I'm 23 and I work in schools. The other day I was grabbing lunch in the caf (I usually either eat out or bring something in, but it was a rush day). Some of the girls in the school were giggling at a table when one approached me and told me how she "thought I was really cool and wanted to give me a hug." Now, obviously it was some sort of game for them but with the public opinion on such things nowadays it freaked the hell out of me. I managed to escape her and her giggling cohorts with just a pat on the back, but even that seemed inappropriate to me.
From my standpoint: I've been told from co-workers that I'm "not what one would expect" (looks-wise and attitude-wise) from a computer geek.
What I've also become aware of is that at 23, both my job and age make the girlies completely unviable on a non-professional basis, but that doesn't mean that it runs both ways. If you think back on the staff members that students had crushes on in High School... it's double-freaky to be one of those staff members.
Thankfully I don't have much in the way of a dress code at work. My hair stays uncombed, and I usually don't bother much on shaving, etc until the weekend is coming up. I can't imagine why anyone of a mature age would want to attract such females, for myself they freak the hell outta me and it costs me enough effort just to not attract them.
As mentioneded with the "assumed anonymity," how about the internet's influence on catching such individuals? Nail a pedophile site and suddenly you've got a collectin of CC #'s you can track down. Perhaps you don't need to arrest them just based on that, but you could certainly investigate them for real-life (as opposed to online) crimes along the same lines.
And how about the "FBI agents are little girls" lines from IRC? Yes, there are people that use MSN, IRC, etc to reel in young victimes. There are also authorities that use these same tools to nab criminals looking for victims. Seems to me it's easier to trace somebody's IP or lure him to an airport encounter than tracing down the guy that was trying to nab a kid using candy or a fuzzy animals, etc.
Sometimes it comes down to that some people just can't be "fixed." People with criminal sexual disorders quite often fall into these categories. Other career criminals are often in and out of prison on a regular basis
The problem that I have with the death penalty is that quite often you're looking at individuals who have committed singular (though heinous) crimes. They're shoved in a cell long enough to reflect on themselves and repent, and then fried in the end anyhow.
However, then you get the repeat offenders. Rapists, molesters, quite often they'll leave behind a history and even after getting out of prison they're still likely to re-offend. Yes, you might mistakenly incarcerate somebody once on a given crime, but 3 times? Three strikes, your out. I think that at a certain point people are past redemption. Keeping them in prison then is a drain on society as a whole, and releasing them will inevitable lead to more victims and broken lives.
The heating was dead in my apartment complex in the midst of some colder-than-usual winter weather. Even with blankets and an AMD CPU on my computer I couldn't keep warm.
I took a trip down to the local small hardware store, but unfortunately it was 4:25 and they'd closed at 4:00. I was just about to leave when somebody came to the door, asked what I needed, and let me in. I managed to get my heater and my toes survived the heater outage.
The heater was on sale too, so it really didn't cost much more than it might have at WalMart. Getting customer service when I needed it at almost a half-hour past closing, however, was something I would never expect from a place like WalMart (or any such larger corp).
Think along the same lines as MS. Yes, you can call and sit on hold with their customer-service department, hoping to get some service. You can email and get a canned answer. But some of the real love I've found came from smaller software companies with real people on the ends of a phone or email message... no canned answers and real solutions.
Indeed. Lower prices are more attractive in some ways, but are they better? Just ask some of the companies that have done business with WalMart, or even better the competition.
I'd imagine it is similar with MS, they can absorb costs that others (paid products) cannot. Suck down the extra $25/copy of a compatible product, and in the end you're still making money because the product only works on your $150+ Operating System.
The problem I see with DRM is that it's impossible to make it work without breaking either existing compatability or fair-use.
You can't stop the "evil dirty pirates" from copying discs without stopping the home user who just wants to make a backup/archival/play-on-my-laptop-while-I'm-travel ling copy.
Making a new format that people will have to move to means making it incompatible with older devices.
Making a device that complies with fair-use laws in various countrie is well nigh impossible too. I believe some places that *do* believe in proper fair use mean that you have to allow personal reproduction.
Oh, and Get this media companies. The analogue loop still exists. So long as your device needs to plug into my TV, it can also plug into my computer. So long as it needs to work with my headphones, it will plug into my soundcard. I don't need 20923x19334 pixels of resolution and 1024kbps-megasurround... and the people transferring the files online will be just as happy to view a scaled down version (hell, they're happy with cams).
