This is Comcast cable. It's $2-3/mo cheaper if you provide your modem, and about $12 more if you're not a cable TV subscriber with them. Service is pretty good.
6 pairs of black socks 1 can of mixed nuts (i hate most nuts) A bottle of leather conditioner (presumably for my car) A pair of cheap $20 headphones (left side doesn't work) 15 losing $1-2 lottery tickets $10 in gift certificates to Krispy Kreme (love them, but the closest one is an HOUR away. All Dunkin' Donuts around here.) Speaker stands for the surround sound system I don't have.
-----
I gave...
My sister a nice Capresso CoffeeTEC coffee maker because her current coffee maker broke, and this does lattes and hot cocoa to boot, which she loves. Also got her an assortment of coffee from Gevalia.
My parents to share, got them 5 classic movie DVDs (Ben-Hur, Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront, Bridge on the River Kwai, Casablanca). My mom a backyard birdwatching and project book, a pair of nice binoculars. My father I got a 10GB iPod (bring his MP3s in his car without him constantly burning CDs), and a new copy of MS Trips and Streets (to replace his 1994 Rand McNally software which he still uses regularly).
-----
I know its not what you get, but the thought that counts, but I think I put in a lot more thought than they did.
Go is the opitime of strategy games. Minutes to learn, eternity to master. Yes, not a lifetime -- eternity.
Richochet Robot is a fun game for a small group of folks. Definitely will drive you nuts to some degree. Really racks your brain and puts it into overdrive. Hell, I think I'm going to bring this one into the office.
Formula De is just nifty. Pretty quick games, some strategy, some luck. Yeah, you'll need to pick up extra boards over time, but it's a tough game to get sick of. I've even played in a local tournament a few times. There is supposedly a "simpler" mini version coming out, but I found the original to be simple (and you don't even need to run the advanced rules if you don't want).
I remember back in high school we had a cluster of several Vaxen. I'd like to say at least four, and as many as six.
Well, waste lines were apparently run through that room. Granted, this is a school of 4000 students. The way the school was sectioned off, I doubt it was the only one, but there's still a big portion of stuff going through this.
Apparently, the pipe burst, and emptied itself more or less directly on the Vaxen, which were 6xxx series cabinets.
I've done this for a while. I have an account in which I pull out money I'll use to write checks for bills, Paypal, and to pull money from the ATM. This account usually only has another $1000-1500 in it that what is necessary for the bills.
I have another account in which the money is meant to sit there unless there's an emergency. I can write checks with this account, but I never do (so if there's a check written from it on my statement, I'd call the bank ASAP). My ATM isn't tied to this account. Paypal will never it ever exists. And half of the money is always purposely tied up in fairly short-term CDs.
-----
Installed mine Friday,,,
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 1
I tossed a black PX-708A into my new box on Friday, and had to give it a few tests.
Does it write at 8X? You bet. 4.38 gigs barely took 8 minutes. 5 DVDs and no failures. My only beef is the drive is a bit noisy. It is definitely the loudest component, by far, in my system.
What surprised me though is Tom's Hardware used the 1.01 firmware, when drives have been shipping with 1.02 for some time, and that 1.03 has been available for over a month. The performance improvements are small, but enough to edge out the old Pioneer in virtually everything now.
Most Li-ion batteries that consumer get is typically at most 15-20% of the density that is used for military applications.
It's possible to have a battery that would make a Centrino laptop run 24 hours under load and be the exact same size and nearly identical weight to what you can get now. It just would cost a ton to produce, develop, and if it failed you better have a buttload of Lithex available to put out the fire -- cause water, baking soda, fire extinguishers, and smothering won't do anything to help save your life.
I'm sure most people have something much older, but... I use this every day for the past 2000 or so days.
Pentium 90 on a PC Chips Socket 5 board. 64M 60ns EDO RAM (four 16MB DIMMs) 1.6GB Western Digital disk 540MB Conner peripherals disk 8x Acer CD-ROM two 10/100 Linksys LNE100 TX nics. Diamond Stealth video (S3 ViRGE chipset)
Yes. That old. What does it do? Mostly serves as a firewall, though does a few other menial tasks. Used to host my website and vhost for friends. Used to give shell accounts so friends could polish their C/C++ and Pascal. Used to be a MAngband server. Used to run a heavily modified CircleMUD on it. Memories...
