Mind you, I can get the 'employee' discount at Best Buy (significant other's sister works at a warehouse for BBuy), but, it's not worth the hassle.
I'm walking into the store, coming straight from working 14 hours. I'm your typical 'non-desk-job-junkie,' and I'm not always the cleanest cut when I'm finished working in the morning.
I go, and I start looking for a replacement cradle for my Palm.
No sooner than I pull out my palm pilot, I'm greeted by some of their 'bouncers,' telling me that they had one of their display palms stolen, and that I had some gall to come back in and steal their accessories for it, too.
At this point in time, I was quite pissed. I turned around, and told the guy, to either cuff me and get someone out there to arrest me and charge me with a crime, or to get the F out of my face. The guy grabbed my hand, and said, "OK, let's do this the hard way."
To make a long story short, when the deputy arrived, he looked at me, said, "Hi Ian," I explained to him what this guy was trying to do, and he let me go, much to the pissed off look on the LP's face. The Deputy then explained that not only did he know me personally from having me fix his wife's computer, he knew me professionally from me fixing the Sheriff's systems in the county (rural Ohio, by the way).
Circuit City's no much better...ten people at the store not knowing what, or where, a KVM would be located at.
Needless to say, I shop at local computer stores now, gladly pay the extra money for the extra service, and help the local economy.
Try Kool-Aid. The ones in little packages. Those totally fuxor up a SCO in working mode. It can't tell whether or not the item was bought, or placed in the bagging area, or scanned...at all.
In a perfect world, the store would have strong Loss Prevention presence to prevent this thing from happening. In the real world, if you want to do it, don't get caught.
From what the submitter had mentioned, he thought it would be possible to reprogram RFID tags to use to cheat a SCO...I'm not really sure about how the RFID stuff works, so I can't really say much about that, however, I do know a bit about the SCO's.
Some SCO's (namly those by ACM/IBM) have a secondary server that handle the interactions with the cash register controllers (sometimes called the BOSS server). They have a 'security profile' that lets a SCO learn pieces of information about an item (dimensions, weight, that kinda thing) and if the item doesn't match a security profile, it'll kick it back, until a cashier scans their card to get it to learn the item.
Other SCO's use a weight-based system. I'm not totally sure if the scales weigh all items and go from item to item specifically, or from item to item just to see if the item's been placed in the 'bagging' area (if not a pass around item).
A properly set-up SCO won't allow things like this anyway. Really, nothing more than barcode switching.
when the slasdotters with girlfriends get 'grounded' because we bought a new computer and didn't tell them until they found the credit card statement.
My favorite quote:
[so]: UMMMMMM [so]: is this game really worth all of that? [me]: you don't understand. [so]: it was ok when I thought we were only buying a $50 game, but now that we have to buy a $1300 computer or spend that much in upgrading one we already have, that is going to be one expensive computer game, not to mention finding space for a new computer, electric, and we've ran out of ports on our switch.
Little does she know that the new computer's almost bought...I've just got to go pick it up. Now to just get some more OT this month to pay for it....
As much as I can relate to that, Places like Micro Center and the Local Circuit City *are* selling computers with Lindows on them.
Mind you, when you go in to buy Lindows, they'll sit you down and show you exactly what you're getting, but, if all you ever do is surf the net, read your email, and chat online...isn't that the best?
As much as I might not like Lindows for personal reasons, I've got to give Michael some credit for trying to market it to the masses--and he's doing a good job at trying to get it to the major retailers.
Sometimes different is better.
Trust, and the 'trustworthy computing'
on
An Online ID Registry
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I can only see where this is going.
First of all, if you're really worried about people abusing a trial service, maybe you could track things via IP, or, even subnet masks. If your application is specific enough (or just geared to one industry in general), try doing the "Thanks for requesting information, we're going to *MAIL* you your login information the next business day."
Second...how do I as J6P know that you're going to handle my data correctly? No matter how many times you tell me on your website that you're handling my data in a secure fashion, I can't actually see it. Am I suppossed to just trust that you'll keep my information away from everyone? Including yourself, your marketing droids, and maybe the FBI should they come knocking on your door?
