As sombody who used to sell computers at BestBuy nearly 4 years ago I know the tricks of the trade. One of their favorite tricks is to first get all the accessories BEFORE they pull the computer down and sell you on the PSP (Service Plan). If the computer you are buying is one of their loss leaders (like an emachine for $300 AR) and you buy it bare bones, don't be surprised if they come back and tell you its out of stock. Even though I/they never make commission off a sale, our sales manager would go around every 15 mins or so with an updated sales report and chew us out if we let too many bare bones computers go out the door.
My girlfriend's sister insisted on buying a computer from Best Buy just the other week and since I couldnt persuade her otherwise she let me go with her and do all the talking. She showed me the computer she wanted and before any sales dog could tell I was interested in it I looked up at the top racks to make sure it was in stock so they couldnt pull that out-of-stock BS on me. Once I found it, I looked at the tag to see what the package comes with and got it all myself.
I eventually had to tell one of the sales people to pull down the computer since they dont like it too much when a customer uses the ladder (understandable). At that point I pointed to the exact box so there was nothing he could do put pull it down. He put it in my cart and told me that he can help me ring it up over at the Computer Sales counter. At that point I informed him that we still wanted to buy some DVD's and would be right back (a lie). I knew that if he were to ring me up with a bare bones computer I would get the full blown sales pitch to buy all the accessories and service plan. Instead, I took the computer straight to the normal checkout counter. The checkout girl *did* ask me if I wanted the service plan, and after a swift "No", that was the end of it. Long story short, take your computer's to the front checkout if you want to bypass the sales pitch.
I applaud MS for allowing SP2 to be available to all. But one thing Im curious about is how hard would it really be for MS to stop at least 98% of the pirated copies of MS products out there (not just limited to windows). If you look at Win XP keys, they have 25 characters in them. Each character can hold either A-Z or 0-9 for a total of 36 possible choices. So if my probability serves me right, this gives a keyspace of 36^25 which is ~8x10^38!! Now im not sure of the number of Windows XP copies that have been sold, but lets just say its 1billion which I believe is pretty giving. I would also assume that somewhere MS has recorded all those 1billion serial numbers that have been used. To store 1billion keys, you would need 25chars * 1byte/char * 1billion = 25Gigs of space. Thats a pretty trivial amount of storage now a days, especially for MS. So it would seem to me that it would be more than feasable to set up a system that would check your serial# versus the known used ones everytime sombody goes to windows update. Even though there are keygens out, they produce keys using the entire 8x10^38 keyspace. The random chance that a keygen would produce a key in that range of the *real* 1billion with so many posibilities has to be infintesimally small.
And the number one reason to move to IPv6 is so we can stop having so many stories about it here! Please, for the love of all that is good, we must adopt IPv6 before slashdot is buried beneath a tsunami of IPv6 stories.
I couldn't agree with you more and so Ill share with you something I posted to my LUG no more than 3 days ago.
Basically, Ive been toying around with IPv6 for the past couple of months and I decided
to make myself a nice little init script and share it with you guys. I made this init script for Mandrake but AFAIK it should be compatible with any Redhat-like distro. There
is alot of information on IPv6 and alot of the good info is scattered all
over. There are quite a few ways to set up an IPv6 tunnel but though much
searching and testing I found this way to be the easiest. If you want to try
out IPv6 just follow these easy steps.
You must compile IPv6 Support into your kernel
You must register with an IPv6 Tunnel Broker. Fortunatly enough there
are quite a few free ones, and I list two below:
Due to the predominate IPv4 nature of the Internet, you must tunnel your
IPv6 packets encapsulated into IPv4 packets and send them off to your tunnel
broker who will then route them nativly within the sixbone. Therefore you
want your tunnel broker as close as possible, so choose accordingly. Unfortunatly HE recently banned IRC
traffic due to abuse, so If you want to join an IPv6 enabled IRC
server you are forced to use Bt Exact which is what im currently using.
Once you register with the Tunnel Broker they will issue you a/64
subnet. That's right a/64 subnet which allows you to have up to 2^64 (18.4
million-billion) IP's!!
One of the other cool features of IPv6 is that you are currently allowed to
host your own reverse DNS for your IPv6 addresses. Thus if you want to
spoof your IP on IRC without having to resort to running your own hosting
company or doing illegal activities this is how you would do it. My
hostname on IRC currently resolves to 0.0.0.0
Once you get all the information from the Tunnel broker, simply edit my
init script and start'er up. Here are the 5 variables you must edit:
LOCAL4: This is simply just your IPv4 address
LOCAL6: This is the IPv6/64 subnet address that I was talking about earlier
REMOTE6:. This is the IPv6 address of the server on the other end of the
tunnel
NUM_ALIAS: This is how many aliases you want to bind to your new IPv6
interface. You can assign a differnt host name to each one, www/ns/mail etc
etc.
