So you're going to pay someone to sit there waiting for a 30 second window in which some random compromised account logs in? That just doesn't make sense. Even at Chinese farmer rates.
Why pay somebody to sit in front of a computer? It can all be automated. The receiving program automatically logs in, and then pages, messages, whatever, the person to come clean out the account. Also, there are bots to automatically clear out guild banks, sell things, etc. I don't think that the thieves consider themselves bound by Blizzards ToS. This just makes their lives a bit more difficult, but nobody said gold selling was easy.
I'm not sure that adding the authenticator will fix the problem of hacked accounts, it will just put things off until the thieves come up with a new system to break in.
If they can install a keylogger on your computer it should be easy enough for them to install a fake WoW login app. Put up the login screen, pass the username, password, and authenticator value to themselves, and give the hacked user a login error, realm is down error, or some such. Take the information and login to the account in the minute or so before the authenticator value expires.
Once the thief is in, it only takes a few minutes to sell gear and mail the gold. Login and realm servers being down occurs frequently enough that most players wouldn't suspect anything was going on if they're locked out for 30 minutes, which is more than enough time to for the thief to wipe out an account.
This is not a new idea, but one that has been floating around for quite some time as a method to access bank accounts, etc. which require some sort of authentication token.
BTW, if you put an authenticator on your WoW account you get a nice in game pet. If you remove the authenticator from your account, Blizzard removes the pet from your characters.
It doesn't have too much effect, really. MZ twins are similar on a trait because of genes that they share (traditionally, all of them) and environment they share (growing up in the same house, etc.) They are different on a trait due to environmental factors they don't share (such as going to different colleges) and error (measurement error in assessing the trait, random noise, etc.)
DZ (fraternal) twins are similar on a trait due to the genes they share (on average, 50%, same as any other full siblings) and the environment they share. They are different on a trait due to the genes they don't share (on average 50%), environment they don't share, and error.
These results say that the assumption that MZ twins share 100% of their genes is wrong. The real question is how wrong? Do MZ twins share 99.99% of their genes? Is that 0.01% difference right in the middle of some gene that has a large effect on the trait you're studying? For most of these new discoveries, it doesn't make any difference at all. Differences in silent mutations between twins isn't going to change scientists' conclusions that height is highly heritable (meaning: most of the difference in height between two people is due to the fact that they have different genes).
A few weeks ago I was at a house with Comcast, and none of us could reliably access Google. All other sites seemed to work. Several hours later (or perhaps the next morning) connections to Google were fine again. At the time I thought it might be a problem with Google, and that would be front page news on Slashdot, but nothing appeared, and I forgot about it.
They're now claiming that there was a malicious attack on the site, and sales will resume later. So, millions of computers attempted to connect to Paciolan's servers and that brought them down? I suppose it is possible that some type of DOS was launched to disrupt the sale, but I think it's also possible that a million people or so wanted to buy 60,000 available tickets.
This thread is old, but I've been away, so I'm just seeing it now (a couple of weeks later).
Gosh yes, that must be exactly what happened. less is known for downloading image bugs, that must be what tipped off the spammers.
Remember, some people aren't noobs. All evidence points to Ameritrade (or one of their employees) releasing (deliberately or unintentionally) the e-mail addresses of some or all of their customers. I think it unlikely that Ameritrade themselves are the spammers, but I would believe (though I have no evidence) that an Ameritrade employee with access to their e-mail list is responsible for sending the pump and dump spams.
Regardless, it is a serious security problem, and not what I expect from an organization I'm expected to trust to hold my money.
None of the companies would ever let the lawmakers do it, but I think the regulation that is needed is something to disentangle the ownership of the actual wires, fibres, spectrum, etc. that carries data from the data itself.
Companies who carry the data, and deliver it to all kinds of end users (home users, businesses, etc.) would be required to be completely agnostic as to what the data is they carry. They would be like the post office, who don't own the mail they deliver, they just deliver it. Perhaps even completely transparent non-neutral prioritization of traffic (like the post office, with airmail, first class, media rate, etc.) would be acceptable. Any VOIP provider could agree to pay the tariff for high priority packets, and Verizon (for example) couldn't block their traffic because they compete with Verizon's local phone service.
Separating the data carrier and the content provider is just my thought for preventing vertical monopolies. Time Warner owns your cable line, and forces their traffic on you, and only lets in their and their "partners" VOIP or video on demand traffic, for example (they don't do this now, but I'm sure they'd love to if given the opportunity).
Simply, you can own the wires or the data, but not both.
