It was a joke, very few people are RainMan enough to memorize 30 MAC addresses. I am doing good to remember 6 or 7 and I have a photographic memory.
Granted, this is one place where standardizing on hardware helps because the first few digits of the MAC address are vendor specific. If you use 100% SMC cards in your organization, you will see a pattern (thus making it easier to spot an outsider.)
Here is how it works: Financial need is roughly Cost of your tuition, books, living expenses minus (your contribution + your parents contribution)
The college considers your parents directly responsible for your college education so a hefty burden (fiscally) is expected of them. If they own their home and have significant savings accounts, the school expects them to liquidate some of the equity in those assets to the tune of about 25% or so of their total worth, and apply that towards your education.
The college considers you also partially responsible, so it figures some magic math and comes up with an annual number that is roughly 10-20 hours a week at minimum wage, aka somewhere in the $2,500 - $5,000 range, plus or minus. Some of this can be in the form of student loans, or getting a job.
What is left over, is your financial need. They try to cover this with a Pell Grant, scholarships, and finally more student loans.
If your parents have a home they have owned more than 10 years in the New England or California regions (even if it isn't paid off yet) you are pretty well screwed because of the rampant house value increases over the past decade. A house bought in either area for $250k ten years ago is worth somewhere in the $600k-$750k+ range, meaning they have at LEAST $400k in equity... and the college takes that into account when determining what they 'can' pay (which is often very different from what they are 'willing' to pay.)
And yes, it sucks to have rich parents (particularly if they are only rich on paper) who have told you basically piss off, they are not helping with your education.
-Besides, college is fun and is often a good place to mature and improve other important social skills.
More importantly, college is the place where you can meet thousands of women just dying to experiment with their newfound sexuality. In college even computer geeks can get laid.
In college I knew a guy that had like 5 associates degrees and no bachelors degrees - with good reason : he had been going to school for close to 9 years, taking out student loans the whole way. He had to keep enrolling in college so his loans wouldn't come due, but if he 'graduated' he would have had to start making payments in about 6 months.
-Like I said in another post, apply for all those paltry little scholarships; no one ever does, and you can "MAKE $$$ FAST" as the default winner.
They don't have to be small either - there were three full ride scholarships (four years of tuition) up for grabs from the college I attended (a long time ago)... I got one, another student from my school got one, and one went unclaimed - there were only two applicants for this particular scholarship.
I think I had to write a 1 page essay as to why I thought I should get the scholarship. Writing that one pager paid off at an hourly rate of close to $4,000 per hour.
-:-
Just a note, on the 'make money at home using your computer' deals, one of them is helping people apply for scholarships for like... $100 or something. They get insanely long lists of scholarships for which you might be eligible and you just go down the list and apply for every single one of them. I'm not suggesting you get the entire 'make money at home using your computer' package (I know a guy that did, cost like $5k or something) but find one of the people that did and pay them $100, get the list and just go crazy sending in applications.
If I was a betting person, I would be that most Windows 2000 Pro installs were done from a Verbatim/Memorex/Fujifilm (tm) CD-R with the words 'Win2k Pro' scribbled on it in black magic marker.
Envision the market share XP would have if it was a little easier to copy.
Or close along those lines, Trojans or Logic Bombs. Close in concept, but wicked different in payload - a Trojan that comes in on port 80 to the leet home user's web site (gotta run server if you gonna be leet) runs a program on that server which probes out to gather data from mapped drives - later on that user VPN's in and has some fairly important data available on some mapped drives, which can be rifled through and summarized, sent back out via any number of ways.
Oh man, I feel for you - they so totally don't appreciate you. I mean why did they bring you into this world if they were going to force you to use cheap ass Belkin network router hardware that can't support... what was it, 10 computers under the same roof? They need to learn to -appreciate- you, to take into account your elite skills and contributions to the household. Heck, they ought to be paying you to live there, because it isn't like either one of them could keep their computers running and fully operational, free of spam and virii, kernels patched and drives defragged.
Angst - it is a harsh reality for a guy trapped under the iron thumb of a couple of people that just don't understand. We feel for you, and we are pulling for you. Once you taste the sweet nectar of freedom you get in the real world, you will never want to go back. Good luck surviving next semester under such emotional traumatic conditions.
-Its like someone bought a Linksys and powered it up without attaching it to anything else on the internal or external side.
