Most IT departments don't really realize how much they're not doing for their users till they lock everything down.
They did this at a previous place of work, and it lasted about a month before they let most of us take control of our own machines again.
At first they thought we were doing some kind of protest, since their workload went up significantly after implementing this. I remember one frustrated IT guy complaining to a co-worker "but you've never had problems before!" and the co-worker replying "Yes, I did, but I usually just fix them and keep working, now I have to call you every time anything goes wrong."
After a few weeks, most of us had Admin privlidges back on our own machines, and then a couple weeks later they offically ended the program.
I realize that this is just a troll, but I just replaced twm with Oroborus because Oroborus is actually lighter and snappier than twm, while still being pretty modern.
The full source download comes in a just under 70k.
I had one of these, I bought it when they'd just stopped making them and toy stores were liqudating their stock. ($75 at Kay-Bee! They're now going for $400 on ebay!) I used it a few times and then put it back, in all it's packaging, and stuck it in my parents attic.
Gah. One day I came home to look for it, and found out that my mom had given it to a younger cousin who proceeded to smash it into little bits, just like he did to my Star Wars X-wing and most of my lego bricks. I'm not sure how you do what he did to my legos, but somehow his ritalin addled mind came up with a way to mangle them.
So whatever you do, don't stash the box anywhere someone who doesn't appreciate a good ebay investment can dispose of it.
Well, PPPoE is a pathetic, half-assed kludge. It's a dynamic IP addressing scheme that tries to put the PPP protocol over lines that really don't need it, mostly to save ISPs money because they can use a lot of their old modem equipment. The result is an inefficient protocol that takes a chunk out of your network's maximum transfer unit, which slows things down and screws up a lot of stuff. If you've ever done NAT behind a PPPoE network, you will discover how crappy it really is.
But that's not really what they're complaining about. They're complaining because SBC wants to prevent any of the ISPs that use their lines from being able to give DSL lines static IP addresses. Which means you can't get a static IP dsl line at all.
They already use PPPoE for most new lines, but you can usually find ISPs willing to sell you a static line as well. This would mean that you couldn't get a static IP address on anything less than a much more expensive buisness class DSL line, even if a third party DSL provider really wanted to sell you one.
I still don't understand what GSM is supposed to give us over the exsisting systems in the US. I travel quite a bit, and have an AT&T phone with national roaming. I can make calls from San Diego, Boston or anywhere in between without thinking about it. I've never been in a situation where my phone couldn't make a call despite having signal.
I also have a Cingular GSM phone (for work), and though the little Nokia is nice, I don't see GSM giving me more features or better sound quality than any of the other systems out there.
From a user perspective, I really don't care if it's GSM or TDMA or XYZPDQ or whatever, I just care if I can make a call. Why all the worship of GSM? I still have yet to see a sound argument for it.
My system (and how/why I wound up with it):
Polk speakers (they're too old): $0
Yamaha receiver (it's got a lcd remote control!) (apparently has too much "sclugger" or "frooz" or somesuch): $0
Subwoofer (behind couch, don't know the brand) (rattles in case when turned up to cardiac arrest levels): $0
Koss headphones (apparently not as good as some german ones): $0
Dennon cd player (not changer):$0
Sony CD changer (roommate moved, owed rent, remaining roommates divvied up remaining possesions) : $0
Sony Tape Deck (see Sony CD Changer):$0
BSR Turntable (it's all about direct drive, baby (actual words when given up)): $0
Infinity mid-channel speaker (you can't hear the hiss?) : $0
Wires and cables (here, I don't need this stuff, just replaced everything with monster cable) : $0
Total system cost : $0
So, you see, by cultivating friendships with people who have, ahem, issues with the sizes of their subwoofers, you can wind up with really nice stereo stuff without costing you a dime. Almost all of this stuff was given to me when helping friends move, and they all had this gleam in their eyes, like they were going to, in the virginal hollows of their new homes, be able to build the most bitchin' stereo ever, and didn't need any of that old crap that had been holding them back all these years.
Counterstrike allows players to vote people off of servers. However, this system doesn't really work, as it requires 50% of all players to vote against someone to boot them.