Runs Linux 2.0.x. I just keep it patched. Been running for about 6 years now doing just that. Crashed never. Uptime is lost only to kernel rebuilds, which haven't happened since the last hole in 2.0.x.
When it dies, I'll replace it with a firewall appliance. Until it does... meh. Let it run.
We're in the Marion, Mass. and being barely above sea level, we're already preparing. Hell, the storm surge would flood our office if it was 15 feet or greater I'd hazard.
Hurricane Bob came through here years ago, but even at a Category 2, that didn't stop it from taking dozens of large boats out of the harbor and sticking them 500-800 feet away in the field of a private school. Skycranes were rented at over $1000/hr to pull them out, and boatyards were pulling $300/hr for emergency boat rescues during the storm itself.
We're already generating two more sets of offsite backups, and putting them 15 miles and 70 miles away from the office respectively, in bank vaults. Just in case. We also have a backup server and lan equipment ready to go at a remote location... just in case. All the codemonkeys with laptops (like me) will be taking it home. We have all the backup paper forms printed and at the remote location, for that if. All of this has been tested... thoroughly, and nearly everyone (small shop) knows the plan stone cold. In the event the office is a loss, we'll be up and running full force, coding like fiends within 48 hours, tops.
Doesn't hurt to be careful. ----- ----- -----
Gas stations and lithium ...
on
Flaming Cellphones
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
First, I saw the "electrostatic discharge" labels at the Mobil pumps today. They've been there a while. For good reason. They wouldn't alter old warning labels and stick them on every pump if there wasn't a reason. Business don't like spending money.
Gasoline ends in "ne" and have that "eeen" pronunciation to them. Xylene. Benzene. Toluene. All come from crude oil and all have a bloody low flash point.
Second, lithium batteries have the highest energy to weight ratio, and yes, folks are still careless with them. Most batteries I believe even have a little resistor in them to moderate the output. Lithium is nasty nasty stuff. I don't suppose anyone here remembers when Kodak started pumping out some of the first lithium cells? Guess how they stored them in the warehouse? On METAL shelves! The battery contacts shorted against the metal shelves and you can guess what happened.
Nasty thing about lithium batts is when they do burn. You essentially need Lithex to put the fire out. Granted you get a warning when something's up. There are sulfur in the batteries as well (a few other things, the mixture is part organic), so you can smell the typical rotten egg smell when the batteries are outgassing. When you smell that -- toss them and RUN. Defense contractors and places working with these things often have bomb blankets and ammo cases around for these suckers for a reason.
Point? Both of these are dangerous substances, and I wouldn't want to be near them when they start burning together!
I'd anonymously email the company that develops the software. Get a free hotmail account or some such and send them a full disclosure of the exploit with proof of concept code all in the body of a plain-text no attachment email.
Hopefully it gets someone's attention, it gets patched, and admins at schools apply the patch. Will you get credit for your findings? No. Will you stand a chance at getting the hole fixed without any real fear of retribution? Yes.
The company I started working for has some weird issues as well.
First, the product ties its upgrades to its support (paying for support? Then all upgrades including brand new versions are free), which isn't bad, except they COMMIT to FOUR RELEASES A YEAR.
Which for the staff we have, is INSANE. So what happens? Right now the developers are in a tiff with management/sales that we have some SERIOUS data integrity issues throughout the package that NEED to be fixed to avoid some serious nightmares. The package was developed by our current VP (then the only developer) and it's just glue-tape-glue-tape-glue-tape built on a product they only intended to sell to one customer.
We've addressed that if these ever came up, they would be nightmares to deal with (lots of our customers don't back up their stuff well...). But management/sales feels they have to commit to their insane release schedule and would rather put in new revenue generating features. So their idea is not only to stick to the release schedule of death, but to not do things correct and proper, and would rather see more glue/tape than let us fix some major design deficiencies.
So, more money, or support nightmares from hell? They're choosing short-term money. Agh.
I've played a MUD (GemStone III) for about 8 years.
