Of course, what I mentioned above is what I'd use if I had to use computers. A good set of two-way radios with headsets, plus some rechargeable batteries and enough chargers to do all at once would be better and last a long time. I have some Motorolas I take skiing that can last a few days on alkaline AA batteries. Even with rechargeables, headsets, and more talking, they should still last at least the few hours required for a show. Just make sure to charge all the batteries between shows, and have some extras on hand for emergencies.
Actually, I think you're on the right track. How about TeamSpeak? I don't think you need to be playing a game to use it. If the crew will be relatively stationary, just put in a cheap networked computer running either Windows or Linux and a headset for every person. If they need to move farther than a cord will let them, see if wireless headsets exist. Make the fastest computer the server and you'll be all set.
Most people's computers are so loaded down with spyware, crapware, and general garbage that I'm surprised they can run 2-3 minutes. The NT kernel is actually pretty stable, especially compared to DOS/Win9x. Although I prefer *nix on servers, most of my desktops run Win2K or XP, and BSODs are rare. Every time it's happened, I've been able to trace it to a bad driver or something else that's not part of the OS.
The default of rebooting after a BSOD is dumb on a desktop IMHO, but it can be turned off (System Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery; uncheck "Automatically reboot").
So.. Why do they/need/ to have commericals? Other than greed, I mean.
The post mentions MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage as being the sites that will use it. All four of them use their web site as their main business or an extension of their business. Their websites are more analogous to television shows than billboards, so their business model involves providing content (news, information, web searching, etc.) to make advertising money. You and a lot of other people that have posted seem to think this is being used on websites that simply advertise a company's core business, which ads for other companies are rarely used on. That would be like one company's brochure having another company's ad in it.
For example, Yahoo! (random example) uses ads, since the website is their end product that only exists to make money. They would have a use for these commercial-type ads. SuSE (another random example), on the other hand, doesn't -- and probably never will -- have ads on their site, since their site exists to sell things like SuSE Linux that have nothing to do with the site.
I like having lots of machines so I can learn different operating systems and software. My file server runs Mepis, my backup server runs Debian, my router runs IPCop, and my web server will run FreeBSD after this weekend. A lot of my stuff is done just "because I can" and for learning.
I have thought about consolidating some things, and am still considering it. I might move my backup server's hard drives into my file server and have it do its own backups (with the occasional burning of irreplaceables to CD of course). I'd like my web server to be separate from the rest of my network, so that means a real DMZ (yeah, I'm paranoid). If my ISP offers additional IP addresses for a reasonable price, I can just buy a regular SOHO router and stick my web server outside of it. Maybe I can build a low-power VIA Epia box if I miss the flexibility of a computer.
About being afraid to dump stuff, I've taken machines and parts to the recycling center in the past if I have no use for it (costing me 25 cents per pound), and will continue to do so in the future. I actually brought home my current web and backup servers from my employer (with permission) to have computers to experiment with.
Does your $30 router have near-infinitely adjustable firewall rules? A real DMZ (real = separate subnet)? The ability to act as a VPN endpoint? Cool traffic graphs and logging? Even in the age of $30 router/switch combos, an old PC is still a great way to get features that come mostly on very expensive corporate routers and firewalls.
Old PCs also make awesome little servers. Even a family of neophytes with multiple computers could use a shared file space, and us geeks can set up our own file/web/FTP/DNS/DHCP/time/backup/whatever servers. Personally, I have a P166 as a router, a P133 web server, and a P133 backup server. My file server is a Tbird900 only because I use it as a desktop sometimes.
"And soon enough, Casey Neistat went back to the Apple boutique and bought a new iPod for $400, which, he says, 'is totally unfair.' He took it back to the office and showed it to his brother, and they vowed to find a way, Casey says, 'to get back at them.'"
If you want to get back at a company that screwed you over, don't turn around and give them $400.
You can turn that off in Mozilla (including Firebird) so that nothing can change the status bar. A Mozilla user who doesn't know about this particular hole would have a false sense of security that everything in the status bar is real.
Hey, free stuff is free stuff. And any geek could turn a free "last-century throwaway computer" into a home server. My router, web server, and backup server (all running Linux) are all old computers that other people had no use for. Old machines are great to mess with.
Good point. PS-on is probably a different color than the rest of the wires, so I assume it would be easy to spot on a proprietary power supply if it's in a different place or even a different color. If not, as Hrothgar said, if it blows up then it's proprietary and was probably going to be replaced anyway.
Compaq has been doing this scam for at least four years already. Accidentally nuke the restore partition, and pay $12 for a pair of CDs that should've been included in the first place.