What happens is that most players (more than 50%) don't even know how to vote. You have to bring down the console, which isn't enabled by default. Then, out of the ones that can vote, only half of them will actually vote, because you're usually voting against someone cheating on the other team. The other team doesn't care because it means they're winning. Or you're voting against a jerk on your team, and the other team isn't even aware that there's a problem.
For the past few days, I've seen people consistently making blind, aimed kills in situations where you wouldn't expect someone to be. It's one thing to blindly open up on a crate or a door, it's something else to headshot someone running on the other side of a wall.
There was one guy Monday night who was getting AWP headshot after headshot through the walls on every level that we played, until the admin decided that he was cheating and booted him. Someone could've been ghosting for him, but he was doing it even before anyone died.
Though I don't think this is going to be as terrible as people assume. At least for CS, they'll probably have to make more walls and boxes impenatrable (the garage in cs_seige comes to mind) but there's really nothing keeping most people from ghosting as it is, and it gets pretty obvious very quickly when someone's doing something illegal. Though they need to lower the vote threshold to kick players, since CS voting doesn't work the way it stands.
What you need someone with a forceful personality and a good deal of experience. You're probably not going to get either hiring new grads.
You need someone with a forceful personality because they're going to need to shout and yell to get the scientists to sit down and write actual specs for the programs they want to be written. A couple of post-its with some scribbled bits on them do not count as a proper spec. And a passive introvert is most likey going to try to figure out the post its, get it wrong, and then nobody is happy.
Unless they did their undergrad study at Hogwarts, no programmer has taken any magic courses. They do not know how to pull rabbits out of hats, nor do they know how to read minds. Chances are, if someone goes off to write a program and comes back with something that nobody wants, it's not because the programmer isn't good, it's because that programmer was given an incomplete or (most often) non-exsistant spec.
So if you want in-house development, you're either going to need to find a progammer that's willing to argue in meetings, or you need to find a manager for those programmers capable of doing the same. You can't just assume that because someone knows how to program that they'll be able to write software in a vacuum that satisfies anybody.
That's exactly what I thought, and I'm sure that's what it is.
You'd be amazed at how expensive normal stuff that's been modifed, even just slightly, for the medical industry is. I volunteer at a mainstreaming school, and there are a lot of toys in the therapy department that are just normal toys with a 1/4" headphone jack in series with the power switch. That way they can hook them up to a variety of switches to teach kids how to use a sip & puff or how to pull a string or whatever.
One of those yappy dogs that does a little backflip, plus a 65 cent headphone jack from radio shack can easily run into the hundreds of dollars. It's nuts. Half the time I'm there I'm running around with a soldering iron fixing the talking cookie monster or the busted teletubby because they can't afford to replace them.
Granted some of the pricing makes sense on things like the mounted switches, which are pretty low run manufacure, but still have some custom machining and molding to them. But the toys and other items are a total ripoff.
I would also add: 5. Donates one's time and effort to volunteer orginizations/groups that the author is unaware of, rather than ones that can be easily cited from old issues of Newsweek (see "Research, Extensive").
Watch the ZDNet talkback section on this article - right now the first ten postings have all been extremely critical of the article and ZD. It'll be interesting to see if those postings stay that way.
It means you don't need people in the room with it. You could get up and leave and turn out the lights and not worry about it.
I assume it must have remote system admin stuff, so you could administer a cluster of these without needing to go to each machine individually, or have direct physical access to the machine.
...that polices nasty villans as the Dark Knight, Batman.
Bruce Ward is some random dork, riding a PR high, unknowing that he's a very small fish swimming in a tank full of sharks. And lawyers, many, many lawyers, who have sharper teeth than the sharks.
Revealing his extraterrestrial orgins, slashdot-terminal said:
"Becuase everything is logical in some way."
I hope your visit to our planet is an enjoyable one. Please be careful, however, around the smaller, curvier humans. They are called "females" and I don't think you're quite ready to deal with them on a 1-to-1 level. Please refer to pamphlet #1450-245 titled "That is Not Logical: An Earth guide for logic based entities" for important saftey tips.
This has been a public service of the Terran Global Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Board.
Apple has not gone after every company with a translucent case design. They have gone after two companies with almost exact iMac ripoffs. There are lots of translucent cases you can go get right now, including the modified non-iMac lookalike eMachines eOne.