About two years in a met a girl and hung around with her in game, and after 4 or so years, she decided that we should meet and hang out for the week, despite about a 1500-mile distance issue. She was a pretty hardcore player. Definitely consumed 15-20 hours a week of her time (I played about 10-15 in comparison).
Well, went to T.F. Green in Providence to pick her up. Just waiting around... holding up a sign with her last name on it. Then all of a sudden some attractive, blonde, Britney Spears lookalike comes up to me and hugs me shouting "Rob" quite happily.
Yeah, I'd say that the stereotype is pretty off-base!;)
The new Google 2.0 Toolbar (still in Beta) has a pop-up blocker as well. Can disable it with a click, or disable it for the next page by holding down Ctrl. Plus it keeps track of how many you've blocked.
I'm also going to recommend POPfile, especially with the SMTP proxy coming in 0.19.
I set up POPFile my last week at my old job. 20 users, 1000 emails a day, 80%+ of which was spam.
PIII 1GHz, 512M of RAM running Win2K server. Load on that box despite running Exchange to boot was maybe 5-6% CPU when idling, and their accuracy only 2 months is 99.98% and we've never even reset the statistics! -----
Actually there was an interview with an MS kernel developer a while back that that Microsoft was embarassed that Samba smoked Windows 2000.
To MS, that's a huge slap in the face, that some 3rd party SMB server emulating Windows tromps the real thing. For Windows 2003, they were bent on the new SMB server on trouncing Samba by about 100%, and I guess they wanted to get the report out.
Veritest by the way, does all of Microsoft's "certified for Windows 200x" application testing. -----
For a POS system you really need a cash drawer (Indiana Cash Drawer?), receipt printer, and a barcode scanner. To display barcodes, I recommend a barcode font, or writing a control that can render them for you. It's typically easier to do it with a font.
Cash drawers typically hang off a parallel or serial port, as barcode scanners. Though I'm not sure about for macs, as I've just started doing this for PCs.
Cash drawers really only need a control code to eject. Since you're a small shop, you can just hardcode it in, unless you wanted to create a definition file. Receipt printers are much of the same, requiring control codes to activate.
This probably could be all done within FileMaker, though I'm not sure. It's not terribly difficult to do, you just need to be able to take some time to sit with the specs for the scanner/drawer/printer and then you should be able to cobble it together fairly quickly.
Best way to go about it? Buy the cheapest USB deskjet money can buy, that comes with a cartridge. Seriously. Like $30 with rebate or something.
Why? Don't cartridges normally cost around $30? Why yes, yes they do. When the cheap printer breaks, junk it, and get another el cheapo. It may last a few cartridges if your lucky, but if it doesn't last more than one, its not a total loss.
In the meantime... I have an HP LaserJet that I bought 2 years ago that's gone through about 25,000 pages without so much of a hiccup. And I've replaced the toner only about 4 times. They're not cheap, but they're very reliable, and the drums last too.
My first PC was one running Win3.1 with a 486/DX 33MHz, 4M EDO, and I think a 150MB disk. (My first computer was a Commodore 64 though).
If you can up it to 8M of RAM, you are golden. SimTower, SimCity 2000, SimFarm all ran fine, as Doom.
Don't throw a 6 year old at a Linux command line. Get him used to something like Win 3.1 and simply get him comfortable using a computer, period. Especially being able to type reasonably well and without having to hunt and peck.
AFTER that -- he understands directories, files, executables, and can type well, then move him to something else, whatever it may be.
-----
Slashdot Mirror
3Mbps down, 300kbps up. $45/mo.
This is Comcast cable. It's $2-3/mo cheaper if you provide your modem, and about $12 more if you're not a cable TV subscriber with them. Service is pretty good.
DSL is similarly priced.
----- ----- ----- -----
My Xmas:
6 pairs of black socks
1 can of mixed nuts (i hate most nuts)
A bottle of leather conditioner (presumably for my car)
A pair of cheap $20 headphones (left side doesn't work)
15 losing $1-2 lottery tickets
$10 in gift certificates to Krispy Kreme (love them, but the closest one is an HOUR away. All Dunkin' Donuts around here.)
