Yeah, for 1500 it'd be faster to find a shredder, but for the 5-10 a month I have to destroy, a drill works fine. And realistically, nobody's going to get any data from them.
Just as fair warning to any slashdotters that might follow that link, the bN discussion has gone from completely reasonable and sane, to a million monkeys on a million hits of acid with a million ping pong balls. Which is pretty good for that place:)
Back to the future 2 and 3 (one game) did this back in 1989, but the object was to avoid contact with yourself and in turn avoid blowing up the universe.
In Portland, Oregon, I have naked dsl through qwest and use dsl-only as my isp. They're great, by the way. Static IP and no bullshit. Qwest didn't give me any hassle about getting the line set up, and the whole process took about 1/2 hour. Lucky me, I guess.
In my area Safeway pulls from the warehouse, not a store. I've had pretty good luck with them overall, but they do have a tendency to replace brands from time to time. Potato chips come to mind. Meat and produce were the two things that I was worried about them getting right, but they've done a good job picking the good stuff so far.
I just picked up a 2TB kit for video storage and have it setup RAID5, so I get 1.5TB of storage out of it. It came with an ESATA install kit for the old fileserver its attached to, and ought to last me about 2 years until I fork out for a larger setup.
Total cost: 1200USD including shipping, and I went from boxcutter to fsck in 15 minutes flat.
And Digg is back up, and the front page is still full of hd-dvd key stories.
I browse digg, comment when I think its necessary, and find it to be a useful site overall. This odd incident over the key seems to have brought out the best, and worst in it. Good on Kevin for realizing that digg is nothing without its population, and I hope it survives the fallout from all this.
On that topic, the MPAA would be absolutely off their rocker if they decided to take on digg for however-many-thousand dmca violations. If they are successful in shutting it down, all those fanboys are going have nothing to do but post the key all over the place.... come to think of it, in the name of free speech, I hope they do.
I'll toss in a nod for backupassist. Its got a nice set of features and takes a bit of the pain out of ntbackup. I've been using it at a site in combination with iomega's nifty little REV discs (35GB uncompressed). I haven't seen anything better for less than $1000 total.
And those little REV drives really are cool. They fit into your existing floppy slot, you can get an autochanger for them, and they perform much faster than tapes. Iomega supplies its own backup software with the drives, but it is useful for only the most basic setups. Forget that, its not useful for anything. Its unstable, requires your backup operator to be logged into the server (ie, doesn't run as a service), and doesn't provide for much flexibility.
No interiors. Your character is basically whatever ship you happen to be in. You can never leave the ship and, say, walk around and shoot things. Otherwise, I thought it was awesome. Too lazy to stfw right now, but I do believe that it'll run in wine.
http://eve-online.com/ is what your lookin for. I just got done with the free trial today, and I found it to be quite a bit of fun. Its different than any mmog I've played (evercrack and ffxi) in that pvp is available and encouraged.
If I had a box at home that could run it, i'd ditch ffxi for it right now.
Back in the first months of the SCO lawsuit, there was a site that you could sign with some sort of message saying "you can pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. Oh, you aren't getting $699 either." Obviously, I cant remember the exact terminology. I signed it. Many others did, too.
I'd gladly sign the same thing directed at MS. They've pissed me off enough times that I really don't care if the software I use infringes their patents. They can sue me into bankruptcy if they want. They won't get much.
My wife calls them "Matrix Chickens", and claims that KFC grows them in a warehouse without heads or feet. The cut-off neck and legs are used to inject whatever hormones and nutrition needed to grow the "chicken" body. I'm not sure if thats exactly how it happens, but I ate at a KFC not too long ago, and something is seriously wrong with their food. She's on to something. Video at 11:)
If they ever try to nail me (not that they'd have a reason to), I'll make sure that my linux box is only examined by a well-trained MCSE with lots of experience with the ntfs and fat32 filesystems.
In reality, I could always do a checksum of my partitions, and see what the checksum is when the drive gets back from the RIAA's expert evidence installer guy. I'd fear a real expert more that I'd fear the RIAA shill doing it.