Apple is not going after this company either. Re-read the article. It does not say anything about Apple actually doing anything to the company. It has one quote from an Apple marketdrone saying that it does look like an iMac, but you have no idea of what he was looking at to come to that conclusion.
This article is essentially a marketing troll, and you've got a bright shiny hook sticking out of your mouth.
If anyone had bothered to read the article, Apple is not suing FishPC. They are evaluating the situation, but have as of yet taken no legal action.
What you are looking at is a press release from FishPC designed to make it look like that they're brave little underdogs fighting the big bad Apple. The reporter then threw in a couple of random quotes from some random Apple marketing person to make it look like he did research.
It is marketing, pure and simple. Five minutes ago you had never heard of FishPC, and had they not done this, you could have probably gone the rest of your life without ever knowing of their exsistance. Read the article. What does it say? Apple is evaluating the situation, and then a glowing description of the internals of the computer, talking about the specs and configurations it comes in. It reads like ad copy, because that's what it is.
I don't trust other people's anti-spam filters. I have yet to see one that doesn't periodcially throw out legitimate email, and that is quite unacceptable. Many of them claim 99.9% success rates, but from my experience, it's more like 80%.
It shouldn't be the providers role to stop incoming spam anyway. That just means you're paying to have someone maintain their filters and the extra computational horsepower to run those filters.
The simple fact of the matter is that spammers need to be held accountable for the expenses their advertising creates. It's already illegal to send fax-spam, because fax paper is a commodity that people can easily understand as costing money. Bandwidth, on the other hand, isn't something people grasp as easily, but that doesn't mean that the money it costs is any less real.
This isn't directly spamming the cell phone, it's spamming cell phones that can recieve alphanumeric internet email. So the spammer isn't paying anything, because it's just going to an email address.
It's a really nice to be able to recieve email pages, so it's not a viable solution to just turn that feature off.
What I'm hoping is that this will clue people into the fact that they're paying for other people's spam. It's not clear to most people that when they pay their ISP bill each month, that part of that goes to pay for the extra robust mail server that their ISP has to run to handle all the extra email that some spammer has just blasted at it. But if people start having to pay directly for each spam page they receive (without the spammer paying anything more than for a temporary ISP account) they're going to be more likely to get uppity and bring it up to their representitives to make some laws prohibiting or restricting it.
What I'd like to see is spammers have to pay a per unit price to every ISP they send messages to. I'd tolerate spam if I knew it was going toward making my ISP bill cheaper, but as it stands, it goes toward making it more expensive, and I can't stand that.
Did you read the article? This isn't some wannabe saying "wouldn't be cool if...", it's descriptions of what these people actually did and the results they got.
But that gave people the idea that if they looked like cell phones, surely they must work like cell phones.
One of the significant problems with the project was that they were trying to get them to work exaclty like cell phones - cell phones in 1989 that is. The Mot engineers hit that target right on the head. It's too bad that cell phones had moved so far away from that target that Iridium became little more than a technical curiosity.
Cell phones back then were huge- the Motorola brick phone was the most portable at a couple of pounds, about 4" deep, 3" wide and 8" tall and most of the other phones had a handset with the batteries and other stuff in a separate pack, like carrying a standard Bell 1948 Desk Phone around with you.
And they didn't work very well indoors or in a car, because the few cells that were out there didn't overlap (so you'd drop going from once cell to the next) and were often quite far apart (so you were probably at the edge of the range to begin with, and walls would block the weak signal).
Though the Iridium phone I had worked while in the car, the window needed to be down and the antenna needed to be stuck out the window and pointing up (it had a joint so you could hold it normally and still point the broomstick sized antenna up). That made it pretty hard to hear, as you can imagine. They had external car antennas that you'd plug into the phone that apparently made using them in the car a lot easier, but I didn't get one of those (I wasn't paying for it, so I got what they gave me).
Slashdot Mirror
Most IT departments don't really realize how much they're not doing for their users till they lock everything down.
They did this at a previous place of work, and it lasted about a month before they let most of us take control of our own machines again.
At first they thought we were doing some kind of protest, since their workload went up significantly after implementing this. I remember one frustrated IT guy complaining to a co-worker "but you've never had problems before!" and the co-worker replying "Yes, I did, but I usually just fix them and keep working, now I have to call you every time anything goes wrong."