All but LOCAL4 will be given to you by the tunnel broker.
My init script creates the conf file for radvd which is basically the
IPv6 Router Advertisment Daemon. This is not necessary to have for the
tunnel to work, but its a nice feature. Just make sure you start up radvd
after you start up my ipv6 script.
To test that your IPv6 tunnel is working, just ping6 any IPv6 enabled server. For example:
[root@maximus][~]# ping6 www.kame.net PING www.kame.net(orange.kame.net) 56 data bytes 64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=31 ms 64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=14 ms 64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=15 ms 64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=51 ms
Yes but if you read the story more closly you will see that they tossed out all data that matched that did not have at least 7 differnt instances of being recorded elsewhere. And in one case they recorded it in 9 seperate instances. Something definantly went screaming through the earth and it didnt follow conventional data related to a fault-like earthquake.
By the time we have the technology to create our own localized black holes, im guessing our understanding of blackholes will be far beyond what they are today. Just look at the last two weeks of/. articles and see how many of them are on black holes and new information we have gathered and/or proven. In anycase I think it would be just as far fetched to say that our salvation might in fact be what this site claims to be our damnation -- a worm hole.
A wormhole at its core are two black holes connected together tearing through the fabric of space-time and allowing matter to pass back and forth between both ends. My guess is keeping the wormhole open is the easy part, passing through it and not be irreversably turned into a trillion atoms is where we will find the difficulty. But assuming we do find the technology, we no longer need a head start to escape the gravitational pull of the localized black hole, and we wont limit ourselves to a few lucky 1000 people who get to be the Adams and Eves of the new era. Crossing through a worm hole can theoretically put us on the other side of the known universe instantaneously (if there is such a thing) and definantly out of harms way (at least in regards to what destroyed the Earth, who knows what is at the other end!) and better yet, we can *all* go through it.
Now before you toss me in the loony bin, ill admit this is very far fected, but I dont think its as far fetched as a space station being built in the next 20 years that can self-sustain life for what is likly to be quite a long time and be sucessfull.
Slashdot Mirror
As sombody who used to sell computers at BestBuy nearly 4 years ago I know the tricks of the trade. One of their favorite tricks is to first get all the accessories BEFORE they pull the computer down and sell you on the PSP (Service Plan). If the computer you are buying is one of their loss leaders (like an emachine for $300 AR) and you buy it bare bones, don't be surprised if they come back and tell you its out of stock. Even though I/they never make commission off a sale, our sales manager would go around every 15 mins or so with an updated sales report and chew us out if we let too many bare bones computers go out the door.
My girlfriend's sister insisted on buying a computer from Best Buy just the other week and since I couldnt persuade her otherwise she let me go with her and do all the talking. She showed me the computer she wanted and before any sales dog could tell I was interested in it I looked up at the top racks to make sure it was in stock so they couldnt pull that out-of-stock BS on me. Once I found it, I looked at the tag to see what the package comes with and got it all myself.
I eventually had to tell one of the sales people to pull down the computer since they dont like it too much when a customer uses the ladder (understandable). At that point I pointed to the exact box so there was nothing he could do put pull it down. He put it in my cart and told me that he can help me ring it up over at the Computer Sales counter. At that point I informed him that we still wanted to buy some DVD's and would be right back (a lie). I knew that if he were to ring me up with a bare bones computer I would get the full blown sales pitch to buy all the accessories and service plan. Instead, I took the computer straight to the normal checkout counter. The checkout girl *did* ask me if I wanted the service plan, and after a swift "No", that was the end of it. Long story short, take your computer's to the front checkout if you want to bypass the sales pitch.
I applaud MS for allowing SP2 to be available to all. But one thing Im curious about is how hard would it really be for MS to stop at least 98% of the pirated copies of MS products out there (not just limited to windows). If you look at Win XP keys, they have 25 characters in them. Each character can hold either A-Z or 0-9 for a total of 36 possible choices. So if my probability serves me right, this gives a keyspace of 36^25 which is ~8x10^38!! Now im not sure of the number of Windows XP copies that have been sold, but lets just say its 1billion which I believe is pretty giving. I would also assume that somewhere MS has recorded all those 1billion serial numbers that have been used. To store 1billion keys, you would need 25chars * 1byte/char * 1billion = 25Gigs of space. Thats a pretty trivial amount of storage now a days, especially for MS. So it would seem to me that it would be more than feasable to set up a system that would check your serial# versus the known used ones everytime sombody goes to windows update. Even though there are keygens out, they produce keys using the entire 8x10^38 keyspace. The random chance that a keygen would produce a key in that range of the *real* 1billion with so many posibilities has to be infintesimally small.
