I would have no prob doing some research on places Ive been in the past or would like to go in the future (this interests me too) - AND let you know what I find. But, what do you like to do? I'm not gonna do research on resorts with skiing or golfing to find out afterwards that you hate the cold or heat. And, what kind of work do you do? How much access do you need? Theres a big difference between pulling HUGE or small amount of source down from cvs nightly and compiling or just having to check and reply to lots of emails. Are you self employed, and this all has to be out of pocket? Or are you employed by some entity that will/won't chip for an upgrade in accomodations to meet your needs? Also, do you really *have* to connect your laptop to the net? Could you get some sort of removable storage and use access at a netcafe (not for company secrets!) and bring your data back to your room? Ive found this to be highly useful, and convenient in the past (even used a netcafe in tijuana one time). if this works for you, you may be interested in these two links: http://cybercaptive.com/ (its a netcafe locator/search engine) and also this book http://www.netcafeguide.com/ (its a guidebook for netcafe's and if youre a Douglas Adams fan, you can appreciate the cover)
Also, only the the biggest prick of a prof would pick on you if he saw you weren't paying attention, especially if he knew you knew your stuff.
Wow. If that's true, I guess most of the teachers I had in High School qualify as BIG PRICKS. I always had a sneaking suspicion about this, but I wasn't sure until now.
Want to know what to do in class? Hack. Classrooms are fun to hack. Back in school, I purchased the smallest universal remote I could find, and used it to mess with the TV/Projection Panels and VCRs in the classes I had. Now you could use something like these happy little devices http://www.quemex.co.uk/, http://www.surprise.com/likes_dislikes/gadgeteer/r emote_control_watch.cfm. You can also use social engineering to cause all sorts of trouble. Or you could always resort to forging a doctor's note stating you have narcolepsy and get one of these free voicemail boxes so they can call in and hear the "doctor's" anwering service, then return the call at your leisure. The whole bottom line I think, is that if you think you're so smart that you don't need to pay attention in class, then you should at least be smart enough to amuse/entertain yourself. Did you really need an Ask Slashdot for this?
youre probably almost completely right.
But you know all about counting on security through obscurity...etc...etc...etc...
(and hey, there are a lot of geeks without jobs right now....you never know which one of your old coworkers is going to show up to take that stereo/network server off your hands while your still at work...) yeah, its far fetched and all....still
I fully agree. Home security is always needed, whether that security is living somewhere thats plain isolated, or having a security system, or just putting your trust into ignorance or luck. I have yet to live in an area that is completely unaffected by vandalism, the random car stereo theft etc... at the least.
As for some of the best home security in my opinion, get a Mastiff. Theyre big nice dogs with a great personality, and should scare off/protect [whatever] from all but the most motivated break-ins. Caveat: They are expensive to feed (due to the amount) and because they eat a ton, they also crap a ton. Talk about landmines;) They also need at least a decently sized house and yard to be happy.
This is usually done by a simple monitoring of line voltage and/or continuity - as I understand it. This would be incredibly easy to work around with some jumper wires and a portable voltage source.
Also, Lynx was mentioned a bit further up. That's a really good way to avoid multimedia advertisements.
Yes, Lynx is a good way to avoid multimedia advertisements, as well as a lot of worthwile content. Thats like saying you should stop driving your red sprotscar and get a Geo, because youre less likely to get a ticket...sure it's more or less true, but its about the tradeoff and what you think is valuable enough to wade through ads to get at. Face it, not many sites get designed with the Lynx user in mind anymore.
I have needed bootdisks in the past for various reasons and not had the facilities to make the right disk for the job. I have often used http://bootdisk.com to get the bootdisks I need for various situations. Although there are actual images available at the site, many are entrapped in.exe files... Nonetheless, it's been a pretty helpful resource for me.
Yes I DO prefer CDE. Maybe its just because Ive been using it for so long, but if given a choice between Gnome and CDE on a solaris machine - I choose CDE.
Death/The Grim Reaper/Your Mother-in-Law, is my costume for the year...all i had to do was bust out my spare holocaust cloak, pickup some face paint and drove to the farm implement store to pick up a scythe. Simple, classic, and cool enaough to not completely embarass my son...
(no Im not on the brute squad, i AM the brute squad!)
