Well, it might have worked if they had the cell phone on vibrate. When the little motor that makes the phone vibrate is spinning, there are tiny sparks inside of it, which could theoretically ignite some gasoline vapors. They had the phone set to audibly ring when they tried their experiment, so no spark was generated.
I didn't see any mention of a pretty good solution that i've run across:
Every time a message hits a server from a sender that it has never met before, it sends a TEMPFAIL back instead of accepting the message. All real MTAs will try again with whatever their retry delay is set to, and usually for about 4 days. If the server gets the same message being delivered again, it accepts it and adds the sender to a whitelist where it never has to 'ask questions' of this sender again.
The reason that this would work, at least for now, is that spammers mostly use badly written MTAs (or something akin to an Expect script posing as an MTA). Their software doesn't know how to deal with a TEMPFAIL and never tries again. All real MTAs will try again within a few minutes. Good times.
Well, for starters, it takes longer to download the file and then to have the viewer application open than it should.
Secondly, the text in Adobe Acrobat is, by default, harder to read than whatever font you have your browser set to, and isn't possible to change the font in Acrobat Reader. This is annoying.
Thirdly, try to use the oh-so-intuitive text-select tool in Acrobat reader to select a paragraph from this document. When you reach the end of the line, the selection continues in the NEXT COLUMN. That's not only annoying, that's retarded.
PDFs open in a non-standard interface in which the functionality is changed from whatever browser the user was using has changed. In IE, they default to opening in the same window, with the Adobe interface at the top of the window. Would you like a printout of the webpage? Well then you had better not click 'Print' in the IE toolbar, or in the 'File' menu - because all you'll get is a blank page. This is frustrating to computer literate people and damn confusing to computer users (yes, there is a difference).
So you say you want something that allows you to deliver a document online to many people, and you want to have control over some text in columns, a few bulleted lists, some small simple graphics and some hyperlinks? Use HTML. PDF is overkill for this - it's fine for delivering something to a publisher, say - even though they'd probably want it in another format. PDF is the bane of web document delivery.
If you need a form on your webpage that people can fill out, that needs to look the same no matter what, PDF is good for that. IRS Tax forms, for example. This is a fine application for something like PDF. Articles are NOT.
PDFs are annoying to users, they are more difficult to use and deal with than plain HTML even though they offer no big benefit (for this situation), they are larger than they need to be for the task that they are being used for, and they just don't make sense. Don't force your site's users into PDF unless you absolutely have to, because you'll also be forcing your users away.
On I-635 in Dallas radar detectors are pretty useless as well - at many exits between the high five up to the 35E split, there are radar devices that measure the average speed of the traffic and display them at up the road at the access ramps so that you can tell if you'd save time getting on the highway or not.
One place where this is really obvious is 635 and Marsh - the transmitters (one for each lane) are painted bright white while the rest of the overpass is dark green. The display signs are further north up Marsh.
Not that anyone really cares how fast you're going on that road anyway - but the signs won't ever read higher than 55mph even if traffic is moving faster. I've never seen anyone pulled over on 635 for speeding, in 5 years.
That's one thing I like about my Linux hardware -- almost all of it uses less power than its proprietary counterpart.
What, pray tell, is "linux hardware"? If you're talking about your PC that's running linux, then you're not talking about linux hardware, you're talking about hardware that's running linux. And I fail to see how hardware running linux is going to use markedly more or less power than hardware running any other operating system.
Only there's no such thing as negative velocity, or -mph. I think that was day one of high school physics.
You can be going 55mph in one direction and then 15mph in a different direction soon afterwards, but you can't be going -15mph.
If you're going 15 miles in one hour in the opposite direction that you've intended to go, you've still covered 15 miles in one hour.
Well now that you know it's in there, if you buy a car, then you gave them permission. If you don't want it, don't buy a car built after 1996. Nobody is forcing you to install one in a car that you already have... if you don't like something about a product, you don't have to purchase it. If McDonald's changes what they put on a Big Mac, they're not doing it "without your permission"; if you don't like it, don't buy one.
