I have made multiple eBay purchases (like 60) and only been conned once. And like the article, it was a Dutch auction, for a $20 Lego set. I got contacted by other bidders about a month later, and I hadn't gotten my set, either. We went to the account, and it was closed, but still had not one negative rating out of 350. A member for 2 years. I never saw it coming.
eBay and Paypal didn't care, and this didn't really shock me. I mean, the guy (or gal) made $600 in $20 increments. I just chalk it up to 'Caveat Emptor,' and honestly, item for item, I have been conned more in garage sales and flea markets with a lot less purchases, so eBay is still okay with me.
Re:Why can't it be more like Linux?
on
Absolute OpenBSD
·
· Score: 2, Informative
... assuming you have version 3.3 on an i386, and you want to download off of a Canadian (ftp.openbsd.org's home) server rather than any of the other fine mirrors they offer. Otherwise, substitute the ftp.openbsd.org with the mirror, 3.3 with your version, and i386 with your chip.
I found this book to be valuable
on
Absolute OpenBSD
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I pre-ordered this book, and poured through it the day it arrived. I have been using OpenBSD at work and at home, and this book filled numerous voids I had from my piecemeal of information from various Usenet postings, man pages, and HOWTOs.
This is *the* book to get if you know a little about *NIX/*BSD and want to flesh out what you know. Maybe if I was some expert guru, I'd find the book's informalness and coverage over basics to be a distraction, but no book of this ilk is ever everything for everybody. I'd call this a sort of "middle knowledge" book: not for raw newbies, not for hardcore experts, but for a lot of people in between.
Part of the problem I have had with OpenBSD is a lot of people in the OpenBSD community are strict RTFMA about any help, and the book even mentions that OpenBSD people ARE a bit aloof, and even WHY this is (a good explanation, IMHO, without making OpenBSD people look like eltist snobs). I think if people are told, "Look, this is an OS *by* hard-core programmers who don't have time to answer 'WTF is pf scroood up R wat? LOL!!' or 'set up my sendmail for me, or I'll have a tantrum,' but want more intelligent questions about in-depth subjects," they'd be more understanding, and maybe start with FreeBSD, and work their way towards OpenBSD. Or do like I did, and found some more newbie-friendly OpenBSD people to share accomplishments with.
OpenBSD is a great complement to the *BSD family, and this book can really teach you a lot about how it works, the philosophy behind it, and why things are the way they are.
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www.punkalrus.com - OpenBSD user for over two years
Many years ago at a well-known ISP, we had a pretty funny and cool guy who worked with us who had the e-mail godzilla@[our_ISPcompany_email.com]. He got a cease and desist order in 1998 from Toho Co., Ltd, stating Godzilla was a copyright of Toho Co., Ltd, and that if he did not give up his e-mail account name, Toho Co., Ltd would sue him and our company for international copyright infringment of Toho Co., Ltd. Then they wanted to take over the e-mail account for the upcoming Godzilla 2000 movie.
This letter was hysterical because apart from being in slightly broken English, it mentioned the name "Toho Co., Ltd" about every sentence, and was full of self-praise about how great and honorable Toho Co., Ltd was.
At first, he ignored it. Then the company came down on him because they got a letter from Toho Co., Ltd's lawyers. There was some debate, and the company decided that it wasn't worth their time to try and deal with this, so they dropped the issue.
The coworker *was* a Godzilla fan, so he wrote back to Toho Co., Ltd that "Godzilla" was not a trademark, but "Gojirra," the proper kanakata spelling was a trademark, and he did not have an account with that name, nor did he have the ability to open an account with that name unless they paid or company for the e-mail address.
They never replied. He had the letter posted on his door for a while, with a photoshop of Godzilla attacking our building. Then Godzilla 2000 ("Ferris Beuller vs. Godzilla") came out, and I think Toho Co., Ltd probably never wanted to deal with Americans again.
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www.punkwalrus.com - As seen on "The Gong Show"
There are good ideas here, but I often use my 64MB thumb drive just to transfer files from work to home and vice versa - there's never many mainstays on it.
Right now, I have:
- Antivirus software installers and updates (we had a problem at work) - Some mp3's a guy at work gave me making fun of Steve Ballmer's "Developers Developers Developers!" speech - A few floppy disk images for various utilities - Some work spreadsheets I worked on at home - Two semi-funny short movies - Two zipped backups of various work projects
________________________________________________ __ __ www.punkwalrus.com - What a world, what a world!
So by tieing a session id to an IP address effectively prevents users of AOL and other large ISPs from using a website.
Most cacheing systems (expecially AOL's) are a little smarter than that. They store only static sites, not any site that has a php, asp, or anything with a cgi, or at the very least, anything with a "?" in the URL. Otherwise, all web boards, search engines, and other dynamic sites would be rendered useless. You would go the weather.com and only see the weather 24 hours ago (or whenever the last fetch was made), for example.
For example, having worked with cacheing systems, I know that nothing on CNN was cached locally, which is why CNN (and most news sites) slowed to a crawl during 9/11, but other non-9/11-related sites were fine. Almost all news sites have dynamic pages, and will not be cached.
In Europe they have those Vend-o-mats in train stations which are (and have been since at least the 1970s) pretty automated. I can see this being even more automated this way:
1. Food prepared at central plant, loaded on robot-driven trucks.
2. Trucks drive to special robot truck loading dock, robot vendomat forklift takes cargo, goes to back of vendomat on specialized tracks, and sorts cargo into cubicles
3. People pay in front of vendomat and eat food like they do now
The thing is, robots can only automate so much. Even with the "human-style brain" there will have to be some system of self-repair on par with a human. Think about it, if you are at work, and you cut your finger, you go "ow," slap on a band-aid, and go on with your work. A robot has to be pretty sophisticated to do that. They lose a wire, anything could happen. Sure, they got have a team of robots fixing robots, but the cost involved would seriously outweight a human doing the same job.
