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  1. Re:you know, on Tom's Hardware Investigates Michael's Computers · · Score: 1

    Have you listened to the testimony of the CIA Director and the former White House and intelligence employees that say the White House told the CIA what they wanted to hear? It hasn't received lots of covereage in the news (no real surprise there) but listening to the actual testimony on C-SPAN has been most interesting. Basically I think we should fire them all and start over. :) I know a certain female House member from Texas that would make a damned fine President.

  2. Re:you know, on Tom's Hardware Investigates Michael's Computers · · Score: 1

    I agree with the AC. They don't have access to classified intelligence report. They rely on the spokespeople for the head of the government not lying to them about the urgency of the situation.

  3. No doubt! on Tom's Hardware Investigates Michael's Computers · · Score: 1, Informative
    Usually the weaker the evidence, the more someone tries to insist they ar [sic] right.

    You can say that again:

    "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
    - Dick Cheney, speech to VFW National Convention

    "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
    - George W. Bush, speech to UN General Assembly, Sept. 12, 2002

    "The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq."
    - George W. Bush, Nov. 23, 2002

  4. Actual nerve replacement? on Stretchy Wires to Create Artificial Nerves · · Score: 1

    Can this be used to replace a damaged nerve? I dislocated my shoulder many years ago in wrestling. I tore one of my Rhomboid muscles (Major or Minor, I forget which) and stretched one of the Brachial Plexus nerves (the one that went to my right hand). The doctor said I damn near severed the nerve, which wouldn't have been good. He said a repeat of the injury, even a minor repeat, would most likely sever the nerve for good so he ended my wrestling career then and there. Damn. If these new stretchy nerves can be used internally, well that would be a damn good thing. Brachial Plexus nerve damage is a common type of damage done by typical childbirth if the baby's shoulder gets hung up during delivery.

  5. Bush on The Sun's 10th Planet... Sedna? · · Score: 1

    Just thank your lucky stars (no pun intended) that NASA isn't calling it Bush.

  6. Phrase on MySQL Writes Exception for PHP in License · · Score: 4, Funny
    ...hung up on religious adherence to GPL principles.

    I think the phrase you're looking for is "GNU Dogma." Correct?

  7. This is too easy on Testing Electrical Capacity of New Offices? · · Score: 1

    The answer is simple go out and buy 30 space heaters. Buy the size that will fit under your typical secretary's desk. "Why," you ask? Well the answer is quite simple actually. That's exactly what will happen in your office once cold weather sets in. I can no longer count on one hand the number of times I've seen this happen (all within one company!). A secretary or receptionist gets cold and brings in a small 1000w space heater and plugs it in under her desk. More often than not she simply plugs it into any available outlet which probably going to be that bright orange, red, or dotted outlet that indicates it's on one of your battery and generator protected circuits. She and her neighbor come in at 7:30 and both flip them on at the same time and "WHAAAM!," the breaker flips on the server farm or wiring closet. I swear every battery/generator outlet should be protected with a key lock of some sort. Grrr.....

  8. Grip tools on Improving Terrible Handwriting? · · Score: 1

    There are actually a few simple little tools you can use to keep you fingers in the appropriate positions. It's basically a small piece of hard rubber that slips on the end of the pen or pencil and is slid up to the normal finger positions. It has flat or indented sides in the correct positions for your fingers. It's like an ergonomic aide of sorts. My mother is a elementary teacher and has used these for years. Hell I had one in my desk at work. :-) Not that my penmanship is any good. In all honesty it is horrific at best. Mine is probably worse than the article poster's. You can pick up these simple tools at any school supply store. Superiors is one place we get them. I don't know if they are a large chain or not though. Don't bother with the rubber prism-shaped grips. They don't position your fingers at all. They just pad the shank of the writing utencil. Make sure it has places for all 3 fingers. This is how they're actually supposed to teach writing. I was taught this way.

  9. Telecom grade hardware on Looking for a Better Back-Up Power Solution? · · Score: 1
    Don't bother buying low-end crap. Buy Telecom-grade UPSs. They will cost a little more but will last a lot longer. You also need to seriously think about 1) centralizing your server farms into one and then 2) putting the entire server farm on a generator. You servers will run off of batteries 24/7. Your city power will be used to charge that bank of batteries. When the city power craps out you're generator either needs to be on auto-standby (with a weekly test) or needs to be started by the on-call person within X minutes. This is how every single telco CO I've ever been in operates.

