Ummm... being a professional anything would require a level of responsability and dedication that for some reason I have a feeling you lack. Like professional sports, to make a living at this you have to be the best or at least in the top single-digit percentile. And there are always hundreds or more likely thousand of people busting their behinds to become better than you. If you don't have the willpower or sense of purpose to put the game controller down long enough to get a passing grade at school, you might want to look into a career where being mediocre will at least put food on your table. My guess is that once StarCraft became a responsability, you'd find yourself sneaking a few rounds of some other game when you should be 'training'.
It's almost 5 on the east coast, and we're just now getting our first Google story on/. for the day? The revenue from that Google Adsense ad in the Google stories for the day is going to be way down! Google.
I'm actually seeing some mail labeled this way in our junk repository - but all of them violate CAN-SPAM in any number of ways, primarily the fact that they have no return address. I don't know why they bother, other than the fact that they're probably better able to reach their target audience with this method/setting up filter to 'Important Stuff' directory
I think it's pretty obvious that cheap WAPs and either a DirecWay or line-of-site to the nearest local broadband link is the way to go, but there are also a couple other things to consider.
First, find out what they're going to be doing. If it's a conference for one company, make sure you find out what sites they'll be surfing the most, and use a proxy server that supports a web cache. If you have a few dozen people viewing a 50Mb PDF file, you'll want that to be local. There's plenty of free proxy servers available for all platforms. It would be best if you could find a way to do it with a setup disk, so that people wouldn't have and difficulty setting up their connection. And if you forced everyone through a Proxy, you could presumably block all the ports you don't need, which in this day and age is almost crucial.
Another issue is liability. I don't know how hotels with free WiFi access handle it, but most have no security turned on in order to make it easy for people to use it. Unfortunately, if you get a bunch of people on this wireless lan with Windows laptops that haven't been updated in a while, one infected user could cause you some serious problems. It might be best (even if impractical) to require everyone to sign a waiver saying you and the event sponsor aren't responsible if they get infected or hacked.
If possible, you might want to set up an SMTP server and make everyone use that. You'll never get anyone to change their settings and use it, but if you could, that would save a lot of bandwidth too.
All of this has to be adapted to who the users are and where they are on a skill level scale. If this is a conference for systems administrators, then you could do all of this and enable WEP too, because setup wouldn't be an issue for them. If it's a conference for graphic designers, good luck. No offence to graphic designers, but in my experience a majority of them are infinitely more skilled at design than they are at configuring network settings.
I agree with some other posters that buying the equipment is the way to go. If all goes well, it might be something you want to do again for other clients. Even if not, you could sell everything on eBay when you're done and still probably come out way ahead over renting.
Good luck!
I read in Fast Company that since they've announced their IPO, they have to be really careful about what they say during this regulatory "quiet" period. The last story that flooded the tech sites this morning only involved "misplacing" a decimal point. Are they serious about this local filesystem search, or could something else be behind it?
Yeah, those bastards- how dare they hire people they can't afford to support when their new major market in Japan takes a dump as a result of the Japanese economy. There should be a law that companies can't layoff anyone ever - they should just have to run themselves into the ground when sales tank as employee costs like healthcare skyrocket. That way, you'd do away with all the uncertainty and doubt; you'd know for sure you'd be out of a job when they closed their doors. I mean, it's not like their aren't a million other companies in Freeport that employ so many people, pay so much taxes, and create walking trails and exercise programs in an effort to promote a healthier employee. Wait a minute... no there isn't. Bah- they could always work in Pownal.
U-Haul lost its case against WhenU, as reported last Sept. on Slashdot. The main difference is that U-Haul went after the company providing the service, rather than the advertisers themselves. I'd give you a link to the original Slashdot story, but it took me too long to find it the first time, when I was submitting this story way before this version of it was posted. I guess I should have posted it under YRO instead of 'The Internet'.
Here's another version of the story, which was online long before the CNN version. It also mentions that Claria Corp. was formerly known as Gator, which CNN seemed to miss.
...every time I get out of our mini-van (shut up) I get the crap shocked out of me when I touch the door. I always make sure I touch it before gassing up.