I also see a lot of Union complications if we end up in an android-like situtaion. It may not be preventable from immigrants "taking all the jobs" (I won't go there, but being an American who was not born here, I am very pro-immigrant), but preventable created robot "people" would certainly be stopped. You'd have to think about the arguments that would be created:
1. Is it REALLY cheaper to create a robot mass working force?
2. Why create it if a human can do the same job?
3. When enough people are out of work, who will buy the goods the robots create?
As par of a long term strategy, "robots run everything" will be scrutinized by lawmakers.
The "Non-GUI" Installer on Slack
on
Slackware Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's all I kept hearing before I tried Slack, whining about the "Non-GUI" installer. "You'll never figure it out. It's primative and incomprehensible."
Bollocks.
This is what they mean by "non-GUI" installer. Instead of pretty windows and shiny icons shaped like big-eyed penguins, you get something that looks like this:
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Here is our completely and utterly incomprehensible non-gui installation screen:
[ ] I can't stand it, help! What? Where are my shoes? Stupid Slack!
[ ] I think my mouse is broke... stupid Slack!
[ ] Hmmm... I think I may have to use the keyboard... Stupid me!
[ ] Hey, I found the space, arrow, and tab keys! Yay me!
[X] This is pretty easy!
[ OK ] [ Cancel ] [ Back to other Distro ]
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*That's* "Non-GUI?" The way people bitched, kvetched, and whined, I thought when I put in the CD, I'd get a flashing cursor, waiting for me to do some "pull out of the air" command like LOAD"$",8 and enter in the hex value of the primary IDE boot sector address or something. Dude, that may not be mouse-enabled or have fancy anti-aliasing, but it's "GUI" to me because:
- It is graphical (it has lines and colors!)
- It is a user interface (it's for me!)
- It's how I have been installing Red Hat via Serial interface/low RAM anyway
- Back when I started computing, the only GUI we had was a menu system like that...
There he goes again... "back in the day" man...
I think Slackware is a pretty tight distro, I wouldn't call it non user-friendly. I'd say it's friendlier than Debian! [not to knock Debian, it also has great uses and noble goals]
I'd say anyone who knows Liunx/UNIX, and has an i386 box should give this a try at least.
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www.punkwalrus.com - They'll only take away my gun when they pry my cold dead fingers off Logitech gamepad
... about three quarters of the planet is covered by water ... most of it is unexplored ... we're not aquatic
I'd say the odds are against us.
I used to know a guy who lived in Guam who told me about some of the scary stuff locals would find in trawlers. Most were tiny fish, but a few were big enough to give a trout a run for its money. One of the stories he used to tell me:
I was sitting up high on some hills, overlooking the deeper waters. I was watching some sport fishermen who were in the process of catching a huge great white shark. It must have been almost a ton in weight. After an hour, they managed to subdue it, and since it was almost the size of their tiny sport boat, they couldn't haul it onboard, and so they dragged it behind them, and had a beer. While it was dragging behind their boat, some huge, dark shape started to follow them. Then the carcass of the shark was yanked down sharply, and then only the head of the shark bobbed back up. You also saw part of its tail drifiting away. I don't know what the hell it was, but in ONE BITE it ripped oout most of the middle of the shark, which meant its jaws must have been over five meters across. I will never swim in the open ocean as long as I live after seeing that shit.
And now, neither will I. He also said some people he grew up with caught a deep sea ribbon fish (oarfish?) that was over 40 feet long. He said he didn't care what anyone said, that thing was a sea serpent if he ever saw one.
We had a guy who put time limits on all his code. I can't recall his exact method (I wasn't the one who discovered it), but it this case, it was simple to figure out and remove, but is was basically something hidden in an innocuous winsock API call that:
a. Checked the day's date b. If Today() greater than xVarDateInHex then
- Figuartively roll 20 sided die
- If date less than roll then end
End if
It was pretty obvious because the call was something like winsock.0pen where the "0" in "0pen" was a zero (which didn't compile because it was a function call that started with a number, which is how we found it).
If this would have worked, the program would have seemed to abort abnormally with no error call, but would work better and better as the month went on, until it always seemed to work from the 20th onwards... only to stop working on the 1st of the next month, then repeat the cycle. Very hard to troubleshoot. If it would have worked. _________________________________________ _________ _ www.punkwalrus.com - What hath God wrought?
I want to start this caveat first: I have never run a LAN party, and only seen them at various venues. Some of these venues are Sci-fi and anime conventions, and so my tips will be slanted that way. I am assuming this is like a 3-day 24 hour event.
Food: "Ha ha I am so l33t that I don't need f00d but jolt and chips and reeces peanut butter cups and... [thud]." There will be some people, who for a multitude of reasons, are not socially experienced enough to realize that you can't sustain long off of just Jolt Cola and nacho chips. This causes headaches, moodiness, poor game play, and in some extreme cases, serious health issues. Combined with lack of sleep, you might actually have someone just pass out, get sick, or in a majority of the cases, be a total asshat because their body is starving for nutrients. Plus, and I can't stress this enough, ENCOURAGE THEM TO DRINK WATER! Caffeine is an okay stimulant, but it's also a diuretic (makes you pee a lot, which gets back to what others suggested about adequate bathrooms). Diuretics dehydrate you. So do salty foods. And especially alcohol. Dehydration is not fun. Not fun at all. It will make you crabby, moody, and eventually pass out so you'll have to go to the hospital.
