Amen to that. I live in Delaware with no sales tax. Most prices are set in even multiples of.05. Everytime I go out of state, I end up with a pocket full of useless change and shit loads of pennies. I never have that problem in my home state.
It's a real pain.
Re:Complete image collection at official Euro site
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1, Redundant
Wow, so the fractions are called "cent" now. Now the EU shopkeepers can say things like "That will be 59 cent please" -- just like in the U.S (adjusted for local language of course. Hmm, le cent instead of les cent?).
(from someone who is annoyed as hell at people who can't seem to understand how to pronounce "cents.")
...and from the looks of the coins, they already say just "cent" so it looks like cent is officially a plural of cent now, at least in E.U.:(
It's phat. Word up mother fucker. I did it all for the nookie, the nookie....
The wife and I are going to be watching the "Sex in the City" marathon, since we've missed a lot of episodes over the past year.
Hey, not my first choice, but you have to think of the wife at times like this. And who knows, it may be followed by an episode of "Sex in the Living Room" if i'm lucky...
You want to get a witness to cooperate. Threaten to throw them away for a long time with trumped up charges, then plea bargain them back out on the streets in return for their cooperation.
Want to get government backdoors in the OS that runs almost every computer in the world? Threaten the company with trumped up charges which will ruin them for life, then cut deals with them so they can return to business as usual in return for their cooperation.
The reason many hate Microsoft is because they are just so damn arrogant. You can't put yourself up on a pedestal and not expect people to look at you closely. It's the same phenomenan as some of those televangelists. They are casting themselves as holy men all the while fleecing their followers and screwing teenage secretaries.
I remember when NT 4.0 came out (they were fairly low key with NT 3.x) and Microsoft claiming it was far more secure than UNIX and you wouldn't have buffer overflows because the source was closed and people couldn't find them even if they existed.
I also remember many years ago them claiming NT was more secure and showing the number of submissions of security holes posted to Bugtraq (before NTbugtraq) there were for UNIX vs NT (back when nothing serious ran on NT and no one really cared less about it to look for holes).
Now they want their code running in everything, including acting as firewall devices. I find this so fucking funny I could just split a gut. You're going to protect machines running code "x" by installing a device running much of the same code "x" to protect those machines from the world?
I just find it a bit frightening. The entire world running on code from one manufacturer that is not open to public review. I'm even more surprised that foreign governments are so trusting of it.
You know what's scary? We just bought an EMC disk array and had to give it an IP address for management. Did a port scan on it. WTF? It's listening on netbios ports. Use smbclient to take a gander at it and low and behold....
Domain=[AZBYCXDWEVFU] OS=[Windows NT 4.0] Server=[NT LAN Manager 4.0]
Workgroup Master
AZBYCXDWEVFU CLARIION_SPB
I call EMC and they say "Oh, the new clariions run a stripped down NT kernel in their service processors.":-( Joy... my SAN is now trusted to that super sekure Microsoft code. At least I can block it from the world through my router which, for now, is running non-Microsoft code...
Can you imagine the harm one could do with a hole in THAT? The financial world survived WTC through redundancy and real-time mirrors of data kept in far flung locations. There are disaster recovery data centers where entire warehouses are filled with machines just waiting to kick in during a crisis. So now you have your storage area networks themselves controlled by Microsoft code. Just exploit the hole-of-the-week to get your code inside a corporate or government firewall, seek out these storage networks running NT kernel code, trash them, take out the primary and backup locations. Chaos.
I haven't seent his mentioned much, but UPNP is all about handling NATed devices. There is a UPNP SDK developed for Linux, but until someone builds a useful kernel module out of it, Linux users are SOL (or maybe they are fortunate).
Why care? Well, I found out after installing MSN Messenger that most of the features are useless behind a NATed network unless your router/firewall understands UPNP. Of course, Microsoft ICS and Servers understand it. I was getting frustrated since I couldn't use MSN messenger except for messages behind my home linux firewall. ICQ features like file transfer work fine by port forwarding the necessary ports or using a kernel module for it.
So, here's the interesting bit. UPNP works by telling the other client on the other end what your private IP address is. Microsoft's docs say this is necessary for the other client to be able to find out how to talk back to you. I think this is stupid. The other end of an MSN connection just needs to look at the source IP in the packets it receives and just send there and hope the owner of the IP knows what to do.