If you or company are worried about people abusing a trial service...well, get over it. It's bound to happen, no matter how you try to stop it. Just use common sense (don't allow signups from Open Proxies, maybe ask for a credit card number if you're looking for a paid service in the future), and realize that you're going to have online 'shrink.' Every company has shrinkage...why should an online company be any different?
I can only see where this is going in the "trustworthy computing" area. In order to get a computer, you're going to have to show your computer maker an ID, they'll seal your computer so you can't install devices (they'll send a technician out to do it), and tell you what you can and can't do with your data, your time, and ultimately, your hardware.
In my house, we've got four desktop computers that are used to get online and do various things. The first one is an Windows XP box, that is used by my spouse (and by me whenever I've got to turn in a timesheet for work).
I've been using linux since 1998, during the days of Redhat 5. I've switched distro's a lot since then..Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, and now Fedora. The other three desktops are running a locked down version of Windows 2000 (for the kids should they need to get online for what-have-you), and SuSE 9.1 and Fedora Core 2.
I can see and like the changes that linux has progressed throught the years. I can remember using things like gaim and mozilla and having xchat crash--or the frustration getting a movie player to work right on my system.
Today, I see things like the kids showing an interest in linux and the GUI's...them telling me that it's different, and they like the way that it works. I even see my significant other take an itnerest in Linux, and she's a non-geek for the most part (Microbiologist).
As Time progesses, so does Linux. I can plug my Digital Camera in to the USB drive, and my system recognises it. Configuration of my network cards was a snap...no hassling around with modprobe. People actually buying Lindows and stuff at Micro Center because it looks easy to use, and it *is*.
I've burned Knoppix cd's for the group of guys that I work with (mainly a non-technical cable puller bunch), and I see some of them using it instead of the XP that our company provides us.
Linux for the desktop is here--the only people that can't support it are people that need bleeding-edge hardware support, or the people that need specalized applications. For J6P, Linux just works.
WiGLE.net is a submission-based catalog of wireless networks. Submissions aren not paired with actualy people; rather name/password identities which people use to associate their data. It's basically a "gee isn't this neat" engine for learning about the spread of wireless computer usage.
WiGLE concerns itself entirely with 802.11b networks right now, since it's REALLY hard to deal with cellular networks, 802.11a is so hard to catch, and everything else is so small-share. 802.11b appears to be experiencing an explosive growth, and it's neat to see it cover cities.
the first step in using WiGLE is to create a username for yourself. You don't have to submit anything other than a made-up name and password, validation is immediate, and we will not contact you (unless you wanna chat on our message boards). This will give you access to our query engine and software downloads.
once you've done this, you're free to send us wireless network traces (in any of our listed formats, usually pairings of wireless sample, names and network hardware addresses (for uniqueness), data/SNR triples and GPS coordinates) or enter networks manually. Note, your username gets "credit" for these, but of course some people don't want their networks listed (various reasons), so we delist these immediately upon request. If you're visiting us to ask for removal, just make an ID and ask about your network through the query page. Once you make a user id, you can look at the submissions statistics page to see how users stack up.
To view networks, you can 1.) ask the website, 2.) download one of our clients. The clients are particularly fun to look at, but require either a java-1.3-and-up machine (windows, sunOS, MacOS-X, linux, mostly) or a windows box, for the new windows-native prototype. This will superimpose "points" from a live query onto a map of an area. Maps can be downloaded in "packs" from our mapping engine and are installed simply by unzipping them into your client installation directory. Mappacks are created and served by-state-by-county, or in the case of large cities, by-state-by-city. If we haven't generated a map for your area of interest yet, ask for it, and come back after the rendering engine's had a minute or 5 to think about it.
Overall, WiGLE aims to show people about wireless in a more-technical capacity then your average static map or newspaper article.
If your network is in WiGLE and you don't like it, we'll take it out immediately, but you should look into making your network harder to detect AND more secure; remember that you're the one bombarding passers-by with your signal. We aren't affiliated directly with any particular community or interest (other than our own), but we appluad the efforts of the people who wrote the stumbling software that feeds our project, the people looking to use wireless in innovatove ways, and especially the community of people who just dig wireless network access and dig sharing it. (freenets)
I use and upload information into WiGLE (wigle.net), and having information like this would do wonders in having accuracy in mapping and plotting. There ahve been times where I've plotted information, but the information from Tiger isn't up to date, so my plots don't look like they're on roads.
