The power companies all over the place are installing bypass caps (bandpass filters) on transformers. These allow 200KHz to 8-10MHz to flow across the transformers back to a centralized point.
There is a lot of money to be saved by installing these everywhere, the power companies can then start installing new electronic meters which send usage information back to a collection point for automated billing. If it saves having to send a meter reader around every two months, the boxes pay for themselves in about a year.
Of course, once you decide to install bandpass filters for.2-10MHz, why not instead put some in that do.2-40MHz. Above 30-40MHz the power lines start behaving like good antennas, and radiate your signal everywhere except where you want it to go at a sub-zone station.
In Europe the meters use 1.7 MHz and maybe 8 MHz to communicate back to collection points. It is done with a polling system, which sends a request down the lines, and reads the response from the meter. Every meter has a unique ID, like a MAC address. The companies can also send information about billing rates to smart meters, because electricity at night is cheaper than at peak hours during the day. I used to live in a place which would only heat the water during cheap hours, and shut off most electicity during expensive hours. The smart meter had a little LCD display showing the next few days expensive and cheap hours, so you could plan accordingly.
The FCC has licensed a couple of frequencies for use on power lines, 200KHz and something higher.
BTW, european electricity uses 50Hz, not 400Hz. Airplanes use 400Hz for efficiency and lighter transformers.
They lost this suit a while back. This is a requirement of the court for them to notify all their customers about the refund. I notice they haven't take out any full page ads in the magazines where they normally advertise.
Just go back and RTFLD, its in legal-speak so you have to read it sideways, preferably after taking some mind-altering substances:-)
There is gigabit ethernet going here, both over fiber and copper. Requires 4 twisted pair wires to get the signal to 100 Meters on Cat 5 cable. Terabit/sec experiments are underway for products to hit the shelves in 4-6 years. Exabits? I smell a media hack!
The biggest problem with the NorTel experiment in England was that power lines are almost never twisted, just straight parallel wires. Even though the transmission used a highly redundant coding scheme of something like 17 of 5 bits (85% of the information is redundancy, 15% is the actual transmission rate), there was problems of noise and crosstalk. Then there was still problems with putting enough power into the return signal to get it back to a sub-station intact. When they did that, the signal was detectable at every other power outlet on the sub-grid. There was a good media hack done in England which put egg on the faces of the NorTel team, since they couldn't clearly deny the charges of radiating peoples private data all over a region.
So where do you put your firewall when every one of your outlets is an internet connection? What's to stop a blackhat from plugging into an outdoor light socket and cracking every house on the block? Sounds like a whole new field of hacking/cracking just waiting to be exploited.
But then, maybe everyone should just be using fully encrypted and authenticated IPv6 between every device in their house.
Go read some past issues of NTK (www.ntk.net), they point this out as a media hoax.
But the hoax was based on some legitimate concerns about re-radiating your private information along all the power lines to the sub-station, which NorTel couldn't answer.
I've got to go post a top-level comment on this...
In parts of the US and Canada, and most places in Europe, electric meters are being replaced with newer models that can be read on a regular basis from collection centers.
The places where I am familiar with the technology the electric companies have had to place small bypass filters at each transformer and switching station, but the costs are small compared to the cost of sending a live person around every few months.
I've seen the signals on 8.something MHz, as well as 1.7 MHz. Every meter has a unique identifier similar to a MAC address on an ethernet card, and gets polled on a regular basis. This also allows the company to detect fraud and out-of-bounds usage on a near real-time basis.
The machines which collect the data are typically located in sub-stations which supply 10,000 to 35,000 customers. They can poll each customer in a sub-zone about once every 2 days, and its a continuous process. They are small unix minis, some new ones use NT, and they feed the data directly to the billing center.
If you poke around on the web, you will find that some German hacking groups have documented the protocol used, its pretty simple. Haven't heard of anyone inserting their own information back onto the line or causing DoS attacks. I would expect the companies that make these products also have a web presence.
The ISO 900x certs are nothing more than proof a company documents all its internal procedures for manufacturing, and follows them. It specifically does not cover software coding, although it does cover the QA and testing functions.