The first time I received spam, not ads for "partner" companies, but pump-and-dump image spam, and such, I reported Ameritrade to the SEC. After contacting Ameritrade and receiving a big "so what" from them, I filled in the SEC's online complaint form, detailing the problem. A week or two later I received a letter (on paper) from them asking me to e-mail them more information and any additional evidence. I sent them a detailed explanation of the problem, along with information about why it was extremely unlikely that the e-mail address was stolen from my end (none of my other unique addresses were receiving spam), and a copy of all of the spam messages that had been sent to my ameritrade address.
Since that time I've not heard anything back from the SEC. I didn't really expect to, but I was hoping that if 10-20 people complained about the same thing, and provided evidence, they might actually start an investigation. That was August, 2006, so maybe they really are doing something, and I should just be more patient.
A friend who was also receiving the ameritrade spam convinced ameritrade to waive the account transfer fee, and moved all of his stuff to Scottrade. I changed my ameritrade e-mail address, and haven't received spam to the new address, so I thought perhaps the leak had been fixed. Now that I see the problem is still occurring, I'll take the time to move my accounts.
A virus and spyware is certainly a possibility for leaking an address, and I know I've had my address leaked when somebody elses computer, who has received an e-mail from me, gets infected with spyware.
In this case though, both a friend and myself started getting spam to our unique Ameritrade addresses at the same time. Both of us use Linux for our primary desktop OS (no e-mail reading from a Windows vmware session, etc.) Neither of us received spam to our many other unique addresses. If it had been spyware infecting one of our machines and stealing our e-mail list, then I would have expected spam to my e-trade, amazon, newegg, etc. unique addresses, but only the ameritrade address received the spam.
It could still be a spyware or virus infection at a machine at Ameritrade. Somebody keeps the full list of e-mail addresses on their laptop, which goes outside all the fancy firewalls and IT oversite and gets infected, and has the data stolen.
I boot multiple disk images from my usb key using grub as the menu, and memdisk from the syslinux package.
In grub/menu.lst I have something like:
title Hitachi Drive test utility root (hd0,0) kernel/boot/memdisk initrd=/boot/dft377_29.img
Some things boot fine, like the above referenced Hitachi DFT, but other disk images don't seem to work. I've successfully booted DOS/Windows floppy images for doing BIOS upgrades, etc.
Memtest86 can be booted directly:
title Memtest 86+ root (hd0,0) kernel/boot/memtest86+.bin
There is almost always an e-mail to sms gateway address, such as 5555555555@t-mobile.com (or whatever). I have a.procmailrc that forwards interesting e-mails to my phone. It strips quoted text and other stuff, to squeeze as much as possible into the allowed 160 characters.
I've been using my phone as a biff for years. If an e-mail is important I know about it right away, if it isn't important I can deal with it later or ignore it completely.
I boot my usb key drive using grub. As long as the PC has BIOS
support for booting a USB device, it should work:
Make the usb key work under Linux, plug it in so it is/dev/sda1
(for example)
copy the grub stuff out of/boot/grub to/boot/grub on the key
run grup --no-floppy
in grub type device (hd0)/dev/sda
then root (hd0,0) grub should say it found a fat filesystem
then install (hd0) and grub should do its thing
now you can boot from your usb key with grub
of course now you have to put things on the key to be booted. Using
memdisk from syslinux is convenient to boot floppy images. My
menu.lst looks something like:
title Memtest86+ kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memtestv100.bin
title IBM/Hitachi Disk Fitness Test 3.50 kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memdisk initrd (hd0,0)/boot/dftv350.bin
title Western Digital DLG Diag Ver. 11 kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memdisk initrd (hd0,0)/boot/wdlifeguard.img
and so on. I'm not booting a full rescue image from the key, mostly
just disk images.
I think Rick Berman not knowing why the movie tanked is pretty much the reason it tanked. If the producer of a movie is so out of touch with an established fan base that he can't see why they didn't flock to see the movie, then perhaps it is time for somebody who does understand the fans and the story to take the lead.
I like Star Trek, and now that it has found its feet a bit I am enjoying Enterprise (though I still don't know all of the characters' names), and I was planning on seeing Nemesis. But, after friends who are big Trek fans came back and told me not to bother, or catch it on DVD, I really lost all interest.
As stated lower in this thread, if you have to manually check your spam folder for "false positives", the filter is utterly useless since you are still checking for spam.
I know what you're getting at with that sentiment, but I have to disagree. I would rather have a few false positives, than to be frequently interrupted with false negatives. The difference, upon arrival "real" e-mail causes biff to get excited and sends a text message to my phone, all of which lead me to take a break from whatever I am doing to check my e-mail.
