Eliminating all ".zip" attachments, and also ".dll", ".exe", ".scr", ".pif", ".com", and ".bat" seems to do the trick.
If your local Powers That Be won't allow you to take this (IMHO sensible) precaution, you can still provide a measure of id10t-proofing by mangling the extensions of these attachments. For example, this procmail script will rename an attachment from PATCH.EXE to PATCH.DEFANGED-EXE, requiring the recipient to save the file (giving the anti-virus software a chance to check it) and rename it before executing it.
My policy (before I got laid off and ended up in a non-policy-setting job elsewhere) was to simply not deliver messages containing SCR/PIF/COM/BAT/DLL, on the grounds that these are never legitimate attachments. (For a while I delivered the message but stripped the file; after several months with no false positives, I just stopped delivering them altogether.) For EXE/DOC/ZIP attachments (which were occasionally legit) I'd mangle the filename.
I'm no linguistic expert, so I might be wrong, but "Clipper" doesn't sound very slavic to me. What's the deal, are they naming this thing to market it more effectively to an anglo audience? What's the explanation for the name?
You could try working remotely - systems admin and code-cutting are two IT related roles that can be performed reasonably easily from a remote location.
It might help if you move to rural Indiana, but conveniently mistype the address on your business cards and web site as "India".
But seriously, the cost of living in the boonies can be dramatically lower than some place like DC, giving you some of the same cost-savings advantages of outsourcing services overseas. I've tried (unsuccessfully so far, so maybe this idea is full of it) to convince various employers in NYC that they'd save a small fortune hiring a qualified Midwesterner like me to telecommute instead of paying Manhattan-scale wages.
Creating.sex or.xxx could only make.com and.net kid-friendly if it all porn were legally required to use it. Due to varying worldwide standards and attitudes about free speech, and the difficulty of enforcement, that would not work. Since the creation of a porn-free space is the only compelling argument for creating such a gTLD, and there are compelling arguments against it, it's simply a Bad Idea.
It's like the Borg assimilating the forces of darkness from the Lord of the Rings.
One OS to rule them all
One ISP to find them
One suite to bring them all
And add their distinctiveness to our own... we wants it, we do!
We are Sauron of the Borg.
Resssissstence isss irrelevant.
Why would MS bother making their own version of Netscape? They've already got IE, the most widely-supported, widely-used browser in the known universe. Sure it's missing a bunch of features, but it's not like they lack the expertise to correct that... just the incentive. This wouldn't change that. What use would they have for Netscape or its source code?
And even if they managed to get around the license issues and created this hypothetical closed-source fork from Mozilla... why use would anyone else have for it?
I'm not convinced that it's as simple as "all the former Windows free(beer)ware developers are now doing Free(speech)ware for Linux." I just don't see a lot of that transition happening.
I think it's more of a generational thing.
The folks who wrote DOS and Windows freeware in the 80's and 90's have just gotten tired of it. It was fun, but the community of techie early adopters has been inundated with everybody and his mother-in-law, and it's just not the same anymore. If they're still doing it, they've decided to make a job of it: hence crippleware requiring payment. Some have moved on to Linux and such, but the rest are just middle-aged parents who don't have time or enthusiasm for it anymore.
Meanwhile, the new generation of techie types (who could have been early adopters of PCs, but now it's too late for that) have either gone directly into open-source, or they've grown up in that "mature market" of Windows, where it seems that most of the neat toys and applets they'd want are already bundled with the OS, and the bubbling stewpot of innovation has cooled to a simmer.
Another related factor is that the nature of the computer you take out of the box has changed dramatically over that timeframe. If you bought a computer 25 years ago, it was expected that you would do some programming with it. Turn on that Apple II or C64 or that IBM PC without an OS installed, and you're in a BASIC interpretter. The more recent computer purchaser is never really given that nudge.
Just after I graduated from college and started a new job, several friends of mine (ages 17-20) had an opportunity for their band to do a short tour in Europe. They'd never been overseas (or in some cases anywhere) without their parents, so they wanted someone with travel experience (I'd spent a several months in Europe over the course of two prior visits) to go along.
I asked my new boss if I could have time off for it. He let me go. Of course this is a bit different, since he knew I'd be back, and fairly soon. But part of my sales pitch was that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (more for them than for me, of course), and he was sympathetic about that. This from a guy who literally wore a suit and tie every day.