Now, if we could only work on GPS accuracy. Sure, 21 feet is 21 feet, but, still...I'd love to be able to wardrive and know exactly where something is at. (Yes, for the subtle, I know that 21 feet doesn't make much of a difference with a Wi-Fi point, but, being able to accurately identify where a point is would be nice. Instead of knowing where on Randall Road something is, it'd be the bomb if we could pick up something like 4033 Randall Road from the GPS Coordinates.)
Maybe I'm just dreaming, or had one too many to drink on a Saturday night.
Your point about not being hassled by the NYC police--I worked on Long Island and Staten Island a few weeks ago. I drive a company van, with Ohio plates.
Unfortunately, the way that New York defines "trucks" and Ohio defines "trucks" are very different. This caused me a lot of harassment by the local law enforcement bodies. Also, every time I went over a toll bridge, I was stopped, and my vehicle was inspected. Also, because I'm not from New York, I didn't have to have holes cut into the back of my van (not sure the reason for that anyway...), but, that seemed to make my traveling more fun.
All in all, the five days that I spent working on Long Island, I was stopped 12 times.
I'm a clean cut twentysomething, driving your usual cable guy van, and not bothering anyone.
Who knows. Maybe it was the "Perkins Observatory - The Place for Space" and the "Will work for Bandwidth" Licence plate frames that made them suspicious. That or a van from Ohio with an E-ZPass Transponder on it.
I was seriously considering heading to HOPE this weekend, however, work has me stuck in Peoria, IL.
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My server is getting quite overloaded at the moment due to lots of publicity (more than quadruple my usual traffic), resulting in access problems and errors for a lot of people. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, and I'm working on improvements - if you're having trouble checking out the site, please visit again soon when everything should be back to full working order. Thanks...
Ohio's already getting to the point where free thinking is about to become a criminal offense. It really saddens me to say that, however, some of the changes that have happened in the past few years really make me wonder what the General Legislature is trying to do here. The Law Enforcement communities run this state. They've done their hardest to keep as much information on their citizens as they can, and limiting the amount of information that you can receive to a bare minimum.
For example, try getting a copy of your driver's abstract record. It takes 2 weeks and $5, however, if you're a corporation, you can get it online, in thirty seconds, without written permission or consent. Also, try to apply for a professional license of any kind. Criminal Background Checks (What, you mean I've got to be fingerprinted to become a PE?), and the privatization of the state's prisons and the slashing of the budget for the prisons they already have (I know that they've closed at least 2 prisons, making the other 30 or so overcrowded--making those prisons a risk to the employees that work there), and giving financial incentives to the counties for sending people to prison (each county receives an amount for holding and transporting the prisoner to the DRC's Correctional Reception Center--sometimes to the tune of $20K/inmate). Add to the fact that the State Highway Patrol frequently stops people for doing 1 or 2 miles over, or when they "think" there are no seatbelts on, and then detain them until a drug dog comes (This happened to me--pulled over on suspicion of having no seat belt, Christmas Day of 2001. My Brother, 19, didn't have his driver's license on him, and we had ample holiday stuff in the back, so, he decided he wanted to search our car, pat us down, and make our life miserable for a little over 3 hours--either waiting for the drug dog, or waiting for them to search the car, or waiting for My Brother's Driver's Licence photo to come back from LEADS. Finally, they let us go...no ticket, no charges, nothing.)...it's really becoming to the point where you should just throw some razor wire up around the state.
Ohio has really gotten to the point where it is a sad state of affairs. Once my company lets me relocate, I'm so out of this state.
I used webmin/usermin for a while, however, there was a point in time where I was innodated with security-type problems with it.
I still provide usermin/webmin to the people who need to tweak server-specific settings on my server, however, I require that they use something like STunnel to get to the server. Less chance of something attacking webmin from the wild, and a little more accountabliity.
One thing that I didn't like about webmin is that it didn't get into the specifics when you installed new software. There were times where I thought webmin was akin to crack...just giving you enough to keep on coming back to it to make small adjustments or when you needed more. I quit cold turkey, however, we still have issues when I modify files by hand, and webmin tries to overwrite them the next time a user goes to modify their settings via tha control panel.
