As the reg points out, these licence packs don't seem to have been distributed in Europe. Which could explain why nobody is currently able to buy one. If the press release were truthful (what, from M$?), it would point out that M$ forgot to print any family pack licenses, and that accounts for a very tiny backlog of clued owners looking for a slight savings.
Its just another PR ploy to get free press by implying that XP is a strong seller, even though the figures seem to be based on early sales to OEMs and distributors, who were forced to pay for large shipments to keep their contracts with M$. Only the register seems to be looking at the numbers of XP copies actually being sold by distributors to end users, any other press outlet who relies on M$ marketing money is printing verbatim the press releases shoveled at them.
At one disti I know, the sales channel manager was lamenting the USD$20 million in XP stock they were forced to buy, which may take them more than 6 months to offload, instead of the vaguely promised 3 weeks. They're hurting, but that's what happens when a convicted monopolist is allowed to continue their abuse.
How many engineers do you know who understand terms such as
algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity terms. An algorithmic complexity variant of mathematical (Godel) incompleteness
Not many. They exist, but they are too few for the numbers of software projects out there. There is also the problem of clueless PHBs who refuse to hire competent engineers with actual degrees who studied "mathematical (Godel) incompleteness" in university and can make use of it for accurate planning.
I've a good friend from university days who stuck it out for about 7 years of study, both computer science and mathematical modeling. He now works for a large company heading large software projects, and his job is to make sure the abstract stuff is covered. Abstract means the kilo-lines-of-code are calculated within reason, the defect tracking statistics reflect reality, and that the end goal is well defined so accurate planning estimates are worth something. He hasn't had a project go over schedule in the last 5 years, but he has had to dump some projects after management tried to fuck them over.
His only horror stories come from clueless VPs who suddenly want to add the latest buzzword to the project. Now every contract for a project contains a whole section dedicated to any changes after the initial spec is finalised. If the client wants to change something, even something very tiny, the whole project starts over with a large payout for the cancelled version of the project. With contracts like that, software projects always stay on time.
Last year, during the boom, I had the unfortunate experience to be forced (of course, it was well paid) into helping an American client filter out people for 12 technical jobs. Particularly, the 3 senior *nix engineers on the western end of our connection. It was a very big company with a big HR department, so there was no shortage of CV^wresumes to look through.
HR shipped to the new managers something like 4000 resumes that had already been filtered for keywords, experience levels, availability. Another group had priority to get people with CS or EE degrees first, so we didn't have a single comp-sci graduate in our pile. (Last week, they had their pick of 50 masters level CS or EE engineers to replace one of the original hires) From those boxes, we filtered them down to 800. HR contacted every one of those 800, and lined up over 400 initial phone interviews. The agravation started then, because not one remaining applicant had the required 5 years of *nix experience. 4 of us took over 4 days just to make those initial calls, and we culled the idiots leaving about 60.
60 techies then got in depth technical phone interviews. None of them met the minimum level of competence (have you ever installed a patch? vi or emacs? what does init do?), so we were told to just go with the best ones to call in for face-to-face interviews. HR also then put the senior job listing in ads, on monster, everywhere, which netted another 40 not-quite-qualified wannabes.
At that point, we had to fall back to gut feeling about friendliness, willingness to admit limitations, university and military experience, and other soft values. We chose 24 for the first round of on-site interviews.
Of those first 24, only about 4 met our lowered expectations. Then we did another 24 interviews, with only about 6 meeting even lower expectations. This had to be repeated until 12 people were actually hired.
The job offers were made to those who showed a willingness to jump into the *nix world, who realised that all hardware sucks and all software sucks, and those who didn't fall for troll/flamebait questions or believe in OS wars or vi/emacs wars.
Not one of the short list candidates followed up with letters or emails, but something polite and simple might have influenced us positively. Some of the total losers did try bombarding us regularly, I got the feeling they couldn't even get a job during the boom times.
So judge the time the hiring manager will be making the decision, and get a *single* follow-up letter or email in just before as a gentle reminder that you are interested and willing to apply yourself. Show them you can take the initiative, even if it was only ask/.:-)
the AC
Sample phone interview questions:
vi or emacs? (no elaboration beyond that)
+10 - Either. Both. they're just tools
+5 - vi, because its everywhere
+4 - vi
+5 - emacs, for programming
+4 - emacs
0 - any discussion on why one is better than the other
-1 - I like graphical editors
-5 - huh?
-10 - I use wurd/notepad (we had a number of these)
You've accidentally typed rm -r/usr on the production system. When you stop self-larting, can you recover the system without any downtime? How?
+10 - any positive answer
0 - I don't think so, but I'd try
-5 - what's self-larting?
-10 - any negative answer
It would be cool to have completely separate processors in a box, so that as long as there is power, each card can run on its own. Then you could network them together into a beowulf cluster, and then make clusters of clusters
the AC
Another /. flamebait, its not about cookies
on
EU May Outlaw Cookies
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· Score: 5, Informative
Reading the Yahoo story, its pretty clear the author took the Internet Advertising Board's press release and printed it almost verbatim.
The proposed legislation has nothing to do with browser cookies, it focuses on regulating what kinds of private information marketing scum can gather and share without permission. The bill aims to prevent marketing firms from using any data obtained through illicit or decietful means to be correlated with personal identities. It would also prevent marketing from using personal information to gather other info through other means.
Web sites could still set cookies on your browser, and even track sessions from one logon to the next. But the web sites would not be allowed to match that information with individual identities. They could still gather statistics, monitor actions, and anything else cookies are useful for, but not for targetting individuals.
This legislation was proposed before, but was stalled after the IAB and a few other telemarketing firms pooled their money to fight it. It has been delayed for a while, but is back for another round.
I know what 4800s are capable of. But the sunray server doesn't use shared memory, it keeps a separate image for each sunray. The article gave the price for a 2 CPU machine with only 4GB of RAM, not nearly enough for more than 8 sunrays before luser complaints start piling up.
In a school situation where the students will likely be using complex software, such as matlab, oracle, compilers, as well as mozilla, the CPUs will be hosed if more than 100 to 200 students are logged on. Then during finals week, all hell would break loose.
I've also ranted about the networking traffic required by sunrays. The 4800 would require a minimum of 25 GigEthernet cards, plus a network switch for every 25 sunrays.
The 4800 is not the machine to put in a school (although it should have one for the compSci folx) I'd rather see a dozen or more E450s, and some percentage of the sunrays should really be various flavours of workstations.
