I was working under the assumption that the GP was indicating that we were suggested to step back into the stone age. That would be the entire population of earth, without modern technology to assist us. Really, I think the farthest back we would go would be to agrarian society, but that would have significant drawbacks.
Say something cataclysmic happened tonight, and in the morning there was no power grid, no city water, no supply chains for food, fuel, etc. I'll focus on only the United States, because I am more familiar with it, and finding numbers relating to it.
According to the 2000 US census, just about 226 million people lived in 3,629 population centers that could be considered "Urban". That's just over 79% of the US population.
Assuming these people had exactly what they started out with before they went to bed, they typically would have 0 to 14 days of food supply on hand, and assuming the use of any water supplies available (i.e., toilet tank water, bottled water, etc), they may have a 3 to 4 day supply of water. Right now, if there is sufficient snow on the ground, some people may be smart and gather all the fresh fallen snow that they can. Virtually no one has any provisions for collecting rain water for drinking or cooking use.
In up to 11 days, people will begin dying of dehydration. In up to 28 days, mass starvation would take effect. Sometime between day 1 and day 10, people will begin using force to horde supplies from weaker people.
Some people will realize the futility of remaining in an urban area, and attempt to leave. In a best case scenario, starting with a fully fueled vehicle, and ideal cruising conditions, passenger vehicles can travel 400 miles. That's a best case. In reality, it won't be just one person saying "we have to get out of here", it will be hundreds of thousands. One accident, vehicle running out of fuel, or mechanical failure, and all vehicles behind them will come to a stop.
The 21% living in "Rural" areas may have a better chance. If (IF) they are lucky, they have a fresh water supply that does not depend on electricity. Most rural homes I've seen are supplied with water from electric pumps. If they are lucky, they have a good on-hand food supply. If they are lucky, they already have a food crop that can be harvested on a regular basis.
In reality, the numbers dwindle. Less than 1% of the 79% of the urbanites will be lucky enough to get to somewhere survivable, but they won't be alone. Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel). How do you trade bare essentials with your neighbors who you can't reach without a car (no fuel).
But, if the 285 million people in the United States did manage to disperse from the urban centers, to areas that could sustain them temporary for food, water, and shelter, and they managed to have or improvise hand tools to cut down trees, make fire for warmth and cooking, it would be absolutely disastrous for the environment.
This is an easy game to play. Go into your garage and shut off the main breaker (or pull the main fuse in older homes). Shut off the water and gas mains. Take all the money out of your wallet, and your credit cards, and stick them in an envelope somewhere safe that you won't touch them. Now, survive for 6 months.
In reality, if we stepped back to the "stone age" tonight, only small pockets of humanity would survive, and they would be the rural dwellers who live in fresh water rivers, have farms, and can live off the land. Everyone else will die.
Actually, with the population of the earth, going back to the stone age would be catastrophic. People would build wood fires for heat, light, and cooking. That would require mass deforestation, and the burning fires would release more pollutants than we are now.
> Hard to filter for the right JW Smythe, twenty years after the fact.
There, fixed that for you.:)
Aliases are a strange yet powerful thing. Mr. JW Smythe has been seen all across the Internet. There have been a few of us. What's funnier is, there are more people of my real name to be found. A search for me, as noted on my real birth certificate, find quite a few me's. Some are in the same city, but different addresses. Several are found in every state, including ones I've never been to. Some are well known internationally.
But for the fact that old information can be dredged up, as time goes on, things start falling off. Sites that archive information today may not exist tomorrow.
Lets use what should be a simple example. I was asked to work on a Redhat 6.2 server. The release date for RH62 was only March of 2000, so it's only coming up on 9 years old. Aw, just a baby. Trivial bits that were available years ago have been lost by the wayside. Sites have crashed and been resurrected missing older pieces. People stopped caring and just deleted things. Sometimes space becomes an issue, so old forgotten bits were deleted. What happened to that post you read in 2001 about the bug in RH62? Now it can't be found. But, who cares? Well, in this example I do, because I'm trying to work around without telling the client to upgrade to something resembling current. (they refuse to upgrade that machine)
What happened to the thousands of Fidonet posts I made in the early 90's? As far as I can tell, they're long since gone. What about the other various BBS based message systems? Likely all tossed by the wayside. I know I was great about archiving them, and at one time had them stored on my good ol' 486/33 (high speed at the time). Drives fail. Backup tapes are wiped or disposed of. I couldn't even guess at where that good ol' 486/33 ended up.
