Closing my browser, because I don't want to deal with the lame April Fool's jokes.
I finally started reading/. again after being away for a year, and the quality really has gone downhill... I'll probably be back tomorrow, but we'll see how long it lasts.
I used to work at an outsourced call centre, supporting Epson printers and scanners. By far the biggest customer complaints we received always had to do with printers wasting ink.
During our training, and from talking to various Epson reps, we learned that the printer doesn't actually monitor the amount of ink in each cartridge. Rather, it estimates the amount left, based on the various print settings chosen.
The worst part is that on many printers, once it "thinks" it's out of ink, it will no longer print until you change the cartridge. In some older printers, you could simply remove the cartride and then put it back into place, tricking it into thinking you replaced it with a new cartridge. However, this would make the ink monitor even less accurate. Newer printers won't even allow this, because the circuitry on the cartridge itself will lock you out once it has reached the estimated empty level.
There are some tools available that let you reset the "intelligent cartridges" so that they can be refilled and reused, but of course they aren't supported by Epson and may void your warranty.
I'm trying my best not to sound like a Microsoft hater, but the summary/article makes it sound like Microsoft embraces the hacking community with open arms. In the article, reference is made to XNA, which is a framework Microsoft released that allows developers to create games for Windows and the Xbox 360. However, in order to develop for the 360, you need to pay to subscribe to their "XNA Creators Club". XNA also comes with a bunch of restrictions pertaining to the distribution of games created with it.
I don't really see this as "hacking" compared to all the independent work that's been done on the original Xbox. There, you see things like Xbox Media Center, which is something I would consider a cool and useful hack, made by a community of like-minded hobbyists.
The Tivo part of the article was a much better example of the power of the hacking community.
Seeing the complexity of a botnet like this is scary. The people responsible for this kind of thing are intelligent, always evolving and don't care about any of the repercussions of their actions. It seems that any proposed solution we can come up with to combat spam will just be worked around shortly after it is implemented.
From the article:
"the Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner--a pirated copy of Kaspersky's security software--that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine"
I never would have thought of something like this. Trojans fighting for territory... crazy.
The software uses proxy servers to avoid blacklisting bot IP addresses, harvests email addresses from the infected machines and randomly changes images used in image-based spam to throw off anti-spam technologies. The people behind this are clever. How can we compete effectively?
I agree, dada21's posts are well-written and usually informative or insightful, making for good reading. He explained how he manages to get his lengthy first posts just the other day.
I used to be a subscriber to this philosophy. Having worked in the financial industry for the past year, I see a lot of wealthy executives working their lives away every day. Sure they have tons of money, drive sweet cars to work, and have all the latest gadgets, but they don't have time to use any of it. For these people, work=life. They work seven days a week, their 'vacations' are veiled business trips and many of them are divorced or don't have very pleasant home lives.
I'm still young, and enjoying the money, but I don't see myself lasting in this kind of lifestyle. I'd much rather work 40 hours (or less) per week, making average money. That way, I can afford a modest house, have a decent car and buy the occasional toy. I may not have it all, but at least I'll get to truly enjoy it.
"Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?"
Yes. Yes you are.
Article at Howstuffworks.com
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If you're interested in learning a bit about lock picking, but aren't sure you want to spend $20 on this book yet, take a look at this article at Howstuffworks.com.
It offers a great introduction to lock picking, and has some nice graphics that really helped me understand how locks work, and how they can be circumvented. If you really get into it, then I'm sure this book would offer a lot more information to help you along.
Having worked at a help desk for a printer/scanner company, I've had the opportunity to give some questionable explanations just to get rid of the customer on the phone.
Customer: my scanner takes a long time to go through its scanning process
Me: (I go through the usual steps, then ask) Do you have a USB cable we could try?
Customer: Yeah (customer spends 8 minutes figuring out how to swap cables) Ok, wow! It's going so much faster now! What did you do?
Me: Well, USB has a much higher data transfer rate, so (customer interrupts)
Customer: So the different wire makes it faster?
Me: Uh, yeah. That's why it's called "USB". It stands for "Unbelievable Speed Bus".
Customer: Really? Haha! You computer guys always have clever names for things...
I just got a new job after working in a call center doing tech support for a major printer manufacturer for the past nine months. We had some real winners working there, and some of the employees had rather interesting explanations for various issues.
One of my favourites: I overheard another rep talking with a customer whose printer kept printing random characters. The rep went through a few steps, and finally decided the best course of action would be to disconnect the cable, shake it a few times, then hang it over the back of a chair for a few minutes. Apparently this helps get rid of the data that's stuck in the cable...
