I'm in the mid-Westchester area of NY. FiOS is available all around my town, but unfortunately not in it. My friend has it, and he is extremely pleased. If it were available in my town, I would be using it right now, and not realizing what I missed out on...
Cablevision/Optimum Online is my current ISP, and the bandwidth they provide me was 10Mbs down/256Kbs up. Extremely lopsided, to the point where even light P2P usage must be throttled down to avoid saturating the upstream.
I was ready to switch after a 6 day Internet outage from Cablevision (only affecting my zip code, from what I was told), but after my service was finally restored, I discovered that my bandwidth had changed to 10Mbs down/3Mbs up.
This bandwidth seems to be available 24/7. Although it is hard to test the downstream without pissing someone off, uTorrent has been uploading at 250K/sec for 4 days straight without a hiccup. Even with the upstream fully saturated, the connection remains nice and responsive.
I was 100% ready to switch to almost anything, including SDSL costing 3X as much which provided much worse downstream and slightly better upstream (compared to 256Kbps). I made this abundantly clear to the phone reps I spoke to, 3 times a day, during my 6 day outage. I'm not normally such an aggrivating customer, but I tele-commute, so having no Internet is an extreme pain in the ass. I seriously doubt my threats meant anything to them, but I can't deny the situation has vastly improved.
My question is, has anyone else noticed strange un-announced "upgrades" to thier cable modem, whether Cablevision or otherwise? If so, please mention your old/new speeds and general location.
"It's crazy," Reynolds said of the law. "The vote was unanimous. We were in the middle of some other bill. Someone walked up to me and said, 'I thought you'd vote against that.' And I said, 'Duh.' I thought it was about spam. I didn't bother to read it to that level."
Does this make anyone else's blood boil? From what I can tell, Reynolds is the "good guy", yet he can't even be bothered to read the law he is passing.
I hear about this all the time. Apparently it's "standard operating procedure." What the FUCK do our elected officials actually do all day?
Actually, I'm not 100% sure the hardware has to cost anything at all. I bought an OEM copy of XP Pro from Newegg. It was the only item in the order. It arrived with a floppy cable in the box, and it was listed as a separate line item on the invoice. "OEM Floppy Cable: $0.00". That was a while ago though, does anyone know if Newegg can still get away with this?
Another interesting tidbit: a businesss that I used to be IT Manager for bought about 200 Dell Optiplexes. They came with W2K pre-installed, yet for some reason each one came with an XP CD and license. It was a W2K shop, so I had piles of unused XP licenses. I took one home and installed it on a new home-built PC. Worked fine, never complained, and only took one registry hack to remove the Dell branding. It even passes the Windows Update validation, although I did get a message stating that (I'm paraphrasing): "the manufacturer of my PC could not be determined, this isn't a problem now, but could become a problem in the future".
I'm wondering if that message was because this is a "Dell build" of XP or because the machine is home-built. It it "becomes a problem", lets just say that I'll have a few more gigs of free space for my Ubuntu system partition! Has anyone seen that message on Windows Update before?
.. It's a helluva lot more fatter than what it was 5 years ago..
(I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but writing sentences like this lead me to believe that you don't know your kernels from your colonels.)
.. was trying to prove was that the memory footprint for a modern Linux distribution, running a modern Linux kernel, is larger than a more older distro/kernel..
(What I am trying to prove is that the sky is blue, in my perception, your mileage may vary!)
.. memory footprint for running a Linux distribution (and that means kernel, since it's the core part)..
(My car runs on gasoline, and since the engine is a core part, I would like you to know that my seat belt latches use far less gas than your car!)
.. I'm well aware.. stability.. 2.4 - 2.4.7.. VM issues.. 2.4.7.. mostly stable.. super stable.. 2.4.18.. compile my own kernels.. done it.. a hundred times.. "usage problems".. 2.6.. not.. user friendly.. or.. robust..
(I find it amazing that with all those extra words removed, this is still pretty much in context, although I would just tweak it a bit and replace the word "usage" with "user".)