Sleep: "Ha ha, sl33p is for lusorz, you STUPID FSCK AND GET THESE SPIDERS OFF OF ME MY STEPMOTHER NEVER TOLD ME SHE CARED ABOUT ME!!!!" Lack of sleep can really affect moodiness. Combine it with improper food and social awkwardness, and you have the recipe for an outburst or angry behavior between people. I have seen fights start between good friends just because they haven't slept in a while. Or in many cases, people do fall asleep, while playing, right in the chair. That's right, they are taking up valuable space or at least an IP you could use elsewhere. I have been to many LAN events where there was some guy, snoozing where he sat, with a trickle of drool soaking a spot into his retro Transformers/Atari shirt.
First Aid: "Hi... I forgot my insulin, and I am not feeling so... [thud]." Have a plan of action in case someone gets cut deeply by a wire cutter, or beat up badly in a parking lot fight, or passes out because they didn't take their prescribed meds. Oh-ho, add drugs to the mix? I can just image taking someone down off of acid playing Doom 3, whenever that comes out. I heard a story about one kid who was passing out Ex at some anime gaming gathering in Baltimore, and telling everyone it was a "stimulant." Ex does NOT make you a better DDR player, trust me.
Most of this stuff probably won't happen, but keep an idea in the back of your head of some emergency plan. Personally? I'd have a few hours each day to clear out the room, and have those posted like "room closed at 6am and 3pm for one hour." That way, you can vacuum, straighten up, clear out drunks and sleepers, reconfigure things, redo the network (if needed), assess damage, and so on. It also gives people time to stretch their legs, go eat real food, see sunlight, etc...
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www.punkwalrus.com - We is no longer ordinary.
We use AIM extensively at work, and we have a rule that no security information, like server IPs, mapped drives, proprietary info, or passswords of any kind are allowed to be used on an open-end IM or non-ecryoted e-mail. Often, we send half-and-half:
IM > See e-mail on the usual server. Password is "Fn68bX4" and the IP is 10.4+
E-mail> The IP to login to is +.10.120, and add "g6h0" to the password.
But really, often we just go to the office and tell them.
> start to build something based on a current digital tech it's
> impossible- my stereo is one chipboard- what can kids do with that?
Huh. That's the very same complaint said among today's Lego enthusiasts. "Too many specialized pieces." But that's just bollocks. I mean, if you really want to, you'll do it. Even if you have to use coconuts, palm fiber, and metal smelted from minerals extracted from sea water: you'll find the way if your will is strong enough. I bet, right now, some kid out there took apart a discarded cell phone (a "specialized" piece), and is playing with the chips, trying to decode how they work.
This guy's site is proof the concept is still alive. I bet when people said, "Why do you do this? They already have VGA cards! What a waste of time..." he didn't even hear them.
Why? Because we can.
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www.punkwalrus.com - "One of the biggest trainwrecks of journals" - Benny
I used to help run a BBS run on an Atari ST (can you believe it?), and the system was so obscure, that we developed a "DOS simulator" for those who tried to hack our BBS and its (limited) games. We faked things like "dir" and "erase" and even "edlin." It was a multiline, so if the hacker tried to "IM" himself (back then software called it "teleport"), he got through, but if he tried it to others, it went to/dev/null. When people did a "who," they got the job :
Hacker: Port 3: [Thinks he's hacking the BBS, tell his mommy!]
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www.punkwalrus.com - Shift to the left, shift to the right! Stand up, sit down, byte byte byte!
Re:The description is very vague
on
Gentoo Games
·
· Score: 2, Funny
How the hell does one port "aggresively"? Like this?
In my experience, passive agressive works best:
Programmer: Okay, you don't have to compile. It's not like anything you do will impact anyone anyway. You're just Linux, a geek-coder's OS, I understand... no no, I am not angry. Far from it. You are open source, you can do whatEVER you want... and if you don't want to let people play fun games on you, hey, who am I to judge? It's not like I can compile. I am sure that you feel not compiling games is what's in your best interest. [in baby talk] Besides, running X-windows on mommy's little poopsie-woopsie 'puter must have tired iddums out. Yes it did! Oh, you have decided to compile now? Okay... whatever you want, it's not my choice...
Mod that to funny? Don't bother. I really have had sessions like this while compiling my own code. I need to go lie down now...
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www.punkwalrus.com - Yeah, it's as weird as you've heard.
Not really. My large company HAS to have legal copies. Think site licenses are cheap? Hardly. It's not as simple as "Flat rate X Million dollars says you can have all the copies you want!" I overheard some people say we pay more for a single copy of Windows than your average home user. But there's also support and legal issues the home user doesn't need or have to worry about. M$ *does* make a ton of money off of us. But when you have ten thousand systems that change daily due to demand (we do QA testing), it's essential. Being a company that deals with security and privacy, it would look so mega-bad if we started pirating software, so we do mega CYA contracts. We have packs of lawyers read through every agreement, and they try and think of every outcome ("If an employee uses this product from home, but for work use, and we can prove it via the IRS, does that agree with the contract?").
And the US Government probably uses more copies of M$ products than I can fathom. I seriously doubt a group of people who pay $600 for a toilet seat are going to violate a contract with a big company like Microsoft. I bet M$ rapes them like a 2 cent whore.
I must agree though about the XP pirating. One of the people who got the new install CD said, "Two years ago I could have gotten this free from a server Hong Kong." But if we got caught? Oh man, I wouldn't want to be near this place if that shit hit the fan. Massive bad juju there...
MSIE took over because Netscape 4.x sucked donkey balls.
Come on, be serious. You have to be joking. What are you, nuts? It sucked donkey dick, but completely left the balls alone, which is why whole job sucked. You have to pay attention to the balls if you want to do the job right.
Seriously, I have to agree that Netscrape 4.x wasn't that great, but it has a cult following of the like that reminds me of Amiga users (who are, inexplicably to this day, still peddling the BeOS or porting FreeBSD to that Motorola-driven goodness).