And I would put the estimate of ISO900x software companies at 25%. Mostly companies who want to sell to governments, banks, telcos, aerospace, and militaries. But for companies selling games, not one.
I have my own phone switch, and a pile of different modems for testing, and various access servers for terminating the 56k end.
We use it to prove that different modems only connect at far less than the 53.3k even under the most ideal conditions. We measure the length of the local loop in inches:-) (actually, we use our poor little switch for purposes that would be illegal and dangerous on any publicly connected switch, but thats another post)
But USR modems are no worse than any of the others, even at ideal conditions. Sometimes they hit the theoretical 53.3 max, sometimes they don't.
Me thinks this to be a lawsuit against all the advertising and slimy sales promotions USR is known for. Certainly their technology is about the same as all their competition.
If it were 'voluntary', and you didn't pay your fines, then you wouldn't get any more permission to put the MARK OF APPROVAL on the outside of your boxes or in your ads.
The more I think about this, the more I don't like it.
We need a discussion on how this might affect a Free Software effort like the Gimp.
This idea has been around since the 1960's, and was a topic of hot debate in the late 70's until the mid-80's (for some reason the debate died down when microso~1 came to dominate:-)
This is another version of putting the IEEE in charge of licensing SW engineers, or forcing warantees on SW to be the same as for any other manufactured good, etc.
His idea of fining the publishers is not the best idea, since they will just force the developers to sign more legal BS and if they get fined pass it on to the developers or their insurers. I get hit with this occasionally, when a client requires professional liability insurance. I triple my rate to cover the costs, often $20000 to $50000 per year per project. Twice my clients didn't blink when I asked them to cover the full insurance costs.
I think if something like this ever happens, it will be like the Underwriters Laboratories seal of approval. The UL mark started as a voluntary thing in the electrical industry, because appliance makers often turned out badly designed products which electrocuted people, burned down houses, or just died after a weeks use. Soon retailers would only offer for sale UL marked appliances. But now UL approval is required by law before you can market or sell any electrical item in the US. The approval process ensured so much quality, that lawmakers were able to hold it up and point to it as a minimum standard.
So beware of this process. A few years ago I would have said it would be inevitable, but with the Free Software/Open Source movements, the point becomes a bit moot. Any software which remains closed or patented may soon find itself regulated by a 'voluntary' certification body.
I think he uses the word 'scary' a little too much in this OpEd piece. Its not that scary to anyone in the FS/OS world, in that you have to have some accountability at some point along the way. FS/OS people can move the accountability from place to place, if the original writer didn't do a good enough job, then the end user can take on the job to fix it, if it is truly important. Closed source products have to disclaim all accountability at all points, since the ability to fix a problem rests with whoever has access to the source.
I've designed a number of boards, with the disclaimer "it was a long time ago, in a chip company far, far away"
The boards were designed specifically for quality assurance environmental testing. That meant thermal shock +120C/-50C, and characterizing things like changing the length & spacing of the leads, dielectric constants, overshoot, voltage changes. The custom built board which changed the operating voltages lead directly to 3.3 volt parts appearing about 2 years later.
My solution was to build a board which could remain outside the harsh operating environments, and attached the processor to a small test jig at the end of a 2.5 foot long cable. Every signal passed over a buffered twisted pair wire, which preservered the AC characteristics from DC to 400+ MHz. The extension cable with its two ends cost about $5000, but then we could swap in a bunch of different cheap test boards, and put the test end just about everywhere. A future idea for DrFfreeze would be to make a small extender tower for the CPU, and build just a small enviro-box around it. Then you only have to keep the CPU cold during overclocking, and ignore cooling the entire board.
Mineral oil works just as good as fluorinert, it has almost the same dielectric properties, and shouldn't change the max operating speed of your board unless the important traces are on the outermost layers, and not properly designed WRT Johnson's "Designing with Black Magic" book. Oil has slightly worse heat transfer props, and tends to burn/smoke at high temps where fluorinert is fine.