Speaker stands for the surround sound system I don't have.
-----
I gave...
My sister a nice Capresso CoffeeTEC coffee maker because her current coffee maker broke, and this does lattes and hot cocoa to boot, which she loves. Also got her an assortment of coffee from Gevalia.
My parents to share, got them 5 classic movie DVDs (Ben-Hur, Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront, Bridge on the River Kwai, Casablanca). My mom a backyard birdwatching and project book, a pair of nice binoculars. My father I got a 10GB iPod (bring his MP3s in his car without him constantly burning CDs), and a new copy of MS Trips and Streets (to replace his 1994 Rand McNally software which he still uses regularly).
-----
I know its not what you get, but the thought that counts, but I think I put in a lot more thought than they did.
----- ----- ----- -----
Go is the opitime of strategy games. Minutes to learn, eternity to master. Yes, not a lifetime -- eternity.
Richochet Robot is a fun game for a small group of folks. Definitely will drive you nuts to some degree. Really racks your brain and puts it into overdrive. Hell, I think I'm going to bring this one into the office.
Formula De is just nifty. Pretty quick games, some strategy, some luck. Yeah, you'll need to pick up extra boards over time, but it's a tough game to get sick of. I've even played in a local tournament a few times. There is supposedly a "simpler" mini version coming out, but I found the original to be simple (and you don't even need to run the advanced rules if you don't want).
----- -----
I remember back in high school we had a cluster of several Vaxen. I'd like to say at least four, and as many as six.
Well, waste lines were apparently run through that room. Granted, this is a school of 4000 students. The way the school was sectioned off, I doubt it was the only one, but there's still a big portion of stuff going through this.
Apparently, the pipe burst, and emptied itself more or less directly on the Vaxen, which were 6xxx series cabinets.
Unbelievably, most survived.
-----
Seperate accounts.
I've done this for a while. I have an account in which I pull out money I'll use to write checks for bills, Paypal, and to pull money from the ATM. This account usually only has another $1000-1500 in it that what is necessary for the bills.
I have another account in which the money is meant to sit there unless there's an emergency. I can write checks with this account, but I never do (so if there's a check written from it on my statement, I'd call the bank ASAP). My ATM isn't tied to this account. Paypal will never it ever exists. And half of the money is always purposely tied up in fairly short-term CDs.
-----
I tossed a black PX-708A into my new box on Friday, and had to give it a few tests.
Does it write at 8X? You bet. 4.38 gigs barely took 8 minutes. 5 DVDs and no failures. My only beef is the drive is a bit noisy. It is definitely the loudest component, by far, in my system.
What surprised me though is Tom's Hardware used the 1.01 firmware, when drives have been shipping with 1.02 for some time, and that 1.03 has been available for over a month. The performance improvements are small, but enough to edge out the old Pioneer in virtually everything now.
----- -----
Most Li-ion batteries that consumer get is typically at most 15-20% of the density that is used for military applications.
It's possible to have a battery that would make a Centrino laptop run 24 hours under load and be the exact same size and nearly identical weight to what you can get now. It just would cost a ton to produce, develop, and if it failed you better have a buttload of Lithex available to put out the fire -- cause water, baking soda, fire extinguishers, and smothering won't do anything to help save your life.
-----
This has been done. I think they call it KaZaa though.
-----
I'm sure most people have something much older, but... I use this every day for the past 2000 or so days.
Pentium 90 on a PC Chips Socket 5 board.
64M 60ns EDO RAM (four 16MB DIMMs)
1.6GB Western Digital disk
540MB Conner peripherals disk
8x Acer CD-ROM
two 10/100 Linksys LNE100 TX nics.
Diamond Stealth video (S3 ViRGE chipset)
Yes. That old. What does it do? Mostly serves as a firewall, though does a few other menial tasks. Used to host my website and vhost for friends. Used to give shell accounts so friends could polish their C/C++ and Pascal. Used to be a MAngband server. Used to run a heavily modified CircleMUD on it. Memories...
Runs Linux 2.0.x. I just keep it patched. Been running for about 6 years now doing just that. Crashed never. Uptime is lost only to kernel rebuilds, which haven't happened since the last hole in 2.0.x.