Don't forget all the students who will want to run napster/gnutella/kazaa, and will try to install all kinds of nasty client software on the server. Better to give them their own CPUs.
With an understatement like that, you might be British:-)
I set up a lab last year with 50 SunRays. 2 big sun servers, 2 cisco 6500 switches with gigE interfaces to the servers, tons of bandwidth every which way. The first attempt at all 50 sunrays on one switch with only 1 server was a complete disaster. To acheive the performance quoted by the sales slime, the contractor had to purchase a second server and switch, and got me in to rework the whole network. Nobody made any profit off that stupid contract (except me).
My rant from last night was more about putting 500 lusers on a single box. It might be possible to do it, but the article quoted a base 4800 with only 2 CPUs, and didn't take into account the expense of a huge network to support it. Maybe 500 lusers spread across 10 servers, and about 100 real sparc stations, freeBSD and linux boxen for the power lusers. Need I mention the price of original Sun RAM?
Some of the other followup posts raised good points, you can figure them out. And yes, I have used sunrays, I even have a sunray at home, but I prefer a blade 100 to a sunray/server combo.
the AC
[/. doesn't allow urls to be pasted into comments, they add random spaces to fuck things up, you need to enclose them in html tags [A href=http://...]description[/A] (change the square brackets into angle brackets, I can't figure out the latest html filter)]
Anyway if they want my pr0n they will have to decrypt the pgpdisk volume first.
Ahhh, you haven't heard about the RIP act. If the police (any policeman, whether acting for a court or just to violate your human rights) can ask you to decrypt your PGPed disk. If you refuse, you can be held without charge forever. If you forget your key, you can be held for up to 5 years without charge. If they think you might in some way be connected to a terrorist organisation, or might commit some crime while on british soil, they can hold you on the Prevention of Terrorism Act for as long as they want, and they never have to report your detention to the public, or allow you to contact the outside world. Ever.
Welcome to England. The most criticised country in Europe for human rights violations (but I'd vote for France and Greece in 1st and 2nd place).
If they took the disk out of my laptop... bye bye warranty.
The guys claimed they are all certified dell/sony/compaq hardware technicians, and their damage^Wwork doesn't violate the warranty. Yeah, I believe that.
Holy shit! 500 SunRay terminals on a single 4800. I must contact the author and find out how to keep the 4800 from exploding under that kind of load.
To properly set up that many SunRays, the load has to be distributed between a number of servers, because every client running *office, nutscrape^Wmozilla, and a few xterms with email clients will require about 50Mbytes per session. Thats 25 GigaBytes of RAM, not counting the slowaris overhead. Hit swap even slightly with that much real memory, and watch every session run at 20MHz 386 speeds.
No, this is a completely unrealistic mismatch. It would have been nice if the author had asked a few *nix and *doze experts for some real numbers and real world installations, then we could use an article like this for something useful. As it is, M$ doesn't even need to respond, its 100% grade-A FUD.
I've seen two large dial-in companies distribute a small program for windoze dialups that keeps a small log of connect attempts. After a successful dialup establishes a proper PPP connection, the software sends the info to a logging server, so that missed attempts are also logged. The clients also keep track of DCE speed, PPP negotiation attempts, retrains, reason for disconnect, etc. Both of them cause all kinds of problems for network managers, since they fuck around with the windoze IP/dialup networking stack, and break things in mysterious ways.
I saw both companies at CeBIT this year (which doesn't do you any good since there are thousands of companies). I'm pretty sure there were others.
One allows their client software to be distibuted freely, and then the customer who wants reports pays by the number/report/detail etc., but requires that all the dialins establish a fully routable IP connection to the internet. The info is slightly encrypted, and may possibly contain sensitive info like login/password and windoze info. The company wouldn't admit it, but that was the only way for them to distinguish which client belongs to which company. Nasty shit for security people. I've heard many reports of targeted spam hitting every person in the company soon after installing the widget.
The other was a full client/server setup, where the server could be installed on the company network, and not require internet access. Cost was based on number of clients/laptops/server size. But it allowed all sensitive info to stay within an organisation. Less nasty shit for paranoid security people. They promised a newer version could also do correlation reports with logging info from radius, and then tried to recruit me to write it:-)
Do some web searches, maybe poke around in comp.dcom groups on google. These tools exist, you just have to be ready to pay for them. And we on slashdot are too lazy to do your job for you (but are available for a hefty consluting fee:-)
So, they were scanning the machine for the HDD contents??
British security has been scanning hard drives for years now. I've been scanned twice entering the UK, once at heathrow (missed an important morning meeting, cost me a bundle) and once at Waterloo after getting off the Eurostar.
Go search on The Register and you will find some articles about the UK system. They have no problem scanning solaris x86 UFS, linux ext2fs, or any other system. They take the HD out of the laptop, copy the whole thing in a machine that apparently does a low level bit copy including boot tracks and bad sectors, and later scan for *ANY* pr0n. They will also copy every CD you have. The process takes at least an hour, during which they offer you the worst tea or coffee ever produced, bad even by low UK standards.
Everyone I know who travels regularly into London for work knows to clean out their browser caches, and to make sure if someone sends the funny pic of the day of a woman+dog, to scrub the free space with some utility. There have been prosecutions for some poor fools, mostly they just hit you up with a large fine. If you don't pay it, expect to be arrested next trip through customs. One good friend has a court appearance soon to justify all of the software found on his system, they won't tell him the exact list they found, but he had Oracle 8i and a ton of development apps licensed to his workplace, and they aren't cooperating.
Searches at PDX sound like a hunt for pr0n that is legal in Japan but totally offends American tastes. Pr0n that may be legal in the US is still illegal to import or export.
99.999% uptime does not mean that your server stay up that long
It depends on who writes the contract. I maintain servers with a 5x9's availability (not uptime, that is something different) guaranteed, the metric is taken at the end of every month for the previous 12 months of operation for a period of 6 years. The 5x9's include no scheduled downtime, we always switch in a fully tested duplicate system for the biannual hardware maintenance. If we ever have a crash that takes out the whole system for more than 7 minutes, we can write our bonuses goodbye for the next 13 months. The bonuses are the only form of profit built into the contract after all the engineering costs are covered.
The real question is: can you trust your OEM?
