I am a certified MCSE with over 15 years' experience in the computer
industry. In those years, I have seen some small fires occur, but
never in the way that the article mentions. Let's take a look at
some facts and mitigating circumstances that can help explain why the
"safety digest" article is dreadfully wrong:
All computer power supplies have temperature sensors. These are
bona fide safety devices that shut the supply down when it overheats -
regardless of cause. Some of them permanently disable the supply (under
the assumption that once they're triggered, enough damage has been done to
make the supply unsafe for use). Others disable the supply until it is
unplugged and the obstruction is cleared. I have seen dozens of
power supply fans fail on very old, dusty PCs, and not a single one has
caused any sort of smoke or fire.
Fire suppression systems do not respond to smoke. According to
the current national fire code, the presence of smoke shall not be used to
trigger fire alarms - only local smoke detectors. Why? The cause is
simple: the ratio of burnt toast to uncontrolled fires is about 200:1. The
resultant false alarms would overwhelm fire departments and cause a public
safety nightmare.
Computer fires almost never leave the case. Nothing inside a
computer is particularly flammable. The threat of dust fires is overrated
- dust is not sufficiently dense to ignite anything else, and when ignited
it burns up within seconds. Computers do not contain much wood, paper, or
any other inflammable substance. Face it folks - metal doesn't burn, and
plastic doesn't do much besides smolder.
Now let's take a look at some actual computer fires that I have
witnessed:
My younger brother, a developmentally disabled individual, plugged in a
PCI card backwards and the motherboard burned up. Several members of the
chipset were burned beyond recognition. No water or other measures were
needed to put the fire out; it fizzled on its own within seconds.
I have seen several laptops overheat because of poor cooling designs
(especially Dells). Typically this means that flames leap out of the
keyboard and melt the LCD. Again, this fire is contained, and unless the
laptop is being operated in a hazardous area, nothing happens.
One of my "hax0r wannabe" co-workers thought he understood
electrical engineering, and caused a brick transformer to catch fire
because he had wired the + and - sides of the output together to "double
the power." The transformer was destroyed, but since almost all power
strips are flame retardant, nothing else caught on fire.
The truth of the matter is that it is extremely difficult to start a
destructive fire by accident. 90% of home fires in the country are caused
by stupidity such as kitchen incidents and smoking in bed. There is no
reason to suspect that your computer is any more of a hazard than leaving
your VCR plugged in all the time.
I worked my way through college by selling life insurance over the phone to
cold customers (a.k.a. telemarketing). I know that what I did was wrong,
but that job taught me volumes about the industry and there are a few
things I'd like to share:
Many telemarketing firms are moving overseas. FTC rulings
cannot control what happens in third-world countries like India and
Portugal. The declining cost of international long distance telephone
calls is making this a viable option, and soon the best option for most of
us will be to block all incoming international calls.
Most domestic telemarketers violate the law. Indeed, calling
people on their cellular phones to advertise services or leave prerecorded
messages is in direct violation of many state and federal laws.
Unfortunately, most telemarketers are boiler-room operations, and
enforcement is a serious problem. Often (as was the case at the firm I
worked at) the owner sets up a shell corporation that shields him from
legal liability for the company's misdeeds. His plan was to dissolve the
company and start a new one if he ever got caught.
Telemarketers are people too. Although many telemarketers
are colored, most of them are just like you and me. Please do not verbally
abuse them - you won't hurt the industry, just somebody (not unlike myself)
who is trying to make ends meet.
U.S. corporations are not accountable to anybody. When federal
law is changed to make CEOs and executives of rogue corporations liable for
prison time, things might change. Until then, everything from
illegal telemarketing to accounting scams will be fair game.
Telemarketers are allowed to circumvent caller ID. A very
simple solution to the problem of domestic telemarketing calls would be to
force telemarketers to stop blocking outgoing CND services. Unfortunately,
our Congress has been paid handsomely so that they could keep this
privilege.
Things will inevitably get worse before they get better. My recommendation
is to buy a good answering machine and don't pick up "unavailable" calls.