I have the same problem with my cell phone; inside the house I get 0-2 bars of signal strength and outside I get 1-3....not a significant difference unless you use my phone (which I do, of course), and then its a BIG difference. Ive been toying with the idea of placing a passive repeater on every window in the house and seeing what happens... I did a search on Ebay for repeaters ("cellular repeater" returned 0 results...) and found a bunch of passive repeaters as well as lots of repeaters that look more complex and list a bunch of specs that I dont understand... anyways heres the URL http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPIC ommand=GetResult&pb=&ht=1&st=2&query=repeater&Sort Property=MetaEndSort
If I may hazard a question, isnt this a bit late to be thinking about Halloween masks/costumes...no express shipping can get it to you fast enough now. Personally, I like the idea of being billgatus of borg for Halloween, but I think the humor would be lost on kids, and if my Halloween costume aint cool (or at least not terribly UNcool), man youd think i shot my son through the heart with an arrow of pure embarassment, which is why my costume is the grim reaper this year. Its a classic (i hear hes been around for awhile) and its easy (c'mon, who DOESNT have a spare holocaust cloak?). My $.02
I apologize for misunderstanding your comment about the 15 hours of hold time. I feel that the way I interpreted your comment justified a bit of bitching. I was wrong, my bad.
I have worked in various support positions at various levels for several years now, and I am constantly amazed both by the sloth of corporations, and just as much by the demands of customers. Customers are obviously the base of just about any business, so it makes sense to treat them right. Most companies will not go out of their way to aggravate or make life difficult for the customer. What you have to realize is that companies like Dell make money like McDonalds. They sell a shitload of stuff, it's about volume for them. To support this volume they have to have techs answering phones. These techs are either well paid or not. If they are well paid, I can guarantee there arent enough of them to answer all calls with a minimun of hold time. If they are the el cheapo techs, they arent good enough yet to solve the calls quickly and keep the hold time down. An hour and forty minutes is a long time to hold, and you are correct in that speakerphone is the best way to deal with this. A wait this long surely doesnt please customers, but imagine the techs getting brutalized by customers who already had a problem BEFORE they waited on hold for 100 minutes turning a ten minute call into a 10 minute call with an additional 30 minute customer rant! This situation exists becuase of a limited resource - money. NO call center will have 100% satisfaction and zero minute hold times ALWAYS. I have found that the support I get from any vendor varies an incredible amount depending on the day, and the kind of gum I chew while on hold. You may find that the next time you call dell support that you get through in 5-10 minutes and speak to a great tech, or you might have to wait forever and speak to an asshole. It's like driving to work; sometimes theres lots of slow, aggravating, and unresponsive traffic - and sometimes theres no traffic and you hit every green light.
As for some advice (that i didnt give because of my misinterpretation of your comment) instead of my usual bitching; I dont really have much that you might find useful, but here it is: When I knew little about computers, I suffered through tech support and hated it. So I looked for a way to avoid it, which meant that I had to fix it myself, or rely on a friend who knew a bit more. A couple books and broken parts later I had a semi-decent grasp and called support far less. As time progressed and I became actively interested in computers (as a hobby), I only had to call support to replace a defective component. So, the moral to this drivel? Simple, unless you want to take on the responsibility of learning and fixing computers yourself, you HAVE TO RELY on others, which means youre at their mercy. Yeah, it definately sometimes sucks, but for me, this isnt enough to denounce a company that for me at least has delivered far more good products than bad.
Of course this all may be a delsuion of my inferior intellect;) (that was good humored sarcasm)
cmon 15 hours? If you have documented proof of this, then you were obviously emotionally involved with this call otherwise you would have realized that Dell would not stop answering the phone for 15 hours. This could only be due to a glitch in their phone system, or a call center being evacuated because of fire or something...
And certified letters to the CEO? man, i hate it when customers try to do this with huge companies...all the CEOs mail gets read and directed to the best place...if the aide who deos this is pissed off or is just a bad aide...these letters get thrown away immediately. If the aide is a good one, the letters get passed down to the customer service department where they again get the chance to be thrown out by someone else...etc...etc...