But, as you said, aliases are disposable and should be changed. I can't even remember the names I used back then. I've had so many over the years, I couldn't even guess at some of the older ones. Very infrequently do they cross paths. Even if I was presented with "In 1993, you said you had smoked marijuana", I wouldn't be able to confirm that statement. Well, I can confirm that I didn't smoke marijuana. I just can't confirm nor deny the statement. Really, who could authenticate the legitimacy of such an online posting? As a joke and proof, I used to send emails to coworkers from various public figures. I had sent an email to a Microsoft fanboy from "Bill Gates", with what appeared to be legitimate headers, offering him a job. He almost quit, except the office manager laughed at him. The officer manager was in on the joke.:) Electronic, paper, whatever, you have to prove the legitimacy of a document. Otherwise, I can produce information from 1985 where George W. Bush admits that he likes wearing womans clothing.
I almost got a ticket once, because the parking meter I was parked at ran out. The parking enforcement officer came up, tapped on my window, and asked "Are you going to pay that, or do I have to write you a ticket?"
I pointed at the car that had double parked beside me. I hadn't stayed to be a scofflaw, I had stayed because there was a car blocking me in.
The officer was much more interested in writing the ticket for parking in the road, blocking traffic, etc, etc. When the lady noticed her car was getting ticketed, she ran over, jumped in, and took off. I hope she got the ticket in the mail.
But likewise, not all tickets are legitimate.
I got ticketed once, for parking in my own driveway. They believed my bumper was "too close" to the sidewalk. Since the other bumper was against the garage door, and the vehicle wasn't in any way blocking the sidewalk, they were just looking for anything to ticket. I lived there over a year, and always parked there, and only was ticketed once. They should have made more of an effort to ticket the people who parked across my driveway. Sometimes I couldn't leave because they were blocking me in.
If I were him, I'd refuse and take the contempt charge. I'd be pretty sure the ACLU will have someone there pretty quickly to assist.
Just because he agreed to help does not guarantee his continued assistance in all matters. They can compel him. They can bully him. They can't force him to do anything.
He could go as far as unencrypting the data, showing it to them, giving them the grand tour of all his smut, and when they ask "Is this your smut?" he doesn't have to answer. The other evidence would be damning, but still....
If they can't get the encrypted data, they have no evidence that he has smut on his computer (I assume). No evidence means they have nothing to try him for. Possession of a locked box that can't be locked, but may contain something bad is not evidence that he has anything in the box at all.
But, I'm sure if the prosecutor is good, they can convince the jury of anything. That's their job.
That would have been nasty. Sunlight unfiltered by the earth's atmosphere? You saw the way the light bloomed in the video. That would have made a mess of an astronaut's eyes. Well, and their face.:)
(ya, ya, I know they have filtered shields on their helmets)
And, we don't have the technology to dump that data back, so it would just have been his (or her) word "Oh, that was beautiful"
Now, if they had done it with a better camera, I would have been more impressed.:)
I don't disagree that it's useful to have a browser available when I work on a freshly installed machine. MSIE is available, so I can download Firefox. But, it would be nice to be able to uninstall MSIE afterward.
For Linux, yes we have a browser. Well, many browsers. When I installed the workstation I'm on right now, I did an "everything" install. That came with Epiphany, Konqueror, Firefox, SeaMonkey, Links, Lynx. I then added Opera. For giggles, I added MSIE with IEs4Linux, so I have MSIE 5, 5.5, 6, and 7. That gives me two things that Windows users can't do. I have multiple versions of MSIE (you can't do that in Windows), AND I can remove it at any time I so decide. Actually, I can remove every single web browser at any time, without harming my system. The only "harm" will be that I can't browse to Slashdot.:)
> As far as wiping the configs, that was paranoid overkill, but considering how often city > office property gets stolen, wiping the config keeps thieves from getting the network > settings to the whole thing which is more valuable than any one office of downtime due > to power failure.
When I left my last job as Sr. SysAdmin (they laid me off, for someone cheaper), they were absolutely sure I had left back doors into the network, and that I could sabotage everything. They couldn't find the backdoors (because they didn't exist), and ended up changing the OS on every server. In that beautiful move, they screwed up an awful lot of stuff. Ha!
The funniest part was, some of the people who they kept on were thieves. They were stealing confidential data, and abusing the network for personal gains. It took two more years for them to figure that one out. All I can do now, since I have no involvement in that company, is sit back and laugh.:)
The "keys to the kingdom" were on file with senior management though. Shit happens. I could get hit by a bus. I could get shot in a botched convenience story robbery. I could just decide not to ever come to work because I got a better offer. Why cripple their company?