Fluorinert costs about $100/gallon, high quality mineral oil costs about $5/gallon. Fluorinert breaks down into nasty hydro-fluoroCarbons which eat the ozone layer forever, mineral oil breaks down into simple hydrocarbons the same as burning kerosene or diesel. The choice should be clear, stick with the mineral oil, and add an overtemp sensor to prevent fires.
As mentioned elsewhere, some types of styro insulators will slowly disolve with mineral oil, so keep an eye on what you have for the first few days. So will some insulators on small green jumper wires, suitcase jumpers, plastic SIMM and PLCC sockets. Avoid acetone, alcohols, distilled water, and just about everything else. They will all cause some kind of chemical reaction with some part of your MoBo.
Hardware hacking is the ultimate proof of ability. Hack On!
If slashdot is not responding, go to http://reboot.slashdot.org, and press the big red button on the page. This triggers a perl script which drops a TTL line low, which triggers a relay connected to the reset button on the slashdot server.
I've had a tour of Lucas Valley years ago. The place is amazing. Custom built for comfort and the best working environment you could ask for.
I'm intrigued by the linux box Robot, with a 5 year uptime that does routing. I sounds like a DNS server, but the description is a bit vague. Maybe its a comm server thingy to the console of a main machine.
If you ever get a chance for a tour of the place, go! It will fill your geeky dreams for a long time afterwards.
Notice how the company doing this is also a spammer?
They call themselves a responsible opt-in spammer, and they don't ask for demographics. But this seems like a great way to harvest good email addresses.
Would it be wrong to forward them the spam with all your details faked so they couldn't add you to thier spam mailing list?:-):-)
There aren't any techincal details in this pre-release press release. But it sounds like they will incorporate win-only drivers in Xerox's new network multi-machines that do copy/print/scan.
So if you have a large corporate environment, where there are all types of machines, from macintoshes to unixes to mainframes, you will have to go to a win box to use these new machines.
I have a feeling that Xerox is shooting themselves in the head again, probably the decision of a very myopic PHB veep. If I were to be presented with one of these by a Xerox sales slime, and I asked if I could control it from a variety of machines like Macs and Unixes, and the answer was NO, then there would be no sale.
I wonder what kind of an offer they made to the veep who agreed to this stupid decision. Probably typical microso~1 hi-pressure sales tactics which the DOJ would be interested in.
I've had a ZH, and now have a toolkit made from a Pelican Case (same thing, but polycarbonate, for expensive cameras). I dont carry it on airplanes anymore, since every snot-nosed security guard learns that the only thing ever carried in these is hard drugs. But just asking you to open it and look at the stuff inside is too simple for them. They will pull you off to a small room and search everything, wait for the dogs to show up, etc.
I got smart after about the third trip, that I really don't need to protect my electronics that well. Now I just use a cardboard box, and they dont care. Only lost one color LCD screen in about 40 trips.
But the cases are cool, when you have to go to a customer site and impress the shit out of the suits. They can be very "james bondish" if done right:-)
And yes, I made my own. True geeks always assemble their own stuff.
The hard part is getting your life neat and tidy so you can disappear for 6 months and when you return its not all in shambles.
It took more than 2 years from when I first really started dreaming about travelling until I was on a plane. I had to make sure all my debts were paid off, like my student loans, and I got rid of all my credit cards except one, and it was tied into an automatic debit scheme with my savings account.
At some point, you realize that you have almost no ties the real world except you are still earning a salary and paying rent. That is when you can escape and go travelling. If you can put your stuff in a pre-paid storage place or with your parents, then you will have no bills coming in until you come back and settle down.
Then you are free. The first time I went travelling, I started with a plan which got tossed within the first week. Suddenly I could take a job for a few weeks in a nice seaside town, and just take it easy. Or I just hitched rides in whatever direction seemed interesting. I got back after six months, and work life was never the same since.
A few years ago I burned out a second time, and for two years I travelled around the world, working all kinds of small jobs, living off my savings. Does it sound good? It is!
So make a plan, pick a date, and work hard towards that one goal.
In my long career, I've now gone through 2 burnouts. Too many long days and nights, no vacations for years on end, the works. But with me its now becoming a cycle.
