Put no security restrictions at all on the laptop, except that no personal files should be stored on it. That way, it can be reimaged on a regular basis to remove unwanted or potentially dangerous software. This reimaging can be done over the network or in an emergency by physically swapping the hard drives.
Do not assume that you need to protect children from the Internet. This is a false assumption that simply creates headaches for parents, teachers, and administrators. Instead approach the computer the same way you would approach a piece of sports equipment or a musical instrument that is on loan to a student. Just as you wouldn't allow a student to use a school owned trumpet as a baseball bat, you can make rules about how the computer is to be used and you can enforce them without the need for software locks and censorship.
Step 1: Clearly define the rules. This is best done by a committee of parents, teachers, and IT experts. Resist all calls for censorship during this process, just make rules that the students should follow. Also define the guidelines for dealing with inappropriate use.
Step 2: Educate laptop recipients about the proper use of the equipment. Also offer education for parents and school personnel on how to deal with inappropriate uses.
Step 3: Monitor but do not censor Computer and Internet use. When inappropriate use is detected, and it will be, follow the guidelines.
Step 4: Maintain the laptops by regularly reimaging them. Hardware issues aside, they will run forever if managed this way.
This is the responsible and sophisticated way to run a laptop loaner program. Any other approach involving software locks and Internet censorship is just a challenge to students to try to route around the damage.
Many years ago, I ran a Wintel based computer lab for students using exactly this methodology and no PC was broken for more than about 10 minutes. All infractions of the rules were dealt with individually, so we punished the guilty instead of punishing everybody.
Electricity can most efficiently be generated as close to where it is consumed as possible. Energy is only going to get more expensive over time.
What we need to look at is massive investment in small scale generation. Every house in the world should have grid connected photovoltaics on the roof. If you are fortunate enough to live in a good location, you should have grid connected wind, hydro, or geothermal generating capacity as well. Net metering of power should be required by law, with a requirement that power companies pay fair market value for energy purchased from small producers. Tax credits and government backed financing should make the cost of system installation and maintenance reasonable for any homeowner.
This coupled with conservation will allow us to continue to run our economy on our current infrastructure. The power companies may find they have such a windfall of power during daylight hours that they have to invest in pumped storage hydro, flywheel, or other energy storage systems. While they can take the fossil plants offline permanently.
It is very kind of the Dutch parliment to create this new business opportunity for the electronics retailers of Germany and Belgium. Let us hope that other EU member states approach this issue with a less corrupt attitude. Meanwhile, I'm going to invest in electronics outlets in Antwerp and Aachen.
Why doesn't a private corporation purchase the Hubble at fire sale prices. If it is scheduled to be de-orbited anyway, seems like $1 would be the asking price. It would be up to this venture to keep it flying. Contract for the robotic mission to repair it, and then sell images and time on the telescope to pay for it. Seems like Bush and the neo-cons would be all over it if someone with the money to make it happened stepped forward.
A revolution in teaching will be required before students begin to be taught what they really need to know. Virtually none of the teaching methods used outside of maths and hard sciences in the last century are applicable to the age of the Internet. Looking at this survey, the academic training done in the schools that the examined students attended is largely irrelevant to today's learners. The most relevant type of leaning revolves around learning to use the tools available to locate the information you need in the shortest period of time. In the past this naturally involved committing to memory large amounts of information since the human memory was the most reliable and quickest storage medium available. In the age of the Internet, the amount of information you can recall in a few seconds is not as important as how quickly you can recover information online. Memorizing the paths to information is more important than knowing the information itself. So the human memory is best used as an index not a repository. Until academia catches up with this idea, those who are most literate in the use of technology may display lower test scores when isolated from their online reference library. But when allowed to use the tools they have mastered to accomplish the same tasks, they will have higher test scores than those who rely only on memory for recall. This does not excuse us in the specific disciplines of math and the scientific method. Every student must learn math the hard way or be forever isolated from the most advanced fields of human knowledge. And most important of all is learning to reason properly. Every student must be able to form hypotheses, test, and discard unproven or unprovable ideas in favor of those that can be demonstrated to not be false.
