We've been using the Skype Connect business service for several months. Works great on our Switchvox (asterisk-based phone server with nice GUI). All it takes is to connect as a standard SIP client to Skype after setting up the account with them.
It seems they are just simplifying their offerings, as you don't need any sort of plugin to asterisk to accomplish this.
I had this exact same symptom on my Droid Incredible yesterday. The microphone worked fine for a voice search (I was afraid of hardware failure), so I just rebooted and everything went back to normal. Curiously, outbound calls I could hear the other person by they could not hear me, and inbound call was dead silent.
We offer a "live help" service to our customers. We used to use PHPLive! (paid app) until they vanished out of existence leaving us with several major security holes. We replaced that with Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH) which is open source and works reasonably well and seems to be pretty safe. I had it scanned by ScanAlert to test against XSS and SQL injection type attacks, and anything else that may raise alarms for "HackerSafe" certification.
The only feature we want that it doesn't have is "rate this operator" at the end of the chat session.
They want to find porn and/or stuff to hand over to the RIAA.
If you put movies on your laptop, delete them after you watch them or before you come home.
If you have a reasonable amount of music you should be safe.
They won't care what your pictures are unless they are pornographic.
But for absolute safety, you must save your pictures to some other device you're not carrying with you in case they decide to take it from you for whatever reason they make up. A network backup is the best bet, and using an encrypted service like JungleDisk is very smart.
Definitely image your laptop to a USB drive you leave at home before you head out, to make recovery faster.
I have the job of assuring PCI compliance at my company. In July the PCI rules changed and some of our systems suddenly became non-compliant as reported by our scanning service.
The two issues were:
1) we ran identd
2) we ran anonymous ftp
The problem is that just the existence of these services is a PCI violation. Even though it is possible (and we do) to configure these services securely.
For identd, the "threat" is that it will leak information about user accounts. We run the liedentd daemon, which responds "nobody" to every request. Thus no information is ever leaked, yet we are not compliant. We run identd since we send a lot of mail and a large percentage of remote sites do ident queries and having an ident server speeds things up.
For anonymous ftp, the threats are: user account leaks, DoS by filling your disk, and making files available. All of these are easily mitigated. Running anonymous ftp in a chroot jail with a private password file limits revealing any information about users -- just delete all but the mandatory "root" and "ftp" user IDs. Limit uploads by only allowing uploads into a small disk partition mounted as the "incoming" directory. We use a file-based virtual file system (vnode file system in BSD) to limit uploads to 50MB. There is no way to fill our real disk. Finally, because it is in a chroot, no other files will be leaked.
At least for the anonymous ftp, we could fake out our scanning company by renaming the "root" account in the jail to "toor".
There is no workaround for the identd "violation". I don't think the people making the PCI really think very much about the anything other than traditional e-commerce web service applications.
A few years back, Damian Conway demonstrated a Klingon interpreter layer on top of Perl. He literally wrote code in klingon that ran on the perl interpreter.
Last summer at OSCON 2005, he demo'd his LATIN version.
Unfortunatly, I don't believe he has released source code for either one.
Long ago, in a land far-far away, a fellow at Bell Labs (IIRC, named Steve Uhler) released for the Sun3 (ie, 68030 based boxes) a windowing system called MGR. It was wickedly simple, and entirely network transparent. That is, if you could telnet/ssh/whatever to a remote system and open a shell, you could run graphical applications.
The core was extremely small and simple. Unfortunately, the apps were few and far between, existing mostly of basic tools like a terminal and a "Mickey Mouse Watch" emulator. It would have filled your wish for a nice GUI which is extremely simple to implement. The major drawback was parts were writtin in 68030 assembler, making portability challenging.
I question Novell's 100% switch away from Office
on
Fun Stuff at OSCON 2005
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a buddy who works in the Novell legal department. I asked him if he was being forced to switch from MSOffice to OpenOffice, and he said no. There is no way he could prepare his necessary documents with OO because of some features it lacked. Specifically he said they had problems with generating the kinds of tables they needed.
Further, he indicated that they were not going to be forced to switch. I wonder if that 100% change that Miguel indicated was for the technical and support staff only.
Anyhow, I decided to download and try out NLD when I got back from the conference. It failed to recognize my monitor (19" Dell flat panel with DVI interface) and sound didn't work even though it recognized the card. On recommendation from a friend, I tried Ubuntu the other night and it worked with everything (except the printer needs some driver change to work which I haven't done yet).