    Generators aren't terribly expensive by any means. If you get one, make sure it's professionally installed. Also hire a real electrician to wire your battery array and server farm. That won't cost a whole lot easier and you'll be adhereing to code. Your only viable option for a seldom-used standby generator is natural gas or propane. Diesel is out of the question simply because you won't be able to use enough diesel to keep what's in the tank fresh and potent. Diesel is the way to go for emergency generators (where you drive it in on a trailer and park it in the alley but it's not good for a standby generator unless you connect it to a supply of diesel that's continually being used and replenished. ie, your company has their own tanks for filling their own vehicles so it's regularly being added cycled. Diesel will lose it's potency over time.

    Again, buy telecom-grade hardware. It won't break the bank but it will last a lot longer. It's worth it.

  10. Re:That's a Mitnick idea on U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off · · Score: 1
    I didn't know that. I bet it would be highly successful.

    I wonder if he realizes how many businesses have locked down their desktops with Group Policy settings.

    I wonder if he (or any of us) realize how many businesses haven't locked down their desktops with Group Policy settings. That's the scary statistic to look at. 8-{

  11. Re:donate to schools on U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off · · Score: 1

    AppleWorks costs schools $20. Literally. It can do every Office can, or at least it has the features people actually use. OpenOffice which works under OS X X11 is free. Eventually it will be carbonized and work natively. It will still be free. I've been a Mac-head for well over a decade. Hell I'm a damned guru. I and every other person who has ever supported Macs and PCs both will state with absolute conviction that it's infinitely easier and cheaper to maintain a network of Macs than it is to maintain a network of Windows machines. I've done both. Oh, and schools don't pay $150 dollars for OS updates. It's $69, and that's only if they buy it through the Apple Store. It can be had for much less if you actually negotiate with an Apple Ed representative. I almost forgot, AppleWorks is shipped in every Apple Ed bundle. So really it's free.

  12. Re:donate to schools on U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But that's just spreading the monopoly even further. I don't want my local school district to get Office for free. I want them to have to caugh up $25k out of thei extremely small budget for licenses. I want it to cost them a much as it can. Hopefully someone will eventually realize that they can do it for a whole lot cheaper with Macs or Linux boxes. Also you can bet that every single free copy of Office or Windows they give away is one they automatically count as a new user, even if the user uses the CD as a coaster. That's not fair either.

  13. Good idea! on U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off · · Score: 1

    That's a Helluva Good idea!(tm) Get a keygen for the latest Office. Hack up an installer to install the hacked up Office and look like an official Microsoft installer. While you're at it install a few backdoors, some ad software, a couple dozen viruses, and email the addressbook to a hotmail account. This sounds like a helluva security attack that's highly likely to succede don't ya think? Damn. Scary.

  14. Re:Sometimes they do on Recovering Secret HD Space · · Score: 1
    I never tried to do that with an ATI product. I always assumed you couldn't do it. I once tried to do that with an Adaptec 2940UW PC version. I tried it in my 8600/300 before the G3 upgrade. I flashed card from OS 9 and tried to boot. The machine wouldn't boot. I stuck it back in a PC, reflashed it twice (didn't work the first time) and all was well again with the card. I ended up dropping damn near $500 on a Mac version of the 2940U2W. Pricey as hell but nice card. SCSI kicks ass, no doubt about it.

    I really wish ATI would wise up and use the same HW for PC and Mac. There really is no reason for them not to. I contend that few Mac people buy their cards directly. I suspect that few Mac users upgrade their video cards. I bet that the only ones that do upgrade are gamers. All the other Mac users 1) aren't willing to pay %50 more to for a Mac version of the ATI card, and 2) don't have a need to upgrade their video card and will get an upgrade when they buy a new Mac in a few years anyway. However if ATI made the price half-assed reasonable AND didn't short the Mac versions on RAM then I think they'd see a fair amount of new income in the form of upgrades. They should make a single version of the hardware and then have driver development groups for the OSs they support. That would be ideal anyhow. Oh if only.... :)

  15. Re:Sometimes they do on Recovering Secret HD Space · · Score: 1

    The cards I was thinking of was the 9600 and FireGL I think. It was about that time. It required a few minutes of soldering and reflashing the card. Nice hack.

  16. TYPO on Comcast Cuts Infected PCs' Network Connections · · Score: 1
    My Bad(tm). I made a rather horrible word ommision that drastically changes the meaning of one of my sentences. Sorry about that:

    Replace: they pay for have the right
    With: they pay for DO NOT have the right

    Whoops! Now that's better. Read what I meant to say and not what I actually wrote. :)

  17. Sometimes they do on Recovering Secret HD Space · · Score: 4, Informative

    ATI is a perfect example I think. Ya'll remember the various mods to convert their otherwise identical top-of-the-line video card into their top-of-the-line 3D rendering graphics pro card? Sometimes the designs are basically identical for good reason. Cost savings comes to mind. They simply use software and/or a few well-placed jumpers to differentiate between the two.