A spam, or a false positive, goes into my spam folder. A few times a day, or whenever, I check my spam folder, sending the true spam off to spamcop, and refiling the false positives. False positives are rare, and in my case they have almost always been non-critical things, such as shipping confirmations, and notices my frequent flier statement is ready.
So utterly useless, no. You are falling into the common trap of thinking that because something isn't perfect, it is useless. Certainly my method can be a bit annoying, but so far is better than the alternatives, which are either letting myself be interrupted by every spam (12 so far today, and its not even 11am), or not noticing important e-mails until long after they arrive.
Sueing could solve my edu's budget problems
on
AOL Wins Anti-Spam Case
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Sueing spammers could solve my University's budget problems (assuming success, etc. etc.) Under Colorado's anti-spam law the university would be entitled to $10 per spam sent through its systems.
In the last 34 hours or so, since the logs last rotated, my server has received almost 1000 spams and blocked the delivery of over 8000 more. I'll call that 6000 spams in 24 hours. This is just one mail server on a large campus with many different mail servers.
At $60,000 a day (dreaming) per machine a cluster of honeypots could wipe out the university's $11 million budget defecit in a week or two.
Uptake slow because telco at capacity on DSL
on
DSL Rising
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· Score: 5, Interesting
In my local area, the telco, Qwest, appears to be at capacity for providing DSL. Of the many people I have encouraged to get DSL, only those folks living in outlying cities have been able to successfully get it installed. People living here in Boulder, CO have repeatedly been told their line does not qualify, when people living in the same building already have DSL.
It always amazes me to read articles about the US lagging in DSL uptake, or the telcos not signing up as many people as they hoped, when in fact they are turning people away.
Maybe there is an explanation other than capacity, such as Qwest pulling a BT and refusing to signup people who don't request MSN as their ISP.
The case my homebrew machine in is has a duct to bring air from the back to the top of the CPU's heatsink. My old athlon system ran cooler with the duct than with a heatsink fan. I ran it for several days each way, and using lmsensors kept a log of the temperature. Not only did the ducting make the case quieter because of one less fan, but it also kept the average and highest temperatures down by several degrees celsius.
Since then I have put a dual athlon board in that case, so the ducting had to go, because it only would have cooled one cpu, and even then it didn't clear the big heatsinks that came with the my new athlons. I found that cooling has been the biggest issue effecting stability in the dual athlon. In the machines original configuration it would lock up under high load, so I rearranged some stuff to bring the max temperature down to about 52C and 56C for each processor, and it has run at full load for weeks at a time with no problem.
I tried adding a front fan to bring air in, and that actually increased the average and max temperature in the case. I am not sure if that was due to increased turbulence or blowing hot air from the drives onto the cpus. Either way, it is important to remember that more fans doesn't automatically equal more cooling.
Last December, on a trip to England, my old Palm III was stolen from my jacket pocket. Of course this was pretty stupid on the theif's part, because the jacket was worth easily 3 or 4 times the Palm III's value. This was on the first day of my trip.
The reason I still had a III was because I couldn't decide on what to replace it with, but now I was forced to choose, so I searched all over the web and decided on the IBM branded Palm Vx, which had been discontinued in the US, but was still available in the UK for a good price. I called IBM and they refused to sell it to me unless I used a credit card with a UK address. So they lost a sale.
Turns out I would be forced to buy something in a store, and the store prices for Palm type devices are insanely higher than in the US, so I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Then I searched all around and decided I would mail order a particular Handspring or some such, and it would be waiting for me when I got back home. My boss agreed to pay for it, as the Palm III had been bought by work, and I was on a work trip.
Then a guy I know over there told me he had a M105 that Dell sent him for free with his laptop, it was almost new, in that he had only played with it a bit, and he agreed to sell it to me for the discount price of 20. It has a much better screen than the Palm III, and of course 8MB instead of 2MB, and obviously the price was right, so I was pleased at first.
Since then the M105 has mostly worked correctly. The case of course feels like crap. The plastic is cheap and the sections pull apart with no effort. The screen has since developed an area in the middle that is a bit too dark or too light, depending on how the contrast is adjusted. Even worse, twice now the unit has completely refused to turn on. I had to remove and reinsert the batteries to get it to come back, and at that point all of the memory was erased.
Still, for $30 I would recommend one to anybody, but if you have to pay real money, get something else. I would also have to recommend that people avoid the newer M125. If Palm wants to get out of the hardware business and just license there OS to other manufacturers (as has been rumored occasionaly), making junk like this is certainly a good way to start.