When it dies, I'll replace it with a firewall appliance. Until it does... meh. Let it run.
----- ----- -----
...cars with power windows that work...
Still to trade up to a 1986 Toyota Camry, eh?
-----
I've never been fired.
Last 3 places I've worked for I ended up getting sick of much too prevalent office politics, ageism, laziness of coworkers.
I quit, and am quickly snapped up after referrals from friends, former associates, and former coworkers.
-----
Mirrored here: Sebek.pdf
-----
We're in the Marion, Mass. and being barely above sea level, we're already preparing. Hell, the storm surge would flood our office if it was 15 feet or greater I'd hazard.
Hurricane Bob came through here years ago, but even at a Category 2, that didn't stop it from taking dozens of large boats out of the harbor and sticking them 500-800 feet away in the field of a private school. Skycranes were rented at over $1000/hr to pull them out, and boatyards were pulling $300/hr for emergency boat rescues during the storm itself.
We're already generating two more sets of offsite backups, and putting them 15 miles and 70 miles away from the office respectively, in bank vaults. Just in case. We also have a backup server and lan equipment ready to go at a remote location... just in case. All the codemonkeys with laptops (like me) will be taking it home. We have all the backup paper forms printed and at the remote location, for that if. All of this has been tested... thoroughly, and nearly everyone (small shop) knows the plan stone cold. In the event the office is a loss, we'll be up and running full force, coding like fiends within 48 hours, tops.
Doesn't hurt to be careful.
----- ----- -----
First, I saw the "electrostatic discharge" labels at the Mobil pumps today. They've been there a while. For good reason. They wouldn't alter old warning labels and stick them on every pump if there wasn't a reason. Business don't like spending money.
Gasoline ends in "ne" and have that "eeen" pronunciation to them. Xylene. Benzene. Toluene. All come from crude oil and all have a bloody low flash point.
Second, lithium batteries have the highest energy to weight ratio, and yes, folks are still careless with them. Most batteries I believe even have a little resistor in them to moderate the output. Lithium is nasty nasty stuff. I don't suppose anyone here remembers when Kodak started pumping out some of the first lithium cells? Guess how they stored them in the warehouse? On METAL shelves! The battery contacts shorted against the metal shelves and you can guess what happened.
Nasty thing about lithium batts is when they do burn. You essentially need Lithex to put the fire out. Granted you get a warning when something's up. There are sulfur in the batteries as well (a few other things, the mixture is part organic), so you can smell the typical rotten egg smell when the batteries are outgassing. When you smell that -- toss them and RUN. Defense contractors and places working with these things often have bomb blankets and ammo cases around for these suckers for a reason.
Point? Both of these are dangerous substances, and I wouldn't want to be near them when they start burning together!
-----
I'd anonymously email the company that develops the software. Get a free hotmail account or some such and send them a full disclosure of the exploit with proof of concept code all in the body of a plain-text no attachment email.
Hopefully it gets someone's attention, it gets patched, and admins at schools apply the patch. Will you get credit for your findings? No. Will you stand a chance at getting the hole fixed without any real fear of retribution? Yes.
-----
The company I started working for has some weird issues as well.
First, the product ties its upgrades to its support (paying for support? Then all upgrades including brand new versions are free), which isn't bad, except they COMMIT to FOUR RELEASES A YEAR.
Which for the staff we have, is INSANE. So what happens? Right now the developers are in a tiff with management/sales that we have some SERIOUS data integrity issues throughout the package that NEED to be fixed to avoid some serious nightmares. The package was developed by our current VP (then the only developer) and it's just glue-tape-glue-tape-glue-tape built on a product they only intended to sell to one customer.
We've addressed that if these ever came up, they would be nightmares to deal with (lots of our customers don't back up their stuff well...).
But management/sales feels they have to commit to their insane release schedule and would rather put in new revenue generating features. So their idea is not only to stick to the release schedule of death, but to not do things correct and proper, and would rather see more glue/tape than let us fix some major design deficiencies.
So, more money, or support nightmares from hell? They're choosing short-term money. Agh.
----- -----
I've played a MUD (GemStone III) for about 8 years.