However, UPNP apparently knows how to handled multiple chains of NAT networks, kinda like I guess an old fashioned UUCP bang path. Problem is, it seems like one can modify that "bang path" to route return packets to false places. Can you say DDOS?
So I sent a rant to my friends about this on December 10, and about how UPNP is a security hole waiting to happen according to posts I read out of google searches...
Here's my rant...
I read the tech article about msn messenger and NAT devices. In order to
do pretty much anything beyond chat, you can't be behind a NAT device
unless that NAT device is a Microsoft device.
Basically, it suggests installing Windows ICS for home users and corporate
users should use a 2000 server for NAT and msn's extra features will work.
Fuckers...
ICQ works just fine behind a NAT. They are basically just trying once
again to leverage one product to sell another....
Their explanation is that the client must send its IP address to the other
user so it knows where to send files, audio, video, etc, and since it's
got a private IP, it screws up. So it needs to query the NAT device for
what ITS IP is. But that's really stupid since there is already a
connection open for chatting and all the other client has to do is look at
that connection for the source IP and use that instead and everything else
would just work....
Someone on a newsgroup said this is another security hole waiting to
happen. Basically, it's trusting client for security. I send a connection
to your msn messenger client and tell it what IP to send its stuff to?
What if I send it the IP address of someone I am trying to DOS? Arrgh...
They'll never learn...
Microsoft claims UPNP is a universal open standard. It'd be interesting to learn more about its origins and who is really controlling development of it, security of it, etc. Microsoft claims all manner of peripheral vendors will be supporting it.
Is the concept itself as flawed as it seems, or is this just yet another case of Microsoft's implementation of something being flawed?
Why the hell weren't advertisers paying out the wazoo to be on adcritic? Here's a place where people actually go voluntarily and watch ads. No attempts to push it down their throats. What a great way to get your message out. Imagine that, people WANT to see your ads. They have hard solid numbers of who is watching the ad versus some black magic neilsen crap where most people have switched channels or doing a system dump.
(They *could* get a better name however. It just sounds so, er, critical...)
Reminds me of my ? to RMS about a free BIOS
on
LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I attended a talk by RMS at H2K. He mentioned how he doesn't use any software that isn't free. I asked him if the BIOS code that boots his computer was free (as in speech).
He said it was a good question. His position on it is if it's flashable and programmable, source should be free.
He kind of dodged the question about whether or not his computer BIOS was flashable, free, whatever...
Don't get me wrong, unlike most people, I have a lot of respect for the guy and I don't believe for a second Linux or Open Source would be where it is today without the efforts of him and his team. It's just that there are always little contradictions that trip up even the best of zealots. Like, I wonder if his life is in danger, will he approve of being hooked up to a computer that provides life support but is running non-free software!:-)
I'm wondering at what point even the staunchest Microsoft supporters will say "Woah." How long before they dominate information in all areas, TVs, Media, Computers, Internet, Advertising, etc., before it becomes a problem to you apologists?
It's not so much that it's been done before, it's being done by one that is troubling. Then you get data mining where all those innocent little bits of information about you are collected, analyzed, and determinations made about you.
My guess is, the only ones left defending Microsoft at that point will be the Microsoft plants. I wonder how close we are to that being the case now...
I didn't know about the take-down link. Thx, but I honestly don't care enough to worry about it. I was just pointing out that x-no-archive is a relatively recent feature. However, even that should not be entrusted to make your stuff disappear.
Personally, I think this is the coolest thing ever. History will never be the same. To be able to go back and re-live events and discussions is like going back in time. It's incredible.
You missed my attempt at sarcasm. Some people are complaining about having all their stuff back to 1981 available and the response was about the x-no-archive header. Well, as you said, it wasn't created until 1995 or so, so people posting before that date have no means or choice on whether to let them live on or not.
I'd like to see something like "There are more usenet posts in one day in 2001 than in all of the 1989s.
I remember sizing a server in 1993 to be a news server and setting aside 350 megs for the news spool and then being pissed off when I got it because news traffic was up to 20 megs a day. The stats back then showed exponential traffic growth.
Go into Tools -> Internet Options, click on Security tab, then Custom Level. Scroll a wee bit down and change "Run ActiveX Controls and plug-ins" and "Script ActiveX controls" from enabled to prompt.
It not only kills this kinda crap, it also protects you from the malicious IE/activeX hole of the week.