On product just getting worse in general? I have a $2500 (when it was new) Dell laptop that in 1.5 years has had almost every piece replaced at least once, and some of them twice or more. The only original pieces left are the actual LCD part of the screen (the plastic it is encased in has been replaced several times), the floppy drive, and the CD drive. The floppy is rarely used, and the removable CD drive spends most of its time sitting in a drawer.
I don't abuse the machine. Mostly I carry it between the bedroom, living room, and kitchen in my house. The plastic on the case is so brittle that it cracks at regular intervals. After just getting the external power supply replaced last week, the second time, now I need to call to get the bottom replaced, because it has cracked in the same place it cracked a few months ago.
Ironically, when entering computer lemon law into Google, the sponsored link is www.dell4me.com.
I got my TiVo for $100 on a promotion for the summer olympics in
Australia, and then I added a 40 or 60GB drive (I can't remember). So
I have been using a TiVo for some time now, and I can't imagine
watching TV without it. I am pretty sure the last time I watched live
TV was in September.
Additionally, my life is as ad free as I can make it. Banner ads are
filtered out, or at a minimum the animation is disabled, so all I see is
the first, usually nonsensical, frame. Now that I have a CD player in
my car, I don't listen to FM radio, and even when I did, I would
change the channel or turn it off when an ad came on. So of course, I
use the TiVo to skip all of the commercials that come on.
Those two things being said, I am not entirely opposed to TiVo using
the reserved space on the recorder (space that doesn't count against
how many hours the recorder came with, or how many shows I can record) to record promotional items.
Assuming, as was the case this time, the TiVo isn't recording anything
else, I don't really care if it decides to grab some show because the
BBC, or whoever, paid them.
What I am opposed to, of course, is having the TiVo force me to watch
it, or even be in my face about telling me it is there. TiVo used to
have a thing where an ad would come up on the screen the first
time the TiVo button was pushed, after the ad was recorded. People
complained this was annoying, so now TiVo just seems to put an extra
line on the main menu, saying Sheryl Crow video, or whatever.
The forced message was bad, because they say, you only see it once,
and it only shows up sometimes, but how soon is it until I have to
flip through 5 pages of banner ads before I can get to the menu? And
then what, forced 30 second commercial spots before I can watch a
show? I currently don't mind paying $12/month for the TiVo service,
but that type of forced behavior will cause me and many others
to investigate other means of loading scheduling information onto the
TiVo. Very simple, abuse your customers, lose your customers.
Now, in the case of this BBC show, I think it would have been more
reasonable for TiVo to have everybody record the show as one of TiVo's
recomendations. Hopefully it would still be stored in reserved space,
as it wasn't a true recomendation. Then people would see it on there
list of shows, and watch or not, and like it or not, based on the
shows merit.
As I am sure many people will mention, a simple way to look at it
is as a question of how much your time is worth. If it takes you
6 hours more to setup each custom built machine than a prepackaged
machine, then is your time worth $67/hour to the company? You also
have to compare this down the line. When a machine's hard disk,
etc. dies, is a quick call to the box maker easier than spending time
dealing with the drive manufacturer?
Of course it isn't quite that simple. This last point used to be
a big reason for me not to build my own machines. Flaky CD,
noisy hard disk, sticking keyboard? Call Dell and a new one will show
up tomorrow morning. However, in the last year or so Dell's service
has gone to crap, so now I spend an hour on the phone with them to get
a dead CD drive replaced. When the cheapest CD drive at newegg is $29
shipped, it is more cost effective for me to buy a new drive than deal
with Dell.
There is also the issue of finding a company that will build the
machine you want. I want to spend $1300 on a dual athlon. I can't
get that from any of the big box companies, and the smaller companies
often have markups too large for me to swallow, or don't quite offer
what I want. I am sure I could work with many of them to get just
what I want, but by the time I have done that I could have chosen the
pieces I want from newegg, mwave, gogocity, etc. 1-2 hours of my time
to put the pieces together is worth $50-100, it isn't worth $500.
I find the balance tends to go in cycles. For a time I can build
boxes better and cheaper than I can buy them ready made, and then for
a while I can get what I want ready made for only a trivial markup.
The combination of being in the "I can't get what I want" and the
decline in customer service I have experienced recently unfortunately
puts me in the building boxes phase.
Of course this only applies for boxes I care about and will have
to support. Any box that even if I helped buy, I don't have to
support, I just order ready made. That way if something goes wrong I
just shrug and tell the user to call Dell, or whoever.
You also might look at the no OS boxes from Wal-mart. there
is an article at NewsForge about setting Linux up on one.
Spending $450 (including upgrading the memory) to get a 1Ghz Duron
all put together isn't bad. Just wipe the commercial OS from the
drive of the old machine, and install it on the new machine.
