I'm curious, at what point did you decide "Hot damn! I wanna hack computers!", and had you done any type of programming/geekwork prior to that?
Because I think it boils down to two possibilities:
a) You're bored with being in college learning to be their concept of a geek (personally I passed on the whole college thing)... This might be summed up as "If geekdom is like college I'm doomed"
- or -
b) You're bored with being a geek, and the prospect of doing this kind of crap for the rest of your life is horrid. Summed up as "I didn't know this was geekdom! Eeeeww!"
In the case of A, everything I've heard about college c/s informs me that it's about as far from the real world as Narnia. Suggesting you sweat through the final hours and look forward to finding a job that will keep you interested (or become a consultant, and play Russian roulette on a regular basis:) In the meantime you might be able (if you have the time) to get a part-time job slinging code (or pulling cables or whatever), that could go a long way towards broadening your horizons. Even if it's just a few hours a couple days a week maybe you can intern somewhere - more for the experience than the cash.
In the case of B, try other stuff as approximately 150 other/.'ers have suggested.
Personally I think true geeks are born and not made, but that's advice worth every penny you paid for it.
In any case, good luck. It'd be interesting if you could post in a year or two and let us know what you decided and how it worked out.
However, in the opening text, it clearly says "Episode IV: A New Hope".
Then you've never seen the original release of Star Wars, which didn't have the Episode IV text - that was added retroactively, after the movie made several bargeloads of money and Lucas realized he had a franchise on his hands, and then some. A little post-facto editing, a re-release, and voila! the man is a visionary genius.
I distinctly remeber seeing the "Episode IV" text for the first time - I did a quick reality check with my friends, it was a surprise to all of us (I'd seen SW maybe half a dozen times by then).
Broadcast stations -- TV, Radio -- need by FCC regulations to identify themselves; this is a (comparitively) un-obtrusive way of doing this.
The FCC requires that broadcasting stations ID themselves by stating their call sign(s) - a minimum of once an hour, IIRC. I've yet to see a "bug" with a call sign in it. And this regulation doesn't apply to cable channels, as they're not broadcasters.
My friend notes that the alteration of people's energy patterns appears to be a cumulative effect, and that people with energy patterns altered in this way seem much more prone to 'fliers' and similar.
Sounds like someone's been standing a little too close to the Resonator. Better get your pineal gland checked. And remember, they can only see you when you move so stand very, very still.
One of these days, all of the people that complain about the recycle bin might actually learn how to:
1) set Windows to not move files to the recycle bin and not prompt for confirmation on delete (hint: right-click on the recycle bin, select properties)
Ok, so I right-clicked on the trash can like you said, and un-checked the box that says "Display delete confimation dialog" and click Ok.
So how come when I delete something from Explorer it pops a "Confirm File Delete" dialog?
When Windoze starts doing WTF I tell it to do, I'll stop complaining. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
There are still some things I go to DOS for, but that doesn't mean that they can't be done in GUI
I never said it couldn't be done - just that it's a PITA. I usually do use a Windows shell (Powerdesk, actually) for file management, but if there's a buttload of files I'll generally head for the command line. Just waiting for the grid to load the info from the filesystem ("oh wait, I've gotta go pull that icon out of the resource list so it'll look pretty", thrash thrash thrash) can take more time than I'm willing to spend staring at the screen.
Re:Remembering DOS
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I find it much easier to use a gui than a command line when moving/copying/deleting files.
Until you've got to delete a few thousand, when DEL *.OBJ starts to look pretty sweet.
and you wouldnt have a recycle bin to hold those "mistakenly deleted" files...
I hate the trashcan. If I tell the computer to delete something then BY GOD it had better delete it. I hate being second-guessed by an operating system. Mistakenly deleted something? That's why we make backups.
I ran scandisk from the DOS prompt (because Windows would NOT load) and it told me "we found errors but couldnt fix them, run scandisk for windows". Gee thanks...
Moral: Windows can trash your filesystem so hard and so deep not even DOS can save you. Before windows, CHKDSK/F did just dandy.
Now that I think back... weren't Win95/98/ME/2K all supposed to be "the death of DOS"... but years later and it's still around.
Microsoft has very little experience in creating operating systems: DOS came from QDOS and Tim Paterson, Win3.x, 95/98/ME all sit upon the shoulders of mighty DOS, and NT was written in partership with IBM (back when OS/2 was a joint venture). XP probably still has some legacy OS/2 stuff in the kernel.