After a few weeks, most of us had Admin privlidges back on our own machines, and then a couple weeks later they offically ended the program.
I realize that this is just a troll, but I just replaced twm with Oroborus because Oroborus is actually lighter and snappier than twm, while still being pretty modern.
The full source download comes in a just under 70k.
It's really a nice refreshing change.
Ahh, the PXL2000.
I had one of these, I bought it when they'd just stopped making them and toy stores were liqudating their stock. ($75 at Kay-Bee! They're now going for $400 on ebay!) I used it a few times and then put it back, in all it's packaging, and stuck it in my parents attic.
Gah. One day I came home to look for it, and found out that my mom had given it to a younger cousin who proceeded to smash it into little bits, just like he did to my Star Wars X-wing and most of my lego bricks. I'm not sure how you do what he did to my legos, but somehow his ritalin addled mind came up with a way to mangle them.
So whatever you do, don't stash the box anywhere someone who doesn't appreciate a good ebay investment can dispose of it.
http://www.google.com/search?q=PPPoE+mtu
Well, PPPoE is a pathetic, half-assed kludge. It's a dynamic IP addressing scheme that tries to put the PPP protocol over lines that really don't need it, mostly to save ISPs money because they can use a lot of their old modem equipment. The result is an inefficient protocol that takes a chunk out of your network's maximum transfer unit, which slows things down and screws up a lot of stuff. If you've ever done NAT behind a PPPoE network, you will discover how crappy it really is.
But that's not really what they're complaining about. They're complaining because SBC wants to prevent any of the ISPs that use their lines from being able to give DSL lines static IP addresses. Which means you can't get a static IP dsl line at all.
They already use PPPoE for most new lines, but you can usually find ISPs willing to sell you a static line as well. This would mean that you couldn't get a static IP address on anything less than a much more expensive buisness class DSL line, even if a third party DSL provider really wanted to sell you one.
I still don't understand what GSM is supposed to give us over the exsisting systems in the US. I travel quite a bit, and have an AT&T phone with national roaming. I can make calls from San Diego, Boston or anywhere in between without thinking about it. I've never been in a situation where my phone couldn't make a call despite having signal.
I also have a Cingular GSM phone (for work), and though the little Nokia is nice, I don't see GSM giving me more features or better sound quality than any of the other systems out there.
From a user perspective, I really don't care if it's GSM or TDMA or XYZPDQ or whatever, I just care if I can make a call. Why all the worship of GSM? I still have yet to see a sound argument for it.
My system (and how/why I wound up with it):
Polk speakers (they're too old): $0
Yamaha receiver (it's got a lcd remote control!) (apparently has too much "sclugger" or "frooz" or somesuch): $0
Subwoofer (behind couch, don't know the brand) (rattles in case when turned up to cardiac arrest levels): $0
Koss headphones (apparently not as good as some german ones): $0
Dennon cd player (not changer):$0
Sony CD changer (roommate moved, owed rent, remaining roommates divvied up remaining possesions) : $0
Sony Tape Deck (see Sony CD Changer):$0
BSR Turntable (it's all about direct drive, baby (actual words when given up)): $0
Infinity mid-channel speaker (you can't hear the hiss?) : $0
Wires and cables (here, I don't need this stuff, just replaced everything with monster cable) : $0
Total system cost : $0
So, you see, by cultivating friendships with people who have, ahem, issues with the sizes of their subwoofers, you can wind up with really nice stereo stuff without costing you a dime. Almost all of this stuff was given to me when helping friends move, and they all had this gleam in their eyes, like they were going to, in the virginal hollows of their new homes, be able to build the most bitchin' stereo ever, and didn't need any of that old crap that had been holding them back all these years.
I can tell you're a troll becaue everybody KNOWS that it's GREEN markers that work the best. Duh.
It's the same thing that makes the green iMacs go faster than the rest of them. Really! Look it up!
Counterstrike allows players to vote people off of servers. However, this system doesn't really work, as it requires 50% of all players to vote against someone to boot them.
What happens is that most players (more than 50%) don't even know how to vote. You have to bring down the console, which isn't enabled by default. Then, out of the ones that can vote, only half of them will actually vote, because you're usually voting against someone cheating on the other team. The other team doesn't care because it means they're winning. Or you're voting against a jerk on your team, and the other team isn't even aware that there's a problem.