This blocks 99% of telemarketers in my experience.
Much has been written about the supposed "fragmentation" of Linux
distributions. However, what the stories don't mention is that there are
simple solutions for the problems that seem to keep cropping up. The core
issue, though, is simple to understand but hard to solve: proprietary
software developers are incompetent. Let me draw from my personal
experience as a Linux guru and system administrator of many years and
explain why that is the case:
Commercial software companies don't understand dynamic
linking. It is a basic principle of dynamic libraries that versions
and functionality changes between releases. Ever notice how many different
versions of Microsoft's DLLs you have on your Windows box? That's no
coincidence - Windows developers are forced to incorporate the version of
the DLL that works with their application. Linux provides a far
superior development model, allowing publishers to statically link the
correct library into their binary. Mozilla does it; Oracle does it; why
can't the rest of the vendors get a clue and do the same thing?
Commercial software developers don't understand the UNIX
filesystem. UNIX is not like Windows: when a user installs an
application on UNIX, he does not expect that application to install
random files in arbitrary directories all over the filesystem. There is
no registry in UNIX and no guarantee that the application
won't be relocated to another system. Any application that forces the user
to use anything more than 'tar xvf' to install it is improperly designed,
from an experienced UNIX user's perspective.
UnitedLinux is an illegal cartel. Similar to OPEC and De Beers, the
members of UnitedLinux realize that their product is nothing more than a
commodity in a very crowded market. To that end, they intend to fix
prices, limit supply, and use anticompetitive tactics to artificially
inflate the market share and supposed importance of their "standard." As
the most influential group of UNIX users and administrators in the
industry, will we allow them to get away with it? I hope not.
Anyone involved in the dot-com industry in the late 1990s, as I was, knows
that money does not grow on trees anymore and that consumer dollars are
difficult to procure online. As somebody who runs several websites that
were "victimized" by Gator's software, I must still applaud their
creativity in designing a way to get their advertising messages out to a
relevant audience. Their idea was simple, yet very clever, and
interestingly enough, they are making a profit (quite unlike their
"victims" - the Washington Post and every other newspaper website are
taking heavy losses - giving content away for free doesn't pay as well as
it used to).
The one issue, then, that I have with Gator is that fact that it
surreptitiously spies on its users and reports their browsing habits back
to a central repository. Similar to slashdot, they profile their users
without adequate disclosure and should be admonished for that. (IMHO,
"adequate disclosure" does not mean that they reveal the fact that
they are monitoring you on page 14 of the 78-page license agreement that
nobody reads.) Aside from this transgression, what Gator does is perfectly
legitimate and is no different than the digital editing that many
television stations are now doing to block competitors' ads from live video
feeds. May the strongest competitor win: it's pure capitalism. Enjoy
it.
Despite all of the profit warnings, delistings, and bankruptcies, it is now
apparent that the same MBA-wielding bean counters who beat us up in middle
school were the driving force behind the Linux hype of the late 1990s.
Ransom Luve and friends want only one thing out of the Free Software
movement: money. That's not a way to run a business, because
they're biting the hands that feed them. Open source isn't like any other
business: since they're not sharing their success with the developers, they
can't get away with the argument that "code for free that we're going to
sell" was a fair trade. Up until the emergence of UnitedLinux, this wasn't
such a big deal: VA and Red Hat, having never turned a single cent of
profit for their shareholders, at least could boast that they offered stock
options to open source luminaries like Linus, Bruce, and Richard. But
UnitedLinux is offering nothing to us developers in the trenches. Instead,
they take everything we offer and then try to sell it back to us.
UnitedLinux has become our enemy: they are the Microsoft of the Open Source
community. Fortunately, we do not need to expend effort to oppose them, as
their business model is sufficiently flawed that they will not survive
long.
It's been almost five years since Microsoft released their first
acknowledgement of a security vulnerability in Internet Exploder. I
remember the day that happened clearly; if only I had the foresight at the
time to see that the same exact scene would play out, on the average, once
every two weeks for the next five years. I could have avoided disaster for
my company.