Err, when exactly? I know the poor thing has been bounced hither tither and yon, but as I understand it before Commodore (a U.S. company) bought'em out, it was made by Hi-Toro, AFAIK also a U.S. company. What am I missing?
How long will the writer last if it is constantly being dropped, banged against your thigh when you walk/jog, or piled under a stack of books on a desk or a schoolbag?
That's why you buy the no-questions-asked "extended warranty" from the retailer for another 20 or 30 bucks. You're right, something like can become trash with one little mishap.
My rule of thumb: never get the extended warranty on something that's going to sit on a shelf all it's life. Do get it if what you're buying is small, expensive and meant to be carried around, because eventually you'll probably drop it.
Nope -- if this is a problem for you, you have the wrong users, not the wrong policies.
I agree with that, but I don't think it has to do with where you're hiring on the wage scale - it has to do with hiring people who will play by the rules, reguardless of how much more they think they know than the admins. Case in point: Installing Microsoft IIS is verbotten where I work, for pretty obvious reasons. Some web developers figured it was more convenient to break the rules, they installed IIS on their workstations, and wham! Nimda time. So now our network folks have to drop everything they're doing and start quarantine and disinfection procedures. Beautiful.
I know one of the admins, and she's pulling for total lockdown. Break the rules just once and you're on the pavement. The cost of putting out fires (or the cost of being offline for our customers) vastly overrides whatever the individual developer brings to the table - that's her philosophy, and I have to say it makes sense to me.
Now, carrying a foot-long ass-widener of a dildo in your bags, that is a little harder to characterize as anything other than funny
Two words for you: Sexual Harassment. People have gotten sued for things as minor as complementing the way a co-working looks in her dress, I imagine dropping a sex toy in your bag when you know there's a chance you'll be searched by a female security person could get your rear canned.
I don't want to come across as a stick in the mud, but I don't want to see somebody get fired trying to be funny in a time when sense of humor is at a premium.
Perhaps a briefcase chock-full of ping-pong balls and/or marbles would be a relativley safe way to make your point...
...and then act really pissed when they spill'em all over the floor. "My collection! You bastards!"
But more importantly, do you really want to be working for a company which would do that in the first place?
If this incident had happened 6 months ago, I'd definitely be doing a "WTF?" - but right here right now whoever thought this would be funny and not have repercussions ain't real bright IMO. So no, I'm not overly worried about working for a company that fires idiots.
Just this week someone got fired at my company for a little joke involving some dairy creamer spread on a co-worker's desk. No warning, no stern lecture, no "mark on your permanent record": terminated. Escorted to the door by security, "we'll mail you your personal items".
A company-wide memo went out saying (distilled from the corp-speak and legalease): "We just fired someone for being a smart-ass. Don't be a smart-ass."
This is not the best time to be pushing the boundries of pranksterism.
If you were an employer, and had spent thousands of dollars on computer equipment, don't you think that you would at least have some right as to what happens on said equipment?
Replace "computer equipment" with "bathroom facilities". You paid for the crapper too, and the plumbing, and the ongoing costs of water, TP and cleaning. I recon you have the same right to make sure somebody isn't in there whacking off on your company time... right? Smile for the camera!
I used to think the same way regarding the company's monitoring of how computers are used, but then I thought of the bathroom example and realized that there are certain reasonable expectations to privacy. Now the question before me is how much monitoring of the computer/network is reasonable.
I still believe the company has the right to whatever computer/network monitoring they care to do, but I don't use the "because they own it" argument any more.
A friend of mine was a telemarketer for a while, they're just people like you and me, who need to pay the rent, and feed themselves.
A friend of mine does spamming for various pr0n and "Herbal Viagra" concerns - perhaps you've recieved one (or a thousand) of her solicitations. She's just trying to make ends meet, too <snif>
Automated dialers (specifically, I have experience with the Melita Predictive Dialer) detect what is an answering machine and what is not automagically. I dont know how, but they do...
No magic here - when a Live Human answers the phone they say "Hello?" and wait a second or two for a response. When an answering machine picks up it says "Hi, this is blah blah and I'm not home..." with no long breaks. All the TeleBastardMatic has to do is listen for a pause a second after the pickup. Pause=human, no pause=machine.