But I don't think it was JUST Netscape that sucked that lead to browser dominance. It was the MSIE free part combined with "down your throat" bundling with the OS (where they claimed "you can't extract it, it's an essential part"... oh, whatever!), and those of us geezers who were alive back then recalled how Netscape was treated like shareware anyway. It was essentially free, because it didn't stop working after 30 days, and they bundled with a lot of the starting ISPs at the time, and they made money that way. But yes, it had a bloated, poor business model, and that's what probably killed Netscape and led to AOL's secret playing card in the OS wars (you want to see some really weird bedfellows, look at AOL and M$ sometime).
And no one can honestly give me the "MSIE was better" schpiel because so was Betamax and the Tucker automobile. M$ has huge, mind-numbing powers when it comes to marketing and promotion, and that's their greatest strength over programming, products, or back room business practices.
I work for a very large company that uses thousands of MS machines, and when Microsoft said after Win2K, they would no longer let us site license, we started to look at alternatives. Microsoft said "there is no way to get Product activation disabled, you must account for every computer." They stood to make millions from us, they must have thought.
So we started a policy that banned XP for "security reasons" and made a sweet deal with Red Hat. Unless you had a valid reason to use an XP product, you used Win2K or Linux. Linux meant that we could use older machines on our server farms and pay virtually nothing because, funny enough, Red Hat gave us a site license for support. Not that we use it (or need to) very much.
Suddenly, Microsoft "produced" a disk with Product activation disabled (sort of, it's kind of complicated), but claimed all kinds of voodoo like it had a copy protection so complex, we couldn't burn a new one from the master... even sector-by-sector copying. Bollocks. You could use any XP disk, just as long as you followed the directions MS gave us for the "master CD." Now we have a lot of the CDs all over the place, with a site key (and no, I won't give it to you, use Linux and be free) and the "process" to make it work legally by our contract. It took them two years to backpedal that far.
It's weird, because for so long, Windows was essentially "free" (although, not legally) because until WinXP, more than half the people I knew had "borrowed" an OS CD from "somewhere." Microsoft knew that (I mean, come on), and like a drug pusher, made sure the buyer was hooked before they started charging (my proof is how they made MSIE a dominant browser over Netscape). But it's not that easy anymore. Linux desktops are getting better and better, and while Windows is easier to use for the most part, it's lack of flexibility, anti-customer anticompetitive stance, and their brazen arrogance in the field is really dulling their blade.
But in this case, I can't fault them for trying to give away freebies, I mean, trade shows do that all the time. But what we should really be wary of is when they get politics involved, and claim stuff like DeCSS is proof that Linux should be banned in the US or something equally as stupid to us techies, but is all greek to your average politician who could be $wayed by $ome other thing$...
__________________________________________________ www. - where else can you get blogged to death?
When I first started on Usenet back in... 1991? 92? Something like that, I recall how excited I was to see so many newsgroups out there. Back then, if a group got over 100 posts in a day, that was BUSY!
Now I see Usenet like a button I have: "Reading Usenet is like drinking from a firehose, posting to Usenet is like shouting at people in a passing rollercoaster, and archiving Usenet is like saving used toilet paper." Usenet is like a philosophical particle accelerator which creates opinions of such energy and instability that they could not exist in nature, and a great way of being annoyed by people I otherwise never would have met.
Now a newsgroup that gets less than 100 posts a day are ones that haven't been harvested by spammers yet. I knew it was over when in a base about Nordic culture was innundated with binaries of jpegs which I am sure were not Viking artifacts or ethnologist and museum lore.
That's why I spent my time on e-mail lists and UBB/phpBB boards. Sure, we get jerks, but well-moderated forums with e-mail verification keep a lot of idiots away.
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"Internet is so huge and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life
Oh, and how to move Mt. Fuji? First, I'd have to establish the reasons for the move so I could best guess what the project goal is. I mean, move it to get more flat land? It's an eyesore for some mad scientist who got a mansion in the Fujishima hills? They need the basalt and pumice? There might be easier ways to achieve good results for any of these.
Okay, no reason, just move it? By "move" to you mean "remove" as in you don't care what happens to Mount Fuji as long as it's gone? Or move it several feet to the left? Or move it to the ocean to get more valuable farm land? Just move it a few miles offshore? Which shore? The Pacific side with the trench, or the Chinese side?
I bet I wouldn't be hired by Microsoft, because obviously, I ask too many questions, and try to find practical and efficient solutions to inane initial concepts in the first place.
... and have a job someone really wants. I swear, even though it's an employer's market out there, I'd disqualify so many people based on not on how they answer some complex question if the can't even get basic skills right.
Example: I got a resume once where a "Unix expert" had half his resume page taken up with how he mastered the "man" command. Really? Tell me how you'd find options on any Unix command. You don't know, huh? How about cp? mv? How do I find out who's logged into the box? Ask? Yeah, don't call us, we'll call you.
A coworker asked a potential network admin candidate to point to a router in the lab. Any router. The guy thought for a long time before picking out the thermostat on the wall.
Best "wriggle in your seat" interview I got was were the potential boss spent an hour defaming the company's own product. Then he wanted to know what *I* thought about what he just said. At the end of the interview, he said, "Tell me three reasons not to hire you." Man. That's a tough one. I gave some pretty weak answers, but they must have been the right ones, because I ended up working with that company for three years.
And then you can have some guy who knows his stuff, wants the job, and will settle for the pay and hours... and then he turns out to be a total slacker, a political player, or worse, a thief. Check those references! I have found that candidates who did great work will have former bosses and coworkers who will boast about it, even miss them. Beware of people who give only friends or relatives as references. I almost never follow up with those. I want proof you do good work.