I downloaded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and like it, so I am going to cash in my yahoo points (I buy lots of stuff on yahoo shopping for work) and get the album when it comes out. Of course the mp3s I downloaded are only 96bit, and are full of static:).
Would I buy the album if the mp3s were 320bit? Probably, but I might just save my money to see Wilco if they come to town. Would I buy the album if I thought it was bad? Probably not.
While Wilco IS one of the bands that I would buy a new album from without ever having heard it, I would be much more likely today to download some or all of the songs before making a purchasing decision. Occasionaly even bands I like put out crap albums.
What I would like to see is labels and artists put up all of their music that is no longer being printed for download. I would happily pay $4-5 to download mp3s, oggs, etc. of an out of print Alejandro Escovedo album. That is money the label and artist would never see if I spent $25 buying the album from somebody on Ebay.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're going to pay someone to sit there waiting for a 30 second window in which some random compromised account logs in? That just doesn't make sense. Even at Chinese farmer rates.
Why pay somebody to sit in front of a computer? It can all be automated. The receiving program automatically logs in, and then pages, messages, whatever, the person to come clean out the account. Also, there are bots to automatically clear out guild banks, sell things, etc. I don't think that the thieves consider themselves bound by Blizzards ToS. This just makes their lives a bit more difficult, but nobody said gold selling was easy.
I'm not sure that adding the authenticator will fix the problem of hacked accounts, it will just put things off until the thieves come up with a new system to break in.
If they can install a keylogger on your computer it should be easy enough for them to install a fake WoW login app. Put up the login screen, pass the username, password, and authenticator value to themselves, and give the hacked user a login error, realm is down error, or some such. Take the information and login to the account in the minute or so before the authenticator value expires.
Once the thief is in, it only takes a few minutes to sell gear and mail the gold. Login and realm servers being down occurs frequently enough that most players wouldn't suspect anything was going on if they're locked out for 30 minutes, which is more than enough time to for the thief to wipe out an account.
This is not a new idea, but one that has been floating around for quite some time as a method to access bank accounts, etc. which require some sort of authentication token.
BTW, if you put an authenticator on your WoW account you get a nice in game pet. If you remove the authenticator from your account, Blizzard removes the pet from your characters.
It doesn't have too much effect, really. MZ twins are similar on a trait because of genes that they share (traditionally, all of them) and environment they share (growing up in the same house, etc.) They are different on a trait due to environmental factors they don't share (such as going to different colleges) and error (measurement error in assessing the trait, random noise, etc.)
DZ (fraternal) twins are similar on a trait due to the genes they share (on average, 50%, same as any other full siblings) and the environment they share. They are different on a trait due to the genes they don't share (on average 50%), environment they don't share, and error.
These results say that the assumption that MZ twins share 100% of their genes is wrong. The real question is how wrong? Do MZ twins share 99.99% of their genes? Is that 0.01% difference right in the middle of some gene that has a large effect on the trait you're studying? For most of these new discoveries, it doesn't make any difference at all. Differences in silent mutations between twins isn't going to change scientists' conclusions that height is highly heritable (meaning: most of the difference in height between two people is due to the fact that they have different genes).
A few weeks ago I was at a house with Comcast, and none of us could reliably access Google. All other sites seemed to work. Several hours later (or perhaps the next morning) connections to Google were fine again. At the time I thought it might be a problem with Google, and that would be front page news on Slashdot, but nothing appeared, and I forgot about it.
That mystery is solved now...
They're now claiming that there was a malicious attack on the site, and sales will resume later. So, millions of computers attempted to connect to Paciolan's servers and that brought them down? I suppose it is possible that some type of DOS was launched to disrupt the sale, but I think it's also possible that a million people or so wanted to buy 60,000 available tickets.
This thread is old, but I've been away, so I'm just seeing it now (a couple of weeks later).
Gosh yes, that must be exactly what happened. less is known for downloading image bugs, that must be what tipped off the spammers.
Remember, some people aren't noobs. All evidence points to Ameritrade (or one of their employees) releasing (deliberately or unintentionally) the e-mail addresses of some or all of their customers. I think it unlikely that Ameritrade themselves are the spammers, but I would believe (though I have no evidence) that an Ameritrade employee with access to their e-mail list is responsible for sending the pump and dump spams.
Regardless, it is a serious security problem, and not what I expect from an organization I'm expected to trust to hold my money.
None of the companies would ever let the lawmakers do it, but I think the regulation that is needed is something to disentangle the ownership of the actual wires, fibres, spectrum, etc. that carries data from the data itself.
