If you start reading this read it all or you might get the wrong idea...
Indeed, it might be a good study to tests ISP's on this to see who is best for self-hosting. My ISP (Telus in Canada) pulled my plug after receiving several complaints about spam. I had been mucking with proxy settings and accidentally left it open for part of a day before noticing (partly thanks to the slashdot open-proxy detection which warned we and prevented me from posting here).
About 4-5 days after the proxy was shut, I was connecting to my home server from work to transfer files when I was suddenly shut out. When I got home - no connection and a message on my answering machine from the Telus abuse department.
It took about a 5-10 minute calL (being on hold and all that) with me explaining the proxy was fixed - and Telus got me back up again. The kept me on monitor for awhile (and I was checking to see that no strange backdoors were spewing spamcrap somehow, I also added some firewall rules to log any emails going to strange SMTP servers), but other than that everything was great. Sometimes it's not just a matter of whether an ISP pulls your plug when something goes wrong (and I was in the wrong here), but one also considers how easy it is to get things fixed up when any problems/misunderstandings are corrected. Again, I was in the wrong here, admitted it, showed them the problem was fixed, and they got my service restored pas de probleme. How many poor plebs have to jump through a million hoops to fix the mistake?
I've replaced a few drives in various laptops, with difficulties ranging from simple to bang-your-head-against-the-table-WTF-were-they-thi nking difficult.
a) Some laptops have the drive/memory right under the keyboard. Often there are a few little snaps/screws which keep the keyboard in place, and you can pull it up and whammo... 1-2 screws and your drive is liberated
b) Others (such as my current work machine, Acer 212T) have a safety screw, a little push-button, and voila, ejectable hard-drive bay. Drive pops up in a little metal shell, replace in same orientation and push back in, re-screw the safety screw. I don't really like cheapie Acers but they definately are easy for parts-replacement.
c) If you wanted to preload some files, you can get an adaptor to plug the laptop-sized drive into a PC with a standard IDE interface and power (I don't recommend preloading a full windows OS as it will go a bit flakey with hardware changes, Linux seems fine with it though as long as kernel CPU settings are compatible). Adaptors should be around $10 or less
d) Pay close attention to what screws go where. Laptops tend to be rather finicky with different sized screws all over the place.
e) They're not as sensitive as you might think, but make sure the battery/power are out, and beware the LCD and thin plasticy ribbon cables.
f) As with a previous post, pictures are quite often a good idea if you have a digital camera, etc. Print in stages showing where screws go.
This is one of my peeves about HP. While they're no ignorent enough so as to "prevent" printing on refilled cartridges, they do not register them as full when the cartridge has been removed+filled+replaced
However, they do still print, the software-timed status meter just stays low and you get warnings every now and again. There is a trick with covering various contacts on the cartridge that will trick it into resetting counters though - but while it worked on one cartridge the other didn't seem to fall for it.
Still, I'm in love with HP's quality, and from one set of cartridges I got over an album of 4x5"-6x9" prints (and some bigger ones), plus a few other printjobs.
Also, the in-cartridge printheads mean that while the cartridges cost more (to but new ones, not fill), I don't have to pay for a whole new printer as you often have to do if the in-printer ones get too plugged up.
We have one of the cheapie HP colour lasers. While the thing does wonders for brochures, etc... and prints better on plain paper than my HP PhotoInkjet, the quality of the inkjet for photographic images seems quite a lot better than the laser.
I'm not sure that colour lasers are so much intended for picture printing as they are for letterheads with coloured logos, etc?
P2P downloading and music purchasing are not exclusive. In fact many studies have proven that at times they go nicely together.
In other words, download song, like song, buy album.
I've bought albums of artists whom I've downloaded the songs for online, because I end up liking their music. These were from legal sites, but there's not much difference there.
And as for sueing actual customers... you don't think that sueing P2P downloaders - particularly children or young adults - is enamoring the general public of the RIAA do you?
First of all, a large portion of P2P users are quite likely under the age of 20... they likely don't know much about being hippies or communism, and aren't likely any dirty than others of their age.