I'm pretty sure they're holding a whole jail open for people like us.:)
I'm an asshole to work for.. I'm an asshole to work with.. But, when I'm in charge, I run a tight ship, and everything gets done right and quickly.
But, someone in senior management always has the master password list, in case I get hit by a bus or something.
As for modems, who uses those any more.:) Apparently a few of his were DSL lines, so they were probably always up. Having redundant lines is a good thing, especially if part of his network supported essential services (EMS/911/etc)
Ya, someone else said they got QZHTTP. I got qhttpd. I know the others are hostnames. it was just a wild guess at where they may have gathered statistics from. If it wasn't, then they likely only got a fraction of the total hosts that QQ is hosting in their nice shiny new server farm.:)
It appears that there are at least a few "qhttpd" projects, so the magic question becomes, are they using one of those, or a hack of something else to show the qhttpd/QZHTTP banner.
I can't imagine they're trying to run a mirrored server farm on multiple web server platforms. It's probably an inconsistency in the configs when they changed the banner from whatever.
You should have seen me take the Cisco test. "write m" isn't acceptable. "copy run start" is. I typed the wrong command every time to save. At least they don't mark you down for hitting wrong commands, as long as the outcome is right.:) I still do "write m" on real Cisco equipment. It's an old habit.
My guess on the QZHTTP thing is that they're simply sending their own banner, rather than that of their real server. It's not exactly rocket science. Anyone who's good enough to handle millions of domains can set one line of configuration I wish we had some examples. The qq.com domain itself, besides being pathetically slow, gives these headers:
telnet www.qq.com 80 Connected to www.qq.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET ? HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request Server: squid/2.6.STABLE5 Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:17:23 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 1336 Expires: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:17:23 GMT X-Squid-Error: ERR_INVALID_URL 0 X-Cache: MISS from rainny.qq.com Via: 1.0 rainny.qq.com:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE5) Connection: close
So, I'd guess they're basing that analysis on the Via or X-Cache lines (or both)
For those who aren't familiar with the headers, this is what it looks like from Slashdot telnet slashdot.org 80 Trying 216.34.181.45... Connected to slashdot.org. Escape character is '^]'. GET ? HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:19:49 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Vary: Accept-Encoding, User-Agent
I'll simpify the rest, and just show the "Server:" line.
My sister hates me sending her articles from The Sun. It's roughly the equivelant of believing the old "Weekly World News". For those who aren't familiar with it, at least some stories had some tiny piece of truth, but that was about it. They'd make up wild stories, and people would believe it.
I've seen similar marks when looking at photos of the moon, mars, and desolate places on Earth that people don't dig trenches in (or even live close to). Now, are they artifacts from the way the images were created, or natural lines, I dunno.
I've looked at enough Atlantis stuff to be curious. What's missing from this is the essential shape of Atlantis. It was suppose to be concentric circles. The center was the main city/castle/etc. There was a ring of ocean, and then another ring of land. etc, etc, etc. There were one or two canals out of the city, likely to the North and South. The important part is.... ROUND, not square.:)
What we have there is obviously... a giant space flyswatter! The martians used it to squish some giant space fly. Don't look under it, you won't like what you find.:)
If anyone can find where this could be, I'm sure the folks at Microsoft would appreciate it. Email to secret.prototype.department@microsoft.com . Make your subject "I know where your phone is."
Hopefully no one would reverse engineer the device, and leak trade secrets to the competition who would then include those new innovations into their own products, where Microsoft would then be able to sue them out of business.
I had one that would. Well, when she felt like it. She actually responded to verbal queues, again when she felt like it. If she didn't, she'd just give a dirty look.:)
Actually, you and your cousin Vinny are an example I was going to make here.
If I "encourage" you two to shoot someone, regardless if I'm there or not, does that free me from any criminal responsibility? Nope. I'd be willing to bet that I'd be sitting in jail waiting for my conviction (bah, who needs a trial) on 1st degree murder.
Instead of using you and Vinny, what if I rigged up a shotgun (with a hair trigger, of course), through a pulley, to the cat's collar? At the time an intended victim was in front of the shotgun, I call the cat, and it shoots. I don't think there's a jury in the world that would go for the "Oh no, the cat did it." defense.
I know there's been at least one conviction where a guy set up an "anti-intruder" system at his house. He tied a string to the doorknob, which lead to a shotgun mounted in the hallway. Someone broke in, and was shot (surprise). Through his action or inaction, he caused the final result.