WHen I'm servicing the clients whom I work for. Darl McNut is somewhat correct when he accounts that 7 of 10 of the top retailers use SCO's unix. I know with some certanity that First and the third use SCO Unix.
I'm really akin to taking the "parenting" stance on this.
Darl McNut is only going for two things:
a) they want to inflate his stock price so he can get his bonus, and, b) to keep a steady stream of FUD coming to keep said stock price up.
I've drawn the conculsion that the community should take the "Sane Parent" stance with Darl and SCO. If we're out shopping, and little Darly Jr. starts acting up, you either smack his ass and tell him to settle down, ignore him, or give him attention. He wants you to notice him, he wants everyone to pay attention to him. If we ignore him, he'll realize that his FUD's getting nowhere.
Of course, it's even questionable that the SCOG *owns* unix. According to the Open Group, They own Unix. (URL: http://www.opengroup.org/press/22may03.htm) So, I'm not sure which 'crack pipe' Darl's smoking.
I should have brought this up on the DMCA story, but, if my memory serves me correct, you've got to provide *exact* notification of what files are infringing when you serve someone a DMCA notice. If there's nothing exact on the DMCA notice, it's a worthless piece of paper (just like the DMCA, ha!). If I should happen to get a DMCA notice, I'll be the first one to let them know that under the DMCA, they've got to show specifics as to what gets taken down, and until they do so, to polietly go shove off.
I listened to their last conference call, and I'm just amazed at Darl's iron gonads. Does he really think he's going to win, or does he just want us to fold in and call it quits? Darl and SCO are truly becoming the "Boy who Cried Wolf" of the software industry.
The power supply goes out monthly on my gateway that is $WORK supplied.
Now, that the warranty's ran out on them...they're paying $300/incident for laptop repair.
Gateway won't do a damn thing about it.
Iroincally enough, it's happened with my home laptop (Gateway, as well), but, instead of paying for it once it went out of warranty (mind you, it had been in-service twice for the exact same thing), I just grabbed my info off of my hard drive, and I'm buying an alienware PC next year.
Screw companies who have forgotten that churn affects their bottom line.
Now, I don't want to speculate into the cause of the SCO outage, however, my guess is that SCO's taking the time to weed out some of the information that they've distributed.
They've realized that they're totally fuxored, and they're abandoning ship, right?
It's called "Profit by Legislation," and it pisses me off. Anyone's eligible for being entered into that category, however, it's really hard to determine the people who would fit. For starters, the DMCA, CAN-SPAM, that kinda thing.
Between that and the total erosion of my civil liberties, I'm thinking that maybe the Netherlands are a better place to live;)
I was under the impression that all of the VoIP traffic was going to be transit'ed over either the Time Warner Telecom Network or the Aol Data Transit Network.
Now, I'm not sure who's going to do the final VoIP-> POTS integration, or who's handling that...but it was my understanding that Time Warner was going to piggyback this on their DOCSIS network -- one of the reasons they they bumped up RoadRunner to 3 Megs Up/Down bandwidth.
From a Technician's stand point, I really hope that before Time Warner goes to VoIP they do the "One Drop for Life" program that Charter uses. When I was a tech down at Charter, I rarely had to replace a drop, however, I've replaced more drops up here than I'd like to mention. If they forced stricter Quality Assurance testing on the contractors as well as the installers, and paid their in-house technicians a bit more, we wouldn't have the "when it rains my cable dies out" problems (and those are typically bad grounding block issues or bad drop issues).
Slashdot Mirror
Richard (Billy) Cunningham is the name of a Talk Radion DJ during the afternoon in Cincinnati (700 WLW).
Really, that's about it.
Mind you, I can get the 'employee' discount at Best Buy (significant other's sister works at a warehouse for BBuy), but, it's not worth the hassle.
I'm walking into the store, coming straight from working 14 hours. I'm your typical 'non-desk-job-junkie,' and I'm not always the cleanest cut when I'm finished working in the morning.
I go, and I start looking for a replacement cradle for my Palm.
No sooner than I pull out my palm pilot, I'm greeted by some of their 'bouncers,' telling me that they had one of their display palms stolen, and that I had some gall to come back in and steal their accessories for it, too.
