but did you try any mice with the same deal? I have used many many ps2 mice that came with a usb adapter and they all worked. I have had keyboards with a usb to ps2 adapter not work on some KVM's but I never battled with it much.
by Plantronics can easily be 'hacked' into to feed another sound source.
I used to work at a place and dealt with the same thing, headphones sucked when you needed to answer the phone or when someone talked to you.
So I took the plantronics headset and base for my phone home with me (prepare to buy a new one if you screw it up) and drilled out a hole big enough for a standard stereo minijack and soldered it inline with the mono headphone output on the phone headset. Then I got a standard male to male stereo cable and ran it from a cd player (later the pc) into the plantronics base. Then I could listen to music in the same ear as my headset which was surprisingly comfortable for most of the day anyway.
When someone talks to you you still have one ear free, and if you have a phone call just puase the other source and you are good to go.
I think it was a total of $4.00 and 1 hr of tinkering around, kinda relaxing at the time too.
Net result: problem solved. Everybody's happy.
-Added side benefit... if you are on the phone with a moron you can just un-pause and let the tunes drown out their stupidness.
spoof your mac and run it in secret... then after you find all the massive holes (the REAL reason they dont want you to scan) you have some dirt on them. Then bargain for better pay and better work conditions, then whip out the scan results. Then sue for wrongful dismissal.
Actually, there are only a few types of install media for XP (and really the other os and applications)
Retail media (boxed software) and their corresponding key
OEM media (coming with a new pc or bought in bulk... for for sale without bundling with a new PC) and it's key
Then the MSDN version
Also the little known Microsoft Action Pack media and the keys that come with it
You can take an oem install on a Dell and format and install using any oem cd with the key on the side of the case and viola! it works just fine.
However, these different install medias and corresponding keys are not interchangeable. i.e. the oem key will not work on retail media and so on.
I have an XP 6-in-1 cd (total pirate... kazaa or usenet or bittorrent) that has 3 versions (oem and retail and one with a patch to reset the 30 day activation on every restart) for Home and pro. I use this all the time for doing clean installes on HP Pavilions and Dells where the installed os is hashed with crap.
Is that against the eula? Probably... but remember the media has no value... if you buy volume licensing you can buy an install cd for $10... it is the license key that is worth the $$.
As long as you are using the key that came with your computer I do not see that you are in error. I am sure fair use would apply.
If you have CS experience than the degree could get you past the resume screening. If not than expect alot of helpdesk (if there are any left in the US).
I would closely consider these articles Here that deal with freelance tech support work. They were posted on slashdot withing the last year. I learned alot from them.
I can speak from experience that in an area with one of the highest IT unemployment rates than I have never been without a job. The last year has shown nothing but success.
Why? Because of my experience and my quality work. I spend a good 30% of my work cleaning up messes from so-called 'computer guys' and college grads that after however many years and however much money cannot troubleshoot a dead powersupply and fix everything with Norton System Works.
If you dont have any experience and you took the classes because of the ITT Tech commercials than you better supplement your degree with something.
I gotta give you credit there. New all-in-ones are the worst. If you dont install in the proper order (software, plug in, turn on... pray) than you are quite often miserable.
That has been my largest bone of contention with Linux Distros. I have tried literally nearly all of them and with the exception of a few (most notably Knoppix) after an installation setting up an HP JetDirect printer is like pulling teeth.
Sure, Linux looks good and has some pretty slick features... but if it takes half an hour and half a dozen packages (if you are lucky) to get printing to an IP address to work than I always come back to the fact that since win98 it just works.
Workarounds are not solutions... they are stop gaps. You have to fill the gaps.
Keep in mind I am about 6 months behind on testing distros... so dont shower me with rhetoric replies and diatribes of linux virtue. This is my personal experience... and appropriate to this slashdot article.
Jack Black put it best. "Set the artist free! I'm saying Quit ya day job. Focus on your craft."
I used to play in a band and had a ball, but I learned a long time ago that it is fleeting and the minute it becomes commercial the fun starts to slip away and it becomes a job.
