Yes. Spent fuel has always been considered a long term asset by the nuclear industry. People in that industry believe that as mining the raw ore becomes more expensive and the technology for reprocessing the spent fuel becomes better it starts to become a more valuable source of future fuel.
The industry would be very different if the governments did not push the technology towards weapons production. The reactor designs we have are all old and they are designed in a way that facilitates the production of plutonium. If the research into other reactor and fuel designs that did not have as many dangerous byproducts were pursued it would be a safer industry today.
The most promising alternative is and was to use Thorium fuelled reactors instead of uranium. There is the potential for far safer reactor designs and far less hazardous waste when using that type of fuel. The USA took a relatively short look at this but then they stopped since they could not also produce weapons from these reactors and at the time it was all about the bomb. But from what I have read they will likely become a technology that becomes more interesting over time as it's capable of using depleted uranium along with the Thorium as a way to use up that spent fuel that's hanging around.
It should be obvious though there are significant challenges to getting the theory into a practical design. All those research reactor projects back in the 50's that gave engineers and scientists the knowledge to build the current reactors would need similar efforts to develop the technology for these alternative fuels and reprocessing technologies. It's starting to happen but in China and India where they have not lost their love for nuclear power yet.
Oh, you noticed they effectively doubled the price of SQL server on April 1 too?
Yeah, they went from pricing based on how many CPU's were in the server to how many cores are on those chips. But the price only remains the same if you have 4 cores in the server yet brand new machines genrally have 8 core CPU's now so it's twice the price now compared to last month for a new server. Microsoft says that the average CPU in the field has 4 CPU's but the average server is a few years old and when it is time to replace it you need to spend twice as much.
And if you're not in one of the states that explicitly grants exemptions, don't just go ahead expecting that you'll win the legal battle.
Good advice. I would suggest the outcome will depend on if the outside project is related in any way to the job you do. If it can be argued that your knowledge required to complete the project was acquired as a result of your employment or a result of training your received at work then things may not be resolved in your favour.
Hardware issue on Galaxy S. No software fix possible. Using a GPS test app you can only see a small number of satellites in most conditions. Unless you are sitting out in a wide open field on a nice day when there are no sources of interference nearby or high solar activity it will not lock on.
Even the windows in a car will attenuate the GPS signal enough to give you poor performance. Turn it off is the best advice I can give. It will only serve to lower your battery life and frustrate you.
Even if you leave every other setting unlocked you should go in and setup parental controls on your device to block in app purchasing. Do it now before you head out to the restaurant and you load up something to keep the kids amused not realizing that because you just finished downloading it your itunes account is still unlocked and the kids can buy whatever they want without a password for the next few minutes.
Even if you don't have kids of your own, you might be out with friends or family that do and your generous act of amusing the kids turns expensive.
So I infer from the description that if those first customers did not lock up all the checkouts by scanning in Alcohol perhaps more of the later customers could have also paid for their purchases.
Way back when I was in University and long before using a laptop in class became popular I was doing it on an Apple Duo 230.
It worked well for me then but it had only a single purpose during the lecture and that was for note taking. There was no wireless Internet, no peer to peer networking, and very few distractions loaded on that machine.
I would advocate that professors and students start the year off with a few minutes discussion this. Perhaps the best advice would be to institute a rule of airplane mode on, silent mode on and only accepted activity is note taking during lecture time. If the are doing a study session or discussion where Internet access actually becomes a benefit (lookup information that adds to the discussion) then perhaps the instructor would then explicitly announce to students they can go an lookup the information and turn on the wireless at those time. But the default behavior should be wireless off, class notes and materials loaded only in class.
I have to post a big Me too on this one. Never an argument, or a crazy request to reinstall software or try pointless remedies.
Nowhere near as many systems as you but exactly the same response. They fixed units that failed, took me about 1-2 minutes on the phone to go over the details and the rest of the time was just waiting for them to fill out the dispatch forms.
Re:Possible professional sports abuse?
on
Muscle Mice
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I predict they won't even wait for this to be perfected.
Someone in a third world country is likely brewing up a batch of stem cells in their "lab" as we speak.
Maybe they will have it ready in time for London. Weight lifting, you were a sport once. Now it's just magic show where everyone wonders how they make the trick work.
An SD card can be locked using a password, or it can be set to permanent write protected mode.
Also the manufacturer of an SD card may not include the secure features in their cards (which would probably mean it wouldn't work on these phones)
From the linked article: Technologic Systems has developed a Linux application named "sdlock" which can be used to manipulate SD card hardware-enforced password locks and set the card's permanent write-protect feature. Using a password protected SD card is a great way to ensure software security and/or to make sure your TS-7000 SBC based product cannot be used in an unintended matter once deployed. This utility is only available for the TS-7300 and TS-7400 products, which are configured with the TS-SDBOOT firmware. Some of the possibilities include:
Password protecting SD Cards
Set the SBC to boot only locked SD Cards
Set the SD Card readable only on a specific SBC
Checksum verification of bootable SD Cards
Make an SD Card permanently write-protected How To Use It Usage and command line help for this command: $ sdlock –help Usage: sdlock [OPTION]... Controls SD card lock and permanent write-protect features. General options: -p, --password=PASS Use PASS as password -c, --clear Remove password lock -s, --set Set password lock -u, --unlock Unlock temporarily -e, --erase Erase entire device (clears password) -w, --wprot Enable permanent write protect -h, --help This help
What Google sticks into their server racks and data centres is not a good comparison to this case. That's a completely different use case.