For the past few days, I've seen people consistently making blind, aimed kills in situations where you wouldn't expect someone to be. It's one thing to blindly open up on a crate or a door, it's something else to headshot someone running on the other side of a wall.
There was one guy Monday night who was getting AWP headshot after headshot through the walls on every level that we played, until the admin decided that he was cheating and booted him. Someone could've been ghosting for him, but he was doing it even before anyone died.
Though I don't think this is going to be as terrible as people assume. At least for CS, they'll probably have to make more walls and boxes impenatrable (the garage in cs_seige comes to mind) but there's really nothing keeping most people from ghosting as it is, and it gets pretty obvious very quickly when someone's doing something illegal. Though they need to lower the vote threshold to kick players, since CS voting doesn't work the way it stands.
The high chief of the Little-endians has made statements that disparage the Big-endians.
"They're unnatural and generally suck monkey ass." he said. "I think they also beat their children."
The response from the Big-endians was quite clear- "The Little-endians are insane and represent a threat to the very fabric of our society."
In a poll of 2000 randomly selected indviduals, none had an opinion on the subject, with a +-4% margin for error.
What you need someone with a forceful personality and a good deal of experience. You're probably not going to get either hiring new grads.
You need someone with a forceful personality because they're going to need to shout and yell to get the scientists to sit down and write actual specs for the programs they want to be written. A couple of post-its with some scribbled bits on them do not count as a proper spec. And a passive introvert is most likey going to try to figure out the post its, get it wrong, and then nobody is happy.
Unless they did their undergrad study at Hogwarts, no programmer has taken any magic courses. They do not know how to pull rabbits out of hats, nor do they know how to read minds. Chances are, if someone goes off to write a program and comes back with something that nobody wants, it's not because the programmer isn't good, it's because that programmer was given an incomplete or (most often) non-exsistant spec.
So if you want in-house development, you're either going to need to find a progammer that's willing to argue in meetings, or you need to find a manager for those programmers capable of doing the same. You can't just assume that because someone knows how to program that they'll be able to write software in a vacuum that satisfies anybody.
That's exactly what I thought, and I'm sure that's what it is.
You'd be amazed at how expensive normal stuff that's been modifed, even just slightly, for the medical industry is. I volunteer at a mainstreaming school, and there are a lot of toys in the therapy department that are just normal toys with a 1/4" headphone jack in series with the power switch. That way they can hook them up to a variety of switches to teach kids how to use a sip & puff or how to pull a string or whatever.
One of those yappy dogs that does a little backflip, plus a 65 cent headphone jack from radio shack can easily run into the hundreds of dollars. It's nuts. Half the time I'm there I'm running around with a soldering iron fixing the talking cookie monster or the busted teletubby because they can't afford to replace them.
Granted some of the pricing makes sense on things like the mounted switches, which are pretty low run manufacure, but still have some custom machining and molding to them. But the toys and other items are a total ripoff.
You hit the nail on the head with that one, man.
I would also add:
5. Donates one's time and effort to volunteer orginizations/groups that the author is unaware of, rather than ones that can be easily cited from old issues of Newsweek (see "Research, Extensive").
Watch the ZDNet talkback section on this article - right now the first ten postings have all been extremely critical of the article and ZD. It'll be interesting to see if those postings stay that way.
It means you don't need people in the room with it. You could get up and leave and turn out the lights and not worry about it.
I assume it must have remote system admin stuff, so you could administer a cluster of these without needing to go to each machine individually, or have direct physical access to the machine.
...that polices nasty villans as the Dark Knight, Batman.
Bruce Ward is some random dork, riding a PR high, unknowing that he's a very small fish swimming in a tank full of sharks. And lawyers, many, many lawyers, who have sharper teeth than the sharks.
Revealing his extraterrestrial orgins, slashdot-terminal said:
"Becuase everything is logical in some way."
I hope your visit to our planet is an enjoyable one. Please be careful, however, around the smaller, curvier humans. They are called "females" and I don't think you're quite ready to deal with them on a 1-to-1 level. Please refer to pamphlet #1450-245 titled "That is Not Logical: An Earth guide for logic based entities" for important saftey tips.
This has been a public service of the Terran Global Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Board.
