[me]: "HONEY -- I'm ready now... you can go off the pill"
The sad thing is I grew up with a C=64. My parents didn't understand what I was doing. Thus they didn't _want_ to know. Nothing illegal, of course...:) It was a good setup.
Today, they _still_ don't understand what I do or how I do it. Fine by me -- and now it pays the bills. Almost ironical.
My.02's? Kids need privacy. Kids need discipline. Kids aren't the parents. Install some snooping software. Just like my mom used to pick up on the phone extension -- though she never knew I knew how to wire up a few parts from Radio Shack and a blinking led always told me of a 2nd extension going off-hook.
Oh yeah. Tell them about using protection (!) PLEASE. Too many Windows boxes spewing spam from virus'. Or go buy them a Mac if you're tired of the patches, but I digress.
The worst punishment I ever got was getting grounded to my parents room. No computer. No TV. Oh my gosh, only books. Funny -- I still like to read.
My only issue with VirtualPC for Mac OS X (so far) is that with the 10.3 [Panther] release 'Virtual Networking' no longer works (share the same IP and the host Mac). Shared networking, however, does appear to work just fine (means you need a DHCP server on the local [intra]network).
I have refused all patches so far from Microsoft concerning VirtualPC (only used on a Mac). Of course the Windows itself it continuously patched -- thouse I will suspect the next SP for 2K or XP... I'd bet they slip code in to NOT run unless VPC is Microsoft patched. Much easier to deal with a simple copy/replace of the HD image...
-k
PS: with the Panther update anyone with a Adaptec 39160 SCSI card... have another way to boot the OS (iPod will do) to at least be able to re-install the Adaptec drivers... Normal IDE users need not worry...:)
Originated on MS-DOS, but has long ago been shifted to PC-DOS -- we have our DOS based accounting package written in a form of BASIC no less. Pure number cruncher.
It easily handles payroll in the 48 states we do business (handled in house). Take into consideration that it handles direct deposit, child support, federal taxes, all the state taxes, not to mention any local taxes. Keeping track of the Union deductions & fringes for dues across dozens of Unions used nationally is trivial. 1099's & W2's printed on a good 'ol fashioned dot-matrix to this day.
Let's not even talk about tying it all together with thousands of vendors on tens of thousands of PO's tied into millions in payables. Keeping track of hundreds (in our case) of customers for a 20 million dollar company and tying it all together in a Job-Costing function and all the bases are getting covered.
Cash management, inventory, and General Ledger producing the financial documents needed does tie it altogether very nicely keeping it all in house and instantly available. Why change?
We recently had the accounting company in, during annual audits, and it was point blank asked by the board if the DOS based accounting system (also available originally on Xenix with a Linux version coming) was faster than the Windows based version only in production for the last three years now. Hands down and without question we were told the DOS based version is faster in producing reports, keying in data, and generally trying to get anything done. Pure keyboard data entry.
In the mean time it's the Connectix version of VirtualPC running PC-DOS to run accounting for us... The next version may be OS X something DOS based (not VirtualPC), or Linux [DOS] based, or pretty much anything but Microsoft for obvious reasons. Windows isn't allowed on our networks anymore...
Wait, wait -- I thought we couldn't USE computer without using Windows or something like that. And ONE (1) computer?! Surely you need at least 3 or 4 so when one is being patched and rebooted the other can BSOD itself so that the other two won't hopefully choke on the load and crash, or become infected with a virus and/or worm. We WANT to spend hundreds or thousands of additional dollars on quality like that, don't we?
In my firecracker youth I can vividly remember a friend lighting the too-short wick of one and it blowing off in his hand. Slight burns, of course, and funny as hell to watch.
Laughing so hard I forgot about the lit cracker in my hand. BOOM! Hurts like hell. One minute laughing, the next you're crying. Such is life sometimes.
Of course I am thankful we didn't do any real damage when growing up and further blowing up objects (read: mailboxes). In those days a neighbor always saw you do it, called your mother and you had to go apologize and buy/install any mailbox they chose.
M80's, then 500's, and the sticks of dynamite were always a treat. Today the FBI would be showing up for some of the shit we pulled way back when. In those days we didn't have the Internet to figure how to not blow ourselves up or make nuclear bombs.
I guess the FBI will be making a few more house calls shortly...