What does Google put on their employees desks? Last I heard they have a mixture of vendors, Apple, Dell or Lenovo machines are common with Google.
Any pictures you see posted of a Google office are usually not the desks but their crazy reception area, break room, lunch room, etc. But the few pictures I scanned through usually you see a Dell or Lenovo box peeking out with a a few obvious Apple laptop appearances.
The earlier comments about integration testing is really the key point why you would never want to roll out white box self made machines as a fleet of office computers. So lets say you pick your specs, your motherboard, video card, etc etc. Only to find out after you buy all of them that the machines randomly freeze up and you don't know why. Maybe you find out that the particular brand of video card you chose is causing the problem with the particular motherboard you choose. The same board with a different video card is fine, the same video card with a different board is fine but together every last PC you assembled will freeze up at least once a day. Not saying a Dell, HP, or Lenovo machine would never have that kind of problem but it's much less likely especially with the business oriented boxes and the extra level of integration testing those machines get even over the same companies consumer oriented units.
So looking at some of the linked info it appears that this is targeting a Siemens SIMATIC WinCC Database. It appears that the database uses a hardcoded username and password combination that end users are told not to change. I found some forum postings from people who made the mistake of changing the password only to have the software fail.
Server=.\WinCC;uid=WinCCConnect;pwd=2WSXcder (+1 for what appears to be a reasonably random looking password, -1 for being short, -1 for not including symbols, -100 for hardcoding it into the app and forcing all users to have the same exploitable entry point into their embedded database that this worm can use to read and inject code into the database) https://www.automation.siemens.com/forum/guests/PostShow.aspx?PostID=16127&Language=en&PageIndex=2
Lets estimate each cab makes an average of 30 trips per day. So every day there are about 397710 cab trips made or 145 million trips a year.
They are saying that 1.8 million trips were overcharged over a period of 2 years. So over 2 years there were about 290 million trips of which 1.8 million were overcharged.
So approximately 0.6% of the trips made were overcharged by about $5.
Doesn't sound like it's so bad to me. Half a percent is a legitimate rate of errors for any human endeavour. So the previous trip was out of the city area and the rate wasn't switched back for the next rider would be a good example of how that would happen.
The story seems a little sensational to me. I'm sure there are a few legitimate abusers but the numbers don't seem to imply a widespread problem to me.
It depends on the provider you are with and the area you are located.
There is no general statement I can make that covers every situation but in general the CDMA based providers have started to allow their customers free roaming within the zone near the border for voice calls. A few years back when they were renegotiating their roaming agreements they came to the sensible conclusion that by treating those calls as regular domestic calls instead of international roaming they would make about the same amount of money since it worked both ways and they would make their customers happier when they didn't get surprise roaming bills.
Unfortunately that agreement was only for Voice calls with those specific providers and they only do it in specific areas where there is a population of people near the border. So you cannot rely on it.
The worst case scenario for this is when your CDMA phone is still locked on to a domestic tower for the voice calls but is using a foreign tower for the EVDO data connection. Most phones will not turn on the roaming indicator for when the EVDO channels in the phone are connected to another providers tower. They only show you the roaming indicator and the home option only takes effect when the primary voice 1x channels in the phone have switched. So you can set your phone to home only and if you are in that particular sweet spot where the phone will happily stay on the local providers tower for 1x voice coverage but wants to grab the foreign providers signal for data packets on the EVDO channel then you will still get a bill.
So the technical challenges with roaming can be pretty substantial. Even when the customer does everything right there are conditions where the network will provide undesired results. So hopefully the customer service at your chosen provider is helpful with resolving the billing issue these technical problems generate. Hopefully the network departments are able to figure out roaming lists which allow the phone to work as the customer intended. And hopefully the executives negotiate partner deals with an eye toward benefiting both the customer and the company interests. Unhappy customers are not likely their intention but too often the complexity of the issues at all levels serve to frustrate the end user when dealing with these large companies.
Downtime period is a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime
Service Credit is three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9 seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0 fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.
You must request your service credit. It is not automatic.
I think the likely reason for the large difference is that AT&T is simply giving you a total number of users who activated a phone on the Specific iphone plans and it does not include users who are blending the data only plan addition with a regular voice plan.
Many people will need more minutes than the regular iphone specific plans can deliver or wanted to keep their existing plan and simply add the iphone features to it.
Or AT&T simply doesn't like paying Apple and they are looking for ways to under report the activations of iphones until after the customers window to cancel without penalties expire or something like that.