Never attribute to malice, that which is easily explained by ignorance. I would give about 50/50 odds that it was a wireless link between friends (Quake3A/UT/whatever deathmatch), and 50/50 that your first assessment was correct (somebody simply powered it up without plugging it into the Internet) - maybe swiped it from work to use as a network hub. Funny story though, tempts me to do the same.
I agree - that is why I said that an insider could pretty easily circumvent this simply by adding his MAC address, or cloning one that is on the list. If you do not already know any white-listed MAC addresses, however, how are you to find out?
I guess it is possible to sniff that out of the air, but if it is 128bit WEP'ed... how reasonable is that?
Locking the connections to specific MAC addresses is about your strongest link if protection from unknown outsiders is your concern. WEP128 is nice, the SSID thing is spiffy but if the WAP is rejecting connections from anybody not on the MAC white-list, unless someone is on the inside of your organization and can get his hands on that list I would say that you are going to be pretty tight.
Remember - you don't have to be uncrackable, you just have to be harder to crack that the other guy. My WAP has 64bit WEP and that's it - but in my hood there are 4 WAPs, two of which are totally open - it is easier for someone that wants to play to get into those systems than to get into mine.
If security is a serious concern, consider installing (on a different channel) a nearby wireless access point with no encryption, with a SSID that seems to indicate that it is worth hacking into, on a lame box connected to the internet but not on your internal network. Keep your eyes on this box watching for intruders. I think the term is 'honeypot' but I am not overly fond of that term.
My first thought was the status screen part of the maintenance / configuration web interface to my router. Have it up, refresh it from time to time and just look at all the MAC addresses. Any clown that can't become familiar enough with 20-30 MAC addresses that are legit to memorize them, thus indentifying unwelcome intruders by looking at this screen... doesn't belong in IT.
And yes, that is one of the things I check from time to time when I want to reassure myself that my system hasn't been compromised.
But you are right, banks probably shouldn't be using wireless, nor should they allow their home users VPN'ing in to use wireless. WEP is strong enough to protect my pr0n and warez, but it isn't strong enough (IMHO) to protect $14.6B worth of assets... because anybody that can memorize 23 MAC addresses probably isn't going to have too much trouble burning through a 56bit key to get his hands on some of it.
I would guess a lot of it has to do with the amounts ingested daily. I consume the caffeine contained in 4 tea bags (black tea) about every 8 hours (I make tea by the teapot and then chill it, drink it straight over ice, no sugar or anything else.) According to back of the envelope rough calculations I take in about 50 to 100 mg of caffeine per hour, 600-800mg per day.
That is pretty close to a full gram of caffeine per day for me, and I guess I am on the 'heavy user' side of the scale. If I just stopped drinking tea I would kill someone (probably myself, but no guarantees.)
No. I accidently did this on vacaction (actually I accidently do this every vaction) and one day I was so totally enthralled with all the fun stuff I was doing I completely forgot to drink ice tea (my caffeine of choice.) By four in the afternoon I was a complete wreck, curled into a fetal little ball crying from a hurting body and head, couldn't figure out why. Once I realized what was happening it was too late, but the folks at Starbucks thought it was funny.
Four day weekends are the worst for me because I am away from the office and off my schedule and routine of getting ice tea throughout the day, I am sooo not looking forward to this Sunday.
If I had to guess, I would say it would take between 2 weeks and a month, and he would be one hurting SOB the first two weeks.
24 comments and nobody has offered up a way to overclock this thing yet? Heck, the only reason I read it was to get a grasp of just how bad/. was going to crank this guy's handle : simple ways to create a 48" parabolic back mirror, ways to create a 48" diameter tube for that mirror, maybe someone would come up with a four bounce set of mirrors set up between two houses as a way to use even larger mirrors or a longer focal length or a wider field of view...
Surely somebody is going to figure out a way to turn a kiddy-pool into a 84" reflector for one of these things...
Take six ounces of raw Lithium and drop it into a large bucket of water. If you survive, come back and tell us about Lithium + Water not belonging in the 'nearly perfect bomb' scenario.
I am kidding, naturally. If you drop six ounces of raw Lithium into a bucket of water it will explode in a massive purple fireball and if you are in the immediate area you will die. I have done it with a pea sized little scoop of Lithium and gained a new appreciation for Alkali metals. Maybe it was Potassium. Crap I don't remember, I just remember that it was impressive enough not to do it again.
If I had to guess, I would say that the chemical reaction was 2Li(s) + 2H2O = 2LiOH(aq) + H2(g). It is an exothermic reaction creating lots of heat, and if I'm not mistaken the hydrogen gas coming off in copious amounts is also fairly reactive (think Hindenburg.) All in all it is a fun reaction unless you are in the middle of it, in which case it ceases to be fun.