Companies who carry the data, and deliver it to all kinds of end users (home users, businesses, etc.) would be required to be completely agnostic as to what the data is they carry. They would be like the post office, who don't own the mail they deliver, they just deliver it. Perhaps even completely transparent non-neutral prioritization of traffic (like the post office, with airmail, first class, media rate, etc.) would be acceptable. Any VOIP provider could agree to pay the tariff for high priority packets, and Verizon (for example) couldn't block their traffic because they compete with Verizon's local phone service.
Separating the data carrier and the content provider is just my thought for preventing vertical monopolies. Time Warner owns your cable line, and forces their traffic on you, and only lets in their and their "partners" VOIP or video on demand traffic, for example (they don't do this now, but I'm sure they'd love to if given the opportunity).
Simply, you can own the wires or the data, but not both.
The first time I received spam, not ads for "partner" companies, but pump-and-dump image spam, and such, I reported Ameritrade to the SEC. After contacting Ameritrade and receiving a big "so what" from them, I filled in the SEC's online complaint form, detailing the problem. A week or two later I received a letter (on paper) from them asking me to e-mail them more information and any additional evidence. I sent them a detailed explanation of the problem, along with information about why it was extremely unlikely that the e-mail address was stolen from my end (none of my other unique addresses were receiving spam), and a copy of all of the spam messages that had been sent to my ameritrade address.
Since that time I've not heard anything back from the SEC. I didn't really expect to, but I was hoping that if 10-20 people complained about the same thing, and provided evidence, they might actually start an investigation. That was August, 2006, so maybe they really are doing something, and I should just be more patient.
A friend who was also receiving the ameritrade spam convinced ameritrade to waive the account transfer fee, and moved all of his stuff to Scottrade. I changed my ameritrade e-mail address, and haven't received spam to the new address, so I thought perhaps the leak had been fixed. Now that I see the problem is still occurring, I'll take the time to move my accounts.
A virus and spyware is certainly a possibility for leaking an address, and I know I've had my address leaked when somebody elses computer, who has received an e-mail from me, gets infected with spyware.
In this case though, both a friend and myself started getting spam to our unique Ameritrade addresses at the same time. Both of us use Linux for our primary desktop OS (no e-mail reading from a Windows vmware session, etc.) Neither of us received spam to our many other unique addresses. If it had been spyware infecting one of our machines and stealing our e-mail list, then I would have expected spam to my e-trade, amazon, newegg, etc. unique addresses, but only the ameritrade address received the spam.
It could still be a spyware or virus infection at a machine at Ameritrade. Somebody keeps the full list of e-mail addresses on their laptop, which goes outside all the fancy firewalls and IT oversite and gets infected, and has the data stolen.
It is also free (gpl), and comes with example files for creating a variety of different graphs.
In grub/menu.lst I have something like:
Some things boot fine, like the above referenced Hitachi DFT, but other disk images don't seem to work. I've successfully booted DOS/Windows floppy images for doing BIOS upgrades, etc.
Memtest86 can be booted directly:
As long as I can steal a bitchin Camaro to go down to the shore.
I've been using my phone as a biff for years. If an e-mail is important I know about it right away, if it isn't important I can deal with it later or ignore it completely.
Oops, step 6 should be setup (hd0)
- Make the usb key work under Linux, plug it in so it is
/dev/sda1
(for example)
- copy the grub stuff out of
/boot/grub to /boot/grub on the key
- run grup --no-floppy
- in grub type device (hd0)
/dev/sda
- then root (hd0,0) grub should say it found a fat filesystem
- then install (hd0) and grub should do its thing
- now you can boot from your usb key with grub
of course now you have to put things on the key to be booted. Using memdisk from syslinux is convenient to boot floppy images. My menu.lst looks something like:and so on. I'm not booting a full rescue image from the key, mostly just disk images.
I think Rick Berman not knowing why the movie tanked is pretty much the reason it tanked. If the producer of a movie is so out of touch with an established fan base that he can't see why they didn't flock to see the movie, then perhaps it is time for somebody who does understand the fans and the story to take the lead.
I like Star Trek, and now that it has found its feet a bit I am enjoying Enterprise (though I still don't know all of the characters' names), and I was planning on seeing Nemesis. But, after friends who are big Trek fans came back and told me not to bother, or catch it on DVD, I really lost all interest.
I know what you're getting at with that sentiment, but I have to disagree. I would rather have a few false positives, than to be frequently interrupted with false negatives. The difference, upon arrival "real" e-mail causes biff to get excited and sends a text message to my phone, all of which lead me to take a break from whatever I am doing to check my e-mail.