Your video player needs to be compatible with our TV's. It's not like everyone will rush out to buy a new TV because the existing one doesn't have your DRM-filled digital connector, nor will the new ones take over for many, many years.
Stop restricting how we use our property, and how about focussing all that intelligence and co-operation on something more useful like features that *enhance* our viewing/listening experience.
To be fair, Sony was pushing memory sticks bigtime for awhile (they still push them now, but less so) and including them in anything that needed memory. Cameras, music devices, etc. The laptops came with a memory stick and either a built-in stick reader or a PCMCIA card with stick reader.
This was quite a time before it became popular to include MMC/SD/CF cardreaders in printers/laptops/PC's. So Sony wasn't format-friendly with out types of media, but definately ahead of the game with their own.
I wonder though, how do the sticks measure up for speed/etc compared to other formats?
Must be some hefty power going on then. I suppose in higher-class server rooms you might actually have a mains or something greater than what we have here. The key in our case is to shutdown for maintenance... so I guess I missed the point of this one. We do have a mains room but I don't remember a button, it's probably a lever or breaker.
You could still use something similar to the key by having a rotating power switch (that is, one that turns clockwise). Nothing to be inserted, it's still fast, but it's harder to accidentally bump off. Nicer than having a glass/lexan cover too, since there's nothing blocking it.
I've seen some buildings which have a 90-degree-turning lever which works along the same ways... still seems better than a button to me but not as good as a rotating switch (most are big enough that somebody could accidentally push down on the lever).
Simple solution to this one. At work we don't have a kill button. We have a kill key. It takes a little bit more work to "insert key" and "turn", but it's better than having incidents like this wherein somebody hits the big red button.
Plus, you can give the key only people that aren't idiots. With the big red button, you'll inevitably get somebody who thinks "hmm, wonder what would happen if I pushed this big red button duhhhhhh."
Since the tactic mentioned involves editing hosts to redirect a site, doesn't that already mean that the system has been owned by a virus/trojan? At that point the game is already lost
a) He did the right thing in notifying the ISP
b) The ISP did the right thing in killing the spammers for breach-of-contract
If the ISP *really* wanted to look good, perhaps they could help fund this guy's legal case? Otherwise, do we really want to set a precedent where simply *informing* a company that their contract is being breached is a civil liablity? Sounds like it would be bad for the ISP's and not just the public. Perhaps he should ask them about this...
Well, I've been an HP customer for a long time. I've also recommended them for clients and at work (to the tune of several printers, etc bought just in the last few months).
That being said, I'll be letting their CEO (Carly Fiorina) know me feelings about this, and that I will no longer recommend HP products.
Around here (BC, Canada) the X-rays are available as digital pics and can easily be printed. Not only are they easy to pull up, but anyone on the system (any city) can grab them. My doc also happily printed me out a few copies of my various x-rays, nothing special just a printout from the office laser printer.
I suppose the might charge for a glossy print, but I'd be surprised if they charged much for just whipping one off on the laserprinter.
So you have somebody connecting to your network, right? Here's a partial example from memory
In/etc/hosts, add 127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
To your firewall rules, add:
iptables -A prerouting -s 192.168.0.0/24 -d 66.35.250.150 -j REDIRECT
Setup a local DNS, using internet DNS for all names except those already in hosts
Add an apache entry like
<Virtualhost slashdot.org$gt;
</VirtualHost>>
Whammo, all connections going to slashdot get redirected to the local machine. The local machine serves out pages for anyone going to slashdot.org, which happen to clone slashdot. You could do the same for a self-signed cert on https, except the user would get a warning (which most click-through anyhow).
And yes, it's easy and it works. I've done this for a staff member whom was working his personal site on work time (cloned it, copied it locally, redirected and "modified" some of the products so there were a little more amusing).
I'm at this moment using an HP pavillion zd7000... so far everything works (including the broadcom wireless card) except for the built-in MMC cardreader.
That's because generally some of the functions needed by airsnort and others aren't supported by the original windows driver - or so I've read. Since NDISwrapper just loads the windriver, you're not able to get any extra functionality that an OS driver might include.
This is one thing I've wondered. Would it exlude others from making "baseball" video games, or just using the team names, logos from the official leagues?
One could still make a football/baseball game with fictional teams and players... hell it might even be better than using existing ones.
I find it interesting how well developed this is. I mean, how many linux coders actually have access to such hardware for testing/development purposes? Many of the larger projects can have a huge base of devs from within the userbase supplying patches/fixes/upgrades. I'm guessing that the userbase for the system described isn't very high (much less so for those able to much with running kernels on such)
Or perhaps most of it just scales up very nicely from smaller systems?