I thing the biggest danger (besides the morons who smoke at the pump) are people who fill plastic gas cans in the back of pick up trucks. I've seen a few videos of people doing that going up in flames.
One time there was a guy filling his tire right next to the pump with one of those 12v mini air compressors, while filling his gas tank. I asked him if he knew how dangerous that was. He didn't understand until I pointed out that the compressor has an electric motor in it.
Sorry, should have posted this with it... found one on ebay, this is exactly the one I have:
Dragon Naturally Speaking Mobile Edition. There's also a used one for $15. It's a bit chunky, but with some patience it might work for you. The concept is certainly a perfect solution, although this particular implementation might not work so well... I seem to remember it didn't have too much capacity. But maybe you could use an mp3 recorder with this type of software, and have a sweet solution, without having a PC or PDA while on the road.
Hey, now that's pretty brilliant - thinking outside the box and all. I'll go you one step further... I have an old Dragon Naturally Speaking package I got at a wholesale club years ago - it came with a digital recorder. The idea is you train your voice recognition on your PC at home, then you can take this little recorder with you, and let the voice recognition software do the transcription for you. The one I had wasn't all that great, but like I said, this was years ago. There must be something like that that works better these days.
First of all, this web page provides some illuminating information on the exploits that exist in the Mac world.
That's some good info, but it's not an exhaustive list and it kind of proves my point. Now maybe you're definition of "damage" is more literal, but to me, a machine that frequently crashes or has corrupted files is "damaged", at least when we're talking viruses. Now I will agree that there are no known Mac viruses that will do damage to the hardware, but neither are there in the PC world (other than ones that damage the BIOS, which I've read about, but I've never heard of anyone having their BIOS wiped). There really isn't anything out there that formatting the drive and reinstalling the OS won't fix.
Secondly, your questioning of my credentials is predictable. You mention the IIfx. My bug report--submitted in about mid-development--resulted in the SCSI terminators being modified after the machine was released. That was a MUCH bigger problem than any virus you could mention. Your dramatic depiction of the effeects of a corrupt font is touching, but it's still a problem today and isn't necessarily caused by viruses. Not a red herring, but definitely pink.
It was late, if I questioned your credentials, I apologize. However, I believe I was simply stating that you weren't "in the trenches" as it were, and obviously by your comments you didn't see the problems I did. I imagine that the types of users I dealt with (heavy removable media users, and most machines had multiple users) had a lot to do with the number of infections I had to deal with, the truth of which you seem to doubt. When I said 'if you knew what _your_ stuff', it wasn't meant to question your credentials as much as it was meant to echo what you said to me, and to illustrate that a statement like that is easily dismissed. BTW- thank you for that bug report, I vaugely remember something about that problem, although I tended to deal with more SE's, IIcx's and IIci's- in any event I'm sure it made my life easier in some way.
But that statement also illustrates my point, which I should expand upon. I feel your experiences and environment at the time preclude you from judging the validity of my statements. Obviously you were doing "bigger picture" work and I'm sure it had a much broader impact than mine - I didn't mean to imply otherwise, and I'm sorry if you feel I've turned this into a "who's is bigger" debate.
You're right about my working in a "sanitized, utopian environment." That's because we were so aggressive about fighting infections precisely because of their mode of transmission. One bad floppy could infect millions of users if it was included in a build. One careless hard drive transfer could ruin a product release. Believe me, you didn't want the infection traced back to something you did.
Good golly yes - again, I wasn't trying to attack you personally, only your authority to make statements like there weren't any viruses that did any damage or that I was "wasting my time" running Disinfectant. I'm glad you worked in such an environment, and wish that I had at the time been qualified enough and had the opportunity to work in such an environment.
But I stand behind what I said. Go over Apple's product lines between late-1987 and December 2001. It'd be easier to list what I didn't work on than what I did. Your post is interesting but it doesn't represent the typical Mac experience. Period.