Which is why my answering machine messages always start with Hello and a pause - it traps all the telemarketer machines, and I get these "Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?" messages on my machine. This wastes the telemarketer's time, which makes me happy.
So a $10.00 pie costs less than twenty cents to make? Damn, we should be dropping Pizza Hut on the Afghans, it'd be a lot cheaper (and tastier) than those $5.00 HDRs they're dumping now!
You could just ensure it had enough warning to allow it to back the data up before the battery died. Or have a second reserve battery with enough power to do this even if the first one dies.
Or you could just use spinning platters to store your data, and forget about that bother.
It seems to me the reason we don't have RAM drives (say, that sounds familiar!) is that the advantages (speed) don't outweigh the downside (more power consumed, more heat created, long time to fill, long time to empty, redundant power requiresments).
I was under the impression that the FBI used a hardware hack to capture the keystrokes - but according to the affidavit the KLS wouldn't capture while the modem was on (getting around some sort of wiretap regulation). So it would have to be software, right?
The affidavit does point out a tastey loophole: enter your passwords only when you're online.
You mean like hitting "Play" makes any device play? Then anytime you hit "Play" your television plays, your cd plays, your dvd plays, your vcr plays...
MIDI has the concept of "channels" - so if I have eight devices I tell them "You're on channel 1, you're two, you have to be 10 because you're a drum machine..."
You could do the same with home A/V. I'd be happy if they'd just standardize the commands that change inputs so I can map a single button to each "configuration" of inputs: Watch Replay, watch Cable, watch VCR, record from Replay to VCR, etc.
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I'm curious, at what point did you decide "Hot damn! I wanna hack computers!", and had you done any type of programming/geekwork prior to that?
:) In the meantime you might be able (if you have the time) to get a part-time job slinging code (or pulling cables or whatever), that could go a long way towards broadening your horizons. Even if it's just a few hours a couple days a week maybe you can intern somewhere - more for the experience than the cash.
/.'ers have suggested.
Because I think it boils down to two possibilities:
a) You're bored with being in college learning to be their concept of a geek (personally I passed on the whole college thing)... This might be summed up as "If geekdom is like college I'm doomed"
- or -
b) You're bored with being a geek, and the prospect of doing this kind of crap for the rest of your life is horrid. Summed up as "I didn't know this was geekdom! Eeeeww!"
In the case of A, everything I've heard about college c/s informs me that it's about as far from the real world as Narnia. Suggesting you sweat through the final hours and look forward to finding a job that will keep you interested (or become a consultant, and play Russian roulette on a regular basis
In the case of B, try other stuff as approximately 150 other
Personally I think true geeks are born and not made, but that's advice worth every penny you paid for it.
In any case, good luck. It'd be interesting if you could post in a year or two and let us know what you decided and how it worked out.
However, in the opening text, it clearly says "Episode IV: A New Hope".
Then you've never seen the original release of Star Wars, which didn't have the Episode IV text - that was added retroactively, after the movie made several bargeloads of money and Lucas realized he had a franchise on his hands, and then some. A little post-facto editing, a re-release, and voila! the man is a visionary genius.
I distinctly remeber seeing the "Episode IV" text for the first time - I did a quick reality check with my friends, it was a surprise to all of us (I'd seen SW maybe half a dozen times by then).
George Lucas has hacked history.
Broadcast stations -- TV, Radio -- need by FCC regulations to identify themselves; this is a (comparitively) un-obtrusive way of doing this.
The FCC requires that broadcasting stations ID themselves by stating their call sign(s) - a minimum of once an hour, IIRC. I've yet to see a "bug" with a call sign in it. And this regulation doesn't apply to cable channels, as they're not broadcasters.
My friend notes that the alteration of people's energy patterns appears to be a cumulative effect, and that people with energy patterns altered in this way seem much more prone to 'fliers' and similar.
Sounds like someone's been standing a little too close to the Resonator. Better get your pineal gland checked. And remember, they can only see you when you move so stand very, very still.
One of these days, all of the people that complain about the recycle bin might actually learn how to:
1) set Windows to not move files to the recycle bin and not prompt for confirmation on delete (hint: right-click on the recycle bin, select properties)
Ok, so I right-clicked on the trash can like you said, and un-checked the box that says "Display delete confimation dialog" and click Ok.
