when I first started playing with computers I was always so carefull with them, always treating them like they were verry delicate things... you know, the way people tell you you're SUPPOSED to handle computers, but experience has made me beleive that maybe theya re a little more durable than you might think... a few fun examples:
A magnetic personality: had a "friend" walk up to me while I was working on a machine and put a speaker magnet down on a stack of floppies containing the program I was in the middle of installing, I thought they were toast for sure, after all these are a MAGNETIC medium, and few magnets are more powerfull than speaker magnets, however for some reason they don't appear to have been affected at all.
The Interuptible Power Supply: we had a UPS that died on us at work, company didn't want to hear "I think I can fix it" they just wanted to replace it and ordered me to toss it, so as I did with much of the "tossed" hardware I tossed it in to my bag to take home (that was a HEAVY backpack!!!) when I opened it up I noticed a LARGE dent in the metal top of the UPS, I also noticed that the control circuitry in the UPS was mounted on a circuit board under this top cover with the components on the under side, in other words the dented case was shorting out the board, I hammered the case out and used the UPS for another 4 years before it finally died, (and I couldn't revive it this time)
Hot swapping: I'm not sure there is any part of a machine I haven't hot-swapped out of either laziness or sheer curiosity (I wonder if I can get away with "this")
The sick computer: I came home one day after being gone camping for a weekend (yes some of us techie types do get outside on occasion) and when I walked in to the kitchen I noticed the keyboard in the dish-drainer, in pieces... I wasn't sure if I wanted to know... but I asked anyway... apparently my brother had thrown up on it, my mother had taken it appart and washed it out and it was drying in the dish drainer, once it dried out we put it back together, hooked it up and no problems, worked for another 3 years untill we sold the computer, and probably many more after that.
Flying Floppies: I had a floppy I used to carry with me pretty much everywhere with "all" my computer utilities on it for rescuing damaged systems (ok, it was a while ago, when 1.44Mb was still a reasonable amount of data), had someone throw me the disk at one point, from accross the room (a computer lab with 40 machines in it, so not a small room) it hit a birkc wall and the door flew off the floppy, the disk flew open, and the media was lying on the, verry dirty, floor, I picked it up, blew the dirt off, put the disk back together, put some tape around the disk to hold it together, and continued using the disk (minus the door) for another couple years, and a couple months ago I found the disk in a pile of old hardware and it still works,
CD drives: this is not quite on topic, but it is interesting none the less. I worked for a while doing R&D work on high speed CD-ROM drives (we were playing with drives with the amazingly high speeds of 24-40x (yeah... I know... this was a few years ago, when you couldn't yet get those drieves on teh shelves here) we would test these drives with the cases removed, so basically you had the chasis, the read head and circuitry, and the motor, and a disc spinning at amazing speeds while you do tests on data-transfer rates on un-ballanced discs (weights glued to the edge of the disc to make it "wobble" as it spins) needless to say these things would on occasion (about 2-3 times a day) come off the test rig... this was an amazing thing to watch the first time it happened (after that we were a little more used to it and had less stuff in the way)... the disc started hovering up off the spindle, then slid sideways and landed on the table, it proceeded to knock everything lighter than our osciliscope off the table and onto the floor (note-pads, bottles of glue, pens, screwdrivers, etc), then it floated down to the floor, skitted around the floor a bit, out the door and most of the way down the hall before stopping. the part that looked so weird was that spinning at those speeds it doesn't LOOK to be moving that much, and the horrizontal or vertical movement was actually pretty slow, (until it hit the floor!) but the rotational speed gave it great stability, and a lot of strength!
I used to register things with the email address not@chance but too many scripts started checking for that "." so I made it not@bloody.likely unfortunatly, it seems most scripts now check the tld to make sure it is valid (and a surprising number check the domain itself as well) so basically you have to decide who you want them to spam... because spamming an invalid domain isn't always an option anymore...
this is what I percieve to be the big problem... I can see a law requiring such things to be labelled, and then the companies complying by slapping stickers on them that say "This disc features new DRM technology for your protection.", then your average consumer who has no idea what "DRM" stands for, and even less of a clue that "Digital Rights Managment" is actually translated to "crippled" will simply read it and think WOW! this one has an extra FEATURE called DRM.... I don't know what it is... but if it's for my protection than it must be a GOOD thing!