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www.punkwalrus.com - what is this guy doing?
They're great! The web interface makes them work over a LAN, and I hooked mine up to my.plan so I can see if my burger is done or not while I am in another office.
The GFDK (George Foreman Development Kit) that you can download off their site is really rockin', too! All you need is a compiler like gcc, and you can make your own modules. I used perl for more complicated meats, like fillet mignon.
Note: this does not cook as well as my P4/3.06ghz and NVidia together, but it's really handy because I was always too lazy to clean the grease from the fans anyway, and when I wrapped stuff in foil, I tended to short out my mobo.
Cool think is, I got it to work with Quake, and when I'm getting fragged, I can smell the meat cooking! I may be gibbed meat product, but that doesn't mean I go hungry.
Mmm mm! That's good gibbed meat sizzling! _______________________________________ ___________ ___________ www.punkwalrus.com - quality bantha pudu for the masses
Let me share the love of this game. I got an Atari emulator for Win32 just FOR this game. Play the funky 4-channel music, and mine and work your way on planet Irata. A friend of mine had it, and we'd play for hours. I always beat him because he was so bad at money. I think I learned some of my first taste for business because of that game.
In the mid 1990s, I told people about it, and they acted like it never existed. But then again, some of these people didn't get into computing until Windows 3.1 or so. But luckily, the web came around, and I was able to get an emulator.
Now if I could get Mail Order Monster again? I'd be all set.
Being tech support for family and friends is okay for those who ask nicely. I like a challenge. I even volunteer. A majority are like that.
Now, what I don't like? People who get rude about it. They ask your help, ask you a favor, and then get all mad and take out their frustrations on you. This is even moreso when they are at fault (e.g., forgot to plug monitor in). And my personal pet peeve: lies. "I never installed anything!" or "It was like that when I got it." They get all defensive, and I want to say, "Look, I don't care if you look at porn! Everyone's got a hobby. But don't try and BS me because that's a porn program in your systray launching your browser every five minutes! Someone had to install it!"
Or people who never listen or learn. "Didn't I tell you not to download that?" (nod) "Didn't I tell you that you can't trust files from people you don't know?" (nod) "So why did you do that?" (pause) "It said it was a greeting card!" These people would die within minutes on the street. "The nice man told me he would come back with my ATM card when he was done with it!"
I also agree when it's assumed you'll drop whatever you are doing to fix the problem, too. I like to help, but I don't like being taken for granted.
Slashdot Mirror
eBay and Paypal didn't care, and this didn't really shock me. I mean, the guy (or gal) made $600 in $20 increments. I just chalk it up to 'Caveat Emptor,' and honestly, item for item, I have been conned more in garage sales and flea markets with a lot less purchases, so eBay is still okay with me.
Easily fixed (on a net connection):
This is *the* book to get if you know a little about *NIX/*BSD and want to flesh out what you know. Maybe if I was some expert guru, I'd find the book's informalness and coverage over basics to be a distraction, but no book of this ilk is ever everything for everybody. I'd call this a sort of "middle knowledge" book: not for raw newbies, not for hardcore experts, but for a lot of people in between.
Part of the problem I have had with OpenBSD is a lot of people in the OpenBSD community are strict RTFMA about any help, and the book even mentions that OpenBSD people ARE a bit aloof, and even WHY this is (a good explanation, IMHO, without making OpenBSD people look like eltist snobs). I think if people are told, "Look, this is an OS *by* hard-core programmers who don't have time to answer 'WTF is pf scroood up R wat? LOL!!' or 'set up my sendmail for me, or I'll have a tantrum,' but want more intelligent questions about in-depth subjects," they'd be more understanding, and maybe start with FreeBSD, and work their way towards OpenBSD. Or do like I did, and found some more newbie-friendly OpenBSD people to share accomplishments with.
OpenBSD is a great complement to the *BSD family, and this book can really teach you a lot about how it works, the philosophy behind it, and why things are the way they are.
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www.punkalrus.com - OpenBSD user for over two years
This letter was hysterical because apart from being in slightly broken English, it mentioned the name "Toho Co., Ltd" about every sentence, and was full of self-praise about how great and honorable Toho Co., Ltd was.
At first, he ignored it. Then the company came down on him because they got a letter from Toho Co., Ltd's lawyers. There was some debate, and the company decided that it wasn't worth their time to try and deal with this, so they dropped the issue.
The coworker *was* a Godzilla fan, so he wrote back to Toho Co., Ltd that "Godzilla" was not a trademark, but "Gojirra," the proper kanakata spelling was a trademark, and he did not have an account with that name, nor did he have the ability to open an account with that name unless they paid or company for the e-mail address.
They never replied. He had the letter posted on his door for a while, with a photoshop of Godzilla attacking our building. Then Godzilla 2000 ("Ferris Beuller vs. Godzilla") came out, and I think Toho Co., Ltd probably never wanted to deal with Americans again.
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www.punkwalrus.com - As seen on "The Gong Show"
There are good ideas here, but I often use my 64MB thumb drive just to transfer files from work to home and vice versa - there's never many mainstays on it.
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Right now, I have:
- Antivirus software installers and updates (we had a problem at work)
- Some mp3's a guy at work gave me making fun of Steve Ballmer's "Developers Developers Developers!" speech
- A few floppy disk images for various utilities
- Some work spreadsheets I worked on at home
- Two semi-funny short movies
- Two zipped backups of various work projects
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www.punkwalrus.com - What a world, what a world!
Most cacheing systems (expecially AOL's) are a little smarter than that. They store only static sites, not any site that has a php, asp, or anything with a cgi, or at the very least, anything with a "?" in the URL. Otherwise, all web boards, search engines, and other dynamic sites would be rendered useless. You would go the weather.com and only see the weather 24 hours ago (or whenever the last fetch was made), for example.