For my money, slack is the only way to go. It makes you learn... no handholding, no Fischer-Price interface, and for God's sake, NO RPM. I have learned more from figuring out "why doesn't this work" or "why won't this compile" then I ever could from flashy little WinXP Wizards and brainless operations like apt-get.
Yeah it works great when a user accidentally kicks the plug out of the floor and takes out the whole row of workstations. Once they're plugged back in, the auto-recover files are gone.
That said... all the students have a network directory that they should be saving their own files in every few minutes, but you can't teach common sense.
I saw something, I want to say on Discovery - a documentary on counterfieting. Anyway, there was a group of people who wheeled an ATM into a mall and set it up to look like a legitimate bank machine. They left it there for a period of time, but it never dispensed any cash. Instead, it would read the magstripe on the card that was inserted, and then record the PIN number that the user entered. It then printed out a message that it was unable to contact the bank, or the customer was out of cash, or whatever. After that, the crooks came back and wheeled their ATM back out the door - along with hundreds of valid ATM card and PIN numbers.
Actually, if you had read the article, you might have noticed the following: (I know there were no pictures, but try to stay focused here...)
What they had:
Front end web servers, built with dual Pentium systems on racked motherboards, running Apache on FreeBSD (a configuration with no need to install licensed software)
Back end file stores, built with Sun Enterprise 4500 servers, running Solaris 2.6 (Sun's UNIX) and with all user data stored on RAID arrays, accessed using very simple filing semantics
Incoming mail listeners, built on Sun Sparc 5 processors, and interacting directly with the back end
What they did:
The spell, dictionary, and thesaurus functions were rewritten to use Microsoft technology...
The SMTP service of IIS was used to handle outgoing mail, replacing a UNIX standard mail service. (Check it yourself, if you want: Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 5.0.2195.5600 )
The Windows DNS service, operating without AD, proved perfectly capable of handling the load, and was able to take up the data from a UNIX BIND server easily. Windows DNS is used at the site for both internal and external name resolution.
These articles, by way, are 3 years old. They're not even using the Sun servers for backend storage anymore.
Tsering Gyaltsen, the grandson of the only surviving Sherpa to have accompanied Hillary on [his] famed climb, is planning to build the world's highest Internet cafe at base camp... Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand.
Mr. Gyaltsen had set up a satellite Internet link and cybercafe in Namche Bazar, a six-day hike below the Everest base camp, and was trying to figure out how to make it more available to his neighbors. Then one night over a beer, he and a friend who works for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a nonprofit environmental group that is responsible for disposing of the mounds of garbage on Everest, hatched the idea for an Internet cafe at base camp.
Jim Forster [of Cisco] eagerly donated three Wi-Fi radios on behalf of his company. The network will consist of a small satellite dish, planted about 1,500 feet above base camp, that can provide two-way communications. Because the dish must operate from firm ground, it cannot be used directly at base camp, which is on a moving glacier. The $10,000 satellite dish, which Mr. Gyaltsen purchased with a bank loan and funds from Square Networks, will connect to the cybercafe at base camp over the Wi-Fi radios. The dish will beam data to a satellite in orbit and to an Internet service provider in Israel.
Mr. Gyaltsen was incommunicado for a couple of days because some drunken climbers in Namche Bazar had tripped over the wires connecting his Internet cafe to his satellite dish there.
Mr. Gyaltsen and the pollution committee, which will technically own the radios, are still deciding what to charge users. They are considering a flat fee of $2,000 to $5,000 per expedition, which can number 5 to 20 people. That price might sound steep, but Mr. Gyaltsen says it paled in comparison with the cost of the expedition itself, typically $65,000 a person. The satellite link and Internet service will cost the operators less than $1,000 a month for the climbing season. Any profits will go to the pollution committee.
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Nice joke... here's another either really funny, or really scary one...
Who reads books now anyways?
7/11 doesn't ever close. You can spend time trying to pick the lock, but I think i'd probably just try the door first.
Well, it might have worked if they had the cell phone on vibrate. When the little motor that makes the phone vibrate is spinning, there are tiny sparks inside of it, which could theoretically ignite some gasoline vapors. They had the phone set to audibly ring when they tried their experiment, so no spark was generated.