I personally gave them 24 hrs from the time of turning it on. No, I won't make any difference in their bottom line -- but if more people did what I've already done...
Within 24hrs I flipped _all_ the domains in my control from.COM to.US (where we are:). Traffic for.COM will be accepted until they expire (next year) and in the mean time Verisign will get no more $$$ from me. Except perhaps for a couple of the domains which I think have a good chance for going for decent $$$ in a sale of them. Otherwise why bother with Verisign anymore?
On your note about alternatives... and in previous years to get said hardware I had -0- aternative BUT to also buy a copy of Windows.
THAT, added with the EULA, added with the shoddy work they do is damn sleazy.
That's why the business' in my control are moving away from Windows altogether. A couple of the shops are happily running only Mac & Linux based setups -- and you know what? We can communicate with the rest of the world just fine. Actually more reliably, with better accuracy, less downtime, and typically significantly faster...and saving money hand over fist it seems sometimes.
Good -- we have extra cash... HIRE MORE PEOPLE. Duh.
Once it is proven that Mass. can interact successfully with the Feds, other states, & businesses, then many more people will take them seriously.
They will succeed and be _amazed_ at the cost savings. Now if we could just get them to roll some of that dough at schools teaching the kids/their replacements about thinking differently, if you will.:)
I know that we've been sending/receiving excel type spreadsheets with the states, unions, and insurance/attorney types with no issues. 90% of the stuff going out is in PDF format for review anyway. People love it. Who cares what you use internally to produce -- the customer doesn't care if we use FastTrack Scheduling software (Mac/Palm -- trained on... Windows, but migrated:), or Mr Project in Linux. They get a PDF and our management can work together as long as they all have the same basic software.
Let's see -- our accounting software is [PC]-DOS based. Yeah, it originated on MS-DOS, but that was trivial. We cover typically 40+ states a year (fed, state, and local taxes where applicable) along with 20-30 Unions a year. Thousands or tens-of-thousands customers and 2-3x that in vendors with hundreds to thousands of employees is typical. Medium sized company with very customized accounting type job costing software. We've done work for secured government contracts, to aerospace, to the automotive industry covering many types inbetween. Very few packages to handle everything needed (filings, W2's, payroll, etc). Funny, but we found that keyboard data entry (pure) is faster than click, click, menu, drop down, key-in, enter. Even the accounting firm, now making and selling the Windows version, agreed that for pure productivity we're not going to beat the 'ol DOS version for raw speed. To this day. Ironically running on a Mac (Virtual PC originally by Connectix). Too bad Microsoft bought them out. Running DOS on Linux is trivially easy...
No where near the Microsoft (what do they run their accounting software on?) or the Motorola level, but we interact with the rest of the world just fine. Except for CAD in our Engineering department. That, unfortunately, is still Win2K based with AutoCAD. AutoDesk has, at least, sent out questionaires inquiring about OS X interest. No word yet. Ironically they should have been the FIRST to migrate away from Windows and are smart enough to see how limiting it is and are drooling over the G5's.
Fortunately Microsoft's wonderful virus attraction of a operating system has caused us, as of 2000..., to decide that no 1 operating system should have all desktops for obvious security and productivity reasons. Linux was the cheap test and successful for everything except CAD work (or we just can't find the right package). The biggest problem is that no matter what the Linux users have felt gilted somewhat and want a Mac. There was one person (1) that just couldn't cope and didn't want anything except Windows. They made their own job so difficult it was just easier to make them want to quite. Done.
Whatever. Why aren't more people just ditching their precious.COM names. Think UPS.com or Amazon.com couldn't get away with switching? Sure they could...
For those in the.US take a look at NIC.US which can point you to all the various registrars. Heck, it's cheaper -- typically $15/yr.
The only thing Verisign will understand is people speaking with their dollars. And yes, I personally have switched my domains over to.US -- of course I'll handle the.COM traffic until they expire in a year or two. In the mean time everything going out says.US as of yesterday.
Sure, business cards and letter head still say.COM, but they surely won't on the next order. Maybe a year.
also mentioned that there was no way in hell they would get the renewal on the mailed from.US domain (unfortunately I registered.COM and.US with them way back when).
They could have the.COM domain back when it expires as well. No, we're not "Fedex.com", but even they could drop the.COM and go to.US and witin a month or two would you really notice? I certainly don't assume.COM today...