Now, since all plugins are installed as an activeX control of sometype (including java and flash), you need to say Yes when prompted for those. You'll quickly learn when to say yes and no from practice. You can't make a mistake since you're basically always saying yes by default. If you say No and some page functionality you WANT to see is lost, reload and answer Yes.
As an introvert at heart, especially at parties, let me list the DOs and DONTs that have impressed upon me from other parties I've been at. Some of these are repeats that others have said, so consider it a reinforcement of their ideas to. (This assumes a company function and due to timing, I'd say Christmas party.)
DONTs
Don't talk about work problems. Talking shop among peers is fine, but damn, I hate it when people come up to me at a party and discuss their computer problems.
Don't force people into social or team building activities. Maybe my idea of a good time is to just relax and sit around. I get enough stress during a work day. I don't want to worry about if I'm playing some stupid game correctly.
Play music, but try to be a bit creative. If I hear "Celebration" one more time I will go postal. I also hate those typical line-dancing songs but a lot of people seem to enjoy them so I don't mind, but don't make me do it too. "Come on, everyone come learn how to do the line dance for..." Also, vary the music some. At parties our SGA run for students, they *ONLY* play rap music. Black rap music. And finding unobjectionable rap music means all the good shit isn't played. I don't mind rap, but play a little something for everyone, OK? (As for rap, I'd love to hear someone play Limp Bizkit's uncensored Break Stuff but I'm not holding out any hope. Hmm, or "N 2 Gether Now" would be perfect... STFU!).
DOs
High-end administrative staff changes roles. They serve food, drinks, wait on people, even do trash runs.
Play music, but see above.
Dim lighting
Don't make a dress code. Yeah, have seen this.
Unstructured.
If I want to leave it shouldn't be made difficult (block alternative exits) or deterred by having some VP or similar greeting people as they come and go.
Food and lots of different food. Have Dominos make runs every 10 minutes even (and don't forget to tip them well damn it). Have lots of places to sit to eat it. It's impossible to hold a plate, a drink, and consume them while standing.
(At one large employee function I went to, the local pizza chain, Grottos, has a tractor trailer that goes to large events and makes and serves real fresh pizza from it. Wow, that was a geek dream come true.)
NOT MANDATORY. If I don't want to come, that's my business.
No name tags. These are especially insultive when they pre-print them with all employee names and if your name isn't picked up, your supervisor asks you the next day why you didn't go and forces you to fill out a leave form. Name tags when used like this are so obviously an attendance device that it just causes massive resentment.
No administrative speeches. No formal thank you for a job well done speeches. These often fall into administrators also thanking each other for their leadership, patting each other on the back, etc, etc... I get that all year long, I don't need it at a function allegedly for the employee's enjoyment.
Better yet, forget the entire idea. If a company wants to wish employees a happy Christmas for example, use the money and give them an extra day off so they can spend it with people they really care about... And do it on Dec 26, not the 24th or 23rd, else we'll just spend it at the Mall. Many countries have Boxing Day, the U.S. needs it too!
... and a bunch of chars I just started as mules but I keep finding great things in hell difficulty that would be great for my mule chars, so I give them to them, try them out for a bit, and all four of my mules are up to act 5 normal now. Arrgh...
I don't get it, and the wife is none to happy either..
Hell with it. I'm buying a Game Cube and Pikmin. That looks harmless... That should cure me.
Per K? Hah. Some providers charge per byte The cost is freakin rediclious too, upwards of 0.25 for a 500 byte message. I could morse a message over the audio service of a cell company about as fast (and much more cheaply than this!)... Crazy, I tell you. What is really stupid, is that GSM takes all of about 3KB/s? For a minute of audio time I could transfer (at that full speed) 180KB. If it takes them one second to do that full 500 bytes (like, yeah), then they are charging me > 2000 times the audio rate! If it takes them less than 1 second for that 500 byte message (wich of course it does, by probably 1/1000) then the cost ratio is astronomical!
Tell me about it. With Nextel it's even more insane. I get unlimited net connect minutes (basically WAP) and I can read and send e-mail to a nextel INBOX that sits on their server, up to 1K a message. But if I get a max 512 byte SMS message, it's freaking 10 cents a message.
With SMS, the message leaves their network, gets zapped to my phone, and is stored there. With e-mail, it sits on their server, I have to connect to it, read it, delete it, save it, whatever, all taking traffic going each way. But that is unlimited usage where SMS is 10 cents a damn message...