Decide on a career, if you think Music is your career than go ahead. If you are realistic you will think twice and find another way to get the fix.
So what kind of business do you run/work for? You seem pretty heavy handed in dishing out the anti MS rhetoric.
Do you have anything to back up your statements or are you just a bitter out of work IT guy that got screwed when the demand for Free Software resulted in a demand for Free labor or cheap labor?
Many admins think that they are lord of the castle, if you suggest a change to the email system, like cancelling the bounce, the first answer is NO like you are stepping in their territory.
I used to work for a place where the admin also got so paranoid with spam that he blocked entire domains like yahoo and hotmail even though there were at least a dozen legitimate customers that used those email services as their primary business email.
It isnt until there is a backlash or fear of losing their castle that some will make a change.
Sometimes you just have to be the loudest voice in complaining and go over their head and reason with their boss. Explain that a flood of redundant emails is bad practice and that in many peoples eyes a bounce message saying "virus found!" with your companies domain makes people think that YOU have the virus. Sounds strange but it happens. You bounce a message and you get a call saying "You guys have a virus... we just got an email about it" coming from the internal staff, then spend the next 15 minutes explaining that they are protected and that the bounce was only informational and still they dont always get it.
Virus protection is best operated SILENTLY! You as an admin can sweat the details but the clients should just "Know they are protected" and not be bothered with details. It's just good management.
Just hang power strips and cables and tools on the peg board. 15" crt on the top on either side and a couple cheap KVMs and you can service 4 towers on this thing at once.
I have used these in my business and other companies I have worked at before for years.
Honestly, a dos boot disk has to be the most common and easily aquired items in the computer world. You can go to BootDisk.com and get your boot disk. And as far as having win98 to make a 98 boot disk I havent myself or known anyone that actually used win98 to make a boot disk. Again they can make one from newer versions of Win or they can download one.
So if a dos boot disk it the simplest and most common type of disposable boot disks for doing a bios flash than why change.
Side point is that most bios flash utilities and the required boot disk have NOTHING to do with win98. I have seen a trend on newer boards with some additional non-volatile memory onboard that copies the bin to this memory and after a restart to bios level only (read NO OS other than bios) it completes the flash overwrite.
In these cases often a '98 boot disk' will not work anyway since it cannot run properly with any memory managers present. In those cases what I end up doing is formatting a floppy fat and setting the option to make it 'bootable' which copies the lowest level dos system files so basically all you get is command.com. Then it can run the bios upgrade in an abesolute and controlled clean environment.
Suck it up! download a boot disk (there are hundreds of them out there) or make your own (there are even more tutorials on how to make your own I would wager) and get a 10 minute job done in 10 minutes instead of re-inventing the wheel.
I have a friend that uses a local Alaskan cable modem company and after a long month of not-stop movie downloading off Kazaa he got a bill for $1000 (or around there) for going over his like 5 gig limit.
Ouch!
Fortunately they didnt push the issue at all. He called to ask what this bill was for and feigned innocence and ignorance and they just comp'd it. But it does make you look at the terms and conditions a little closer. They never hid the 5gig limit, but none of us ever took it serious.
I know for a fact I was over my limit on several months, just not by like 100gigs so it never was an issue. Honestly I have never heard of anyone actually paying for their exceeded limits but the ISP is fully within their rights.
If you put up enough XMas lights to be seen from the moon and get a huge electric bill next cycle you most likely wouldnt get off, certainly not be able to deny it after confirmation by an blinded airline pilot!
Just tread lightly on their kindness or willingness to please their customers. Don't screw it up for us all.
p.s. there is no such thing as 'unlimited bandwith' there are limits on everything, you just might not ever reach them.
PHpMyChat comes with CPanel which is an extremely popular web hosting management package, so you might have it available and not even know it. PHPMyChat is also freely available and totally customizeable. After editing the css files I was able to make the window very small and nearly borderless so it is very lowkey for my wife whose boss treats all the employees like children.
