Here is one I (inadvertently) did a few years ago. Set your pager to vibrate and throw in in your desk drawer, then go on vacation. Assuming nobody catches it when it rings it will vibrate for about 3 seconds every 15 minutes or so, long enough to catch random people's attention but not long enough for them to figure out what it is. Sounds like a mean bumble bee.
I know there is a joke in there about a 'fraidy girl screaming in the dark, a tree in the forest falling, and nobody around to hear it... but I just can't put it together this morning.
This about the smartest thing I have read in this thread yet. OP: even in a good economic environment hacking on your buddies is something best reserved for your best, best buddies (tip - if you can't call this guy in the middle of the night to move a dead human corpse, he isn't your best friend)... in the existing employment and economic environment I recommend saving the shenanigans for off-site.
It's all fun and games until someone loses an eyeball - and then it's just a game (find the eyeball.)
Count the number of non-valie HTML tags, or the number of comment tags, or number of font tags. I think most spam that uses HTML formatting to break up words (to bypass word filters) use HTML tags of one of those types, like a LOT of them, and I don't envision OE filling the email with a zillion font or bogus or comment html tags.
Of course your de-spamulator needs to pre-process the email and parse it to check the email body for HTML tags, but if the number of FONT, comment, or bogus tags is more than about 10 then I 100% assure it that it is spam.
You, like me, don't actually remember phone numbers. You remember mnomonic patterns on a 3x4 keypad and use muscle memory to actually dial the numbers, much the way your fingers just automatically hit keys on your computer keyboard without thinking about where they are... it probably wouldn't matter if your phone had the buttons labeled because you don't look at them anymore - you just push them in the geometric order you have conditioned yourself to use to access a particular phone number.
It is way more than 'I like the old style' - you and I actually 'need' the old style.
Jesus this has got to be the best idea I have read yet in this thread. You would only need one air line with a splitter at the end, and you could either run the ink up via small hoses (the air lines for fishtanks come to mind, or just use the little bottles that hang below the newbie airbrush kits to make it even simpler.
The entire exercise boils down to the stepper motor being able to accurately move around the media, and simple solenoids to mash the airbrush button.
Understanding how an old HP pen plotter works would mesh well with this idea and almost give you all the answers. Heck, you might be able to use HP plotter drivers to actually drive it - and vector graphics would be a lot faster than bitmaps... not as precise, but a lot faster.
Forget a generic plastic lunchbox, put this thing in a Superman or Batman lunchbox like we took to school as kids and THAT would be cool. Maybe still be room in there for a PB/J and a twinkie too.
Bluetooth the mouse and a tiny keyboard, cut a hole for the 8" LCD on the back side and you would be all set.
Well other than trying to take the sqrt of a negative number, here is how that plays out on my Casio fx-7000G:
2462 / sqrt ( 645 - 2453 );
The cool thing is that that entire string shows on the display (operators also) so you can see it as you enter it.
It has a 16 wide x 8 tall display and graphing functionality, a little programming (every character in the alphabet can be assigned a number, and up to 10 'programs' of functions strung together with a ; in between) but the coolest thing is seeing the algebra on the screen exactly like it is on paper, and a redo function to go back into the entered equation and fix it after you hit EXE. Finally you can freehand an equation with the 'graph y =' key (ie, graph y = 3x^2 -2x + 3 ) and there you go, nice parabolic curve with X and Y axis.
Personally, I love it. And similar to an RPN, it takes some getting adjusted to.. very fun to watch someone borrow it, hit 4+5 and have 4+5 (with no answer) show up on the screen.
Heck, here is a perfect way for all the ISP's to make this RIAA lawsuit crap go away : when they come asking 'Who has IP address 192.168.2.105 so we can sue them ?!?' just give them bogus replies, pick a customer at random (even better, give them a customer at random that moves less than 100M a month, pretty much insuring it ISN'T a P2P trader.) It will only take about 5 of these in a row before the common public totally freaks out over this witch hunt and says ENOUGH!
Bingo! At a company I did IS/IT at quite a few years ago they (hmm as there were only two IT guys I guess I could say 'we') would buy random clone machines and switch gray market vendors to shave $50 off the price of a $1200 486DX/2-66 box. The proliferation of different hardware brands, interfaces, etc. was a tech support nightmare and we ended up needing to hire another IT guy just to keep everything running.