Congratulations. You have been randomly selected for enhanced screening procedures. I wouldn't take it personally, they are required to do a full inspection now and then.
Either that or they thought you were smuggling in guns. You probably haven't heard but every gun used in a crime in Canada was smuggled in from the USA.;)
In canada the regulations for image scan processing of cheques is actually taking steps to make post dating cheques more effective. When the regulations go into full effect at the end of this year cheques will require the date fields to be marked with month day year field indicators to remove the ambiguous notations currently used (Section 5.4.1 of new regulations).
Basically they want to allow the banks to use image processing software to automatically recognize the date field on the cheque so that postdated or stale dated (old) cheques cannot be processed. In the past, it was very easy for the clerk to miss this. Even if they check the date on the cheques they may confuse something like January 10 and October 1. (1/10/2006 vs 10/1/2006) In Canada the conventional order of month day year is different depending on what area of the country you are in (French vs English speaking provinces traditionally do it a little bit differently). Believe me, I'm looking at store receipts and gas receipts right now to get my taxes in order and it's hard to figure out what format they use.
A ring laser gyro like this for aircraft cost in the neighborhood of $250,000.
A plane that wants to fly overseas routes like the atlantic routes to europe needs to have 2 of these.
I doubt that it's appropriate to adapt a device meant for objects traveling a high speeds over huge distance to something traveling in a small relative area at low speeds.
I think one of the floor grid suggestions might be workable. It reminds me of the old style optical mice that required the mirrored mouse pad with the grid lines on it to work. Actually I wonder if the current optical mice technology could scale up? Consider that the forklift is a giant mouse and the warehouse is a big mousepad. If you want to embed stuff in the floor then look at how a Wacom tablet works. Maybe that kind of thing is possible.
While the company is not one most geeks would trust I do admire this move. Other registrars are complaining about the control and lack of innovation by ICANN yet Verisign is finding ways to intruduce new products.
If nobody buys this service then it is a failed experiment but I suspect they will do a slow but steady business selling these virtually unlimited domains. I know many companies that went out and registered their domains with the longest expiration possible at the time. If a 100 year registration was available I'm sure at least one would have done it.
Of course in 100 years from now and your company has moved 6 times, phone numbers have been extended many times, email addresses in the form used now don't even exist anymore so all the contact info on your record is completely stale. Is someone going to remember to renew? Will the renewal notices ever have a hope of arriving?
Well I can give a very positive experience with freezing a drive. I have 2 Fujitsu MPG3204AT drives. Consecutive serial numbers and both are dead with the same symptoms. The 2 drives were installed in the same machine though one of them was never actually used. I believe that either the original tech who built the computer had the second drive in the computer for the purpose of transferring an initial software image or they had intended to mirror the drives. For whatever reason the second drive was never used. They just formatted the drive and left it blank until it finally died. I unhooked that dead drive and left it in the case and didn't worry about it but then the primary drive that they were using also died.
The drive wouldn't spin up. A visual inspection of the drive and electronics looked good, no burned traces. There was no clicking or scraping sounds to indicate an old fashioned head crash, just a nearly inaudible buzz for a second after it was initially powered up. At the computer repair shop I worked in once we used to call this problem "sticktion" (stikshun).
I tried lots of the other tricks to get it to go. Swapped the electronics between the two drives. Tapped and twisted and banging the side of the drive trying to get it to spin up just after turning it on. Tried plugging it into different cables and into an external enclosure. They told me that they were having problems getting the computer to startup sometimes, especially right after shutting it down so I suspected it might be overheating so we tried a less extreme form of cooling. I let it sit for 30 minutes in a cool area but it still would not go. At this point I contacted Drivesavers for a quote ($500-$2700, $200 attempt charge even if no data recovered). Took the recovery quote to the manager and they said it wasn't worth it. It was just email from the receptionist computer and they had copies of all the important email somewhere else. They should have had a full backup copy of the hard drive as I had verified the backup on this very same computer was working properly just a week earlier but someone decided to clean up their hard drive and deleted the folder containing the backups 3 days earlier. So we called it quits, got a new hard drive and reinstalled Win98 and open office and I left.
A day later I read this article and thought what the heck. They aren't going to recover the data, they had 2 days to reconsider. They went from relatively sure they weren't going to pay for a recovery to absolutely positively sure they weren't going to pay for professional recovery. I got the drives from them, stuck the one with data in a static bag and then into a Glad(tm) brand freezer bag, and into the freezer it went. 10 hours later I pulled it out and stuck the drive in my external enclosure and BOOM it spun right up. Plugged it into my laptop, grabbed the email, bookmarks, address book, and document folders, even found their desktop picture and I'm now burning it all to a CD for tomorrow. I think they will be happy to hear the news, I just told them I wanted to try some things with the drives.
So the scoreboard on this one is: 2 Fujitsu MPG3204AT drives. Won't spin, bios doesn't see it. -brains swapped -gently and not so gently bumped them on their sides trying to get the motor to "unstick"
I have never noticed the pricing in CD's to be flexible with the exchange rate either.