it's one thing to require labeling, it's another thing to convince the people who apply the labeling to want to make their product look bad... whatever else we might think about the RIAA/MPAA/ETC, if there is one thing they are good at it is MARKETTING... and this is one thing I REALLY don't want to see them put their "spin" on.
purely anecdotal... but when I was buying speakers I was shown a pair that were supposed to be "as good" as the really expensive ones I was looking at... and they sounded great... but something was missing... the difference that I beleive I was sensing was the lack of any frequency response outside of the audible... you could "hear" the music just fine... but you couldn't "feel" it. the stuff outside of the audible spectrum may not be heard... but it defintely adds "depth" to the sound. The sub-audible portion (the base) is definitely felt, and adds a lot of depth to the music. I don't know enough what the high end frequencies add... (but I would suspect that they are just as important to the "full experience")
I can't say how this works for your telco, however in the telco I work for (a reasonably large canadian telco) it is not actually the telco's choice, but is actually the way the CRTC (canadian equivlant to the FCC) regulates it. you see when you get your local phone service from a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) your phone line is physically disconnected from our equipment and hooked up the the CLEC's equipment within the phone exchange, on top of that (as per CRTC regulation) we are not allowed to touch that phone line without permission from the CLEC (we can't disconnect it, we can't move it, we can't put other equipment in line with it (ie. ADSL) the phone line is leased to the CLEC and we can't touch it. so now if you want ADSL the only company that can LEGALLY give you that service is your local provider (or someone who is re-selling that service, (in the case you mentioned Yahoo! is just re-selling SBC DSL service)) in our case, as far as I know, none of our CLECs currently offer ADSL, however I know one of them has been thinking about it, and we may see it soon.
This does pose other problems as well, for example if you order service from a CLEC, and then move out of your house we can't legally provide the next occupant of the house service untill the CLEC decides to release the line (which they are often pretty slow at doing) (ok, legally we can provide service, however we would have to run a brand new line to the house. even though there is a line that we maintain that isn't in use... or in english it's a big mess)
mostly back up by the end of the day... but the relatively large canadian telco I work for was really in trouble today...
work today was quite the adventure...
all internal systems were taken offline due to the MSSQL worm... our dispatch software was completely down untull almost noon... our records and switch programming systems were still down at the end of the day, even access cards to get in to the buildings weren't working this-morning!
don't underestimate that one! I worked in technical support for an ISP for a while.. when the superbowl hit we did not get a single call in to the cue for over an hour, (I think between all the techs on shift we totalled less then 3 calls durring the game) we could tell when the game was over because the phone lines lit up, one of the techs answered the phone with "thankyou for calling, can I get your userid and the final score to the game please?"... and the client wondered how we knew that he was watching the game...
I volunteer with a SAR group (Search And Rescue) and some people ARE pretty close to that stupid... (side note, on most topo maps they use 100' spacing in the contour lines... so if placed right you can have a 99' cliff in front of you that's not on the map.)
We all carry GPSs... we all know not to rely on them.
as we were told in our navigation course, if you're standing on a road it doesn't matter what the map and compass says, or what the GPS says. you are ON the road. you are where you are. period.
GPS is a valuable tool... but not a replacment for common sense (and if you don't have the common sense in the first place.. PLEASE stay home!)
(of course we can also get in to the fact that GPS uses batteries which can die, doesn't like falling in the creek, doesn't like dense tree cover, can be off by using the wrong datum, etc etc. and is therefore not good to be your primary navigational instrument.)
all that said, when search base calls us and asks for our location we generally look at the gps and spit out the 6 digit UTM it gives us. (though we do check on the map to make sure it makes sense, and search base WILL call us back and ask if we're sure if it doesn't)
Re:Only 81 spam, but its only 9:30
on
Spammers Busted
·
· Score: 1
"Never post that address on the internet, and never give it to a company when you register for something and you'll find that you don't have a problem."
too bad it doesn't work that way... that sure HELPS... but it doesn't solve the problem,
I run my own mail server and looking through the logs I get a LOT of spam to addresses that do not, and never have, existed. it's not like I, or anybody else who uses my mail server (I know all those that do) have ever posted these addresses anywhere. they aren't even close to the real addresses used. spamers guess at addresses, and eventually they'll get it... unless your email address is SDADH2146SADG32JHL787HKJKHKJ4390@yourdomain.com (which I don't know about you... but I find that a bit challenging for my friends to remember...)