Youre upset about being your families support line? Thats too bad. If you were a mechanic, guess whos car you'd fixing (theirs), if you were a painter, guess who your family would call when they needed a room painted. Theyre your family. If they need help so often it reallys disrupts your life, either you need to prioritize and let them know, or you need to tell them no sometimes.
Personally, when I had to start a new job and learn unfamiliar technology, I decided to quit smoking pot. That was a couple years ago and I really do feel that my mind is much sharper for having quit. Also, I discovered that the small but ever present gut I had been toting around since high school pretty much went away on its own. I have a feeling it was a munchie-induced gut.
If you don't smoke pot, I still have a tip for you. Good people. Thats right, make sure you have at least a few genuinely supportive and happy people in your life. Your mind can do so much more if it's secure and at ease with your life. My 2 cents.
yeah yeah, back in the good ole days...
1k chess and all that...
Slick stuff I'll admit, but if you look at the tinyapps.org site listed in the story, you will see that this stuff is for DOS and Windows. Small is obviously a subjective and/or relative term. A 1.4 meg program is small on todays new systems with 60-100 Gig hdds. Its not small if you have a trs-80. some people actually install the whole ms office suite just to have a word processor, so i say if it fits on a floppy and is useful without being feature stripped, its a good small program. and i must say that QNX has to be the coolest and most fun of of anything ive ever seen fit on a floppy.
wow, certainly a lot of BS calling here....but of course I have nothing to substantiate this with except my word. At any rate I certainly dont think I look like the cnn stereotyped terrorist. I really dont know what they were looking for; if it was child porn, stolen software or what...
Another thing that i wonder about security officers checking electronic devices is that with one the size of a laptop, couldn't the battery be replaced by one of the same external size, having a just small battery inside with enough power to boot up, but enough extra space to store/transport drugs/explosives/anthrax/etc? I dont know what betteries look like going thru an xray machine...but I assume they are pretty dense and thus a bit easier to disguise a replacement.
Alas, that laptop suffered a catastrophic failure. (apparently it had an issue with the pint of beer i tried to kindly nourish it with...) And my current laptop? Company owned and running win2k, but i do carry a QNX floppy disk so i can feel cool....
On a serious note, *Nix users beware:
On an international flight coming back into the states, I was taken aside and told I matched a profile and I would be searched. I was told this wasnt unusual and was for the safety of everyone. They decided that my laptop did need to be scanned. For what exactly, I have never been sure. I was running Redhat at the time and their scanning machine had NO provisions for *nix OSes...and I was questioned as to why I was NOT running windows. (like i was automatically suspect because of this!) They had to bring in a computer "expert" (an airport IT guy) to evaluate the computer. He seemed clued in to what was going on and after a quick look see, assured the security goons that there was nothing on my laptop that could end the world. This whole process took almost 2 hours, which isnt terribly long, but long enough to miss my connecting flight out. The moral to this? Be prepared to explain yourself if you have anything the security guys dont recognize.
But what if some clueful person in security (yeah yeah I know its not likely) decides that my compnay laptop with Win2k is a "non-functional device"? They'd be pretty much right of course, but does that mean I can't take it with me?
just imagine YOURSELF with a computer in middle school during a boring class. what would you do? something bad or good?
Good troll, and Im gonna bite. OK, if youre in a boring class, most people will just zone out after a brief point anyways. SO? Nothing is being learned; if a kid is intellectually excited by something online and they pursue it for 45 minutes in class (yes, still ignoring the teacher) instead of fantasizing about the girl two desks over...whats the big deal? People have been bypassing boring teachers and having fun for years (well, even longer than that), as represented by the always present note being passed, pencils getting thrown at the ceiling etc. etc.... But, replace the mindless time, filling with something a bit intellectual, and many kids are bound to grow a little bit. Plus, i might be little bit stimulating to find various ways around filters, firewalls and stuff. The worst part about introducing these laptops is that they DO have the potential to be distractions, and surely will be to a lot of kids. But isnt it a better distraction than fantasizing all class about the hot substitute? (which can be better accomplished at home with the door locked anyways;)
Slashdot Mirror
wireless 802.11a
I would have no prob doing some research on places Ive been in the past or would like to go in the future (this interests me too) - AND let you know what I find. But, what do you like to do? I'm not gonna do research on resorts with skiing or golfing to find out afterwards that you hate the cold or heat. And, what kind of work do you do? How much access do you need? Theres a big difference between pulling HUGE or small amount of source down from cvs nightly and compiling or just having to check and reply to lots of emails. Are you self employed, and this all has to be out of pocket? Or are you employed by some entity that will/won't chip for an upgrade in accomodations to meet your needs? Also, do you really *have* to connect your laptop to the net? Could you get some sort of removable storage and use access at a netcafe (not for company secrets!) and bring your data back to your room? Ive found this to be highly useful, and convenient in the past (even used a netcafe in tijuana one time). if this works for you, you may be interested in these two links: http://cybercaptive.com/ (its a netcafe locator/search engine) and also this book http://www.netcafeguide.com/ (its a guidebook for netcafe's and if youre a Douglas Adams fan, you can appreciate the cover)
My 2 cents
Also, only the the biggest prick of a prof would pick on you if he saw you weren't paying attention, especially if he knew you knew your stuff.