Not to question your qualifications, but again I have to strongly disagree (You might want to cover your ears and go "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" really loudly at this point). Does 1995 ring a bell? PowerBook 190's and 5300's? LC/Performa 5200 and 5300's? While their were earlier problems, I think 1995 was the beginning of some of the worst hardware problems for Apple, and unfortunately, 1995 was around the time I began working with k-12 schools almost exclusively, and they all got a ton of these mo
I have to disagree with you about the wasting time. I'm sure you could take me to school on anything after System 7, but in my day, I could hold my own with the best of them. I ran a service route that was over 150 miles round trip, twice a week. On a typical road day, I would visit 3 colleges, 4 or 5 k-12 schools, 3 or 4 publishers/print shops. I didn't do anything that was a waste of time.
First of all, if you walk in the door and immediately booted all the macs to a locked boot floppy with Disinfectant on it and got them running, you could then talk to the users, find out what had been going on lately, clean some printers, replace a few ImageWriter II paper guides, and before you had a chance to go back to the Macs to run Speed Disk, Disinfectant was done.
If you knew _your_ stuff, you'd realize that at least 60% of being a tech is putting the customer's mind at ease, and the otherwise unused time taken to run any kind of scan, even if it were pointless or fake, is a great investment in the customer's comfort level.
Now I can understand that if you worked at Apple (were you even a technician?) and weren't exposed to real computers and real users in the field, you might not have been exposed to real viruses doing real damage. Like MBDF A, for example. If a machine crashing when you try and use a menu isn't damaged, I don't know what is. Or even WDEF- you say "WDEF didn't do anything". Beeping, Frequent crashing on some models and corruption and incorrect display of fonts??? Hello??? You didn't work with a lot of publishers or print shops, did you? Corrupt fonts - think about that for a minute. Customer brings you a print job, and a critical font is corrupted right at the deadline. What are they going to do, e-mail it to you? Remember what year we're talking here.
Granted, this was a different time, and from your comments, you were in a different environment. A very sanitized, utopian environment, apparently.
The one I was in had elementary, high school and college kids, along with writers, graphic artists, musicians and rent-a-mac users swapping more viruses than Pamela Andersen and Tommy Lee.
Point is, while Disinfectant may have been a waste of your time because of the type of users you dealt with, it certainly wasn't a waste of my time, when a good 20% of the frequent mysterious crashing problems during a certain period in time in my geographical location and market were the result of a virus. Don't foget, back then, there were very few hardware problems with Apple equipment, other than (fanless) Mac Plus power supplies, Mac SE squirell cage fans and ImageWriter II paper guides.
I will agree with you about the guy getting what he deserved though. 110%.
Sadly, I couldn't afford it anymore either, and I never made it to OS 8. But my first PC had mostly Mac parts in it (hard drive, CD-ROM, memory, etc), which I found hillarious. It was a scary switch, but I didn't have much choice.
Your point is well taken, but I think there's plenty of script kiddies with access to Mac labs. And no matter what OS you're running, if you're dumb enough to click on an executable of unknown origins because it has a pretty logo, you're doomed unless of course you have an admin who's locked you out of everything.
I worked on Macs as an certified tech back when the IIfx was the machine. I used to run Disinfectant on every machine I worked on, and there were tons of them that were infected, and this was on machines that didn't even have modems and weren't on networks. The only reason I bring this up is that this is probably a/. story soley because it involves a trojan or virus on a Mac. The fact that some poor schmuck actually downloaded what he thought was a commercial app from p2p network and tried to install it... this is "Stuff that matters"?
Someone big like DC filing something to the effect of:
Dear Judge for SCO v. [insert defendant name here]
We have reveiwed SCO's claims and are fully confident in your ability to come to the right decision without us contantly bothering you with the obvious. We will be happy to appear if you request it, otherwise we look forward to hearing your ruling.
Sincerely,
[insert defendant name here]
Ok, so it would never happen, but hey, they'd save a**loads of cash on lawyers, get a ton of free publicity, and even if they did loose, there's always the inevitable appeal.
Oh yeah, IANAL, feel free to use this defense, but it's at your own risk:-)
Slashdot Mirror
...and you're still trying to figure out how he gave you that exam with both hands on your shoulders?
Ummm... being a professional anything would require a level of responsability and dedication that for some reason I have a feeling you lack. Like professional sports, to make a living at this you have to be the best or at least in the top single-digit percentile. And there are always hundreds or more likely thousand of people busting their behinds to become better than you.