I have a regular old JanSport backpack with an extra padded pocket to hold the laptop. I've logged about 200k flight miles with it over the last 2.5 years or so. My suitcase is falling apart, but the backpack is fine.
I have heard that The Last Starfighter was the first film to use CGI for extensive portions of the movie. That would be the space sequences. Some people in the thread have already had issues with this idea, so I won't argue their far superior knowledge of movie trivia. Much more importantly however, The Last Starfighter included a walk-on part (well roll-on anyway) by a Heathkit Hero 1 robot with arm attached. A true technological marvel. I would bet this is the first and last instance of a Hero 1 playing the roll of an alien robot in a major motion picture.
That would be what Ford said to Zaphod before they stole the flagship belonging the Haggunenon Admiral. This was a bad idea, since the Admiral later evolved into a Ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal. I knew there was a reason I kept all this stuff.
Back when memory was around $100/megabyte the school I was attending received some donated hardware that included one non-functioning 1 MB SIMM. Rather than toss $100 in the trash, I examined the SIMM and found a broken pin on the side of one of the chips. Using a battered soldering iron and a length of cold solder to replace the pin, I managed to get a good enough connection to restore the SIMM to operation. It functioned perfectly in a 486SX machine for several years afterward. I also managed to upgrade that same machine to a DX (MMU and FPU added) by salvaging a 486DX chip off another dead motherboard installing it in a cleverly included socket on the SX motherboard and disabling the onboard chip via jumper settings. This was before the ZIF socket, so the amount of force and screw driver based prying required to first remove and then install that 486DX chip could easily have killed it. Luck was definitely required in the days of expensive parts, and $0 technology budgets. I'd like to say we later installed Linux on that machine and used it to run our first web server, but alas, we used it for playing deathmatch Doom after the computer lab was closed. That's why we needed 4MB of memory and a FPU.
The best place I've read slashdot was in the NOC at the cable landing station in Singapore where the undersea cables from other parts of Asia arrive. They have really good connectivity there.
VoIP security is ripe to be exploited. No one is going to create a "bluebox" for VoIP. But hacking techniques that are common to Unix and Internet will work well when applied to VoIP signalling, particularly SIP, but H.323, and potentially even MGCP could be exploited. It is very important to recognize that some VoIP signalling (yes, two "l"s) is done in plain text, particularly MGCP which won't help you much for spoofing your identity, and SIP which will. In fact, a SIP endpoint is acting in effect as a class 5 switch. This means that if you roll your own SIP client (or wait for someone else to do it for you, you script kiddie) you can send whatever kind of data you like in the various fields associated with identity. A couple of useful things in the SIP protocol could be spoofed this way. 1. Run Ethereal on your neigbors open WLAN, grab his registration information, and you now have a free SIP account. Since most SIP accounts (Vonage) are flat rate billing, your calls won't even be noticed. 2. Call a compromised SIP line from your PSTN phone, send a spoofed SIP redirect message at the right moment and you are calling pay numbers from your phone for free. This will get noticed, but its between your neighbor and his Telco, right. 3. A SIP provider might have a pool of provisioned, but unused accounts/numbers sitting on its system with trivial login/password. This makes for quick turnaround when people buy a new account. Find out the phone numbers of two or three friends who just got the service in the same area and find out what their initial username and password were. You may have a goldmine of never ending free accounts. Just keep incrementing the values as the passwords change on the older numbers. 4. Now for the fun stuff. We need to send a few spoofed messages to get an unbilled SIP call. Begin with a normal call from your SIP phone in New York to your friend on the PSTN in Mexico City. First make a good call and capture all the SIP information. You are looking for the IP information for your Phone, the Proxy Server, and the media gateway that will handle the converstion from VoIP to PSTN. With this information you can create a "shadow proxy" which sends SIP messages just before or after the real proxy to effectively cut-through a call which the actual proxy thinks has been released due to "Busy Here" or some other good reason. If the media gateway uses MGCP instead of SIP this gets harder, but it is still possible. Your "shadow proxy" will have to become a "shadow media gateway controller" and you'll need a lot more information about your providers network. Still a strategic DLCX that appears to come from the gateway could work wonders. So, in short, a lot of free phone calls will be made until the SPs get this security thing right. SIP will probably have to go through major revision, and providers will have to carefully guard their networks. Also, your neighbor should really use encryption on his WLAN.