A shrinkwrap/clickthrough agreement is a joke at best. I would be more concerned about being hit by you or Vinny (since I haven't pissed off that many people, I doubt I'm a target yet), than I would be about even hear a word from a lawyer about some shrinkwrap agreement. But you never know, the economy is starting to really suck. Maybe big businesses will start trying to cash in on their shrinkwrap licenses.
You know, when you go to make the argument to your superiors as they're giving the lovely speech of "we're firing you", it's just added insubordination. Make sure it sticks.:)
"Sirs and ma'am, I spent the extra necessary time on the project because the coders you had working her previous to me were complete morons who had no clue of what they were doing. I am aware that these untrained monkeys who had just escaped the circus were working for peanuts (or bananas), but they should not have ever been allowed to touch a computer, much less code even a "hello world" shell script. In years past, the imbecile who not only gave them access to develop such code, but also authorized it to be in production wouldn't be fired. He would have been drawn, quartered, and beheaded for betraying the crown. I understand this is the 21st century, so he has been given a C-level position, a paycheck 100 times what he deserves, and a secretary who is taking an fully paid sick day today to have an abortion of his illegitimate child.
Being that the level of bureaucracy exists that such gross incompetence exists at all levels of management, where I am being fired for being one of the few in my group with the ability to accomplish the projects, and I was willing to put in the extra time here at work. I would have preferred to have been at home, having hot dirty sex with my girlfriend. I consider it a pleasure that you are firing me. As you fire the only remaining talent, you will find that your company was running on a prayer as it was. With idiots like you at the helm, full speed ahead towards that iceberg off your bow! More power to you when the stockholders get a hold of you."
You'll probably get a less than friendly invitation to leave the office, and probably a firm escort through the front doors. They may even open the doors first.:)
I should mention, no I haven't given that speech, and no it does NOT accurately depict my current working environment. It's simply a combination of past experience.:)
Every employer has some petty reason for something. I've seen quite a few people laid off due to personality conflicts. They're always well documented as some other reason. 5 minutes late last thursday? Didn't get the impossible project done on time? Myself, I was once written up for working 1 minute overtime. Honestly, exactly 1 minute over in one week.
It would be nice to know what kind of people you'd really be working with, but you'll never find out until you start.
The one I usually hear is "You would be perfect here. We need everything you know. We just can't afford you. We hate to insult you by asking this, but will you work for $20k/yr?"
I wouldn't worry that an employer may or may not find something in my history, or the history of someone with my name. I'd worry that there's an employer hiring.
I personally know dozens of people who have been laid off recently because their businesses are doing poorly. I can't think of anyone who's started a new job in quite a while. Now even my friends are my competition if I need to start looking for a job.
It's not necessarily a matter of what the battery needs to charge. What does the charging circuit expect to be able to draw? If it can't draw sufficient power, it may not try to charge.... or a better example...
A friend of mine has a.. well, some weird little phone.:) I know it was covered here on Slashdot at some point. Anyways, it's a neat phone, but if the battery dies, you can't charge it. No power means nothing to power the charging circuit to say it's allowed to charge. It's just a subtle design flaw.
So we cheated. We couldn't find a stand-alone charger for the battery. If we can't bring power to the battery, we have to bring it to the phone, so the phone can charge the battery. It needed a jump start.
It has a 3.5v battery, something like 1500mAh. The design spec is up to 4.2 volts.
I wired two C-cell batteries in series. They each read 1.8v on my meter, which can be expected from dry-cell batteries. I carefully attached two wires between the battery and the phone, so the battery made contact with it's normal terminals, AND my wires.
When everything was connected, we were able to turn it on, and plug it back into the wall. After about a minute, it started to charge.
So, just because you think something operates one way, doesn't mean that it really does.
I know the crackberry's won't charge unless the driver is installed (a kernel option in Linux). They expect to pull more current than is available in low power mode, and it simply doesn't work.
I was working on some other piece of hardware. I can't remember exactly what right now. But, it was the same way. The port had to be told to allow the extra current, and voila, it would work.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I was working under the assumption that the GP was indicating that we were suggested to step back into the stone age. That would be the entire population of earth, without modern technology to assist us. Really, I think the farthest back we would go would be to agrarian society, but that would have significant drawbacks.
Say something cataclysmic happened tonight, and in the morning there was no power grid, no city water, no supply chains for food, fuel, etc. I'll focus on only the United States, because I am more familiar with it, and finding numbers relating to it.
According to the 2000 US census, just about 226 million people lived in 3,629 population centers that could be considered "Urban". That's just over 79% of the US population.