  18. Don't think so on Comcast Cuts Infected PCs' Network Connections · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A few minutes before I found this thread today I received an automated message from lafn.org. In that message it stated very clearly that it was an automated process that was blacklisting a /24 around a machine on one of our dialup netblocks that was caught sending mail to one of their spamtraps. That user is of course infected as are probably 50% IF NOT MORE of our customers. Our customers, no matter how big they are, no matter how big a customer they *think* they are, no matter what service they pay for have the right to cause 252 other customers at any given moment to be blacklisted. If they think they are that important then we sure as hell don't need them as a customer.

  19. I want to do this!! on Comcast Cuts Infected PCs' Network Connections · · Score: 1

    I've been getting just under a dozen or so abuse@ messages a day thanks to our infected customers. I REALLY want to redirect all outbound tcp/25 to our own mail server where we can disinfect and log all outbound mail. That's my grand goal. I wouldn't mind just cutting the customers off though. I wish we'd had the foresight to require customers to purchase an AV utility as part of their signing the AUP. That would have been nice.

  20. Run their email on Protecting Our Parents' PCs? · · Score: 1
    Besides getting the folks a Mac, I highly recommend buying a domain for the family, getting a server co-loed somewhere, and running their email through it. Yes you can do all of your email, all your friends' email, yadd, yadda. A simple Sendmail setup with MIMEDefang, SpamAssassin (and supporting friends), and ClamAV can handle all the crap you can't deal with at present. You can filter out ALL attachments with notoriously BAD extensions (ie of the over 100 extensions Microsoft treats as executable) before the probably infected attachments even reach your folks' machine. You can all but eliminate spam so you don't have to hear your folks whining about it. You can do a lot with little effort if you pre-process their email. Give it a whirl.

    Oh, and get your folks off of IE. That's worse than Outlook for the silent spread of viruses. Switch them to Mozilla.

    Replace Outlook for anything else (Mozilla would be good).

    Use the various hacks to permanently kill Outlook, Messenger (both), and IE.

    Install ZoneAlarm.

    For the hell of it NAT your folks' machine. Even if it's the only machine they have, buy a $50 Linksys and NAT it. That will go a long ways in stopping most NetBIOS worms.

    Install a VNC app so you can remotely fix their machine when they inevitably do something wrong.

  21. Re:OMG my rights online on US Government Upgrades RAM · · Score: 1

    Hell it could simply be used to store definitions of all the new words that Curious George jr makes up in his speeches.

  22. Landscaping on Summer Businesses for High School Students? · · Score: 1

    Forget anything in the IT field. You won't get a decent job. You won't make a decent business. No one in their right mind would buy a computer you build because you have no way of supporting it, especially after the summer is over. Unless you want to sell computers at a computer store (not a bad idea so you can get an idea of what you don't want to ever do again) get a real job doing actual manual work. You won't regret it. You might actually learn something. I did landscaping for a while. The folks I worked for were a bunch of jackasses but the pay was good. We had overtime every single week because they were undermaned and overworked and then some. The hours will probably have some flexibility to them so you can take a couple college classes during the summer. What?! You're not planning on taking summer college courses. You're one dumb SOB then. Take them and get it over with. Working outside will give you a good tan. Doing manual labor might actually get your fat ass into somewhat decent shape too. Both of these things will be useful when you get to college. Forget the dreams of striking it rich when people find out you know how to work with computers. Do a job that will pay you real money and save the fancy IT job until you have a degree or impressive certification (not MCSE!) that says you actually know what you're doing.

  23. Skill their peers can admire on Building Social Skills in Gifted Youths? · · Score: 1
    Help them find a skill that their peers can look up to. Maybe besides being a brainiac this kid has some other talent that his peers could admire, even if they wouldn't say so publicly. Can your student play an instrument? Can he run fast or a long distance? Is he good at art or working with woods? Find something he can do that 1) he can be proud himself and 2) his snot-nosed peers can also admire in some manner.

    Your student needs to learn some simple speaking skills. Speaking skills will go a long ways towards their future career and life in general. Get him involved in forensics. That would be an excellent place to learn to speak in public as well as put his intellect and primarily his reasoning to good use.

  24. Re:HIPA on 'They Can Sue, But They Can't Hide' · · Score: 1

    D'oh! Dammit, I always misspell that one. I always leave off "Act" for some reason. Thanks for pointing that out.

  25. HIPA on 'They Can Sue, But They Can't Hide' · · Score: 1

    It would be a HIPA violation for the doctor to discuss anything about the medical work they performed on you unless the patient waives their rights. The site *claims* all of the information is derived from public information (ie, publicly accessible court records). Therefore all the information *could* be just fine and not violate HIPA. However if the doctor defendant posted the record himself and made any further comments other than referring to the actual lawsuit, then a HIPA violation exists. Make sense?