No, the real question is whether your management is stupid enough to believe a vendor offering a mythical 5x9's availability without a well developed plan for redundant hardware switchover, mirrored machines, raid storage, onsite spare hardware, experienced engineers who live within 30 minutes drive from your site with a goddamned pager surgically attached[end rantlet]. Did I forget to mention the motorcycles in case of large traffic jams:-) For the original poster's question, start googling for horror stories about the OEM and their failed installations, and complile a list for the next presentation. Then watch the sales slime start to sweat, mumble, and wave their hands to try warding off bad karma.
To offer 5x9's, the vendor must provide their own power (a battery room built by a qualified company), local stocks of spare hardware, and be able to supply a complete duplicate system within a few hours. At every one of our 5x9's sites, we have our own office space, with our own phones and our own internet connection.
As you can tell, a real 5x9's contract costs about 5 times as much as a regular installation. A real 5x9's contract always specifies the length of time to measure against, usually over a number of years, often as a moving average for the previous year or 24 months. A real 5x9's system isn't delivered on a custom burned CD-R so the client can fuck up the installation.
CND was supposedly designed as an XML formatted network diagram tool. The idea was that the data picked up from autodiscovery could be manipulated into part numbers, and exported into ordering programs and accounting systems, and exchanged with network management systems. Cisco has been pushing hard to get into XML for communication between all their applications, with varying degrees of success. As one person at a conference said "It takes management only 2 seconds to make the decision to go with the latest buzzword (XML), but first implementation takes 2 years of hard work with plenty of resources. And if during those 2 years a new buzzword comes along, kiss most of that work goodbye".
I have no real understanding of the underlying technology, CND is just a tool that works. You might try googling, and digging around cisco and netformx sites for more info.
"I have a budget of $0.39, and I would like the same amount of security major banks, intelligence organisations, and the military use. I'll ask/. how I can build a super-secure connection for less than a dollar, I'm sure many geeks have done this before"
If you truly have information so valuable that someone could gain information just on traffic analysis, you need to hire real professionals. Not some ex-cracker wannabe with a nose-ring and tattoo collection, but ex-DIA soldiers who have already made a career of physical security.
You either spend the money, or tell the powers-that-be to kill the idea of placing a remote terminal in an unsecured location. If the information is that valuable, those who need access to it can cross the street. If they are too lazy to cross the street for your information, then the information isn't valuable enough to keep secure.
Pressurised conduit requires separate monitoring facilities at both ends, inside the secure areas. That means physical access for inspections and maintenance on a regular basis, not just once a month. And if you can't run a customised IPSec implementation with a constant level of traffic, you don't have the budget to do this project correctly. Kill yourself now:-)
According to my lawyer (HIAL, IANAL) 18USC1030(b) has been used in court to describe cisco routers, sun sparcstations with 2 or more communication ports, and various other pieces of comms gear. The catch is that at least one communication port must be connected to a circuit that has the potential for interstate or foreign communications. That includes any modem hooked to the phone system, any leased line from any telco, or any radio system.
The protected computer does not have to be cracked, or compromised, merely accessed, which includes passing normal traffic over it.
Security teams in the US can mention 18USC1030(b) to a fed when they want action to be taken for cracked systems. It is one of the few used in almost every cracker case, I'm pretty sure it was one of the charges brought against Kevin Mitnik.
Now even pinging a host on a leased line or tracerouting past a router could be considered an act of terrorism. Not that it will result in every computer user in the world being thrown in jail next week, but the law will be abused. Just the merest hint of life with no parole to a defence lawyer will get them into plea bargain mode, after that the poor skriptkiddie is really fucked.
You poor americans. I really feel sorry for you now, seeing how a small terrorist act can get the entire constitution and bill of rights overturned without much of a fight. The terrorists have won, with a loss of only 19 of their fighters they have turned america from the most open and free society in the world to the second most repressive.
Visio is considered the standard for manually diagramming a network, it's unfortunate the company was borg'd by M$, and the latest version of the product (visio2k) has already shown its direction from professional diagramming tool to org chart tool for micr~1.oft orfice drones. Cmdr. Marille points to a bunch of network icons in his message, every network person should have a copy.
If you can afford it, look into Cisco's Network Designer (assuming a large part of your kit is cisco), which autodiscovers your network, similar to how HP openview works, and it also uses CDP info and examines cisco configuration files to understand complex interconnections. If you can't get a copy from cisco, NetFormX sells it to everyone else. The neat thing about CND is you can click on each generic icon, replace it with a specific model of equipment, and it builds a database of every component on the network. I've seen clients extract that data automatically into an inventory database for the beancounters.
Other posters are listing all the free alternatives, but if you really have a globe spanning network with that many machines and routers, spend a little on either visio or CND. Good documentation is a major part of network administration, don't skimp on the tools. If you have to skimp, I'd go with dia, or maybe Kivio is stable enough now.
When you are trying to build a document base, first find out the largest size printer you will have regular access to. Make all your pages that size, put a nice border just inside the print margins, and have a small info block in one corner just like professionals do. Test how small you can make your fonts so you can read a photocopy of the original. Once you know the limits of your printed pages, then start your documenting project. Break the network into logical maps, representing regional areas, physical locations, protocol types, vpn tunnels, backbones, hosts, etc.
You can't fit an entire network onto a single sheet of A4 (8.5x11) paper, no matter how hard you try. I can barely fit my home network diagram onto an A3 page. Move all the important non-graphical information onto other pages that accompany the pretty picture page. Make a book where each diagram has a few pages of text descriptions, specs, snippets of configs, spreadsheets, caveats and reasons for doing screwy things.
When you have successfully documented your network, any PFY should be able to flip through the pages and be able to fix problems with only a few minutes of study (yeah, right!).
the AC
only 1 ml? What about the taste tests?
on
Beer In Space
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· Score: 2
Time to send up some master brewers with a few tons of hops and malt. Let them play with various batches and send the "space brew" back to earth.
Hell, I'd pay about $100 for a drink of space brew if it had orbited the earth a few thousand times. NASA could send up the raw materials on cheap(er) rockets, and sell the brew for a good profit. A few thousand litres could pay for a shuttle flight.
the AC
Re:An international tragedy
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
Most nations lost citizens in the attack.
An ex-GF has several french colleagues out of contact since Tuesday. She left NY over the weekend after working next to the towers for a few weeks. Several french families she knows are now homeless, since they lived a few blocks from the WTC.
There aren't any Belgians confirmed dead yet, but around 20 are missing with no news.