I usually don't watch a lot of tv, or at least I didn't until last night. I just got a new satellite dish, with so many channels I don't know what to do with them all. Today's my last day at work, and I'm off next week, so I was planning a week-long tv-watching marathon, watching nothing but movies, sports, Chinese newscasts, home shopping channels, cartoons, infomercials, Hungarian soap operas and maybe even a little bit of porn...
I currently work in a call center for a major printer manufacturer, doing technical support. Up until recently, we were actually located in a makeshift cube farm, located in the company's warehouse. There were people packaging boxes and forklifts driving by while us grunts on the phones were straining our ears to hear customers trying to tell us why they couldn't install their brand new printers. Try forcing already angry customers to try and communicate with representatives who can't hear them, along with forklift and beeping sounds in the background... it sucked. All day I had customers asking me if I was working outside or in a warehouse or on a street corner.
Not that it's much better now... we're on the 3rd floor of a building with a constantly broken elevator and no heating, while it is -15 degrees Celsius outside. And our cubicle walls are only 4 feet high, providing absolutely no sound blocking at all, so I hear the guy next to me trying to explain where the Start button is, while I'm still straining to hear my customer explain his installation woes. All of this, coupled with inept management is making me a very bitter person. Then again, call centers aren't really a good place to work anyway...
Back in June, I was at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, when I noticed one of many scheduling monitors was displaying a nice big blue screen of death. Check out these two pics I took: Picture 1Picture 2
To be honest, this has always been my favourite place to see the bsod.
Like many fellow Slashdotters, I emailed several different people/departments at Belkin, expressing my disappointment with their new "feature". I received the following canned response today, from Eric Pipkin, an Account Manager at Belkin:
Rob,
Please refer to attachment below in regards to your email.
Thnx.
The email contained a 119k pdf file attachment, which I actually found on the Belkin website by adding the filename to the end of the belkin.com URL. Here's a link to the pdf file I received: http://www.belkin.com/Belkin_parental-control.pdf
It doesn't really tell us anything new, except that Belkin seems to be missing the point entirely, defending their "feature" and not mentioning anything about any upcoming firmware fixes.
Before reading this post, I have only heard about Esperanto a few times. I always assumed it was some sort of Spanish dialect or something, not knowing any better.
So, I did a bit of research and found that Esperanto is actually a very interesting language. Apparently it is an "artificial" language, created by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof and published in 1887. The concept was to to be a "middle ground" language, facilitating communication between people of different backgrounds or cultures. Esperanto is apparently much easier to learn than many national languages and was designed to be a straight-forward neutral language. Surprisingly, there are an estimated 2 million Esperanto speakers in the world.
As soon as I saw Matt Dillon's name associated with BSD, I got really excited. I mean, who knew that the ol' gunslinger Marshal Matt Dillon became a programmer?
Then, I realized I must have been thinking about the wrong Matt Dillon, but I still thought it was weird that the guy from There's Something About Mary became involved in a BSD project.
Finally I remembered the other Matt Dillon who developed the DICE C compiler for the Amiga back in the good old days.
As a fellow Canadian, I found your post interesting. However, I found that when I tried searching for the terms listed in the Slashdot article, I received the same results as mentioned in the article. For example, Google.ca was returning "Results 1-1 of about 48,600" for the search term "speaker bracelet", just like Google.com.
Also, I used to find the automatic redirect to google.ca annoying, but you can get around that by going to www.google.com/ncr. It will bring you to the original google.com site, with an optional link to go to Google Canada.
I used to feel bad about giving telemarketers a hard time, but then I came to a realization: if we make their lives a living hell, they won't want to work as telemarketers anymore. If we are nice to them, they will enjoy (or at least tolerate) their jobs, and they will keep doing what they are doing. When their job becomes a source of major stress in their lives, they will hopefully end up quitting and then there will be one less telemarketer in the world.
Sure, it's kinda mean to fuck with them, but it's part of their job and it comes with the territory. It's up to them to determine if they are getting paid enough to deal with shit from angry people all day. And judging by the high turnover rate at call centers and telemarketing companies, my guess is that they definitely don't make enough money to deal with us.
So feel free to abuse telemarketers, they've been doing it to us for years.
I work at a call center, doing tech support for Epson products. I actually had a customer today call, asking about the retail price for a ribbon for a certain point-of-sale receipt printer. Apparently, they were paying almost $200 for each ribbon from their reseller. I couldn't believe this, so I did a quick check and found that they were listed for sale on our website at $39.99... for a case of 10!
While at the airport about 2 months ago, I noticed one of the display terminals had blue screened. I was rather delighted, so I snapped a few pics before airport security noticed.
I remembered seeing this site featured on slashdot last year. It looks like Mattias Wandel is quite the innovator. Check out the rest of his site for all kinds of interesting inventions.