Assuming these people had exactly what they started out with before they went to bed, they typically would have 0 to 14 days of food supply on hand, and assuming the use of any water supplies available (i.e., toilet tank water, bottled water, etc), they may have a 3 to 4 day supply of water. Right now, if there is sufficient snow on the ground, some people may be smart and gather all the fresh fallen snow that they can. Virtually no one has any provisions for collecting rain water for drinking or cooking use.
In up to 11 days, people will begin dying of dehydration. In up to 28 days, mass starvation would take effect. Sometime between day 1 and day 10, people will begin using force to horde supplies from weaker people.
Some people will realize the futility of remaining in an urban area, and attempt to leave. In a best case scenario, starting with a fully fueled vehicle, and ideal cruising conditions, passenger vehicles can travel 400 miles. That's a best case. In reality, it won't be just one person saying "we have to get out of here", it will be hundreds of thousands. One accident, vehicle running out of fuel, or mechanical failure, and all vehicles behind them will come to a stop.
The 21% living in "Rural" areas may have a better chance. If (IF) they are lucky, they have a fresh water supply that does not depend on electricity. Most rural homes I've seen are supplied with water from electric pumps. If they are lucky, they have a good on-hand food supply. If they are lucky, they already have a food crop that can be harvested on a regular basis.
In reality, the numbers dwindle. Less than 1% of the 79% of the urbanites will be lucky enough to get to somewhere survivable, but they won't be alone. Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel). How do you trade bare essentials with your neighbors who you can't reach without a car (no fuel).
But, if the 285 million people in the United States did manage to disperse from the urban centers, to areas that could sustain them temporary for food, water, and shelter, and they managed to have or improvise hand tools to cut down trees, make fire for warmth and cooking, it would be absolutely disastrous for the environment.
This is an easy game to play. Go into your garage and shut off the main breaker (or pull the main fuse in older homes). Shut off the water and gas mains. Take all the money out of your wallet, and your credit cards, and stick them in an envelope somewhere safe that you won't touch them. Now, survive for 6 months.
In reality, if we stepped back to the "stone age" tonight, only small pockets of humanity would survive, and they would be the rural dwellers who live in fresh water rivers, have farms, and can live off the land. Everyone else will die.
Actually, with the population of the earth, going back to the stone age would be catastrophic. People would build wood fires for heat, light, and cooking. That would require mass deforestation, and the burning fires would release more pollutants than we are now.
> Hard to filter for the right JW Smythe, twenty years after the fact.
There, fixed that for you. :)
Aliases are a strange yet powerful thing. Mr. JW Smythe has been seen all across the Internet. There have been a few of us. What's funnier is, there are more people of my real name to be found. A search for me, as noted on my real birth certificate, find quite a few me's. Some are in the same city, but different addresses. Several are found in every state, including ones I've never been to. Some are well known internationally.
But for the fact that old information can be dredged up, as time goes on, things start falling off. Sites that archive information today may not exist tomorrow.
Lets use what should be a simple example. I was asked to work on a Redhat 6.2 server. The release date for RH62 was only March of 2000, so it's only coming up on 9 years old. Aw, just a baby. Trivial bits that were available years ago have been lost by the wayside. Sites have crashed and been resurrected missing older pieces. People stopped caring and just deleted things. Sometimes space becomes an issue, so old forgotten bits were deleted. What happened to that post you read in 2001 about the bug in RH62? Now it can't be found. But, who cares? Well, in this example I do, because I'm trying to work around without telling the client to upgrade to something resembling current. (they refuse to upgrade that machine)
What happened to the thousands of Fidonet posts I made in the early 90's? As far as I can tell, they're long since gone. What about the other various BBS based message systems? Likely all tossed by the wayside. I know I was great about archiving them, and at one time had them stored on my good ol' 486/33 (high speed at the time). Drives fail. Backup tapes are wiped or disposed of. I couldn't even guess at where that good ol' 486/33 ended up.
But, as you said, aliases are disposable and should be changed. I can't even remember the names I used back then. I've had so many over the years, I couldn't even guess at some of the older ones. Very infrequently do they cross paths. Even if I was presented with "In 1993, you said you had smoked marijuana", I wouldn't be able to confirm that statement. Well, I can confirm that I didn't smoke marijuana. I just can't confirm nor deny the statement. Really, who could authenticate the legitimacy of such an online posting? As a joke and proof, I used to send emails to coworkers from various public figures. I had sent an email to a Microsoft fanboy from "Bill Gates", with what appeared to be legitimate headers, offering him a job. He almost quit, except the office manager laughed at him. The officer manager was in on the joke. :) Electronic, paper, whatever, you have to prove the legitimacy of a document. Otherwise, I can produce information from 1985 where George W. Bush admits that he likes wearing womans clothing.
