Illegal? What's illegal about no cd cracks (DMCA aside - not only is that provision of law unethical, I'm in Canada and do not have to abide by it)? There is nothing inherantly wrong with no cd cracks. I own the game legit - bought it release day, retail copy. Nowhere did it ever say that Half-Life 2 uses CD copy protection - quite the opposite. Every Valve release I saw (and I saw a LOT) said that there was no copy protection. I also use a legit copy of Alcohol 120 for CD emulation to get around needing all those CDs. Lately, there have been a lot of games that use the new securom copy protection that detects alcohol120, so I have to resort to no CD cracks. I own the game legit. I own the game legit. I own the game legit. I want to play the game I own legit. There. I've said that enough times that it should get through to you - I AM NOT PIRATING THE GAME. Changing CDs in every time I or someone who wants to use my computer is not an option. Let me explain why.
I have over 90 computers. Most of them don't have CD/DVDroms.
I work at a LAN center. Changing CDs every time someone wants to change games is not an option. We'd not only have to have full-time staff just to change out CDs, we'd have to keep a library of CDs in an easily accessable place where they could be stolen. Theft IS a problem for us - we've had people open up our computers and steal RAM. Not only that, but we'd have to worry about game discs getting scratched. Once that happens, well there's $70(CAD) gone. Half-Life 2 uses the new securom, which means that if we had bought any copies (other than one copy I got as an evaluation copy), we wouldn't have been able to play the game without a crack. Installing would have been a nightmare (it took 5 hours including activation on a single machine), and then, a week later, all of our CDkeys would have been banned. Does this sound reasonable to you? Sure we could buy through Steam - take a guess how long it would take to pre-load HL2 on 90 machines. Go ahead. Guess. Answer - WEEKS. There is no way we were going to pre-load before release, since we didn't know for sure whether we would even buy the game.
If you're at all educated about how Valve does business, you'll know that there is a Cyber-Cafe licencing deal available. You know what they charge, and what you ACTUALLY get? They charge $15(CAD)/month/machine. That means, before taxes & such, we'd be paying $1350/month just so our customers can play counter-strike. $1350/MONTH. That's almost a third of our already-streched-thin game purchasing budget. If we did that, we wouldn't be able to afford to buy any other games. As it is, we can afford one, maybe two games a month. With that program, we could afford one new game every 2-3 months. That is NOT worth it, considering what you get in exchange.
So what do you ACTUALLY get with Valve's Cyber-Cafe licence?
A free copy of every Valve game for every computer that's livenced. Goody. Before HL2, what did valve release? Counter-strike:condition zero. That's it. Those are the only games that have been released in the 2 years that Cyber Cafe program has been around. We didn't even bother with CS:CZ because it was nothing new. CS had everything CS:CZ had - bots, freely downloadable maps. At $15/machine/month, over 24 months, that means we would have payed, over 2 years, $180/copy for CS:CZ and $180/copy for HL2. $32,400 total.
They unban any accounts that get booted for cheating. This would be a huge plus, and we were breifly considering it. Then we realized that banned CDkeys take up about $50/month. That's it. It's not that cheaters only come in once a month, it's that so rarely are cheaters detected & banned. Our staff boots cheaters before Valve catches them.
...um... I guess that's it. They also offer some management software that allows you to remotely manage each Steam install on every machine, but I've written software that does that for every game we have anyway.
It's all about dual ethical standards. Your company (if ever the BSA decides to send the jackboot lawyers) will be held up to an impossible standard - no warezed software, ANYWHERE, or your company will pay through the nose. Microsoft not only founded the BSA, but has been responsible for sending said jackboot lawyers after numerous companies. Basically, the reason the slashbots are going nuts over this is that it's just more proof that Microsoft can't live up to the standards they push on everyone else.
The fact that it was likely "just one employee" wouldn't save your company from the BSA - Microsoft shouldn't be able to use that justification either.
And obviously, the only thing that could have had this effect was Bush and Co.