Yes, this disaster is going to touch every country on the planet, not just the US. I fear the backlash will be all out of proportion, but in the words of Sigue-Sigue Sputnik...
So does France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium and a number of other countries.
Holland is the only country to not have a Marshall plan debt, mostly because they financed the American Revolution. America was still paying off the Dutch bank loans from 140 years earlier, and the Marshall plan cancelled out the remainder, and the small amount left over was paid back by giving the U.S. two NATO bases on Dutch soil.
This so-called "canadian editorial" was published in 1973, hastily put together and full of errors and lies. But it reads good. The version(s) floating around on the internet are all modified depending on which slant the plagarisers want to add. I've received several different versions today, plus seen at least a dozen different knock-offs.
the AC
[For something really sick, see this mailer sent out last friday]
Equant is the customer facing part of SITA, and they have a pretty extensive international network. Its the only network with a presence in every country in the world.
They have dial-in points in pretty much every country, and can allow your roamers to set up VPNs back to your firewall. They offer crypto-card services and other geeky things for security.
If your boss is as cheap as you say, then stick with a bunch of AOL accounts. Real ISPs who allow their customers to act like professionals cost more money than the clueless discount ISPs or AOLs of the world. Let your boss know that the image your customers see is directly proportional to the budget you have to work with, and if he can run the business without customers, there are a bunch of dotbombs who would love to hire him (for stock options only, of course).
Images on my site are my property. In every jpeg image (and powerpoint, word and text file) I create, I place my copyright statement. I also have a robots.txt file to prevent copying by search engines. To google's credit, they obey the robots.txt file, but others are not so considerate.
Recently, I had the occasion to place a number of images and other copyrighted works on a website hosted on one of my machines. The copyrighted works were available for a period of about 20 minutes, long enough for my friend (who paid me in beer, including many pints tonight just before I typed this, apologies for typos and bad grammar) and his brother to retrieve the works. My friend used AOL Instant Messenger to tell his brother which URL to find the images, including the obscure URL.
After I saw the two of them had retrieved the images, I left the site up for some stupid reasons (end of work day, beers calling, phone calls from idiots). Apache was running on an obscure port (28962) on an IP address with no DNS/reverse DNS entry. About 14 hours after my friend has sent the URL to his brother via AIM, I saw an AOL spider crawled my site for those works.
Its pretty fucking obvious that AOL is sucking up every copyrighted work they can, presumably to have copies of everything of value that passes by AIM. Their EULA allows them unlimited copyright to anything that passes by their systems, even if it is hosted on a third party system that doesn't agree to their EULA.
The machines involved slowly crawled the site, about one hit per minute from 4 different IP addresses. Machines like:
spider-loh-ta012.proxy.aol.com, spider-loh-ta016.proxy.aol.com, cache-loh-aa01.proxy.aol.com, and
cache-loh-ab02.proxy.aol.com carefully worked the site, following every link, and grabbing every (huge) jpeg and ppt file. Stupid of me to not filter AOL from my website, but I've learned. From now on, only password protected protocols that can't be easily picked up in plaintext streams.
Since that incident, I've been able to work this demonstration into my security reports. A client can set up a totally fake URL on a random port, send a message by AIM, and within 24 hours, the site is spidered by AOL, regardless of the robots.txt file. Sending an FTP username and password will result in the site being accessed within 24 hours. AOL hasn't responded to any of my queries, so that makes the whole thing even more interesting from a security aspect, and makes me even more money.
So don't place any intellectual property on any internet connected machine, if you want to retain control of your copyright. Large corporations will take your works, and if they happen to have great value later on, you won't see any recompense. I actually feel bad for the RIAA/MPAA giants, because they can't defend themselves, even with the DMCA and new European laws. You may own the IP for a work, but the internet doesn't care. "Get over it".
Americans are regularly arrested in Russia for various crimes, mostly drug related. About 2 per week in Moscow alone, according to my embassy friends.
There is a notice up in the lobby of every US embassy in Europe, and probably Russia as well, warning Americans that the embassy can not support them in any way if they are arrested. It goes on to say that the ex-USSR countries no longer notify the embassy if an american is arrested in the country, since the US state department has quietly stopped obeying an international treaty to do the same for foreigners caught in America.
There is a whole list of things to do to attract the attention of the embassy staff in case of arrest in Russia, Byelorusse, Ukraine, or other ex-communist states. Simple advice such as repeatedly asking to phone the embassy or a relative in the US, asking other prisoners to relay the message, or ask a local lawyer to relay the message. Then there is a whole list of things the embassy will NOT do for americans, such as provide legal advice, apply diplomatic pressure, or provide any monetary assistance. All the embassy will do is relay your plight to a close relative in the US, and will ask officials to be kept advised of your location. That's it.
There is also a special note that anyone accused of any drug related crime will not receive any assistance from the embassy, part of the "war on drugs" policy. So most police forces always toss a drugs trafficing charge in with the other charges, which, by US law, keeps the embassy away. During the trial, the drugs charge tends to just disappear, but by then the US State Department has completely forgotten the case.
Securitas said MS insists it's going to meet its Nov. 8 North American release date. I'll believe it when I see it.
M$ will certainly ship the north american X-box in time for the X-mas season, even if it is full of bugs or has some major safety problems. The only time to make large advances in marketshare come during the christmas season in the U.S., so M$ would rather risk a recall or later fix if they can grab 40% of the game console market this year.
If the X-box does take off, they will then ramp up production and get units into secondary markets, or, as ioman1 points out, if the U.S. sales aren't spectacular Japan will see suddenly have a bunch of consoles available. But given the state of the world's economies right now, any product manager who mis-calculates demand could cost a company $$$billions if inventory just sits unsold in warehouses.
Go search the cisco web site for aironet and antenna, they have a few other antenna types, including a nice +21dB parabola not available in Europe.
Because 802.11b devices are being sold to consumers, they are required to have "non-standard" connectors not readily available on the market so people can NOT modify the antennas to boost range. That is a requirement in the U.S. and Europe, so all 802.11b manufacturers use Reverse-TNC or Reverse-SMA connectors.
The article had it wrong when it said the units had standard connectors. Clearly the author just bought two boxes and hooked them up and they worked, just like the TFM says. This article didn't deserve a/. listing, but in these last few hot summer days, the news is pretty thin.