If you can't get them to hold your job for you (and I can certainly see why they'd be reluctant), I think that most future would-be employers - certainly the ones you'd want to work for - would be quite understanding about you taking time off from IT to take a shot at something else. That's not a 4-month "hole" in your resume; it's 4 months of life experience. If the touring gig falls through, explain that it was something you wanted to try, it didn't work out, and you're ready to get back to your first love: stultifying IT drudgery.:) Even if you didn't feel comfortable telling a certain prospective employer what you were really doing (say, applying for a job with the Coalition Against Contemporary Music) 4 months is still a smaller hole than the one in my resume from being laid off last year... and not doing anything or going anywhere.
If you go for it, you may someday look back at this opportunity and regret how it turned out. But if you don't, you will look back and regret not taking it.
Last time I saw a thread like this, consensus was that the general public wouldn't know what a hard drive looked like if you tried to use that.
Apple seems to think otherwise. OS X uses a photo of a bare hard drive as the icon for internal hard drive(s). I was a bit surprised to see that, because I assumed the conventional wisdom was true. But with hard drives stocked on the shelves of your local electronics or office supply store, maybe it's not that unrealistic an expectation for users to recognise it. They may not know the correct term for it [insert anecdote about calling a 3.5" floppy in its plastic case as a "hard disk"] but they might still know what it is.
Who modded up this as "Insightful"? It's nothing more than clueless bashing.
Who modded up this as "Informative"? It's nothing more than clueless pontificating.
That distro A uses XFree86 and distro B uses XOrg means absolutely nothing to end users. Everything's still interoperable because X11 is a standard. Everything will still Just Work(tm) and the end user won't even notice something has changed.
Until he tries to install a driver that was written only for one implementation on a system that uses the other. Or he tries to turn on a new extended feature that only exists in the other one. IE for Windows and Safari for OS X may both implement the same HTML spec, but that doesn't mean their rendering of it is the same, or their plug-ins are interchangeable.
Xouvert is yet another implementation of X11, based on XFree86, developed (roughly) in parallel to XFree86 with some different methodoogy, and with the intention of feeding stuff back to XFree86.
I don't know how (or if) the recent XFree86 licence change affects it.
First, you need to start looking for another job. Your boss's head is not screwed on straight.
Second, if you can't explain to your boss the illogic of demanding that you provide a cell phone for him to call you, you need to talk to his boss about this situation. If they want to contact you after hours, they should supply the means to do so. That's only reasonable.
Third, make a phone call to a labor lawyer, to see if firing you for failing to provide your own mobile phone would qualify as "wrongful termination" in your jurisdiction. There are limits even on "at will" employment.
What you didn't say is what their reason for the ban is. Many an executive decree turns out to be the wrong (or overly broad) solution to a genuine problem, and it's possible that your intended use of your phone falls outside of that problem area and can be exempted (e.g. they're freaking about camera phones and your phone is demonstrably camera-free). Or perhaps that information will suggest solutions to your own problem that get around this decree (e.g. they don't want people yakking with their friends, so you could use a pager instead of a phone). Heck, if you know what they're trying to accomplish, maybe you could even suggest a different solution that makes more sense.
it's mentioned in passing that the VP of the US is Gay,
OK, there goes my suspension of disbelief.
I can see a woman being elected VP within 25 years, or a person of color, but I can't see the people who select the veep candidate* putting someone on the short list whose religious orthodoxy is so easily called into question.
*Anybody else here old enough to remember when party convention delegates actually got to vote on who would be on the ticket?
The OED has their purview: words spelled out in letters. While it might be academically interesting and downright valuable to expand that to include verbal speech, that's a can of worms they're not ready to open. If actual copies of the scripts can't be found to cite, the Blish novelizations (short-story-izations, actually) which mention these Trekisms will certainly suffice.
So you got tired of them saying "Clinton, Clinton"?:)
Did they recite Cleveland's name twice (non-consecutively)? It's always annoyed me that he's given two instances of "Nth President" (22nd and 24th), rendering the value of N assigned to every subsequent president factually incorrect. For example, GWB is referred to (even in official government documents) as "the 43rd president" despite the fact that there were only 41 people to hold the office before him.
ObTopic: M-VEM-J-SUN-P.S. (a variation on the mnemonic I learned) seems to me like a good one. It groups the planets logically, putting the three (roughly) Earth-sized ones in a syllable together, the three mid-sized gas giants together, and the two little rocks way out in the cold as... a Post Script.