Yes. An end to boredom. Also, for those who have long commute times, sitting on a bus or train and being able to pull out a reasonable size PDA (or just sleep) is a way to turn 30 minutes or more of dead time driving a car to productive time, even if productive means catching up on slashdot.
My work recently got us all Nextels and I've been using the WAP feature a lot at red lights. I can buzz right into CNN and catch up on news each time I have to sit for a minute or two. It also contains e-mail (er, two-way messaging). With the predictive text input feature, I can tap out on a 10-key faster than a lot of people can type using a qwerty keyboard. I love it.
Now if I could only subscribe to O'reilly's Safari via direct implant connection to my brain, my life would be complete.
Like many other wireless solutions out there, watch it be priced per k so watching a movie that you ripped from a DVD you purchased and stored on your home media server will cost more than it did to make the movie in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a real pain.
(from someone who is annoyed as hell at people who can't seem to understand how to pronounce "cents.")
It's phat. Word up mother fucker. I did it all for the nookie, the nookie....
Hey, not my first choice, but you have to think of the wife at times like this. And who knows, it may be followed by an episode of "Sex in the Living Room" if i'm lucky...
Don't bitch at me. Go read the Microsoft tech note on the topic and deploy the recommended Microsoft solution at your site as documented there.
Want to get government backdoors in the OS that runs almost every computer in the world? Threaten the company with trumped up charges which will ruin them for life, then cut deals with them so they can return to business as usual in return for their cooperation.
I remember when NT 4.0 came out (they were fairly low key with NT 3.x) and Microsoft claiming it was far more secure than UNIX and you wouldn't have buffer overflows because the source was closed and people couldn't find them even if they existed.
I also remember many years ago them claiming NT was more secure and showing the number of submissions of security holes posted to Bugtraq (before NTbugtraq) there were for UNIX vs NT (back when nothing serious ran on NT and no one really cared less about it to look for holes).
Now they want their code running in everything, including acting as firewall devices. I find this so fucking funny I could just split a gut. You're going to protect machines running code "x" by installing a device running much of the same code "x" to protect those machines from the world?
I just find it a bit frightening. The entire world running on code from one manufacturer that is not open to public review. I'm even more surprised that foreign governments are so trusting of it.
You know what's scary? We just bought an EMC disk array and had to give it an IP address for management. Did a port scan on it. WTF? It's listening on netbios ports. Use smbclient to take a gander at it and low and behold....
Domain=[AZBYCXDWEVFU] OS=[Windows NT 4.0] Server=[NT LAN Manager 4.0]
Workgroup Master
AZBYCXDWEVFU CLARIION_SPB
I call EMC and they say "Oh, the new clariions run a stripped down NT kernel in their service processors." :-( Joy... my SAN is now trusted to that super sekure Microsoft code. At least I can block it from the world through my router which, for now, is running non-Microsoft code...
Can you imagine the harm one could do with a hole in THAT? The financial world survived WTC through redundancy and real-time mirrors of data kept in far flung locations. There are disaster recovery data centers where entire warehouses are filled with machines just waiting to kick in during a crisis. So now you have your storage area networks themselves controlled by Microsoft code. Just exploit the hole-of-the-week to get your code inside a corporate or government firewall, seek out these storage networks running NT kernel code, trash them, take out the primary and backup locations. Chaos.
Sorry, bad link in my comment above. The UPNP Linux SDK is at upnp.sourceforge.net
Why care? Well, I found out after installing MSN Messenger that most of the features are useless behind a NATed network unless your router/firewall understands UPNP. Of course, Microsoft ICS and Servers understand it. I was getting frustrated since I couldn't use MSN messenger except for messages behind my home linux firewall. ICQ features like file transfer work fine by port forwarding the necessary ports or using a kernel module for it.
So, here's the interesting bit. UPNP works by telling the other client on the other end what your private IP address is. Microsoft's docs say this is necessary for the other client to be able to find out how to talk back to you. I think this is stupid. The other end of an MSN connection just needs to look at the source IP in the packets it receives and just send there and hope the owner of the IP knows what to do.
However, UPNP apparently knows how to handled multiple chains of NAT networks, kinda like I guess an old fashioned UUCP bang path. Problem is, it seems like one can modify that "bang path" to route return packets to false places. Can you say DDOS?
So I sent a rant to my friends about this on December 10, and about how UPNP is a security hole waiting to happen according to posts I read out of google searches...
Here's my rant...