I've seen a lot of bad parking jobs.
I almost got a ticket once, because the parking meter I was parked at ran out. The parking enforcement officer came up, tapped on my window, and asked "Are you going to pay that, or do I have to write you a ticket?"
I pointed at the car that had double parked beside me. I hadn't stayed to be a scofflaw, I had stayed because there was a car blocking me in.
The officer was much more interested in writing the ticket for parking in the road, blocking traffic, etc, etc. When the lady noticed her car was getting ticketed, she ran over, jumped in, and took off. I hope she got the ticket in the mail.
But likewise, not all tickets are legitimate.
I got ticketed once, for parking in my own driveway. They believed my bumper was "too close" to the sidewalk. Since the other bumper was against the garage door, and the vehicle wasn't in any way blocking the sidewalk, they were just looking for anything to ticket. I lived there over a year, and always parked there, and only was ticketed once. They should have made more of an effort to ticket the people who parked across my driveway. Sometimes I couldn't leave because they were blocking me in.
I think you're thinking of the Annabel Chong movie. :)
If I were him, I'd refuse and take the contempt charge. I'd be pretty sure the ACLU will have someone there pretty quickly to assist.
Just because he agreed to help does not guarantee his continued assistance in all matters. They can compel him. They can bully him. They can't force him to do anything.
He could go as far as unencrypting the data, showing it to them, giving them the grand tour of all his smut, and when they ask "Is this your smut?" he doesn't have to answer. The other evidence would be damning, but still....
If they can't get the encrypted data, they have no evidence that he has smut on his computer (I assume). No evidence means they have nothing to try him for. Possession of a locked box that can't be locked, but may contain something bad is not evidence that he has anything in the box at all.
But, I'm sure if the prosecutor is good, they can convince the jury of anything. That's their job.
That would have been nasty. Sunlight unfiltered by the earth's atmosphere? You saw the way the light bloomed in the video. That would have made a mess of an astronaut's eyes. Well, and their face. :)
(ya, ya, I know they have filtered shields on their helmets)
And, we don't have the technology to dump that data back, so it would just have been his (or her) word "Oh, that was beautiful"
Now, if they had done it with a better camera, I would have been more impressed. :)
But, you can change the radio in your Ford.
You can't removed MSIE
I don't disagree that it's useful to have a browser available when I work on a freshly installed machine. MSIE is available, so I can download Firefox. But, it would be nice to be able to uninstall MSIE afterward.
For Linux, yes we have a browser. Well, many browsers. When I installed the workstation I'm on right now, I did an "everything" install. That came with Epiphany, Konqueror, Firefox, SeaMonkey, Links, Lynx. I then added Opera. For giggles, I added MSIE with IEs4Linux, so I have MSIE 5, 5.5, 6, and 7. That gives me two things that Windows users can't do. I have multiple versions of MSIE (you can't do that in Windows), AND I can remove it at any time I so decide. Actually, I can remove every single web browser at any time, without harming my system. The only "harm" will be that I can't browse to Slashdot. :)
> As far as wiping the configs, that was paranoid overkill, but considering how often city
> office property gets stolen, wiping the config keeps thieves from getting the network
> settings to the whole thing which is more valuable than any one office of downtime due
> to power failure.
When I left my last job as Sr. SysAdmin (they laid me off, for someone cheaper), they were absolutely sure I had left back doors into the network, and that I could sabotage everything. They couldn't find the backdoors (because they didn't exist), and ended up changing the OS on every server. In that beautiful move, they screwed up an awful lot of stuff. Ha!
The funniest part was, some of the people who they kept on were thieves. They were stealing confidential data, and abusing the network for personal gains. It took two more years for them to figure that one out. All I can do now, since I have no involvement in that company, is sit back and laugh. :)
The "keys to the kingdom" were on file with senior management though. Shit happens. I could get hit by a bus. I could get shot in a botched convenience story robbery. I could just decide not to ever come to work because I got a better offer. Why cripple their company?
I'm pretty sure they're holding a whole jail open for people like us. :)
I'm an asshole to work for.. I'm an asshole to work with.. But, when I'm in charge, I run a tight ship, and everything gets done right and quickly.
But, someone in senior management always has the master password list, in case I get hit by a bus or something.