Back in 1999, when the dot-coms were flying high and my company resembled
an Internet startup (although we had been in business since 1992), we
hastily set up new offices and cubicles with little regard for information
security. After all, what was the worst that could happen - an email worm?
Well, we quickly found out: a malicious hacker had targeted our company,
and sent an email to "all @" my domain containing a link to a supposed
Yahoo News story. Unfortunately, this link sent the employees to a
malicious site that caused their insecure IE browsers to yield control of
nearly every Windows PC in the company to the intruder. They stole and
destroyed much important data, and took over a week of nonstop unpaid
overtime to fix things.
A few weeks after the incident, our vice president of operations mandated a
Mozilla-only policy. Employees were forbidden from running IE, Lynx
(another notoriously insecure browser), and Konqueror (which crashed
constantly anyway). Since that time, we have had zero browser related
security issues, and employees waste far less time surfing the web, mainly
because a lot of time-wasting sites only work in Microsoft
standards-compliant browsers. Converting to Mozilla has been a win-win
situation, and I fully expect the same to be happening across America after
this latest IE security breach. Enough is enough; we need to take back
control of our networks.
I used to work for a large internet
provider (which shall remain nameless) who had contracts with several
small cable franchises for end-user internet services. As a network
engineer I was responsible for planning and supervising the rollout of
metered cable modem service in one mid-sized city, as a pilot program.
Needless to say, things didn't work as well as we had hoped. Here are some
of the problems we ran into:
Fraud. Several prolific warez kiddies figured out how to
change their MAC address to bill their service to their neighbors or even
to our own router (!). We're still not sure exactly how that
happened. Sure, we cut them off and connected their modems to a high
voltage source as punishment (our contract allowed it), but how many more
are there who we didn't catch?
Billing issues. People who obviously ran up a very high
bandwidth bill would call us and complain when they got their statements,
asking us to lower their bills. Our position was that it wasn't our
responsibility that they couldn't figure out how to close Napster or stop
downloading porn. When they paid with credit card we would sometimes lose
the dispute, but things were okay when they paid with cash or check.
Expectation of quality. As you know, a cable modem is a shared
medium and cable companies are not at fault for your neighbors' downloading
habits. However, it was considered a potential legal liability to be
providing a service of varying quality.
For these reasons and many others, metered cable modem service just won't
work.
A number of years ago, when I was just getting into the digirati, Oracle
filed lawsuits against several members of a DBA discussion group because
they were posting less-than-glowing reviews of their database software.
Since these victims were highly-paid professionals, not just a bunch of
whiny kids (as in the PetsWarehouse case), they had the resources to fight
Oracle in court. What happened next was a victory for free speech on the
Net and for American justice: every single case Oracle filed against the
users was summarily dismissed, and the 4-5 defendants who countersued
Oracle received several hundred thousand dollars in punitive damages - more
than enough to cover their legal bills and buy themselves something
nice.
The moral of the story here is that giving up on what you believe in gets
you nowhere. If you cave in to corporate pressure, you will lose your
money, your good name, and your credit rating when you settle out of court.
If you stand up for your rights when you know you're correct, justice will
prevail and you will know you've made a difference for netizens everywhere.
What would you rather be - a victorious hero or an unprincipled loser?
Don't answer here - save your response for the judge.
/ali
Why yEnv is good for the software companies
on
Usenet Encoding: yEnc
·
· Score: -1, Troll
As a Deja.com shareholder, I followed the talks between Deja and Google
last January very closely. I learned many interesting things about company
strategy, usage patterns, and targeted markets. But one thing that I'll
never forget is this one chilling statistic: 98% of binaries traffic on
Usenet is pirated software or illegal pornography (by volume), and 93% by
number of posts. For the first time, I truly felt appreciative to Deja
for all of the efforts they expended in keeping this illicit content off of
their fine service.
And that brings me to my point: yEnc sucks. yEnc is a horrible standard.