The pricing trends you mention are more proof that pricing levels are primarily set by "psychological" price points.
I don't know if these price points actually maximize profit or sales but it seems that most retail goods follow this same model. $199 for consumer electronics, the $999 pc, etc.
Well I work for an ISP that uses broadjump for our client install CD. Basically broadjump as a company specializes in making these CD's that automatically check the system and do any neccesary steps for getting your broadband connection working.
In our case the CD will install a branded internet explorer/outlook express but it's just something they whiped up with the IEAK tools so nothing too special.
The big step on our network is it will register the MAC address on our customer administration webpage. Broadjump basically builds the CD to the specifications the ISP asks for. They are simply an outsourcer that specializes in these things. On our CD there are basically 3 steps. First the CD checks the machine to make sure it meets the minimum requirements. So it checks the basics like CPU speed, free hard drive space and memory. It also verifies there is an Ethernet card and that it's bound to the TCP/IP protocol with the proper DHCP settings. If it finds any problems with these settings it will give the user the opportunity to automatically fix the error or a description of the problem so you can fix it yourself. The next step is it will install the internet explorer software. After this it does a dhcp release and renew to get an IP. It then contacts the customer administration website to register the MAC address so that the computer can get a valid IP. Up to this point the machine only has a 10.x.x.x IP address which only allows you to connect to the DHCP server, DNS server, and the online customer administration servers. After it successfully registers the MAC it does another release and renew which should give you a real IP address and it uploads a text file log of the whole process to an FTP site. The text file doesn't really contain anything terribly useful and nobody on the helpdesk ever bothers with the things. Nothing evil was included in our text file though I'm sure other ISP's may ask broadjump to include some system configuration details in their implementations. Like I said, for us it's just a log file of the steps the broadjump CD completed. If it got to the point where it succesfully uploaded the file then the connection is obviously working and at that point there isn't going to be much to say in the log file of interest.
All the steps this CD takes can easily be duplicated manually. In fact most of the time if a user calls the helpdesk because they cannot get their new connection up and running we just register the MAC address manually on the website for them. Registering this address automatically is the main reason we include the CD in the self install packages. I do recommend people unfamilear with DHCP and mac addresses to use the CD on our system, there isn't anything terribly mysterious about our broadjump cd though who knows what other ISP's ask them to implement.
In general there are only a few methods of broadband client access that users need to be familear with to get up and running manually without these CD's. 1. Plain DHCP or Static address. Most cable modems work on simple DHCP addresses. Usually the cable ISP will hack their DHCP server to only allocate a certain number of unique IP's through a single cable modem. I know the cable ISP I used to work for did this. After the first 2 IP's included in a consumer package it would just keep sending a DHCP offer of the second IP address to any additional computer that sent a request from that cable modem. The system programmer there hacked a neat little system together using SNMP and DHCP. SNMP trap would be sent to the DHCP server with the sequence number of the DHCP request and serial number of the cable modem. 2. DHCP with Mac address or hostname registration. The ISP I'm working for uses the MAC address to limit the number of IP's you can get. A web interface to register these MAC addresses is available and before you register you are assigned a private IP address in the 10.x.x.x range which only works inside a small internal network segment the DNS, DHCP, and registration server are on. I have also seen ISP's that use the hostname as a unique identifier. Usually this involves setting the name of the computer to be your ISP username to get a valid IP. 3. PPPoE. An extention of the dialup authentication model to broadband connections. Usually you will need some form of client software for these though most routers have built a PPPoE clients into their firmware. MacosX also includes out of the box support for this protocol. You will need to use a username and password to authenticate with the network to allow traffic to pass to the internet. Seems to be most popular with DSL providers probably because of their dialup heritage. 4. Custom client/logon. As seen in the roadrunner cable modem networks. A custom authentication method can be used that usually contacts a server to authenticate the user in a fashion similar in structure to PPPoE. In the case of roadrunner their client has been thouroghly reverse engineered so if you are running an alternate OS you should find a client available to keep you logged in. The proprietary method of authentication will probably become extinct as industry standard solutions are cheaper and easier for broadband providers to implement. If you are saddled by this method of authentication just check around for a third party client. It will probably provide some benefits over the standard client like automatic keep alives so your connection doesn't time out.
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Yes. Spent fuel has always been considered a long term asset by the nuclear industry. People in that industry believe that as mining the raw ore becomes more expensive and the technology for reprocessing the spent fuel becomes better it starts to become a more valuable source of future fuel.
The industry would be very different if the governments did not push the technology towards weapons production. The reactor designs we have are all old and they are designed in a way that facilitates the production of plutonium. If the research into other reactor and fuel designs that did not have as many dangerous byproducts were pursued it would be a safer industry today.
The most promising alternative is and was to use Thorium fuelled reactors instead of uranium. There is the potential for far safer reactor designs and far less hazardous waste when using that type of fuel. The USA took a relatively short look at this but then they stopped since they could not also produce weapons from these reactors and at the time it was all about the bomb. But from what I have read they will likely become a technology that becomes more interesting over time as it's capable of using depleted uranium along with the Thorium as a way to use up that spent fuel that's hanging around.