Microsoft claims UPNP is a universal open standard. It'd be interesting to learn more about its origins and who is really controlling development of it, security of it, etc. Microsoft claims all manner of peripheral vendors will be supporting it.
Is the concept itself as flawed as it seems, or is this just yet another case of Microsoft's implementation of something being flawed?
Except for downloading attachments. This is a big one IMO since it appears to be a genuine cookie handling bug and not some quirk of hotmail.
Bug 105917. Target fix release, 0.9.9
You can turn it off in the preferences. It's called "web site icons." Try that in IE.
(They *could* get a better name however. It just sounds so, er, critical...)
He said it was a good question. His position on it is if it's flashable and programmable, source should be free.
He kind of dodged the question about whether or not his computer BIOS was flashable, free, whatever...
Don't get me wrong, unlike most people, I have a lot of respect for the guy and I don't believe for a second Linux or Open Source would be where it is today without the efforts of him and his team. It's just that there are always little contradictions that trip up even the best of zealots. Like, I wonder if his life is in danger, will he approve of being hooked up to a computer that provides life support but is running non-free software! :-)
Can that be done in IE?
It's not so much that it's been done before, it's being done by one that is troubling. Then you get data mining where all those innocent little bits of information about you are collected, analyzed, and determinations made about you.
My guess is, the only ones left defending Microsoft at that point will be the Microsoft plants. I wonder how close we are to that being the case now...
Personally, I think this is the coolest thing ever. History will never be the same. To be able to go back and re-live events and discussions is like going back in time. It's incredible.
You missed my attempt at sarcasm. Some people are complaining about having all their stuff back to 1981 available and the response was about the x-no-archive header. Well, as you said, it wasn't created until 1995 or so, so people posting before that date have no means or choice on whether to let them live on or not.
Sonofabitch. You don't say. And when exactly was that first documented?
I remember sizing a server in 1993 to be a news server and setting aside 350 megs for the news spool and then being pissed off when I got it because news traffic was up to 20 megs a day. The stats back then showed exponential traffic growth.
How much crap is in a typical full feed today?
It not only kills this kinda crap, it also protects you from the malicious IE/activeX hole of the week.
Now, since all plugins are installed as an activeX control of sometype (including java and flash), you need to say Yes when prompted for those. You'll quickly learn when to say yes and no from practice. You can't make a mistake since you're basically always saying yes by default. If you say No and some page functionality you WANT to see is lost, reload and answer Yes.
Most Mac users are Microsoft haters too, but they certainly buy a shitload of copies of Microsoft Office for the Mac.
DONTs
DOs
Better yet, forget the entire idea. If a company wants to wish employees a happy Christmas for example, use the money and give them an extra day off so they can spend it with people they really care about... And do it on Dec 26, not the 24th or 23rd, else we'll just spend it at the Mall. Many countries have Boxing Day, the U.S. needs it too!
Necro: lvl 69 hell
Assasin: lvl 60 hell
I don't get it, and the wife is none to happy either..
Hell with it. I'm buying a Game Cube and Pikmin. That looks harmless... That should cure me.
Tell me about it. With Nextel it's even more insane. I get unlimited net connect minutes (basically WAP) and I can read and send e-mail to a nextel INBOX that sits on their server, up to 1K a message. But if I get a max 512 byte SMS message, it's freaking 10 cents a message.
With SMS, the message leaves their network, gets zapped to my phone, and is stored there. With e-mail, it sits on their server, I have to connect to it, read it, delete it, save it, whatever, all taking traffic going each way. But that is unlimited usage where SMS is 10 cents a damn message...
Yes. An end to boredom. Also, for those who have long commute times, sitting on a bus or train and being able to pull out a reasonable size PDA (or just sleep) is a way to turn 30 minutes or more of dead time driving a car to productive time, even if productive means catching up on slashdot.
My work recently got us all Nextels and I've been using the WAP feature a lot at red lights. I can buzz right into CNN and catch up on news each time I have to sit for a minute or two. It also contains e-mail (er, two-way messaging). With the predictive text input feature, I can tap out on a 10-key faster than a lot of people can type using a qwerty keyboard. I love it.
Now if I could only subscribe to O'reilly's Safari via direct implant connection to my brain, my life would be complete.
Like many other wireless solutions out there, watch it be priced per k so watching a movie that you ripped from a DVD you purchased and stored on your home media server will cost more than it did to make the movie in the first place.