Thank you.
Apple has not gone after every company with a translucent case design. They have gone after two companies with almost exact iMac ripoffs. There are lots of translucent cases you can go get right now, including the modified non-iMac lookalike eMachines eOne.
Apple is not going after this company either. Re-read the article. It does not say anything about Apple actually doing anything to the company. It has one quote from an Apple marketdrone saying that it does look like an iMac, but you have no idea of what he was looking at to come to that conclusion.
This article is essentially a marketing troll, and you've got a bright shiny hook sticking out of your mouth.
If anyone had bothered to read the article, Apple is not suing FishPC. They are evaluating the situation, but have as of yet taken no legal action.
What you are looking at is a press release from FishPC designed to make it look like that they're brave little underdogs fighting the big bad Apple. The reporter then threw in a couple of random quotes from some random Apple marketing person to make it look like he did research.
It is marketing, pure and simple. Five minutes ago you had never heard of FishPC, and had they not done this, you could have probably gone the rest of your life without ever knowing of their exsistance. Read the article. What does it say? Apple is evaluating the situation, and then a glowing description of the internals of the computer, talking about the specs and configurations it comes in. It reads like ad copy, because that's what it is.
I don't trust other people's anti-spam filters. I have yet to see one that doesn't periodcially throw out legitimate email, and that is quite unacceptable. Many of them claim 99.9% success rates, but from my experience, it's more like 80%.
It shouldn't be the providers role to stop incoming spam anyway. That just means you're paying to have someone maintain their filters and the extra computational horsepower to run those filters.
The simple fact of the matter is that spammers need to be held accountable for the expenses their advertising creates. It's already illegal to send fax-spam, because fax paper is a commodity that people can easily understand as costing money. Bandwidth, on the other hand, isn't something people grasp as easily, but that doesn't mean that the money it costs is any less real.
This isn't directly spamming the cell phone, it's spamming cell phones that can recieve alphanumeric internet email. So the spammer isn't paying anything, because it's just going to an email address.
It's a really nice to be able to recieve email pages, so it's not a viable solution to just turn that feature off.
What I'm hoping is that this will clue people into the fact that they're paying for other people's spam. It's not clear to most people that when they pay their ISP bill each month, that part of that goes to pay for the extra robust mail server that their ISP has to run to handle all the extra email that some spammer has just blasted at it. But if people start having to pay directly for each spam page they receive (without the spammer paying anything more than for a temporary ISP account) they're going to be more likely to get uppity and bring it up to their representitives to make some laws prohibiting or restricting it.
What I'd like to see is spammers have to pay a per unit price to every ISP they send messages to. I'd tolerate spam if I knew it was going toward making my ISP bill cheaper, but as it stands, it goes toward making it more expensive, and I can't stand that.
Did you read the article? This isn't some wannabe saying "wouldn't be cool if...", it's descriptions of what these people actually did and the results they got.
Yes, they used Apple hardware.
This is a quite cool hack.
I love the meter-long directional antenna bit. I'm going to mount one on the roof of my car.
I wonder what the foul weather performance is. How does it handle rain?
But that gave people the idea that if they looked like cell phones, surely they must work like cell phones.
One of the significant problems with the project was that they were trying to get them to work exaclty like cell phones - cell phones in 1989
that is. The Mot engineers hit that target right on the head. It's too bad that cell phones had moved so far away from that target that Iridium became little more than a technical curiosity.
Cell phones back then were huge- the Motorola brick phone was the most portable at a couple of pounds, about 4" deep, 3" wide and 8" tall and most of the other phones had a handset with the batteries and other stuff in a separate pack, like carrying a standard Bell 1948 Desk Phone around with you.
And they didn't work very well indoors or in a car, because the few cells that were out there didn't overlap (so you'd drop going from once cell to the next) and were often quite far apart (so you were probably at the edge of the range to begin with, and walls would block the weak signal).
Though the Iridium phone I had worked while in the car, the window needed to be down and the antenna needed to be stuck out the window and pointing up (it had a joint so you could hold it normally and still point the broomstick sized antenna up). That made it pretty hard to hear, as you can imagine. They had external car antennas that you'd plug into the phone that apparently made using them in the car a lot easier, but I didn't get one of those (I wasn't paying for it, so I got what they gave me).