I worked for years in my first real job, almost never took vacations, saved what money I could. Then I burned out and went looking for other things in life. School was unreachable at that point, but various other jobs got me through, and I travelled around the world. Life was good.
Then I got tired of the rough life, and took another IT job. After a few years, I was burned out completely. The company was one of the lowest bottom-feeding sales-oriented places I've ever seen, morals and conscience were a liability. We sold random scraps of free software bundled together for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the idiot clients bought it up and were very unhappy. It took more than 2 years to turn my life around and become a responsible person again, the crash was that bad. But for those 2 years I had a lot of irresponsible fun, learned a lot of non-career skills.
When I decided to go IT again, it took a year to re-build my jobs skills to get my salary back to something reasonable, and now I'm back at the top of my field, making a ton of money and benefits, and the stress level is starting to creep up. Today I was asked if my health was ok, and if I was burning myself out. The words were "you look like shit".
Tomorrow I leave on a well deserved vacation, but I'll be taking the cell phone and the laptop, as someone pointed out, because I care if disasters happen. Actually, the vacation starts this weekend, but I'm going to work at home, *wink* *wink*. I expect to see a bunch of movies, get some sun, and play a ton of the latest games.
Yeah, editing the From: line is one of the first hacks I'd make. I'd even go do it myself if necessary. And make the personalities switchable from within the compose window. And arrange the columns in any order I want, with different setting for each folder/window.
I use too many systems to keep switching from a CLI mail on unix, to Eudora, to the occasional trip to hell in the outlook handbasket. If there were a *nix version of Eudora, that would cover all the platforms I have to use in my job/secret life as a boy reporter.
Eudora and Visio are the only reasons to use a micros~1 product.
Eudora has the interface almost nailed down to perfection. It could use a few more interface whizzies, and better LDAP and IMAP backends, but it does everything I need in an email front end.
When the rumors of Qualcomm releasing the Eudora source as OSS went around last year, I was rejoicing. As soon as that happened, I knew the Open Source community would jump on it and make it into a truly inspired and great program. Then I could make up extremely cheap email machines for my clueless relatives, instead of now getting them cheap 98 machines with AOL or Eudora. And with something like Enlightenment to make the windows pretty, it would be the coolest machine on their block.
But alas, Qualcomm has failed in their duty, but they might do it yet... there is another Qualcomm story on the wires this morning...we wait and see
If your friend is so good at configuring NT and OE, have him contact micros~1. I understand they are offering various contractors around US$50,000 bonus to get this bid back. They haven't had any serious takers in almost 2 months. And that's the bonus, on top of the $20,000 or so for the one week of work.
SunFed sells Secure Solaris, which has an A2 rating even in small network clusters. But they only sell it to approved government agencies.
And there are two linux boxes here with C2 ratings.
the company provides highly reliable security "out of the box.... Policywise, you have to make sure you configure it correctly."
A group I work with for setting up some secure systems recently invited micros~1 to send some experts to set up a system with proper security. There was a rather large contract riding on this bid, and as near as we can tell micros~1 DID send their most knowledgable engineers. But after three days of configuration and re-configuration, we could break the box with any of a dozen script-kiddie exploits, and with several custom made attacks.
The micros~1 experts finally went away muttering a few feeble excuses. Only one seemed genuinely embarassed, the others 'just didnt get it'.
So the bid going to the customer will be almost entirely unix based, and only a handful of M$ machines to cover a specific need in the contract. The account team from micros~1 are crying themselves blue right now, since it was going to be their quota for the year. Either way, I get paid:-)
I think that the folks running e-bay have a/. alarm on their systems. When the see a bunch of browsers referred-to by slashdot, they go yank the page. Might even have a big red rotating light in the SysAdmins office.
Of course, if it's a Chris DiBona bid, it should probably be yanked milliseconds after posting anyways. Otherwise I might bid on it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The power companies all over the place are installing bypass caps (bandpass filters) on transformers. These allow 200KHz to 8-10MHz to flow across the transformers back to a centralized point.
.2-10MHz, why not instead put some in that do .2-40MHz. Above 30-40MHz the power lines start behaving like good antennas, and radiate your signal everywhere except where you want it to go at a sub-zone station.