Here is the big problem with that - just as my example showed, by and large the biggest source of what the world perceives as 'bugs' in software are not really bugs at all - they are instances where the developer had not anticipated a certain senario and didn't code to handle it.
Speed limiters sound great, until you realize they were developed by people that have no clue about how the real world operates and didn't take into account how to handle even the simplest of exception cases. The big problem with that is - a fatal exception error in this case isn't a blue screen, it is a dead person.
Just a thought : maybe the Police can spend less time worrying about people that drive 70mph on the freeway and do something about the drug dealers in high schools, the traffic in white slavery, and.. I dunno.. maybe that whole terrorism thing?
An impending lateral collision, such as getting T-Boned at an intersection by some clown that is not paying attention (talking on his cell phone) and about to blow past a stop sign. Slowing down will not save you, evasive swerving will not save you. Speeding up may be your only chance.
Folks - this isn't about speeding. OnStar is everything : GPS, location tracking, speed, locking and unlocking your car doors, disabling the engine, knowing how many people are in the car (determined by how many seat belts are latched), and the real kicker : real time audio surveillance.
You read that right - they can open the phone connection on your in-dash phone and listen to everything said and done in the vehicle. In theory they should announce themselves, but don't kid yourself.
Think you are being entirely too cool taking your secretary out in your new Mercedes Benz for a ride in the country and a romp in the back seat? Not only do they know where you picked her up, where you went, where you stopped in the country to tap a little ass, they can listen in on the juicy parts.
If you think they are not already doing it, think again. Watch the movie Enemy of the State and remember it is about 5 years old. That's about 28 in computer years.
As for what happens when we no longer have floppy drives, good question. Actually quite telling as my new desktop doesn't have a floppy disk and I wanted to burn a bootable CD today. Had to fire up another machine (that has a floppy) to create a binary image of the floppy disk (used Roxio to make the image on that machine), copy the image file across the network to my new box and finally.. success.
Not sure what is going to happen if I ever need to update the BIOS, although I alway leave a small (4G) partition on the hard drives of all my machines formatted FAT32 so I can access them when I boot from the BootCD I make (I use the Windows 98 boot disk as a master, I like it because when it boots it pretty much guarantees that I can access the CD-ROM and has a bunch of nifty tools in a ramdrive (like format, fdisk, etc..)) I guess I could put the BIOS update program on that partition and run it after I boot from my BootCD.
As for FreeDOS - I don't have it, haven't felt compelled to track it down as I have a few Microsoft versions laying around.
BIOS flash software needs to be run. In order for a computer to run it needs to be booted and have some OS. There are no guarantees that the computer being flashed even has a hard drive yet, or that the hard drive is talking because the machine is using an old BIOS.
The computer can't really be running a full house OS from the hard drive when it is time to flash the BIOS, because when the BIOS flashes it needs to power down and power back up again without giving the OS a chance to politely close everything down and disconnect all the users etc.
The 'Windows98 Boot Disk' isn't a Windows boot disk any more than the bash shell is a KDE operating system - the 'Windows98 Boot Disk' is actually a bootable disk that invokes the command.com command interpreter, also known as the DOS (disk operating system) shell originally made by Microsoft and occasionally reengineered by Digital Research et.al., and is probably the most widely pirated piece of software known to man. It doesn't have to be DOS7 (the one associated with Win98) either, it can be DOS 6.22, DOS 5.0 too.
And here is the good part - all of the boot files to get this command shell fit in under 500k, so they will fit on just about any floppy disk or bootable media on the planet (360k floppy excluded.) I am not aware of any other boot OS + command shell for x86 machines that fits on a single floppy disk. If there is a way to boot Linux to a command shell using a single floppy (no hard drive, CD ROM, ramdrive tricks - just a single floppy) I am eager to learn about it - but if there isn't... then that will explain why BIOS updates are not being eagerly created by vendors for Linux.
DOS boot floppies are pretty much free - Microsoft doesn't really care if you make a boot floppy to flash your BIOS even if you don't use Windows. You can download and dd a DOS boot floppy from the net.
PS - I didn't mean to come across as confrontational, I am just pointing things out.
How else are you going to boot an x86 system that only has a floppy drive?
Slashdot Mirror
If they could have gotten a 2G model down to the $99 price point it would have destroyed the market for ALL flash based players over night.
It was a joke, very few people are RainMan enough to memorize 30 MAC addresses. I am doing good to remember 6 or 7 and I have a photographic memory.