As soon as I see one of these things in my city, i'm gonna pick a fight with my best friend. Then, I'm gonna tell everybody I know that instead of shaking hands or hugging, we should be fake-punching each other, running off with each others bags, and pointing fake guns everywhere. Afterall, at least in the US, there is no assault if the victim doesn't press charges.
After a couple of weeks, we should see a system so clogged up that the cameras will be effectively useless.
These people think their so smart, that they can create a device to control the citizens. Bullshit. Remember folks, the entire population cannot be members of the thought police. If the government wants to attempt to instill this level of control over the people that it serves, we will have no choice but to respond with anarchy.
Or, perhaps the American-super-patriotic-anti-terrorism-freedom collider. That should get them at least $10 Billion in funding. For bonus points, they could build it in Kansas and proclaim that their using it to prove intelligent design. They could line the tube with incense and nuns, and wait for god to show up.
I've been thinking of posting a bounty on Ubuntu for a good vpn front-end. What do you mean that nobody collects them? Somehow, you got modded +5 without qualifying your opinion.
Not trying to troll here, but am very curious as to why its failed. Do folks post bounties and then not pay up when they get their features added? If so, then Ubuntu/Drupal/whoever should look into taking the cash first, and putting it into some sort of escrow. Say, $100 in escrow for 60 days until the feature gets added, or you get your money back.
Thats the driver i'm using for my old riva tnt something-or-other. 3d works okay. Tuxracer gets about 25 fps.
I'd recommend that and a lightweight WM to anybody looking to resurrect old hardware and/or get rid of win98. Hell, Icewm runs on almost no memory whatsoever and looks just like win95/98. Unfortunately, its the modern apps that are all reliant on GTK/Qt that will bloat everything up.
I try to combine trips. I have a full-time job, and this side business, so I always pick up after hours. If a customer calls me, I'll set up a 1/2 hour appointment to diagnose, then take their box home so I can run whatever checks on it from there. Sometimes, I'll do three of these in an evening, work in parallell for the automated stuff, then take the boxes back all on the same day.
On the subject of sub-contractors: I've spoken to one of them for a few minutes, and I'd be better off taking a position at compusa doing their "repair". Now, I avoid them completely. Sorry, Dell, but you'll have to find a different sucker.
That is one hell of an awesome idea! Usually, I tell folks that I may have their PC for up to a week, but I'll call you tomorrow. Sometimes they have a problem with that. A loaner would be a great idea to help me be lazy and not have to ruch too much.
...And, it can be fun and rewarding ($), or it can be a living hell.
If I was starting from scratch again, here's what I'd do:
Incorporate. Look into starting an LLC, and get some liability insurance. If anything, your insurance carrier can hook you up with a lawyer when somebody decides that the pictures of your dog that they didn't tell you about when you went to back up "anything that they don't want to lose" are worth $50,000.
Don't spend too much on advertising. I've gotten good customers just by printing a flyer and pinning them up at the local grocery stores. If you live in a mostly blue-collar area, then chances are that the local restaurants have ads on their menu, and folks really do read the corkboard ads at the local Safeway.
Be nice. Don't wear a tie, but be clean and presentable. If you have a shirt with your company logo on it, good. Don't try to educate them on what they did "wrong" by installing the bonzi buddies out there. If you think they want or need some explanation, do it slowly, use car and highway analagies, and make them as comfortable with you as they would be with a plumber showing up to fix the toilet. Tell them that this sort of thing happens to everybody eventually, even you (no matter how dumb they are, you still want their money).
Use write-protected media. this means no regular usb keys, and no external hdds, unless they have a read-only switch. Burning Cds every week gets tedious and can be wasteful if you don't go the cdrw route, but remember the type of customer you're dealing with.
Expect lots of calls from aol users who think that their dial-up service is too slow, even though the computer is only 6 months old. There are several ways to deal with this, but I find it profitable to attempt to get them on dsl, even if its still with aol.
Work from your garage as much as possible. If you're charging $75 for a virus/defrag/spyware/OSS install (more on that next), you can set up a workbench with a kvm switch and multiply your profits/hour. I just bought a house and this is the first thing that i'll be setting up.
