a great lesson for you: a lack of memory and slow hard drives will make even the fastest machine seem slow - thus don't skimp on memory to buy a faster CPU and don't stick a 3 gig HDD into a 1700+ Athlon XP.
For the machines, but a quality motherboard. You don't want to go for the top performer, but for stability. Right now, I've had great experiences with the Gigabyte GA-7VTXH+ (Socket A DDR, 100/133 mhz bus, built in creative sound, realtek nic) and the Tyan S2390B (Socket A, 100/133 mhz bus, no sound/lan). Buy memory from a trusted supplier (mushkin & crucial seem nice), and use memtest86 for a few hours per machine for testing, and burncpu from a floppy (I'd suggest tomsrbt). Since you will support these machines, you want them to be stable. Also, grab yourself a large (locking) file cabinet, give a number to each machine, and store all manuals/cds/floppys/software in the file cabinet in a folder with the machine's number. That way, software audits are easy, users won't be able to install software on unauthorized machines, and you'll always have the documentation. For hard drives, use 40 giggers. They won't need the room (since they'll be putting all essential data on the server), but a 40 gig seems to be the optimal price/size ratio. Throw a cheap 8 or 32 meg vid card in with good 2D support and no history in the usenet archives of having problems with 9x/NT/2k/XP, use a quality floppy/cd drive, and you're set. All windows installations are scriptable, or else you can ghost the drives, and make sure you install a good antivirus client (Norton AV Corp is expensive, but nice).
The advantage is, you get a machine that's built your way, without all the added crap software OEMs throw on them. The disadvantage is that you lose tech support, so you probably need to develope the skills to type in "groups.google.com" in your browser and search for problems. Anyone with an A+ and half a brain in their head can maintain their machines, which doesn't make it easy, since there is a severe lack of people out there with at least half a brain in their head. (And don't get me started about "teach to the test" A+ courses...)
Just my $.02
I'll bite. The reason why I'll flame you for leaving a machine plugged in while you work on it is that the ATX motherboard spec gives power to the motherboard while the machine is off. Even if it didn't, you still have a great ground to the machine, which leaves in the slight possibility of electrocuting yourself if you find a power source (why do you think that the static wrist straps have resistors in them?). The trick should be, ground the chassis (with the resister), then make sure your are touching the chassis while you are working on the machine.
Just my $.02
Links is better, save for the low resolution on my laptop, where Lynx saves the day in console (since it ignores tables).
Btw, I have a win32 version of Lynx, but does anyone know of a win32 version of Links?
If people can give away their works for little or no cost, then the incentive to make new works is ruined. Thus, to preserve the urge to create, we must have a system of rewarding the creators, preferrably through a system of IP controlled by the corporations.
Just think, those vile people who are releasing GPL software are destroying our way of life! It needs to be outlawed! Just like the ability to share files and the ability for local artists to release their music over the internet for free!
The above was sarcasm, btw.
Having read a few books here and there on various types of computer crimes, there are a lot of cases where access to a system was gained through a person giving out confidential information to an unauthorized person? In this light, any security audit should include tests of how easy it is to get confidential information from employees and any third party services. For example, there are many small businesses out there in my town that use dialup accounts for internet access and email. Most of these companies will give out the user name and password over tech support if you only supply the account holder's name. This leads to anyone being able to access the company's email. In a big corporation, I'm guessing a few users would give out name/passwords to a call claiming to be from the IT department, if the company has a modem pool, I'm sure its trivial to get that number too ("Hello, Jane Doe? Its John from the IT department. Were doing some work with the phone company, and we're wondering, what number do you use for dialing up? Is it 555-1111? No, you use, 555-1234? Thank you!"
Any good audit should include the social engineering factor.
Just my $.02