Speak with your $$$ -- it's the only thing they will understand.
I ran an experiment to do just this... Originally USENET (a decade ago I did that one), web pages, etc... Hundreds of trap address' across many of the domains in my control -- harvest and block 'em early has been my general method...:)
I recently took 1 Windows 2K box (SP2) and put it directly online in the DMZ type zone. Do NOT patch it and add no virus software. Load some trap address' (never used before) into the Outlook address book.
It took twelve (12) minutes from plugging it in to getting many, many infections, to the final spam. Typical time is 3-4 hours usually and I've seen the test go for as long as 8 hours.
How many people do you know that use Outlook and may have your email in their address book? The bitch of the matter? No Windows here anywhere, well, except for VirtualPC which makes such tests so damn easy -- too bad Microsoft had to buy them up too...
Is this going to be another.COM bust? It might be the beginning of the end for.COM &.NET (it is for me at least:), but certainly not of the Internet as we know and love to hate it. If everybody jumps one way or the other NOW we can all just BLOCK.COM and.NET traffic probably within a year or two.
Thankfully I had the fore-site to also register all my domains in the.US category. Unfortunately they're also currently held by... Verisign. I do believe that.US is, however, authoritatively not handled by "them" and most definitely (and will be) moved to another provider.
I handle all my own traffic 100% (including DNS) -- and it appears that Verisign can only pull this stunt with.COM and.NET. Effective immediately we've moved from.COM to.US
Though I'm also considering a couple of the domains for.ORG (non-profit) with the current economy recently...:)
By far the Gyration has won me over. Charges on the dock which was the primary reason -- at the time Logitech only has battery replacable mice.
I use it as a TV remote on the Mac all the time from the lazy boy. Right click is mute, scrolling is channel change, wheel click is full screen toggle, scroll clicked is volume adjustment. So on and so forth...
You should see the look on the wife's face when I play Quake and I'm just waiving my hand around in the air.:)
That's IT? Jeez, me, myself, and I (plus my wife:) @ home have gotten about a dozen emails today (legit).
Didn't _see_ any spam, but the logs surely show 685 rejects from known previously spammed us IP's.
169 IP's made it known through various methods (ie: we don't KNOW anybody outside the US...) that they would probably spam us.
55 messages/IP's (slow day, typically a couple of hundred) were harvested from trap addresses.
To date I've had to unblock one (1) such IP at home (work is up to maybe a dozen now) that got caught in the traps. As email flows in, and not blocks, those IP's are reverse-harvested as OK. A problem child will become evident quickly. Damn, still trying to build the perfect mouse trap as a people, eh?
IP's that have made themselves KNOWN to be a problem for us? Up to 117,469,666 as of midnight tonight. Yeah -- that's 117 million IP's blocked. Only about 3% of the total ~3.9-4 billion IP's assignable.
127 mail servers. Bah -- child's play...
Oh -- and the number of spam's that I personally saw today? I think one, which the Mac highlighted for me and dumped it. I know the wife got worried her pecker must be too small a couple of times today...
My study, funded by me, has shown that Windows is the most expensive to maintain (patch, patch, reboot, patch, reboot) and use.
Thank you Microsoft: for security reasons it was determined here that at NO TIME will _any_ operating system gain 100% penetration to the desktops. The datacenter already runs a mix of Linux, BSD, and Netware...
Since the changes started we've rolled Linux out to some people and OS X to others (OS X is my preferred GUI of choice:). Amazing that IT isn't running around chasing their tails with these new systems like they do with the Windows boxes. Help desk calls for the operating system causing another stupid error and confusing the end user have dropped off. It's more than obvious that those users without Windows have increased productivity. Amazing.
I can't agree more. OS X is my personal GUI of choice these days -- and yeah, since the beta release I've seen this thing go down maybe 4 times (not the "server" edition, not that it matters much). I was, each time, completely beating the hell out of the system -- and one of the times I had successfully mounted the core _live_ OS X file system (/) in a Linux based VirtualPC running on said file system. It didn't last too long...:)
I've run Linux for years upon years without interruption and my record keeper was a Netware 3.12 box that ran a few weeks shy of a decade. Still unacceptable for some kind of failure that could end a life (!)
The big benefit to many of the Un*x's is that 99% of the updates (pretty much short of a kernel swap out) can and are updated with no reboots needed. Simply restart the given service leaving all other services up and running. The end user typically may notice a "hickup", but not much more.