.. text-mode.. text-mode.. this is the text mode specs I might add..
(Thanks! I didn't know it was text mode! Maybe it was the hyphens that threw me off? Also, do you think those requirements might have anything to do with the fact that "text mode" and "useless" do not have equivalent meanings? 200MHz and 128MB isn't too steep for a fully functional, bleeding-edge application server.)
.. find me a Linux distribution that lets you customer a Linux kernel at install time..
(wow)
.. Tell me.. I am.. a tool..
(Finally, talking some sense! I agree you with fully on this point. You are a tool!)
.. run a./configure on a kernel tree.. Slackware.. didn't let you adjust the kernel..
(Again, wow. Just.. wow. It's no wonder that you had trouble configuring/compiling your kernel with autoconf.)
.. This is indeed true.. the average person.. has become a LOT fatter..
(Finally, back on track!)
.. As to being "negative", I admit that yes..
(Please note that this is the only part of your post that I quoted out of order. Simply put, you are not being "negative", you are being "intentionally contrary", or "a troll".)
True dat! I really only asked because I am a lazy beer-swilling American. Naturually I figured I could get some foreign devil to figure out if it's tomorrow anywhere in the world (isn't it always tomorrow somewhere?).
Seriously though, thanks for saving me from using my brain on Friday, much appreciated!
From tomorrow? Is it April fools anywhere in the world yet?
Re:Why is Google doing this redundant service?! Fo
on
Google Pages Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
*sigh*
Maybe there will be ads at some point, and maybe I'm just feeding a troll, but currently there are no Google ads on any *.googlepages.com web sites that I have seen so far.
The Shockwave application wanted to install a component so that my computer could "generate spacific sounds"... Anyone trying to sell me a brain tester damn well better be able to spell "specific".
Stop it. This isn't true with Office 2003, and I'm not sure if it ever has been for any version of Office.
Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows uses the Win32 API and COM, so the only part of office that is "pre-cached" is called "Windows". Yes there is the "Office Toolbar" and some other extras that run at startup, but you can easily disable them (or not install them) without any applications in the suite taking longer to start.
OpenOffice on any platform has implemented wrapper API's to facilitate portability, and thus has to spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel to present a similiar interface on every platform it supports. It has to do more by itself, so it winds up taking longer to start, but runs in a lot more places.
That was the point I made about brute-forcing it: after three tries you are dissallowed from ever trying again without entering the complete credit card information, as the encrypted info would be purged.
Although the point made by the AC that the last 4 digits of people's credit cards are readily available in trash cans everywhere renders this method moot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this can be done relatively securely, can't it? You store all the credit card info except the last four digits, and encrypt the stored data using those four digits (and of course some other data tied to that user). Then when you enter the last four, attempt to decrypt the stored data, append the four digits to end of the credit card number, calculate a hash of the decrypted info and compare it to the previously computed hash from the last transcation.
Obviously you could brute-force this system easier than a system that stores no info at all, but if I were to implement this, three wrong tries would wipe the info from the system and force you to re-enter all of it.
I'm not a security expert, and am actually a strong proponent within my comany to outsource all credit card processing (to the extent that none of our systems ever see any credit card info at all), but is there any gaping hole I'm missing in the above method?
On my own Windows machines (80% built-from-scratch, 20% IBM/HP machines provided by my job), I have only ever seen *one* blue screen on an NT-based OS, ever. Not only that, but Googling (from my iBook) for the.sys file mentioned in the blue screen immediately revealed that the VPN software I installed *3 weeks ago* (but had not restarted as recommended) was conflicting with my software firewall, it was a known issue, and both vendors had released patches to fix the issue.
For getting (non-Win32-development) work done, I will always prefer virtually anything to Windows, but I really wish so-called technically-savvy folks would realize that Windows is as stable as a desktop OS can be. (Note I did not say "easy", "pleasant", "secure", "robust", "fun", or "scalable"; just stable!)
Also, I have to say, Excel and Outlook 2003 are simply amazing applications. FOSS or proprietary, I have yet to find a general-purpose data-crunching app better than Excel or a PIM app better than Outlook.