You can create users and private rooms and and all kinds of other stuff. Just type/help for a popup window with commands and instructions.
Ever heard of PDF995? At the least you could pdf your statements. There are a number of ways of storing your statements. If you cant get your statements from 6 months ago because you didnt save them it's your fault, not theirs.
I am lenient in consideration of your low slashdot number;-)
Speaking from experience working with both food service companies and small mailbox etc. type stores, you will suffer if you get the cheapest available.
Biggest problem was inaccuracy or under sensitivity (the sense screen far enough off the display that viewing angle made it a pain to calibrate) and it just wearing out from use.
In the case of the small post office place, they decided that the amount of typing made the touchscreen a bad option since it was difficult to say the least for typing.
What kind of industry is this for? Is a mouse or trackball surface mounted out of the question? I know that the mouse/trackball is real short money.
As mentioned above it is a good looking interface but you dont want to teach them to depend on a nice looking gui for a database.
If they wont let you use IIS then can I suggest Microweb for a quick eval to see if you want to go the MySQL route. Just download it and burn it to a CD and then you can quickly and painlessly see how MySQL works on any win32 computer.
If you also download the phpMyAdmin and drop it into the cd you can use the graphical web-based frontend and see how simple and powerful it is.
I think you will have a much better educated class as a result of using an open source database. You will help them to see and understand the structure and interelation in tables outside of a slick gui. Then once they understand this then show them how to make their administration tasks easier with a gui.
It was reported on slashdot recently that Apache has a 2/3 market share, I wonder what MySql has for a market share of internet servers.
Slashdot Mirror
but did you try any mice with the same deal? I have used many many ps2 mice that came with a usb adapter and they all worked. I have had keyboards with a usb to ps2 adapter not work on some KVM's but I never battled with it much.
Good luck... I am anxious to see the suggestions.
by Plantronics can easily be 'hacked' into to feed another sound source.
I used to work at a place and dealt with the same thing, headphones sucked when you needed to answer the phone or when someone talked to you.
So I took the plantronics headset and base for my phone home with me (prepare to buy a new one if you screw it up) and drilled out a hole big enough for a standard stereo minijack and soldered it inline with the mono headphone output on the phone headset.
Then I got a standard male to male stereo cable and ran it from a cd player (later the pc) into the plantronics base. Then I could listen to music in the same ear as my headset which was surprisingly comfortable for most of the day anyway.
When someone talks to you you still have one ear free, and if you have a phone call just puase the other source and you are good to go.
I think it was a total of $4.00 and 1 hr of tinkering around, kinda relaxing at the time too.
Net result: problem solved. Everybody's happy.
-Added side benefit... if you are on the phone with a moron you can just un-pause and let the tunes drown out their stupidness.
to the full wav of 'livin la vida loca' and sit back and enjoy!
spoof your mac and run it in secret... then after you find all the massive holes (the REAL reason they dont want you to scan) you have some dirt on them. Then bargain for better pay and better work conditions, then whip out the scan results. Then sue for wrongful dismissal.
It's guerilla warfare!
Actually, there are only a few types of install media for XP (and really the other os and applications)
Retail media (boxed software) and their corresponding key
OEM media (coming with a new pc or bought in bulk... for for sale without bundling with a new PC) and it's key
Then the MSDN version
Also the little known Microsoft Action Pack media and the keys that come with it
You can take an oem install on a Dell and format and install using any oem cd with the key on the side of the case and viola! it works just fine.
However, these different install medias and corresponding keys are not interchangeable. i.e. the oem key will not work on retail media and so on.
I have an XP 6-in-1 cd (total pirate... kazaa or usenet or bittorrent) that has 3 versions (oem and retail and one with a patch to reset the 30 day activation on every restart) for Home and pro. I use this all the time for doing clean installes on HP Pavilions and Dells where the installed os is hashed with crap.
Is that against the eula? Probably... but remember the media has no value... if you buy volume licensing you can buy an install cd for $10... it is the license key that is worth the $$.
As long as you are using the key that came with your computer I do not see that you are in error. I am sure fair use would apply.