There is a lot of money to be saved by installing these everywhere, the power companies can then start installing new electronic meters which send usage information back to a collection point for automated billing. If it saves having to send a meter reader around every two months, the boxes pay for themselves in about a year.
Of course, once you decide to install bandpass filters for
In Europe the meters use 1.7 MHz and maybe 8 MHz to communicate back to collection points. It is done with a polling system, which sends a request down the lines, and reads the response from the meter. Every meter has a unique ID, like a MAC address. The companies can also send information about billing rates to smart meters, because electricity at night is cheaper than at peak hours during the day. I used to live in a place which would only heat the water during cheap hours, and shut off most electicity during expensive hours. The smart meter had a little LCD display showing the next few days expensive and cheap hours, so you could plan accordingly.
The FCC has licensed a couple of frequencies for use on power lines, 200KHz and something higher.
BTW, european electricity uses 50Hz, not 400Hz. Airplanes use 400Hz for efficiency and lighter transformers.
the AntiCypher
They lost this suit a while back. This is a requirement of the court for them to notify all their customers about the refund. I notice they haven't take out any full page ads in the magazines where they normally advertise.
:-)
Just go back and RTFLD, its in legal-speak so you have to read it sideways, preferably after taking some mind-altering substances
IANAL, and I Hate Lawyers
the AntiCypher
There is gigabit ethernet going here, both over fiber and copper. Requires 4 twisted pair wires to get the signal to 100 Meters on Cat 5 cable. Terabit/sec experiments are underway for products to hit the shelves in 4-6 years. Exabits? I smell a media hack!
The biggest problem with the NorTel experiment in England was that power lines are almost never twisted, just straight parallel wires. Even though the transmission used a highly redundant coding scheme of something like 17 of 5 bits (85% of the information is redundancy, 15% is the actual transmission rate), there was problems of noise and crosstalk. Then there was still problems with putting enough power into the return signal to get it back to a sub-station intact. When they did that, the signal was detectable at every other power outlet on the sub-grid. There was a good media hack done in England which put egg on the faces of the NorTel team, since they couldn't clearly deny the charges of radiating peoples private data all over a region.
So where do you put your firewall when every one of your outlets is an internet connection? What's to stop a blackhat from plugging into an outdoor light socket and cracking every house on the block? Sounds like a whole new field of hacking/cracking just waiting to be exploited.
But then, maybe everyone should just be using fully encrypted and authenticated IPv6 between every device in their house.
Go read some past issues of NTK (www.ntk.net), they point this out as a media hoax.
But the hoax was based on some legitimate concerns about re-radiating your private information along all the power lines to the sub-station, which NorTel couldn't answer.
I've got to go post a top-level comment on this...
In parts of the US and Canada, and most places in Europe, electric meters are being replaced with newer models that can be read on a regular basis from collection centers.
The places where I am familiar with the technology the electric companies have had to place small bypass filters at each transformer and switching station, but the costs are small compared to the cost of sending a live person around every few months.
I've seen the signals on 8.something MHz, as well as 1.7 MHz. Every meter has a unique identifier similar to a MAC address on an ethernet card, and gets polled on a regular basis. This also allows the company to detect fraud and out-of-bounds usage on a near real-time basis.
The machines which collect the data are typically located in sub-stations which supply 10,000 to 35,000 customers. They can poll each customer in a sub-zone about once every 2 days, and its a continuous process. They are small unix minis, some new ones use NT, and they feed the data directly to the billing center.
If you poke around on the web, you will find that some German hacking groups have documented the protocol used, its pretty simple. Haven't heard of anyone inserting their own information back onto the line or causing DoS attacks. I would expect the companies that make these products also have a web presence.
the AntiCypher
The ISO 900x certs are nothing more than proof a company documents all its internal procedures for manufacturing, and follows them. It specifically does not cover software coding, although it does cover the QA and testing functions.
And I would put the estimate of ISO900x software companies at 25%. Mostly companies who want to sell to governments, banks, telcos, aerospace, and militaries. But for companies selling games, not one.
the AntiCypher
I have my own phone switch, and a pile of different modems for testing, and various access servers for terminating the 56k end.