r emote_control_watch.cfm. You can also use social engineering to cause all sorts of trouble. Or you could always resort to forging a doctor's note stating you have narcolepsy and get one of these free voicemail boxes so they can call in and hear the "doctor's" anwering service, then return the call at your leisure. The whole bottom line I think, is that if you think you're so smart that you don't need to pay attention in class, then you should at least be smart enough to amuse/entertain yourself. Did you really need an Ask Slashdot for this?
Wow. If that's true, I guess most of the teachers I had in High School qualify as BIG PRICKS. I always had a sneaking suspicion about this, but I wasn't sure until now.
Want to know what to do in class? Hack. Classrooms are fun to hack. Back in school, I purchased the smallest universal remote I could find, and used it to mess with the TV/Projection Panels and VCRs in the classes I had. Now you could use something like these happy little devices http://www.quemex.co.uk/, http://www.surprise.com/likes_dislikes/gadgeteer/
youre probably almost completely right.
But you know all about counting on security through obscurity...etc...etc...etc...
(and hey, there are a lot of geeks without jobs right now....you never know which one of your old coworkers is going to show up to take that stereo/network server off your hands while your still at work...) yeah, its far fetched and all....still
I fully agree. Home security is always needed, whether that security is living somewhere thats plain isolated, or having a security system, or just putting your trust into ignorance or luck. I have yet to live in an area that is completely unaffected by vandalism, the random car stereo theft etc... at the least.
As for some of the best home security in my opinion, get a Mastiff. Theyre big nice dogs with a great personality, and should scare off/protect [whatever] from all but the most motivated break-ins. Caveat: They are expensive to feed (due to the amount) and because they eat a ton, they also crap a ton. Talk about landmines;) They also need at least a decently sized house and yard to be happy.
This is usually done by a simple monitoring of line voltage and/or continuity - as I understand it. This would be incredibly easy to work around with some jumper wires and a portable voltage source.
?
Also, Lynx was mentioned a bit further up. That's a really good way to avoid multimedia advertisements.
Yes, Lynx is a good way to avoid multimedia advertisements, as well as a lot of worthwile content. Thats like saying you should stop driving your red sprotscar and get a Geo, because youre less likely to get a ticket...sure it's more or less true, but its about the tradeoff and what you think is valuable enough to wade through ads to get at. Face it, not many sites get designed with the Lynx user in mind anymore.
I have needed bootdisks in the past for various reasons and not had the facilities to make the right disk for the job. I have often used http://bootdisk.com to get the bootdisks I need for various situations. Although there are actual images available at the site, many are entrapped in .exe files... Nonetheless, it's been a pretty helpful resource for me.
Youre right...simple, workable and its been being developed for a long time...with a good sized user base.
Yes I DO prefer CDE. Maybe its just because Ive been using it for so long, but if given a choice between Gnome and CDE on a solaris machine - I choose CDE.
Death/The Grim Reaper/Your Mother-in-Law, is my costume for the year...all i had to do was bust out my spare holocaust cloak, pickup some face paint and drove to the farm implement store to pick up a scythe. Simple, classic, and cool enaough to not completely embarass my son...
(no Im not on the brute squad, i AM the brute squad!)