Slashdot Mirror
As the reg points out, these licence packs don't seem to have been distributed in Europe. Which could explain why nobody is currently able to buy one. If the press release were truthful (what, from M$?), it would point out that M$ forgot to print any family pack licenses, and that accounts for a very tiny backlog of clued owners looking for a slight savings.
Its just another PR ploy to get free press by implying that XP is a strong seller, even though the figures seem to be based on early sales to OEMs and distributors, who were forced to pay for large shipments to keep their contracts with M$. Only the register seems to be looking at the numbers of XP copies actually being sold by distributors to end users, any other press outlet who relies on M$ marketing money is printing verbatim the press releases shoveled at them.
At one disti I know, the sales channel manager was lamenting the USD$20 million in XP stock they were forced to buy, which may take them more than 6 months to offload, instead of the vaguely promised 3 weeks. They're hurting, but that's what happens when a convicted monopolist is allowed to continue their abuse.
the AC
How many engineers do you know who understand terms such as
algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity terms. An algorithmic complexity variant of mathematical (Godel) incompleteness
Not many. They exist, but they are too few for the numbers of software projects out there. There is also the problem of clueless PHBs who refuse to hire competent engineers with actual degrees who studied "mathematical (Godel) incompleteness" in university and can make use of it for accurate planning.
I've a good friend from university days who stuck it out for about 7 years of study, both computer science and mathematical modeling. He now works for a large company heading large software projects, and his job is to make sure the abstract stuff is covered. Abstract means the kilo-lines-of-code are calculated within reason, the defect tracking statistics reflect reality, and that the end goal is well defined so accurate planning estimates are worth something. He hasn't had a project go over schedule in the last 5 years, but he has had to dump some projects after management tried to fuck them over.
His only horror stories come from clueless VPs who suddenly want to add the latest buzzword to the project. Now every contract for a project contains a whole section dedicated to any changes after the initial spec is finalised. If the client wants to change something, even something very tiny, the whole project starts over with a large payout for the cancelled version of the project. With contracts like that, software projects always stay on time.
the AC
Last year, during the boom, I had the unfortunate experience to be forced (of course, it was well paid) into helping an American client filter out people for 12 technical jobs. Particularly, the 3 senior *nix engineers on the western end of our connection. It was a very big company with a big HR department, so there was no shortage of CV^wresumes to look through.
/. :-)
/usr on the production system. When you stop self-larting, can you recover the system without any downtime? How?
HR shipped to the new managers something like 4000 resumes that had already been filtered for keywords, experience levels, availability. Another group had priority to get people with CS or EE degrees first, so we didn't have a single comp-sci graduate in our pile. (Last week, they had their pick of 50 masters level CS or EE engineers to replace one of the original hires) From those boxes, we filtered them down to 800. HR contacted every one of those 800, and lined up over 400 initial phone interviews. The agravation started then, because not one remaining applicant had the required 5 years of *nix experience. 4 of us took over 4 days just to make those initial calls, and we culled the idiots leaving about 60.
60 techies then got in depth technical phone interviews. None of them met the minimum level of competence (have you ever installed a patch? vi or emacs? what does init do?), so we were told to just go with the best ones to call in for face-to-face interviews. HR also then put the senior job listing in ads, on monster, everywhere, which netted another 40 not-quite-qualified wannabes.
At that point, we had to fall back to gut feeling about friendliness, willingness to admit limitations, university and military experience, and other soft values. We chose 24 for the first round of on-site interviews.
Of those first 24, only about 4 met our lowered expectations. Then we did another 24 interviews, with only about 6 meeting even lower expectations. This had to be repeated until 12 people were actually hired.
The job offers were made to those who showed a willingness to jump into the *nix world, who realised that all hardware sucks and all software sucks, and those who didn't fall for troll/flamebait questions or believe in OS wars or vi/emacs wars.
Not one of the short list candidates followed up with letters or emails, but something polite and simple might have influenced us positively. Some of the total losers did try bombarding us regularly, I got the feeling they couldn't even get a job during the boom times.
So judge the time the hiring manager will be making the decision, and get a *single* follow-up letter or email in just before as a gentle reminder that you are interested and willing to apply yourself. Show them you can take the initiative, even if it was only ask
the AC
Sample phone interview questions:
vi or emacs? (no elaboration beyond that)
+10 - Either. Both. they're just tools
+5 - vi, because its everywhere
+4 - vi
+5 - emacs, for programming
+4 - emacs
0 - any discussion on why one is better than the other
-1 - I like graphical editors
-5 - huh?
-10 - I use wurd/notepad (we had a number of these)
You've accidentally typed rm -r
+10 - any positive answer
0 - I don't think so, but I'd try
-5 - what's self-larting?
-10 - any negative answer
Imagine...
It would be cool to have completely separate processors in a box, so that as long as there is power, each card can run on its own. Then you could network them together into a beowulf cluster, and then make clusters of clusters
the AC
Reading the Yahoo story, its pretty clear the author took the Internet Advertising Board's press release and printed it almost verbatim.
The proposed legislation has nothing to do with browser cookies, it focuses on regulating what kinds of private information marketing scum can gather and share without permission. The bill aims to prevent marketing firms from using any data obtained through illicit or decietful means to be correlated with personal identities. It would also prevent marketing from using personal information to gather other info through other means.
Web sites could still set cookies on your browser, and even track sessions from one logon to the next. But the web sites would not be allowed to match that information with individual identities. They could still gather statistics, monitor actions, and anything else cookies are useful for, but not for targetting individuals.
This legislation was proposed before, but was stalled after the IAB and a few other telemarketing firms pooled their money to fight it. It has been delayed for a while, but is back for another round.
the AC
I know what 4800s are capable of. But the sunray server doesn't use shared memory, it keeps a separate image for each sunray. The article gave the price for a 2 CPU machine with only 4GB of RAM, not nearly enough for more than 8 sunrays before luser complaints start piling up.
In a school situation where the students will likely be using complex software, such as matlab, oracle, compilers, as well as mozilla, the CPUs will be hosed if more than 100 to 200 students are logged on. Then during finals week, all hell would break loose.
I've also ranted about the networking traffic required by sunrays. The 4800 would require a minimum of 25 GigEthernet cards, plus a network switch for every 25 sunrays.
The 4800 is not the machine to put in a school (although it should have one for the compSci folx) I'd rather see a dozen or more E450s, and some percentage of the sunrays should really be various flavours of workstations.
Don't forget all the students who will want to run napster/gnutella/kazaa, and will try to install all kinds of nasty client software on the server. Better to give them their own CPUs.
the AC
SunRays are huge network bandwidth hogs.