Wonderful -- as I read the article, plastered in the center of the page is the ad:
"Microsoft - Big business ambition. Small business resources. Get your FREE 6-month trial now. Windows Small Business Server 2003".
The very fact that the power grid, atm's, so on and so forth -- hell, I worked on the power supply to a embedded PC today for a newspaper printing press that had NT on it... it frankly scares the hell out of me.
There I'll be sitting there in front of my OS X or Linux box. Can't be too smug I suppose with no power. No telephone. No gas. No cash to buy bread. Hell, the auto-checkout lanes (which I refuse to use on principle) at Jewel are Mickey-MouseSoft based. Certainly no Internet.
For my business' I absolutely refused to allow a Windows server of any type in the datacenter. I still say, "are you nuts?". Yet people still did it. Once again, Bill Gates will get a chance to screw us I guess.
So, when is the next worm due to hit? At least my TiVo will still work...:)
Yeah, well, I'm long ago out of college. And have become my own ISP. 5Ghz wireless with a 10Mbit uplink -- and yes, I regularly see +900K/sec if the other end can support it.
To boot _none_ of "my" networks has one Windows box on them and my IP's are fixed (no wanna-be laptop user is gonna get DHCP in my pad).
Now, WHO is the sucker?:)...that _would_ be me -- yeah, we're still removing that other operating system from the corporate network(s)...:(
Slashdot Mirror
I love it. /. parenting. Finally.
... you can go off the pill"
:) It was a good setup.
.02's? Kids need privacy. Kids need discipline. Kids aren't the parents. Install some snooping software. Just like my mom used to pick up on the phone extension -- though she never knew I knew how to wire up a few parts from Radio Shack and a blinking led always told me of a 2nd extension going off-hook.
[me]: "HONEY -- I'm ready now
The sad thing is I grew up with a C=64. My parents didn't understand what I was doing. Thus they didn't _want_ to know. Nothing illegal, of course...
Today, they _still_ don't understand what I do or how I do it. Fine by me -- and now it pays the bills. Almost ironical.
My
Oh yeah. Tell them about using protection (!) PLEASE. Too many Windows boxes spewing spam from virus'. Or go buy them a Mac if you're tired of the patches, but I digress.
The worst punishment I ever got was getting grounded to my parents room. No computer. No TV. Oh my gosh, only books. Funny -- I still like to read.
I've had to re-activate I don't know how many XP boxes. Office had a bought a while back and would always need activation.
Heck, even my Linux and OS X boxes keep asking for activation!
Login:
My only issue with VirtualPC for Mac OS X (so far) is that with the 10.3 [Panther] release 'Virtual Networking' no longer works (share the same IP and the host Mac). Shared networking, however, does appear to work just fine (means you need a DHCP server on the local [intra]network).
... have another way to boot the OS (iPod will do) to at least be able to re-install the Adaptec drivers... Normal IDE users need not worry... :)
I have refused all patches so far from Microsoft concerning VirtualPC (only used on a Mac). Of course the Windows itself it continuously patched -- thouse I will suspect the next SP for 2K or XP... I'd bet they slip code in to NOT run unless VPC is Microsoft patched. Much easier to deal with a simple copy/replace of the HD image...
-k
PS: with the Panther update anyone with a Adaptec 39160 SCSI card
I'll bet $1 that the next SP from Microsoft breaks iTunes for Windows. Flame bait? Not with their history...
The KEY is: does either the Athlon or Pentium run OS X?
Originated on MS-DOS, but has long ago been shifted to PC-DOS -- we have our DOS based accounting package written in a form of BASIC no less. Pure number cruncher.
It easily handles payroll in the 48 states we do business (handled in house). Take into consideration that it handles direct deposit, child support, federal taxes, all the state taxes, not to mention any local taxes. Keeping track of the Union deductions & fringes for dues across dozens of Unions used nationally is trivial. 1099's & W2's printed on a good 'ol fashioned dot-matrix to this day.
Let's not even talk about tying it all together with thousands of vendors on tens of thousands of PO's tied into millions in payables. Keeping track of hundreds (in our case) of customers for a 20 million dollar company and tying it all together in a Job-Costing function and all the bases are getting covered.