Value added services. I've found that lots of folks really appreciate an offer of "free software". Naturally, I'll offer to install openoffice if they aren't running any real office suite, firefox, gaim, etc.
Document the non-trivial fixes that you perform. Even though you read slashdot, you don't know everything, and eventually you'll run into a problem that will stump you at first. Don't immediatly re-install. Work the problem out at home in your shop, and document it. You'll eventually run into it again, and it'll be a no-brainer that time.
If possible, get somebody else involved for overflow work. If you end up being successful, you'll have times when you get burned out. Have somebody you trust come over and do some of the work for you. Pay them about 1/3 of what your charging. They'll enjoy the extra money, and you'll enjoy getting paid somewhat while you aren't really working. Thats how business works:)
Have a website, but don't be a.com. If you think there's a need for web hosting, or having a computer-related forum or some such in your area, then cool, but don't plan on it.
Since you presumably don't know what to charge, I'll chime in on that too. I feel that I'm no more or less skilled than my brother, who is an electrician. Or my other brother who is a plumber. Folks pay plumbers $75/hour to fix a $75 toilet or garbage disposal all the time, so don't fret that they are using some $400 e-machines and are paying you $350 in services. I do a flat rate for virus/spyware removal, a different flat rate for backup/reinstall/restore, which is much more expensive. As an aside, Don't call it a re-install. anybody can put the cd into the drive and reboot. You perform a comprehensive data/settings backup and restoration that their 15-year-old nephew can't do. You provide a copy of their data on CD. People like hearing that. Anyhow, After that I charge a nominal amount, aroung $60/hour for general work, networking setup/repair, software fixes, etc.
Good luck! I needed it, got it, and love not having to work as a waiter part-time anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, for 1500 it'd be faster to find a shredder, but for the 5-10 a month I have to destroy, a drill works fine. And realistically, nobody's going to get any data from them.
1/4" bit, drill 3 or 4 holes through the drive around the platter. Cost: zero. Time: about 1 minute per drive.
holy crap that was fast. Thanks!
I'd love one if they're still be given out - my username at gmail. Thanks!
Just as fair warning to any slashdotters that might follow that link, the bN discussion has gone from completely reasonable and sane, to a million monkeys on a million hits of acid with a million ping pong balls. Which is pretty good for that place :)
Back to the future 2 and 3 (one game) did this back in 1989, but the object was to avoid contact with yourself and in turn avoid blowing up the universe.
In Portland, Oregon, I have naked dsl through qwest and use dsl-only as my isp. They're great, by the way. Static IP and no bullshit. Qwest didn't give me any hassle about getting the line set up, and the whole process took about 1/2 hour. Lucky me, I guess.
As I understand it, Sony buys 8 SPE chips, but the PS3 only uses 7 of them to reduce costs. If they get a chip with a broken SPE, it still gets used.
In my area Safeway pulls from the warehouse, not a store. I've had pretty good luck with them overall, but they do have a tendency to replace brands from time to time. Potato chips come to mind. Meat and produce were the two things that I was worried about them getting right, but they've done a good job picking the good stuff so far.
Terrastation seconded here.
I just picked up a 2TB kit for video storage and have it setup RAID5, so I get 1.5TB of storage out of it. It came with an ESATA install kit for the old fileserver its attached to, and ought to last me about 2 years until I fork out for a larger setup.
Total cost: 1200USD including shipping, and I went from boxcutter to fsck in 15 minutes flat.
And Digg is back up, and the front page is still full of hd-dvd key stories.
I browse digg, comment when I think its necessary, and find it to be a useful site overall. This odd incident over the key seems to have brought out the best, and worst in it. Good on Kevin for realizing that digg is nothing without its population, and I hope it survives the fallout from all this.
On that topic, the MPAA would be absolutely off their rocker if they decided to take on digg for however-many-thousand dmca violations. If they are successful in shutting it down, all those fanboys are going have nothing to do but post the key all over the place.... come to think of it, in the name of free speech, I hope they do.