A spam, or a false positive, goes into my spam folder. A few times a day, or whenever, I check my spam folder, sending the true spam off to spamcop, and refiling the false positives. False positives are rare, and in my case they have almost always been non-critical things, such as shipping confirmations, and notices my frequent flier statement is ready.
So utterly useless, no. You are falling into the common trap of thinking that because something isn't perfect, it is useless. Certainly my method can be a bit annoying, but so far is better than the alternatives, which are either letting myself be interrupted by every spam (12 so far today, and its not even 11am), or not noticing important e-mails until long after they arrive.
In the last 34 hours or so, since the logs last rotated, my server has received almost 1000 spams and blocked the delivery of over 8000 more. I'll call that 6000 spams in 24 hours. This is just one mail server on a large campus with many different mail servers.
At $60,000 a day (dreaming) per machine a cluster of honeypots could wipe out the university's $11 million budget defecit in a week or two.
It always amazes me to read articles about the US lagging in DSL uptake, or the telcos not signing up as many people as they hoped, when in fact they are turning people away.
Maybe there is an explanation other than capacity, such as Qwest pulling a BT and refusing to signup people who don't request MSN as their ISP.
The case my homebrew machine in is has a duct to bring air from the back to the top of the CPU's heatsink. My old athlon system ran cooler with the duct than with a heatsink fan. I ran it for several days each way, and using lmsensors kept a log of the temperature. Not only did the ducting make the case quieter because of one less fan, but it also kept the average and highest temperatures down by several degrees celsius.
Since then I have put a dual athlon board in that case, so the ducting had to go, because it only would have cooled one cpu, and even then it didn't clear the big heatsinks that came with the my new athlons. I found that cooling has been the biggest issue effecting stability in the dual athlon. In the machines original configuration it would lock up under high load, so I rearranged some stuff to bring the max temperature down to about 52C and 56C for each processor, and it has run at full load for weeks at a time with no problem.
I tried adding a front fan to bring air in, and that actually increased the average and max temperature in the case. I am not sure if that was due to increased turbulence or blowing hot air from the drives onto the cpus. Either way, it is important to remember that more fans doesn't automatically equal more cooling.
The reason I still had a III was because I couldn't decide on what to replace it with, but now I was forced to choose, so I searched all over the web and decided on the IBM branded Palm Vx, which had been discontinued in the US, but was still available in the UK for a good price. I called IBM and they refused to sell it to me unless I used a credit card with a UK address. So they lost a sale.
Turns out I would be forced to buy something in a store, and the store prices for Palm type devices are insanely higher than in the US, so I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Then I searched all around and decided I would mail order a particular Handspring or some such, and it would be waiting for me when I got back home. My boss agreed to pay for it, as the Palm III had been bought by work, and I was on a work trip.
Then a guy I know over there told me he had a M105 that Dell sent him for free with his laptop, it was almost new, in that he had only played with it a bit, and he agreed to sell it to me for the discount price of 20. It has a much better screen than the Palm III, and of course 8MB instead of 2MB, and obviously the price was right, so I was pleased at first.
Since then the M105 has mostly worked correctly. The case of course feels like crap. The plastic is cheap and the sections pull apart with no effort. The screen has since developed an area in the middle that is a bit too dark or too light, depending on how the contrast is adjusted. Even worse, twice now the unit has completely refused to turn on. I had to remove and reinsert the batteries to get it to come back, and at that point all of the memory was erased.
Still, for $30 I would recommend one to anybody, but if you have to pay real money, get something else. I would also have to recommend that people avoid the newer M125. If Palm wants to get out of the hardware business and just license there OS to other manufacturers (as has been rumored occasionaly), making junk like this is certainly a good way to start.
On product just getting worse in general? I have a $2500 (when it was new) Dell laptop that in 1.5 years has had almost every piece replaced at least once, and some of them twice or more. The only original pieces left are the actual LCD part of the screen (the plastic it is encased in has been replaced several times), the floppy drive, and the CD drive. The floppy is rarely used, and the removable CD drive spends most of its time sitting in a drawer.
I don't abuse the machine. Mostly I carry it between the bedroom, living room, and kitchen in my house. The plastic on the case is so brittle that it cracks at regular intervals. After just getting the external power supply replaced last week, the second time, now I need to call to get the bottom replaced, because it has cracked in the same place it cracked a few months ago.
Ironically, when entering computer lemon law into Google, the sponsored link is www.dell4me.com.
I got my TiVo for $100 on a promotion for the summer olympics in Australia, and then I added a 40 or 60GB drive (I can't remember). So I have been using a TiVo for some time now, and I can't imagine watching TV without it. I am pretty sure the last time I watched live TV was in September.