Slashdot Mirror
Closing my browser, because I don't want to deal with the lame April Fool's jokes. I finally started reading /. again after being away for a year, and the quality really has gone downhill... I'll probably be back tomorrow, but we'll see how long it lasts.
Regarding this article, he could have at least linked to the original artist's Youtube video, rather than someone else's repost of it.
Slashdot has a fashion section now?
...I'm not renewing my slashdot subscription.
I used to work at an outsourced call centre, supporting Epson printers and scanners. By far the biggest customer complaints we received always had to do with printers wasting ink.
During our training, and from talking to various Epson reps, we learned that the printer doesn't actually monitor the amount of ink in each cartridge. Rather, it estimates the amount left, based on the various print settings chosen.
The worst part is that on many printers, once it "thinks" it's out of ink, it will no longer print until you change the cartridge. In some older printers, you could simply remove the cartride and then put it back into place, tricking it into thinking you replaced it with a new cartridge. However, this would make the ink monitor even less accurate. Newer printers won't even allow this, because the circuitry on the cartridge itself will lock you out once it has reached the estimated empty level.
There are some tools available that let you reset the "intelligent cartridges" so that they can be refilled and reused, but of course they aren't supported by Epson and may void your warranty.
I'm trying my best not to sound like a Microsoft hater, but the summary/article makes it sound like Microsoft embraces the hacking community with open arms. In the article, reference is made to XNA, which is a framework Microsoft released that allows developers to create games for Windows and the Xbox 360. However, in order to develop for the 360, you need to pay to subscribe to their "XNA Creators Club". XNA also comes with a bunch of restrictions pertaining to the distribution of games created with it.
I don't really see this as "hacking" compared to all the independent work that's been done on the original Xbox. There, you see things like Xbox Media Center, which is something I would consider a cool and useful hack, made by a community of like-minded hobbyists.
The Tivo part of the article was a much better example of the power of the hacking community.
Seeing the complexity of a botnet like this is scary. The people responsible for this kind of thing are intelligent, always evolving and don't care about any of the repercussions of their actions. It seems that any proposed solution we can come up with to combat spam will just be worked around shortly after it is implemented.
From the article:"the Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner--a pirated copy of Kaspersky's security software--that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine"
I never would have thought of something like this. Trojans fighting for territory... crazy.
The software uses proxy servers to avoid blacklisting bot IP addresses, harvests email addresses from the infected machines and randomly changes images used in image-based spam to throw off anti-spam technologies. The people behind this are clever. How can we compete effectively?I agree, dada21's posts are well-written and usually informative or insightful, making for good reading. He explained how he manages to get his lengthy first posts just the other day.
Of course an online store can use MySQL... After all, God uses MySQL.
I used to be a subscriber to this philosophy. Having worked in the financial industry for the past year, I see a lot of wealthy executives working their lives away every day. Sure they have tons of money, drive sweet cars to work, and have all the latest gadgets, but they don't have time to use any of it. For these people, work=life. They work seven days a week, their 'vacations' are veiled business trips and many of them are divorced or don't have very pleasant home lives.
I'm still young, and enjoying the money, but I don't see myself lasting in this kind of lifestyle. I'd much rather work 40 hours (or less) per week, making average money. That way, I can afford a modest house, have a decent car and buy the occasional toy. I may not have it all, but at least I'll get to truly enjoy it.
Money may buy happiness, but it can't buy time.
"Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?"
Yes. Yes you are.
If you're interested in learning a bit about lock picking, but aren't sure you want to spend $20 on this book yet, take a look at this article at Howstuffworks.com.
It offers a great introduction to lock picking, and has some nice graphics that really helped me understand how locks work, and how they can be circumvented. If you really get into it, then I'm sure this book would offer a lot more information to help you along.
Having worked at a help desk for a printer/scanner company, I've had the opportunity to give some questionable explanations just to get rid of the customer on the phone.
Customer: my scanner takes a long time to go through its scanning process
Me: (I go through the usual steps, then ask) Do you have a USB cable we could try?
Customer: Yeah (customer spends 8 minutes figuring out how to swap cables) Ok, wow! It's going so much faster now! What did you do?
Me: Well, USB has a much higher data transfer rate, so (customer interrupts)
Customer: So the different wire makes it faster?
Me: Uh, yeah. That's why it's called "USB". It stands for "Unbelievable Speed Bus".
Customer: Really? Haha! You computer guys always have clever names for things...
I just got a new job after working in a call center doing tech support for a major printer manufacturer for the past nine months. We had some real winners working there, and some of the employees had rather interesting explanations for various issues.
