I think the blank key thing would eventually make me insane. I already flop around uselessly, stuck in paroxysms of hunt-n-peckery, after switching from my work keyboard (IBM P/N KB-0225) to my home keyboard (Eluminx Sapphire). The delete and right-ctrl keys are in different places, see... http://www.thinktechie.com/reviews/05-2003/eluminX /kb05.jpg
However, I do dig the "clicky high-end mechanical switches". Anyone who's played a Kurzweil KX88 next to a cheapo Casio can agree with that.
The government doing things like this makes me scared. Especially given the obvious ire raised against it on Slashdot by people I imagine to be smarter and more knowlegdeable on the subject than myself. Still, as an average American I feel terribly disconnected from legislation and government. You propose sending emails to my ISPs, eschewing letters to congressmen as ineffective. I agree, and isn't that an unfortunate truth? I wish democracy was as user-friendly as American Idol. Sad but true.
It seems to me that the current ruling class has realized that everyone else is pretty much ineffective in opposing their will-- what has changed? Is this the price we Gen-Xers pay for our aloofness and politcal apathy? Perhaps emmigration is the best way to "vote with your foot". The war cry of our parents used to be "America, love it or leave it" and I'm beginning to see more solace in the latter.
Poor guy. Somebody should send him a box or something to help clean out his desk. Not only a non-flattering article for his employer, but tediously from a limited perspective of "I couldn't get it to run on my Lenovo". At least MSNBC had the cajones to run the piece anyway. I wonder if they forced his deadline before the official Beta release and before the drivers were on Windows Update on purpose?
...In another thought, could it be that his Chinese Lenovo has a secret spy device that makes it not run Vista on purpose? Could it be part of some evil commie pinko plot? Send in Mike Hayden!
Once, I walled to you,
Now I vdiff from you.
This tainted kern'l you've given.
I gave you all a geek could give you,
Take my GPL and that's not nearly all...
Great, add "magha" to the "slang for 'stupid american'" category along with gweilo, amerikanaki, a merkin, meguksaram, bushkrieger, gaikokujin, amerloque, kalboj, pindos, yank, and gringo. I am so very proud.
The third format, Ms-RL (Microsoft Reference License), "has no open-source alternative and is a reference-only license that allows licensees to view source code in order to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of Microsoft technology."
Now it will be even easier for the script kiddies and botherders to wreck my online experience and steal my identity. Wheeee.
Seriously though, while this type of under-the-sheets view may make it easier for the rest of us to engineer solutions to fix glaring security holes, won't it also make it easier for those driven to leverage those insufficiencies for evil?
I agree Knoppmyth or a Gentoo/MythTV installation can be tough, especially concerning driver support. I've been running KnoppMyth on an older Compaq DeskPro that I picked up for about $90, plus a Hauppage PVR-250, 160gb disk and a NVidia with S-Video out, for about two years now. Previously, I'd had hobbyist experience with Linux (read: webservers, mailservers, ipchains fws), and was by no means a guru. The initial installation was pretty easy, but configuring and customizing stuff like: multiple drives and LVM spanning, getting the video playback drivers solid and at the right aspect ratio, getting a WiFi NIC working (never actually did get it working), took about two weeks of 4-6 hour days. Fortunately I was working from home at the time and could afford the investment.
It wasn't easy, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wants a cheap, easy PVR RIGHT NOW. Instead, it's an excellent learning tool for Linux, IR, video compression, and networking. The amount of knowledge I gained from getting Knoppmyth working was immense, and I feel much more comfortable with it now. It still involves a lot of cursing when a new version comes out, or I change my home network layout, but as a hobbyist learning tool and bleeding-edge package, it's second to none. The online self-support resources are very good, if you can craft a decent query statement.
Plus, now I can baffle anyone with bullsh*t concerning/dev/pci. And to not get too far off thread, the only thing I would add would be ntp support, a dickey clock ending your shows 4 minutes early can ruin your day!
I've been using MovableType as my blogging software for some time now, and Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin to block spam. Here are my stats since I installed version 2.04b on 8/19/2004:
I'm a low end blogger and 300MB a month of traffic is plenty for me. This service costs me about $60 a year and I hate that most of my time spent with it is cleaning up comment and trackback spam that went out before the clearinghouse was updated. I also recently started using the Nofollow plugin to stop search engine page ranks from counting links from my commenters.