Cash management, inventory, and General Ledger producing the financial documents needed does tie it altogether very nicely keeping it all in house and instantly available. Why change?
We recently had the accounting company in, during annual audits, and it was point blank asked by the board if the DOS based accounting system (also available originally on Xenix with a Linux version coming) was faster than the Windows based version only in production for the last three years now. Hands down and without question we were told the DOS based version is faster in producing reports, keying in data, and generally trying to get anything done. Pure keyboard data entry.
In the mean time it's the Connectix version of VirtualPC running PC-DOS to run accounting for us... The next version may be OS X something DOS based (not VirtualPC), or Linux [DOS] based, or pretty much anything but Microsoft for obvious reasons. Windows isn't allowed on our networks anymore...
But you would have a hard time bringing a Windows box onto any of my networks. They're just not allowed anymore.
Wait, wait -- I thought we couldn't USE computer without using Windows or something like that. And ONE (1) computer?! Surely you need at least 3 or 4 so when one is being patched and rebooted the other can BSOD itself so that the other two won't hopefully choke on the load and crash, or become infected with a virus and/or worm. We WANT to spend hundreds or thousands of additional dollars on quality like that, don't we?
Nah.
In my firecracker youth I can vividly remember a friend lighting the too-short wick of one and it blowing off in his hand. Slight burns, of course, and funny as hell to watch.
Laughing so hard I forgot about the lit cracker in my hand. BOOM! Hurts like hell. One minute laughing, the next you're crying. Such is life sometimes.
Of course I am thankful we didn't do any real damage when growing up and further blowing up objects (read: mailboxes). In those days a neighbor always saw you do it, called your mother and you had to go apologize and buy/install any mailbox they chose.
M80's, then 500's, and the sticks of dynamite were always a treat. Today the FBI would be showing up for some of the shit we pulled way back when. In those days we didn't have the Internet to figure how to not blow ourselves up or make nuclear bombs.
I guess the FBI will be making a few more house calls shortly...
I personally gave them 24 hrs from the time of turning it on. No, I won't make any difference in their bottom line -- but if more people did what I've already done...
.COM to .US (where we are :). Traffic for .COM will be accepted until they expire (next year) and in the mean time Verisign will get no more $$$ from me. Except perhaps for a couple of the domains which I think have a good chance for going for decent $$$ in a sale of them. Otherwise why bother with Verisign anymore?
Within 24hrs I flipped _all_ the domains in my control from
Useless company.
On your note about alternatives ... and in previous years to get said hardware I had -0- aternative BUT to also buy a copy of Windows.
... HIRE MORE PEOPLE. Duh.
THAT, added with the EULA, added with the shoddy work they do is damn sleazy.
That's why the business' in my control are moving away from Windows altogether. A couple of the shops are happily running only Mac & Linux based setups -- and you know what? We can communicate with the rest of the world just fine. Actually more reliably, with better accuracy, less downtime, and typically significantly faster...and saving money hand over fist it seems sometimes.
Good -- we have extra cash
Once it is proven that Mass. can interact successfully with the Feds, other states, & businesses, then many more people will take them seriously.
:)
... Windows, but migrated :), or Mr Project in Linux. They get a PDF and our management can work together as long as they all have the same basic software.
They will succeed and be _amazed_ at the cost savings. Now if we could just get them to roll some of that dough at schools teaching the kids/their replacements about thinking differently, if you will.
I know that we've been sending/receiving excel type spreadsheets with the states, unions, and insurance/attorney types with no issues. 90% of the stuff going out is in PDF format for review anyway. People love it. Who cares what you use internally to produce -- the customer doesn't care if we use FastTrack Scheduling software (Mac/Palm -- trained on
Let's see -- our accounting software is [PC]-DOS based. Yeah, it originated on MS-DOS, but that was trivial. We cover typically 40+ states a year (fed, state, and local taxes where applicable) along with 20-30 Unions a year. Thousands or tens-of-thousands customers and 2-3x that in vendors with hundreds to thousands of employees is typical. Medium sized company with very customized accounting type job costing software. We've done work for secured government contracts, to aerospace, to the automotive industry covering many types inbetween. Very few packages to handle everything needed (filings, W2's, payroll, etc). Funny, but we found that keyboard data entry (pure) is faster than click, click, menu, drop down, key-in, enter. Even the accounting firm, now making and selling the Windows version, agreed that for pure productivity we're not going to beat the 'ol DOS version for raw speed. To this day. Ironically running on a Mac (Virtual PC originally by Connectix). Too bad Microsoft bought them out. Running DOS on Linux is trivially easy...