Depending on the hash method, can't different strings/files sometimes result in the same hash?
I'd assume that if you nailed somebody with 10+ hashes you've got them, but 1-2 matches might be false positives?
Also on the hash front, wouldn't any simple alterations to the file (format conversion, brightness/contrast adjust, resize, etc) break the hash? Perhaps even an "echo 1 >> somefile" would kill it?
Useful, certainly, but likely with some flaws/pitfalls.
That might work for you wish a desktop PC, but if you leave your PC on 24/7 (or have servers, which are generally always-on) then you can start to appreciate the impact on your power bill. Moving into the winter season, I replaced a Duron 1Ghz server (which died) with an low-power-consumption Epia. End result was that despite the fact that one generally uses more power in the winter (less light=more bulbs on, electric heating, etc) my bill actually lowered enough that the different was noticable.
And with the wattage there's always the heat issues too. In summer my AMD's get nice and toasty and can add uncomfortable heat to an already hot room. My laptop has a 2.8Ghz P4 (not P4m) which cranks out a lot of heat when running full bore, as well as requiring a 120W power brick.
As per the discussion, for the same reason google does as well as others. It encourages creativity, and one won't be punished for experimenting (provided said experiment doesn't damage company property) or attempting to think outside of the box. One might ask why a company would pay for employees to work on Open-Source projects, but some do.
And besides, it allows the company to at least partially profit from otherwise employee-owned ideas (say if they worked on it at home). Exempting those that signed draconian *your brain is ours* contracts, the company misses out if the employee thinks up something big outside of work.
This way should appeal to both PHB's and employees alike:
a) Employee can work on personal projects during X hours of a day.
b) Contract states that company is allowed to use product of employee's work freely, but not resell
c) Contract states that employee is given rights to resell product
The issues I can see come in where the project produces the component of a larger project. The company may wish to resell the larger project, so some allowance might need to be made, or maybe a close for xx percent profit from projects resold using components goes to the employee.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 23 and I work in schools. The other day I was grabbing lunch in the caf (I usually either eat out or bring something in, but it was a rush day). Some of the girls in the school were giggling at a table when one approached me and told me how she "thought I was really cool and wanted to give me a hug." Now, obviously it was some sort of game for them but with the public opinion on such things nowadays it freaked the hell out of me. I managed to escape her and her giggling cohorts with just a pat on the back, but even that seemed inappropriate to me.
From my standpoint: I've been told from co-workers that I'm "not what one would expect" (looks-wise and attitude-wise) from a computer geek.
What I've also become aware of is that at 23, both my job and age make the girlies completely unviable on a non-professional basis, but that doesn't mean that it runs both ways. If you think back on the staff members that students had crushes on in High School... it's double-freaky to be one of those staff members.
Thankfully I don't have much in the way of a dress code at work. My hair stays uncombed, and I usually don't bother much on shaving, etc until the weekend is coming up. I can't imagine why anyone of a mature age would want to attract such females, for myself they freak the hell outta me and it costs me enough effort just to not attract them.
As mentioneded with the "assumed anonymity," how about the internet's influence on catching such individuals? Nail a pedophile site and suddenly you've got a collectin of CC #'s you can track down. Perhaps you don't need to arrest them just based on that, but you could certainly investigate them for real-life (as opposed to online) crimes along the same lines.
And how about the "FBI agents are little girls" lines from IRC? Yes, there are people that use MSN, IRC, etc to reel in young victimes. There are also authorities that use these same tools to nab criminals looking for victims. Seems to me it's easier to trace somebody's IP or lure him to an airport encounter than tracing down the guy that was trying to nab a kid using candy or a fuzzy animals, etc.
Sometimes it comes down to that some people just can't be "fixed." People with criminal sexual disorders quite often fall into these categories. Other career criminals are often in and out of prison on a regular basis
The problem that I have with the death penalty is that quite often you're looking at individuals who have committed singular (though heinous) crimes. They're shoved in a cell long enough to reflect on themselves and repent, and then fried in the end anyhow.
However, then you get the repeat offenders. Rapists, molesters, quite often they'll leave behind a history and even after getting out of prison they're still likely to re-offend. Yes, you might mistakenly incarcerate somebody once on a given crime, but 3 times? Three strikes, your out. I think that at a certain point people are past redemption. Keeping them in prison then is a drain on society as a whole, and releasing them will inevitable lead to more victims and broken lives.