And bribing congress is a related problem, because it's not about "ripping off the music industry," it's about being sued for breaking laws. But the problem is, the laws and penalties keep changing, because the "industry" is bribing politicians to make them worse - and using their monentary clout to scare out settlements in face of said penalties.
The problem here, is not just that the industry may at times be getting "ripped off," but that they are ripping us off through our wallets by price fixing. And more importantly, they are ripping us off through our dimished rights through bribed politicians.
I'm sorry, but while there's no real excuse for dl'ing a commercial item you didn't pay for, neither is there an excuse for crippling the discs that I did pay for so that I can't make anti-scratch or roaming copies.
So guess what. I don't need to justify myself. The music I've been listening to the last few years: bought and paid for or freely licensed. The games, bought and paid for. It's the industry that is justifying itself by attacking consumers with lawsuits and copy-protection, claiming damage by piracy when in truth they're making more profit than ever. When I go on Kazaa I'm happily downloading copies of music simply because it's easier than trying to rip my own copy-crippled discs... think about that for a second.
Downloading music you already paid for is ethical (scratched CD's, etc)
Neither is it ethical to sue the pants off your customer base, and bribe politicians to make laws that make it easier to sue/imprison said customer base.
A lot of people on here are complaining about the lack of plot, but perhaps they're thinking of the the original doom games and not doom3
a) Far-flung space colony on mars
b) Experimental weapons researched by a huge conglomerate
c) Discovery of an alien race with ties to earth
d) Alien race apparently killed off by other alien race
e) Alien race sacrified many of its citizens to create a device used to stave off the baddies
f) Possibility that the aliens escape to Earth, perhaps as our ancestors
g) Nutso scientist dude
h) Freaky aliens discovered on mars, various dissections and investigations as to why they can manifest fireaballs, etc
i) Gateway to research site reveals more ugly aliens
j) Gateway to one area finds a very hellish world with more uglies and a distorted reality - most visitors come back insane (or not at all)
k) Nutso scientist trying to open said gateway
l) Nutso scientist trying to bring ugly zombies/aliens to earth
Movies have been built on less. I think if they ramped up the "investigation of alien species" and the parent race plot, you might get a cross between something from Tomb Raider, Alien, and Army of Darkness. OK, so except for Alien none of these were spectacular at the time, but a mixed plot could come out with something good if done well.
I didn't the show, but I do remember reading on a relation between plague survivors and the mutant gene. I can't remember if it was a gene that prevent transfers, or a gene not present which the virus needed in order to propogate within the host.
It's not unthinkable though, that a plague or other nasty disease could in fact mutate cells causing genetic alterations in later descenendants...
While an FAQ may be part of a KB, I think that many here are in fact using FAQ in reference to something more like "help files."
Awhile back I built a support or "knowledgebase" (kb) web-based tool. It allows articles to be searched based on topic, keyword, body contents, etc.
While it could include a basic FAQ section, the KB is generally more useful. For example, a question like:
"How do I change my firefox start page", could be referenced with keywords "firefox" "browser" "start page" "home"
Provided the user enters 1-2 of the above in search, the results will probably display the revelant FAQ article in regards to what he/she was looking for.
How many companies have patented the same thing, possibly within the same time frame. Would it go far to show how terribly broken the patent system is if 10+ companies all turn out to have the exact same dumb patent, and then have to bicker over whose is valid?
There have been a few times when there have been internet breakages between Australia and N. America, and I believe even between N. America and Europe.
Critical hubs go down, storms disrupt communications, trunk lines can be damaged
As far as deterring crackers in N. Korea, wouldn't it be as simple as pulling a plug?
Of course, many of these seem to be operating out of China, but I'd imagine that China itself can employee enough counter-hackers and hunters to deal with that problem... they've definately got the population for it and some damn good hackers of their own.
More like, the plane was known to continuously leak oil and/or other safety fluids to the point where it became dangerous or unreliable. They could have either replaced the plane or fixed the problem for greater cost, but chose to ignore the problem until one day missing that critical oilchange caused a near crash.