For example, having worked with cacheing systems, I know that nothing on CNN was cached locally, which is why CNN (and most news sites) slowed to a crawl during 9/11, but other non-9/11-related sites were fine. Almost all news sites have dynamic pages, and will not be cached.
1. Food prepared at central plant, loaded on robot-driven trucks.
2. Trucks drive to special robot truck loading dock, robot vendomat forklift takes cargo, goes to back of vendomat on specialized tracks, and sorts cargo into cubicles
3. People pay in front of vendomat and eat food like they do now
The thing is, robots can only automate so much. Even with the "human-style brain" there will have to be some system of self-repair on par with a human. Think about it, if you are at work, and you cut your finger, you go "ow," slap on a band-aid, and go on with your work. A robot has to be pretty sophisticated to do that. They lose a wire, anything could happen. Sure, they got have a team of robots fixing robots, but the cost involved would seriously outweight a human doing the same job.
I also see a lot of Union complications if we end up in an android-like situtaion. It may not be preventable from immigrants "taking all the jobs" (I won't go there, but being an American who was not born here, I am very pro-immigrant), but preventable created robot "people" would certainly be stopped. You'd have to think about the arguments that would be created:
1. Is it REALLY cheaper to create a robot mass working force?
2. Why create it if a human can do the same job?
3. When enough people are out of work, who will buy the goods the robots create?
As par of a long term strategy, "robots run everything" will be scrutinized by lawmakers.
Bollocks.
This is what they mean by "non-GUI" installer. Instead of pretty windows and shiny icons shaped like big-eyed penguins, you get something that looks like this:
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Here is our completely and utterly incomprehensible non-gui installation screen:
[ ] I can't stand it, help! What? Where are my shoes? Stupid Slack!
[ ] I think my mouse is broke... stupid Slack!
[ ] Hmmm... I think I may have to use the keyboard... Stupid me!
[ ] Hey, I found the space, arrow, and tab keys! Yay me!
[X] This is pretty easy!
[ OK ] [ Cancel ] [ Back to other Distro ]_ _
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*That's* "Non-GUI?" The way people bitched, kvetched, and whined, I thought when I put in the CD, I'd get a flashing cursor, waiting for me to do some "pull out of the air" command like LOAD"$",8 and enter in the hex value of the primary IDE boot sector address or something. Dude, that may not be mouse-enabled or have fancy anti-aliasing, but it's "GUI" to me because:
- It is graphical (it has lines and colors!)
- It is a user interface (it's for me!)
- It's how I have been installing Red Hat via Serial interface/low RAM anyway - Back when I started computing, the only GUI we had was a menu system like that...
There he goes again... "back in the day" man...
I think Slackware is a pretty tight distro, I wouldn't call it non user-friendly. I'd say it's friendlier than Debian! [not to knock Debian, it also has great uses and noble goals]
I'd say anyone who knows Liunx/UNIX, and has an i386 box should give this a try at least.
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www.punkwalrus.com - They'll only take away my gun when they pry my cold dead fingers off Logitech gamepad
I'd say the odds are against us.
I used to know a guy who lived in Guam who told me about some of the scary stuff locals would find in trawlers. Most were tiny fish, but a few were big enough to give a trout a run for its money. One of the stories he used to tell me:
And now, neither will I. He also said some people he grew up with caught a deep sea ribbon fish (oarfish?) that was over 40 feet long. He said he didn't care what anyone said, that thing was a sea serpent if he ever saw one.We had a guy who put time limits on all his code. I can't recall his exact method (I wasn't the one who discovered it), but it this case, it was simple to figure out and remove, but is was basically something hidden in an innocuous winsock API call that:
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a. Checked the day's date
b. If Today() greater than xVarDateInHex then
- Figuartively roll 20 sided die
- If date less than roll then end
End if
It was pretty obvious because the call was something like winsock.0pen where the "0" in "0pen" was a zero (which didn't compile because it was a function call that started with a number, which is how we found it).
If this would have worked, the program would have seemed to abort abnormally with no error call, but would work better and better as the month went on, until it always seemed to work from the 20th onwards... only to stop working on the 1st of the next month, then repeat the cycle. Very hard to troubleshoot. If it would have worked.
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www.punkwalrus.com - What hath God wrought?
Food: "Ha ha I am so l33t that I don't need f00d but jolt and chips and reeces peanut butter cups and... [thud]." There will be some people, who for a multitude of reasons, are not socially experienced enough to realize that you can't sustain long off of just Jolt Cola and nacho chips. This causes headaches, moodiness, poor game play, and in some extreme cases, serious health issues. Combined with lack of sleep, you might actually have someone just pass out, get sick, or in a majority of the cases, be a total asshat because their body is starving for nutrients. Plus, and I can't stress this enough, ENCOURAGE THEM TO DRINK WATER! Caffeine is an okay stimulant, but it's also a diuretic (makes you pee a lot, which gets back to what others suggested about adequate bathrooms). Diuretics dehydrate you. So do salty foods. And especially alcohol. Dehydration is not fun. Not fun at all. It will make you crabby, moody, and eventually pass out so you'll have to go to the hospital.
Sleep: "Ha ha, sl33p is for lusorz, you STUPID FSCK AND GET THESE SPIDERS OFF OF ME MY STEPMOTHER NEVER TOLD ME SHE CARED ABOUT ME!!!!" Lack of sleep can really affect moodiness. Combine it with improper food and social awkwardness, and you have the recipe for an outburst or angry behavior between people. I have seen fights start between good friends just because they haven't slept in a while. Or in many cases, people do fall asleep, while playing, right in the chair. That's right, they are taking up valuable space or at least an IP you could use elsewhere. I have been to many LAN events where there was some guy, snoozing where he sat, with a trickle of drool soaking a spot into his retro Transformers/Atari shirt.