I won't post at 1 AM anymore. Troll on! My grandmother would be ashamed of me.
If you have CS experience than the degree could get you past the resume screening. If not than expect alot of helpdesk (if there are any left in the US).
I would closely consider these articles Here that deal with freelance tech support work. They were posted on slashdot withing the last year. I learned alot from them.
I can speak from experience that in an area with one of the highest IT unemployment rates than I have never been without a job. The last year has shown nothing but success.
Why? Because of my experience and my quality work. I spend a good 30% of my work cleaning up messes from so-called 'computer guys' and college grads that after however many years and however much money cannot troubleshoot a dead powersupply and fix everything with Norton System Works.
If you dont have any experience and you took the classes because of the ITT Tech commercials than you better supplement your degree with something.
Good Luck!
I gotta give you credit there. New all-in-ones are the worst. If you dont install in the proper order (software, plug in, turn on... pray) than you are quite often miserable.
That has been my largest bone of contention with Linux Distros. I have tried literally nearly all of them and with the exception of a few (most notably Knoppix) after an installation setting up an HP JetDirect printer is like pulling teeth.
Sure, Linux looks good and has some pretty slick features... but if it takes half an hour and half a dozen packages (if you are lucky) to get printing to an IP address to work than I always come back to the fact that since win98 it just works.
Workarounds are not solutions... they are stop gaps. You have to fill the gaps.
Keep in mind I am about 6 months behind on testing distros... so dont shower me with rhetoric replies and diatribes of linux virtue. This is my personal experience... and appropriate to this slashdot article.
Then you can be sure noone can open it!
I used to play in a band and had a ball, but I learned a long time ago that it is fleeting and the minute it becomes commercial the fun starts to slip away and it becomes a job.
Decide on a career, if you think Music is your career than go ahead. If you are realistic you will think twice and find another way to get the fix.
So what kind of business do you run/work for? You seem pretty heavy handed in dishing out the anti MS rhetoric.
Do you have anything to back up your statements or are you just a bitter out of work IT guy that got screwed when the demand for Free Software resulted in a demand for Free labor or cheap labor?
Many admins think that they are lord of the castle, if you suggest a change to the email system, like cancelling the bounce, the first answer is NO like you are stepping in their territory.
I used to work for a place where the admin also got so paranoid with spam that he blocked entire domains like yahoo and hotmail even though there were at least a dozen legitimate customers that used those email services as their primary business email.
It isnt until there is a backlash or fear of losing their castle that some will make a change.
Sometimes you just have to be the loudest voice in complaining and go over their head and reason with their boss. Explain that a flood of redundant emails is bad practice and that in many peoples eyes a bounce message saying "virus found!" with your companies domain makes people think that YOU have the virus. Sounds strange but it happens. You bounce a message and you get a call saying "You guys have a virus... we just got an email about it" coming from the internal staff, then spend the next 15 minutes explaining that they are protected and that the bounce was only informational and still they dont always get it.
Virus protection is best operated SILENTLY! You as an admin can sweat the details but the clients should just "Know they are protected" and not be bothered with details. It's just good management.
of anti-spam measures.
Yahoo Groups?
Ha ha, that would be funny...
mycompany@yahoogroups.com and then all the ads and random named spammers come along.
The sad part is many small businesses still use free email for their company email, i wouldnt be suprised if there were businesses using this.
I agree with phpBB, doesnt get any better.
Well for a budget anyway.
Work Bench (put in your zip for the price and details... 98022 works if yours doesnt)
Just hang power strips and cables and tools on the peg board. 15" crt on the top on either side and a couple cheap KVMs and you can service 4 towers on this thing at once.
I have used these in my business and other companies I have worked at before for years.
Honestly, a dos boot disk has to be the most common and easily aquired items in the computer world. You can go to BootDisk.com and get your boot disk. And as far as having win98 to make a 98 boot disk I havent myself or known anyone that actually used win98 to make a boot disk. Again they can make one from newer versions of Win or they can download one.