Whenever I think of WalMart I think of this:
The heating was dead in my apartment complex in the midst of some colder-than-usual winter weather. Even with blankets and an AMD CPU on my computer I couldn't keep warm.
I took a trip down to the local small hardware store, but unfortunately it was 4:25 and they'd closed at 4:00. I was just about to leave when somebody came to the door, asked what I needed, and let me in. I managed to get my heater and my toes survived the heater outage.
The heater was on sale too, so it really didn't cost much more than it might have at WalMart. Getting customer service when I needed it at almost a half-hour past closing, however, was something I would never expect from a place like WalMart (or any such larger corp).
Think along the same lines as MS. Yes, you can call and sit on hold with their customer-service department, hoping to get some service. You can email and get a canned answer. But some of the real love I've found came from smaller software companies with real people on the ends of a phone or email message... no canned answers and real solutions.
Indeed. Lower prices are more attractive in some ways, but are they better? Just ask some of the companies that have done business with WalMart, or even better the competition.
I'd imagine it is similar with MS, they can absorb costs that others (paid products) cannot. Suck down the extra $25/copy of a compatible product, and in the end you're still making money because the product only works on your $150+ Operating System.
The problem I see with DRM is that it's impossible to make it work without breaking either existing compatability or fair-use.
l ling copy.
You can't stop the "evil dirty pirates" from copying discs without stopping the home user who just wants to make a backup/archival/play-on-my-laptop-while-I'm-trave
Making a new format that people will have to move to means making it incompatible with older devices.
Making a device that complies with fair-use laws in various countrie is well nigh impossible too. I believe some places that *do* believe in proper fair use mean that you have to allow personal reproduction.
Oh, and Get this media companies. The analogue loop still exists. So long as your device needs to plug into my TV, it can also plug into my computer. So long as it needs to work with my headphones, it will plug into my soundcard. I don't need 20923x19334 pixels of resolution and 1024kbps-megasurround... and the people transferring the files online will be just as happy to view a scaled down version (hell, they're happy with cams).
Your video player needs to be compatible with our TV's. It's not like everyone will rush out to buy a new TV because the existing one doesn't have your DRM-filled digital connector, nor will the new ones take over for many, many years.
Stop restricting how we use our property, and how about focussing all that intelligence and co-operation on something more useful like features that *enhance* our viewing/listening experience.
Windows?
You might want to try IzArc
I've been using it for quite awhile now, supports not only zip/rar, but a whackload of others including tar.gz, tar.bz2, etc
Doesn't seem to have any hidden surprises in it either, just very useful (and free) software.
To be fair, Sony was pushing memory sticks bigtime for awhile (they still push them now, but less so) and including them in anything that needed memory. Cameras, music devices, etc. The laptops came with a memory stick and either a built-in stick reader or a PCMCIA card with stick reader.
This was quite a time before it became popular to include MMC/SD/CF cardreaders in printers/laptops/PC's. So Sony wasn't format-friendly with out types of media, but definately ahead of the game with their own.
I wonder though, how do the sticks measure up for speed/etc compared to other formats?
Must be some hefty power going on then. I suppose in higher-class server rooms you might actually have a mains or something greater than what we have here. The key in our case is to shutdown for maintenance ... so I guess I missed the point of this one. We do have a mains room but I don't remember a button, it's probably a lever or breaker.
You could still use something similar to the key by having a rotating power switch (that is, one that turns clockwise). Nothing to be inserted, it's still fast, but it's harder to accidentally bump off. Nicer than having a glass/lexan cover too, since there's nothing blocking it.
I've seen some buildings which have a 90-degree-turning lever which works along the same ways... still seems better than a button to me but not as good as a rotating switch (most are big enough that somebody could accidentally push down on the lever).
The price will be steep indeed. In fact, it will cost "an arm and a leg"
Simple solution to this one. At work we don't have a kill button. We have a kill key. It takes a little bit more work to "insert key" and "turn", but it's better than having incidents like this wherein somebody hits the big red button.
Plus, you can give the key only people that aren't idiots. With the big red button, you'll inevitably get somebody who thinks "hmm, wonder what would happen if I pushed this big red button duhhhhhh."
Since the tactic mentioned involves editing hosts to redirect a site, doesn't that already mean that the system has been owned by a virus/trojan? At that point the game is already lost
For those that don't know, what exactly is this number?
a) He did the right thing in notifying the ISP
b) The ISP did the right thing in killing the spammers for breach-of-contract
If the ISP *really* wanted to look good, perhaps they could help fund this guy's legal case? Otherwise, do we really want to set a precedent where simply *informing* a company that their contract is being breached is a civil liablity? Sounds like it would be bad for the ISP's and not just the public. Perhaps he should ask them about this...