I couldn't agree with you more and so Ill share with you something I posted to my LUG no more than 3 days ago.
Basically, Ive been toying around with IPv6 for the past couple of months and I decided to make myself a nice little init script and share it with you guys. I made this init script for Mandrake but AFAIK it should be compatible with any Redhat-like distro. There is alot of information on IPv6 and alot of the good info is scattered all over. There are quite a few ways to set up an IPv6 tunnel but though much searching and testing I found this way to be the easiest. If you want to try out IPv6 just follow these easy steps.
- You must compile IPv6 Support into your kernel
- You must register with an IPv6 Tunnel Broker. Fortunatly enough there
are quite a few free ones, and I list two below:
- Once you register with the Tunnel Broker they will issue you a
/64
subnet. That's right a /64 subnet which allows you to have up to 2^64 (18.4
million-billion) IP's!! - Download my init script at www.identityflux.com/ipv6 (Slashdot effect here I come!)
- Once you get all the information from the Tunnel broker, simply edit my
init script and start'er up. Here are the 5 variables you must edit:
- LOCAL4: This is simply just your IPv4 address
- LOCAL6: This is the IPv6
/64 subnet address that I was talking about earlier
- REMOTE6:. This is the IPv6 address of the server on the other end of the
tunnel
- NUM_ALIAS: This is how many aliases you want to bind to your new IPv6
interface. You can assign a differnt host name to each one, www/ns/mail etc
etc.
My init script creates the conf file for radvd which is basically the IPv6 Router Advertisment Daemon. This is not necessary to have for the tunnel to work, but its a nice feature. Just make sure you start up radvd after you start up my ipv6 script. To test that your IPv6 tunnel is working, just ping6 any IPv6 enabled server. For example:- Hurricane Electric: http://tunnelbroker.net (Based In California)
- Bt Exact: https://tb.ipv6.bt.com (Based in the UK)
Due to the predominate IPv4 nature of the Internet, you must tunnel your IPv6 packets encapsulated into IPv4 packets and send them off to your tunnel broker who will then route them nativly within the sixbone. Therefore you want your tunnel broker as close as possible, so choose accordingly. Unfortunatly HE recently banned IRC traffic due to abuse, so If you want to join an IPv6 enabled IRC server you are forced to use Bt Exact which is what im currently using.One of the other cool features of IPv6 is that you are currently allowed to host your own reverse DNS for your IPv6 addresses. Thus if you want to spoof your IP on IRC without having to resort to running your own hosting company or doing illegal activities this is how you would do it. My hostname on IRC currently resolves to 0.0.0.0
All but LOCAL4 will be given to you by the tunnel broker.
Yes but if you read the story more closly you will see that they tossed out all data that matched that did not have at least 7 differnt instances of being recorded elsewhere. And in one case they recorded it in 9 seperate instances. Something definantly went screaming through the earth and it didnt follow conventional data related to a fault-like earthquake.
By the time we have the technology to create our own localized black holes, im guessing our understanding of blackholes will be far beyond what they are today. Just look at the last two weeks of /. articles and see how many of them are on black holes and new information we have gathered and/or proven. In anycase I think it would be just as far fetched to say that our salvation might in fact be what this site claims to be our damnation -- a worm hole.
A wormhole at its core are two black holes connected together tearing through the fabric of space-time and allowing matter to pass back and forth between both ends. My guess is keeping the wormhole open is the easy part, passing through it and not be irreversably turned into a trillion atoms is where we will find the difficulty. But assuming we do find the technology, we no longer need a head start to escape the gravitational pull of the localized black hole, and we wont limit ourselves to a few lucky 1000 people who get to be the Adams and Eves of the new era. Crossing through a worm hole can theoretically put us on the other side of the known universe instantaneously (if there is such a thing) and definantly out of harms way (at least in regards to what destroyed the Earth, who knows what is at the other end!) and better yet, we can *all* go through it.
Now before you toss me in the loony bin, ill admit this is very far fected, but I dont think its as far fetched as a space station being built in the next 20 years that can self-sustain life for what is likly to be quite a long time and be sucessfull.