On the flip side of the coin...
If anyone knows a solution to the "service had an internal error and is now in an unknown state, cannot be stopped or started until you reboot" problem (um, kill -9, wtf?), or any of the myriad of issues that make Windows a next-to-useless server OS, please speak up!
I don't think the legality of freely downloaded TV shows has been proven in a court of law yet. Obligatory IANAL.
Setting that aside, can you remind me again why allegedly "illegal" content is generally several orders of magnitude higher quality than "legal" content?
Several years ago, my father was working on the brakes on his 1982 junker Audi. I was watching too closely. He slipped and one of the brake springs flew off and hit me squarely in the left eye, or at least it would have had I not been wearing "scratch-proof" plastic lenses. Yes, there was a minor scratch in the surface of the lens, but it's better than losing an eye.
I wouldn't mind owning an iPod as durable as that, but judging from the article, the nano is no slouch.
The jokes on SCO, they paid to use something in a product very few companies will buy.
More precisely: The joke's on SCO, they paid for something that very few companies have to pay for, to use in a product that very few companies will buy. Additionally, for those companies already own UnixWare or OpenUNIX, MySQL AB already provides installation instructions and patches for them. Finally, for the exceptionally lazy, SCO themselves provide a GPL'd version for you to download for free!
More on-topic, isn't this story a dupe? Granted I wouldn't expect these editors to search back 6 years to find it, but I would at least expect them not to be 6 releases behind on the PostgreSQL version number! Oh wait...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the mid-Westchester area of NY. FiOS is available all around my town, but unfortunately not in it. My friend has it, and he is extremely pleased. If it were available in my town, I would be using it right now, and not realizing what I missed out on...
Cablevision/Optimum Online is my current ISP, and the bandwidth they provide me was 10Mbs down/256Kbs up. Extremely lopsided, to the point where even light P2P usage must be throttled down to avoid saturating the upstream.
I was ready to switch after a 6 day Internet outage from Cablevision (only affecting my zip code, from what I was told), but after my service was finally restored, I discovered that my bandwidth had changed to 10Mbs down/3Mbs up.
This bandwidth seems to be available 24/7. Although it is hard to test the downstream without pissing someone off, uTorrent has been uploading at 250K/sec for 4 days straight without a hiccup. Even with the upstream fully saturated, the connection remains nice and responsive.
I was 100% ready to switch to almost anything, including SDSL costing 3X as much which provided much worse downstream and slightly better upstream (compared to 256Kbps). I made this abundantly clear to the phone reps I spoke to, 3 times a day, during my 6 day outage. I'm not normally such an aggrivating customer, but I tele-commute, so having no Internet is an extreme pain in the ass. I seriously doubt my threats meant anything to them, but I can't deny the situation has vastly improved.
My question is, has anyone else noticed strange un-announced "upgrades" to thier cable modem, whether Cablevision or otherwise? If so, please mention your old/new speeds and general location.
I wish I still had my Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses(tm)!
That part I was aware of, hence why I took the XP sticker off one of the Dells and put it on the machine that I actually installed XP on.
Seeing as I no longer work for that company, should I report them to the BSA?
From TFA:
"It's crazy," Reynolds said of the law. "The vote was unanimous. We were in the middle of some other bill. Someone walked up to me and said, 'I thought you'd vote against that.' And I said, 'Duh.' I thought it was about spam. I didn't bother to read it to that level."
Does this make anyone else's blood boil? From what I can tell, Reynolds is the "good guy", yet he can't even be bothered to read the law he is passing.
I hear about this all the time. Apparently it's "standard operating procedure." What the FUCK do our elected officials actually do all day?
Actually, I'm not 100% sure the hardware has to cost anything at all. I bought an OEM copy of XP Pro from Newegg. It was the only item in the order. It arrived with a floppy cable in the box, and it was listed as a separate line item on the invoice. "OEM Floppy Cable: $0.00". That was a while ago though, does anyone know if Newegg can still get away with this?