No where near the Microsoft (what do they run their accounting software on?) or the Motorola level, but we interact with the rest of the world just fine. Except for CAD in our Engineering department. That, unfortunately, is still Win2K based with AutoCAD. AutoDesk has, at least, sent out questionaires inquiring about OS X interest. No word yet. Ironically they should have been the FIRST to migrate away from Windows and are smart enough to see how limiting it is and are drooling over the G5's.
Fortunately Microsoft's wonderful virus attraction of a operating system has caused us, as of 2000..., to decide that no 1 operating system should have all desktops for obvious security and productivity reasons. Linux was the cheap test and successful for everything except CAD work (or we just can't find the right package). The biggest problem is that no matter what the Linux users have felt gilted somewhat and want a Mac. There was one person (1) that just couldn't cope and didn't want anything except Windows. They made their own job so difficult it was just easier to make them want to quite. Done.
Whatever. Why aren't more people just ditching their precious .COM names. Think UPS.com or Amazon.com couldn't get away with switching? Sure they could...
.US take a look at NIC.US which can point you to all the various registrars. Heck, it's cheaper -- typically $15/yr.
.US -- of course I'll handle the .COM traffic until they expire in a year or two. In the mean time everything going out says .US as of yesterday.
.COM, but they surely won't on the next order. Maybe a year.
For those in the
The only thing Verisign will understand is people speaking with their dollars. And yes, I personally have switched my domains over to
Sure, business cards and letter head still say
great idea. been there, done that.
.US domain (unfortunately I registered .COM and .US with them way back when).
.COM domain back when it expires as well. No, we're not "Fedex.com", but even they could drop the .COM and go to .US and witin a month or two would you really notice? I certainly don't assume .COM today...
also mentioned that there was no way in hell they would get the renewal on the mailed from
They could have the
Speak with your $$$ -- it's the only thing they will understand.
10Mbit wireless uplink on each end. A steady 900K/sec no problem... In six hours I can dump 18.5G in one night.
:)
That's averages to about 400G a month. Don't think some of us don't do it...
I ran an experiment to do just this... Originally USENET (a decade ago I did that one), web pages, etc... Hundreds of trap address' across many of the domains in my control -- harvest and block 'em early has been my general method... :)
I recently took 1 Windows 2K box (SP2) and put it directly online in the DMZ type zone. Do NOT patch it and add no virus software. Load some trap address' (never used before) into the Outlook address book.
It took twelve (12) minutes from plugging it in to getting many, many infections, to the final spam. Typical time is 3-4 hours usually and I've seen the test go for as long as 8 hours.
How many people do you know that use Outlook and may have your email in their address book? The bitch of the matter? No Windows here anywhere, well, except for VirtualPC which makes such tests so damn easy -- too bad Microsoft had to buy them up too...
Is this going to be another .COM bust? It might be the beginning of the end for .COM & .NET (it is for me at least :), but certainly not of the Internet as we know and love to hate it. If everybody jumps one way or the other NOW we can all just BLOCK .COM and .NET traffic probably within a year or two.
.US category. Unfortunately they're also currently held by ... Verisign. I do believe that .US is, however, authoritatively not handled by "them" and most definitely (and will be) moved to another provider.
.COM and .NET. Effective immediately we've moved from .COM to .US
.ORG (non-profit) with the current economy recently... :)
Thankfully I had the fore-site to also register all my domains in the
I handle all my own traffic 100% (including DNS) -- and it appears that Verisign can only pull this stunt with
Though I'm also considering a couple of the domains for
> This way the machine will be down, thus not answering request and we will get errors like before. ;)
:) -- I beg to differ, but I think his calculation were incorrect. It's 48.
Good idea...
> "The answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is... 42"
But the sig (timing is right...
You know - 69. But things are typically a little screwed up and backwards. 96. And you only ever get half of what you wanted anyway (if that): 48.
Simple really. Back to 86'ing Verisign...
By far the Gyration has won me over. Charges on the dock which was the primary reason -- at the time Logitech only has battery replacable mice.