Then why are eMachines, Compaq, AOL, Gator/Claria (it's SPYWARE!), etc. still in business? Call my cynical, but home computer users don't research what they buy at all, so Dell could get away with whatever they want to for years to come with no negative effect on their profits.
Amen! I'd like to kick the ass of whoever thought of the nonstandard power supply pinout on Dell and other big cheapass OEMs. Especially when it looks just like a real ATX connector.
Anyway, to continue this offtopic post, here's what I did last time I needed to replace a motherboard in a big-name OEM computer -- a Compaq. Unplug the power supply from everything. Use the ATX power pinout as a reference and find pin 14. It's usually the green wire, but don't trust the colors. Stick one end of a straightened paperclip into pin 14, and stick the other end into any of the ground pins. Now plug in the power supply, make sure the switch on the back is turned on if it has one, and use a multimeter to see if it's standard ATX or some proprietary crap. Surprisingly, my friend's Compaq had a power supply and mobo with a standard ATX pinout. If you find yourself with a nonstandard power supply, either rewire it or get a new one. And don't ever expect tech support from the OEM again.
Netcraft says they're running "Yes we are using ServerMask on Windows 2000." Considering Port80's bias, and that they're on Windows 2000, and that ServerMask only works on IIS, their own security by obscurity isn't working. It's obvious that they use IIS 5. In fact, the only way to actually fool anyone with ServerMask is to hide your Windows server behind a *nix load balancer or reverse proxy. Without a *nix box in front, anyone using Netcraft or Nmap will see you're running Windows, and almost all Windows web servers are running IIS.
If you need security by obscurity, you're not secure at all.
Then whoever has the most money will choose the winner. Sure, it already happens to some extent with television commercials and campaign funding, but vote selling is much more direct and would have an even higher impact.
Maybe the firewall can always leave all known virus definition update sites open, so they're the only thing the user can connect to.
Of course, this whole scheme must be done exactly right or it will cause more problems than it solves, like ISPs forcing specific software on users and general inflexibility.
Try Real Alternative. It installs Media Player Classic and enough codecs to play RealMedia. Nobody should have to use RealPlayer; it even crashes on TV.
I've seen the local community access channel with error messages a few times. Here's one example; it's the only one I managed to dig up. It's hard to read, but it's RealPlayer that crashed. It doesn't surprise me that RealPlayer crashed since it runs in the background for no reason, but I wonder WTF it was doing on that box.
Another time some program (like antivirus, or whatever they used to show ads and stuff) would crash, then the computer would reboot, then the cycle would repeat. It ran Windows 2000 Pro and I could see almost the entire bootup process every few minutes.
Just hope they have some decent authentication/encryption mechanism for the wireless transmission (yeah, I know you already mentioned encryption), or else someone sitting outside with a laptop and airsnort/kismet/ethereal/whatever will get all the answers. This is especially bad if said person will be taking the same exam in the next day or so.
Why is it that so many anti-spam proposals involve stepping on anonymous free speech rights? We need more than just a knee-jerk reaction. There's enough alternatives, such as reverse MX, to require cheap webhosts to investigate every customer. Not to mention that investigations would make cheap hosts expensive.
If it's off school grounds, then the school probably doesn't (and definitely shouldn't) have any authority. Sure, the school getting involved with this issue may have a slightly positive outcome, but then they'd want to start getting their dirty hands into other off-campus issues. "Zero tolerance" usually descends into "zero sense" in the hands of school administration.
If I were a victim of some bully's website, I would try to go through the parents, and if that doesn't work I'd set up my own site and try to get their webhost to bring theirs down. If that doesn't work, it's DoS time (should be especially easy on most free webhosts with very low transfer limits). Maybe sign them up for some spam. The Internet is the geek's home turf.
Even easier if it's a Geocities page or something similar with a low transfer limit: just write a little script calling wget to download each file, then have cron (or scheduled tasks on Windows) call that script every minute.
What sweet irony it would be to have a site making fun of me for being a geek, then using abilities gained from being a geek to kill it. Nobody successfully attacks us geeks on our home turf.;-)
If IE blocks popups like Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and everyone else, then advertisers will just use much more invasive, hard-to-block ads. It will accelerate the arms race between marketroids and Internet users. Maybe ads will use Flash, Java, or some random security hole. As long as the unwashed masses are vulnerable to popup ads, they will be advertised to with popups and those of us who use good web browsers (read: not IE) won't see much invasive advertising.