As a developer of predictive dialing technologies, hanging up will actually get you called back quicker. In constructing a outbound calling campaign, I want to know if I've gotten the decision maker on the phone (called a right party connect or RPC), and I want them to make a decision. If the called party hangs up in queue or right after being passed to an agent, I'm going to try to call that number back as soon as possible in an attempt to get some sort of decision.
Really, your best recourse is to get on the national DNC (Do Not Call) register, the new laws of last year have some serious teeth-- if a given company receives a lot of complaints the feds will come in and audit their calling list. This means that they bump the DNC list up against their list, and issue a fine for each instance of matching numbers found-- regardless of if they have been called or not. Too many instances can mean jail time for managers and dialer supervisors; and I have a sneaking suspicion that DNC abusers have to toss a lot more salads in the joint than child molesters.
Also, attempting to waste the time of the calling agent backfires more often than not. These people have their performance measured on how fast they can handle calls, and how much of America they can reach out and piss off each shift-- a calling agent who is willing to sit on the phone while you pretend to look for your credit card for five hours will quickly be forced to find a new means of employment and be replaced with an agent that will just hang up on you and schedule a call-back. The analogy the sales managers used at the firm I used to develop for, was "the slot machine". The more times you pull the lever, then better your chances of winning, so close calls quickly or decide to come back later, rather than attempt to win customers over with a 30 minute heartfelt oration on the glories of your product.
Personally, I got tired of the bad kharma, so I gave up working on outbound sales applications and I only do collections/recovery related dialer work now. So keep your payments up to date, and people like me won't find new and irritating ways to get you on the phone.
This isn't so much a new thing. SRC Technologies in Hilliard, OH makes a spyware remover called SpyBouncer that checks for adware and malicious spyware. The same parent company also sells KeyLogger, a program that does just that-- it logs all keystrokes (including passwords, SSNs, credit card numbers, your pr0n searches, etc.) into a hidden file for retreval later. I sent a message to the SpyBouncer tech support group asking if it will remove KeyLogger. No response. One could take that to mean "No". Kinda like the fire department selling white phosphorus grenades to children, IMHO.
In it's heyday, would the Mob have prospered if every young Italian/Russian/Irish son of an immigrant started up a protection scheme? Instead, you could say the Mob paved the way for the modern insurance industry. So now the question is, who survived that growth period? The Mob or the insurance magnates?
In case any of you big-giant-brain types want to re-task a satellite to degrade orbit and "splash down" in Las Vegas, here's the coordinates of Mandalay Bay:
3950 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, Nv , 89193-8880
Longitude: 115.1727, Latitude: 36.0922
As an IT professional/developer with 130 wintel boxes in my charge, I just want to say thanks to Microsoft for giving me something to fill up the otherwise boring hours of my employment with endless regression testing to make sure everything works with everything else. It's not as if I'm AT ALL busy with keeping everything running anyway. Not to mention writing new code that compiles and runs fine on Win2K but randomly throws exceptions on NT.
!= ("Not!")
Sheesh... I'm gonna quit my job and start a new thrash band called Rage Against The Butterfly
Shock And Awe
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This morning all the news channels are throwing around the term "shock and awe" when they talk about the first missile strike carried out against Iraq. What exactly is that? Well, I did a little researching on the net and I found a site hosting the text of a small book written by Harlan Ullman and James Wade called Shock And Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. It appears this was written as kind of a military playbook or "intellectual construct", written back in 1996. At the time of it's writing, this handbook had to undergo testing at something called the MRC (Military Relations Committee?) and the "Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997". Finally it had to be proven against the Operations Other Than War doctrine and training platforms. Now, I'm not certain what these terms mean, but I'm wondering if this manual is the script for the style of tactics we are now seeing Iraq. If so, the timeline suggests to me that as soon as the first military action in Iraq was over, we started planning the next one...
Cross-post from my blog at www.kellytadams.com
Hee hee. It would seem the little engine is not multi-threaded, but I discovered you can run two of them and they will run on separate processors.