I didn't see any mention of a pretty good solution that i've run across:
Every time a message hits a server from a sender that it has never met before, it sends a TEMPFAIL back instead of accepting the message. All real MTAs will try again with whatever their retry delay is set to, and usually for about 4 days. If the server gets the same message being delivered again, it accepts it and adds the sender to a whitelist where it never has to 'ask questions' of this sender again.
The reason that this would work, at least for now, is that spammers mostly use badly written MTAs (or something akin to an Expect script posing as an MTA). Their software doesn't know how to deal with a TEMPFAIL and never tries again. All real MTAs will try again within a few minutes. Good times.
And what is wrong with reading a PDF?
Well, for starters, it takes longer to download the file and then to have the viewer application open than it should.
Secondly, the text in Adobe Acrobat is, by default, harder to read than whatever font you have your browser set to, and isn't possible to change the font in Acrobat Reader. This is annoying.
Thirdly, try to use the oh-so-intuitive text-select tool in Acrobat reader to select a paragraph from this document. When you reach the end of the line, the selection continues in the NEXT COLUMN. That's not only annoying, that's retarded.
PDFs open in a non-standard interface in which the functionality is changed from whatever browser the user was using has changed. In IE, they default to opening in the same window, with the Adobe interface at the top of the window. Would you like a printout of the webpage? Well then you had better not click 'Print' in the IE toolbar, or in the 'File' menu - because all you'll get is a blank page. This is frustrating to computer literate people and damn confusing to computer users (yes, there is a difference).
So you say you want something that allows you to deliver a document online to many people, and you want to have control over some text in columns, a few bulleted lists, some small simple graphics and some hyperlinks? Use HTML. PDF is overkill for this - it's fine for delivering something to a publisher, say - even though they'd probably want it in another format. PDF is the bane of web document delivery.
If you need a form on your webpage that people can fill out, that needs to look the same no matter what, PDF is good for that. IRS Tax forms, for example. This is a fine application for something like PDF. Articles are NOT.
PDFs are annoying to users, they are more difficult to use and deal with than plain HTML even though they offer no big benefit (for this situation), they are larger than they need to be for the task that they are being used for, and they just don't make sense. Don't force your site's users into PDF unless you absolutely have to, because you'll also be forcing your users away.
Gee, I sure wish that I had said something about this like a year ago...
On I-635 in Dallas radar detectors are pretty useless as well - at many exits between the high five up to the 35E split, there are radar devices that measure the average speed of the traffic and display them at up the road at the access ramps so that you can tell if you'd save time getting on the highway or not. One place where this is really obvious is 635 and Marsh - the transmitters (one for each lane) are painted bright white while the rest of the overpass is dark green. The display signs are further north up Marsh. Not that anyone really cares how fast you're going on that road anyway - but the signs won't ever read higher than 55mph even if traffic is moving faster. I've never seen anyone pulled over on 635 for speeding, in 5 years.
That's one thing I like about my Linux hardware -- almost all of it uses less power than its proprietary counterpart.
What, pray tell, is "linux hardware"? If you're talking about your PC that's running linux, then you're not talking about linux hardware, you're talking about hardware that's running linux. And I fail to see how hardware running linux is going to use markedly more or less power than hardware running any other operating system.
This used to be the default in the Slackware distro of X/KDE. Now they've switched to Konqueror... Galeon works better though, I recommend it.
That's not cron. That's not even 10 minutes.
/dev/null 2>&1
*/10 * * * * dial 8005551212 >
Only there's no such thing as negative velocity, or -mph. I think that was day one of high school physics. You can be going 55mph in one direction and then 15mph in a different direction soon afterwards, but you can't be going -15mph. If you're going 15 miles in one hour in the opposite direction that you've intended to go, you've still covered 15 miles in one hour.
Well now that you know it's in there, if you buy a car, then you gave them permission. If you don't want it, don't buy a car built after 1996. Nobody is forcing you to install one in a car that you already have... if you don't like something about a product, you don't have to purchase it. If McDonald's changes what they put on a Big Mac, they're not doing it "without your permission"; if you don't like it, don't buy one.