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Of course, what I mentioned above is what I'd use if I had to use computers. A good set of two-way radios with headsets, plus some rechargeable batteries and enough chargers to do all at once would be better and last a long time. I have some Motorolas I take skiing that can last a few days on alkaline AA batteries. Even with rechargeables, headsets, and more talking, they should still last at least the few hours required for a show. Just make sure to charge all the batteries between shows, and have some extras on hand for emergencies.
Actually, I think you're on the right track. How about TeamSpeak? I don't think you need to be playing a game to use it. If the crew will be relatively stationary, just put in a cheap networked computer running either Windows or Linux and a headset for every person. If they need to move farther than a cord will let them, see if wireless headsets exist. Make the fastest computer the server and you'll be all set.
Most people's computers are so loaded down with spyware, crapware, and general garbage that I'm surprised they can run 2-3 minutes. The NT kernel is actually pretty stable, especially compared to DOS/Win9x. Although I prefer *nix on servers, most of my desktops run Win2K or XP, and BSODs are rare. Every time it's happened, I've been able to trace it to a bad driver or something else that's not part of the OS.
The default of rebooting after a BSOD is dumb on a desktop IMHO, but it can be turned off (System Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery; uncheck "Automatically reboot").
So.. Why do they /need/ to have commericals? Other than greed, I mean.
The post mentions MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage as being the sites that will use it. All four of them use their web site as their main business or an extension of their business. Their websites are more analogous to television shows than billboards, so their business model involves providing content (news, information, web searching, etc.) to make advertising money. You and a lot of other people that have posted seem to think this is being used on websites that simply advertise a company's core business, which ads for other companies are rarely used on. That would be like one company's brochure having another company's ad in it.For example, Yahoo! (random example) uses ads, since the website is their end product that only exists to make money. They would have a use for these commercial-type ads. SuSE (another random example), on the other hand, doesn't -- and probably never will -- have ads on their site, since their site exists to sell things like SuSE Linux that have nothing to do with the site.
For those that are beyond help, there is money to be made in fixing their computers. Over and over again. It's frustrating, but very profitable.
I like having lots of machines so I can learn different operating systems and software. My file server runs Mepis, my backup server runs Debian, my router runs IPCop, and my web server will run FreeBSD after this weekend. A lot of my stuff is done just "because I can" and for learning.
I have thought about consolidating some things, and am still considering it. I might move my backup server's hard drives into my file server and have it do its own backups (with the occasional burning of irreplaceables to CD of course). I'd like my web server to be separate from the rest of my network, so that means a real DMZ (yeah, I'm paranoid). If my ISP offers additional IP addresses for a reasonable price, I can just buy a regular SOHO router and stick my web server outside of it. Maybe I can build a low-power VIA Epia box if I miss the flexibility of a computer.
About being afraid to dump stuff, I've taken machines and parts to the recycling center in the past if I have no use for it (costing me 25 cents per pound), and will continue to do so in the future. I actually brought home my current web and backup servers from my employer (with permission) to have computers to experiment with.
Does your $30 router have near-infinitely adjustable firewall rules? A real DMZ (real = separate subnet)? The ability to act as a VPN endpoint? Cool traffic graphs and logging? Even in the age of $30 router/switch combos, an old PC is still a great way to get features that come mostly on very expensive corporate routers and firewalls.
Old PCs also make awesome little servers. Even a family of neophytes with multiple computers could use a shared file space, and us geeks can set up our own file/web/FTP/DNS/DHCP/time/backup/whatever servers. Personally, I have a P166 as a router, a P133 web server, and a P133 backup server. My file server is a Tbird900 only because I use it as a desktop sometimes.
"And soon enough, Casey Neistat went back to the Apple boutique and bought a new iPod for $400, which, he says, 'is totally unfair.' He took it back to the office and showed it to his brother, and they vowed to find a way, Casey says, 'to get back at them.'"
If you want to get back at a company that screwed you over, don't turn around and give them $400.
When it comes to security, paranoia is good. Especially with something as important as elections.
You can turn that off in Mozilla (including Firebird) so that nothing can change the status bar. A Mozilla user who doesn't know about this particular hole would have a false sense of security that everything in the status bar is real.
Hey, free stuff is free stuff. And any geek could turn a free "last-century throwaway computer" into a home server. My router, web server, and backup server (all running Linux) are all old computers that other people had no use for. Old machines are great to mess with.
Good point. PS-on is probably a different color than the rest of the wires, so I assume it would be easy to spot on a proprietary power supply if it's in a different place or even a different color. If not, as Hrothgar said, if it blows up then it's proprietary and was probably going to be replaced anyway.