Just like uuencode, it forces you to track down all 56 posts that
constitute the 1337 warez release or all 7 posts of your kiddie porn movie.
yEnc discourages binaries traffic, and that is a good thing for
intellectual property protection. We don't need a heavy-handed government
or "BSA" to police us - with people like the yEnc author around, we can
show the software companies that we are responsible enough to make it a
pain in the ass to pirate software. And that is all they could ask from
us.
And my eye doctor had a lot to say about this new development:
Are they crazy???
He went on to explain that everybody knows how sensitive human eyes are,
until some new technology comes out that is "so cool" that everybody wants
to try it. Witness retinal scanning: retina scanners have been known to
damage sensitive (read: decaying 80-year-old) eyes and result in a
temporary loss or blurriness of vision. He also explained that there are
many subtle ways that these sorts of devices can break that would cause
unspeakable damage to one's eyes. "Hiccups" in power supplies, jarring,
and even everyday resistor failure could have dire consequences. My eye
doctor believes that anything that interacts closely with a user's eyes
should be classified as medical equipment and held to the same high,
fault-tolerant standards as dialysis machines, heary defiberators, and
breathing tents. And, as somebody concerned about the bodily
integrity concerns involving human-computer integration, I just have to
agree with him.
One of my close friends had owned a very desirable 3-letter.com domain
since 1994. He had received several (pitifully small) offers from a large
corporation to purchase the domain name, but he had no interest in
accomodating their demands. Sure enough, the company dragged it before
ICANN not once, not twice, but three times before they got the result they
wanted. After spending a few hundred dollars on attorneys' bills, my
friend gave up and dropped the matter.
Now, since he makes over $100k a year as a consultant, he gives generously
to the EFF and is a vocal opponent of ICANN and their pro-corporatist domain
dispute rules. He is actively working for change in the system, and
although the road is long, I am confident that someday we will win this
battle.
A lot of people here on/. like the freedom of choice that open source software provides.
It's hardly hypocritical to bash Microsoft for releasing closed-source spyware, and to forgive AOL on account of the fact that a four-line diff will remove any trace of the problem. AOL has put control of the information in the hands of the user (where it belongs, IMHO), and Microsoft has not. That is the reason why MS gets bashed.
I am the president of a medium-sized dotcom that has been struggling to
keep costs under control ever since the cash infusion of the 90s ended.
Back in the day, we wasted millions of VC dollars on Aerun chairs, foosball
tables, catered meals, and giving lots of stock to useless spokesmen who
make fools of themselves in public.
Nowadays, the money doesn't flow quite as freely. Although we only
occasionally remodel our office space (usually turning old kitchens and
other "play areas" into rental space), we typically do things with an eye
to the budget because cheap is in, and luxury is out. And that brings me
to my point here: at $400 a crack, a "smart whiteboard" is a waste of
money. Even back in 1999, we paid about $10 each for standard chalkboards.
And they serve their purpose: chalk is cheap (much cheaper than those fancy
whiteboard markers) and they don't require a special cleaning fluid to
erase them after the ink has dried for a few days. We just can't justify
paying 40 times the cost just because it's "cool."
Sometimes employees will complain about the chalk dust and threaten to sue
us under the ADA because they think their chalk allergies are a
"disability." Recent Supreme Court rulings are in the employer's favor
over such fabricated disabilities, though, and we have never actually been
sued. Typically we make a habit of ridding the organization of such
squeaky wheels anyway, since they hinder productivity and lower morale
amongst their right-thinking co-workers.
Slashdot Mirror
user: 578929835
pass: 578929835
- All computer power supplies have temperature sensors. These are
bona fide safety devices that shut the supply down when it overheats -
regardless of cause. Some of them permanently disable the supply (under
the assumption that once they're triggered, enough damage has been done to
make the supply unsafe for use). Others disable the supply until it is
unplugged and the obstruction is cleared. I have seen dozens of
power supply fans fail on very old, dusty PCs, and not a single one has
caused any sort of smoke or fire.