:-) (actually, we use our poor little switch for purposes that would be illegal and dangerous on any publicly connected switch, but thats another post)
We use it to prove that different modems only connect at far less than the 53.3k even under the most ideal conditions. We measure the length of the local loop in inches
But USR modems are no worse than any of the others, even at ideal conditions. Sometimes they hit the theoretical 53.3 max, sometimes they don't.
Me thinks this to be a lawsuit against all the advertising and slimy sales promotions USR is known for. Certainly their technology is about the same as all their competition.
If it were 'voluntary', and you didn't pay your fines, then you wouldn't get any more permission to put the MARK OF APPROVAL on the outside of your boxes or in your ads.
The more I think about this, the more I don't like it.
We need a discussion on how this might affect a Free Software effort like the Gimp.
This idea has been around since the 1960's, and was a topic of hot debate in the late 70's until the mid-80's (for some reason the debate died down when microso~1 came to dominate :-)
This is another version of putting the IEEE in charge of licensing SW engineers, or forcing warantees on SW to be the same as for any other manufactured good, etc.
His idea of fining the publishers is not the best idea, since they will just force the developers to sign more legal BS and if they get fined pass it on to the developers or their insurers. I get hit with this occasionally, when a client requires professional liability insurance. I triple my rate to cover the costs, often $20000 to $50000 per year per project. Twice my clients didn't blink when I asked them to cover the full insurance costs.
I think if something like this ever happens, it will be like the Underwriters Laboratories seal of approval. The UL mark started as a voluntary thing in the electrical industry, because appliance makers often turned out badly designed products which electrocuted people, burned down houses, or just died after a weeks use. Soon retailers would only offer for sale UL marked appliances. But now UL approval is required by law before you can market or sell any electrical item in the US. The approval process ensured so much quality, that lawmakers were able to hold it up and point to it as a minimum standard.
So beware of this process. A few years ago I would have said it would be inevitable, but with the Free Software/Open Source movements, the point becomes a bit moot. Any software which remains closed or patented may soon find itself regulated by a 'voluntary' certification body.
I think he uses the word 'scary' a little too much in this OpEd piece. Its not that scary to anyone in the FS/OS world, in that you have to have some accountability at some point along the way. FS/OS people can move the accountability from place to place, if the original writer didn't do a good enough job, then the end user can take on the job to fix it, if it is truly important. Closed source products have to disclaim all accountability at all points, since the ability to fix a problem rests with whoever has access to the source.
I've designed a number of boards, with the disclaimer "it was a long time ago, in a chip company far, far away"
The boards were designed specifically for quality assurance environmental testing. That meant thermal shock +120C/-50C, and characterizing things like changing the length & spacing of the leads, dielectric constants, overshoot, voltage changes. The custom built board which changed the operating voltages lead directly to 3.3 volt parts appearing about 2 years later.
My solution was to build a board which could remain outside the harsh operating environments, and attached the processor to a small test jig at the end of a 2.5 foot long cable. Every signal passed over a buffered twisted pair wire, which preservered the AC characteristics from DC to 400+ MHz. The extension cable with its two ends cost about $5000, but then we could swap in a bunch of different cheap test boards, and put the test end just about everywhere. A future idea for DrFfreeze would be to make a small extender tower for the CPU, and build just a small enviro-box around it. Then you only have to keep the CPU cold during overclocking, and ignore cooling the entire board.
Mineral oil works just as good as fluorinert, it has almost the same dielectric properties, and shouldn't change the max operating speed of your board unless the important traces are on the outermost layers, and not properly designed WRT Johnson's "Designing with Black Magic" book. Oil has slightly worse heat transfer props, and tends to burn/smoke at high temps where fluorinert is fine.
Fluorinert costs about $100/gallon, high quality mineral oil costs about $5/gallon. Fluorinert breaks down into nasty hydro-fluoroCarbons which eat the ozone layer forever, mineral oil breaks down into simple hydrocarbons the same as burning kerosene or diesel. The choice should be clear, stick with the mineral oil, and add an overtemp sensor to prevent fires.