I disagree. I don't think it was Bush and Co that prevented a mainland attack. I think it was this Magical Anti-Terrorism Spoon I bought on 9/12. I got it from a street vendor who looked like a gypsie. He said it would prevent any terrorist attacks on american soil so long as I eat my Magical Anti-Terrorism Corn Flakes with it every morning. Bush has just been taking the credit - you really should be thanking the spoon!
Seriously, just because attacks haven't happened since 9/11 doesn't mean that any one person is responsible. Maybe Bush's policies really did stop attacks, or maybe the Evil-Doers(TM) just haven't been planning any lately. Maybe said Evil-Doers(TM) have just been sitting in one big circle-jerk for the past 3 years celebrating a successful attack. Maybe they've only made half-assed attempts. You can't be certain either way who prevented what. What you CAN be certain of is that you can't trust anyone who takes the credit for something that can't be proven.
Twofold - first off, there's the whole change/admitting mistake thing. They don't wanna do it. Being able to blame Jow Blow means they would have changed and thereby admitted a mistake in previously choosing Microsoft. Once a problem happens, then they will likely have to admit they made another mistake when they trusted Joe Blow.
Second, "everyone" uses Microsoft. That means when a problem happens, everyone gets to stand up and say with one voice "Microsoft screwed us over". If you read in trade mags and hear at cocktail parties that everyone's system got raped by a worm, then when your employees say that it happened to you, it doesn't look like you have incompetent employees. When that happens, it looks like a flawed product. But when you use JoeBlowSoft, you and maybe a handful of other corps are gonna get hit with a specific problem. That means that when your employees come up and say "a worm raped us", you've only heard it from your employees. It's only *happened* to your employees. They stand alone. No longer are they part of a crowd of professionals who got hit by an "undocumented feature", they are the lone schmuck who made a mistake. Whether the mistake was technically based or choosing JoeBlowSoft is irrelevant.
Think of it as "when you're all alone, you have no one to blame but yourself". Seriously, with how afraid of change some companies are, I'm surprised any progress is made at all. It's like anything visonary that leaks out is a fluke - a failure of the corporate machine designed to squelch any glimmer of inspiration.
It's not about suing the vendor. It's about being able to say to your boss/the board/the shareholders that "hey, it's not MY fault - MS made a lousy product. Whaddya gonna do?" Then your boss/the board/the shareholders shrug their shoulders and say "yeah, they DID make a lousy product. I guess it's not your fault." Then they buy the next version of Exchange ("WHIZZBANG EDITION!!!") and the cycle continues.
Since everyone knows that whole "do things the same and expect different results" def'n of insanity, so you may wonder why they keep up the cycle. The reason is not that they expect different results - they know perfectly well what will happen next time. They will get to defer blame to someone else - a someone else that happens to be a big corp that won't fight back if you blame your stupidity on it. They also get the luxury of maintaining the status quo. That is a huge plus since they fear change almost as much as they fear admitting they made a mistake. And that's what switching to another vendor would be - admitting they made a mistake all those years they stuck with Microsoft.
This is Future Shop we're talking about. I have been told by different salemen the following things:
I should buy the Monster brand optical audio cable, because it has better shielding. If I were to buy the cheap kind, I would be getting all sorts of interferance through the line. He INSISTED that he had plugged the two in and 'head the difference'.
Minidisk is the ONLY digital audio format. CDs, MP3s, FLACC, etc. are NOT digital. Oh, and my Pioneer MP3 car stereo will indeed be able to play the ATRAC3 recordings I would get off a $150 Minidisk recorder w/ mic in
Optical is the only way to carry a digital signal. Copper can't carry digital. Aluminum can't carry digital. ANYWHERE. Including inside your CPU. He actually told me that inside your computer, there is NO DIGITAL SIGNALS. Damn - guess the A in AMD stands for analog.
A dual core processor will allow you to TRULY run 2 programs at once - because it will take your word processor and put that on half the processor, and it will take your music player and put it on the other half. Presto! No slowdown!