So how come when I delete something from Explorer it pops a "Confirm File Delete" dialog?
When Windoze starts doing WTF I tell it to do, I'll stop complaining. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
There are still some things I go to DOS for, but that doesn't mean that they can't be done in GUI
I never said it couldn't be done - just that it's a PITA. I usually do use a Windows shell (Powerdesk, actually) for file management, but if there's a buttload of files I'll generally head for the command line. Just waiting for the grid to load the info from the filesystem ("oh wait, I've gotta go pull that icon out of the resource list so it'll look pretty", thrash thrash thrash) can take more time than I'm willing to spend staring at the screen.
I find it much easier to use a gui than a command line when moving/copying/deleting files.
:)
Until you've got to delete a few thousand, when DEL *.OBJ starts to look pretty sweet.
and you wouldnt have a recycle bin to hold those "mistakenly deleted" files...
I hate the trashcan. If I tell the computer to delete something then BY GOD it had better delete it. I hate being second-guessed by an operating system. Mistakenly deleted something? That's why we make backups.
I ran scandisk from the DOS prompt (because Windows would NOT load) and it told me "we found errors but couldnt fix them, run scandisk for windows". Gee thanks...
Moral: Windows can trash your filesystem so hard and so deep not even DOS can save you. Before windows, CHKDSK/F did just dandy.
Now that I think back... weren't Win95/98/ME/2K all supposed to be "the death of DOS"... but years later and it's still around.
Microsoft has very little experience in creating operating systems: DOS came from QDOS and Tim Paterson, Win3.x, 95/98/ME all sit upon the shoulders of mighty DOS, and NT was written in partership with IBM (back when OS/2 was a joint venture). XP probably still has some legacy OS/2 stuff in the kernel.
</crochety_old_fart>
Thank god I can still emulate CP/M!
Amiga was a Canadian company.
Err, when exactly? I know the poor thing has been bounced hither tither and yon, but as I understand it before Commodore (a U.S. company) bought'em out, it was made by Hi-Toro, AFAIK also a U.S. company. What am I missing?
How long will the writer last if it is constantly being dropped, banged against your thigh when you walk/jog, or piled under a stack of books on a desk or a schoolbag?
That's why you buy the no-questions-asked "extended warranty" from the retailer for another 20 or 30 bucks. You're right, something like can become trash with one little mishap.
My rule of thumb: never get the extended warranty on something that's going to sit on a shelf all it's life. Do get it if what you're buying is small, expensive and meant to be carried around, because eventually you'll probably drop it.
Then again, maybe I'm just clumsy...
Nope -- if this is a problem for you, you have the wrong users, not the wrong policies.
I agree with that, but I don't think it has to do with where you're hiring on the wage scale - it has to do with hiring people who will play by the rules, reguardless of how much more they think they know than the admins. Case in point: Installing Microsoft IIS is verbotten where I work, for pretty obvious reasons. Some web developers figured it was more convenient to break the rules, they installed IIS on their workstations, and wham! Nimda time. So now our network folks have to drop everything they're doing and start quarantine and disinfection procedures. Beautiful.
I know one of the admins, and she's pulling for total lockdown. Break the rules just once and you're on the pavement. The cost of putting out fires (or the cost of being offline for our customers) vastly overrides whatever the individual developer brings to the table - that's her philosophy, and I have to say it makes sense to me.
Now, carrying a foot-long ass-widener of a dildo in your bags, that is a little harder to characterize as anything other than funny
Two words for you: Sexual Harassment. People have gotten sued for things as minor as complementing the way a co-working looks in her dress, I imagine dropping a sex toy in your bag when you know there's a chance you'll be searched by a female security person could get your rear canned.
I don't want to come across as a stick in the mud, but I don't want to see somebody get fired trying to be funny in a time when sense of humor is at a premium.
Perhaps a briefcase chock-full of ping-pong balls and/or marbles would be a relativley safe way to make your point...
...and then act really pissed when they spill'em all over the floor. "My collection! You bastards!"
But more importantly, do you really want to be working for a company which would do that in the first place?
If this incident had happened 6 months ago, I'd definitely be doing a "WTF?" - but right here right now whoever thought this would be funny and not have repercussions ain't real bright IMO. So no, I'm not overly worried about working for a company that fires idiots.