I typically purchase about $15k to $30k of servers from Dell each year. Last December I asked them to guarantee to me that the server I was preparing to purchase (about $8k for one box) would perform like I needed (very high I/O speed), given that the similar one I got a year ago was barely keeping up with the load I needed.
Others with similar hardware were getting more than double the I/O performance, but were not using Dells. They had no answers for me other than 'trust us'. When I asked about AMD solutions which others had reported providing the necessary speed, they just more or less did the equivalent of staring at me over the phone.
I ended up buying an Opteron system from Iron Systems which has more then met the challenge. They are about to get yet another order for an identical system. That's $16k to Iron, and $16k less for Dell. Not to mention that they've lost my server business... probably close to $30k this year.
So it will add up. They can't keep ignoring Opteron.
But IBM has rights to put any and all of that code into AIX. They paid SCO (or its predecessors) for that.
However, SCO are trying to show that code from AIX was copied into linux, and they want to claim that even if IBM wrote it, because they put it into AIX first, SCO owns it. Something like that...
You are totally wrong. You can invalidate any single claim of the patent while not affecting others. That's why they have so many individual claims in them. Kind of like shooting buck shot to kill a rat sometimes.
Back in the seemingly dark ages of the early 90's the "hot" thing in OS design was microkernels (think Mach -- known today as MacOS/Darwin kernel for most poeple).
Many people found that while the idea was wonderful, the implementation of it sucked, because of the massive context switching and message passing necessary.
The next generation of kernels took the microkernel idea of complete separation of functions but linked it all together in a single executable, replacing message passing with parameter passing. This produces much of the benefit of the microkernel design without the tremendous speed degredation of the microkernel design. Monolithic kernels are here to stay, just because they perform better.
The FreeBSD kernel, at least, has incredible amounts of engineering in it. Device drivers are not put in unless they are well built (ie, no stupid things like wait loops, or polling when it is at all avoidable).
When you don't cut corners, sometimes things run slower but you are assured that they work correctly. I'll take correct over fast any day, especially when my business depends on it.
Last year, my partner took a flight from DC to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. The were testing IP connections then, and he was able to borrow a laptop from the plane's stash to try it out. It was suitable for doing email (yahoo web based email), but not yahoo! chat, because those ports were blocked. we were able to hold a pretty good conversation via email though. Web surfing was passable.
He was told that if he had his own laptop, he could connect to the office VPN and then have unrestricted access anywhere via that connection.
Two months ago when he took the trip again, Lufthansa told him they were no longer offering that service, so he left his laptop at home...
I'm glad to see they're offering it again. Perhaps the next trip (if they offer it on the DC->Frankfurt leg) he'll take his laptop again.
I hardly see this as a "debut" given that he was using it over a year ago.
but they mean 2 billion messages. There's a big difference here...
I'll wager that a fairly significant portion of that blocked mail is wanted by the recipients. I know that we get many calls when our AOL recipients don't recieve their expected daily/weekly newsletters.
When OSX needs root privs, it asks for an administrator's password (just like running sudo).
Sometimes control panels are locked to prevent changes other than by root, so you click on the lock icon and it asks for the password, and then lets you make the changes.
Are you hallucinating? BSDI, the company that sells BSD/OS is NOT a public company. What company you're thinking of on Nasdaq is anybody's guess. And you've never heard of a public company buying another company?
I disagree. I have a accountants. I have money managers for my "7 figures". I still need to keep my checkbook balanced and I still need to reconcile my credit cards (I guess I could just let the managers pay it off monthly, but I prefer to keep my eye closely on those scummy carpet installer shops who don't deliver.)
I use Quicken98 on a mac right now. Many bugs. Mostly it does what I want. It gives me all kinds of nifty reports. I would prefer no to have to boot the mac to do this. I would prefer to have a FreeBSD program.
I just tried it on one of the severs run by one of my companies, and I could not get it to work.
I tried the ncx99.exe version, and never was there a reference to fetch that file from my main web site where I put it. So either, I'm an idjit (but when it comes to doing NT stuff, I'll admin I am) or this thing doesn't work.
The NT system in question is a vanilla install of NT4 SP3 with IIS. Hmm. Maybe I'll upgrade to SP4 and see if it works...
Did anyone else read the article in the current Business Week about Reinventing Microsoft. There's a passage in there about how Steve Ballmer had to dispatch 20 (yes twenty) field engineers who took several days to get acceptable performance out of a large company's NT installation.