WMA recorded at 48kbps sounds just as good as the CD original.
These were all different salespeople that told me this, so it's not like there is just one REALLY stupid guy there. In fact, every time I have engaged a Future Shop saleman in a conversation more difficult than "Do you have X? Where is X? I want to buy X", I have heard something either mind-bogglingly stupid or just grossly mis-informed.
Actually, Deepfreeze pro & enterprise accounts for updates. You can schedule times & dates for the machines to automatically set themselves to 'thaw', connect to an SUS server of your choice, run batch files/programs/scripts of your choosing, etc. Enterprise edition even comes with a command console to do it remotely on command. Or you could write your own remote console using the DFC commaind line interface that comes with pro, like I did. It's all pretty easy. As for people saving files where they shouldn't, it'll only take once or twice before they learn.
Trust me, when I have apx 50 games/machine to look after, with an average of 5-6 patches a week to do (that HAVE to be done if my customers want to play online), I know about patches and update cycles. As for personalized machines, you are right - there isn't that much. But there ARE savegames and all that jazz that people want kept (esp the Neverwinter & Final Fantasy guys). We've had to get a little creative with that, but we manage. For things like personalized desktops, bookmarks and such, isn't there a way to map the My Documents folder to a separate partition/drive?
Oh my god, I'm surprised it took that long to mention DeepFreeze. I LOVE DEEP FREEZE. I only manage 70 comps at a lan center, but if you think office drones are demanding, try gamers. We used to have the comps locked down as tight as possible (well, as tight as you can get with XP pro and still have games/punkbuster be functional), and we still had to do regular weekly maintenance (AV, spyware removal, etc). With DeepFreeze, you can set up a 2 gig thaw partition that allows people to save any files they might need, they can still save files to a network drive, but the C: drive (or any other fixed drive you want) have a persistant image resident. They can save any files they want, make any changes they want, delete anything they want, but on next boot, everything on a frozen drive is back to the way it was before. They can't permanently install any progs, but honestly, when should a user be installing anything anyway? The best part is, I can go about a month between issues that can't be solved by a reboot.
I answer it two ways. The first way is my favorite, and most agree with it. The second is a fallback that doesn't work often, but it's still worth a shot.
1 - We all go to the bathroom. Everyone does. It's biological. Nothing wrong with it. At one point or another, we've all made embarrasing sounds in the bathroom. Again, nothing wrong. But who would welcome an intrusion in that private moment? I wouldn't. There are times where I am engaging in activities that aren't wrong, but I'd be really upset if someone was watching/listening in. The same goes for comunications of any kind. We all discuss things with people that we don't want others to know. Even if the person listening in is benevolent and has no interest in revealing our secrets (or honestly doesn't even care), we'd still rather have that unknown third party not know. For your wife, ask her if she'd have a problem with some government terrorist sniffer listening in on a conversation she had with her doctor about a yeast infection. The spook doesn't know her, doesn't care, and would likely rather not have been privy to the details - but I doubt that would comfort your wife. All she knows is that an intimate discussion with a medical professional has been monitored and possibly recorded in a massive databse, JUST IN CASE.
2 - Sounds a little tin-foil-hattish, but here goes. Let's assume that we can trust the government of today not to abuse the power. We can pretend that everyone in power has the genuine intention of using this technology/law to stop suicide bombers (not a safe assumption to make, but hey - for the sake of argument, why not). What assurance do we have that the government of a year/5 years/10 years from now are just as trustworthy? We don't know that, we can't know that. But the law/technology will still be there, but the honest people it was meant for may be gone and replaced with a government you cannot trust. These things happen, even in American history (see: McCarthy, Hoover). Even if we can trust the leaders of today, it won't be the leaders who actually use the laws/technology. It will be hundreds or maybe thousands of government employees -- and anyone who has ever had experience with a civil servant can tell you that not all of them can be trusted. Maybe someone tries to get a job as a 'line sniffer' just so that they can listen in to private calls and jack off later to them (not likely, but hey - sick people exist). I know I'd feel violated because if that happened. Or maybe one of them hears something like a call between someone (such as a respected member of a conservative community) and asubstance abuse councelor about their secret addiction? Well, lookie-lookie. All of a sudden, this line sniffer has blackmail info. Or a more likely scenario - a call to a shop-by-phone company. With that one call, a crooked sniffer would have your name, address and credit card number. What's to say that government employees aren't subject to the same temptations as the rest of us? All it will take is time before you get the right combination of a morally-loose sniffer and the big promise of enough cash.