Granted, this is one place where standardizing on hardware helps because the first few digits of the MAC address are vendor specific. If you use 100% SMC cards in your organization, you will see a pattern (thus making it easier to spot an outsider.)
Here is how it works:
... and the college takes that into account when determining what they 'can' pay (which is often very different from what they are 'willing' to pay.)
Financial need is roughly
Cost of your tuition, books, living expenses
minus
(your contribution + your parents contribution)
The college considers your parents directly responsible for your college education so a hefty burden (fiscally) is expected of them. If they own their home and have significant savings accounts, the school expects them to liquidate some of the equity in those assets to the tune of about 25% or so of their total worth, and apply that towards your education.
The college considers you also partially responsible, so it figures some magic math and comes up with an annual number that is roughly 10-20 hours a week at minimum wage, aka somewhere in the $2,500 - $5,000 range, plus or minus. Some of this can be in the form of student loans, or getting a job.
What is left over, is your financial need. They try to cover this with a Pell Grant, scholarships, and finally more student loans.
If your parents have a home they have owned more than 10 years in the New England or California regions (even if it isn't paid off yet) you are pretty well screwed because of the rampant house value increases over the past decade. A house bought in either area for $250k ten years ago is worth somewhere in the $600k-$750k+ range, meaning they have at LEAST $400k in equity
And yes, it sucks to have rich parents (particularly if they are only rich on paper) who have told you basically piss off, they are not helping with your education.
-Besides, college is fun and is often a good place to mature and improve other important social skills.
More importantly, college is the place where you can meet thousands of women just dying to experiment with their newfound sexuality. In college even computer geeks can get laid.
In college I knew a guy that had like 5 associates degrees and no bachelors degrees - with good reason : he had been going to school for close to 9 years, taking out student loans the whole way. He had to keep enrolling in college so his loans wouldn't come due, but if he 'graduated' he would have had to start making payments in about 6 months.
Trapped.
-Like I said in another post, apply for all those paltry little scholarships; no one ever does, and you can "MAKE $$$ FAST" as the default winner.
... I got one, another student from my school got one, and one went unclaimed - there were only two applicants for this particular scholarship.
... $100 or something. They get insanely long lists of scholarships for which you might be eligible and you just go down the list and apply for every single one of them. I'm not suggesting you get the entire 'make money at home using your computer' package (I know a guy that did, cost like $5k or something) but find one of the people that did and pay them $100, get the list and just go crazy sending in applications.
They don't have to be small either - there were three full ride scholarships (four years of tuition) up for grabs from the college I attended (a long time ago)
I think I had to write a 1 page essay as to why I thought I should get the scholarship. Writing that one pager paid off at an hourly rate of close to $4,000 per hour.
-:-
Just a note, on the 'make money at home using your computer' deals, one of them is helping people apply for scholarships for like
If I was a betting person, I would be that most Windows 2000 Pro installs were done from a Verbatim/Memorex/Fujifilm (tm) CD-R with the words 'Win2k Pro' scribbled on it in black magic marker.
Envision the market share XP would have if it was a little easier to copy.
Or close along those lines, Trojans or Logic Bombs. Close in concept, but wicked different in payload - a Trojan that comes in on port 80 to the leet home user's web site (gotta run server if you gonna be leet) runs a program on that server which probes out to gather data from mapped drives - later on that user VPN's in and has some fairly important data available on some mapped drives, which can be rifled through and summarized, sent back out via any number of ways.
Might as well post it on the web.
Oh man, I feel for you - they so totally don't appreciate you. I mean why did they bring you into this world if they were going to force you to use cheap ass Belkin network router hardware that can't support ... what was it, 10 computers under the same roof? They need to learn to -appreciate- you, to take into account your elite skills and contributions to the household. Heck, they ought to be paying you to live there, because it isn't like either one of them could keep their computers running and fully operational, free of spam and virii, kernels patched and drives defragged.
Angst - it is a harsh reality for a guy trapped under the iron thumb of a couple of people that just don't understand. We feel for you, and we are pulling for you. Once you taste the sweet nectar of freedom you get in the real world, you will never want to go back. Good luck surviving next semester under such emotional traumatic conditions.
-Its like someone bought a Linksys and powered it up without attaching it to anything else on the internal or external side.
Never attribute to malice, that which is easily explained by ignorance. I would give about 50/50 odds that it was a wireless link between friends (Quake3A/UT/whatever deathmatch), and 50/50 that your first assessment was correct (somebody simply powered it up without plugging it into the Internet) - maybe swiped it from work to use as a network hub. Funny story though, tempts me to do the same.