" I shouldn't have to call a repairman to come reboot something. So nothing should ever go wrong, but if it does it should be easy for the user to make it work correctly again. Just turning the car off and back on should fix the problem"
While I can't vouch for this particular system, the "turning it off and back on again" solution does solve many problems in other motor vehicles (I know our city busses constantly have issues that require a reboot, usually the doors won't open, or won't close) the driver shuts off the bus, waits 15 seconds, then turns everything back on again and it usually all works) the problem is that to "reboot" the car I need to find somewhere to pull over, stop, shut off the car, then turn it back on again, try doing that on the freeway at rush hour from the fast lane because some accessory won't work... now if it's something like the stereo not turning on, you can do that, or the doors not locking... but it could easilly be something more "urgent" (imagine pouring rain, in the dark, in heavy traffic and the headlights turn off and the wipers don't work... now each of these are only "accessories" but if you're in the fast lane this could be a major problem to deal with, even if all it requires is a reboot.)
for now I think I'll stick to my 20 year old car (ok... I'll stick to it because I can't afford newer... but I can at least use this as an excuse!)
it's despicable that most people accept that computers just normally need to be rebooted frequently... lets hope they never accept the same with cars...
"What I want to know, though, is why I keep getting back 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd no matter what I search for?"
for me it's a different song... but always the same one... I now set up filters in all my gtk-gnutella searches along the lines of: if name is not "what I searched for" discard haven't seen one of those results in a long time (I also set up simple size checking on there as well, if it's only 2k it's probably not the file I'm looking for.
"Friend of mine "carded" the president of the company at one point, and got commended."
good on them, that's what they SHOULD do... but I think you'll find even in so called "classified" areas that some people aren't as strict with that as they should be.
as a general rule people never like to question someone who looks like they're supposed to be there, (probably for fear of looking stupid (which is NOT a good reason)) wether they are or not. the only places I've ever seen this to work as it should are in places employing less than 50 people and where everyone knows everyone... but even then people tend to assume that the stranger is legitimatly there but to visit someone else.
unfortunatly although a good manager/president/whatever will commend you for taking security seriously, all too often you'll find a bad one who acts insulted "how DARE you question ME???"
"I can't wait until going through my office door right behind someone is an offense - since I didn't use my badge."
In most companies that is against the corporate security policy and (if yours is worded anything like ours) could lead to "termination" of the employee whom you followed...
that said, the easiest way to get in to 90% of offices is run up to a door with your hands full and yell to the person in front "hold the door!" in almost any large company that will work just fine.
(People act REALLY annoyed at you when you actually follow the rules and aske them for ID when they do that...)
probaly in a student's code... if I DIDN'T put those comments in while in college I lost marks... personnally I thought SOME stuff was self explanitory!
I had a programming instructor in college who taught programming in C on 2 different platforms... our class was working on winblows boxes while the other class worked on some UNIX variant... she gave the same assignment to each class, however due to the differences between the two environments the results came out slightly different (neither one was "wrong" per say... just different spacing on an output file) however the instructor refused to allow for these differences and was grading the assignment by simply comparing the output file of the program with one from her program writen in the other environment. this resulted in many comments in the code in our class allong the lines of "adjustment because our instructor can't tell windows from unix" or "adjustment to make my program wrong... but the same wrong as the instructor's program"
funnily enough nobody lost marks on any of those comments.
>> Yahoo or MSN do not receive notification when someone cancels their phone account.
yes and no... nobody tells yahhoo or MSN that the account is cancelled, but at the same time I know that most telcos (or at least the one I work for) have a policy that phone numbers must remain disconnected for a minimum of so many months before the next person gets that number (in our case I beleive it is 6 months)
so while they won't get a message asking to cancel it, they should get a bunch of bounce messages if they are paging every day as was indicated by the orriginal poster. and I would think it would be reasonable (note I didn't say expected... I know better) to remove an address that has bounced every day for 6 months or more.
I work as a field technician for a relatively large telco (though I don't know if it's safe to admit that here...) I find the company does an excelent job of blocking spam in our work emailboxes, however there is a BIG problem with internal junk mail, the worst offenders being internal corporate "newsletters" and such. what makes it a REALLY big problem is the combination of 2 things: 1) they like to make these newsletters "pretty" (HUGE HTML messages with lots of graphics just to tell you that the "real" newsletter is at link http://blah_blah_blah) 2) I am forced to retreive these emails in outlook on a 9600 buad wireless CDPD connection on my truck's notebook.