One of my favourites: I overheard another rep talking with a customer whose printer kept printing random characters. The rep went through a few steps, and finally decided the best course of action would be to disconnect the cable, shake it a few times, then hang it over the back of a chair for a few minutes. Apparently this helps get rid of the data that's stuck in the cable...
I usually don't watch a lot of tv, or at least I didn't until last night. I just got a new satellite dish, with so many channels I don't know what to do with them all. Today's my last day at work, and I'm off next week, so I was planning a week-long tv-watching marathon, watching nothing but movies, sports, Chinese newscasts, home shopping channels, cartoons, infomercials, Hungarian soap operas and maybe even a little bit of porn...
I currently work in a call center for a major printer manufacturer, doing technical support. Up until recently, we were actually located in a makeshift cube farm, located in the company's warehouse. There were people packaging boxes and forklifts driving by while us grunts on the phones were straining our ears to hear customers trying to tell us why they couldn't install their brand new printers. Try forcing already angry customers to try and communicate with representatives who can't hear them, along with forklift and beeping sounds in the background... it sucked. All day I had customers asking me if I was working outside or in a warehouse or on a street corner.
Not that it's much better now... we're on the 3rd floor of a building with a constantly broken elevator and no heating, while it is -15 degrees Celsius outside. And our cubicle walls are only 4 feet high, providing absolutely no sound blocking at all, so I hear the guy next to me trying to explain where the Start button is, while I'm still straining to hear my customer explain his installation woes. All of this, coupled with inept management is making me a very bitter person. Then again, call centers aren't really a good place to work anyway...
Back in June, I was at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, when I noticed one of many scheduling monitors was displaying a nice big blue screen of death. Check out these two pics I took:
Picture 1 Picture 2
To be honest, this has always been my favourite place to see the bsod.
It doesn't really tell us anything new, except that Belkin seems to be missing the point entirely, defending their "feature" and not mentioning anything about any upcoming firmware fixes.
Before reading this post, I have only heard about Esperanto a few times. I always assumed it was some sort of Spanish dialect or something, not knowing any better.
So, I did a bit of research and found that Esperanto is actually a very interesting language. Apparently it is an "artificial" language, created by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof and published in 1887. The concept was to to be a "middle ground" language, facilitating communication between people of different backgrounds or cultures. Esperanto is apparently much easier to learn than many national languages and was designed to be a straight-forward neutral language. Surprisingly, there are an estimated 2 million Esperanto speakers in the world.
Check out some of these interesting links that I found:
Esperanto FAQ
What, why, who and where info about Esperanto
Previously mentioned educational Esperanto site with the little green goblin, "Zam"
As soon as I saw Matt Dillon's name associated with BSD, I got really excited. I mean, who knew that the ol' gunslinger Marshal Matt Dillon became a programmer?
Then, I realized I must have been thinking about the wrong Matt Dillon, but I still thought it was weird that the guy from There's Something About Mary became involved in a BSD project.
Finally I remembered the other Matt Dillon who developed the DICE C compiler for the Amiga back in the good old days.
As a fellow Canadian, I found your post interesting. However, I found that when I tried searching for the terms listed in the Slashdot article, I received the same results as mentioned in the article. For example, Google.ca was returning "Results 1-1 of about 48,600" for the search term "speaker bracelet", just like Google.com.
Also, I used to find the automatic redirect to google.ca annoying, but you can get around that by going to www.google.com/ncr. It will bring you to the original google.com site, with an optional link to go to Google Canada.
I used to feel bad about giving telemarketers a hard time, but then I came to a realization: if we make their lives a living hell, they won't want to work as telemarketers anymore. If we are nice to them, they will enjoy (or at least tolerate) their jobs, and they will keep doing what they are doing. When their job becomes a source of major stress in their lives, they will hopefully end up quitting and then there will be one less telemarketer in the world.
Sure, it's kinda mean to fuck with them, but it's part of their job and it comes with the territory. It's up to them to determine if they are getting paid enough to deal with shit from angry people all day. And judging by the high turnover rate at call centers and telemarketing companies, my guess is that they definitely don't make enough money to deal with us.
So feel free to abuse telemarketers, they've been doing it to us for years.
I work at a call center, doing tech support for Epson products. I actually had a customer today call, asking about the retail price for a ribbon for a certain point-of-sale receipt printer. Apparently, they were paying almost $200 for each ribbon from their reseller. I couldn't believe this, so I did a quick check and found that they were listed for sale on our website at $39.99... for a case of 10!
While at the airport about 2 months ago, I noticed one of the display terminals had blue screened. I was rather delighted, so I snapped a few pics before airport security noticed.
I remembered seeing this site featured on slashdot last year. It looks like Mattias Wandel is quite the innovator. Check out the rest of his site for all kinds of interesting inventions.