I'll toss in a nod for backupassist. Its got a nice set of features and takes a bit of the pain out of ntbackup. I've been using it at a site in combination with iomega's nifty little REV discs (35GB uncompressed). I haven't seen anything better for less than $1000 total.
And those little REV drives really are cool. They fit into your existing floppy slot, you can get an autochanger for them, and they perform much faster than tapes. Iomega supplies its own backup software with the drives, but it is useful for only the most basic setups. Forget that, its not useful for anything. Its unstable, requires your backup operator to be logged into the server (ie, doesn't run as a service), and doesn't provide for much flexibility.
No interiors. Your character is basically whatever ship you happen to be in. You can never leave the ship and, say, walk around and shoot things. Otherwise, I thought it was awesome. Too lazy to stfw right now, but I do believe that it'll run in wine.
http://eve-online.com/ is what your lookin for. I just got done with the free trial today, and I found it to be quite a bit of fun. Its different than any mmog I've played (evercrack and ffxi) in that pvp is available and encouraged.
If I had a box at home that could run it, i'd ditch ffxi for it right now.
You can't even use it to generate the 1.21 jigawatts necessary to fuel the flux capacitor. Thats why its available at the corner drug store.
Back in the first months of the SCO lawsuit, there was a site that you could sign with some sort of message saying "you can pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. Oh, you aren't getting $699 either." Obviously, I cant remember the exact terminology. I signed it. Many others did, too.
I'd gladly sign the same thing directed at MS. They've pissed me off enough times that I really don't care if the software I use infringes their patents. They can sue me into bankruptcy if they want. They won't get much.
My wife calls them "Matrix Chickens", and claims that KFC grows them in a warehouse without heads or feet. The cut-off neck and legs are used to inject whatever hormones and nutrition needed to grow the "chicken" body. I'm not sure if thats exactly how it happens, but I ate at a KFC not too long ago, and something is seriously wrong with their food. She's on to something. Video at 11
If they ever try to nail me (not that they'd have a reason to), I'll make sure that my linux box is only examined by a well-trained MCSE with lots of experience with the ntfs and fat32 filesystems.
In reality, I could always do a checksum of my partitions, and see what the checksum is when the drive gets back from the RIAA's expert evidence installer guy. I'd fear a real expert more that I'd fear the RIAA shill doing it.
As soon as I see one of these things in my city, i'm gonna pick a fight with my best friend. Then, I'm gonna tell everybody I know that instead of shaking hands or hugging, we should be fake-punching each other, running off with each others bags, and pointing fake guns everywhere. Afterall, at least in the US, there is no assault if the victim doesn't press charges.
After a couple of weeks, we should see a system so clogged up that the cameras will be effectively useless.
These people think their so smart, that they can create a device to control the citizens. Bullshit. Remember folks, the entire population cannot be members of the thought police. If the government wants to attempt to instill this level of control over the people that it serves, we will have no choice but to respond with anarchy.
Or, perhaps the American-super-patriotic-anti-terrorism-freedom collider. That should get them at least $10 Billion in funding. For bonus points, they could build it in Kansas and proclaim that their using it to prove intelligent design. They could line the tube with incense and nuns, and wait for god to show up.
I've been thinking of posting a bounty on Ubuntu for a good vpn front-end. What do you mean that nobody collects them? Somehow, you got modded +5 without qualifying your opinion.
Not trying to troll here, but am very curious as to why its failed. Do folks post bounties and then not pay up when they get their features added? If so, then Ubuntu/Drupal/whoever should look into taking the cash first, and putting it into some sort of escrow. Say, $100 in escrow for 60 days until the feature gets added, or you get your money back.
Thats the driver i'm using for my old riva tnt something-or-other. 3d works okay. Tuxracer gets about 25 fps.
I'd recommend that and a lightweight WM to anybody looking to resurrect old hardware and/or get rid of win98. Hell, Icewm runs on almost no memory whatsoever and looks just like win95/98. Unfortunately, its the modern apps that are all reliant on GTK/Qt that will bloat everything up.