-Sazarac
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He
has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would
suffice." --Albert Einstein
And they wonder why no one comes forward? I'd much rather deal with the guy that hacked my home www serv in my OWN way. Why let the FBI lock him up in Club Fed?
Clearly I still have some issues to work through...
-Sazarac
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He
has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would
suffice." --Albert Einstein
"The only solution as far as I can see is to contribute to the products that I like and use as well as writing members of Congress as well as the DOJ and telling them that I would prefer if my tax dollars were spent on items that can be benneficial to the nation as a whole."
My 2 pennies:
There is a second solution, albeit not very legal. I pay for software I use if I don't protest to their business practices. It's easy to P2P/rip/crack/steal-from-the-office various MS products. That's because all the warez d00dz want to be the first to crack and distribute "MS WindowsOfficeXP200097InterDev.NET" or whatever. I personally have never paid one red cent to Microsoft for any service or product. However I have gladly paid for Tag&Rename, Opera, PhotoShop, WinZip and many others. Most of which are easily cracked. Not to mention games, which is where most of my computer dollars go.
I guess my personal voice says "Put the 900-pound gorilla on a starvation diet until he can no longer sit where he wants." Given that my entire livelyhood consists of programming both at work and on the side with MS tools, I think this is a pretty strong message.
-Sazarac
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He
has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would
suffice." --Albert Einstein
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I wonder if Das Keyboard II comes in both QWERTY and Dvorak variants? *chuckle*
However, I do dig the "clicky high-end mechanical switches". Anyone who's played a Kurzweil KX88 next to a cheapo Casio can agree with that.
It seems to me that the current ruling class has realized that everyone else is pretty much ineffective in opposing their will-- what has changed? Is this the price we Gen-Xers pay for our aloofness and politcal apathy? Perhaps emmigration is the best way to "vote with your foot". The war cry of our parents used to be "America, love it or leave it" and I'm beginning to see more solace in the latter.
Poor guy. Somebody should send him a box or something to help clean out his desk. Not only a non-flattering article for his employer, but tediously from a limited perspective of "I couldn't get it to run on my Lenovo". At least MSNBC had the cajones to run the piece anyway. I wonder if they forced his deadline before the official Beta release and before the drivers were on Windows Update on purpose?
...In another thought, could it be that his Chinese Lenovo has a secret spy device that makes it not run Vista on purpose? Could it be part of some evil commie pinko plot? Send in Mike Hayden!
Once, I walled to you,
Now I vdiff from you.
This tainted kern'l you've given.
I gave you all a geek could give you,
Take my GPL and that's not nearly all...
Boop boop.
Tainted kern'l.
Boop boop.
Tainted kern'l.
Great, add "magha" to the "slang for 'stupid american'" category along with gweilo, amerikanaki, a merkin, meguksaram, bushkrieger, gaikokujin, amerloque, kalboj, pindos, yank, and gringo. I am so very proud.
Now it will be even easier for the script kiddies and botherders to wreck my online experience and steal my identity. Wheeee.
Seriously though, while this type of under-the-sheets view may make it easier for the rest of us to engineer solutions to fix glaring security holes, won't it also make it easier for those driven to leverage those insufficiencies for evil?
And how is this different than domain squatting?
I agree Knoppmyth or a Gentoo/MythTV installation can be tough, especially concerning driver support. I've been running KnoppMyth on an older Compaq DeskPro that I picked up for about $90, plus a Hauppage PVR-250, 160gb disk and a NVidia with S-Video out, for about two years now. Previously, I'd had hobbyist experience with Linux (read: webservers, mailservers, ipchains fws), and was by no means a guru. The initial installation was pretty easy, but configuring and customizing stuff like: multiple drives and LVM spanning, getting the video playback drivers solid and at the right aspect ratio, getting a WiFi NIC working (never actually did get it working), took about two weeks of 4-6 hour days. Fortunately I was working from home at the time and could afford the investment.
It wasn't easy, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wants a cheap, easy PVR RIGHT NOW. Instead, it's an excellent learning tool for Linux, IR, video compression, and networking. The amount of knowledge I gained from getting Knoppmyth working was immense, and I feel much more comfortable with it now. It still involves a lot of cursing when a new version comes out, or I change my home network layout, but as a hobbyist learning tool and bleeding-edge package, it's second to none. The online self-support resources are very good, if you can craft a decent query statement.