Additionally, my life is as ad free as I can make it. Banner ads are filtered out, or at a minimum the animation is disabled, so all I see is the first, usually nonsensical, frame. Now that I have a CD player in my car, I don't listen to FM radio, and even when I did, I would change the channel or turn it off when an ad came on. So of course, I use the TiVo to skip all of the commercials that come on.
Those two things being said, I am not entirely opposed to TiVo using the reserved space on the recorder (space that doesn't count against how many hours the recorder came with, or how many shows I can record) to record promotional items. Assuming, as was the case this time, the TiVo isn't recording anything else, I don't really care if it decides to grab some show because the BBC, or whoever, paid them.What I am opposed to, of course, is having the TiVo force me to watch it, or even be in my face about telling me it is there. TiVo used to have a thing where an ad would come up on the screen the first time the TiVo button was pushed, after the ad was recorded. People complained this was annoying, so now TiVo just seems to put an extra line on the main menu, saying Sheryl Crow video, or whatever.
The forced message was bad, because they say, you only see it once, and it only shows up sometimes, but how soon is it until I have to flip through 5 pages of banner ads before I can get to the menu? And then what, forced 30 second commercial spots before I can watch a show? I currently don't mind paying $12/month for the TiVo service, but that type of forced behavior will cause me and many others to investigate other means of loading scheduling information onto the TiVo. Very simple, abuse your customers, lose your customers.
Now, in the case of this BBC show, I think it would have been more reasonable for TiVo to have everybody record the show as one of TiVo's recomendations. Hopefully it would still be stored in reserved space, as it wasn't a true recomendation. Then people would see it on there list of shows, and watch or not, and like it or not, based on the shows merit.
As I am sure many people will mention, a simple way to look at it is as a question of how much your time is worth. If it takes you 6 hours more to setup each custom built machine than a prepackaged machine, then is your time worth $67/hour to the company? You also have to compare this down the line. When a machine's hard disk, etc. dies, is a quick call to the box maker easier than spending time dealing with the drive manufacturer?
Of course it isn't quite that simple. This last point used to be a big reason for me not to build my own machines. Flaky CD, noisy hard disk, sticking keyboard? Call Dell and a new one will show up tomorrow morning. However, in the last year or so Dell's service has gone to crap, so now I spend an hour on the phone with them to get a dead CD drive replaced. When the cheapest CD drive at newegg is $29 shipped, it is more cost effective for me to buy a new drive than deal with Dell.
There is also the issue of finding a company that will build the machine you want. I want to spend $1300 on a dual athlon. I can't get that from any of the big box companies, and the smaller companies often have markups too large for me to swallow, or don't quite offer what I want. I am sure I could work with many of them to get just what I want, but by the time I have done that I could have chosen the pieces I want from newegg, mwave, gogocity, etc. 1-2 hours of my time to put the pieces together is worth $50-100, it isn't worth $500.
I find the balance tends to go in cycles. For a time I can build boxes better and cheaper than I can buy them ready made, and then for a while I can get what I want ready made for only a trivial markup. The combination of being in the "I can't get what I want" and the decline in customer service I have experienced recently unfortunately puts me in the building boxes phase.
Of course this only applies for boxes I care about and will have to support. Any box that even if I helped buy, I don't have to support, I just order ready made. That way if something goes wrong I just shrug and tell the user to call Dell, or whoever.
You also might look at the no OS boxes from Wal-mart. there is an article at NewsForge about setting Linux up on one. Spending $450 (including upgrading the memory) to get a 1Ghz Duron all put together isn't bad. Just wipe the commercial OS from the drive of the old machine, and install it on the new machine.
I am at 180 days uptime on my Tivo. I guess that is how long it has been since the 2.5.1 update.
I downloaded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and like it, so I am going to cash in my yahoo points (I buy lots of stuff on yahoo shopping for work) and get the album when it comes out. Of course the mp3s I downloaded are only 96bit, and are full of static :).
Would I buy the album if the mp3s were 320bit? Probably, but I might just save my money to see Wilco if they come to town. Would I buy the album if I thought it was bad? Probably not.
While Wilco IS one of the bands that I would buy a new album from without ever having heard it, I would be much more likely today to download some or all of the songs before making a purchasing decision. Occasionaly even bands I like put out crap albums.
What I would like to see is labels and artists put up all of their music that is no longer being printed for download. I would happily pay $4-5 to download mp3s, oggs, etc. of an out of print Alejandro Escovedo album. That is money the label and artist would never see if I spent $25 buying the album from somebody on Ebay.