- Fire suppression systems do not respond to smoke. According to
the current national fire code, the presence of smoke shall not be used to
trigger fire alarms - only local smoke detectors. Why? The cause is
simple: the ratio of burnt toast to uncontrolled fires is about 200:1. The
resultant false alarms would overwhelm fire departments and cause a public
safety nightmare.
- Computer fires almost never leave the case. Nothing inside a
computer is particularly flammable. The threat of dust fires is overrated
- dust is not sufficiently dense to ignite anything else, and when ignited
it burns up within seconds. Computers do not contain much wood, paper, or
any other inflammable substance. Face it folks - metal doesn't burn, and
plastic doesn't do much besides smolder.
Now let's take a look at some actual computer fires that I have witnessed:- My younger brother, a developmentally disabled individual, plugged in a
PCI card backwards and the motherboard burned up. Several members of the
chipset were burned beyond recognition. No water or other measures were
needed to put the fire out; it fizzled on its own within seconds.
- I have seen several laptops overheat because of poor cooling designs
(especially Dells). Typically this means that flames leap out of the
keyboard and melt the LCD. Again, this fire is contained, and unless the
laptop is being operated in a hazardous area, nothing happens.
- One of my "hax0r wannabe" co-workers thought he understood
electrical engineering, and caused a brick transformer to catch fire
because he had wired the + and - sides of the output together to "double
the power." The transformer was destroyed, but since almost all power
strips are flame retardant, nothing else caught on fire.
The truth of the matter is that it is extremely difficult to start a destructive fire by accident. 90% of home fires in the country are caused by stupidity such as kitchen incidents and smoking in bed. There is no reason to suspect that your computer is any more of a hazard than leaving your VCR plugged in all the time.- Many telemarketing firms are moving overseas. FTC rulings
cannot control what happens in third-world countries like India and
Portugal. The declining cost of international long distance telephone
calls is making this a viable option, and soon the best option for most of
us will be to block all incoming international calls.
- Most domestic telemarketers violate the law. Indeed, calling
people on their cellular phones to advertise services or leave prerecorded
messages is in direct violation of many state and federal laws.
Unfortunately, most telemarketers are boiler-room operations, and
enforcement is a serious problem. Often (as was the case at the firm I
worked at) the owner sets up a shell corporation that shields him from
legal liability for the company's misdeeds. His plan was to dissolve the
company and start a new one if he ever got caught.
- Telemarketers are people too. Although many telemarketers
are colored, most of them are just like you and me. Please do not verbally
abuse them - you won't hurt the industry, just somebody (not unlike myself)
who is trying to make ends meet.
- U.S. corporations are not accountable to anybody. When federal
law is changed to make CEOs and executives of rogue corporations liable for
prison time, things might change. Until then, everything from
illegal telemarketing to accounting scams will be fair game.
- Telemarketers are allowed to circumvent caller ID. A very
simple solution to the problem of domestic telemarketing calls would be to
force telemarketers to stop blocking outgoing CND services. Unfortunately,
our Congress has been paid handsomely so that they could keep this
privilege.
Things will inevitably get worse before they get better. My recommendation is to buy a good answering machine and don't pick up "unavailable" calls. This blocks 99% of telemarketers in my experience.The one issue, then, that I have with Gator is that fact that it surreptitiously spies on its users and reports their browsing habits back to a central repository. Similar to slashdot, they profile their users without adequate disclosure and should be admonished for that. (IMHO, "adequate disclosure" does not mean that they reveal the fact that they are monitoring you on page 14 of the 78-page license agreement that nobody reads.) Aside from this transgression, what Gator does is perfectly legitimate and is no different than the digital editing that many television stations are now doing to block competitors' ads from live video feeds. May the strongest competitor win: it's pure capitalism. Enjoy it.
UnitedLinux has become our enemy: they are the Microsoft of the Open Source community. Fortunately, we do not need to expend effort to oppose them, as their business model is sufficiently flawed that they will not survive long.