Plus, now I can baffle anyone with bullsh*t concerning /dev/pci. And to not get too far off thread, the only thing I would add would be ntp support, a dickey clock ending your shows 4 minutes early can ruin your day!
Really, your best recourse is to get on the national DNC (Do Not Call) register, the new laws of last year have some serious teeth-- if a given company receives a lot of complaints the feds will come in and audit their calling list. This means that they bump the DNC list up against their list, and issue a fine for each instance of matching numbers found-- regardless of if they have been called or not. Too many instances can mean jail time for managers and dialer supervisors; and I have a sneaking suspicion that DNC abusers have to toss a lot more salads in the joint than child molesters.
Also, attempting to waste the time of the calling agent backfires more often than not. These people have their performance measured on how fast they can handle calls, and how much of America they can reach out and piss off each shift-- a calling agent who is willing to sit on the phone while you pretend to look for your credit card for five hours will quickly be forced to find a new means of employment and be replaced with an agent that will just hang up on you and schedule a call-back. The analogy the sales managers used at the firm I used to develop for, was "the slot machine". The more times you pull the lever, then better your chances of winning, so close calls quickly or decide to come back later, rather than attempt to win customers over with a 30 minute heartfelt oration on the glories of your product.
Personally, I got tired of the bad kharma, so I gave up working on outbound sales applications and I only do collections/recovery related dialer work now. So keep your payments up to date, and people like me won't find new and irritating ways to get you on the phone.
This isn't so much a new thing. SRC Technologies in Hilliard, OH makes a spyware remover called SpyBouncer that checks for adware and malicious spyware. The same parent company also sells KeyLogger, a program that does just that-- it logs all keystrokes (including passwords, SSNs, credit card numbers, your pr0n searches, etc.) into a hidden file for retreval later. I sent a message to the SpyBouncer tech support group asking if it will remove KeyLogger. No response. One could take that to mean "No". Kinda like the fire department selling white phosphorus grenades to children, IMHO.
In it's heyday, would the Mob have prospered if every young Italian/Russian/Irish son of an immigrant started up a protection scheme? Instead, you could say the Mob paved the way for the modern insurance industry. So now the question is, who survived that growth period? The Mob or the insurance magnates?
3950 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, Nv , 89193-8880
Longitude: 115.1727, Latitude: 36.0922
!= ("Not!")
Sheesh... I'm gonna quit my job and start a new thrash band called Rage Against The Butterfly
This morning all the news channels are throwing around the term "shock and awe" when they talk about the first missile strike carried out against Iraq. What exactly is that? Well, I did a little researching on the net and I found a site hosting the text of a small book written by Harlan Ullman and James Wade called Shock And Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. It appears this was written as kind of a military playbook or "intellectual construct", written back in 1996. At the time of it's writing, this handbook had to undergo testing at something called the MRC (Military Relations Committee?) and the "Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997". Finally it had to be proven against the Operations Other Than War doctrine and training platforms. Now, I'm not certain what these terms mean, but I'm wondering if this manual is the script for the style of tactics we are now seeing Iraq. If so, the timeline suggests to me that as soon as the first military action in Iraq was over, we started planning the next one... Cross-post from my blog at www.kellytadams.com
-Sazarac
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." --Albert Einstein
Clearly I still have some issues to work through...
-Sazarac
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." --Albert Einstein
There is a second solution, albeit not very legal. I pay for software I use if I don't protest to their business practices. It's easy to P2P/rip/crack/steal-from-the-office various MS products. That's because all the warez d00dz want to be the first to crack and distribute "MS WindowsOfficeXP200097InterDev.NET" or whatever. I personally have never paid one red cent to Microsoft for any service or product. However I have gladly paid for Tag&Rename, Opera, PhotoShop, WinZip and many others. Most of which are easily cracked. Not to mention games, which is where most of my computer dollars go.
I guess my personal voice says "Put the 900-pound gorilla on a starvation diet until he can no longer sit where he wants." Given that my entire livelyhood consists of programming both at work and on the side with MS tools, I think this is a pretty strong message.
-Sazarac
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." --Albert Einstein