I have the same problem with my cell phone; inside the house I get 0-2 bars of signal strength and outside I get 1-3....not a significant difference unless you use my phone (which I do, of course), and then its a BIG difference. Ive been toying with the idea of placing a passive repeater on every window in the house and seeing what happens... I did a search on Ebay for repeaters ("cellular repeater" returned 0 results...) and found a bunch of passive repeaters as well as lots of repeaters that look more complex and list a bunch of specs that I dont understand... anyways heres the URL http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPIC ommand=GetResult&pb=&ht=1&st=2&query=repeater&Sort Property=MetaEndSort
i ewItem&item=1289651845
and heres the url for somrthing that looks useful, but I dont know how....http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?V
Heres a bill gates mask - its not billgatus, but hacks can be esaily added. http://www.funshop.com/billgates.html
If I may hazard a question, isnt this a bit late to be thinking about Halloween masks/costumes...no express shipping can get it to you fast enough now. Personally, I like the idea of being billgatus of borg for Halloween, but I think the humor would be lost on kids, and if my Halloween costume aint cool (or at least not terribly UNcool), man youd think i shot my son through the heart with an arrow of pure embarassment, which is why my costume is the grim reaper this year. Its a classic (i hear hes been around for awhile) and its easy (c'mon, who DOESNT have a spare holocaust cloak?). My $.02
Try your mom - she was able to hold down my terabyte wab last night.
I apologize for misunderstanding your comment about the 15 hours of hold time. I feel that the way I interpreted your comment justified a bit of bitching. I was wrong, my bad.
;) (that was good humored sarcasm)
I have worked in various support positions at various levels for several years now, and I am constantly amazed both by the sloth of corporations, and just as much by the demands of customers. Customers are obviously the base of just about any business, so it makes sense to treat them right. Most companies will not go out of their way to aggravate or make life difficult for the customer. What you have to realize is that companies like Dell make money like McDonalds. They sell a shitload of stuff, it's about volume for them. To support this volume they have to have techs answering phones. These techs are either well paid or not. If they are well paid, I can guarantee there arent enough of them to answer all calls with a minimun of hold time. If they are the el cheapo techs, they arent good enough yet to solve the calls quickly and keep the hold time down. An hour and forty minutes is a long time to hold, and you are correct in that speakerphone is the best way to deal with this. A wait this long surely doesnt please customers, but imagine the techs getting brutalized by customers who already had a problem BEFORE they waited on hold for 100 minutes turning a ten minute call into a 10 minute call with an additional 30 minute customer rant! This situation exists becuase of a limited resource - money. NO call center will have 100% satisfaction and zero minute hold times ALWAYS. I have found that the support I get from any vendor varies an incredible amount depending on the day, and the kind of gum I chew while on hold. You may find that the next time you call dell support that you get through in 5-10 minutes and speak to a great tech, or you might have to wait forever and speak to an asshole. It's like driving to work; sometimes theres lots of slow, aggravating, and unresponsive traffic - and sometimes theres no traffic and you hit every green light.
As for some advice (that i didnt give because of my misinterpretation of your comment) instead of my usual bitching; I dont really have much that you might find useful, but here it is: When I knew little about computers, I suffered through tech support and hated it. So I looked for a way to avoid it, which meant that I had to fix it myself, or rely on a friend who knew a bit more. A couple books and broken parts later I had a semi-decent grasp and called support far less. As time progressed and I became actively interested in computers (as a hobby), I only had to call support to replace a defective component. So, the moral to this drivel? Simple, unless you want to take on the responsibility of learning and fixing computers yourself, you HAVE TO RELY on others, which means youre at their mercy. Yeah, it definately sometimes sucks, but for me, this isnt enough to denounce a company that for me at least has delivered far more good products than bad.
Of course this all may be a delsuion of my inferior intellect
cmon 15 hours? If you have documented proof of this, then you were obviously emotionally involved with this call otherwise you would have realized that Dell would not stop answering the phone for 15 hours. This could only be due to a glitch in their phone system, or a call center being evacuated because of fire or something...
And certified letters to the CEO? man, i hate it when customers try to do this with huge companies...all the CEOs mail gets read and directed to the best place...if the aide who deos this is pissed off or is just a bad aide...these letters get thrown away immediately. If the aide is a good one, the letters get passed down to the customer service department where they again get the chance to be thrown out by someone else...etc...etc...