At this point in time, I was quite pissed. I turned around, and told the guy, to either cuff me and get someone out there to arrest me and charge me with a crime, or to get the F out of my face. The guy grabbed my hand, and said, "OK, let's do this the hard way."
To make a long story short, when the deputy arrived, he looked at me, said, "Hi Ian," I explained to him what this guy was trying to do, and he let me go, much to the pissed off look on the LP's face. The Deputy then explained that not only did he know me personally from having me fix his wife's computer, he knew me professionally from me fixing the Sheriff's systems in the county (rural Ohio, by the way).
Circuit City's no much better...ten people at the store not knowing what, or where, a KVM would be located at.
Needless to say, I shop at local computer stores now, gladly pay the extra money for the extra service, and help the local economy.
Ian
Also, little known fact:
If you're driving a vehicle over 6,000 pounds, you're required to stop at weigh stations and 'weigh in.'
Any commercial vehicle, Truck, or hazmat load.
I found this out the hard way...my work van and I were pulled over in Conneticut for not 'weighing in.' A $500 fine later, I'm still banging my head.
Don't even get me started about NYC with their "No Commercial Vehicles" on parkways rule.
Funny the AC brings this up.
Try Kool-Aid. The ones in little packages. Those totally fuxor up a SCO in working mode. It can't tell whether or not the item was bought, or placed in the bagging area, or scanned...at all.
In a perfect world, the store would have strong Loss Prevention presence to prevent this thing from happening. In the real world, if you want to do it, don't get caught.
From what the submitter had mentioned, he thought it would be possible to reprogram RFID tags to use to cheat a SCO...I'm not really sure about how the RFID stuff works, so I can't really say much about that, however, I do know a bit about the SCO's.
Some SCO's (namly those by ACM/IBM) have a secondary server that handle the interactions with the cash register controllers (sometimes called the BOSS server). They have a 'security profile' that lets a SCO learn pieces of information about an item (dimensions, weight, that kinda thing) and if the item doesn't match a security profile, it'll kick it back, until a cashier scans their card to get it to learn the item.
Other SCO's use a weight-based system. I'm not totally sure if the scales weigh all items and go from item to item specifically, or from item to item just to see if the item's been placed in the 'bagging' area (if not a pass around item).
A properly set-up SCO won't allow things like this anyway. Really, nothing more than barcode switching.
I like it.
/.'ing says something else.
Look at the forum:
Welcome Slashdotters. I am a slashdot reader too.
To know your servers are pending a
I usually read slashdot while on the road. I've got my cell hooked up to my laptop, and dial in on the 1xRTT network.
:)
Frills? None, but streaming digitally imported on my laptop sure beats listening to the CB in the van
Ian
when the slasdotters with girlfriends get 'grounded' because we bought a new computer and didn't tell them until they found the credit card statement.
My favorite quote:
[so]: UMMMMMM
[so]: is this game really worth all of that?
[me]: you don't understand.
[so]: it was ok when I thought we were only buying a $50 game, but now that we have to buy a $1300 computer or spend that much in upgrading one we already have, that is going to be one expensive computer game, not to mention finding space for a new computer, electric, and we've ran out of ports on our switch.
Little does she know that the new computer's almost bought...I've just got to go pick it up. Now to just get some more OT this month to pay for it....
As much as I can relate to that, Places like Micro Center and the Local Circuit City *are* selling computers with Lindows on them.
Mind you, when you go in to buy Lindows, they'll sit you down and show you exactly what you're getting, but, if all you ever do is surf the net, read your email, and chat online...isn't that the best?
As much as I might not like Lindows for personal reasons, I've got to give Michael some credit for trying to market it to the masses--and he's doing a good job at trying to get it to the major retailers.
Sometimes different is better.
I can only see where this is going.
First of all, if you're really worried about people abusing a trial service, maybe you could track things via IP, or, even subnet masks. If your application is specific enough (or just geared to one industry in general), try doing the "Thanks for requesting information, we're going to *MAIL* you your login information the next business day."
Second...how do I as J6P know that you're going to handle my data correctly? No matter how many times you tell me on your website that you're handling my data in a secure fashion, I can't actually see it. Am I suppossed to just trust that you'll keep my information away from everyone? Including yourself, your marketing droids, and maybe the FBI should they come knocking on your door?