If you don't have the willpower or sense of purpose to put the game controller down long enough to get a passing grade at school, you might want to look into a career where being mediocre will at least put food on your table. My guess is that once StarCraft became a responsability, you'd find yourself sneaking a few rounds of some other game when you should be 'training'.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy -Cat Stevens
It's almost 5 on the east coast, and we're just now getting our first Google story on /. for the day? The revenue from that Google Adsense ad in the Google stories for the day is going to be way down! Google.
I'm actually seeing some mail labeled this way in our junk repository - but all of them violate CAN-SPAM in any number of ways, primarily the fact that they have no return address. I don't know why they bother, other than the fact that they're probably better able to reach their target audience with this method /setting up filter to 'Important Stuff' directory
I think it's pretty obvious that cheap WAPs and either a DirecWay or line-of-site to the nearest local broadband link is the way to go, but there are also a couple other things to consider. First, find out what they're going to be doing. If it's a conference for one company, make sure you find out what sites they'll be surfing the most, and use a proxy server that supports a web cache. If you have a few dozen people viewing a 50Mb PDF file, you'll want that to be local. There's plenty of free proxy servers available for all platforms. It would be best if you could find a way to do it with a setup disk, so that people wouldn't have and difficulty setting up their connection. And if you forced everyone through a Proxy, you could presumably block all the ports you don't need, which in this day and age is almost crucial. Another issue is liability. I don't know how hotels with free WiFi access handle it, but most have no security turned on in order to make it easy for people to use it. Unfortunately, if you get a bunch of people on this wireless lan with Windows laptops that haven't been updated in a while, one infected user could cause you some serious problems. It might be best (even if impractical) to require everyone to sign a waiver saying you and the event sponsor aren't responsible if they get infected or hacked. If possible, you might want to set up an SMTP server and make everyone use that. You'll never get anyone to change their settings and use it, but if you could, that would save a lot of bandwidth too. All of this has to be adapted to who the users are and where they are on a skill level scale. If this is a conference for systems administrators, then you could do all of this and enable WEP too, because setup wouldn't be an issue for them. If it's a conference for graphic designers, good luck. No offence to graphic designers, but in my experience a majority of them are infinitely more skilled at design than they are at configuring network settings. I agree with some other posters that buying the equipment is the way to go. If all goes well, it might be something you want to do again for other clients. Even if not, you could sell everything on eBay when you're done and still probably come out way ahead over renting. Good luck!
I read in Fast Company that since they've announced their IPO, they have to be really careful about what they say during this regulatory "quiet" period. The last story that flooded the tech sites this morning only involved "misplacing" a decimal point. Are they serious about this local filesystem search, or could something else be behind it?
Yeah, those bastards- how dare they hire people they can't afford to support when their new major market in Japan takes a dump as a result of the Japanese economy. There should be a law that companies can't layoff anyone ever - they should just have to run themselves into the ground when sales tank as employee costs like healthcare skyrocket. That way, you'd do away with all the uncertainty and doubt; you'd know for sure you'd be out of a job when they closed their doors. I mean, it's not like their aren't a million other companies in Freeport that employ so many people, pay so much taxes, and create walking trails and exercise programs in an effort to promote a healthier employee. Wait a minute... no there isn't. Bah- they could always work in Pownal.
U-Haul lost its case against WhenU, as reported last Sept. on Slashdot. The main difference is that U-Haul went after the company providing the service, rather than the advertisers themselves. I'd give you a link to the original Slashdot story, but it took me too long to find it the first time, when I was submitting this story way before this version of it was posted. I guess I should have posted it under YRO instead of 'The Internet'.
Here's another version of the story, which was online long before the CNN version. It also mentions that Claria Corp. was formerly known as Gator, which CNN seemed to miss.
"Plus, if one of them blows up, who's going to cry?"
I was raised by giant Gambian rats, you insensitive... oh nevermind. I'm calling Peta, the People for the Eating of Tasty Animals.
...every time I get out of our mini-van (shut up) I get the crap shocked out of me when I touch the door. I always make sure I touch it before gassing up.
I thing the biggest danger (besides the morons who smoke at the pump) are people who fill plastic gas cans in the back of pick up trucks. I've seen a few videos of people doing that going up in flames.