Back in 1999, when the dot-coms were flying high and my company resembled an Internet startup (although we had been in business since 1992), we hastily set up new offices and cubicles with little regard for information security. After all, what was the worst that could happen - an email worm? Well, we quickly found out: a malicious hacker had targeted our company, and sent an email to "all @" my domain containing a link to a supposed Yahoo News story. Unfortunately, this link sent the employees to a malicious site that caused their insecure IE browsers to yield control of nearly every Windows PC in the company to the intruder. They stole and destroyed much important data, and took over a week of nonstop unpaid overtime to fix things.
A few weeks after the incident, our vice president of operations mandated a Mozilla-only policy. Employees were forbidden from running IE, Lynx (another notoriously insecure browser), and Konqueror (which crashed constantly anyway). Since that time, we have had zero browser related security issues, and employees waste far less time surfing the web, mainly because a lot of time-wasting sites only work in Microsoft standards-compliant browsers. Converting to Mozilla has been a win-win situation, and I fully expect the same to be happening across America after this latest IE security breach. Enough is enough; we need to take back control of our networks.
- Fraud. Several prolific warez kiddies figured out how to
change their MAC address to bill their service to their neighbors or even
to our own router (!). We're still not sure exactly how that
happened. Sure, we cut them off and connected their modems to a high
voltage source as punishment (our contract allowed it), but how many more
are there who we didn't catch?
- Billing issues. People who obviously ran up a very high
bandwidth bill would call us and complain when they got their statements,
asking us to lower their bills. Our position was that it wasn't our
responsibility that they couldn't figure out how to close Napster or stop
downloading porn. When they paid with credit card we would sometimes lose
the dispute, but things were okay when they paid with cash or check.
- Expectation of quality. As you know, a cable modem is a shared
medium and cable companies are not at fault for your neighbors' downloading
habits. However, it was considered a potential legal liability to be
providing a service of varying quality.
For these reasons and many others, metered cable modem service just won't work.The moral of the story here is that giving up on what you believe in gets you nowhere. If you cave in to corporate pressure, you will lose your money, your good name, and your credit rating when you settle out of court. If you stand up for your rights when you know you're correct, justice will prevail and you will know you've made a difference for netizens everywhere. What would you rather be - a victorious hero or an unprincipled loser? Don't answer here - save your response for the judge.
And that brings me to my point: yEnc sucks. yEnc is a horrible standard. Just like uuencode, it forces you to track down all 56 posts that constitute the 1337 warez release or all 7 posts of your kiddie porn movie. yEnc discourages binaries traffic, and that is a good thing for intellectual property protection. We don't need a heavy-handed government or "BSA" to police us - with people like the yEnc author around, we can show the software companies that we are responsible enough to make it a pain in the ass to pirate software. And that is all they could ask from us.
Now, since he makes over $100k a year as a consultant, he gives generously to the EFF and is a vocal opponent of ICANN and their pro-corporatist domain dispute rules. He is actively working for change in the system, and although the road is long, I am confident that someday we will win this battle.
It's hardly hypocritical to bash Microsoft for releasing closed-source spyware, and to forgive AOL on account of the fact that a four-line diff will remove any trace of the problem. AOL has put control of the information in the hands of the user (where it belongs, IMHO), and Microsoft has not. That is the reason why MS gets bashed.
Nowadays, the money doesn't flow quite as freely. Although we only occasionally remodel our office space (usually turning old kitchens and other "play areas" into rental space), we typically do things with an eye to the budget because cheap is in, and luxury is out. And that brings me to my point here: at $400 a crack, a "smart whiteboard" is a waste of money. Even back in 1999, we paid about $10 each for standard chalkboards. And they serve their purpose: chalk is cheap (much cheaper than those fancy whiteboard markers) and they don't require a special cleaning fluid to erase them after the ink has dried for a few days. We just can't justify paying 40 times the cost just because it's "cool."
Sometimes employees will complain about the chalk dust and threaten to sue us under the ADA because they think their chalk allergies are a "disability." Recent Supreme Court rulings are in the employer's favor over such fabricated disabilities, though, and we have never actually been sued. Typically we make a habit of ridding the organization of such squeaky wheels anyway, since they hinder productivity and lower morale amongst their right-thinking co-workers.
Just my 2c.