I went back to college and picked up a BFA in design, in addition to my Comp Sci degree. If you don't have time for that, the first year's classes at many art schools will focus on the foundations of design (color, shape, line, etc.) which is probably about 75% of what you need to know.
Of course you can't just turn a geek into an artist by sending him to some classes; he needs some aptitude for it as well.
Once upon a time, graphic design professionals were expected to be able to do decent hand lettering which was suggestive of a variety of fonts, for doing roughs of ad layouts and such. A common method for teaching this was to have the students trace lettering samples, to (re)develop some physical memory of the strokes used in making the letter shapes. In this case you'd probably want to use some kind of semi-natural simple block lettering, like Comic Sans or Tekton or some other comics or drafting font.
When I was a teenager I did all my writing in this style (except when required to use cursive:rolleyes:), and actually got pretty good at it, even at speed. (Over time it developed into a hybrid connected-printing.) Using fairly stiff block lettering tends to slow you down, which is probably better for legibility.
What are good choices for UPS for Stereo/TiVo/TV setups?
Generally speaking, a UPS doesn't make a lot of sense for that kind of situation. If the power goes out briefly, your stereo isn't at risk for data loss. Even a TiVo, despite being just a specialised computer with hard drives and everything, isn't going to benefit much from a keeping the power on, because that's the standard way to turn them off anyway: pull the plug. And a TV is probably going to suck a UPS dry in pretty short order.
The main thing a UPS is good for with such devices is power conditioning, acting as both a surge and slump suppressor. For that purpose, all you need is something that will provide enough relatively steady power until you walk over and clunk the power off, cleanly. Don't buy the cheapest unit on sale at Best Buy, but you don't need to spend an arm and a leg.
If you want to run these devices through a power outage, you want a generator. Yamaha makes some fairly inexpensive inverter-type generators which will produce a fairly clean power supply as long as you feed it petrol. You might want to run the generator's output through a UPS or at least through a surge protector, as an added measure of safety. (Keep in mind that you'll need an electrical cord that'll reach to your gear from outside, because the noise and exhaust of the generator mean it can't be indoors.) But again, the TV is going to suck up a lot of petrol. I've kept my home web server going through a couple of short (a few hours) outages with Yamaha's 1KW generator, but with an LCD monitor only, no CRT.
If they start using G5s in their renderfarm, I wouldn't be all that surprised if they used Linux or Darwin on them, to avoid unnecessary GUI overhead.
Or they could just use stock Xserves. Something tells me that Apple doesn't configure their rack-mounted often-headless servers to waste a lot of CPU cycles or RAM on the GUI. {smile}
with OS X creating webpages is as easy as dropping your webpage files into a folder and turning on an option in prefs.
And how, exactly, does doing this promote familiarity with Unix?
I'm not saying that this is a Bad Thing. Setting up your computer to act as a web server should be this easy, and the typical user shouldn't need to know or care whether the daemon is Apache or thttpd or Sambar or WebStar, and a nice big hand to Apple for doing it. It's great that there's a command shell available for those few who will actually seek it out. But there's nothing about using a Mac that requires or actively promotes use of the shell. So putting students in front of a Mac doesn't automatically make them Unix-literate any more than putting them behind the wheel of a car teaches them anything about internal combustion engines.
Of course the key is to be "closed-minded" to the bad ideas and "open-minded" to the good ones.
And the above would be one of the bad ones.
You need to be open to any ideas... and exercise your mind by figuring out which ones are bad and which are good. That's what the scientific method is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
If your local Powers That Be won't allow you to take this (IMHO sensible) precaution, you can still provide a measure of id10t-proofing by mangling the extensions of these attachments. For example, this procmail script will rename an attachment from PATCH.EXE to PATCH.DEFANGED-EXE, requiring the recipient to save the file (giving the anti-virus software a chance to check it) and rename it before executing it.
My policy (before I got laid off and ended up in a non-policy-setting job elsewhere) was to simply not deliver messages containing SCR/PIF/COM/BAT/DLL, on the grounds that these are never legitimate attachments. (For a while I delivered the message but stripped the file; after several months with no false positives, I just stopped delivering them altogether.) For EXE/DOC/ZIP attachments (which were occasionally legit) I'd mangle the filename.
I'm no linguistic expert, so I might be wrong, but "Clipper" doesn't sound very slavic to me. What's the deal, are they naming this thing to market it more effectively to an anglo audience? What's the explanation for the name?
It might help if you move to rural Indiana, but conveniently mistype the address on your business cards and web site as "India".