Go to College, but consider a non-traditional program such as a Work College or a Great Books Program. There are numerous small schools with alternative programs scattered around the US. Find one that seems to fit you.
Travel abroad either as part of College or before/break in the middle/right after. Rough it. Experiencing different cultures the hard way disrupts your rituals and forces you to deal with people, places, things that you normally would avoid.
Get a job. If you are still in high school and bored, get a job now, tomorrow. If you are going to college, try to work part time if you can. Try to find a job that relates to your hobbies or that you enjoy, but any job where you work hard and must deal with people and take direction from superiors will do. Save the money your earn, unless you need it for education.
Keep learning all the time. College, Travel, Work will provide many learning experiences, but you need to learn faster than that. Read as much as you can, across a broad range of topics. Read fiction and non-fiction, Biography, History, Religion, Politics, Science, whatever interests you.
Lastly, take risks in your choices about how to proceed in life. Don't avoid doing something because you are afraid to fail, and don't let anxiety keep you from something that you know is what you really want. If you are given the choice between continuing with a comfortable life and going off on a new, frightening, but potentially rewarding path. Take the new path. Disrupt your mental routine and you will advance. Become the routine and you will stay the same forever.
Joe vs. vi vs. GUI based editors
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Everyone should use Joe because CTRL-k-d is so much easier and more intuitive than ESC:wq!
Joe was a nice alternative for DOS refugees when vi was the only other choice, but X-windows based editors make everything nicer...try middle click cut-and-paste for starters.
Unless we are all sitting at green Wyse 50 terminals, why are we still so married to command line editors? I am guilty of it too. vi is my God.
I'm taking a series of Undergrad Math courses through the Friday Center for continuing ed at UNC. These are self study courses, but you have full access to a professor via email or phone if you need real help. They are quite affordable for in-state, and not too unreasonable out of state. Plus if you are in a technical position, and feeling creative you can probably get your company to pay for them if you make the argument that these are preparation to go for a masters in CS or some subject related to your job. Check out http://www.unc.edu and follow the links to the Friday Center.
I run Microsoft Word under Wine on GNU/Linux. I guess that means that Microsoft will have to release the source code to Word now. It's been infected with the open source cancer.
This idea of using an E.164 address instead of a cryptic and easy to forget name like slashdot.org has some merit. There is a patent in there somewhere, I know it.
A method for abbreviating 32 bit numbers such that a consumer can more easily remember said numbers. For example, rather than express a binary 32 bit number as 01111111000000000000000000000001, a short hand notation method making use of base ten numbers and periods can be employed. A base ten number such as 127 can be used instead of 01111111, followed by a period, followed by simply a 0 instead of 00000000, followed by a period, followed by another 0 instead of 00000000, followed by a period, followed by a 1 instead of 00000001. This short hand method yields 127.0.0.1, much more compact and much easier to remember. Using this same technique, any 32 bit binary number can be expressed in an easy to remember short hand format.
It doesn't matter what degree you get, its the skills you have. Enroll in the program of your choice, but do internships and work in the industry during the summer. Your experience will mean much more than your degree. I work for a large maker of network equipment, and my English degree does wonders for me here:)
Slashdot Mirror
Do rogue waves bring down airplanes as well?