:-)
With an understatement like that, you might be British
I set up a lab last year with 50 SunRays. 2 big sun servers, 2 cisco 6500 switches with gigE interfaces to the servers, tons of bandwidth every which way. The first attempt at all 50 sunrays on one switch with only 1 server was a complete disaster. To acheive the performance quoted by the sales slime, the contractor had to purchase a second server and switch, and got me in to rework the whole network. Nobody made any profit off that stupid contract (except me).
My rant from last night was more about putting 500 lusers on a single box. It might be possible to do it, but the article quoted a base 4800 with only 2 CPUs, and didn't take into account the expense of a huge network to support it. Maybe 500 lusers spread across 10 servers, and about 100 real sparc stations, freeBSD and linux boxen for the power lusers. Need I mention the price of original Sun RAM?
Some of the other followup posts raised good points, you can figure them out. And yes, I have used sunrays, I even have a sunray at home, but I prefer a blade 100 to a sunray/server combo.
the AC
[/. doesn't allow urls to be pasted into comments, they add random spaces to fuck things up, you need to enclose them in html tags [A href=http://...]description[/A] (change the square brackets into angle brackets, I can't figure out the latest html filter)]
Anyway if they want my pr0n they will have to decrypt the pgpdisk volume first.
... bye bye warranty.
Ahhh, you haven't heard about the RIP act. If the police (any policeman, whether acting for a court or just to violate your human rights) can ask you to decrypt your PGPed disk. If you refuse, you can be held without charge forever. If you forget your key, you can be held for up to 5 years without charge. If they think you might in some way be connected to a terrorist organisation, or might commit some crime while on british soil, they can hold you on the Prevention of Terrorism Act for as long as they want, and they never have to report your detention to the public, or allow you to contact the outside world. Ever.
Welcome to England. The most criticised country in Europe for human rights violations (but I'd vote for France and Greece in 1st and 2nd place).
If they took the disk out of my laptop
The guys claimed they are all certified dell/sony/compaq hardware technicians, and their damage^Wwork doesn't violate the warranty. Yeah, I believe that.
the AC
Holy shit! 500 SunRay terminals on a single 4800. I must contact the author and find out how to keep the 4800 from exploding under that kind of load.
To properly set up that many SunRays, the load has to be distributed between a number of servers, because every client running *office, nutscrape^Wmozilla, and a few xterms with email clients will require about 50Mbytes per session. Thats 25 GigaBytes of RAM, not counting the slowaris overhead. Hit swap even slightly with that much real memory, and watch every session run at 20MHz 386 speeds.
No, this is a completely unrealistic mismatch. It would have been nice if the author had asked a few *nix and *doze experts for some real numbers and real world installations, then we could use an article like this for something useful. As it is, M$ doesn't even need to respond, its 100% grade-A FUD.
the AC
I can't remember their names, however.
:-)
:-)
I've seen two large dial-in companies distribute a small program for windoze dialups that keeps a small log of connect attempts. After a successful dialup establishes a proper PPP connection, the software sends the info to a logging server, so that missed attempts are also logged. The clients also keep track of DCE speed, PPP negotiation attempts, retrains, reason for disconnect, etc. Both of them cause all kinds of problems for network managers, since they fuck around with the windoze IP/dialup networking stack, and break things in mysterious ways.
I saw both companies at CeBIT this year (which doesn't do you any good since there are thousands of companies). I'm pretty sure there were others.
One allows their client software to be distibuted freely, and then the customer who wants reports pays by the number/report/detail etc., but requires that all the dialins establish a fully routable IP connection to the internet. The info is slightly encrypted, and may possibly contain sensitive info like login/password and windoze info. The company wouldn't admit it, but that was the only way for them to distinguish which client belongs to which company. Nasty shit for security people. I've heard many reports of targeted spam hitting every person in the company soon after installing the widget.
The other was a full client/server setup, where the server could be installed on the company network, and not require internet access. Cost was based on number of clients/laptops/server size. But it allowed all sensitive info to stay within an organisation. Less nasty shit for paranoid security people. They promised a newer version could also do correlation reports with logging info from radius, and then tried to recruit me to write it
Do some web searches, maybe poke around in comp.dcom groups on google. These tools exist, you just have to be ready to pay for them. And we on slashdot are too lazy to do your job for you (but are available for a hefty consluting fee
the AC
So, they were scanning the machine for the HDD contents??
British security has been scanning hard drives for years now. I've been scanned twice entering the UK, once at heathrow (missed an important morning meeting, cost me a bundle) and once at Waterloo after getting off the Eurostar.
Go search on The Register and you will find some articles about the UK system. They have no problem scanning solaris x86 UFS, linux ext2fs, or any other system. They take the HD out of the laptop, copy the whole thing in a machine that apparently does a low level bit copy including boot tracks and bad sectors, and later scan for *ANY* pr0n. They will also copy every CD you have. The process takes at least an hour, during which they offer you the worst tea or coffee ever produced, bad even by low UK standards.
Everyone I know who travels regularly into London for work knows to clean out their browser caches, and to make sure if someone sends the funny pic of the day of a woman+dog, to scrub the free space with some utility. There have been prosecutions for some poor fools, mostly they just hit you up with a large fine. If you don't pay it, expect to be arrested next trip through customs. One good friend has a court appearance soon to justify all of the software found on his system, they won't tell him the exact list they found, but he had Oracle 8i and a ton of development apps licensed to his workplace, and they aren't cooperating.
Searches at PDX sound like a hunt for pr0n that is legal in Japan but totally offends American tastes. Pr0n that may be legal in the US is still illegal to import or export.
the AC
99.999% uptime does not mean that your server stay up that long
:-) For the original poster's question, start googling for horror stories about the OEM and their failed installations, and complile a list for the next presentation. Then watch the sales slime start to sweat, mumble, and wave their hands to try warding off bad karma.
It depends on who writes the contract. I maintain servers with a 5x9's availability (not uptime, that is something different) guaranteed, the metric is taken at the end of every month for the previous 12 months of operation for a period of 6 years. The 5x9's include no scheduled downtime, we always switch in a fully tested duplicate system for the biannual hardware maintenance. If we ever have a crash that takes out the whole system for more than 7 minutes, we can write our bonuses goodbye for the next 13 months. The bonuses are the only form of profit built into the contract after all the engineering costs are covered.