But seriously, the cost of living in the boonies can be dramatically lower than some place like DC, giving you some of the same cost-savings advantages of outsourcing services overseas. I've tried (unsuccessfully so far, so maybe this idea is full of it) to convince various employers in NYC that they'd save a small fortune hiring a qualified Midwesterner like me to telecommute instead of paying Manhattan-scale wages.
Creating .sex or .xxx could only make .com and .net kid-friendly if it all porn were legally required to use it. Due to varying worldwide standards and attitudes about free speech, and the difficulty of enforcement, that would not work. Since the creation of a porn-free space is the only compelling argument for creating such a gTLD, and there are compelling arguments against it, it's simply a Bad Idea.
One OS to rule them all
One ISP to find them
One suite to bring them all
And add their distinctiveness to our own... we wants it, we do!
We are Sauron of the Borg.
Resssissstence isss irrelevant.
And even if they managed to get around the license issues and created this hypothetical closed-source fork from Mozilla... why use would anyone else have for it?
The folks who wrote DOS and Windows freeware in the 80's and 90's have just gotten tired of it. It was fun, but the community of techie early adopters has been inundated with everybody and his mother-in-law, and it's just not the same anymore. If they're still doing it, they've decided to make a job of it: hence crippleware requiring payment. Some have moved on to Linux and such, but the rest are just middle-aged parents who don't have time or enthusiasm for it anymore.
Meanwhile, the new generation of techie types (who could have been early adopters of PCs, but now it's too late for that) have either gone directly into open-source, or they've grown up in that "mature market" of Windows, where it seems that most of the neat toys and applets they'd want are already bundled with the OS, and the bubbling stewpot of innovation has cooled to a simmer.
Another related factor is that the nature of the computer you take out of the box has changed dramatically over that timeframe. If you bought a computer 25 years ago, it was expected that you would do some programming with it. Turn on that Apple II or C64 or that IBM PC without an OS installed, and you're in a BASIC interpretter. The more recent computer purchaser is never really given that nudge.
I asked my new boss if I could have time off for it. He let me go. Of course this is a bit different, since he knew I'd be back, and fairly soon. But part of my sales pitch was that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (more for them than for me, of course), and he was sympathetic about that. This from a guy who literally wore a suit and tie every day.
If you can't get them to hold your job for you (and I can certainly see why they'd be reluctant), I think that most future would-be employers - certainly the ones you'd want to work for - would be quite understanding about you taking time off from IT to take a shot at something else. That's not a 4-month "hole" in your resume; it's 4 months of life experience. If the touring gig falls through, explain that it was something you wanted to try, it didn't work out, and you're ready to get back to your first love: stultifying IT drudgery. :) Even if you didn't feel comfortable telling a certain prospective employer what you were really doing (say, applying for a job with the Coalition Against Contemporary Music) 4 months is still a smaller hole than the one in my resume from being laid off last year... and not doing anything or going anywhere.
If you go for it, you may someday look back at this opportunity and regret how it turned out. But if you don't, you will look back and regret not taking it.
Apple seems to think otherwise. OS X uses a photo of a bare hard drive as the icon for internal hard drive(s). I was a bit surprised to see that, because I assumed the conventional wisdom was true. But with hard drives stocked on the shelves of your local electronics or office supply store, maybe it's not that unrealistic an expectation for users to recognise it. They may not know the correct term for it [insert anecdote about calling a 3.5" floppy in its plastic case as a "hard disk"] but they might still know what it is.
Who modded up this as "Informative"? It's nothing more than clueless pontificating.
That distro A uses XFree86 and distro B uses XOrg means absolutely nothing to end users. Everything's still interoperable because X11 is a standard. Everything will still Just Work(tm) and the end user won't even notice something has changed.
Until he tries to install a driver that was written only for one implementation on a system that uses the other. Or he tries to turn on a new extended feature that only exists in the other one. IE for Windows and Safari for OS X may both implement the same HTML spec, but that doesn't mean their rendering of it is the same, or their plug-ins are interchangeable.
I don't know how (or if) the recent XFree86 licence change affects it.
Second, if you can't explain to your boss the illogic of demanding that you provide a cell phone for him to call you, you need to talk to his boss about this situation. If they want to contact you after hours, they should supply the means to do so. That's only reasonable.
Third, make a phone call to a labor lawyer, to see if firing you for failing to provide your own mobile phone would qualify as "wrongful termination" in your jurisdiction. There are limits even on "at will" employment.