The minute you need one more guy to support your infrastructure it costs you $50,000 plus benefits and HR overhead to make up all the times you save $50 on the price of a machine. Ouch.
If you (through centralization) can support all those end users with the same number of IT staff, instead of adding ten more guys, over the course of three years (lifecycle of an operating system, machine, etc.) you are looking at a savings of $1,500 per desktop.
That would have been the punchline to a really funny joke if it the on-site 'system admin' didn't really say it and really mean it.
Anyways, with RAID-1 you have insured through redundant hardware that a single drive failure will not destroy your data - but you haven't actually backed it up. RAID won't protect against software or wetware problems (del *.bak somehow becomes del *.* before you get your daily recommended allowance of caffeine, or what have you.)
As an extension to the discussion (because the OP also has half a T of space)... how do you as a home user back up (in the true sense of the word) half a T of data? I'm not so interested in how it gets done in theory, I want to know how/. peeps do it in reality.
Personally I currently maintain two pretty much identical servers and occasionally copy the entire dataset from one to the other - then I go back to doing real work on the original. In the event that something goes wrong I have a warm spare (just change the drive mappings on any of the machines on my network and I am back up and running, although the data replication is manual and thus not always totally up to date.). Not optimal from a cost perspective (although the machines themselves were only like $300 apiece) but it works really, really well. Or it would, in something (knock on wood) were to happen.
Use Windows NT (or 2000 or XP, I am guessing) software RAID to sling them all together into a massive striped set and make one big massive drive out of them.
To expound on your example, what if a water park in Hollywood was entertaining only 50 people a day and using half the water available to California every day (like maybe it was being used in a particularly wasteful manner.) But they were only paying 50 regular people's worth of water bills, based on people and not based on actual consumption.
People are not dying of dehydration in CA, but it is a limited resource. And 50 particularly wasteful people were using enough water to supply half the state, every day.
Good analogy, I like it.
Remember this isn't about folks like us that burn through 10G a month. This is about the top 1% of the mega-warez/P2P/Anime sites moving 300G or more a month. All you can drink liquor at a party means all you can consume. The minute some lamers just start uncorking bottles and pouring them on the ground is the minute us serious drinkers say - enough : all you can drink is all you can drink but even unlimited drinks has a reality check.
Just based on the fact that you had enough bandwidth left over to post that thread indicates to me that you are one of us, not one of them. From what the rest of the thread is pointing at, we are talking about sick amounts of bandwidth, not the 20G/mo you or I would normally consider 'excessive'.
I totally agree, wrote something to that effect like on page four. And God knows sys/admins can occasionally go on a power trip (not that I ever did, ahem.)
Ya, I alluded to that. Actually I occasionally set up (for friends, private server) a UT2003/Q3A server and my system peaks out at about 4 inbound connections. This of course could be because of my upstream bandwidth throttled to 128kb/s, or maybe because I only have 4 friends.
I read this entire thread and now have a question. Here is a serious question to all the nay-sayers: Assuming that the top 1% of users is using 50% of the bandwidth, and by eliminating that top 1% of users from the customer base the other 99% would get their bandwidth doubled and their pings halved - would you agree when Comcast's business solution?
If you were part of the 1% that kept the cablemodem pegged wide open 24x7, moving more than 300 Gigabytes per month (that is 10 Gigs each and every day without letting up) then you get sliced off the network, but anybody short of that gets their pipe doubled... would you go for it? Your P2P stuff would go twice as fast, and your web pages would load twice as fast (and your gamer pings would halve, in theory, for this quesiton.)
Just curious. 1GB/month isn't reasonable. 10GB/month... I dunno, would have to check my usage. What if they were capping users at 100GB/month - where would you stand on that? I guess it depends on how severe the penalty for occasional overage was, not that I have ever (nor could, I imagine) managed to sustain 3GB/day for 30+ days at a time.
I think we have hit on the real issue. Could it be that the guys they are targetting are not the ones doing what you and I consider excessive (8G a month, two or three ISO distros a week) but are moving half a Terabyte (500G) or more each month? What about a small group of guys, lets say a dozen warez/P2P guys from school, serious hardcore guys that keep their 1.544Mb/s cablemodems absolutely pegged 24x7 (that is about 430G per month, each, or 5 TERABYTES combined per month)... 5TB of bandwidth in a month used by 12 guys - that is enough bandwidth to sustain all of Africa and these warez monkeys are choking it down on a scale three orders of magnitude larger than you consider 'excessive' (5G/mo vs. 5T/mo.)