I try to combine trips. I have a full-time job, and this side business, so I always pick up after hours. If a customer calls me, I'll set up a 1/2 hour appointment to diagnose, then take their box home so I can run whatever checks on it from there. Sometimes, I'll do three of these in an evening, work in parallell for the automated stuff, then take the boxes back all on the same day.
On the subject of sub-contractors: I've spoken to one of them for a few minutes, and I'd be better off taking a position at compusa doing their "repair". Now, I avoid them completely. Sorry, Dell, but you'll have to find a different sucker.
I have mod points, but I already posted here.
That is one hell of an awesome idea! Usually, I tell folks that I may have their PC for up to a week, but I'll call you tomorrow. Sometimes they have a problem with that. A loaner would be a great idea to help me be lazy and not have to ruch too much.
...And, it can be fun and rewarding ($), or it can be a living hell.
:)
.com. If you think there's a need for web hosting, or having a computer-related forum or some such in your area, then cool, but don't plan on it.
If I was starting from scratch again, here's what I'd do:
Incorporate. Look into starting an LLC, and get some liability insurance. If anything, your insurance carrier can hook you up with a lawyer when somebody decides that the pictures of your dog that they didn't tell you about when you went to back up "anything that they don't want to lose" are worth $50,000.
Don't spend too much on advertising. I've gotten good customers just by printing a flyer and pinning them up at the local grocery stores. If you live in a mostly blue-collar area, then chances are that the local restaurants have ads on their menu, and folks really do read the corkboard ads at the local Safeway.
Be nice. Don't wear a tie, but be clean and presentable. If you have a shirt with your company logo on it, good. Don't try to educate them on what they did "wrong" by installing the bonzi buddies out there. If you think they want or need some explanation, do it slowly, use car and highway analagies, and make them as comfortable with you as they would be with a plumber showing up to fix the toilet. Tell them that this sort of thing happens to everybody eventually, even you (no matter how dumb they are, you still want their money).
Use write-protected media. this means no regular usb keys, and no external hdds, unless they have a read-only switch. Burning Cds every week gets tedious and can be wasteful if you don't go the cdrw route, but remember the type of customer you're dealing with.
Expect lots of calls from aol users who think that their dial-up service is too slow, even though the computer is only 6 months old. There are several ways to deal with this, but I find it profitable to attempt to get them on dsl, even if its still with aol.
Work from your garage as much as possible. If you're charging $75 for a virus/defrag/spyware/OSS install (more on that next), you can set up a workbench with a kvm switch and multiply your profits/hour. I just bought a house and this is the first thing that i'll be setting up.
Value added services. I've found that lots of folks really appreciate an offer of "free software". Naturally, I'll offer to install openoffice if they aren't running any real office suite, firefox, gaim, etc.
Document the non-trivial fixes that you perform. Even though you read slashdot, you don't know everything, and eventually you'll run into a problem that will stump you at first. Don't immediatly re-install. Work the problem out at home in your shop, and document it. You'll eventually run into it again, and it'll be a no-brainer that time.
If possible, get somebody else involved for overflow work. If you end up being successful, you'll have times when you get burned out. Have somebody you trust come over and do some of the work for you. Pay them about 1/3 of what your charging. They'll enjoy the extra money, and you'll enjoy getting paid somewhat while you aren't really working. Thats how business works
Have a website, but don't be a
Since you presumably don't know what to charge, I'll chime in on that too. I feel that I'm no more or less skilled than my brother, who is an electrician. Or my other brother who is a plumber. Folks pay plumbers $75/hour to fix a $75 toilet or garbage disposal all the time, so don't fret that they are using some $400 e-machines and are paying you $350 in services. I do a flat rate for virus/spyware removal, a different flat rate for backup/reinstall/restore, which is much more expensive. As an aside, Don't call it a re-install. anybody can put the cd into the drive and reboot. You perform a comprehensive data/settings backup and restoration that their 15-year-old nephew can't do. You provide a copy of their data on CD. People like hearing that. Anyhow, After that I charge a nominal amount, aroung $60/hour for general work, networking setup/repair, software fixes, etc.
Good luck! I needed it, got it, and love not having to work as a waiter part-time anymore.