One time there was a guy filling his tire right next to the pump with one of those 12v mini air compressors, while filling his gas tank. I asked him if he knew how dangerous that was. He didn't understand until I pointed out that the compressor has an electric motor in it.
Sorry, should have posted this with it... found one on ebay, this is exactly the one I have: Dragon Naturally Speaking Mobile Edition. There's also a used one for $15. It's a bit chunky, but with some patience it might work for you. The concept is certainly a perfect solution, although this particular implementation might not work so well... I seem to remember it didn't have too much capacity. But maybe you could use an mp3 recorder with this type of software, and have a sweet solution, without having a PC or PDA while on the road.
Hey, now that's pretty brilliant - thinking outside the box and all. I'll go you one step further... I have an old Dragon Naturally Speaking package I got at a wholesale club years ago - it came with a digital recorder. The idea is you train your voice recognition on your PC at home, then you can take this little recorder with you, and let the voice recognition software do the transcription for you. The one I had wasn't all that great, but like I said, this was years ago. There must be something like that that works better these days.
I hate it when that happens. It's supposed to be a link to the new front wheel drive V6 Impalla SS.
So you're saying it worked really well, right? :-)
First of all, this web page provides some illuminating information on the exploits that exist in the Mac world.
That's some good info, but it's not an exhaustive list and it kind of proves my point. Now maybe you're definition of "damage" is more literal, but to me, a machine that frequently crashes or has corrupted files is "damaged", at least when we're talking viruses. Now I will agree that there are no known Mac viruses that will do damage to the hardware, but neither are there in the PC world (other than ones that damage the BIOS, which I've read about, but I've never heard of anyone having their BIOS wiped). There really isn't anything out there that formatting the drive and reinstalling the OS won't fix.
Secondly, your questioning of my credentials is predictable. You mention the IIfx. My bug report--submitted in about mid-development--resulted in the SCSI terminators being modified after the machine was released. That was a MUCH bigger problem than any virus you could mention. Your dramatic depiction of the effeects of a corrupt font is touching, but it's still a problem today and isn't necessarily caused by viruses. Not a red herring, but definitely pink.
It was late, if I questioned your credentials, I apologize. However, I believe I was simply stating that you weren't "in the trenches" as it were, and obviously by your comments you didn't see the problems I did. I imagine that the types of users I dealt with (heavy removable media users, and most machines had multiple users) had a lot to do with the number of infections I had to deal with, the truth of which you seem to doubt. When I said 'if you knew what _your_ stuff', it wasn't meant to question your credentials as much as it was meant to echo what you said to me, and to illustrate that a statement like that is easily dismissed. BTW- thank you for that bug report, I vaugely remember something about that problem, although I tended to deal with more SE's, IIcx's and IIci's- in any event I'm sure it made my life easier in some way.
But that statement also illustrates my point, which I should expand upon. I feel your experiences and environment at the time preclude you from judging the validity of my statements. Obviously you were doing "bigger picture" work and I'm sure it had a much broader impact than mine - I didn't mean to imply otherwise, and I'm sorry if you feel I've turned this into a "who's is bigger" debate.
You're right about my working in a "sanitized, utopian environment." That's because we were so aggressive about fighting infections precisely because of their mode of transmission. One bad floppy could infect millions of users if it was included in a build. One careless hard drive transfer could ruin a product release. Believe me, you didn't want the infection traced back to something you did.
Good golly yes - again, I wasn't trying to attack you personally, only your authority to make statements like there weren't any viruses that did any damage or that I was "wasting my time" running Disinfectant. I'm glad you worked in such an environment, and wish that I had at the time been qualified enough and had the opportunity to work in such an environment.
But I stand behind what I said. Go over Apple's product lines between late-1987 and December 2001. It'd be easier to list what I didn't work on than what I did. Your post is interesting but it doesn't represent the typical Mac experience. Period.