This isn't about a standard maintenance procedure, since a server should not have to be rebooted constantly in order to maintain. stability/functionality. That's like saying it's ok to swap the oil every second flight because it's cheaper than fixing the actual problem (that there's a leak in the first place).
And actually, considering that many earlier windows problems were caused by memory leaks... not such a bad analogy now...
Probably the video drivers here, which in reference to games is definately an important factor. Perhaps the parent was talking more about the overall picture? My laptop sucks for games anyways (no 3d video card), but I would definately say that it handles very nicely under load in comparison to windows (I can have a full GUI, Thunderbird, FireFox, GAIM, and a GCC compile running at the same time without nasty lag or jerking while switching between).
Windows definately seems to do better at many times when putting pretty stuff on the screen, but Linux multitasks much better overall on this rig (2.6 kernel, Celeron 800, 256MB RAM, crappy Trident video and sound).
Only over the long-term. In the short term, it could prevent an intended target from being warned of an attack, or from coordinating resistance, etc. In the short-term, it's about divide and conquer.
Somehow, I doubt you have any training in electronic warfare either... I'm sure you read some nice books though:-)
I remember on a previous article, it was argued that if terrorist communications were to be jammed, etc, but there was no given reason for outage - then terrorists would know they are being jammed.
That seemed like bullshit to me, and I really thought that something like this wouldn't pass. Really, what use could terrorists make of such outages, except for perhaps a very tentative prediction?
Even with the terrorist excuse, records released after-the-fact would still indicate which carriers suck repeatedly to the public, while negating the "exposive-of-jamming" arguement.
So, anyone know what the official excuse is for this?
What are the companies that bought these products going to do? The companies that developed existing ones will make new ones, and probably resell them for more $$$.
We have one such system at work - for which the login page has some awful script which detects when you hit enter on a textbox and then submits the form (with no submit button at all on the page). I can rewrite the "SubmitMe()" function to be cross-compatible, or perhaps add a button to the page, but I could see how other companies without somebody who has done web-dev could be a little stuck here.
Around here they used to do it as confirmation. Sometimes the delivery guy would get lost and need directions, or other times if they suspected it was a prank order they might call back before making 12 orders of hotwings and 8 pizzas to deliver at 1-2-3 Nowhere St...
Just as an FYI, I've had a few durons, and they have tended to be among the more power-hungry and hot systems I've run.
Durons really aren't all that efficient... not as powerful in output as compared to an Athlon, sure, but that doesn't mean that less output doesn't mean input is generally lower (just less efficient).
IP I generally respect, it's the IP owners (RIAA, etc) that I generally don't. However, now that I have a decent job, I can generally afford music and software, etc.
Does this mean that I would buy from the RIAA? Hell no, it means that I can afford to pay out more to those I respect and enjoy. There are lots of indie bands with "free" music online where I can now buy a CD online instead of just downloading the provided Mp3. I figure that not only do they benefit, but if enough people start doing so perhaps more musicians will hook up with internet startups rather than getting sunk into RIAA music contacts.
Actually, DamnSmallLinux is not commandline, it has a GUI with web-browser, a few games, etc etc. It even has a movie player and media player (XMMS, not sure what plays movies).
I'm not sure how they managed to pack all that in there, but I've just been playing with it recently and it actually has quite a bit in there for a 50MB distro.
In most of these cases, the camera is either visible (in which case it's not only a monitor but a deterrent), or a warning may be posted to effect of "security cameras present."
Perhaps posting such a sticker up would cover you, "this home monitored by closed-circuit security cameras."
Oh, and on the technical end, there are lots of programs for snapping a shot from your webcam, etc, and I manage to get decent resolution on my old Creative Webcam Go (there is a 'nix kernel module for it) as long as the light doesn't suck too badly.
With the exception of when a baby might roll over and accidentally suffocate or something similar - I would wonder what a parent might actually be able to do for a suffocating child. Not to say that an effort wouldn't be good, but it would be even more heartbreaking to find that not only has your child passed away due to some unknown defect/condition, but that you couldn't save him/her.
Slashdot Mirror
If you start reading this read it all or you might get the wrong idea...