GRRRR I wish the people who created these things were forced to use the same type of net connection that those VIEWING them will be using!
this is quite interesting... I keep seeing this image in my head... the taliban call up the american government and ask them to send over john smith from montana who they suspect had something to do with a bombing of a major centre in afghanastan. The US government asks for proof and the taliban say no. would you expect the US to hand over this person? of course not... now substitute US for Taliban and vice-versa...
now I'm not saying that Bin Laden is innocent. and I'm not saying that the Taliban would necesarilly have beleived the US proof. however take a look for just a moment at how this makes the US look...
and before you start thinking "but the US is different" ask yourself what REALLY is different. the US government is just the government of one country. no more or less important then that of any other country. The US only enjoys it's current position in the world because it is currently "the" superpower in the world... just keep in mind that superpowers come and go... and someday when the states get to see the world from the other side of the fence things might not seem quite so "fair"...
just a thought...
Re:Getting cancelled from AOL
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's pretty sad when the easiest and often most feasable to cancel your account it so violate their AUP...
does sorta suck if you want to sign up with them again though...
As many others respondoing to this post have stated Redhat has the utility up2date, I beleive you are however talking about how XP can be set to do it completely invisibly as opposed to up2date which you actually run yourself, if you really want it to do it automatically simply set it up in your cron.daily and once a day it will check for and inmplement any updates. that way it will work "invisibly" in the background similar to XP's auto-update feature.
The way I see things up here in Canada we tend to follow the states blindly in this regard (we even "lead the way" by implementing tariffs on all blank media assuming all people guilty untill proven guilty (no, innocent doesn't factor in to it anymore)) so given your two options I think we will eventually get to number 1... the main problem is that we'll have to go through a long period of number 2 to get there... I don't think that people en-masse will let us be that oppressed (look at history, oppressed people tend to revolt) the problem is that the general public won't see themselves as oppressed for a long time to come. Things will have to get a lot worse before the general public gets upset enough to do something about it. And it certainly will be messy when they do...
> When they put a tax (as proposed in Canada) on CD-R's
unfortunatly it's no longer "proposed" we have been paying this levy up here since 99 or 2000 no matter what we use the blank media for a portion of it still gets paid to the "starving artists" (interestingly enough the person I met who was the most upset about the levy ran a small record label, he would have to pay this levy on every CD he produced, while at the same time his company was too small to see a single penny of it returned to him, so basically he got to pay the competition for every cd he produced)
we had a similar problem with junk faxes to our residential fax machine, large numbers of junk faxes for various products (2-3 per day) all from the same marketting company who claimed (several times) to have removed us from their lists and we kept getting them, eventually we talked to the phone company (AGT at the time, now Telus) who had their security company send this company a letter that basically said "stop doing this or you will never have phone service again" and we never again received a junk fax from them... or for that matter anyone else it seems...
I remember working as a sysadmin for a company where the CEO was... a little less then brilliant... after setting up his new computer for him I set his local login password to "password" and had it force him to change it on first login so that nobody else would know the password yet it would be simple enough that even he could remember it the first time, when he came in the following conversation ensued:
ceo: what's the password to my new computer? me: password ceo: I know that but what is it? me: password ceo: of course it is but what IS the password? me: the password is "password" ceo: would you quit that and just tell me what the password is!?! me: the password is "P - A - S - S - W - O - R - D" ceo: don't get smart with me young man! you don't want to make the person who signs your paycheques angry!!!!! (meanwhile in the other corner of the room the accountant and receptionist were just howling with laughter and the ceo couldn't understand why...)
I finally led him over to the machine and made him watch the keyboard as I typed in "p - a - s - s - w - o - r - d" he suddenly changed his tune and was extremely appologetic and suitably embarrased... I didn't have quite so many run-ins with him after that... and it provided a much needed comedic break for the rest of the office.
side note: I've since switched from that to using other simple words as initial passwords making sure to AVOID the word "password" (and after that initial password people were forced to use minimum 6 characters, not dictionary based)
So does anyone know of ways to physically secure PCMCIA devices?
My toshiba notebook had a good way of doing this, there was a switch bellow the slot that slid a piece of metal part way over the end of the PCMCIA cards (only works with the normal ones, not the ones that stick out of the computer like the wireless cards tend to) it also had a similar device for the power switch. normally you could just slide the switch out of the way and remove/insert cards at will, however if you had a laptop lock in use (anything that locks to the lock port on the laptop) those switches would be locked too. so basically once the laptop was locked to the desk it also locked the pcmcia cards and the power switch as well.