Well, I've been an HP customer for a long time. I've also recommended them for clients and at work (to the tune of several printers, etc bought just in the last few months).
That being said, I'll be letting their CEO (Carly Fiorina) know me feelings about this, and that I will no longer recommend HP products.
Perhaps you can let her know as well?
Around here (BC, Canada) the X-rays are available as digital pics and can easily be printed. Not only are they easy to pull up, but anyone on the system (any city) can grab them. My doc also happily printed me out a few copies of my various x-rays, nothing special just a printout from the office laser printer.
I suppose the might charge for a glossy print, but I'd be surprised if they charged much for just whipping one off on the laserprinter.
So you have somebody connecting to your network, right? Here's a partial example from memory
/etc/hosts, add 127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
In
To your firewall rules, add:
iptables -A prerouting -s 192.168.0.0/24 -d 66.35.250.150 -j REDIRECT
Setup a local DNS, using internet DNS for all names except those already in hosts
Add an apache entry like
<Virtualhost slashdot.org$gt;
</VirtualHost>>
Whammo, all connections going to slashdot get redirected to the local machine. The local machine serves out pages for anyone going to slashdot.org, which happen to clone slashdot. You could do the same for a self-signed cert on https, except the user would get a warning (which most click-through anyhow).
And yes, it's easy and it works. I've done this for a staff member whom was working his personal site on work time (cloned it, copied it locally, redirected and "modified" some of the products so there were a little more amusing).
I'm at this moment using an HP pavillion zd7000... so far everything works (including the broadcom wireless card) except for the built-in MMC cardreader.
If you're still having problems, contact me
That's because generally some of the functions needed by airsnort and others aren't supported by the original windows driver - or so I've read. Since NDISwrapper just loads the windriver, you're not able to get any extra functionality that an OS driver might include.
This is one thing I've wondered. Would it exlude others from making "baseball" video games, or just using the team names, logos from the official leagues?
One could still make a football/baseball game with fictional teams and players... hell it might even be better than using existing ones.
I find it interesting how well developed this is. I mean, how many linux coders actually have access to such hardware for testing/development purposes? Many of the larger projects can have a huge base of devs from within the userbase supplying patches/fixes/upgrades. I'm guessing that the userbase for the system described isn't very high (much less so for those able to much with running kernels on such)
Or perhaps most of it just scales up very nicely from smaller systems?
Depending on the hash method, can't different strings/files sometimes result in the same hash?
I'd assume that if you nailed somebody with 10+ hashes you've got them, but 1-2 matches might be false positives?
Also on the hash front, wouldn't any simple alterations to the file (format conversion, brightness/contrast adjust, resize, etc) break the hash? Perhaps even an "echo 1 >> somefile" would kill it?
Useful, certainly, but likely with some flaws/pitfalls.
That might work for you wish a desktop PC, but if you leave your PC on 24/7 (or have servers, which are generally always-on) then you can start to appreciate the impact on your power bill. Moving into the winter season, I replaced a Duron 1Ghz server (which died) with an low-power-consumption Epia. End result was that despite the fact that one generally uses more power in the winter (less light=more bulbs on, electric heating, etc) my bill actually lowered enough that the different was noticable.
And with the wattage there's always the heat issues too. In summer my AMD's get nice and toasty and can add uncomfortable heat to an already hot room. My laptop has a 2.8Ghz P4 (not P4m) which cranks out a lot of heat when running full bore, as well as requiring a 120W power brick.
As per the discussion, for the same reason google does as well as others. It encourages creativity, and one won't be punished for experimenting (provided said experiment doesn't damage company property) or attempting to think outside of the box. One might ask why a company would pay for employees to work on Open-Source projects, but some do.
And besides, it allows the company to at least partially profit from otherwise employee-owned ideas (say if they worked on it at home). Exempting those that signed draconian *your brain is ours* contracts, the company misses out if the employee thinks up something big outside of work.
This way should appeal to both PHB's and employees alike:
a) Employee can work on personal projects during X hours of a day.
b) Contract states that company is allowed to use product of employee's work freely, but not resell
c) Contract states that employee is given rights to resell product
The issues I can see come in where the project produces the component of a larger project. The company may wish to resell the larger project, so some allowance might need to be made, or maybe a close for xx percent profit from projects resold using components goes to the employee.