Indeed, it might be a good study to tests ISP's on this to see who is best for self-hosting. My ISP (Telus in Canada) pulled my plug after receiving several complaints about spam. I had been mucking with proxy settings and accidentally left it open for part of a day before noticing (partly thanks to the slashdot open-proxy detection which warned we and prevented me from posting here).
About 4-5 days after the proxy was shut, I was connecting to my home server from work to transfer files when I was suddenly shut out. When I got home - no connection and a message on my answering machine from the Telus abuse department.
It took about a 5-10 minute calL (being on hold and all that) with me explaining the proxy was fixed - and Telus got me back up again. The kept me on monitor for awhile (and I was checking to see that no strange backdoors were spewing spamcrap somehow, I also added some firewall rules to log any emails going to strange SMTP servers), but other than that everything was great. Sometimes it's not just a matter of whether an ISP pulls your plug when something goes wrong (and I was in the wrong here), but one also considers how easy it is to get things fixed up when any problems/misunderstandings are corrected. Again, I was in the wrong here, admitted it, showed them the problem was fixed, and they got my service restored pas de probleme. How many poor plebs have to jump through a million hoops to fix the mistake?
I've replaced a few drives in various laptops, with difficulties ranging from simple to bang-your-head-against-the-table-WTF-were-they-thi nking difficult.
a) Some laptops have the drive/memory right under the keyboard. Often there are a few little snaps/screws which keep the keyboard in place, and you can pull it up and whammo... 1-2 screws and your drive is liberated
b) Others (such as my current work machine, Acer 212T) have a safety screw, a little push-button, and voila, ejectable hard-drive bay. Drive pops up in a little metal shell, replace in same orientation and push back in, re-screw the safety screw. I don't really like cheapie Acers but they definately are easy for parts-replacement.
c) If you wanted to preload some files, you can get an adaptor to plug the laptop-sized drive into a PC with a standard IDE interface and power (I don't recommend preloading a full windows OS as it will go a bit flakey with hardware changes, Linux seems fine with it though as long as kernel CPU settings are compatible). Adaptors should be around $10 or less
d) Pay close attention to what screws go where. Laptops tend to be rather finicky with different sized screws all over the place.
e) They're not as sensitive as you might think, but make sure the battery/power are out, and beware the LCD and thin plasticy ribbon cables.
f) As with a previous post, pictures are quite often a good idea if you have a digital camera, etc. Print in stages showing where screws go.
This is one of my peeves about HP. While they're no ignorent enough so as to "prevent" printing on refilled cartridges, they do not register them as full when the cartridge has been removed+filled+replaced
However, they do still print, the software-timed status meter just stays low and you get warnings every now and again. There is a trick with covering various contacts on the cartridge that will trick it into resetting counters though - but while it worked on one cartridge the other didn't seem to fall for it.
Still, I'm in love with HP's quality, and from one set of cartridges I got over an album of 4x5"-6x9" prints (and some bigger ones), plus a few other printjobs.
Also, the in-cartridge printheads mean that while the cartridges cost more (to but new ones, not fill), I don't have to pay for a whole new printer as you often have to do if the in-printer ones get too plugged up.
We have one of the cheapie HP colour lasers. While the thing does wonders for brochures, etc... and prints better on plain paper than my HP PhotoInkjet, the quality of the inkjet for photographic images seems quite a lot better than the laser.
I'm not sure that colour lasers are so much intended for picture printing as they are for letterheads with coloured logos, etc?
P2P downloading and music purchasing are not exclusive. In fact many studies have proven that at times they go nicely together.
In other words, download song, like song, buy album.
I've bought albums of artists whom I've downloaded the songs for online, because I end up liking their music. These were from legal sites, but there's not much difference there.
And as for sueing actual customers... you don't think that sueing P2P downloaders - particularly children or young adults - is enamoring the general public of the RIAA do you?
I always think...
One less, of course
First of all, a large portion of P2P users are quite likely under the age of 20... they likely don't know much about being hippies or communism, and aren't likely any dirty than others of their age.
And bribing congress is a related problem, because it's not about "ripping off the music industry," it's about being sued for breaking laws. But the problem is, the laws and penalties keep changing, because the "industry" is bribing politicians to make them worse - and using their monentary clout to scare out settlements in face of said penalties.