It should be obvious though there are significant challenges to getting the theory into a practical design. All those research reactor projects back in the 50's that gave engineers and scientists the knowledge to build the current reactors would need similar efforts to develop the technology for these alternative fuels and reprocessing technologies. It's starting to happen but in China and India where they have not lost their love for nuclear power yet.
Oh, you noticed they effectively doubled the price of SQL server on April 1 too?
Yeah, they went from pricing based on how many CPU's were in the server to how many cores are on those chips. But the price only remains the same if you have 4 cores in the server yet brand new machines genrally have 8 core CPU's now so it's twice the price now compared to last month for a new server. Microsoft says that the average CPU in the field has 4 CPU's but the average server is a few years old and when it is time to replace it you need to spend twice as much.
And if you're not in one of the states that explicitly grants exemptions, don't just go ahead expecting that you'll win the legal battle.
Good advice. I would suggest the outcome will depend on if the outside project is related in any way to the job you do. If it can be argued that your knowledge required to complete the project was acquired as a result of your employment or a result of training your received at work then things may not be resolved in your favour.
Hardware issue on Galaxy S. No software fix possible. Using a GPS test app you can only see a small number of satellites in most conditions. Unless you are sitting out in a wide open field on a nice day when there are no sources of interference nearby or high solar activity it will not lock on.
Even the windows in a car will attenuate the GPS signal enough to give you poor performance. Turn it off is the best advice I can give. It will only serve to lower your battery life and frustrate you.
Even if you leave every other setting unlocked you should go in and setup parental controls on your device to block in app purchasing. Do it now before you head out to the restaurant and you load up something to keep the kids amused not realizing that because you just finished downloading it your itunes account is still unlocked and the kids can buy whatever they want without a password for the next few minutes.
Even if you don't have kids of your own, you might be out with friends or family that do and your generous act of amusing the kids turns expensive.
So I infer from the description that if those first customers did not lock up all the checkouts by scanning in Alcohol perhaps more of the later customers could have also paid for their purchases.
Way back when I was in University and long before using a laptop in class became popular I was doing it on an Apple Duo 230.
It worked well for me then but it had only a single purpose during the lecture and that was for note taking. There was no wireless Internet, no peer to peer networking, and very few distractions loaded on that machine.
I would advocate that professors and students start the year off with a few minutes discussion this. Perhaps the best advice would be to institute a rule of airplane mode on, silent mode on and only accepted activity is note taking during lecture time. If the are doing a study session or discussion where Internet access actually becomes a benefit (lookup information that adds to the discussion) then perhaps the instructor would then explicitly announce to students they can go an lookup the information and turn on the wireless at those time. But the default behavior should be wireless off, class notes and materials loaded only in class.
I have to post a big Me too on this one. Never an argument, or a crazy request to reinstall software or try pointless remedies.
Nowhere near as many systems as you but exactly the same response. They fixed units that failed, took me about 1-2 minutes on the phone to go over the details and the rest of the time was just waiting for them to fill out the dispatch forms.
I predict they won't even wait for this to be perfected.
Someone in a third world country is likely brewing up a batch of stem cells in their "lab" as we speak.
Maybe they will have it ready in time for London. Weight lifting, you were a sport once. Now it's just magic show where everyone wonders how they make the trick work.
The SD Card can be locked to a specific device using a password.
example:
http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-linux-sdcard-security.php
An SD card can be locked using a password, or it can be set to permanent write protected mode.
Also the manufacturer of an SD card may not include the secure features in their cards (which would probably mean it wouldn't work on these phones)
From the linked article: ...
Technologic Systems has developed a Linux application named "sdlock" which can be used to manipulate SD card hardware-enforced password locks and set the card's permanent write-protect feature. Using a password protected SD card is a great way to ensure software security and/or to make sure your TS-7000 SBC based product cannot be used in an unintended matter once deployed. This utility is only available for the TS-7300 and TS-7400 products, which are configured with the TS-SDBOOT firmware.
Some of the possibilities include:
Password protecting SD Cards
Set the SBC to boot only locked SD Cards
Set the SD Card readable only on a specific SBC
Checksum verification of bootable SD Cards
Make an SD Card permanently write-protected
How To Use It
Usage and command line help for this command:
$ sdlock –help
Usage: sdlock [OPTION]
Controls SD card lock and permanent write-protect features.
General options:
-p, --password=PASS Use PASS as password
-c, --clear Remove password lock
-s, --set Set password lock
-u, --unlock Unlock temporarily
-e, --erase Erase entire device (clears password)
-w, --wprot Enable permanent write protect
-h, --help This help
What Google sticks into their server racks and data centres is not a good comparison to this case. That's a completely different use case.
What does Google put on their employees desks?
Last I heard they have a mixture of vendors, Apple, Dell or Lenovo machines are common with Google.