First Aid: "Hi... I forgot my insulin, and I am not feeling so... [thud]." Have a plan of action in case someone gets cut deeply by a wire cutter, or beat up badly in a parking lot fight, or passes out because they didn't take their prescribed meds. Oh-ho, add drugs to the mix? I can just image taking someone down off of acid playing Doom 3, whenever that comes out. I heard a story about one kid who was passing out Ex at some anime gaming gathering in Baltimore, and telling everyone it was a "stimulant." Ex does NOT make you a better DDR player, trust me.
Most of this stuff probably won't happen, but keep an idea in the back of your head of some emergency plan. Personally? I'd have a few hours each day to clear out the room, and have those posted like "room closed at 6am and 3pm for one hour." That way, you can vacuum, straighten up, clear out drunks and sleepers, reconfigure things, redo the network (if needed), assess damage, and so on. It also gives people time to stretch their legs, go eat real food, see sunlight, etc...
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www.punkwalrus.com - We is no longer ordinary.
IM > See e-mail on the usual server. Password is "Fn68bX4" and the IP is 10.4+
E-mail> The IP to login to is +.10.120, and add "g6h0" to the password.
But really, often we just go to the office and tell them.
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www.punkwalrus.com - Benny rated, Benny non-approved!
> impossible- my stereo is one chipboard- what can kids do with that?
Huh. That's the very same complaint said among today's Lego enthusiasts. "Too many specialized pieces." But that's just bollocks. I mean, if you really want to, you'll do it. Even if you have to use coconuts, palm fiber, and metal smelted from minerals extracted from sea water: you'll find the way if your will is strong enough. I bet, right now, some kid out there took apart a discarded cell phone (a "specialized" piece), and is playing with the chips, trying to decode how they work.
This guy's site is proof the concept is still alive. I bet when people said, "Why do you do this? They already have VGA cards! What a waste of time..." he didn't even hear them.
Why? Because we can.
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www.punkwalrus.com - "One of the biggest trainwrecks of journals" - Benny
I used to help run a BBS run on an Atari ST (can you believe it?), and the system was so obscure, that we developed a "DOS simulator" for those who tried to hack our BBS and its (limited) games. We faked things like "dir" and "erase" and even "edlin." It was a multiline, so if the hacker tried to "IM" himself (back then software called it "teleport"), he got through, but if he tried it to others, it went to /dev/null. When people did a "who," they got the job :
Hacker: Port 3: [Thinks he's hacking the BBS, tell his mommy!]
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www.punkwalrus.com - Shift to the left, shift to the right! Stand up, sit down, byte byte byte!
In my experience, passive agressive works best:
Programmer: Okay, you don't have to compile. It's not like anything you do will impact anyone anyway. You're just Linux, a geek-coder's OS, I understand... no no, I am not angry. Far from it. You are open source, you can do whatEVER you want... and if you don't want to let people play fun games on you, hey, who am I to judge? It's not like I can compile. I am sure that you feel not compiling games is what's in your best interest. [in baby talk] Besides, running X-windows on mommy's little poopsie-woopsie 'puter must have tired iddums out. Yes it did! Oh, you have decided to compile now? Okay... whatever you want, it's not my choice...
Mod that to funny? Don't bother. I really have had sessions like this while compiling my own code. I need to go lie down now...
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www.punkwalrus.com - Yeah, it's as weird as you've heard.
And the US Government probably uses more copies of M$ products than I can fathom. I seriously doubt a group of people who pay $600 for a toilet seat are going to violate a contract with a big company like Microsoft. I bet M$ rapes them like a 2 cent whore.
I must agree though about the XP pirating. One of the people who got the new install CD said, "Two years ago I could have gotten this free from a server Hong Kong." But if we got caught? Oh man, I wouldn't want to be near this place if that shit hit the fan. Massive bad juju there...
Come on, be serious. You have to be joking. What are you, nuts? It sucked donkey dick, but completely left the balls alone, which is why whole job sucked. You have to pay attention to the balls if you want to do the job right.
Seriously, I have to agree that Netscrape 4.x wasn't that great, but it has a cult following of the like that reminds me of Amiga users (who are, inexplicably to this day, still peddling the BeOS or porting FreeBSD to that Motorola-driven goodness).
But I don't think it was JUST Netscape that sucked that lead to browser dominance. It was the MSIE free part combined with "down your throat" bundling with the OS (where they claimed "you can't extract it, it's an essential part" ... oh, whatever!), and those of us geezers who were alive back then recalled how Netscape was treated like shareware anyway. It was essentially free, because it didn't stop working after 30 days, and they bundled with a lot of the starting ISPs at the time, and they made money that way. But yes, it had a bloated, poor business model, and that's what probably killed Netscape and led to AOL's secret playing card in the OS wars (you want to see some really weird bedfellows, look at AOL and M$ sometime).
And no one can honestly give me the "MSIE was better" schpiel because so was Betamax and the Tucker automobile. M$ has huge, mind-numbing powers when it comes to marketing and promotion, and that's their greatest strength over programming, products, or back room business practices.
So we started a policy that banned XP for "security reasons" and made a sweet deal with Red Hat. Unless you had a valid reason to use an XP product, you used Win2K or Linux. Linux meant that we could use older machines on our server farms and pay virtually nothing because, funny enough, Red Hat gave us a site license for support. Not that we use it (or need to) very much.
Suddenly, Microsoft "produced" a disk with Product activation disabled (sort of, it's kind of complicated), but claimed all kinds of voodoo like it had a copy protection so complex, we couldn't burn a new one from the master... even sector-by-sector copying. Bollocks. You could use any XP disk, just as long as you followed the directions MS gave us for the "master CD." Now we have a lot of the CDs all over the place, with a site key (and no, I won't give it to you, use Linux and be free) and the "process" to make it work legally by our contract. It took them two years to backpedal that far.