Oh god, I can't believe I'm about to make a post like this, but here goes...
I think you get what you deserve for having a windows machine exposed to the net. I know that has nothing to do with CPU stability issues beyond a karma thing, but still...
Anyway, now that my kneejerk linux zealot reflex is satiated, it could be the mobo chipset you were using - a Via chipset can be problematic. At my workplace, we HAVE to experiment, so I've seen a lot of configurations come through. I've found that an nForce chipset is worth it's weight in solar dust. Seriously, I'd rather have 1 Asus mobo with an nForce chipset than 10 gigabytes with a VIA.
Our primary internal (IE: no internet connection) fileserver used to have stability issues running win2k on a VIA chipset. About a month ago, I swapped it out with a spare ASUS I managed to grab. Presto - no more strange crashes.
The same thing can be said for winXP machines, too. nForce chipsets are a MUST if you want things to run smoothly.
*I'm a sysadmin for a 3 30-desktop gaming center chain - you think you have it bad with peple running MS Office and Seibel? Try it when you have a bunch of gamers running the latest bug-riddled POS to come out of EA (*coughBFVIETNAMcough*). And don't get me started on the heat issues.
Well, I don't know if I count as a source, but the province where I live has enacted some anti-smoking laws that prohibit tobaco retailers from even DISPLAYING cigarettes in places where underage buyers can see them. There have been convienience stores (in particular, a Klien's location on Vic and Sask drive in case any/.'ers are in the same town as me) that have decided to display smokes and ban kids. It's not out of the realm of possibilities that a Timmy Ho's has decided to do the same thing.
How does the cost factor into RAID? Oh, wait! I get it. Another person who thinks the I in RAID means 'inexpensive'. Sorry dude, the I is for 'independant'. Redundant Array of Independant Disks.
As a point of clarification, only about 15% of the levy goes toward the record labels. The rest goes to songwriters and performers.
Since 1997, only 12% of the money collected has actually been paid to copyright holders (as reported by the Globe & Mail in feb 2003). The rest has been taken by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (who is supposed to oversee who gets how much). Futhermore, when the levy was enacted, the gov't was reluctant to let it pass. The only way the CRIA was able to get the levy imposed was by relinquishing the right to bring suit against people who shared music (which at the time was limited to swapping CDs). I'd say that they gave me permission to do so in exchange for paying the levy in 1997 gives me the moral right. If they want to change it now, fine - give me back all the protection money I've paid over the years and repeal the levy.
So in what world is putting a file that you do _NOT_ own the copyright on, and have not actually obtained permission from the copyright holder to copy for purposes beyond fair use, in a publicly shared folder for others to obtain _not_ a violation of the copyright act?
The world where Canadians have been paying 21 cents per blank CD bought (regardless of intended use) since 1997 for the right to share music with our friends ("non-commercial use"). The music industry faught long and hard to get this levy, and to get it, they gave up the right to bring suit against people who shared their music. Granted, at the time, Napster didn't exist and broadband was something very few had, so music sharing was still swapping CDs. To compensate for the rise in broadband and p2p usage, the levy was recently increased and expanded. Want to buy an iPod in Canada? Get ready to fork over another $25 to the levy. It was also proposed to impose the same levy on any hard drive, not just "permanently embedded non-removable memory".