Put no security restrictions at all on the laptop, except that no personal files should be stored on it. That way, it can be reimaged on a regular basis to remove unwanted or potentially dangerous software. This reimaging can be done over the network or in an emergency by physically swapping the hard drives.
Do not assume that you need to protect children from the Internet. This is a false assumption that simply creates headaches for parents, teachers, and administrators. Instead approach the computer the same way you would approach a piece of sports equipment or a musical instrument that is on loan to a student. Just as you wouldn't allow a student to use a school owned trumpet as a baseball bat, you can make rules about how the computer is to be used and you can enforce them without the need for software locks and censorship.
Step 1: Clearly define the rules. This is best done by a committee of parents, teachers, and IT experts. Resist all calls for censorship during this process, just make rules that the students should follow. Also define the guidelines for dealing with inappropriate use.
Step 2: Educate laptop recipients about the proper use of the equipment. Also offer education for parents and school personnel on how to deal with inappropriate uses.
Step 3: Monitor but do not censor Computer and Internet use. When inappropriate use is detected, and it will be, follow the guidelines.
Step 4: Maintain the laptops by regularly reimaging them. Hardware issues aside, they will run forever if managed this way.
This is the responsible and sophisticated way to run a laptop loaner program. Any other approach involving software locks and Internet censorship is just a challenge to students to try to route around the damage.
Many years ago, I ran a Wintel based computer lab for students using exactly this methodology and no PC was broken for more than about 10 minutes. All infractions of the rules were dealt with individually, so we punished the guilty instead of punishing everybody.
Electricity can most efficiently be generated as close to where it is consumed as possible. Energy is only going to get more expensive over time.
What we need to look at is massive investment in small scale generation. Every house in the world should have grid connected photovoltaics on the roof. If you are fortunate enough to live in a good location, you should have grid connected wind, hydro, or geothermal generating capacity as well. Net metering of power should be required by law, with a requirement that power companies pay fair market value for energy purchased from small producers. Tax credits and government backed financing should make the cost of system installation and maintenance reasonable for any homeowner.
This coupled with conservation will allow us to continue to run our economy on our current infrastructure. The power companies may find they have such a windfall of power during daylight hours that they have to invest in pumped storage hydro, flywheel, or other energy storage systems. While they can take the fossil plants offline permanently.
It is very kind of the Dutch parliment to create this new business opportunity for the electronics retailers of Germany and Belgium. Let us hope that other EU member states approach this issue with a less corrupt attitude. Meanwhile, I'm going to invest in electronics outlets in Antwerp and Aachen.
Why doesn't a private corporation purchase the Hubble at fire sale prices. If it is scheduled to be de-orbited anyway, seems like $1 would be the asking price. It would be up to this venture to keep it flying. Contract for the robotic mission to repair it, and then sell images and time on the telescope to pay for it.
Seems like Bush and the neo-cons would be all over it if someone with the money to make it happened stepped forward.
A revolution in teaching will be required before students begin to be taught what they really need to know. Virtually none of the teaching methods used outside of maths and hard sciences in the last century are applicable to the age of the Internet.
Looking at this survey, the academic training done in the schools that the examined students attended is largely irrelevant to today's learners. The most relevant type of leaning revolves around learning to use the tools available to locate the information you need in the shortest period of time. In the past this naturally involved committing to memory large amounts of information since the human memory was the most reliable and quickest storage medium available.
In the age of the Internet, the amount of information you can recall in a few seconds is not as important as how quickly you can recover information online. Memorizing the paths to information is more important than knowing the information itself. So the human memory is best used as an index not a repository.
Until academia catches up with this idea, those who are most literate in the use of technology may display lower test scores when isolated from their online reference library. But when allowed to use the tools they have mastered to accomplish the same tasks, they will have higher test scores than those who rely only on memory for recall.
This does not excuse us in the specific disciplines of math and the scientific method. Every student must learn math the hard way or be forever isolated from the most advanced fields of human knowledge. And most important of all is learning to reason properly.