What you didn't say is what their reason for the ban is. Many an executive decree turns out to be the wrong (or overly broad) solution to a genuine problem, and it's possible that your intended use of your phone falls outside of that problem area and can be exempted (e.g. they're freaking about camera phones and your phone is demonstrably camera-free). Or perhaps that information will suggest solutions to your own problem that get around this decree (e.g. they don't want people yakking with their friends, so you could use a pager instead of a phone). Heck, if you know what they're trying to accomplish, maybe you could even suggest a different solution that makes more sense.
OK, there goes my suspension of disbelief.
I can see a woman being elected VP within 25 years, or a person of color, but I can't see the people who select the veep candidate* putting someone on the short list whose religious orthodoxy is so easily called into question.
*Anybody else here old enough to remember when party convention delegates actually got to vote on who would be on the ticket?
There's also MorphOS, which is (give or take) AmigaOS for PPC then taken further. Not open-source, but it's an option.
Er... the fact that TV is not a textual medium?
The OED has their purview: words spelled out in letters. While it might be academically interesting and downright valuable to expand that to include verbal speech, that's a can of worms they're not ready to open. If actual copies of the scripts can't be found to cite, the Blish novelizations (short-story-izations, actually) which mention these Trekisms will certainly suffice.
Did they recite Cleveland's name twice (non-consecutively)? It's always annoyed me that he's given two instances of "Nth President" (22nd and 24th), rendering the value of N assigned to every subsequent president factually incorrect. For example, GWB is referred to (even in official government documents) as "the 43rd president" despite the fact that there were only 41 people to hold the office before him.
ObTopic: M-VEM-J-SUN-P.S. (a variation on the mnemonic I learned) seems to me like a good one. It groups the planets logically, putting the three (roughly) Earth-sized ones in a syllable together, the three mid-sized gas giants together, and the two little rocks way out in the cold as... a Post Script.
In that case... I, for one, do not welcome our new autonomous-vehicle overlords.
Of course you can't just turn a geek into an artist by sending him to some classes; he needs some aptitude for it as well.
When I was a teenager I did all my writing in this style (except when required to use cursive :rolleyes:), and actually got pretty good at it, even at speed. (Over time it developed into a hybrid connected-printing.) Using fairly stiff block lettering tends to slow you down, which is probably better for legibility.
Generally speaking, a UPS doesn't make a lot of sense for that kind of situation. If the power goes out briefly, your stereo isn't at risk for data loss. Even a TiVo, despite being just a specialised computer with hard drives and everything, isn't going to benefit much from a keeping the power on, because that's the standard way to turn them off anyway: pull the plug. And a TV is probably going to suck a UPS dry in pretty short order.
The main thing a UPS is good for with such devices is power conditioning, acting as both a surge and slump suppressor. For that purpose, all you need is something that will provide enough relatively steady power until you walk over and clunk the power off, cleanly. Don't buy the cheapest unit on sale at Best Buy, but you don't need to spend an arm and a leg.
If you want to run these devices through a power outage, you want a generator. Yamaha makes some fairly inexpensive inverter-type generators which will produce a fairly clean power supply as long as you feed it petrol. You might want to run the generator's output through a UPS or at least through a surge protector, as an added measure of safety. (Keep in mind that you'll need an electrical cord that'll reach to your gear from outside, because the noise and exhaust of the generator mean it can't be indoors.) But again, the TV is going to suck up a lot of petrol. I've kept my home web server going through a couple of short (a few hours) outages with Yamaha's 1KW generator, but with an LCD monitor only, no CRT.
Are you sure you didn't accidentally tunnel to an alternate universe where "your" work history was different?
Or they could just use stock Xserves. Something tells me that Apple doesn't configure their rack-mounted often-headless servers to waste a lot of CPU cycles or RAM on the GUI. {smile}
And how, exactly, does doing this promote familiarity with Unix?
I'm not saying that this is a Bad Thing. Setting up your computer to act as a web server should be this easy, and the typical user shouldn't need to know or care whether the daemon is Apache or thttpd or Sambar or WebStar, and a nice big hand to Apple for doing it. It's great that there's a command shell available for those few who will actually seek it out. But there's nothing about using a Mac that requires or actively promotes use of the shell. So putting students in front of a Mac doesn't automatically make them Unix-literate any more than putting them behind the wheel of a car teaches them anything about internal combustion engines.
And the above would be one of the bad ones.
You need to be open to any ideas... and exercise your mind by figuring out which ones are bad and which are good. That's what the scientific method is all about.