The real question is: can you trust your OEM?
No, the real question is whether your management is stupid enough to believe a vendor offering a mythical 5x9's availability without a well developed plan for redundant hardware switchover, mirrored machines, raid storage, onsite spare hardware, experienced engineers who live within 30 minutes drive from your site with a goddamned pager surgically attached[end rantlet]. Did I forget to mention the motorcycles in case of large traffic jams
To offer 5x9's, the vendor must provide their own power (a battery room built by a qualified company), local stocks of spare hardware, and be able to supply a complete duplicate system within a few hours. At every one of our 5x9's sites, we have our own office space, with our own phones and our own internet connection.
As you can tell, a real 5x9's contract costs about 5 times as much as a regular installation. A real 5x9's contract always specifies the length of time to measure against, usually over a number of years, often as a moving average for the previous year or 24 months. A real 5x9's system isn't delivered on a custom burned CD-R so the client can fuck up the installation.
the AC
CND was supposedly designed as an XML formatted network diagram tool. The idea was that the data picked up from autodiscovery could be manipulated into part numbers, and exported into ordering programs and accounting systems, and exchanged with network management systems. Cisco has been pushing hard to get into XML for communication between all their applications, with varying degrees of success. As one person at a conference said "It takes management only 2 seconds to make the decision to go with the latest buzzword (XML), but first implementation takes 2 years of hard work with plenty of resources. And if during those 2 years a new buzzword comes along, kiss most of that work goodbye".
I have no real understanding of the underlying technology, CND is just a tool that works. You might try googling, and digging around cisco and netformx sites for more info.
the AC
I read your questions as:
/. how I can build a super-secure connection for less than a dollar, I'm sure many geeks have done this before"
:-)
"I have a budget of $0.39, and I would like the same amount of security major banks, intelligence organisations, and the military use. I'll ask
If you truly have information so valuable that someone could gain information just on traffic analysis, you need to hire real professionals. Not some ex-cracker wannabe with a nose-ring and tattoo collection, but ex-DIA soldiers who have already made a career of physical security.
You either spend the money, or tell the powers-that-be to kill the idea of placing a remote terminal in an unsecured location. If the information is that valuable, those who need access to it can cross the street. If they are too lazy to cross the street for your information, then the information isn't valuable enough to keep secure.
Pressurised conduit requires separate monitoring facilities at both ends, inside the secure areas. That means physical access for inspections and maintenance on a regular basis, not just once a month. And if you can't run a customised IPSec implementation with a constant level of traffic, you don't have the budget to do this project correctly. Kill yourself now
the AC
According to my lawyer (HIAL, IANAL) 18USC1030(b) has been used in court to describe cisco routers, sun sparcstations with 2 or more communication ports, and various other pieces of comms gear. The catch is that at least one communication port must be connected to a circuit that has the potential for interstate or foreign communications. That includes any modem hooked to the phone system, any leased line from any telco, or any radio system.
The protected computer does not have to be cracked, or compromised, merely accessed, which includes passing normal traffic over it.
Security teams in the US can mention 18USC1030(b) to a fed when they want action to be taken for cracked systems. It is one of the few used in almost every cracker case, I'm pretty sure it was one of the charges brought against Kevin Mitnik.
Now even pinging a host on a leased line or tracerouting past a router could be considered an act of terrorism. Not that it will result in every computer user in the world being thrown in jail next week, but the law will be abused. Just the merest hint of life with no parole to a defence lawyer will get them into plea bargain mode, after that the poor skriptkiddie is really fucked.
You poor americans. I really feel sorry for you now, seeing how a small terrorist act can get the entire constitution and bill of rights overturned without much of a fight. The terrorists have won, with a loss of only 19 of their fighters they have turned america from the most open and free society in the world to the second most repressive.
the AC
Visio is considered the standard for manually diagramming a network, it's unfortunate the company was borg'd by M$, and the latest version of the product (visio2k) has already shown its direction from professional diagramming tool to org chart tool for micr~1.oft orfice drones. Cmdr. Marille points to a bunch of network icons in his message, every network person should have a copy.
If you can afford it, look into Cisco's Network Designer (assuming a large part of your kit is cisco), which autodiscovers your network, similar to how HP openview works, and it also uses CDP info and examines cisco configuration files to understand complex interconnections. If you can't get a copy from cisco, NetFormX sells it to everyone else. The neat thing about CND is you can click on each generic icon, replace it with a specific model of equipment, and it builds a database of every component on the network. I've seen clients extract that data automatically into an inventory database for the beancounters.
Other posters are listing all the free alternatives, but if you really have a globe spanning network with that many machines and routers, spend a little on either visio or CND. Good documentation is a major part of network administration, don't skimp on the tools. If you have to skimp, I'd go with dia, or maybe Kivio is stable enough now.
When you are trying to build a document base, first find out the largest size printer you will have regular access to. Make all your pages that size, put a nice border just inside the print margins, and have a small info block in one corner just like professionals do. Test how small you can make your fonts so you can read a photocopy of the original. Once you know the limits of your printed pages, then start your documenting project. Break the network into logical maps, representing regional areas, physical locations, protocol types, vpn tunnels, backbones, hosts, etc.
You can't fit an entire network onto a single sheet of A4 (8.5x11) paper, no matter how hard you try. I can barely fit my home network diagram onto an A3 page. Move all the important non-graphical information onto other pages that accompany the pretty picture page. Make a book where each diagram has a few pages of text descriptions, specs, snippets of configs, spreadsheets, caveats and reasons for doing screwy things.
When you have successfully documented your network, any PFY should be able to flip through the pages and be able to fix problems with only a few minutes of study (yeah, right!).
the AC
Time to send up some master brewers with a few tons of hops and malt. Let them play with various batches and send the "space brew" back to earth.
Hell, I'd pay about $100 for a drink of space brew if it had orbited the earth a few thousand times. NASA could send up the raw materials on cheap(er) rockets, and sell the brew for a good profit. A few thousand litres could pay for a shuttle flight.
the AC
Most nations lost citizens in the attack.
An ex-GF has several french colleagues out of contact since Tuesday. She left NY over the weekend after working next to the towers for a few weeks. Several french families she knows are now homeless, since they lived a few blocks from the WTC.
There aren't any Belgians confirmed dead yet, but around 20 are missing with no news.
Yes, this disaster is going to touch every country on the planet, not just the US. I fear the backlash will be all out of proportion, but in the words of Sigue-Sigue Sputnik...
the AC
So does France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium and a number of other countries.