As for modems, who uses those any more. :) Apparently a few of his were DSL lines, so they were probably always up. Having redundant lines is a good thing, especially if part of his network supported essential services (EMS/911/etc)
Ya, someone else said they got QZHTTP. I got qhttpd. I know the others are hostnames. it was just a wild guess at where they may have gathered statistics from. If it wasn't, then they likely only got a fraction of the total hosts that QQ is hosting in their nice shiny new server farm. :)
It appears that there are at least a few "qhttpd" projects, so the magic question becomes, are they using one of those, or a hack of something else to show the qhttpd/QZHTTP banner.
I can't imagine they're trying to run a mirrored server farm on multiple web server platforms. It's probably an inconsistency in the configs when they changed the banner from whatever.
Old habits die hard.
You should have seen me take the Cisco test. "write m" isn't acceptable. "copy run start" is. I typed the wrong command every time to save. At least they don't mark you down for hitting wrong commands, as long as the outcome is right. :) I still do "write m" on real Cisco equipment. It's an old habit.
Hey, that's not fair. I saw one good Geocities site....
Once....
A long time ago...
Ok, you're right. :)
My guess on the QZHTTP thing is that they're simply sending their own banner, rather than that of their real server. It's not exactly rocket science. Anyone who's good enough to handle millions of domains can set one line of configuration I wish we had some examples. The qq.com domain itself, besides being pathetically slow, gives these headers:
telnet www.qq.com 80
Connected to www.qq.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET ? HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
Server: squid/2.6.STABLE5
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:17:23 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1336
Expires: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:17:23 GMT
X-Squid-Error: ERR_INVALID_URL 0
X-Cache: MISS from rainny.qq.com
Via: 1.0 rainny.qq.com:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE5)
Connection: close
So, I'd guess they're basing that analysis on the Via or X-Cache lines (or both)
For those who aren't familiar with the headers, this is what it looks like from Slashdot
telnet slashdot.org 80
Trying 216.34.181.45...
Connected to slashdot.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET ? HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:19:49 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Vary: Accept-Encoding, User-Agent
I'll simpify the rest, and just show the "Server:" line.
Apache.org: Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Unix)
Microsoft: Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
Whitehouse.gov: Server: AkamaiGHost
cnn.com: Server: Apache
My sister hates me sending her articles from The Sun. It's roughly the equivelant of believing the old "Weekly World News". For those who aren't familiar with it, at least some stories had some tiny piece of truth, but that was about it. They'd make up wild stories, and people would believe it.
I've seen similar marks when looking at photos of the moon, mars, and desolate places on Earth that people don't dig trenches in (or even live close to). Now, are they artifacts from the way the images were created, or natural lines, I dunno.
I've looked at enough Atlantis stuff to be curious. What's missing from this is the essential shape of Atlantis. It was suppose to be concentric circles. The center was the main city/castle/etc. There was a ring of ocean, and then another ring of land. etc, etc, etc. There were one or two canals out of the city, likely to the North and South. The important part is .... ROUND, not square. :)
What we have there is obviously ... a giant space flyswatter! The martians used it to squish some giant space fly. Don't look under it, you won't like what you find. :)
Who? me?
Actually, it does. But, the latitude, longitude, altitude speed and heading frequently get switched.
After correcting the inconsistencies, it last checked in for an update 3 hours ago from:
Lat/Lon: 47.64408, -122.128556
Lat/Lon: +47 38' 38.69", -122 7' 42.80"
Speed: 5mph
Heading: 180.0
(All information is +- 500 feet or 5%)
If anyone can find where this could be, I'm sure the folks at Microsoft would appreciate it. Email to secret.prototype.department@microsoft.com . Make your subject "I know where your phone is."
Hopefully no one would reverse engineer the device, and leak trade secrets to the competition who would then include those new innovations into their own products, where Microsoft would then be able to sue them out of business.
I had one that would. Well, when she felt like it. She actually responded to verbal queues, again when she felt like it. If she didn't, she'd just give a dirty look. :)
Actually, you and your cousin Vinny are an example I was going to make here.
If I "encourage" you two to shoot someone, regardless if I'm there or not, does that free me from any criminal responsibility? Nope. I'd be willing to bet that I'd be sitting in jail waiting for my conviction (bah, who needs a trial) on 1st degree murder.
Instead of using you and Vinny, what if I rigged up a shotgun (with a hair trigger, of course), through a pulley, to the cat's collar? At the time an intended victim was in front of the shotgun, I call the cat, and it shoots. I don't think there's a jury in the world that would go for the "Oh no, the cat did it." defense.