;)
About two years in a met a girl and hung around with her in game, and after 4 or so years, she decided that we should meet and hang out for the week, despite about a 1500-mile distance issue. She was a pretty hardcore player. Definitely consumed 15-20 hours a week of her time (I played about 10-15 in comparison).
Well, went to T.F. Green in Providence to pick her up. Just waiting around... holding up a sign with her last name on it. Then all of a sudden some attractive, blonde, Britney Spears lookalike comes up to me and hugs me shouting "Rob" quite happily.
Yeah, I'd say that the stereotype is pretty off-base!
----- ----- -----
The new Google 2.0 Toolbar (still in Beta) has a pop-up blocker as well. Can disable it with a click, or disable it for the next page by holding down Ctrl. Plus it keeps track of how many you've blocked.
----- ----- -----
If I had that kind of money I'd seriously store it in a gigantic vault like Scrooge McDuck did in DuckTales.
It'd be huge. I'd swim in it. But it wouldn't be this massive building on the top of a hill with a gigantic dollar sign on it.
I wonder though... he had so many coins in... didn't diving into that hurt?? That's like diving into an empty swimming pool. Ah... cartoon physics.
-----
NTFS supports junction points. I believe on the Windows 2000 Resource Kit (don't ask why it wasn't included with Win2K...) has LINKD on it.
Junction points are a little better than parsing points, and work very much link symlinks do.
-----
I'm also going to recommend POPfile, especially with the SMTP proxy coming in 0.19.
I set up POPFile my last week at my old job. 20 users, 1000 emails a day, 80%+ of which was spam.
PIII 1GHz, 512M of RAM running Win2K server. Load on that box despite running Exchange to boot was maybe 5-6% CPU when idling, and their accuracy only 2 months is 99.98% and we've never even reset the statistics!
-----
Actually there was an interview with an MS kernel developer a while back that that Microsoft was embarassed that Samba smoked Windows 2000.
To MS, that's a huge slap in the face, that some 3rd party SMB server emulating Windows tromps the real thing. For Windows 2003, they were bent on the new SMB server on trouncing Samba by about 100%, and I guess they wanted to get the report out.
Veritest by the way, does all of Microsoft's "certified for Windows 200x" application testing.
-----
Actually, buidling POS terminals isn't too bad.
For a POS system you really need a cash drawer (Indiana Cash Drawer?), receipt printer, and a barcode scanner. To display barcodes, I recommend a barcode font, or writing a control that can render them for you. It's typically easier to do it with a font.
Cash drawers typically hang off a parallel or serial port, as barcode scanners. Though I'm not sure about for macs, as I've just started doing this for PCs.
Cash drawers really only need a control code to eject. Since you're a small shop, you can just hardcode it in, unless you wanted to create a definition file. Receipt printers are much of the same, requiring control codes to activate.
This probably could be all done within FileMaker, though I'm not sure. It's not terribly difficult to do, you just need to be able to take some time to sit with the specs for the scanner/drawer/printer and then you should be able to cobble it together fairly quickly.
----------
Best way to go about it? Buy the cheapest USB deskjet money can buy, that comes with a cartridge. Seriously. Like $30 with rebate or something.
Why? Don't cartridges normally cost around $30? Why yes, yes they do. When the cheap printer breaks, junk it, and get another el cheapo. It may last a few cartridges if your lucky, but if it doesn't last more than one, its not a total loss.
In the meantime... I have an HP LaserJet that I bought 2 years ago that's gone through about 25,000 pages without so much of a hiccup. And I've replaced the toner only about 4 times. They're not cheap, but they're very reliable, and the drums last too.
-----
My first PC was one running Win3.1 with a 486/DX 33MHz, 4M EDO, and I think a 150MB disk. (My first computer was a Commodore 64 though).
If you can up it to 8M of RAM, you are golden. SimTower, SimCity 2000, SimFarm all ran fine, as Doom.
Don't throw a 6 year old at a Linux command line. Get him used to something like Win 3.1 and simply get him comfortable using a computer, period. Especially being able to type reasonably well and without having to hunt and peck.
AFTER that -- he understands directories, files, executables, and can type well, then move him to something else, whatever it may be.
-----