Not to question your qualifications, but again I have to strongly disagree (You might want to cover your ears and go "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" really loudly at this point). Does 1995 ring a bell? PowerBook 190's and 5300's? LC/Performa 5200 and 5300's? While their were earlier problems, I think 1995 was the beginning of some of the worst hardware problems for Apple, and unfortunately, 1995 was around the time I began working with k-12 schools almost exclusively, and they all got a ton of these mo
I have to disagree with you about the wasting time. I'm sure you could take me to school on anything after System 7, but in my day, I could hold my own with the best of them. I ran a service route that was over 150 miles round trip, twice a week. On a typical road day, I would visit 3 colleges, 4 or 5 k-12 schools, 3 or 4 publishers/print shops. I didn't do anything that was a waste of time. First of all, if you walk in the door and immediately booted all the macs to a locked boot floppy with Disinfectant on it and got them running, you could then talk to the users, find out what had been going on lately, clean some printers, replace a few ImageWriter II paper guides, and before you had a chance to go back to the Macs to run Speed Disk, Disinfectant was done. If you knew _your_ stuff, you'd realize that at least 60% of being a tech is putting the customer's mind at ease, and the otherwise unused time taken to run any kind of scan, even if it were pointless or fake, is a great investment in the customer's comfort level. Now I can understand that if you worked at Apple (were you even a technician?) and weren't exposed to real computers and real users in the field, you might not have been exposed to real viruses doing real damage. Like MBDF A, for example. If a machine crashing when you try and use a menu isn't damaged, I don't know what is. Or even WDEF- you say "WDEF didn't do anything". Beeping, Frequent crashing on some models and corruption and incorrect display of fonts??? Hello??? You didn't work with a lot of publishers or print shops, did you? Corrupt fonts - think about that for a minute. Customer brings you a print job, and a critical font is corrupted right at the deadline. What are they going to do, e-mail it to you? Remember what year we're talking here. Granted, this was a different time, and from your comments, you were in a different environment. A very sanitized, utopian environment, apparently. The one I was in had elementary, high school and college kids, along with writers, graphic artists, musicians and rent-a-mac users swapping more viruses than Pamela Andersen and Tommy Lee. Point is, while Disinfectant may have been a waste of your time because of the type of users you dealt with, it certainly wasn't a waste of my time, when a good 20% of the frequent mysterious crashing problems during a certain period in time in my geographical location and market were the result of a virus. Don't foget, back then, there were very few hardware problems with Apple equipment, other than (fanless) Mac Plus power supplies, Mac SE squirell cage fans and ImageWriter II paper guides. I will agree with you about the guy getting what he deserved though. 110%.
Sadly, I couldn't afford it anymore either, and I never made it to OS 8. But my first PC had mostly Mac parts in it (hard drive, CD-ROM, memory, etc), which I found hillarious. It was a scary switch, but I didn't have much choice. Your point is well taken, but I think there's plenty of script kiddies with access to Mac labs. And no matter what OS you're running, if you're dumb enough to click on an executable of unknown origins because it has a pretty logo, you're doomed unless of course you have an admin who's locked you out of everything.
This is mp3.com like this is an Impala SS. Dual chrome exhaust tips and a supercharger doesn't make a front wheel drive V6 into an Impala SS.
I worked on Macs as an certified tech back when the IIfx was the machine. I used to run Disinfectant on every machine I worked on, and there were tons of them that were infected, and this was on machines that didn't even have modems and weren't on networks. The only reason I bring this up is that this is probably a /. story soley because it involves a trojan or virus on a Mac. The fact that some poor schmuck actually downloaded what he thought was a commercial app from p2p network and tried to install it... this is "Stuff that matters"?
LOL - A friend wrote that domain in my 9y/o's homework folder last week. Too funny.
...and be done with it.
You're welcome.
1. Design a product 2. Ensure it's Overpriced 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
They could also keep an eye on this link.
Someone big like DC filing something to the effect of:
:-)
Dear Judge for SCO v. [insert defendant name here]
We have reveiwed SCO's claims and are fully confident in your ability to come to the right decision without us contantly bothering you with the obvious. We will be happy to appear if you request it, otherwise we look forward to hearing your ruling.
Sincerely, [insert defendant name here]
Ok, so it would never happen, but hey, they'd save a**loads of cash on lawyers, get a ton of free publicity, and even if they did loose, there's always the inevitable appeal.
Oh yeah, IANAL, feel free to use this defense, but it's at your own risk