Envision what would happen to the ISP's average user's experience when they booted those 12 guys. Your throughput would double overnight from an average of 425kb/s to 900kb/s. Your ping in Quake drops from 68ms to 38ms.
I am 100% with everybody that says they are a little above average but don't think that they deserve to be capped... because odds are they don't. This isn't about you or I, it is about the crack-babies on a mission to suck the Internet dry of every instance and form of video, audio, game, and application ever produced by man over the past century.
From what I have been reading, the top 1% uses HALF of the total ISP bandwidth. It isn't about reducing the overall average, it is about the top 1% of the people causing the entire customer base to pay twice as much as they would have otherwise (as this thread indicates that the ISP buys bandwidth upstream by volume, not max or theoretical throughput.)
Using your example, top 10% of the users using 20% of the bandwidth is a very slight skewing of the bandwidth distribution from a statistical perspective and is not something I would want the ISP jacking with - but if the reality is the top 1% using 50% of the bandwidth then I can see where they are coming from. Doesn't mean I approve of their methods (particularly not disclosing what is 'ok' by them, keeping the limits a 'secret') but I understand their business perspective on the matter.
Based on what I have read and seen the biggest rational and universally agreed upon gripe everybody here has isn't that there are caps, but that the actual cap is being kept a secret and that the penalty for going over the cap is pretty severe (ie, losing the only broadband available to many subscribers.) It is entirely possible that there isn't a 'documented' limit and that some ISP net/admin just looks over the logs and picks out some uberWarezMonkeyz off the top as the worst offenders and cranks out these notes without letting them know what the limit is - because the limit is arbitary and subject to interpretation (and thus abuse.)
The trick of course is not getting caught. The first time you mention that you are leeching off your neighbor's unWEP'ed access point they freak out and go home to enable encryption.
Oh wait, you mean do it in a cooperative manner... I hadn't considered that/grin
Slashdot Mirror
Here is one I (inadvertently) did a few years ago. Set your pager to vibrate and throw in in your desk drawer, then go on vacation. Assuming nobody catches it when it rings it will vibrate for about 3 seconds every 15 minutes or so, long enough to catch random people's attention but not long enough for them to figure out what it is. Sounds like a mean bumble bee.
I did not do this on purpose.
I know there is a joke in there about a 'fraidy girl screaming in the dark, a tree in the forest falling, and nobody around to hear it ... but I just can't put it together this morning.
This about the smartest thing I have read in this thread yet. OP: even in a good economic environment hacking on your buddies is something best reserved for your best, best buddies (tip - if you can't call this guy in the middle of the night to move a dead human corpse, he isn't your best friend) ... in the existing employment and economic environment I recommend saving the shenanigans for off-site.
It's all fun and games until someone loses an eyeball - and then it's just a game (find the eyeball.)
Count the number of non-valie HTML tags, or the number of comment tags, or number of font tags. I think most spam that uses HTML formatting to break up words (to bypass word filters) use HTML tags of one of those types, like a LOT of them, and I don't envision OE filling the email with a zillion font or bogus or comment html tags.
Of course your de-spamulator needs to pre-process the email and parse it to check the email body for HTML tags, but if the number of FONT, comment, or bogus tags is more than about 10 then I 100% assure it that it is spam.
D'oh.
That was HTML and BODY between less than and greater than signs.
Just delete every inbound email that contains this in the body : and
You, like me, don't actually remember phone numbers. You remember mnomonic patterns on a 3x4 keypad and use muscle memory to actually dial the numbers, much the way your fingers just automatically hit keys on your computer keyboard without thinking about where they are ... it probably wouldn't matter if your phone had the buttons labeled because you don't look at them anymore - you just push them in the geometric order you have conditioned yourself to use to access a particular phone number.
It is way more than 'I like the old style' - you and I actually 'need' the old style.
Pager ...
Cell phone
PDA
If I get one more device for my belt I qualify for a big yellow belt buckle the shape of a BAT.
Jesus this has got to be the best idea I have read yet in this thread. You would only need one air line with a splitter at the end, and you could either run the ink up via small hoses (the air lines for fishtanks come to mind, or just use the little bottles that hang below the newbie airbrush kits to make it even simpler.
... not as precise, but a lot faster.
The entire exercise boils down to the stepper motor being able to accurately move around the media, and simple solenoids to mash the airbrush button.