If you or company are worried about people abusing a trial service...well, get over it. It's bound to happen, no matter how you try to stop it. Just use common sense (don't allow signups from Open Proxies, maybe ask for a credit card number if you're looking for a paid service in the future), and realize that you're going to have online 'shrink.' Every company has shrinkage...why should an online company be any different?
I can only see where this is going in the "trustworthy computing" area. In order to get a computer, you're going to have to show your computer maker an ID, they'll seal your computer so you can't install devices (they'll send a technician out to do it), and tell you what you can and can't do with your data, your time, and ultimately, your hardware.
Ian
In my house, we've got four desktop computers that are used to get online and do various things. The first one is an Windows XP box, that is used by my spouse (and by me whenever I've got to turn in a timesheet for work).
I've been using linux since 1998, during the days of Redhat 5. I've switched distro's a lot since then..Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, and now Fedora. The other three desktops are running a locked down version of Windows 2000 (for the kids should they need to get online for what-have-you), and SuSE 9.1 and Fedora Core 2.
I can see and like the changes that linux has progressed throught the years. I can remember using things like gaim and mozilla and having xchat crash--or the frustration getting a movie player to work right on my system.
Today, I see things like the kids showing an interest in linux and the GUI's...them telling me that it's different, and they like the way that it works. I even see my significant other take an itnerest in Linux, and she's a non-geek for the most part (Microbiologist).
As Time progesses, so does Linux. I can plug my Digital Camera in to the USB drive, and my system recognises it. Configuration of my network cards was a snap...no hassling around with modprobe. People actually buying Lindows and stuff at Micro Center because it looks easy to use, and it *is*.
I've burned Knoppix cd's for the group of guys that I work with (mainly a non-technical cable puller bunch), and I see some of them using it instead of the XP that our company provides us.
Linux for the desktop is here--the only people that can't support it are people that need bleeding-edge hardware support, or the people that need specalized applications. For J6P, Linux just works.
Try http://www.wigle.net/
And, from their homepage:
Getting Started
WiGLE.net is a submission-based catalog of wireless networks. Submissions aren not paired with actualy people; rather name/password identities which people use to associate their data. It's basically a "gee isn't this neat" engine for learning about the spread of wireless computer usage.
WiGLE concerns itself entirely with 802.11b networks right now, since it's REALLY hard to deal with cellular networks, 802.11a is so hard to catch, and everything else is so small-share. 802.11b appears to be experiencing an explosive growth, and it's neat to see it cover cities.
the first step in using WiGLE is to create a username for yourself. You don't have to submit anything other than a made-up name and password, validation is immediate, and we will not contact you (unless you wanna chat on our message boards). This will give you access to our query engine and software downloads.
once you've done this, you're free to send us wireless network traces (in any of our listed formats, usually pairings of wireless sample, names and network hardware addresses (for uniqueness), data/SNR triples and GPS coordinates) or enter networks manually. Note, your username gets "credit" for these, but of course some people don't want their networks listed (various reasons), so we delist these immediately upon request. If you're visiting us to ask for removal, just make an ID and ask about your network through the query page. Once you make a user id, you can look at the submissions statistics page to see how users stack up.
To view networks, you can 1.) ask the website, 2.) download one of our clients. The clients are particularly fun to look at, but require either a java-1.3-and-up machine (windows, sunOS, MacOS-X, linux, mostly) or a windows box, for the new windows-native prototype. This will superimpose "points" from a live query onto a map of an area. Maps can be downloaded in "packs" from our mapping engine and are installed simply by unzipping them into your client installation directory. Mappacks are created and served by-state-by-county, or in the case of large cities, by-state-by-city. If we haven't generated a map for your area of interest yet, ask for it, and come back after the rendering engine's had a minute or 5 to think about it.
Overall, WiGLE aims to show people about wireless in a more-technical capacity then your average static map or newspaper article.
If your network is in WiGLE and you don't like it, we'll take it out immediately, but you should look into making your network harder to detect AND more secure; remember that you're the one bombarding passers-by with your signal. We aren't affiliated directly with any particular community or interest (other than our own), but we appluad the efforts of the people who wrote the stumbling software that feeds our project, the people looking to use wireless in innovatove ways, and especially the community of people who just dig wireless network access and dig sharing it. (freenets)
I use and upload information into WiGLE (wigle.net), and having information like this would do wonders in having accuracy in mapping and plotting. There ahve been times where I've plotted information, but the information from Tiger isn't up to date, so my plots don't look like they're on roads.