Okay, now you're just being assinine. What did he say that was wrong? Please, point something out. You agreed that the US provided aid and comfort to Saddam all the while knowing he was a brutal dictoator (you just tried to justify it by saying that the USSR did it more). The US also stil provides aid to brutal dictators (Uzbekistan as mentioned). Grandparent's conclusions of "1) they haven't learned not to cozy up to dictators yet, and 2) human rights simply aren't a concern for them" naturally follow. If you came to a different conclusion, please explain your logic so that we may understand. If you disagree with the facts (that the US did provide aid to Saddam, and the US continues to support other dictoral regimes), please state why you disagree.
And please, no more "The USSR was worse!"-style finger-pointing. The USSR isn't the one occupying Iraq under the pretense of moral superiority.
The question is - is it from the BMW/Mini folks, is this a teaser thing for the oft-rumored live-action Transformers movie, or is this just a guy with too much time on their hands? I'd put even money on each.
I've done a bit of work with spray paints (don't ask), and I would think that if the glue in labels is enough to corrode the data layer, wouldn't the all the chems in spray paint be at least as damaging over time? I've also had bad experiences trying to use spraypaint on plastic (vinyl dye is much better for this, but you definately do not want to use that on a CD). IANAchemist, so there's a good chance I'm wrong. I'd love to put some Dupli-Color Mirage or Krylon Mystique on some of my CDs.
Fun, definately fun. I didn't know about the shutdown remote tool in the Win2K res kit though, thanks. But yeah, I've gone to some great lengths for fun. That and the right to say "I made this", which tends to impress the boss more.
Actually, there's not a lot to WOL. You can do it in any language that allows you to use UDP. Here's how I set up the main function (someone feel free to correct me if I make any mistakes, I only have the binaries with me):
Function takes the target MAC address (in hex - not as a string) as a 6 byte array
Makes new byte array, 102 bytes in length
The first six bytes of the new array each need to be FFh
The rest of the array needs to be filled with the MAC address, 16 times over. EG: If the target MAC address is 0A:0B:0C:0D:0E:0F, the byte array should be filled with:
FFFFFFFFFFFF0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F 0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F 0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F 0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F 0A0B0C0D0E0F
Send that byte array out as a UDP packet to IP (limited broadcast) address 255.255.255.255 (most WOL apps use port 9, but pretty much any port will do)
Also remember to turn WOL on in both your BIOS settings and in the OS on the target machine.
As for releasing the source, I could do that once I get my webserver back up and running (unfourtunately, due to midterms and such, not a very high priority).
I work in a LAN gaming center. Most of you have probably seen the type - lost of high end gaming pay-for-play comps loaded with CS, BF:1942, CoD, UT2k3, and a bunch of other acronyms. The power buttons on the cases are really inconvienient to get to (behind one of those door things, 5' off the floor, turned to the side so the case window faces out).
Hitting all those power buttons is NOT FUN. Not difficult, just annoying. So, being the compsci student I am, I wrote a litte C proggie that sends WOL packets out to any machine I want. Incorporate a small databse of the MAC's and a tidy front-end and voila - instant 'power-on' menu. It works well. I'm also going to write a small client-side app that allows me to turn them off remotely, just for fun.
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I have over 90 computers. Most of them don't have CD/DVDroms.
I work at a LAN center. Changing CDs every time someone wants to change games is not an option. We'd not only have to have full-time staff just to change out CDs, we'd have to keep a library of CDs in an easily accessable place where they could be stolen. Theft IS a problem for us - we've had people open up our computers and steal RAM. Not only that, but we'd have to worry about game discs getting scratched. Once that happens, well there's $70(CAD) gone. Half-Life 2 uses the new securom, which means that if we had bought any copies (other than one copy I got as an evaluation copy), we wouldn't have been able to play the game without a crack. Installing would have been a nightmare (it took 5 hours including activation on a single machine), and then, a week later, all of our CDkeys would have been banned. Does this sound reasonable to you? Sure we could buy through Steam - take a guess how long it would take to pre-load HL2 on 90 machines. Go ahead. Guess. Answer - WEEKS. There is no way we were going to pre-load before release, since we didn't know for sure whether we would even buy the game.