Compaq has been doing this scam for at least four years already. Accidentally nuke the restore partition, and pay $12 for a pair of CDs that should've been included in the first place.
Then why are eMachines, Compaq, AOL, Gator/Claria (it's SPYWARE!), etc. still in business? Call my cynical, but home computer users don't research what they buy at all, so Dell could get away with whatever they want to for years to come with no negative effect on their profits.
Amen! I'd like to kick the ass of whoever thought of the nonstandard power supply pinout on Dell and other big cheapass OEMs. Especially when it looks just like a real ATX connector.
Anyway, to continue this offtopic post, here's what I did last time I needed to replace a motherboard in a big-name OEM computer -- a Compaq. Unplug the power supply from everything. Use the ATX power pinout as a reference and find pin 14. It's usually the green wire, but don't trust the colors. Stick one end of a straightened paperclip into pin 14, and stick the other end into any of the ground pins. Now plug in the power supply, make sure the switch on the back is turned on if it has one, and use a multimeter to see if it's standard ATX or some proprietary crap. Surprisingly, my friend's Compaq had a power supply and mobo with a standard ATX pinout. If you find yourself with a nonstandard power supply, either rewire it or get a new one. And don't ever expect tech support from the OEM again.
Netcraft says they're running "Yes we are using ServerMask on Windows 2000." Considering Port80's bias, and that they're on Windows 2000, and that ServerMask only works on IIS, their own security by obscurity isn't working. It's obvious that they use IIS 5. In fact, the only way to actually fool anyone with ServerMask is to hide your Windows server behind a *nix load balancer or reverse proxy. Without a *nix box in front, anyone using Netcraft or Nmap will see you're running Windows, and almost all Windows web servers are running IIS.
If you need security by obscurity, you're not secure at all.
Then whoever has the most money will choose the winner. Sure, it already happens to some extent with television commercials and campaign funding, but vote selling is much more direct and would have an even higher impact.
Maybe the firewall can always leave all known virus definition update sites open, so they're the only thing the user can connect to.
Of course, this whole scheme must be done exactly right or it will cause more problems than it solves, like ISPs forcing specific software on users and general inflexibility.
Try Real Alternative. It installs Media Player Classic and enough codecs to play RealMedia. Nobody should have to use RealPlayer; it even crashes on TV.
I've seen the local community access channel with error messages a few times. Here's one example; it's the only one I managed to dig up. It's hard to read, but it's RealPlayer that crashed. It doesn't surprise me that RealPlayer crashed since it runs in the background for no reason, but I wonder WTF it was doing on that box.
Another time some program (like antivirus, or whatever they used to show ads and stuff) would crash, then the computer would reboot, then the cycle would repeat. It ran Windows 2000 Pro and I could see almost the entire bootup process every few minutes.
Just hope they have some decent authentication/encryption mechanism for the wireless transmission (yeah, I know you already mentioned encryption), or else someone sitting outside with a laptop and airsnort/kismet/ethereal/whatever will get all the answers. This is especially bad if said person will be taking the same exam in the next day or so.
Why is it that so many anti-spam proposals involve stepping on anonymous free speech rights? We need more than just a knee-jerk reaction. There's enough alternatives, such as reverse MX, to require cheap webhosts to investigate every customer. Not to mention that investigations would make cheap hosts expensive.
If it's off school grounds, then the school probably doesn't (and definitely shouldn't) have any authority. Sure, the school getting involved with this issue may have a slightly positive outcome, but then they'd want to start getting their dirty hands into other off-campus issues. "Zero tolerance" usually descends into "zero sense" in the hands of school administration.
If I were a victim of some bully's website, I would try to go through the parents, and if that doesn't work I'd set up my own site and try to get their webhost to bring theirs down. If that doesn't work, it's DoS time (should be especially easy on most free webhosts with very low transfer limits). Maybe sign them up for some spam. The Internet is the geek's home turf.
Even easier if it's a Geocities page or something similar with a low transfer limit: just write a little script calling wget to download each file, then have cron (or scheduled tasks on Windows) call that script every minute.
;-)
What sweet irony it would be to have a site making fun of me for being a geek, then using abilities gained from being a geek to kill it. Nobody successfully attacks us geeks on our home turf.
If IE blocks popups like Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and everyone else, then advertisers will just use much more invasive, hard-to-block ads. It will accelerate the arms race between marketroids and Internet users. Maybe ads will use Flash, Java, or some random security hole. As long as the unwashed masses are vulnerable to popup ads, they will be advertised to with popups and those of us who use good web browsers (read: not IE) won't see much invasive advertising.