Any pictures you see posted of a Google office are usually not the desks but their crazy reception area, break room, lunch room, etc. But the few pictures I scanned through usually you see a Dell or Lenovo box peeking out with a a few obvious Apple laptop appearances.
The earlier comments about integration testing is really the key point why you would never want to roll out white box self made machines as a fleet of office computers. So lets say you pick your specs, your motherboard, video card, etc etc. Only to find out after you buy all of them that the machines randomly freeze up and you don't know why. Maybe you find out that the particular brand of video card you chose is causing the problem with the particular motherboard you choose. The same board with a different video card is fine, the same video card with a different board is fine but together every last PC you assembled will freeze up at least once a day. Not saying a Dell, HP, or Lenovo machine would never have that kind of problem but it's much less likely especially with the business oriented boxes and the extra level of integration testing those machines get even over the same companies consumer oriented units.
So looking at some of the linked info it appears that this is targeting a Siemens SIMATIC WinCC Database. It appears that the database uses a hardcoded username and password combination that end users are told not to change. I found some forum postings from people who made the mistake of changing the password only to have the software fail.
Server=.\WinCC;uid=WinCCConnect;pwd=2WSXcder (+1 for what appears to be a reasonably random looking password, -1 for being short, -1 for not including symbols, -100 for hardcoding it into the app and forcing all users to have the same exploitable entry point into their embedded database that this worm can use to read and inject code into the database)
https://www.automation.siemens.com/forum/guests/PostShow.aspx?PostID=16127&Language=en&PageIndex=2
Product being targeted:
http://www.automation.siemens.com/w2/automation-technology-distributed-control-system-simatic-pcs-7-1075.htm
Seems pretty clear that this was a targeted attack. (Launched by Competitor, former employee, etc)
I wonder what Google uses for an accounting package?
Very hard to find accounting programs that do not require Windows OS.
So there are 13,257 medallions in new york.
Lets estimate each cab makes an average of 30 trips per day. So every day there are about 397710 cab trips made or 145 million trips a year.
They are saying that 1.8 million trips were overcharged over a period of 2 years. So over 2 years there were about 290 million trips of which 1.8 million were overcharged.
So approximately 0.6% of the trips made were overcharged by about $5.
Doesn't sound like it's so bad to me. Half a percent is a legitimate rate of errors for any human endeavour. So the previous trip was out of the city area and the rate wasn't switched back for the next rider would be a good example of how that would happen.
The story seems a little sensational to me. I'm sure there are a few legitimate abusers but the numbers don't seem to imply a widespread problem to me.
Mod this one up.
This is 100% the answer the original post was looking for.
It's open source
It encrypts only the users profile folder
Doesn't require the business, or Vista Ultimate edition of Windows.
And It's not really an ugly hack. the GINA api's are stable and allow Windows to decrypt the data prior to reading the profile.
It depends on the provider you are with and the area you are located.
There is no general statement I can make that covers every situation but in general the CDMA based providers have started to allow their customers free roaming within the zone near the border for voice calls. A few years back when they were renegotiating their roaming agreements they came to the sensible conclusion that by treating those calls as regular domestic calls instead of international roaming they would make about the same amount of money since it worked both ways and they would make their customers happier when they didn't get surprise roaming bills.
Unfortunately that agreement was only for Voice calls with those specific providers and they only do it in specific areas where there is a population of people near the border. So you cannot rely on it.
The worst case scenario for this is when your CDMA phone is still locked on to a domestic tower for the voice calls but is using a foreign tower for the EVDO data connection. Most phones will not turn on the roaming indicator for when the EVDO channels in the phone are connected to another providers tower. They only show you the roaming indicator and the home option only takes effect when the primary voice 1x channels in the phone have switched. So you can set your phone to home only and if you are in that particular sweet spot where the phone will happily stay on the local providers tower for 1x voice coverage but wants to grab the foreign providers signal for data packets on the EVDO channel then you will still get a bill.
So the technical challenges with roaming can be pretty substantial. Even when the customer does everything right there are conditions where the network will provide undesired results. So hopefully the customer service at your chosen provider is helpful with resolving the billing issue these technical problems generate. Hopefully the network departments are able to figure out roaming lists which allow the phone to work as the customer intended. And hopefully the executives negotiate partner deals with an eye toward benefiting both the customer and the company interests. Unhappy customers are not likely their intention but too often the complexity of the issues at all levels serve to frustrate the end user when dealing with these large companies.
Quote from article: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers?
Paying customers of the apps Premium account level DO have a service level agreement.
Free customers do not however which is probably what they were trying to say.
Revised quote: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for free customers in addition to paying customers?
From the terms of service for Premier account edition:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html
1.9. *Service Level Agreement*, or *SLA* means the Service Level Agreement located at the following URL: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/sla.html
Downtime period is a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime
Service Credit is
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9
seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0
fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.
You must request your service credit. It is not automatic.
I think the likely reason for the large difference is that AT&T is simply giving you a total number of users who activated a phone on the Specific iphone plans and it does not include users who are blending the data only plan addition with a regular voice plan.