As mentioned elsewhere, some types of styro insulators will slowly disolve with mineral oil, so keep an eye on what you have for the first few days. So will some insulators on small green jumper wires, suitcase jumpers, plastic SIMM and PLCC sockets. Avoid acetone, alcohols, distilled water, and just about everything else. They will all cause some kind of chemical reaction with some part of your MoBo.
Hardware hacking is the ultimate proof of ability. Hack On!
If slashdot is not responding, go to http://reboot.slashdot.org, and press the big red button on the page. This triggers a perl script which drops a TTL line low, which triggers a relay connected to the reset button on the slashdot server.
:-)
Use with care
I love it!
the AntiCypher
NTK Now had this last week, but they promise not to gloat too much. Check them out at http://www.ntk.net
It it great news for pro-privacy advocates, both in Europe and the U.S.
the AntiCypher
I've had a tour of Lucas Valley years ago. The place is amazing. Custom built for comfort and the best working environment you could ask for.
I'm intrigued by the linux box Robot, with a 5 year uptime that does routing. I sounds like a DNS server, but the description is a bit vague. Maybe its a comm server thingy to the console of a main machine.
If you ever get a chance for a tour of the place, go! It will fill your geeky dreams for a long time afterwards.
Notice how the company doing this is also a spammer?
:-) :-)
They call themselves a responsible opt-in spammer, and they don't ask for demographics. But this seems like a great way to harvest good email addresses.
Would it be wrong to forward them the spam with all your details faked so they couldn't add you to thier spam mailing list?
There aren't any techincal details in this pre-release press release. But it sounds like they will incorporate win-only drivers in Xerox's new network multi-machines that do copy/print/scan.
So if you have a large corporate environment, where there are all types of machines, from macintoshes to unixes to mainframes, you will have to go to a win box to use these new machines.
I have a feeling that Xerox is shooting themselves in the head again, probably the decision of a very myopic PHB veep. If I were to be presented with one of these by a Xerox sales slime, and I asked if I could control it from a variety of machines like Macs and Unixes, and the answer was NO, then there would be no sale.
I wonder what kind of an offer they made to the veep who agreed to this stupid decision. Probably typical microso~1 hi-pressure sales tactics which the DOJ would be interested in.
the AntiCypher
I've had a ZH, and now have a toolkit made from a Pelican Case (same thing, but polycarbonate, for expensive cameras). I dont carry it on airplanes anymore, since every snot-nosed security guard learns that the only thing ever carried in these is hard drugs. But just asking you to open it and look at the stuff inside is too simple for them. They will pull you off to a small room and search everything, wait for the dogs to show up, etc.
:-)
I got smart after about the third trip, that I really don't need to protect my electronics that well. Now I just use a cardboard box, and they dont care. Only lost one color LCD screen in about 40 trips.
But the cases are cool, when you have to go to a customer site and impress the shit out of the suits. They can be very "james bondish" if done right
And yes, I made my own. True geeks always assemble their own stuff.
The hard part is getting your life neat and tidy so you can disappear for 6 months and when you return its not all in shambles.
It took more than 2 years from when I first really started dreaming about travelling until I was on a plane. I had to make sure all my debts were paid off, like my student loans, and I got rid of all my credit cards except one, and it was tied into an automatic debit scheme with my savings account.
At some point, you realize that you have almost no ties the real world except you are still earning a salary and paying rent. That is when you can escape and go travelling. If you can put your stuff in a pre-paid storage place or with your parents, then you will have no bills coming in until you come back and settle down.
Then you are free. The first time I went travelling, I started with a plan which got tossed within the first week. Suddenly I could take a job for a few weeks in a nice seaside town, and just take it easy. Or I just hitched rides in whatever direction seemed interesting. I got back after six months, and work life was never the same since.
A few years ago I burned out a second time, and for two years I travelled around the world, working all kinds of small jobs, living off my savings. Does it sound good? It is!