If you're at all educated about how Valve does business, you'll know that there is a Cyber-Cafe licencing deal available. You know what they charge, and what you ACTUALLY get? They charge $15(CAD)/month/machine. That means, before taxes & such, we'd be paying $1350/month just so our customers can play counter-strike. $1350/MONTH. That's almost a third of our already-streched-thin game purchasing budget. If we did that, we wouldn't be able to afford to buy any other games. As it is, we can afford one, maybe two games a month. With that program, we could afford one new game every 2-3 months. That is NOT worth it, considering what you get in exchange.
So what do you ACTUALLY get with Valve's Cyber-Cafe licence?
That's all Valve gives yo
The fact that it was likely "just one employee" wouldn't save your company from the BSA - Microsoft shouldn't be able to use that justification either.
I disagree. I don't think it was Bush and Co that prevented a mainland attack. I think it was this Magical Anti-Terrorism Spoon I bought on 9/12. I got it from a street vendor who looked like a gypsie. He said it would prevent any terrorist attacks on american soil so long as I eat my Magical Anti-Terrorism Corn Flakes with it every morning. Bush has just been taking the credit - you really should be thanking the spoon!
Seriously, just because attacks haven't happened since 9/11 doesn't mean that any one person is responsible. Maybe Bush's policies really did stop attacks, or maybe the Evil-Doers(TM) just haven't been planning any lately. Maybe said Evil-Doers(TM) have just been sitting in one big circle-jerk for the past 3 years celebrating a successful attack. Maybe they've only made half-assed attempts. You can't be certain either way who prevented what. What you CAN be certain of is that you can't trust anyone who takes the credit for something that can't be proven.
Second, "everyone" uses Microsoft. That means when a problem happens, everyone gets to stand up and say with one voice "Microsoft screwed us over". If you read in trade mags and hear at cocktail parties that everyone's system got raped by a worm, then when your employees say that it happened to you, it doesn't look like you have incompetent employees. When that happens, it looks like a flawed product. But when you use JoeBlowSoft, you and maybe a handful of other corps are gonna get hit with a specific problem. That means that when your employees come up and say "a worm raped us", you've only heard it from your employees. It's only *happened* to your employees. They stand alone. No longer are they part of a crowd of professionals who got hit by an "undocumented feature", they are the lone schmuck who made a mistake. Whether the mistake was technically based or choosing JoeBlowSoft is irrelevant.
Think of it as "when you're all alone, you have no one to blame but yourself". Seriously, with how afraid of change some companies are, I'm surprised any progress is made at all. It's like anything visonary that leaks out is a fluke - a failure of the corporate machine designed to squelch any glimmer of inspiration.
Since everyone knows that whole "do things the same and expect different results" def'n of insanity, so you may wonder why they keep up the cycle. The reason is not that they expect different results - they know perfectly well what will happen next time. They will get to defer blame to someone else - a someone else that happens to be a big corp that won't fight back if you blame your stupidity on it. They also get the luxury of maintaining the status quo. That is a huge plus since they fear change almost as much as they fear admitting they made a mistake. And that's what switching to another vendor would be - admitting they made a mistake all those years they stuck with Microsoft.
- I should buy the Monster brand optical audio cable, because it has better shielding. If I were to buy the cheap kind, I would be getting all sorts of interferance through the line. He INSISTED that he had plugged the two in and 'head the difference'.
- Minidisk is the ONLY digital audio format. CDs, MP3s, FLACC, etc. are NOT digital. Oh, and my Pioneer MP3 car stereo will indeed be able to play the ATRAC3 recordings I would get off a $150 Minidisk recorder w/ mic in
- Optical is the only way to carry a digital signal. Copper can't carry digital. Aluminum can't carry digital. ANYWHERE. Including inside your CPU. He actually told me that inside your computer, there is NO DIGITAL SIGNALS. Damn - guess the A in AMD stands for analog.