I know there's been at least one conviction where a guy set up an "anti-intruder" system at his house. He tied a string to the doorknob, which lead to a shotgun mounted in the hallway. Someone broke in, and was shot (surprise). Through his action or inaction, he caused the final result.
A shrinkwrap/clickthrough agreement is a joke at best. I would be more concerned about being hit by you or Vinny (since I haven't pissed off that many people, I doubt I'm a target yet), than I would be about even hear a word from a lawyer about some shrinkwrap agreement. But you never know, the economy is starting to really suck. Maybe big businesses will start trying to cash in on their shrinkwrap licenses.
But, I don't know Visual Basic. I guess I probably do, but much like Java I won't admit that I do. :)
If their budget is so low that they can't pay me anything resembling what I'm worth, I don't need to be there.
You know, when you go to make the argument to your superiors as they're giving the lovely speech of "we're firing you", it's just added insubordination. Make sure it sticks. :)
"Sirs and ma'am, I spent the extra necessary time on the project because the coders you had working her previous to me were complete morons who had no clue of what they were doing. I am aware that these untrained monkeys who had just escaped the circus were working for peanuts (or bananas), but they should not have ever been allowed to touch a computer, much less code even a "hello world" shell script. In years past, the imbecile who not only gave them access to develop such code, but also authorized it to be in production wouldn't be fired. He would have been drawn, quartered, and beheaded for betraying the crown. I understand this is the 21st century, so he has been given a C-level position, a paycheck 100 times what he deserves, and a secretary who is taking an fully paid sick day today to have an abortion of his illegitimate child.
Being that the level of bureaucracy exists that such gross incompetence exists at all levels of management, where I am being fired for being one of the few in my group with the ability to accomplish the projects, and I was willing to put in the extra time here at work. I would have preferred to have been at home, having hot dirty sex with my girlfriend. I consider it a pleasure that you are firing me. As you fire the only remaining talent, you will find that your company was running on a prayer as it was. With idiots like you at the helm, full speed ahead towards that iceberg off your bow! More power to you when the stockholders get a hold of you."
You'll probably get a less than friendly invitation to leave the office, and probably a firm escort through the front doors. They may even open the doors first. :)
I should mention, no I haven't given that speech, and no it does NOT accurately depict my current working environment. It's simply a combination of past experience. :)
Every employer has some petty reason for something. I've seen quite a few people laid off due to personality conflicts. They're always well documented as some other reason. 5 minutes late last thursday? Didn't get the impossible project done on time? Myself, I was once written up for working 1 minute overtime. Honestly, exactly 1 minute over in one week.
It would be nice to know what kind of people you'd really be working with, but you'll never find out until you start.
The one I usually hear is "You would be perfect here. We need everything you know. We just can't afford you. We hate to insult you by asking this, but will you work for $20k/yr?"
I wouldn't worry that an employer may or may not find something in my history, or the history of someone with my name. I'd worry that there's an employer hiring.
I personally know dozens of people who have been laid off recently because their businesses are doing poorly. I can't think of anyone who's started a new job in quite a while. Now even my friends are my competition if I need to start looking for a job.
It's not necessarily a matter of what the battery needs to charge. What does the charging circuit expect to be able to draw? If it can't draw sufficient power, it may not try to charge. ... or a better example ...
A friend of mine has a .. well, some weird little phone. :) I know it was covered here on Slashdot at some point. Anyways, it's a neat phone, but if the battery dies, you can't charge it. No power means nothing to power the charging circuit to say it's allowed to charge. It's just a subtle design flaw.
So we cheated. We couldn't find a stand-alone charger for the battery. If we can't bring power to the battery, we have to bring it to the phone, so the phone can charge the battery. It needed a jump start.
It has a 3.5v battery, something like 1500mAh. The design spec is up to 4.2 volts.
I wired two C-cell batteries in series. They each read 1.8v on my meter, which can be expected from dry-cell batteries. I carefully attached two wires between the battery and the phone, so the battery made contact with it's normal terminals, AND my wires.
When everything was connected, we were able to turn it on, and plug it back into the wall. After about a minute, it started to charge.
So, just because you think something operates one way, doesn't mean that it really does.
I know the crackberry's won't charge unless the driver is installed (a kernel option in Linux). They expect to pull more current than is available in low power mode, and it simply doesn't work.
I was working on some other piece of hardware. I can't remember exactly what right now. But, it was the same way. The port had to be told to allow the extra current, and voila, it would work. :)