:)
I use it as a TV remote on the Mac all the time from the lazy boy. Right click is mute, scrolling is channel change, wheel click is full screen toggle, scroll clicked is volume adjustment. So on and so forth...
You should see the look on the wife's face when I play Quake and I'm just waiving my hand around in the air.
http://www.gyration.com/ultragt.htm
That's IT? Jeez, me, myself, and I (plus my wife :) @ home have gotten about a dozen emails today (legit).
Didn't _see_ any spam, but the logs surely show 685 rejects from known previously spammed us IP's.
169 IP's made it known through various methods (ie: we don't KNOW anybody outside the US...) that they would probably spam us.
55 messages/IP's (slow day, typically a couple of hundred) were harvested from trap addresses.
To date I've had to unblock one (1) such IP at home (work is up to maybe a dozen now) that got caught in the traps. As email flows in, and not blocks, those IP's are reverse-harvested as OK. A problem child will become evident quickly. Damn, still trying to build the perfect mouse trap as a people, eh?
IP's that have made themselves KNOWN to be a problem for us? Up to 117,469,666 as of midnight tonight. Yeah -- that's 117 million IP's blocked. Only about 3% of the total ~3.9-4 billion IP's assignable.
127 mail servers. Bah -- child's play...
Oh -- and the number of spam's that I personally saw today? I think one, which the Mac highlighted for me and dumped it. I know the wife got worried her pecker must be too small a couple of times today...
My study, funded by me, has shown that Windows is the most expensive to maintain (patch, patch, reboot, patch, reboot) and use.
:). Amazing that IT isn't running around chasing their tails with these new systems like they do with the Windows boxes. Help desk calls for the operating system causing another stupid error and confusing the end user have dropped off. It's more than obvious that those users without Windows have increased productivity. Amazing.
Thank you Microsoft: for security reasons it was determined here that at NO TIME will _any_ operating system gain 100% penetration to the desktops. The datacenter already runs a mix of Linux, BSD, and Netware...
Since the changes started we've rolled Linux out to some people and OS X to others (OS X is my preferred GUI of choice
I wish I could have gone to this school -- even if it is in the inner city (suburbian myself :).
My favorite days were those closed school snow days. I guess they'll be getting used to crash days...
I can't agree more. OS X is my personal GUI of choice these days -- and yeah, since the beta release I've seen this thing go down maybe 4 times (not the "server" edition, not that it matters much). I was, each time, completely beating the hell out of the system -- and one of the times I had successfully mounted the core _live_ OS X file system (/) in a Linux based VirtualPC running on said file system. It didn't last too long... :)
I've run Linux for years upon years without interruption and my record keeper was a Netware 3.12 box that ran a few weeks shy of a decade. Still unacceptable for some kind of failure that could end a life (!)
The big benefit to many of the Un*x's is that 99% of the updates (pretty much short of a kernel swap out) can and are updated with no reboots needed. Simply restart the given service leaving all other services up and running. The end user typically may notice a "hickup", but not much more.
Three letters for you then: QNX>
Wonderful -- as I read the article, plastered in the center of the page is the ad:
... it frankly scares the hell out of me.
:)
"Microsoft - Big business ambition. Small business resources. Get your FREE 6-month trial now. Windows Small Business Server 2003".
The very fact that the power grid, atm's, so on and so forth -- hell, I worked on the power supply to a embedded PC today for a newspaper printing press that had NT on it
There I'll be sitting there in front of my OS X or Linux box. Can't be too smug I suppose with no power. No telephone. No gas. No cash to buy bread. Hell, the auto-checkout lanes (which I refuse to use on principle) at Jewel are Mickey-MouseSoft based. Certainly no Internet.
For my business' I absolutely refused to allow a Windows server of any type in the datacenter. I still say, "are you nuts?". Yet people still did it. Once again, Bill Gates will get a chance to screw us I guess.
So, when is the next worm due to hit? At least my TiVo will still work...
Yeah, well, I'm long ago out of college. And have become my own ISP. 5Ghz wireless with a 10Mbit uplink -- and yes, I regularly see +900K/sec if the other end can support it.
:) ...that _would_ be me -- yeah, we're still removing that other operating system from the corporate network(s)... :(
To boot _none_ of "my" networks has one Windows box on them and my IP's are fixed (no wanna-be laptop user is gonna get DHCP in my pad).
Now, WHO is the sucker?