I agree - that is why I said that an insider could pretty easily circumvent this simply by adding his MAC address, or cloning one that is on the list. If you do not already know any white-listed MAC addresses, however, how are you to find out?
... how reasonable is that?
I guess it is possible to sniff that out of the air, but if it is 128bit WEP'ed
Locking the connections to specific MAC addresses is about your strongest link if protection from unknown outsiders is your concern. WEP128 is nice, the SSID thing is spiffy but if the WAP is rejecting connections from anybody not on the MAC white-list, unless someone is on the inside of your organization and can get his hands on that list I would say that you are going to be pretty tight.
Remember - you don't have to be uncrackable, you just have to be harder to crack that the other guy. My WAP has 64bit WEP and that's it - but in my hood there are 4 WAPs, two of which are totally open - it is easier for someone that wants to play to get into those systems than to get into mine.
If security is a serious concern, consider installing (on a different channel) a nearby wireless access point with no encryption, with a SSID that seems to indicate that it is worth hacking into, on a lame box connected to the internet but not on your internal network. Keep your eyes on this box watching for intruders. I think the term is 'honeypot' but I am not overly fond of that term.
My first thought was the status screen part of the maintenance / configuration web interface to my router. Have it up, refresh it from time to time and just look at all the MAC addresses. Any clown that can't become familiar enough with 20-30 MAC addresses that are legit to memorize them, thus indentifying unwelcome intruders by looking at this screen ... doesn't belong in IT.
... because anybody that can memorize 23 MAC addresses probably isn't going to have too much trouble burning through a 56bit key to get his hands on some of it.
And yes, that is one of the things I check from time to time when I want to reassure myself that my system hasn't been compromised.
But you are right, banks probably shouldn't be using wireless, nor should they allow their home users VPN'ing in to use wireless. WEP is strong enough to protect my pr0n and warez, but it isn't strong enough (IMHO) to protect $14.6B worth of assets
I would guess a lot of it has to do with the amounts ingested daily. I consume the caffeine contained in 4 tea bags (black tea) about every 8 hours (I make tea by the teapot and then chill it, drink it straight over ice, no sugar or anything else.) According to back of the envelope rough calculations I take in about 50 to 100 mg of caffeine per hour, 600-800mg per day.
That is pretty close to a full gram of caffeine per day for me, and I guess I am on the 'heavy user' side of the scale. If I just stopped drinking tea I would kill someone (probably myself, but no guarantees.)
No.
I accidently did this on vacaction (actually I accidently do this every vaction) and one day I was so totally enthralled with all the fun stuff I was doing I completely forgot to drink ice tea (my caffeine of choice.) By four in the afternoon I was a complete wreck, curled into a fetal little ball crying from a hurting body and head, couldn't figure out why. Once I realized what was happening it was too late, but the folks at Starbucks thought it was funny.
Four day weekends are the worst for me because I am away from the office and off my schedule and routine of getting ice tea throughout the day, I am sooo not looking forward to this Sunday.
If I had to guess, I would say it would take between 2 weeks and a month, and he would be one hurting SOB the first two weeks.
You forgot '... and we were thankful.'
24 comments and nobody has offered up a way to overclock this thing yet? Heck, the only reason I read it was to get a grasp of just how bad /. was going to crank this guy's handle : simple ways to create a 48" parabolic back mirror, ways to create a 48" diameter tube for that mirror, maybe someone would come up with a four bounce set of mirrors set up between two houses as a way to use even larger mirrors or a longer focal length or a wider field of view ...
...
Surely somebody is going to figure out a way to turn a kiddy-pool into a 84" reflector for one of these things
Just point Adobe Acrobat at http://www.google.com and back up the entire Internet to one big .PDF file.
Take six ounces of raw Lithium and drop it into a large bucket of water. If you survive, come back and tell us about Lithium + Water not belonging in the 'nearly perfect bomb' scenario.
I am kidding, naturally. If you drop six ounces of raw Lithium into a bucket of water it will explode in a massive purple fireball and if you are in the immediate area you will die. I have done it with a pea sized little scoop of Lithium and gained a new appreciation for Alkali metals. Maybe it was Potassium. Crap I don't remember, I just remember that it was impressive enough not to do it again.