Just this week someone got fired at my company for a little joke involving some dairy creamer spread on a co-worker's desk. No warning, no stern lecture, no "mark on your permanent record": terminated. Escorted to the door by security, "we'll mail you your personal items".
A company-wide memo went out saying (distilled from the corp-speak and legalease): "We just fired someone for being a smart-ass. Don't be a smart-ass."
This is not the best time to be pushing the boundries of pranksterism.
I started carrying the biggest, most realistic dildo I could find. The thing was more than a foot long.
/.
Either there's an oxymoron here, or you are one very, very lucky man.
Even those searches that were completed seemed to be much briefer than before. They were into and out of my bags in mere seconds.
A lightbulb appears over the heads of drug smugglers that read
If you were an employer, and had spent thousands of dollars on computer equipment, don't you think that you would at least have some right as to what happens on said equipment?
Replace "computer equipment" with "bathroom facilities". You paid for the crapper too, and the plumbing, and the ongoing costs of water, TP and cleaning. I recon you have the same right to make sure somebody isn't in there whacking off on your company time... right? Smile for the camera!
I used to think the same way regarding the company's monitoring of how computers are used, but then I thought of the bathroom example and realized that there are certain reasonable expectations to privacy. Now the question before me is how much monitoring of the computer/network is reasonable.
I still believe the company has the right to whatever computer/network monitoring they care to do, but I don't use the "because they own it" argument any more.
Will this work with the $10 C.A.B.L.E. D.E.S.C.R.A.M.B.L.E.R that I can build with parts available at any Radio Shack?
A friend of mine was a telemarketer for a while, they're just people like you and me, who need to pay the rent, and feed themselves.
A friend of mine does spamming for various pr0n and "Herbal Viagra" concerns - perhaps you've recieved one (or a thousand) of her solicitations. She's just trying to make ends meet, too <snif>
Automated dialers (specifically, I have experience with the Melita Predictive Dialer) detect what is an answering machine and what is not automagically. I dont know how, but they do...
No magic here - when a Live Human answers the phone they say "Hello?" and wait a second or two for a response. When an answering machine picks up it says "Hi, this is blah blah and I'm not home..." with no long breaks. All the TeleBastardMatic has to do is listen for a pause a second after the pickup. Pause=human, no pause=machine.
Which is why my answering machine messages always start with Hello and a pause - it traps all the telemarketer machines, and I get these "Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?" messages on my machine. This wastes the telemarketer's time, which makes me happy.
(Markup on a Pizza was close to 5000%)
So a $10.00 pie costs less than twenty cents to make? Damn, we should be dropping Pizza Hut on the Afghans, it'd be a lot cheaper (and tastier) than those $5.00 HDRs they're dumping now!
Hold the pepperoni!
We can download audio from Robin Williams!
Who in the name of all that's holy would put the "Popeye" soundtrack on the web?
Oh, the goatscx people. Nevermind.
You could just ensure it had enough warning to allow it to back the data up before the battery died. Or have a second reserve battery with enough power to do this even if the first one dies.
Or you could just use spinning platters to store your data, and forget about that bother.
It seems to me the reason we don't have RAM drives (say, that sounds familiar!) is that the advantages (speed) don't outweigh the downside (more power consumed, more heat created, long time to fill, long time to empty, redundant power requiresments).
I was under the impression that the FBI used a hardware hack to capture the keystrokes - but according to the affidavit the KLS wouldn't capture while the modem was on (getting around some sort of wiretap regulation). So it would have to be software, right?
The affidavit does point out a tastey loophole: enter your passwords only when you're online.
Just use the windows character generator.
I don't get it. How does a third level hobbit thief make my password more secure?
You mean like hitting "Play" makes any device play? Then anytime you hit "Play" your television plays, your cd plays, your dvd plays, your vcr plays...
MIDI has the concept of "channels" - so if I have eight devices I tell them "You're on channel 1, you're two, you have to be 10 because you're a drum machine..."
You could do the same with home A/V. I'd be happy if they'd just standardize the commands that change inputs so I can map a single button to each "configuration" of inputs: Watch Replay, watch Cable, watch VCR, record from Replay to VCR, etc.
The Internet is a peer-to-peer system where one peer can piss in the public pool.
Hmm, that's a pretty good argument for shutting down Napster, Gnutella et al.