The problem here, is not just that the industry may at times be getting "ripped off," but that they are ripping us off through our wallets by price fixing. And more importantly, they are ripping us off through our dimished rights through bribed politicians.
I'm sorry, but while there's no real excuse for dl'ing a commercial item you didn't pay for, neither is there an excuse for crippling the discs that I did pay for so that I can't make anti-scratch or roaming copies.
So guess what. I don't need to justify myself. The music I've been listening to the last few years: bought and paid for or freely licensed. The games, bought and paid for. It's the industry that is justifying itself by attacking consumers with lawsuits and copy-protection, claiming damage by piracy when in truth they're making more profit than ever. When I go on Kazaa I'm happily downloading copies of music simply because it's easier than trying to rip my own copy-crippled discs... think about that for a second.
A final round, where they introduce an as-yet-unknown FPS or RTS game. Perhaps just a nicely customized map that nobody has played might do as well.
Real skill comes in how you adapt to a new situation, the rest is practice (this applies to more than just gaming, of course)
Downloading music you already paid for is ethical (scratched CD's, etc)
Neither is it ethical to sue the pants off your customer base, and bribe politicians to make laws that make it easier to sue/imprison said customer base.
A lot of people on here are complaining about the lack of plot, but perhaps they're thinking of the the original doom games and not doom3
a) Far-flung space colony on mars
b) Experimental weapons researched by a huge conglomerate
c) Discovery of an alien race with ties to earth
d) Alien race apparently killed off by other alien race
e) Alien race sacrified many of its citizens to create a device used to stave off the baddies
f) Possibility that the aliens escape to Earth, perhaps as our ancestors
g) Nutso scientist dude
h) Freaky aliens discovered on mars, various dissections and investigations as to why they can manifest fireaballs, etc
i) Gateway to research site reveals more ugly aliens
j) Gateway to one area finds a very hellish world with more uglies and a distorted reality - most visitors come back insane (or not at all)
k) Nutso scientist trying to open said gateway
l) Nutso scientist trying to bring ugly zombies/aliens to earth
Movies have been built on less. I think if they ramped up the "investigation of alien species" and the parent race plot, you might get a cross between something from Tomb Raider, Alien, and Army of Darkness. OK, so except for Alien none of these were spectacular at the time, but a mixed plot could come out with something good if done well.
I didn't the show, but I do remember reading on a relation between plague survivors and the mutant gene. I can't remember if it was a gene that prevent transfers, or a gene not present which the virus needed in order to propogate within the host.
It's not unthinkable though, that a plague or other nasty disease could in fact mutate cells causing genetic alterations in later descenendants...
While an FAQ may be part of a KB, I think that many here are in fact using FAQ in reference to something more like "help files."
Awhile back I built a support or "knowledgebase" (kb) web-based tool. It allows articles to be searched based on topic, keyword, body contents, etc.
While it could include a basic FAQ section, the KB is generally more useful. For example, a question like:
"How do I change my firefox start page", could be referenced with keywords "firefox" "browser" "start page" "home"
Provided the user enters 1-2 of the above in search, the results will probably display the revelant FAQ article in regards to what he/she was looking for.
How many companies have patented the same thing, possibly within the same time frame. Would it go far to show how terribly broken the patent system is if 10+ companies all turn out to have the exact same dumb patent, and then have to bicker over whose is valid?
There have been a few times when there have been internet breakages between Australia and N. America, and I believe even between N. America and Europe.
Critical hubs go down, storms disrupt communications, trunk lines can be damaged
As far as deterring crackers in N. Korea, wouldn't it be as simple as pulling a plug?
Of course, many of these seem to be operating out of China, but I'd imagine that China itself can employee enough counter-hackers and hunters to deal with that problem... they've definately got the population for it and some damn good hackers of their own.
More like, the plane was known to continuously leak oil and/or other safety fluids to the point where it became dangerous or unreliable. They could have either replaced the plane or fixed the problem for greater cost, but chose to ignore the problem until one day missing that critical oilchange caused a near crash.