Every student must be able to form hypotheses, test, and discard unproven or unprovable ideas in favor of those that can be demonstrated to not be false.
I have a regular old JanSport backpack with an extra padded pocket to hold the laptop. I've logged about 200k flight miles with it over the last 2.5 years or so. My suitcase is falling apart, but the backpack is fine.
I have heard that The Last Starfighter was the first film to use CGI for extensive portions of the movie. That would be the space sequences. Some people in the thread have already had issues with this idea, so I won't argue their far superior knowledge of movie trivia.
Much more importantly however, The Last Starfighter included a walk-on part (well roll-on anyway) by a Heathkit Hero 1 robot with arm attached. A true technological marvel. I would bet this is the first and last instance of a Hero 1 playing the roll of an alien robot in a major motion picture.
That would be what Ford said to Zaphod before they stole the flagship belonging the Haggunenon Admiral. This was a bad idea, since the Admiral later evolved into a Ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal.
I knew there was a reason I kept all this stuff.
Back when memory was around $100/megabyte the school I was attending received some donated hardware that included one non-functioning 1 MB SIMM. Rather than toss $100 in the trash, I examined the SIMM and found a broken pin on the side of one of the chips. Using a battered soldering iron and a length of cold solder to replace the pin, I managed to get a good enough connection to restore the SIMM to operation. It functioned perfectly in a 486SX machine for several years afterward. I also managed to upgrade that same machine to a DX (MMU and FPU added) by salvaging a 486DX chip off another dead motherboard installing it in a cleverly included socket on the SX motherboard and disabling the onboard chip via jumper settings. This was before the ZIF socket, so the amount of force and screw driver based prying required to first remove and then install that 486DX chip could easily have killed it.
Luck was definitely required in the days of expensive parts, and $0 technology budgets.
I'd like to say we later installed Linux on that machine and used it to run our first web server, but alas, we used it for playing deathmatch Doom after the computer lab was closed. That's why we needed 4MB of memory and a FPU.
The best place I've read slashdot was in the NOC at the cable landing station in Singapore where the undersea cables from other parts of Asia arrive. They have really good connectivity there.
VoIP security is ripe to be exploited. No one is going to create a "bluebox" for VoIP. But hacking techniques that are common to Unix and Internet will work well when applied to VoIP signalling, particularly SIP, but H.323, and potentially even MGCP could be exploited.
It is very important to recognize that some VoIP signalling (yes, two "l"s) is done in plain text, particularly MGCP which won't help you much for spoofing your identity, and SIP which will. In fact, a SIP endpoint is acting in effect as a class 5 switch. This means that if you roll your own SIP client (or wait for someone else to do it for you, you script kiddie) you can send whatever kind of data you like in the various fields associated with identity.
A couple of useful things in the SIP protocol could be spoofed this way.
1. Run Ethereal on your neigbors open WLAN, grab his registration information, and you now have a free SIP account. Since most SIP accounts (Vonage) are flat rate billing, your calls won't even be noticed.
2. Call a compromised SIP line from your PSTN phone, send a spoofed SIP redirect message at the right moment and you are calling pay numbers from your phone for free. This will get noticed, but its between your neighbor and his Telco, right.
3. A SIP provider might have a pool of provisioned, but unused accounts/numbers sitting on its system with trivial login/password. This makes for quick turnaround when people buy a new account. Find out the phone numbers of two or three friends who just got the service in the same area and find out what their initial username and password were. You may have a goldmine of never ending free accounts. Just keep incrementing the values as the passwords change on the older numbers.
4. Now for the fun stuff. We need to send a few spoofed messages to get an unbilled SIP call. Begin with a normal call from your SIP phone in New York to your friend on the PSTN in Mexico City. First make a good call and capture all the SIP information. You are looking for the IP information for your Phone, the Proxy Server, and the media gateway that will handle the converstion from VoIP to PSTN. With this information you can create a "shadow proxy" which sends SIP messages just before or after the real proxy to effectively cut-through a call which the actual proxy thinks has been released due to "Busy Here" or some other good reason. If the media gateway uses MGCP instead of SIP this gets harder, but it is still possible. Your "shadow proxy" will have to become a "shadow media gateway controller" and you'll need a lot more information about your providers network. Still a strategic DLCX that appears to come from the gateway could work wonders.