For my money, slack is the only way to go. It makes you learn... no handholding, no Fischer-Price interface, and for God's sake, NO RPM. I have learned more from figuring out "why doesn't this work" or "why won't this compile" then I ever could from flashy little WinXP Wizards and brainless operations like apt-get.
kwenda@backslash:~$ uptime
21:05:31 up 408 days, 10:40, 1 user, load average: 0.12, 0.12, 0.09
Yeah it works great when a user accidentally kicks the plug out of the floor and takes out the whole row of workstations. Once they're plugged back in, the auto-recover files are gone. That said... all the students have a network directory that they should be saving their own files in every few minutes, but you can't teach common sense.
I saw something, I want to say on Discovery - a documentary on counterfieting. Anyway, there was a group of people who wheeled an ATM into a mall and set it up to look like a legitimate bank machine. They left it there for a period of time, but it never dispensed any cash. Instead, it would read the magstripe on the card that was inserted, and then record the PIN number that the user entered. It then printed out a message that it was unable to contact the bank, or the customer was out of cash, or whatever. After that, the crooks came back and wheeled their ATM back out the door - along with hundreds of valid ATM card and PIN numbers.
What they had:
Front end web servers, built with dual Pentium systems on racked motherboards, running Apache on FreeBSD (a configuration with no need to install licensed software)
Back end file stores, built with Sun Enterprise 4500 servers, running Solaris 2.6 (Sun's UNIX) and with all user data stored on RAID arrays, accessed using very simple filing semantics
Incoming mail listeners, built on Sun Sparc 5 processors, and interacting directly with the back end
What they did:
The spell, dictionary, and thesaurus functions were rewritten to use Microsoft technology...
The SMTP service of IIS was used to handle outgoing mail, replacing a UNIX standard mail service. (Check it yourself, if you want: Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 5.0.2195.5600 )
The Windows DNS service, operating without AD, proved perfectly capable of handling the load, and was able to take up the data from a UNIX BIND server easily. Windows DNS is used at the site for both internal and external name resolution.
These articles, by way, are 3 years old. They're not even using the Sun servers for backend storage anymore.
Hotmail still has *nix at it's base, so it's still up.....
No
It
Doesn't.
The site www.hotmail.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
Tsering Gyaltsen, the grandson of the only surviving Sherpa to have accompanied Hillary on [his] famed climb, is planning to build the world's highest Internet cafe at base camp... Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand. Mr. Gyaltsen had set up a satellite Internet link and cybercafe in Namche Bazar, a six-day hike below the Everest base camp, and was trying to figure out how to make it more available to his neighbors. Then one night over a beer, he and a friend who works for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a nonprofit environmental group that is responsible for disposing of the mounds of garbage on Everest, hatched the idea for an Internet cafe at base camp. Jim Forster [of Cisco] eagerly donated three Wi-Fi radios on behalf of his company. The network will consist of a small satellite dish, planted about 1,500 feet above base camp, that can provide two-way communications. Because the dish must operate from firm ground, it cannot be used directly at base camp, which is on a moving glacier. The $10,000 satellite dish, which Mr. Gyaltsen purchased with a bank loan and funds from Square Networks, will connect to the cybercafe at base camp over the Wi-Fi radios. The dish will beam data to a satellite in orbit and to an Internet service provider in Israel. Mr. Gyaltsen was incommunicado for a couple of days because some drunken climbers in Namche Bazar had tripped over the wires connecting his Internet cafe to his satellite dish there. Mr. Gyaltsen and the pollution committee, which will technically own the radios, are still deciding what to charge users. They are considering a flat fee of $2,000 to $5,000 per expedition, which can number 5 to 20 people. That price might sound steep, but Mr. Gyaltsen says it paled in comparison with the cost of the expedition itself, typically $65,000 a person. The satellite link and Internet service will cost the operators less than $1,000 a month for the climbing season. Any profits will go to the pollution committee.
Was this town the setting of the 2000 film The Dish?