This isn't about a standard maintenance procedure, since a server should not have to be rebooted constantly in order to maintain. stability/functionality. That's like saying it's ok to swap the oil every second flight because it's cheaper than fixing the actual problem (that there's a leak in the first place).
And actually, considering that many earlier windows problems were caused by memory leaks... not such a bad analogy now...
Probably the video drivers here, which in reference to games is definately an important factor. Perhaps the parent was talking more about the overall picture? My laptop sucks for games anyways (no 3d video card), but I would definately say that it handles very nicely under load in comparison to windows (I can have a full GUI, Thunderbird, FireFox, GAIM, and a GCC compile running at the same time without nasty lag or jerking while switching between).
Windows definately seems to do better at many times when putting pretty stuff on the screen, but Linux multitasks much better overall on this rig (2.6 kernel, Celeron 800, 256MB RAM, crappy Trident video and sound).
Only over the long-term. In the short term, it could prevent an intended target from being warned of an attack, or from coordinating resistance, etc. In the short-term, it's about divide and conquer.
:-)
Somehow, I doubt you have any training in electronic warfare either... I'm sure you read some nice books though
I remember on a previous article, it was argued that if terrorist communications were to be jammed, etc, but there was no given reason for outage - then terrorists would know they are being jammed.
That seemed like bullshit to me, and I really thought that something like this wouldn't pass. Really, what use could terrorists make of such outages, except for perhaps a very tentative prediction?
Even with the terrorist excuse, records released after-the-fact would still indicate which carriers suck repeatedly to the public, while negating the "exposive-of-jamming" arguement.
So, anyone know what the official excuse is for this?
What are the companies that bought these products going to do? The companies that developed existing ones will make new ones, and probably resell them for more $$$.
We have one such system at work - for which the login page has some awful script which detects when you hit enter on a textbox and then submits the form (with no submit button at all on the page). I can rewrite the "SubmitMe()" function to be cross-compatible, or perhaps add a button to the page, but I could see how other companies without somebody who has done web-dev could be a little stuck here.
Around here they used to do it as confirmation. Sometimes the delivery guy would get lost and need directions, or other times if they suspected it was a prank order they might call back before making 12 orders of hotwings and 8 pizzas to deliver at 1-2-3 Nowhere St...
Just as an FYI, I've had a few durons, and they have tended to be among the more power-hungry and hot systems I've run.
Durons really aren't all that efficient... not as powerful in output as compared to an Athlon, sure, but that doesn't mean that less output doesn't mean input is generally lower (just less efficient).
IP I generally respect, it's the IP owners (RIAA, etc) that I generally don't. However, now that I have a decent job, I can generally afford music and software, etc.
Does this mean that I would buy from the RIAA? Hell no, it means that I can afford to pay out more to those I respect and enjoy. There are lots of indie bands with "free" music online where I can now buy a CD online instead of just downloading the provided Mp3. I figure that not only do they benefit, but if enough people start doing so perhaps more musicians will hook up with internet startups rather than getting sunk into RIAA music contacts.
Actually, DamnSmallLinux is not commandline, it has a GUI with web-browser, a few games, etc etc. It even has a movie player and media player (XMMS, not sure what plays movies).
I'm not sure how they managed to pack all that in there, but I've just been playing with it recently and it actually has quite a bit in there for a 50MB distro.
Check it out on freshmeat to see a screenshot.
In most of these cases, the camera is either visible (in which case it's not only a monitor but a deterrent), or a warning may be posted to effect of "security cameras present."
Perhaps posting such a sticker up would cover you, "this home monitored by closed-circuit security cameras."
Oh, and on the technical end, there are lots of programs for snapping a shot from your webcam, etc, and I manage to get decent resolution on my old Creative Webcam Go (there is a 'nix kernel module for it) as long as the light doesn't suck too badly.
With the exception of when a baby might roll over and accidentally suffocate or something similar - I would wonder what a parent might actually be able to do for a suffocating child. Not to say that an effort wouldn't be good, but it would be even more heartbreaking to find that not only has your child passed away due to some unknown defect/condition, but that you couldn't save him/her.