Slashdot Mirror
when I first started playing with computers I was always so carefull with them, always treating them like they were verry delicate things... you know, the way people tell you you're SUPPOSED to handle computers, but experience has made me beleive that maybe theya re a little more durable than you might think... a few fun examples:
A magnetic personality:
had a "friend" walk up to me while I was working on a machine and put a speaker magnet down on a stack of floppies containing the program I was in the middle of installing, I thought they were toast for sure, after all these are a MAGNETIC medium, and few magnets are more powerfull than speaker magnets, however for some reason they don't appear to have been affected at all.
The Interuptible Power Supply:
we had a UPS that died on us at work, company didn't want to hear "I think I can fix it" they just wanted to replace it and ordered me to toss it, so as I did with much of the "tossed" hardware I tossed it in to my bag to take home (that was a HEAVY backpack!!!) when I opened it up I noticed a LARGE dent in the metal top of the UPS, I also noticed that the control circuitry in the UPS was mounted on a circuit board under this top cover with the components on the under side, in other words the dented case was shorting out the board, I hammered the case out and used the UPS for another 4 years before it finally died, (and I couldn't revive it this time)
Hot swapping:
I'm not sure there is any part of a machine I haven't hot-swapped out of either laziness or sheer curiosity (I wonder if I can get away with "this")
The sick computer:
I came home one day after being gone camping for a weekend (yes some of us techie types do get outside on occasion) and when I walked in to the kitchen I noticed the keyboard in the dish-drainer, in pieces... I wasn't sure if I wanted to know... but I asked anyway... apparently my brother had thrown up on it, my mother had taken it appart and washed it out and it was drying in the dish drainer, once it dried out we put it back together, hooked it up and no problems, worked for another 3 years untill we sold the computer, and probably many more after that.
Flying Floppies:
I had a floppy I used to carry with me pretty much everywhere with "all" my computer utilities on it for rescuing damaged systems (ok, it was a while ago, when 1.44Mb was still a reasonable amount of data), had someone throw me the disk at one point, from accross the room (a computer lab with 40 machines in it, so not a small room) it hit a birkc wall and the door flew off the floppy, the disk flew open, and the media was lying on the, verry dirty, floor, I picked it up, blew the dirt off, put the disk back together, put some tape around the disk to hold it together, and continued using the disk (minus the door) for another couple years, and a couple months ago I found the disk in a pile of old hardware and it still works,
CD drives:
this is not quite on topic, but it is interesting none the less. I worked for a while doing R&D work on high speed CD-ROM drives (we were playing with drives with the amazingly high speeds of 24-40x (yeah... I know... this was a few years ago, when you couldn't yet get those drieves on teh shelves here) we would test these drives with the cases removed, so basically you had the chasis, the read head and circuitry, and the motor, and a disc spinning at amazing speeds while you do tests on data-transfer rates on un-ballanced discs (weights glued to the edge of the disc to make it "wobble" as it spins) needless to say these things would on occasion (about 2-3 times a day) come off the test rig... this was an amazing thing to watch the first time it happened (after that we were a little more used to it and had less stuff in the way)... the disc started hovering up off the spindle, then slid sideways and landed on the table, it proceeded to knock everything lighter than our osciliscope off the table and onto the floor (note-pads, bottles of glue, pens, screwdrivers, etc), then it floated down to the floor, skitted around the floor a bit, out the door and most of the way down the hall before stopping. the part that looked so weird was that spinning at those speeds it doesn't LOOK to be moving that much, and the horrizontal or vertical movement was actually pretty slow, (until it hit the floor!) but the rotational speed gave it great stability, and a lot of strength!
I used to register things with the email address not@chance but too many scripts started checking for that "." so I made it not@bloody.likely unfortunatly, it seems most scripts now check the tld to make sure it is valid (and a surprising number check the domain itself as well) so basically you have to decide who you want them to spam... because spamming an invalid domain isn't always an option anymore...
this is what I percieve to be the big problem... I can see a law requiring such things to be labelled, and then the companies complying by slapping stickers on them that say "This disc features new DRM technology for your protection.", then your average consumer who has no idea what "DRM" stands for, and even less of a clue that "Digital Rights Managment" is actually translated to "crippled" will simply read it and think WOW! this one has an extra FEATURE called DRM.... I don't know what it is... but if it's for my protection than it must be a GOOD thing!
it's one thing to require labeling, it's another thing to convince the people who apply the labeling to want to make their product look bad... whatever else we might think about the RIAA/MPAA/ETC, if there is one thing they are good at it is MARKETTING... and this is one thing I REALLY don't want to see them put their "spin" on.
purely anecdotal... but when I was buying speakers I was shown a pair that were supposed to be "as good" as the really expensive ones I was looking at... and they sounded great... but something was missing... the difference that I beleive I was sensing was the lack of any frequency response outside of the audible... you could "hear" the music just fine... but you couldn't "feel" it. the stuff outside of the audible spectrum may not be heard... but it defintely adds "depth" to the sound.