It's weird, because for so long, Windows was essentially "free" (although, not legally) because until WinXP, more than half the people I knew had "borrowed" an OS CD from "somewhere." Microsoft knew that (I mean, come on), and like a drug pusher, made sure the buyer was hooked before they started charging (my proof is how they made MSIE a dominant browser over Netscape). But it's not that easy anymore. Linux desktops are getting better and better, and while Windows is easier to use for the most part, it's lack of flexibility, anti-customer anticompetitive stance, and their brazen arrogance in the field is really dulling their blade.
But in this case, I can't fault them for trying to give away freebies, I mean, trade shows do that all the time. But what we should really be wary of is when they get politics involved, and claim stuff like DeCSS is proof that Linux should be banned in the US or something equally as stupid to us techies, but is all greek to your average politician who could be $wayed by $ome other thing$...
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www. - where else can you get blogged to death?
Now I see Usenet like a button I have: "Reading Usenet is like drinking from a firehose, posting to Usenet is like shouting at people in a passing rollercoaster, and archiving Usenet is like saving used toilet paper." Usenet is like a philosophical particle accelerator which creates opinions of such energy and instability that they could not exist in nature, and a great way of being annoyed by people I otherwise never would have met.
Now a newsgroup that gets less than 100 posts a day are ones that haven't been harvested by spammers yet. I knew it was over when in a base about Nordic culture was innundated with binaries of jpegs which I am sure were not Viking artifacts or ethnologist and museum lore.
That's why I spent my time on e-mail lists and UBB/phpBB boards. Sure, we get jerks, but well-moderated forums with e-mail verification keep a lot of idiots away.
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"Internet is so huge and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life
Oh, and how to move Mt. Fuji? First, I'd have to establish the reasons for the move so I could best guess what the project goal is. I mean, move it to get more flat land? It's an eyesore for some mad scientist who got a mansion in the Fujishima hills? They need the basalt and pumice? There might be easier ways to achieve good results for any of these.
Okay, no reason, just move it? By "move" to you mean "remove" as in you don't care what happens to Mount Fuji as long as it's gone? Or move it several feet to the left? Or move it to the ocean to get more valuable farm land? Just move it a few miles offshore? Which shore? The Pacific side with the trench, or the Chinese side?
I bet I wouldn't be hired by Microsoft, because obviously, I ask too many questions, and try to find practical and efficient solutions to inane initial concepts in the first place.
Example: I got a resume once where a "Unix expert" had half his resume page taken up with how he mastered the "man" command. Really? Tell me how you'd find options on any Unix command. You don't know, huh? How about cp? mv? How do I find out who's logged into the box? Ask? Yeah, don't call us, we'll call you.
A coworker asked a potential network admin candidate to point to a router in the lab. Any router. The guy thought for a long time before picking out the thermostat on the wall.
Best "wriggle in your seat" interview I got was were the potential boss spent an hour defaming the company's own product. Then he wanted to know what *I* thought about what he just said. At the end of the interview, he said, "Tell me three reasons not to hire you." Man. That's a tough one. I gave some pretty weak answers, but they must have been the right ones, because I ended up working with that company for three years.
And then you can have some guy who knows his stuff, wants the job, and will settle for the pay and hours... and then he turns out to be a total slacker, a political player, or worse, a thief. Check those references! I have found that candidates who did great work will have former bosses and coworkers who will boast about it, even miss them. Beware of people who give only friends or relatives as references. I almost never follow up with those. I want proof you do good work.
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www.punkwalrus.com - what is this guy doing?
They're great! The web interface makes them work over a LAN, and I hooked mine up to my .plan so I can see if my burger is done or not while I am in another office.
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The GFDK (George Foreman Development Kit) that you can download off their site is really rockin', too! All you need is a compiler like gcc, and you can make your own modules. I used perl for more complicated meats, like fillet mignon.
Note: this does not cook as well as my P4/3.06ghz and NVidia together, but it's really handy because I was always too lazy to clean the grease from the fans anyway, and when I wrapped stuff in foil, I tended to short out my mobo.
Cool think is, I got it to work with Quake, and when I'm getting fragged, I can smell the meat cooking! I may be gibbed meat product, but that doesn't mean I go hungry.
Mmm mm! That's good gibbed meat sizzling!
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www.punkwalrus.com - quality bantha pudu for the masses
Will require me to get CTHULHU? Cisco Training: Home User, Limited Home Use?
In the mid 1990s, I told people about it, and they acted like it never existed. But then again, some of these people didn't get into computing until Windows 3.1 or so. But luckily, the web came around, and I was able to get an emulator.
Now if I could get Mail Order Monster again? I'd be all set.
Now, what I don't like? People who get rude about it. They ask your help, ask you a favor, and then get all mad and take out their frustrations on you. This is even moreso when they are at fault (e.g., forgot to plug monitor in). And my personal pet peeve: lies. "I never installed anything!" or "It was like that when I got it." They get all defensive, and I want to say, "Look, I don't care if you look at porn! Everyone's got a hobby. But don't try and BS me because that's a porn program in your systray launching your browser every five minutes! Someone had to install it!"
Or people who never listen or learn. "Didn't I tell you not to download that?" (nod) "Didn't I tell you that you can't trust files from people you don't know?" (nod) "So why did you do that?" (pause) "It said it was a greeting card!" These people would die within minutes on the street. "The nice man told me he would come back with my ATM card when he was done with it!"
I also agree when it's assumed you'll drop whatever you are doing to fix the problem, too. I like to help, but I don't like being taken for granted.
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