So make a plan, pick a date, and work hard towards that one goal.
the AntiCypher
In my long career, I've now gone through 2 burnouts. Too many long days and nights, no vacations for years on end, the works. But with me its now becoming a cycle.
I worked for years in my first real job, almost never took vacations, saved what money I could. Then I burned out and went looking for other things in life. School was unreachable at that point, but various other jobs got me through, and I travelled around the world. Life was good.
Then I got tired of the rough life, and took another IT job. After a few years, I was burned out completely. The company was one of the lowest bottom-feeding sales-oriented places I've ever seen, morals and conscience were a liability. We sold random scraps of free software bundled together for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the idiot clients bought it up and were very unhappy. It took more than 2 years to turn my life around and become a responsible person again, the crash was that bad. But for those 2 years I had a lot of irresponsible fun, learned a lot of non-career skills.
When I decided to go IT again, it took a year to re-build my jobs skills to get my salary back to something reasonable, and now I'm back at the top of my field, making a ton of money and benefits, and the stress level is starting to creep up. Today I was asked if my health was ok, and if I was burning myself out. The words were "you look like shit".
Tomorrow I leave on a well deserved vacation, but I'll be taking the cell phone and the laptop, as someone pointed out, because I care if disasters happen. Actually, the vacation starts this weekend, but I'm going to work at home, *wink* *wink*. I expect to see a bunch of movies, get some sun, and play a ton of the latest games.
the AntiCypher
Yeah, editing the From: line is one of the first hacks I'd make. I'd even go do it myself if necessary. And make the personalities switchable from within the compose window. And arrange the columns in any order I want, with different setting for each folder/window.
I use too many systems to keep switching from a CLI mail on unix, to Eudora, to the occasional trip to hell in the outlook handbasket. If there were a *nix version of Eudora, that would cover all the platforms I have to use in my job/secret life as a boy reporter.
the AntiCypher
Eudora and Visio are the only reasons to use a micros~1 product.
Eudora has the interface almost nailed down to perfection. It could use a few more interface whizzies, and better LDAP and IMAP backends, but it does everything I need in an email front end.
When the rumors of Qualcomm releasing the Eudora source as OSS went around last year, I was rejoicing. As soon as that happened, I knew the Open Source community would jump on it and make it into a truly inspired and great program. Then I could make up extremely cheap email machines for my clueless relatives, instead of now getting them cheap 98 machines with AOL or Eudora. And with something like Enlightenment to make the windows pretty, it would be the coolest machine on their block.
But alas, Qualcomm has failed in their duty, but they might do it yet... there is another Qualcomm story on the wires this morning...we wait and see
the AntiCypher
If your friend is so good at configuring NT and OE, have him contact micros~1. I understand they are offering various contractors around US$50,000 bonus to get this bid back. They haven't had any serious takers in almost 2 months. And that's the bonus, on top of the $20,000 or so for the one week of work.
SunFed sells Secure Solaris, which has an A2 rating even in small network clusters. But they only sell it to approved government agencies.
And there are two linux boxes here with C2 ratings.
Here's my favorite:
:-)
the company provides highly reliable security "out of the box.... Policywise, you have to make sure you configure it correctly."
A group I work with for setting up some secure systems recently invited micros~1 to send some experts to set up a system with proper security. There was a rather large contract riding on this bid, and as near as we can tell micros~1 DID send their most knowledgable engineers. But after three days of configuration and re-configuration, we could break the box with any of a dozen script-kiddie exploits, and with several custom made attacks.
The micros~1 experts finally went away muttering a few feeble excuses. Only one seemed genuinely embarassed, the others 'just didnt get it'.
So the bid going to the customer will be almost entirely unix based, and only a handful of M$ machines to cover a specific need in the contract. The account team from micros~1 are crying themselves blue right now, since it was going to be their quota for the year. Either way, I get paid
The AntiCypher
I think that the folks running e-bay have a /. alarm on their systems. When the see a bunch of browsers referred-to by slashdot, they go yank the page. Might even have a big red rotating light in the SysAdmins office.
:-)
Of course, if it's a Chris DiBona bid, it should probably be yanked milliseconds after posting anyways. Otherwise I might bid on it
the AntiCypher