Now, if we could only work on GPS accuracy. Sure, 21 feet is 21 feet, but, still...I'd love to be able to wardrive and know exactly where something is at. (Yes, for the subtle, I know that 21 feet doesn't make much of a difference with a Wi-Fi point, but, being able to accurately identify where a point is would be nice. Instead of knowing where on Randall Road something is, it'd be the bomb if we could pick up something like 4033 Randall Road from the GPS Coordinates.)
Maybe I'm just dreaming, or had one too many to drink on a Saturday night.
Your point about not being hassled by the NYC police--I worked on Long Island and Staten Island a few weeks ago. I drive a company van, with Ohio plates.
Unfortunately, the way that New York defines "trucks" and Ohio defines "trucks" are very different. This caused me a lot of harassment by the local law enforcement bodies. Also, every time I went over a toll bridge, I was stopped, and my vehicle was inspected. Also, because I'm not from New York, I didn't have to have holes cut into the back of my van (not sure the reason for that anyway...), but, that seemed to make my traveling more fun.
All in all, the five days that I spent working on Long Island, I was stopped 12 times.
I'm a clean cut twentysomething, driving your usual cable guy van, and not bothering anyone.
Who knows. Maybe it was the "Perkins Observatory - The Place for Space" and the "Will work for Bandwidth" Licence plate frames that made them suspicious. That or a van from Ohio with an E-ZPass Transponder on it.
I was seriously considering heading to HOPE this weekend, however, work has me stuck in Peoria, IL.
but now it's dead.
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My server is getting quite overloaded at the moment due to lots of publicity (more than quadruple my usual traffic), resulting in access problems and errors for a lot of people. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, and I'm working on improvements - if you're having trouble checking out the site, please visit again soon when everything should be back to full working order. Thanks...
Ohio's already getting to the point where free thinking is about to become a criminal offense. It really saddens me to say that, however, some of the changes that have happened in the past few years really make me wonder what the General Legislature is trying to do here. The Law Enforcement communities run this state. They've done their hardest to keep as much information on their citizens as they can, and limiting the amount of information that you can receive to a bare minimum.
For example, try getting a copy of your driver's abstract record. It takes 2 weeks and $5, however, if you're a corporation, you can get it online, in thirty seconds, without written permission or consent. Also, try to apply for a professional license of any kind. Criminal Background Checks (What, you mean I've got to be fingerprinted to become a PE?), and the privatization of the state's prisons and the slashing of the budget for the prisons they already have (I know that they've closed at least 2 prisons, making the other 30 or so overcrowded--making those prisons a risk to the employees that work there), and giving financial incentives to the counties for sending people to prison (each county receives an amount for holding and transporting the prisoner to the DRC's Correctional Reception Center--sometimes to the tune of $20K/inmate). Add to the fact that the State Highway Patrol frequently stops people for doing 1 or 2 miles over, or when they "think" there are no seatbelts on, and then detain them until a drug dog comes (This happened to me--pulled over on suspicion of having no seat belt, Christmas Day of 2001. My Brother, 19, didn't have his driver's license on him, and we had ample holiday stuff in the back, so, he decided he wanted to search our car, pat us down, and make our life miserable for a little over 3 hours--either waiting for the drug dog, or waiting for them to search the car, or waiting for My Brother's Driver's Licence photo to come back from LEADS. Finally, they let us go...no ticket, no charges, nothing.)...it's really becoming to the point where you should just throw some razor wire up around the state.
Ohio has really gotten to the point where it is a sad state of affairs. Once my company lets me relocate, I'm so out of this state.
Ian
I used webmin/usermin for a while, however, there was a point in time where I was innodated with security-type problems with it.
I still provide usermin/webmin to the people who need to tweak server-specific settings on my server, however, I require that they use something like STunnel to get to the server. Less chance of something attacking webmin from the wild, and a little more accountabliity.