Another interesting tidbit: a businesss that I used to be IT Manager for bought about 200 Dell Optiplexes. They came with W2K pre-installed, yet for some reason each one came with an XP CD and license. It was a W2K shop, so I had piles of unused XP licenses. I took one home and installed it on a new home-built PC. Worked fine, never complained, and only took one registry hack to remove the Dell branding. It even passes the Windows Update validation, although I did get a message stating that (I'm paraphrasing): "the manufacturer of my PC could not be determined, this isn't a problem now, but could become a problem in the future".
I'm wondering if that message was because this is a "Dell build" of XP or because the machine is home-built. It it "becomes a problem", lets just say that I'll have a few more gigs of free space for my Ubuntu system partition! Has anyone seen that message on Windows Update before?
Allow me to summarize your posts:
.. It's a helluva lot more fatter than what it was 5 years ago ..
.. was trying to prove was that the memory footprint for a modern Linux distribution, running a modern Linux kernel, is larger than a more older distro/kernel ..
.. memory footprint for running a Linux distribution (and that means kernel, since it's the core part) ..
.. I'm well aware .. stability .. 2.4 - 2.4.7 .. VM issues .. 2.4.7 .. mostly stable .. super stable .. 2.4.18 .. compile my own kernels .. done it .. a hundred times .. "usage problems" .. 2.6 .. not .. user friendly .. or .. robust ..
.. text-mode .. text-mode .. this is the text mode specs I might add ..
.. find me a Linux distribution that lets you customer a Linux kernel at install time ..
.. Tell me .. I am .. a tool ..
.. run a ./configure on a kernel tree .. Slackware .. didn't let you adjust the kernel ..
.. This is indeed true .. the average person .. has become a LOT fatter ..
.. As to being "negative", I admit that yes ..
(I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but writing sentences like this lead me to believe that you don't know your kernels from your colonels.)
(What I am trying to prove is that the sky is blue, in my perception, your mileage may vary!)
(My car runs on gasoline, and since the engine is a core part, I would like you to know that my seat belt latches use far less gas than your car!)
(I find it amazing that with all those extra words removed, this is still pretty much in context, although I would just tweak it a bit and replace the word "usage" with "user".)
(Thanks! I didn't know it was text mode! Maybe it was the hyphens that threw me off? Also, do you think those requirements might have anything to do with the fact that "text mode" and "useless" do not have equivalent meanings? 200MHz and 128MB isn't too steep for a fully functional, bleeding-edge application server.)
(wow)
(Finally, talking some sense! I agree you with fully on this point. You are a tool!)
(Again, wow. Just.. wow. It's no wonder that you had trouble configuring/compiling your kernel with autoconf.)
(Finally, back on track!)
(Please note that this is the only part of your post that I quoted out of order. Simply put, you are not being "negative", you are being "intentionally contrary", or "a troll".)
Please stop posting. Thanks!
Can someone please mod this funny? I haven't laughed so hard in days.
It's compounded by the fact that the DNS name no longer exists, and no one even bothered to squat it.
True dat! I really only asked because I am a lazy beer-swilling American. Naturually I figured I could get some foreign devil to figure out if it's tomorrow anywhere in the world (isn't it always tomorrow somewhere?).
Seriously though, thanks for saving me from using my brain on Friday, much appreciated!
From tomorrow? Is it April fools anywhere in the world yet?
*sigh*
Maybe there will be ads at some point, and maybe I'm just feeding a troll, but currently there are no Google ads on any *.googlepages.com web sites that I have seen so far.
The Shockwave application wanted to install a component so that my computer could "generate spacific sounds"... Anyone trying to sell me a brain tester damn well better be able to spell "specific".
Shh! They're called "Gadgets", you wanna get sued?!?!
I know it's asking a lot, but if you RTFA, it summarizes what each utility does, and what the author likes about each one.
Stop it. This isn't true with Office 2003, and I'm not sure if it ever has been for any version of Office.
Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows uses the Win32 API and COM, so the only part of office that is "pre-cached" is called "Windows". Yes there is the "Office Toolbar" and some other extras that run at startup, but you can easily disable them (or not install them) without any applications in the suite taking longer to start.
OpenOffice on any platform has implemented wrapper API's to facilitate portability, and thus has to spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel to present a similiar interface on every platform it supports. It has to do more by itself, so it winds up taking longer to start, but runs in a lot more places.
I momentarily forgot that the application logic doesn't mean jack once you've got the data.
Thanks again! You've helped expand my security mindset.
That was the point I made about brute-forcing it: after three tries you are dissallowed from ever trying again without entering the complete credit card information, as the encrypted info would be purged.
Although the point made by the AC that the last 4 digits of people's credit cards are readily available in trash cans everywhere renders this method moot.
Thanks for the responses both of you!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this can be done relatively securely, can't it? You store all the credit card info except the last four digits, and encrypt the stored data using those four digits (and of course some other data tied to that user). Then when you enter the last four, attempt to decrypt the stored data, append the four digits to end of the credit card number, calculate a hash of the decrypted info and compare it to the previously computed hash from the last transcation.
Obviously you could brute-force this system easier than a system that stores no info at all, but if I were to implement this, three wrong tries would wipe the info from the system and force you to re-enter all of it.
I'm not a security expert, and am actually a strong proponent within my comany to outsource all credit card processing (to the extent that none of our systems ever see any credit card info at all), but is there any gaping hole I'm missing in the above method?
Just read at -1
On my own Windows machines (80% built-from-scratch, 20% IBM/HP machines provided by my job), I have only ever seen *one* blue screen on an NT-based OS, ever. Not only that, but Googling (from my iBook) for the .sys file mentioned in the blue screen immediately revealed that the VPN software I installed *3 weeks ago* (but had not restarted as recommended) was conflicting with my software firewall, it was a known issue, and both vendors had released patches to fix the issue.
For getting (non-Win32-development) work done, I will always prefer virtually anything to Windows, but I really wish so-called technically-savvy folks would realize that Windows is as stable as a desktop OS can be. (Note I did not say "easy", "pleasant", "secure", "robust", "fun", or "scalable"; just stable!)
Also, I have to say, Excel and Outlook 2003 are simply amazing applications. FOSS or proprietary, I have yet to find a general-purpose data-crunching app better than Excel or a PIM app better than Outlook.
On the flip side of the coin...
If anyone knows a solution to the "service had an internal error and is now in an unknown state, cannot be stopped or started until you reboot" problem (um, kill -9, wtf?), or any of the myriad of issues that make Windows a next-to-useless server OS, please speak up!
I don't think the legality of freely downloaded TV shows has been proven in a court of law yet. Obligatory IANAL.
Setting that aside, can you remind me again why allegedly "illegal" content is generally several orders of magnitude higher quality than "legal" content?
The Firefly DVD boxed set doesn't include the 3 unaired episodes?
Are you saying they set us up the bomb?
Because the printable version automatically redirects to the normal one if the referred is not extremetech.com
Totally off-topic, but interesting nonetheless...
Several years ago, my father was working on the brakes on his 1982 junker Audi. I was watching too closely. He slipped and one of the brake springs flew off and hit me squarely in the left eye, or at least it would have had I not been wearing "scratch-proof" plastic lenses. Yes, there was a minor scratch in the surface of the lens, but it's better than losing an eye.
I wouldn't mind owning an iPod as durable as that, but judging from the article, the nano is no slouch.
The jokes on SCO, they paid to use something in a product very few companies will buy.
More precisely:
The joke's on SCO, they paid for something that very few companies have to pay for, to use in a product that very few companies will buy. Additionally, for those companies already own UnixWare or OpenUNIX, MySQL AB already provides installation instructions and patches for them. Finally, for the exceptionally lazy, SCO themselves provide a GPL'd version for you to download for free!
More on-topic, isn't this story a dupe? Granted I wouldn't expect these editors to search back 6 years to find it, but I would at least expect them not to be 6 releases behind on the PostgreSQL version number! Oh wait...