Many people will need more minutes than the regular iphone specific plans can deliver or wanted to keep their existing plan and simply add the iphone features to it.
Or AT&T simply doesn't like paying Apple and they are looking for ways to under report the activations of iphones until after the customers window to cancel without penalties expire or something like that.
Congratulations. You have been randomly selected for enhanced screening procedures. I wouldn't take it personally, they are required to do a full inspection now and then.
;)
a l_gun_pip.html
Either that or they thought you were smuggling in guns. You probably haven't heard but every gun used in a crime in Canada was smuggled in from the USA.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/illeg
In canada the regulations for image scan processing of cheques is actually taking steps to make post dating cheques more effective. When the regulations go into full effect at the end of this year cheques will require the date fields to be marked with month day year field indicators to remove the ambiguous notations currently used (Section 5.4.1 of new regulations).
n s/imaging.pdfn s/imaging.pdf
Basically they want to allow the banks to use image processing software to automatically recognize the date field on the cheque so that postdated or stale dated (old) cheques cannot be processed. In the past, it was very easy for the clerk to miss this. Even if they check the date on the cheques they may confuse something like January 10 and October 1. (1/10/2006 vs 10/1/2006) In Canada the conventional order of month day year is different depending on what area of the country you are in (French vs English speaking provinces traditionally do it a little bit differently). Believe me, I'm looking at store receipts and gas receipts right now to get my taxes in order and it's hard to figure out what format they use.
Links:
Main page regarding new specs http://www.cdnpay.ca/news/new_cheque_specs.asp
11 Page document explaining their take on the benefits of the new system: http://www.cdnpay.ca/publications/pdfs_publicatio
The full text of the new regulations: http://www.cdnpay.ca/publications/pdfs_publicatio
A ring laser gyro like this for aircraft cost in the neighborhood of $250,000.
A plane that wants to fly overseas routes like the atlantic routes to europe needs to have 2 of these.
I doubt that it's appropriate to adapt a device meant for objects traveling a high speeds over huge distance to something traveling in a small relative area at low speeds.
I think one of the floor grid suggestions might be workable. It reminds me of the old style optical mice that required the mirrored mouse pad with the grid lines on it to work. Actually I wonder if the current optical mice technology could scale up? Consider that the forklift is a giant mouse and the warehouse is a big mousepad. If you want to embed stuff in the floor then look at how a Wacom tablet works. Maybe that kind of thing is possible.
While the company is not one most geeks would trust I do admire this move.
Other registrars are complaining about the control and lack of innovation by ICANN yet Verisign is finding ways to intruduce new products.
If nobody buys this service then it is a failed experiment but I suspect they will do a slow but steady business selling these virtually unlimited domains. I know many companies that went out and registered their domains with the longest expiration possible at the time. If a 100 year registration was available I'm sure at least one would have done it.
Of course in 100 years from now and your company has moved 6 times, phone numbers have been extended many times, email addresses in the form used now don't even exist anymore so all the contact info on your record is completely stale. Is someone going to remember to renew? Will the renewal notices ever have a hope of arriving?
Well I can give a very positive experience with freezing a drive. I have 2 Fujitsu MPG3204AT drives. Consecutive serial numbers and both are dead with the same symptoms. The 2 drives were installed in the same machine though one of them was never actually used. I believe that either the original tech who built the computer had the second drive in the computer for the purpose of transferring an initial software image or they had intended to mirror the drives. For whatever reason the second drive was never used. They just formatted the drive and left it blank until it finally died. I unhooked that dead drive and left it in the case and didn't worry about it but then the primary drive that they were using also died.
The drive wouldn't spin up. A visual inspection of the drive and electronics looked good, no burned traces. There was no clicking or scraping sounds to indicate an old fashioned head crash, just a nearly inaudible buzz for a second after it was initially powered up. At the computer repair shop I worked in once we used to call this problem "sticktion" (stikshun).
I tried lots of the other tricks to get it to go. Swapped the electronics between the two drives. Tapped and twisted and banging the side of the drive trying to get it to spin up just after turning it on. Tried plugging it into different cables and into an external enclosure. They told me that they were having problems getting the computer to startup sometimes, especially right after shutting it down so I suspected it might be overheating so we tried a less extreme form of cooling. I let it sit for 30 minutes in a cool area but it still would not go. At this point I contacted Drivesavers for a quote ($500-$2700, $200 attempt charge even if no data recovered). Took the recovery quote to the manager and they said it wasn't worth it. It was just email from the receptionist computer and they had copies of all the important email somewhere else. They should have had a full backup copy of the hard drive as I had verified the backup on this very same computer was working properly just a week earlier but someone decided to clean up their hard drive and deleted the folder containing the backups 3 days earlier. So we called it quits, got a new hard drive and reinstalled Win98 and open office and I left.