Understanding how an old HP pen plotter works would mesh well with this idea and almost give you all the answers. Heck, you might be able to use HP plotter drivers to actually drive it - and vector graphics would be a lot faster than bitmaps
Forget a generic plastic lunchbox, put this thing in a Superman or Batman lunchbox like we took to school as kids and THAT would be cool. Maybe still be room in there for a PB/J and a twinkie too.
Bluetooth the mouse and a tiny keyboard, cut a hole for the 8" LCD on the back side and you would be all set.
Well other than trying to take the sqrt of a negative number, here is how that plays out on my Casio fx-7000G :
.. very fun to watch someone borrow it, hit 4+5 and have 4+5 (with no answer) show up on the screen.
2462 / sqrt ( 645 - 2453 );
The cool thing is that that entire string shows on the display (operators also) so you can see it as you enter it.
It has a 16 wide x 8 tall display and graphing functionality, a little programming (every character in the alphabet can be assigned a number, and up to 10 'programs' of functions strung together with a ; in between) but the coolest thing is seeing the algebra on the screen exactly like it is on paper, and a redo function to go back into the entered equation and fix it after you hit EXE. Finally you can freehand an equation with the 'graph y =' key (ie, graph y = 3x^2 -2x + 3 ) and there you go, nice parabolic curve with X and Y axis.
Personally, I love it. And similar to an RPN, it takes some getting adjusted to
Just hire a dyslexic lady to process those requests. It works for the government.
Or the article for that matter?
Heck, here is a perfect way for all the ISP's to make this RIAA lawsuit crap go away : when they come asking 'Who has IP address 192.168.2.105 so we can sue them ?!?' just give them bogus replies, pick a customer at random (even better, give them a customer at random that moves less than 100M a month, pretty much insuring it ISN'T a P2P trader.) It will only take about 5 of these in a row before the common public totally freaks out over this witch hunt and says ENOUGH!
Can I copywrite or patent that idea?
-The real payoff is with the centralization.
Bingo! At a company I did IS/IT at quite a few years ago they (hmm as there were only two IT guys I guess I could say 'we') would buy random clone machines and switch gray market vendors to shave $50 off the price of a $1200 486DX/2-66 box. The proliferation of different hardware brands, interfaces, etc. was a tech support nightmare and we ended up needing to hire another IT guy just to keep everything running.
The minute you need one more guy to support your infrastructure it costs you $50,000 plus benefits and HR overhead to make up all the times you save $50 on the price of a machine. Ouch.
If you (through centralization) can support all those end users with the same number of IT staff, instead of adding ten more guys, over the course of three years (lifecycle of an operating system, machine, etc.) you are looking at a savings of $1,500 per desktop.
That would have been the punchline to a really funny joke if it the on-site 'system admin' didn't really say it and really mean it.
... how do you as a home user back up (in the true sense of the word) half a T of data? I'm not so interested in how it gets done in theory, I want to know how /. peeps do it in reality.
Anyways, with RAID-1 you have insured through redundant hardware that a single drive failure will not destroy your data - but you haven't actually backed it up. RAID won't protect against software or wetware problems (del *.bak somehow becomes del *.* before you get your daily recommended allowance of caffeine, or what have you.)
As an extension to the discussion (because the OP also has half a T of space)
Personally I currently maintain two pretty much identical servers and occasionally copy the entire dataset from one to the other - then I go back to doing real work on the original. In the event that something goes wrong I have a warm spare (just change the drive mappings on any of the machines on my network and I am back up and running, although the data replication is manual and thus not always totally up to date.). Not optimal from a cost perspective (although the machines themselves were only like $300 apiece) but it works really, really well. Or it would, in something (knock on wood) were to happen.
And you?
Use Windows NT (or 2000 or XP, I am guessing) software RAID to sling them all together into a massive striped set and make one big massive drive out of them.
To expound on your example, what if a water park in Hollywood was entertaining only 50 people a day and using half the water available to California every day (like maybe it was being used in a particularly wasteful manner.) But they were only paying 50 regular people's worth of water bills, based on people and not based on actual consumption.
People are not dying of dehydration in CA, but it is a limited resource. And 50 particularly wasteful people were using enough water to supply half the state, every day.
Good analogy, I like it.