One thing that I didn't like about webmin is that it didn't get into the specifics when you installed new software. There were times where I thought webmin was akin to crack...just giving you enough to keep on coming back to it to make small adjustments or when you needed more. I quit cold turkey, however, we still have issues when I modify files by hand, and webmin tries to overwrite them the next time a user goes to modify their settings via tha control panel.
Ian
Look at Lowe's.
They use XWindows on all of their terminals--self-booting workstations.
Even use Mozilla as their web browser.
Just because software 'dies' or some people think it sucks, doesn't mean that big businesses don't/won't use it.
I feel bad, but Slashcode stripped my attribution.
It's one of the mod's in their IRC Channel that posted this.
Christ, we're hosted off PHL. We're not gonna be bloody slashdotted.
Sure, like we've never heard *that* before.
WHen I'm servicing the clients whom I work for. Darl McNut is somewhat correct when he accounts that 7 of 10 of the top retailers use SCO's unix. I know with some certanity that First and the third use SCO Unix.
I'm really akin to taking the "parenting" stance on this.
Darl McNut is only going for two things:
a) they want to inflate his stock price so he can get his bonus, and,
b) to keep a steady stream of FUD coming to keep said stock price up.
I've drawn the conculsion that the community should take the "Sane Parent" stance with Darl and SCO. If we're out shopping, and little Darly Jr. starts acting up, you either smack his ass and tell him to settle down, ignore him, or give him attention. He wants you to notice him, he wants everyone to pay attention to him. If we ignore him, he'll realize that his FUD's getting nowhere.
Of course, it's even questionable that the SCOG *owns* unix. According to the Open Group, They own Unix. (URL: http://www.opengroup.org/press/22may03.htm) So, I'm not sure which 'crack pipe' Darl's smoking.
I should have brought this up on the DMCA story, but, if my memory serves me correct, you've got to provide *exact* notification of what files are infringing when you serve someone a DMCA notice. If there's nothing exact on the DMCA notice, it's a worthless piece of paper (just like the DMCA, ha!). If I should happen to get a DMCA notice, I'll be the first one to let them know that under the DMCA, they've got to show specifics as to what gets taken down, and until they do so, to polietly go shove off.
I listened to their last conference call, and I'm just amazed at Darl's iron gonads. Does he really think he's going to win, or does he just want us to fold in and call it quits? Darl and SCO are truly becoming the "Boy who Cried Wolf" of the software industry.
Ian
Don't buy from Gateway.
The power supply goes out monthly on my gateway that is $WORK supplied.
Now, that the warranty's ran out on them...they're paying $300/incident for laptop repair.
Gateway won't do a damn thing about it.
Iroincally enough, it's happened with my home laptop (Gateway, as well), but, instead of paying for it once it went out of warranty (mind you, it had been in-service twice for the exact same thing), I just grabbed my info off of my hard drive, and I'm buying an alienware PC next year.
Screw companies who have forgotten that churn affects their bottom line.
Now, I don't want to speculate into the cause of the SCO outage, however, my guess is that SCO's taking the time to weed out some of the information that they've distributed.
They've realized that they're totally fuxored, and they're abandoning ship, right?
*wishful thinking*
Yeah.
;)
It's called "Profit by Legislation," and it pisses me off. Anyone's eligible for being entered into that category, however, it's really hard to determine the people who would fit. For starters, the DMCA, CAN-SPAM, that kinda thing.
Between that and the total erosion of my civil liberties, I'm thinking that maybe the Netherlands are a better place to live
Ian
I was under the impression that all of the VoIP traffic was going to be transit'ed over either the Time Warner Telecom Network or the Aol Data Transit Network.
Now, I'm not sure who's going to do the final VoIP-> POTS integration, or who's handling that...but it was my understanding that Time Warner was going to piggyback this on their DOCSIS network -- one of the reasons they they bumped up RoadRunner to 3 Megs Up/Down bandwidth.
From a Technician's stand point, I really hope that before Time Warner goes to VoIP they do the "One Drop for Life" program that Charter uses. When I was a tech down at Charter, I rarely had to replace a drop, however, I've replaced more drops up here than I'd like to mention. If they forced stricter Quality Assurance testing on the contractors as well as the installers, and paid their in-house technicians a bit more, we wouldn't have the "when it rains my cable dies out" problems (and those are typically bad grounding block issues or bad drop issues).
Eh, just my thoughts.
Ian