- A dual core processor will allow you to TRULY run 2 programs at once - because it will take your word processor and put that on half the processor, and it will take your music player and put it on the other half. Presto! No slowdown!
- WMA recorded at 48kbps sounds just as good as the CD original.
These were all different salespeople that told me this, so it's not like there is just one REALLY stupid guy there. In fact, every time I have engaged a Future Shop saleman in a conversation more difficult than "Do you have X? Where is X? I want to buy X", I have heard something either mind-bogglingly stupid or just grossly mis-informed.Trust me, when I have apx 50 games/machine to look after, with an average of 5-6 patches a week to do (that HAVE to be done if my customers want to play online), I know about patches and update cycles. As for personalized machines, you are right - there isn't that much. But there ARE savegames and all that jazz that people want kept (esp the Neverwinter & Final Fantasy guys). We've had to get a little creative with that, but we manage. For things like personalized desktops, bookmarks and such, isn't there a way to map the My Documents folder to a separate partition/drive?
I know, it still shouldn't have taken that long :)
1 - We all go to the bathroom. Everyone does. It's biological. Nothing wrong with it. At one point or another, we've all made embarrasing sounds in the bathroom. Again, nothing wrong. But who would welcome an intrusion in that private moment? I wouldn't. There are times where I am engaging in activities that aren't wrong, but I'd be really upset if someone was watching/listening in. The same goes for comunications of any kind. We all discuss things with people that we don't want others to know. Even if the person listening in is benevolent and has no interest in revealing our secrets (or honestly doesn't even care), we'd still rather have that unknown third party not know. For your wife, ask her if she'd have a problem with some government terrorist sniffer listening in on a conversation she had with her doctor about a yeast infection. The spook doesn't know her, doesn't care, and would likely rather not have been privy to the details - but I doubt that would comfort your wife. All she knows is that an intimate discussion with a medical professional has been monitored and possibly recorded in a massive databse, JUST IN CASE.
2 - Sounds a little tin-foil-hattish, but here goes. Let's assume that we can trust the government of today not to abuse the power. We can pretend that everyone in power has the genuine intention of using this technology/law to stop suicide bombers (not a safe assumption to make, but hey - for the sake of argument, why not). What assurance do we have that the government of a year/5 years/10 years from now are just as trustworthy? We don't know that, we can't know that. But the law/technology will still be there, but the honest people it was meant for may be gone and replaced with a government you cannot trust. These things happen, even in American history (see: McCarthy, Hoover). Even if we can trust the leaders of today, it won't be the leaders who actually use the laws/technology. It will be hundreds or maybe thousands of government employees -- and anyone who has ever had experience with a civil servant can tell you that not all of them can be trusted. Maybe someone tries to get a job as a 'line sniffer' just so that they can listen in to private calls and jack off later to them (not likely, but hey - sick people exist). I know I'd feel violated because if that happened. Or maybe one of them hears something like a call between someone (such as a respected member of a conservative community) and asubstance abuse councelor about their secret addiction? Well, lookie-lookie. All of a sudden, this line sniffer has blackmail info. Or a more likely scenario - a call to a shop-by-phone company. With that one call, a crooked sniffer would have your name, address and credit card number. What's to say that government employees aren't subject to the same temptations as the rest of us? All it will take is time before you get the right combination of a morally-loose sniffer and the big promise of enough cash.
Hope that helps!
I think you get what you deserve for having a windows machine exposed to the net. I know that has nothing to do with CPU stability issues beyond a karma thing, but still...
Anyway, now that my kneejerk linux zealot reflex is satiated, it could be the mobo chipset you were using - a Via chipset can be problematic. At my workplace, we HAVE to experiment, so I've seen a lot of configurations come through. I've found that an nForce chipset is worth it's weight in solar dust. Seriously, I'd rather have 1 Asus mobo with an nForce chipset than 10 gigabytes with a VIA.