Remember this isn't about folks like us that burn through 10G a month. This is about the top 1% of the mega-warez/P2P/Anime sites moving 300G or more a month. All you can drink liquor at a party means all you can consume. The minute some lamers just start uncorking bottles and pouring them on the ground is the minute us serious drinkers say - enough : all you can drink is all you can drink but even unlimited drinks has a reality check.
Just based on the fact that you had enough bandwidth left over to post that thread indicates to me that you are one of us, not one of them. From what the rest of the thread is pointing at, we are talking about sick amounts of bandwidth, not the 20G/mo you or I would normally consider 'excessive'.
I totally agree, wrote something to that effect like on page four. And God knows sys/admins can occasionally go on a power trip (not that I ever did, ahem.)
Ya, I alluded to that. Actually I occasionally set up (for friends, private server) a UT2003/Q3A server and my system peaks out at about 4 inbound connections. This of course could be because of my upstream bandwidth throttled to 128kb/s, or maybe because I only have 4 friends.
I read this entire thread and now have a question. :
... would you go for it? Your P2P stuff would go twice as fast, and your web pages would load twice as fast (and your gamer pings would halve, in theory, for this quesiton.)
Here is a serious question to all the nay-sayers
Assuming that the top 1% of users is using 50% of the bandwidth, and by eliminating that top 1% of users from the customer base the other 99% would get their bandwidth doubled and their pings halved - would you agree when Comcast's business solution?
If you were part of the 1% that kept the cablemodem pegged wide open 24x7, moving more than 300 Gigabytes per month (that is 10 Gigs each and every day without letting up) then you get sliced off the network, but anybody short of that gets their pipe doubled
Just curious.
Did they tell you what the usage caps were?
... I dunno, would have to check my usage. What if they were capping users at 100GB/month - where would you stand on that? I guess it depends on how severe the penalty for occasional overage was, not that I have ever (nor could, I imagine) managed to sustain 3GB/day for 30+ days at a time.
Just curious. 1GB/month isn't reasonable. 10GB/month
Bingo!
... 5TB of bandwidth in a month used by 12 guys - that is enough bandwidth to sustain all of Africa and these warez monkeys are choking it down on a scale three orders of magnitude larger than you consider 'excessive' (5G/mo vs. 5T/mo.)
... because odds are they don't. This isn't about you or I, it is about the crack-babies on a mission to suck the Internet dry of every instance and form of video, audio, game, and application ever produced by man over the past century.
I think we have hit on the real issue.
Could it be that the guys they are targetting are not the ones doing what you and I consider excessive (8G a month, two or three ISO distros a week) but are moving half a Terabyte (500G) or more each month? What about a small group of guys, lets say a dozen warez/P2P guys from school, serious hardcore guys that keep their 1.544Mb/s cablemodems absolutely pegged 24x7 (that is about 430G per month, each, or 5 TERABYTES combined per month)
Envision what would happen to the ISP's average user's experience when they booted those 12 guys. Your throughput would double overnight from an average of 425kb/s to 900kb/s. Your ping in Quake drops from 68ms to 38ms.
I am 100% with everybody that says they are a little above average but don't think that they deserve to be capped
From what I have been reading, the top 1% uses HALF of the total ISP bandwidth. It isn't about reducing the overall average, it is about the top 1% of the people causing the entire customer base to pay twice as much as they would have otherwise (as this thread indicates that the ISP buys bandwidth upstream by volume, not max or theoretical throughput.)
Using your example, top 10% of the users using 20% of the bandwidth is a very slight skewing of the bandwidth distribution from a statistical perspective and is not something I would want the ISP jacking with - but if the reality is the top 1% using 50% of the bandwidth then I can see where they are coming from. Doesn't mean I approve of their methods (particularly not disclosing what is 'ok' by them, keeping the limits a 'secret') but I understand their business perspective on the matter.
Based on what I have read and seen the biggest rational and universally agreed upon gripe everybody here has isn't that there are caps, but that the actual cap is being kept a secret and that the penalty for going over the cap is pretty severe (ie, losing the only broadband available to many subscribers.) It is entirely possible that there isn't a 'documented' limit and that some ISP net/admin just looks over the logs and picks out some uberWarezMonkeyz off the top as the worst offenders and cranks out these notes without letting them know what the limit is - because the limit is arbitary and subject to interpretation (and thus abuse.)
The trick of course is not getting caught. The first time you mention that you are leeching off your neighbor's unWEP'ed access point they freak out and go home to enable encryption.
... I hadn't considered that /grin
Oh wait, you mean do it in a cooperative manner