The sub-audible portion (the base) is definitely felt, and adds a lot of depth to the music. I don't know enough what the high end frequencies add... (but I would suspect that they are just as important to the "full experience")
I can't say how this works for your telco, however in the telco I work for (a reasonably large canadian telco) it is not actually the telco's choice, but is actually the way the CRTC (canadian equivlant to the FCC) regulates it. you see when you get your local phone service from a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) your phone line is physically disconnected from our equipment and hooked up the the CLEC's equipment within the phone exchange, on top of that (as per CRTC regulation) we are not allowed to touch that phone line without permission from the CLEC (we can't disconnect it, we can't move it, we can't put other equipment in line with it (ie. ADSL) the phone line is leased to the CLEC and we can't touch it. so now if you want ADSL the only company that can LEGALLY give you that service is your local provider (or someone who is re-selling that service, (in the case you mentioned Yahoo! is just re-selling SBC DSL service)) in our case, as far as I know, none of our CLECs currently offer ADSL, however I know one of them has been thinking about it, and we may see it soon.
This does pose other problems as well, for example if you order service from a CLEC, and then move out of your house we can't legally provide the next occupant of the house service untill the CLEC decides to release the line (which they are often pretty slow at doing) (ok, legally we can provide service, however we would have to run a brand new line to the house. even though there is a line that we maintain that isn't in use... or in english it's a big mess)
mostly back up by the end of the day... but the relatively large canadian telco I work for was really in trouble today...
work today was quite the adventure...
all internal systems were taken offline due to the MSSQL worm... our dispatch software was completely down untull almost noon... our records and switch programming systems were still down at the end of the day, even access cards to get in to the buildings weren't working this-morning!
"The Super Bowl will be on."
don't underestimate that one! I worked in technical support for an ISP for a while.. when the superbowl hit we did not get a single call in to the cue for over an hour, (I think between all the techs on shift we totalled less then 3 calls durring the game) we could tell when the game was over because the phone lines lit up, one of the techs answered the phone with "thankyou for calling, can I get your userid and the final score to the game please?"... and the client wondered how we knew that he was watching the game...
I volunteer with a SAR group (Search And Rescue) and some people ARE pretty close to that stupid... (side note, on most topo maps they use 100' spacing in the contour lines... so if placed right you can have a 99' cliff in front of you that's not on the map.)
We all carry GPSs... we all know not to rely on them.
as we were told in our navigation course, if you're standing on a road it doesn't matter what the map and compass says, or what the GPS says. you are ON the road. you are where you are. period.
GPS is a valuable tool... but not a replacment for common sense (and if you don't have the common sense in the first place.. PLEASE stay home!)
(of course we can also get in to the fact that GPS uses batteries which can die, doesn't like falling in the creek, doesn't like dense tree cover, can be off by using the wrong datum, etc etc. and is therefore not good to be your primary navigational instrument.)
all that said, when search base calls us and asks for our location we generally look at the gps and spit out the 6 digit UTM it gives us. (though we do check on the map to make sure it makes sense, and search base WILL call us back and ask if we're sure if it doesn't)
"Never post that address on the internet, and never give it to a company when you register for something and you'll find that you don't have a problem."
too bad it doesn't work that way... that sure HELPS... but it doesn't solve the problem,
I run my own mail server and looking through the logs I get a LOT of spam to addresses that do not, and never have, existed. it's not like I, or anybody else who uses my mail server (I know all those that do) have ever posted these addresses anywhere. they aren't even close to the real addresses used. spamers guess at addresses, and eventually they'll get it... unless your email address is SDADH2146SADG32JHL787HKJKHKJ4390@yourdomain.com (which I don't know about you... but I find that a bit challenging for my friends to remember...)