Youre upset about being your families support line? Thats too bad. If you were a mechanic, guess whos car you'd fixing (theirs), if you were a painter, guess who your family would call when they needed a room painted. Theyre your family. If they need help so often it reallys disrupts your life, either you need to prioritize and let them know, or you need to tell them no sometimes.
my 2 cents.
Personally, when I had to start a new job and learn unfamiliar technology, I decided to quit smoking pot. That was a couple years ago and I really do feel that my mind is much sharper for having quit. Also, I discovered that the small but ever present gut I had been toting around since high school pretty much went away on its own. I have a feeling it was a munchie-induced gut.
If you don't smoke pot, I still have a tip for you. Good people. Thats right, make sure you have at least a few genuinely supportive and happy people in your life. Your mind can do so much more if it's secure and at ease with your life. My 2 cents.
i bet its tiny too...1.44 inches?
yeah yeah, back in the good ole days...
1k chess and all that...
Slick stuff I'll admit, but if you look at the tinyapps.org site listed in the story, you will see that this stuff is for DOS and Windows. Small is obviously a subjective and/or relative term. A 1.4 meg program is small on todays new systems with 60-100 Gig hdds. Its not small if you have a trs-80. some people actually install the whole ms office suite just to have a word processor, so i say if it fits on a floppy and is useful without being feature stripped, its a good small program. and i must say that QNX has to be the coolest and most fun of of anything ive ever seen fit on a floppy.
wow, certainly a lot of BS calling here....but of course I have nothing to substantiate this with except my word. At any rate I certainly dont think I look like the cnn stereotyped terrorist. I really dont know what they were looking for; if it was child porn, stolen software or what...
Another thing that i wonder about security officers checking electronic devices is that with one the size of a laptop, couldn't the battery be replaced by one of the same external size, having a just small battery inside with enough power to boot up, but enough extra space to store/transport drugs/explosives/anthrax/etc? I dont know what betteries look like going thru an xray machine...but I assume they are pretty dense and thus a bit easier to disguise a replacement.
Alas, that laptop suffered a catastrophic failure. (apparently it had an issue with the pint of beer i tried to kindly nourish it with...) And my current laptop? Company owned and running win2k, but i do carry a QNX floppy disk so i can feel cool....
Portland International Airport. COming back from Japan. I negelcted to mention this was almost two years ago.
On a serious note, *Nix users beware:
On an international flight coming back into the states, I was taken aside and told I matched a profile and I would be searched. I was told this wasnt unusual and was for the safety of everyone. They decided that my laptop did need to be scanned. For what exactly, I have never been sure. I was running Redhat at the time and their scanning machine had NO provisions for *nix OSes...and I was questioned as to why I was NOT running windows. (like i was automatically suspect because of this!) They had to bring in a computer "expert" (an airport IT guy) to evaluate the computer. He seemed clued in to what was going on and after a quick look see, assured the security goons that there was nothing on my laptop that could end the world. This whole process took almost 2 hours, which isnt terribly long, but long enough to miss my connecting flight out. The moral to this? Be prepared to explain yourself if you have anything the security guys dont recognize.
But what if some clueful person in security (yeah yeah I know its not likely) decides that my compnay laptop with Win2k is a "non-functional device"? They'd be pretty much right of course, but does that mean I can't take it with me?
just imagine YOURSELF with a computer in middle school during a boring class. what would you do? something bad or good?
;)
Good troll, and Im gonna bite. OK, if youre in a boring class, most people will just zone out after a brief point anyways. SO? Nothing is being learned; if a kid is intellectually excited by something online and they pursue it for 45 minutes in class (yes, still ignoring the teacher) instead of fantasizing about the girl two desks over...whats the big deal? People have been bypassing boring teachers and having fun for years (well, even longer than that), as represented by the always present note being passed, pencils getting thrown at the ceiling etc. etc.... But, replace the mindless time, filling with something a bit intellectual, and many kids are bound to grow a little bit. Plus, i might be little bit stimulating to find various ways around filters, firewalls and stuff. The worst part about introducing these laptops is that they DO have the potential to be distractions, and surely will be to a lot of kids. But isnt it a better distraction than fantasizing all class about the hot substitute? (which can be better accomplished at home with the door locked anyways