If I had to guess, I would say that the chemical reaction was 2Li(s) + 2H2O = 2LiOH(aq) + H2(g). It is an exothermic reaction creating lots of heat, and if I'm not mistaken the hydrogen gas coming off in copious amounts is also fairly reactive (think Hindenburg.) All in all it is a fun reaction unless you are in the middle of it, in which case it ceases to be fun.
Here is the big problem with that - just as my example showed, by and large the biggest source of what the world perceives as 'bugs' in software are not really bugs at all - they are instances where the developer had not anticipated a certain senario and didn't code to handle it.
.. I dunno .. maybe that whole terrorism thing?
Speed limiters sound great, until you realize they were developed by people that have no clue about how the real world operates and didn't take into account how to handle even the simplest of exception cases. The big problem with that is - a fatal exception error in this case isn't a blue screen, it is a dead person.
Just a thought : maybe the Police can spend less time worrying about people that drive 70mph on the freeway and do something about the drug dealers in high schools, the traffic in white slavery, and
An impending lateral collision, such as getting T-Boned at an intersection by some clown that is not paying attention (talking on his cell phone) and about to blow past a stop sign. Slowing down will not save you, evasive swerving will not save you. Speeding up may be your only chance.
Motorcycle 101.
Folks - this isn't about speeding. OnStar is everything : GPS, location tracking, speed, locking and unlocking your car doors, disabling the engine, knowing how many people are in the car (determined by how many seat belts are latched), and the real kicker : real time audio surveillance.
You read that right - they can open the phone connection on your in-dash phone and listen to everything said and done in the vehicle. In theory they should announce themselves, but don't kid yourself.
Think you are being entirely too cool taking your secretary out in your new Mercedes Benz for a ride in the country and a romp in the back seat? Not only do they know where you picked her up, where you went, where you stopped in the country to tap a little ass, they can listen in on the juicy parts.
If you think they are not already doing it, think again. Watch the movie Enemy of the State and remember it is about 5 years old. That's about 28 in computer years.
As for what happens when we no longer have floppy drives, good question. Actually quite telling as my new desktop doesn't have a floppy disk and I wanted to burn a bootable CD today. Had to fire up another machine (that has a floppy) to create a binary image of the floppy disk (used Roxio to make the image on that machine), copy the image file across the network to my new box and finally .. success.
Not sure what is going to happen if I ever need to update the BIOS, although I alway leave a small (4G) partition on the hard drives of all my machines formatted FAT32 so I can access them when I boot from the BootCD I make (I use the Windows 98 boot disk as a master, I like it because when it boots it pretty much guarantees that I can access the CD-ROM and has a bunch of nifty tools in a ramdrive (like format, fdisk, etc..)) I guess I could put the BIOS update program on that partition and run it after I boot from my BootCD.
As for FreeDOS - I don't have it, haven't felt compelled to track it down as I have a few Microsoft versions laying around.
Whatever else you do, change the default password on the router.
BIOS flash software needs to be run.
... then that will explain why BIOS updates are not being eagerly created by vendors for Linux.
In order for a computer to run it needs to be booted and have some OS.
There are no guarantees that the computer being flashed even has a hard drive yet, or that the hard drive is talking because the machine is using an old BIOS.
The computer can't really be running a full house OS from the hard drive when it is time to flash the BIOS, because when the BIOS flashes it needs to power down and power back up again without giving the OS a chance to politely close everything down and disconnect all the users etc.
The 'Windows98 Boot Disk' isn't a Windows boot disk any more than the bash shell is a KDE operating system - the 'Windows98 Boot Disk' is actually a bootable disk that invokes the command.com command interpreter, also known as the DOS (disk operating system) shell originally made by Microsoft and occasionally reengineered by Digital Research et.al., and is probably the most widely pirated piece of software known to man. It doesn't have to be DOS7 (the one associated with Win98) either, it can be DOS 6.22, DOS 5.0 too.
And here is the good part - all of the boot files to get this command shell fit in under 500k, so they will fit on just about any floppy disk or bootable media on the planet (360k floppy excluded.) I am not aware of any other boot OS + command shell for x86 machines that fits on a single floppy disk. If there is a way to boot Linux to a command shell using a single floppy (no hard drive, CD ROM, ramdrive tricks - just a single floppy) I am eager to learn about it - but if there isn't
DOS boot floppies are pretty much free - Microsoft doesn't really care if you make a boot floppy to flash your BIOS even if you don't use Windows. You can download and dd a DOS boot floppy from the net.
PS - I didn't mean to come across as confrontational, I am just pointing things out.
How else are you going to boot an x86 system that only has a floppy drive?