" I shouldn't have to call a repairman to come reboot something. So nothing should ever go wrong, but if it does it should be easy for the user to make it work correctly again. Just turning the car off and back on should fix the problem"
While I can't vouch for this particular system, the "turning it off and back on again" solution does solve many problems in other motor vehicles (I know our city busses constantly have issues that require a reboot, usually the doors won't open, or won't close) the driver shuts off the bus, waits 15 seconds, then turns everything back on again and it usually all works) the problem is that to "reboot" the car I need to find somewhere to pull over, stop, shut off the car, then turn it back on again, try doing that on the freeway at rush hour from the fast lane because some accessory won't work... now if it's something like the stereo not turning on, you can do that, or the doors not locking... but it could easilly be something more "urgent" (imagine pouring rain, in the dark, in heavy traffic and the headlights turn off and the wipers don't work... now each of these are only "accessories" but if you're in the fast lane this could be a major problem to deal with, even if all it requires is a reboot.)
for now I think I'll stick to my 20 year old car (ok... I'll stick to it because I can't afford newer... but I can at least use this as an excuse!)
it's despicable that most people accept that computers just normally need to be rebooted frequently... lets hope they never accept the same with cars...
"What I want to know, though, is why I keep getting back 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd no matter what I search for?"
for me it's a different song... but always the same one... I now set up filters in all my gtk-gnutella searches along the lines of:
if name is not "what I searched for" discard
haven't seen one of those results in a long time (I also set up simple size checking on there as well, if it's only 2k it's probably not the file I'm looking for.
"Friend of mine "carded" the president of the company at one point, and got commended."
good on them, that's what they SHOULD do... but I think you'll find even in so called "classified" areas that some people aren't as strict with that as they should be.
as a general rule people never like to question someone who looks like they're supposed to be there, (probably for fear of looking stupid (which is NOT a good reason)) wether they are or not. the only places I've ever seen this to work as it should are in places employing less than 50 people and where everyone knows everyone... but even then people tend to assume that the stranger is legitimatly there but to visit someone else.
unfortunatly although a good manager/president/whatever will commend you for taking security seriously, all too often you'll find a bad one who acts insulted "how DARE you question ME???"
"I can't wait until going through my office door right behind someone is an offense - since I didn't use my badge."
In most companies that is against the corporate security policy and (if yours is worded anything like ours) could lead to "termination" of the employee whom you followed...
that said, the easiest way to get in to 90% of offices is run up to a door with your hands full and yell to the person in front "hold the door!" in almost any large company that will work just fine.
(People act REALLY annoyed at you when you actually follow the rules and aske them for ID when they do that...)
probaly in a student's code... if I DIDN'T put those comments in while in college I lost marks... personnally I thought SOME stuff was self explanitory!
I had a programming instructor in college who taught programming in C on 2 different platforms... our class was working on winblows boxes while the other class worked on some UNIX variant... she gave the same assignment to each class, however due to the differences between the two environments the results came out slightly different (neither one was "wrong" per say... just different spacing on an output file) however the instructor refused to allow for these differences and was grading the assignment by simply comparing the output file of the program with one from her program writen in the other environment. this resulted in many comments in the code in our class allong the lines of "adjustment because our instructor can't tell windows from unix"
or "adjustment to make my program wrong... but the same wrong as the instructor's program"
funnily enough nobody lost marks on any of those comments.
>> Yahoo or MSN do not receive notification when someone cancels their phone account.
yes and no... nobody tells yahhoo or MSN that the account is cancelled, but at the same time I know that most telcos (or at least the one I work for) have a policy that phone numbers must remain disconnected for a minimum of so many months before the next person gets that number (in our case I beleive it is 6 months)
so while they won't get a message asking to cancel it, they should get a bunch of bounce messages if they are paging every day as was indicated by the orriginal poster. and I would think it would be reasonable (note I didn't say expected... I know better) to remove an address that has bounced every day for 6 months or more.
I work as a field technician for a relatively large telco (though I don't know if it's safe to admit that here...) I find the company does an excelent job of blocking spam in our work emailboxes, however there is a BIG problem with internal junk mail, the worst offenders being internal corporate "newsletters" and such. what makes it a REALLY big problem is the combination of 2 things:
1) they like to make these newsletters "pretty" (HUGE HTML messages with lots of graphics just to tell you that the "real" newsletter is at link http://blah_blah_blah)
2) I am forced to retreive these emails in outlook on a 9600 buad wireless CDPD connection on my truck's notebook.