Holland is the only country to not have a Marshall plan debt, mostly because they financed the American Revolution. America was still paying off the Dutch bank loans from 140 years earlier, and the Marshall plan cancelled out the remainder, and the small amount left over was paid back by giving the U.S. two NATO bases on Dutch soil.
This so-called "canadian editorial" was published in 1973, hastily put together and full of errors and lies. But it reads good. The version(s) floating around on the internet are all modified depending on which slant the plagarisers want to add. I've received several different versions today, plus seen at least a dozen different knock-offs.
the AC
[For something really sick, see this mailer sent out last friday]
Equant is the customer facing part of SITA, and they have a pretty extensive international network. Its the only network with a presence in every country in the world.
They have dial-in points in pretty much every country, and can allow your roamers to set up VPNs back to your firewall. They offer crypto-card services and other geeky things for security.
If your boss is as cheap as you say, then stick with a bunch of AOL accounts. Real ISPs who allow their customers to act like professionals cost more money than the clueless discount ISPs or AOLs of the world. Let your boss know that the image your customers see is directly proportional to the budget you have to work with, and if he can run the business without customers, there are a bunch of dotbombs who would love to hire him (for stock options only, of course).
the AC
They've shut down Infocom.
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. It is dark, if you proceed, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
xyzzy AC
The answer is YES! Maybe.
Images on my site are my property. In every jpeg image (and powerpoint, word and text file) I create, I place my copyright statement. I also have a robots.txt file to prevent copying by search engines. To google's credit, they obey the robots.txt file, but others are not so considerate.
Recently, I had the occasion to place a number of images and other copyrighted works on a website hosted on one of my machines. The copyrighted works were available for a period of about 20 minutes, long enough for my friend (who paid me in beer, including many pints tonight just before I typed this, apologies for typos and bad grammar) and his brother to retrieve the works. My friend used AOL Instant Messenger to tell his brother which URL to find the images, including the obscure URL.
After I saw the two of them had retrieved the images, I left the site up for some stupid reasons (end of work day, beers calling, phone calls from idiots). Apache was running on an obscure port (28962) on an IP address with no DNS/reverse DNS entry. About 14 hours after my friend has sent the URL to his brother via AIM, I saw an AOL spider crawled my site for those works.
Its pretty fucking obvious that AOL is sucking up every copyrighted work they can, presumably to have copies of everything of value that passes by AIM. Their EULA allows them unlimited copyright to anything that passes by their systems, even if it is hosted on a third party system that doesn't agree to their EULA.
The machines involved slowly crawled the site, about one hit per minute from 4 different IP addresses. Machines like:
spider-loh-ta012.proxy.aol.com, spider-loh-ta016.proxy.aol.com, cache-loh-aa01.proxy.aol.com, and
cache-loh-ab02.proxy.aol.com carefully worked the site, following every link, and grabbing every (huge) jpeg and ppt file. Stupid of me to not filter AOL from my website, but I've learned. From now on, only password protected protocols that can't be easily picked up in plaintext streams.
Since that incident, I've been able to work this demonstration into my security reports. A client can set up a totally fake URL on a random port, send a message by AIM, and within 24 hours, the site is spidered by AOL, regardless of the robots.txt file. Sending an FTP username and password will result in the site being accessed within 24 hours. AOL hasn't responded to any of my queries, so that makes the whole thing even more interesting from a security aspect, and makes me even more money.
So don't place any intellectual property on any internet connected machine, if you want to retain control of your copyright. Large corporations will take your works, and if they happen to have great value later on, you won't see any recompense. I actually feel bad for the RIAA/MPAA giants, because they can't defend themselves, even with the DMCA and new European laws. You may own the IP for a work, but the internet doesn't care. "Get over it".
the AC
Americans are regularly arrested in Russia for various crimes, mostly drug related. About 2 per week in Moscow alone, according to my embassy friends.
There is a notice up in the lobby of every US embassy in Europe, and probably Russia as well, warning Americans that the embassy can not support them in any way if they are arrested. It goes on to say that the ex-USSR countries no longer notify the embassy if an american is arrested in the country, since the US state department has quietly stopped obeying an international treaty to do the same for foreigners caught in America.
There is a whole list of things to do to attract the attention of the embassy staff in case of arrest in Russia, Byelorusse, Ukraine, or other ex-communist states. Simple advice such as repeatedly asking to phone the embassy or a relative in the US, asking other prisoners to relay the message, or ask a local lawyer to relay the message. Then there is a whole list of things the embassy will NOT do for americans, such as provide legal advice, apply diplomatic pressure, or provide any monetary assistance. All the embassy will do is relay your plight to a close relative in the US, and will ask officials to be kept advised of your location. That's it.
There is also a special note that anyone accused of any drug related crime will not receive any assistance from the embassy, part of the "war on drugs" policy. So most police forces always toss a drugs trafficing charge in with the other charges, which, by US law, keeps the embassy away. During the trial, the drugs charge tends to just disappear, but by then the US State Department has completely forgotten the case.
I'm so glad I'm not an american.
the AC
Securitas said MS insists it's going to meet its Nov. 8 North American release date. I'll believe it when I see it.
M$ will certainly ship the north american X-box in time for the X-mas season, even if it is full of bugs or has some major safety problems. The only time to make large advances in marketshare come during the christmas season in the U.S., so M$ would rather risk a recall or later fix if they can grab 40% of the game console market this year.
If the X-box does take off, they will then ramp up production and get units into secondary markets, or, as ioman1 points out, if the U.S. sales aren't spectacular Japan will see suddenly have a bunch of consoles available. But given the state of the world's economies right now, any product manager who mis-calculates demand could cost a company $$$billions if inventory just sits unsold in warehouses.
the AC
Go search the cisco web site for aironet and antenna, they have a few other antenna types, including a nice +21dB parabola not available in Europe.
/. listing, but in these last few hot summer days, the news is pretty thin.
Because 802.11b devices are being sold to consumers, they are required to have "non-standard" connectors not readily available on the market so people can NOT modify the antennas to boost range. That is a requirement in the U.S. and Europe, so all 802.11b manufacturers use Reverse-TNC or Reverse-SMA connectors.
The article had it wrong when it said the units had standard connectors. Clearly the author just bought two boxes and hooked them up and they worked, just like the TFM says. This article didn't deserve a
the AC