A day later I read this article and thought what the heck. They aren't going to recover the data, they had 2 days to reconsider. They went from relatively sure they weren't going to pay for a recovery to absolutely positively sure they weren't going to pay for professional recovery. I got the drives from them, stuck the one with data in a static bag and then into a Glad(tm) brand freezer bag, and into the freezer it went. 10 hours later I pulled it out and stuck the drive in my external enclosure and BOOM it spun right up. Plugged it into my laptop, grabbed the email, bookmarks, address book, and document folders, even found their desktop picture and I'm now burning it all to a CD for tomorrow. I think they will be happy to hear the news, I just told them I wanted to try some things with the drives.
So the scoreboard on this one is:
2 Fujitsu MPG3204AT drives. Won't spin, bios doesn't see it.
-brains swapped
-gently and not so gently bumped them on their sides trying to get the motor to "unstick"
The winning method: Give the drive freezer burn!
I have never noticed the pricing in CD's to be flexible with the exchange rate either.
The pricing trends you mention are more proof that pricing levels are primarily set by "psychological" price points.
I don't know if these price points actually maximize profit or sales but it seems that most retail goods follow this same model. $199 for consumer electronics, the $999 pc, etc.
The marketing dept sets the prices.
Well I work for an ISP that uses broadjump for our client install CD. Basically broadjump as a company specializes in making these CD's that automatically check the system and do any neccesary steps for getting your broadband connection working.
In our case the CD will install a branded internet explorer/outlook express but it's just something they whiped up with the IEAK tools so nothing too special.
The big step on our network is it will register the MAC address on our customer administration webpage. Broadjump basically builds the CD to the specifications the ISP asks for. They are simply an outsourcer that specializes in these things. On our CD there are basically 3 steps. First the CD checks the machine to make sure it meets the minimum requirements. So it checks the basics like CPU speed, free hard drive space and memory. It also verifies there is an Ethernet card and that it's bound to the TCP/IP protocol with the proper DHCP settings. If it finds any problems with these settings it will give the user the opportunity to automatically fix the error or a description of the problem so you can fix it yourself. The next step is it will install the internet explorer software. After this it does a dhcp release and renew to get an IP. It then contacts the customer administration website to register the MAC address so that the computer can get a valid IP. Up to this point the machine only has a 10.x.x.x IP address which only allows you to connect to the DHCP server, DNS server, and the online customer administration servers. After it successfully registers the MAC it does another release and renew which should give you a real IP address and it uploads a text file log of the whole process to an FTP site. The text file doesn't really contain anything terribly useful and nobody on the helpdesk ever bothers with the things. Nothing evil was included in our text file though I'm sure other ISP's may ask broadjump to include some system configuration details in their implementations. Like I said, for us it's just a log file of the steps the broadjump CD completed. If it got to the point where it succesfully uploaded the file then the connection is obviously working and at that point there isn't going to be much to say in the log file of interest.
All the steps this CD takes can easily be duplicated manually. In fact most of the time if a user calls the helpdesk because they cannot get their new connection up and running we just register the MAC address manually on the website for them. Registering this address automatically is the main reason we include the CD in the self install packages. I do recommend people unfamilear with DHCP and mac addresses to use the CD on our system, there isn't anything terribly mysterious about our broadjump cd though who knows what other ISP's ask them to implement.
In general there are only a few methods of broadband client access that users need to be familear with to get up and running manually without these CD's.
1. Plain DHCP or Static address. Most cable modems work on simple DHCP addresses. Usually the cable ISP will hack their DHCP server to only allocate a certain number of unique IP's through a single cable modem. I know the cable ISP I used to work for did this. After the first 2 IP's included in a consumer package it would just keep sending a DHCP offer of the second IP address to any additional computer that sent a request from that cable modem. The system programmer there hacked a neat little system together using SNMP and DHCP. SNMP trap would be sent to the DHCP server with the sequence number of the DHCP request and serial number of the cable modem.
2. DHCP with Mac address or hostname registration. The ISP I'm working for uses the MAC address to limit the number of IP's you can get. A web interface to register these MAC addresses is available and before you register you are assigned a private IP address in the 10.x.x.x range which only works inside a small internal network segment the DNS, DHCP, and registration server are on. I have also seen ISP's that use the hostname as a unique identifier. Usually this involves setting the name of the computer to be your ISP username to get a valid IP.
3. PPPoE. An extention of the dialup authentication model to broadband connections. Usually you will need some form of client software for these though most routers have built a PPPoE clients into their firmware. MacosX also includes out of the box support for this protocol. You will need to use a username and password to authenticate with the network to allow traffic to pass to the internet. Seems to be most popular with DSL providers probably because of their dialup heritage.
4. Custom client/logon. As seen in the roadrunner cable modem networks. A custom authentication method can be used that usually contacts a server to authenticate the user in a fashion similar in structure to PPPoE. In the case of roadrunner their client has been thouroghly reverse engineered so if you are running an alternate OS you should find a client available to keep you logged in. The proprietary method of authentication will probably become extinct as industry standard solutions are cheaper and easier for broadband providers to implement. If you are saddled by this method of authentication just check around for a third party client. It will probably provide some benefits over the standard client like automatic keep alives so your connection doesn't time out.