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We've been using the Skype Connect business service for several months. Works great on our Switchvox (asterisk-based phone server with nice GUI). All it takes is to connect as a standard SIP client to Skype after setting up the account with them.
It seems they are just simplifying their offerings, as you don't need any sort of plugin to asterisk to accomplish this.
I had this exact same symptom on my Droid Incredible yesterday. The microphone worked fine for a voice search (I was afraid of hardware failure), so I just rebooted and everything went back to normal. Curiously, outbound calls I could hear the other person by they could not hear me, and inbound call was dead silent.
We offer a "live help" service to our customers. We used to use PHPLive! (paid app) until they vanished out of existence leaving us with several major security holes. We replaced that with Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH) which is open source and works reasonably well and seems to be pretty safe. I had it scanned by ScanAlert to test against XSS and SQL injection type attacks, and anything else that may raise alarms for "HackerSafe" certification.
The only feature we want that it doesn't have is "rate this operator" at the end of the chat session.
They want to find porn and/or stuff to hand over to the RIAA.
If you put movies on your laptop, delete them after you watch them or before you come home.
If you have a reasonable amount of music you should be safe.
They won't care what your pictures are unless they are pornographic.
But for absolute safety, you must save your pictures to some other device you're not carrying with you in case they decide to take it from you for whatever reason they make up. A network backup is the best bet, and using an encrypted service like JungleDisk is very smart.
Definitely image your laptop to a USB drive you leave at home before you head out, to make recovery faster.
I have the job of assuring PCI compliance at my company. In July the PCI rules changed and some of our systems suddenly became non-compliant as reported by our scanning service.
The two issues were:
1) we ran identd
2) we ran anonymous ftp
The problem is that just the existence of these services is a PCI violation. Even though it is possible (and we do) to configure these services securely.
For identd, the "threat" is that it will leak information about user accounts. We run the liedentd daemon, which responds "nobody" to every request. Thus no information is ever leaked, yet we are not compliant. We run identd since we send a lot of mail and a large percentage of remote sites do ident queries and having an ident server speeds things up.
For anonymous ftp, the threats are: user account leaks, DoS by filling your disk, and making files available. All of these are easily mitigated. Running anonymous ftp in a chroot jail with a private password file limits revealing any information about users -- just delete all but the mandatory "root" and "ftp" user IDs. Limit uploads by only allowing uploads into a small disk partition mounted as the "incoming" directory. We use a file-based virtual file system (vnode file system in BSD) to limit uploads to 50MB. There is no way to fill our real disk. Finally, because it is in a chroot, no other files will be leaked.
At least for the anonymous ftp, we could fake out our scanning company by renaming the "root" account in the jail to "toor".
There is no workaround for the identd "violation". I don't think the people making the PCI really think very much about the anything other than traditional e-commerce web service applications.
I just hope they'll get around to fixing their long-standing sftp publishing problem....
A few years back, Damian Conway demonstrated a Klingon interpreter layer on top of Perl. He literally wrote code in klingon that ran on the perl interpreter.
Last summer at OSCON 2005, he demo'd his LATIN version.
Unfortunatly, I don't believe he has released source code for either one.
Long ago, in a land far-far away, a fellow at Bell Labs (IIRC, named Steve Uhler) released for the Sun3 (ie, 68030 based boxes) a windowing system called MGR. It was wickedly simple, and entirely network transparent. That is, if you could telnet/ssh/whatever to a remote system and open a shell, you could run graphical applications.
The core was extremely small and simple. Unfortunately, the apps were few and far between, existing mostly of basic tools like a terminal and a "Mickey Mouse Watch" emulator. It would have filled your wish for a nice GUI which is extremely simple to implement. The major drawback was parts were writtin in 68030 assembler, making portability challenging.
I have a buddy who works in the Novell legal department. I asked him if he was being forced to switch from MSOffice to OpenOffice, and he said no. There is no way he could prepare his necessary documents with OO because of some features it lacked. Specifically he said they had problems with generating the kinds of tables they needed.
Further, he indicated that they were not going to be forced to switch. I wonder if that 100% change that Miguel indicated was for the technical and support staff only.
Anyhow, I decided to download and try out NLD when I got back from the conference. It failed to recognize my monitor (19" Dell flat panel with DVI interface) and sound didn't work even though it recognized the card. On recommendation from a friend, I tried Ubuntu the other night and it worked with everything (except the printer needs some driver change to work which I haven't done yet).