So if a dos boot disk it the simplest and most common type of disposable boot disks for doing a bios flash than why change.
Side point is that most bios flash utilities and the required boot disk have NOTHING to do with win98. I have seen a trend on newer boards with some additional non-volatile memory onboard that copies the bin to this memory and after a restart to bios level only (read NO OS other than bios) it completes the flash overwrite.
In these cases often a '98 boot disk' will not work anyway since it cannot run properly with any memory managers present. In those cases what I end up doing is formatting a floppy fat and setting the option to make it 'bootable' which copies the lowest level dos system files so basically all you get is command.com. Then it can run the bios upgrade in an abesolute and controlled clean environment.
Suck it up! download a boot disk (there are hundreds of them out there) or make your own (there are even more tutorials on how to make your own I would wager) and get a 10 minute job done in 10 minutes instead of re-inventing the wheel.
O'Douls can produce antibubbles? And if so would it then be an Antibeer Antibubble? Or is it still just gross.
I have a friend that uses a local Alaskan cable modem company and after a long month of not-stop movie downloading off Kazaa he got a bill for $1000 (or around there) for going over his like 5 gig limit.
Ouch!
Fortunately they didnt push the issue at all. He called to ask what this bill was for and feigned innocence and ignorance and they just comp'd it. But it does make you look at the terms and conditions a little closer. They never hid the 5gig limit, but none of us ever took it serious.
I know for a fact I was over my limit on several months, just not by like 100gigs so it never was an issue. Honestly I have never heard of anyone actually paying for their exceeded limits but the ISP is fully within their rights.
If you put up enough XMas lights to be seen from the moon and get a huge electric bill next cycle you most likely wouldnt get off, certainly not be able to deny it after confirmation by an blinded airline pilot!
Just tread lightly on their kindness or willingness to please their customers. Don't screw it up for us all.
p.s. there is no such thing as 'unlimited bandwith' there are limits on everything, you just might not ever reach them.
PHpMyChat comes with CPanel which is an extremely popular web hosting management package, so you might have it available and not even know it. PHPMyChat is also freely available and totally customizeable. After editing the css files I was able to make the window very small and nearly borderless so it is very lowkey for my wife whose boss treats all the employees like children.
You can create users and private rooms and and all kinds of other stuff. Just type /help for a popup window with commands and instructions.
Ever heard of PDF995? At the least you could pdf your statements. There are a number of ways of storing your statements. If you cant get your statements from 6 months ago because you didnt save them it's your fault, not theirs.
;-)
I am lenient in consideration of your low slashdot number
lots of companies that work with kiosk cabinets google for "kiosk cabinet".
Not knowing what your software already looks like, this site asks some good questions for a touchscreen application.
Speaking from experience working with both food service companies and small mailbox etc. type stores, you will suffer if you get the cheapest available.
Biggest problem was inaccuracy or under sensitivity (the sense screen far enough off the display that viewing angle made it a pain to calibrate) and it just wearing out from use.
In the case of the small post office place, they decided that the amount of typing made the touchscreen a bad option since it was difficult to say the least for typing.
What kind of industry is this for? Is a mouse or trackball surface mounted out of the question? I know that the mouse/trackball is real short money.
As mentioned above it is a good looking interface but you dont want to teach them to depend on a nice looking gui for a database.
If they wont let you use IIS then can I suggest Microweb for a quick eval to see if you want to go the MySQL route. Just download it and burn it to a CD and then you can quickly and painlessly see how MySQL works on any win32 computer.
If you also download the phpMyAdmin and drop it into the cd you can use the graphical web-based frontend and see how simple and powerful it is.
I think you will have a much better educated class as a result of using an open source database. You will help them to see and understand the structure and interelation in tables outside of a slick gui. Then once they understand this then show them how to make their administration tasks easier with a gui.
It was reported on slashdot recently that Apache has a 2/3 market share, I wonder what MySql has for a market share of internet servers.
Yup, kinda. I tell them the competitors deal and ask them to match it. We will see if I am still successful in another month when mine is due again.