So, in short, a lot of free phone calls will be made until the SPs get this security thing right. SIP will probably have to go through major revision, and providers will have to carefully guard their networks. Also, your neighbor should really use encryption on his WLAN.
A few suggestions for the orginal poster:
Go to College, but consider a non-traditional program such as a Work College or a Great Books Program. There are numerous small schools with alternative programs scattered around the US. Find one that seems to fit you.
Travel abroad either as part of College or before/break in the middle/right after. Rough it. Experiencing different cultures the hard way disrupts your rituals and forces you to deal with people, places, things that you normally would avoid.
Get a job. If you are still in high school and bored, get a job now, tomorrow. If you are going to college, try to work part time if you can. Try to find a job that relates to your hobbies or that you enjoy, but any job where you work hard and must deal with people and take direction from superiors will do. Save the money your earn, unless you need it for education.
Keep learning all the time. College, Travel, Work will provide many learning experiences, but you need to learn faster than that. Read as much as you can, across a broad range of topics. Read fiction and non-fiction, Biography, History, Religion, Politics, Science, whatever interests you.
Lastly, take risks in your choices about how to proceed in life. Don't avoid doing something because you are afraid to fail, and don't let anxiety keep you from something that you know is what you really want. If you are given the choice between continuing with a comfortable life and going off on a new, frightening, but potentially rewarding path. Take the new path. Disrupt your mental routine and you will advance. Become the routine and you will stay the same forever.
A torx screwdriver followed by a sledge hammer.
Everyone should use Joe because CTRL-k-d is so much easier and more intuitive than ESC :wq!
Joe was a nice alternative for DOS refugees when vi was the only other choice, but X-windows based editors make everything nicer...try middle click cut-and-paste for starters.
Unless we are all sitting at green Wyse 50 terminals, why are we still so married to command line editors? I am guilty of it too. vi is my God.
Alas, as a non-US resident I cannot submit my Haiku to the contest, so here it is for all to share.
Crack the oyster, by Bapu:
A CSV file
Many records many fields
Find the perl inside
I'm taking a series of Undergrad Math courses through the Friday Center for continuing ed at UNC. These are self study courses, but you have full access to a professor via email or phone if you need real help. They are quite affordable for in-state, and not too unreasonable out of state. Plus if you are in a technical position, and feeling creative you can probably get your company to pay for them if you make the argument that these are preparation to go for a masters in CS or some subject related to your job. Check out http://www.unc.edu and follow the links to the Friday Center.
I run Microsoft Word under Wine on GNU/Linux. I guess that means that Microsoft will have to release the source code to Word now. It's been infected with the open source cancer.
This idea of using an E.164 address instead of a cryptic and easy to forget name like slashdot.org has some merit. There is a patent in there somewhere, I know it.
A method for abbreviating 32 bit numbers such that a consumer can more easily remember said numbers. For example, rather than express a binary 32 bit number as 01111111000000000000000000000001, a short hand notation method making use of base ten numbers and periods can be employed. A base ten number such as 127 can be used instead of 01111111, followed by a period, followed by simply a 0 instead of 00000000, followed by a period, followed by another 0 instead of 00000000, followed by a period, followed by a 1 instead of 00000001. This short hand method yields 127.0.0.1, much more compact and much easier to remember. Using this same technique, any 32 bit binary number can be expressed in an easy to remember short hand format.
It doesn't matter what degree you get, its the skills you have. Enroll in the program of your choice, but do internships and work in the industry during the summer. Your experience will mean much more than your degree. I work for a large maker of network equipment, and my English degree does wonders for me here:)