I typically purchase about $15k to $30k of servers from Dell each year. Last December I asked them to guarantee to me that the server I was preparing to purchase (about $8k for one box) would perform like I needed (very high I/O speed), given that the similar one I got a year ago was barely keeping up with the load I needed.
Others with similar hardware were getting more than double the I/O performance, but were not using Dells. They had no answers for me other than 'trust us'. When I asked about AMD solutions which others had reported providing the necessary speed, they just more or less did the equivalent of staring at me over the phone.
I ended up buying an Opteron system from Iron Systems which has more then met the challenge. They are about to get yet another order for an identical system. That's $16k to Iron, and $16k less for Dell. Not to mention that they've lost my server business... probably close to $30k this year.
So it will add up. They can't keep ignoring Opteron.
But IBM has rights to put any and all of that code into AIX. They paid SCO (or its predecessors) for that.
However, SCO are trying to show that code from AIX was copied into linux, and they want to claim that even if IBM wrote it, because they put it into AIX first, SCO owns it. Something like that...
You are totally wrong. You can invalidate any single claim of the patent while not affecting others. That's why they have so many individual claims in them. Kind of like shooting buck shot to kill a rat sometimes.
Well, there's design and there's design.
Back in the seemingly dark ages of the early 90's the "hot" thing in OS design was microkernels (think Mach -- known today as MacOS/Darwin kernel for most poeple).
Many people found that while the idea was wonderful, the implementation of it sucked, because of the massive context switching and message passing necessary.
The next generation of kernels took the microkernel idea of complete separation of functions but linked it all together in a single executable, replacing message passing with parameter passing. This produces much of the benefit of the microkernel design without the tremendous speed degredation of the microkernel design. Monolithic kernels are here to stay, just because they perform better.
The FreeBSD kernel, at least, has incredible amounts of engineering in it. Device drivers are not put in unless they are well built (ie, no stupid things like wait loops, or polling when it is at all avoidable).
When you don't cut corners, sometimes things run slower but you are assured that they work correctly. I'll take correct over fast any day, especially when my business depends on it.
Last year, my partner took a flight from DC to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. The were testing IP connections then, and he was able to borrow a laptop from the plane's stash to try it out. It was suitable for doing email (yahoo web based email), but not yahoo! chat, because those ports were blocked. we were able to hold a pretty good conversation via email though. Web surfing was passable.
He was told that if he had his own laptop, he could connect to the office VPN and then have unrestricted access anywhere via that connection.
Two months ago when he took the trip again, Lufthansa told him they were no longer offering that service, so he left his laptop at home...
I'm glad to see they're offering it again. Perhaps the next trip (if they offer it on the DC->Frankfurt leg) he'll take his laptop again.
I hardly see this as a "debut" given that he was using it over a year ago.
actually, you have to use defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 -- note the capitalization... it is important. but thanks for the tip!
I'll wager that a fairly significant portion of that blocked mail is wanted by the recipients. I know that we get many calls when our AOL recipients don't recieve their expected daily/weekly newsletters.
When OSX needs root privs, it asks for an administrator's password (just like running sudo).
Sometimes control panels are locked to prevent changes other than by root, so you click on the lock icon and it asks for the password, and then lets you make the changes.
Never. SSH has been perfectly reliable for me on all my BSD/OS, FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris boxes.
Where can I find info on burning VCDs to play on my DVD player? I'd love to do that!
Are you hallucinating? BSDI, the company that sells BSD/OS is NOT a public company. What company you're thinking of on Nasdaq is anybody's guess. And you've never heard of a public company buying another company?
I use Quicken98 on a mac right now. Many bugs. Mostly it does what I want. It gives me all kinds of nifty reports. I would prefer no to have to boot the mac to do this. I would prefer to have a FreeBSD program.
I just tried it on one of the severs run by one of my companies, and I could not get it to work.
I tried the ncx99.exe version, and never was there a reference to fetch that file from my main web site where I put it. So either, I'm an idjit (but when it comes to doing NT stuff, I'll admin I am) or this thing doesn't work.
The NT system in question is a vanilla install of NT4 SP3 with IIS. Hmm. Maybe I'll upgrade to SP4 and see if it works...
Actually, "ungrade" seems more appropos for M$ software... ;-)
And they say it's easy to use.
This one's been removed...