GRRRR I wish the people who created these things were forced to use the same type of net connection that those VIEWING them will be using!
this is quite interesting... I keep seeing this image in my head... the taliban call up the american government and ask them to send over john smith from montana who they suspect had something to do with a bombing of a major centre in afghanastan. The US government asks for proof and the taliban say no. would you expect the US to hand over this person? of course not... now substitute US for Taliban and vice-versa...
now I'm not saying that Bin Laden is innocent. and I'm not saying that the Taliban would necesarilly have beleived the US proof. however take a look for just a moment at how this makes the US look...
and before you start thinking "but the US is different" ask yourself what REALLY is different. the US government is just the government of one country. no more or less important then that of any other country. The US only enjoys it's current position in the world because it is currently "the" superpower in the world... just keep in mind that superpowers come and go... and someday when the states get to see the world from the other side of the fence things might not seem quite so "fair"...
just a thought...
It's pretty sad when the easiest and often most feasable to cancel your account it so violate their AUP...
does sorta suck if you want to sign up with them again though...
As many others respondoing to this post have stated Redhat has the utility up2date, I beleive you are however talking about how XP can be set to do it completely invisibly as opposed to up2date which you actually run yourself, if you really want it to do it automatically simply set it up in your cron.daily and once a day it will check for and inmplement any updates. that way it will work "invisibly" in the background similar to XP's auto-update feature.
The way I see things up here in Canada we tend to follow the states blindly in this regard (we even "lead the way" by implementing tariffs on all blank media assuming all people guilty untill proven guilty (no, innocent doesn't factor in to it anymore))
so given your two options I think we will eventually get to number 1... the main problem is that we'll have to go through a long period of number 2 to get there...
I don't think that people en-masse will let us be that oppressed (look at history, oppressed people tend to revolt) the problem is that the general public won't see themselves as oppressed for a long time to come. Things will have to get a lot worse before the general public gets upset enough to do something about it. And it certainly will be messy when they do...
> When they put a tax (as proposed in Canada) on CD-R's
unfortunatly it's no longer "proposed" we have been paying this levy up here since 99 or 2000 no matter what we use the blank media for a portion of it still gets paid to the "starving artists" (interestingly enough the person I met who was the most upset about the levy ran a small record label, he would have to pay this levy on every CD he produced, while at the same time his company was too small to see a single penny of it returned to him, so basically he got to pay the competition for every cd he produced)
we had a similar problem with junk faxes to our residential fax machine, large numbers of junk faxes for various products (2-3 per day) all from the same marketting company who claimed (several times) to have removed us from their lists and we kept getting them, eventually we talked to the phone company (AGT at the time, now Telus) who had their security company send this company a letter that basically said "stop doing this or you will never have phone service again" and we never again received a junk fax from them... or for that matter anyone else it seems...
I remember working as a sysadmin for a company where the CEO was... a little less then brilliant... after setting up his new computer for him I set his local login password to "password" and had it force him to change it on first login so that nobody else would know the password yet it would be simple enough that even he could remember it the first time, when he came in the following conversation ensued:
ceo: what's the password to my new computer?
me: password
ceo: I know that but what is it?
me: password
ceo: of course it is but what IS the password?
me: the password is "password"
ceo: would you quit that and just tell me what the password is!?!
me: the password is "P - A - S - S - W - O - R - D"
ceo: don't get smart with me young man! you don't want to make the person who signs your paycheques angry!!!!!
(meanwhile in the other corner of the room the accountant and receptionist were just howling with laughter and the ceo couldn't understand why...)
I finally led him over to the machine and made him watch the keyboard as I typed in "p - a - s - s - w - o - r - d" he suddenly changed his tune and was extremely appologetic and suitably embarrased... I didn't have quite so many run-ins with him after that... and it provided a much needed comedic break for the rest of the office.
side note: I've since switched from that to using other simple words as initial passwords making sure to AVOID the word "password" (and after that initial password people were forced to use minimum 6 characters, not dictionary based)
So does anyone know of ways to physically secure PCMCIA devices?
My toshiba notebook had a good way of doing this, there was a switch bellow the slot that slid a piece of metal part way over the end of the PCMCIA cards (only works with the normal ones, not the ones that stick out of the computer like the wireless cards tend to) it also had a similar device for the power switch. normally you could just slide the switch out of the way and remove/insert cards at will, however if you had a laptop lock in use (anything that locks to the lock port on the laptop) those switches would be locked too. so basically once the laptop was locked to the desk it also locked the pcmcia cards and the power switch as well.