Our primary internal (IE: no internet connection) fileserver used to have stability issues running win2k on a VIA chipset. About a month ago, I swapped it out with a spare ASUS I managed to grab. Presto - no more strange crashes.
The same thing can be said for winXP machines, too. nForce chipsets are a MUST if you want things to run smoothly.
*I'm a sysadmin for a 3 30-desktop gaming center chain - you think you have it bad with peple running MS Office and Seibel? Try it when you have a bunch of gamers running the latest bug-riddled POS to come out of EA (*coughBFVIETNAMcough*). And don't get me started on the heat issues.
So let me get this straight - we take Utah and Celine Dion? What's in it for us?
Well, I don't know if I count as a source, but the province where I live has enacted some anti-smoking laws that prohibit tobaco retailers from even DISPLAYING cigarettes in places where underage buyers can see them. There have been convienience stores (in particular, a Klien's location on Vic and Sask drive in case any /.'ers are in the same town as me) that have decided to display smokes and ban kids. It's not out of the realm of possibilities that a Timmy Ho's has decided to do the same thing.
How does the cost factor into RAID? Oh, wait! I get it. Another person who thinks the I in RAID means 'inexpensive'. Sorry dude, the I is for 'independant'. Redundant Array of Independant Disks.
Or, if you want to let her know what you think personally, you can e-mail her here.
Please tell me you have a referance. I believe you, really, it's just that I would also like to see a source to back this up.
And please, no more "The USSR was worse!"-style finger-pointing. The USSR isn't the one occupying Iraq under the pretense of moral superiority.
You sir, have made my 'friends' list. Gotta say, I also love the sig.
The question is - is it from the BMW/Mini folks, is this a teaser thing for the oft-rumored live-action Transformers movie, or is this just a guy with too much time on their hands? I'd put even money on each.
I've done a bit of work with spray paints (don't ask), and I would think that if the glue in labels is enough to corrode the data layer, wouldn't the all the chems in spray paint be at least as damaging over time? I've also had bad experiences trying to use spraypaint on plastic (vinyl dye is much better for this, but you definately do not want to use that on a CD). IANAchemist, so there's a good chance I'm wrong. I'd love to put some Dupli-Color Mirage or Krylon Mystique on some of my CDs.
Fun, definately fun. I didn't know about the shutdown remote tool in the Win2K res kit though, thanks. But yeah, I've gone to some great lengths for fun. That and the right to say "I made this", which tends to impress the boss more.
- Function takes the target MAC address (in hex - not as a string) as a 6 byte array
- Makes new byte array, 102 bytes in length
- The first six bytes of the new array each need to be FFh
- The rest of the array needs to be filled with the MAC address, 16 times over.
- Send that byte array out as a UDP packet to IP (limited broadcast) address 255.255.255.255 (most WOL apps use port 9, but pretty much any port will do)
Also remember to turn WOL on in both your BIOS settings and in the OS on the target machine.EG: If the target MAC address is 0A:0B:0C:0D:0E:0F, the byte array should be filled with: FFFFFFFFFFFF0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F
0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F
0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F
0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F0A0B0C0D0E0F
0A0B0C0D0E0F
As for releasing the source, I could do that once I get my webserver back up and running (unfourtunately, due to midterms and such, not a very high priority).
I work in a LAN gaming center. Most of you have probably seen the type - lost of high end gaming pay-for-play comps loaded with CS, BF:1942, CoD, UT2k3, and a bunch of other acronyms. The power buttons on the cases are really inconvienient to get to (behind one of those door things, 5' off the floor, turned to the side so the case window faces out).
Hitting all those power buttons is NOT FUN. Not difficult, just annoying. So, being the compsci student I am, I wrote a litte C proggie that sends WOL packets out to any machine I want. Incorporate a small databse of the MAC's and a tidy front-end and voila - instant 'power-on' menu. It works well. I'm also going to write a small client-side app that allows me to turn them off remotely, just for fun.