This is true, at least in the US. That three-tone beep is called the "SIT tone". It is a standard cue that machinery can detect to find out when the number they just dialed is out of service.
You can go here for the real TeleZapper website, which is a device that detects when you answer your phone, and plays the tone basically as you're saying "hello".
Asterisk has this sound built-in, so you can trigger it in your dialplan wherever you need.
According to Symantec, you require a license for every computer DEPLOYED with Ghost, regardless of how it happens. (through the console, ghost/multicast, an image from a hard drive, or a drive-to-drive transfer)
I LOVE ghost, and I've been using it since v3.xx (when it was owned by a company named Binary Research) for doing harddrive upgrades. I really wish Symantec would pull their head out of their *** and sell me some sort of "technician license", where for $900 I can use it on as many computers as I want - because I can't afford to have a $25 license disappear everytime I use it on a client's machine in the shop!
Here are some sources you can read to confirm what I'm saying:
(Note at the bottom of this particular page:) Note: You are allowed to install the Ghost console numerous times, however, you must keep track of the total number of licenses used. This includes all clients managed by any console of a given version, plus all copies made with boot disks.
NEW YORK - A former America Online software engineer was sentenced yesterday to a year and three months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages.
"I know I've done something very wrong," a soft-spoken and teary Jason Smathers told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein.
The judge credited the 25-year-old former Harpers Ferry, W.Va., resident for his contrition and efforts to help the government before he pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. A plea deal had called for a sentence of at least 1 1/2 years in prison.
In a letter from Smathers to the court, part of which was read into the record by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Siegal, Smathers tried to explain the crimes that AOL has said cost the company at least $300,000 and possibly millions of dollars.
"Cyberspace is a new and strange place," Siegal said Smathers wrote. "I was good at navigating in that frontier, and I became an outlaw."
As the judge indicated he would be lenient toward Smathers, Siegal told Hellerstein that the public needs to learn from the case that the "Internet is not lawless. The public at large has an interest in making sure people respect the same values that apply in everyday life, on the Internet."
The judge said in imposing the reduced sentence that he recognized that Smathers cooperated fully with the government but did not have the kind of information that would have helped to build other criminal cases.
First plea rejected
He said leniency was appropriate for "someone who tries hard to bare his soul but doesn't have the information the government needs."
In December, Hellerstein rejected the first attempt by Smathers to plead guilty, saying he was not convinced Smathers actually had committed a crime. The judge accepted the plea in February, saying prosecutors had sufficiently explained why he had.
Smathers has admitted that he accepted $28,000 from someone who wanted to pitch an offshore gambling site to AOL customers, knowing that the list of screen names might make its way to others who would send e-mail solicitations.
The judge has recommended $84,000 restitution, triple what Smathers earned. The imposition of restitution was delayed to give AOL a chance to prove that the damages were much greater, after the judge suggested the $300,000 damage figure was subjective.
Prosecutors said Smathers had engaged in the interstate transportation of stolen property and had violated a new federal CAN-SPAM law, short for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, which is meant to diminish unsolicited e-mail about everything from Viagra to mortgages.
In December, the judge said he had dropped his own AOL membership because he received too much spam.
America Online Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., has since launched a major assault on spam, significantly reducing unsolicited e-mail.
Smathers was fired by AOL in June. Authorities said he used another employee's access code to steal the list of AOL customers in 2003 from its headquarters in Dulles, Va.
Still circulating
Smathers allegedly sold the list to Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas, who used it to send unwanted gambling advertisements to subscribers of AOL, the world's largest Internet provider. Charges are pending against Dunaway.
The stolen list of 92 million AOL addresses included multiple addresses used by each of AOL's estimated 30 million customers. It is believed to be still circulating among spammers.
The judge refused a Probation Department recommendation that Smathers be banned from his profession, saying he trusted Smathers had learned his lesson.
hmm.. Could this be the "history" tab you're referring to? Then you can diff it against any of the older edits (with their timestamps to tell how old they are)... then you get your color code you asked for.
Or am I misunderstanding, and you want something else?
Generally speaking, not getting media is a choice you make when ordering the machine (at least in the case of Dell). I know some companies don't offer you the choice, and maybe that's one of the OTHER reasons to never buy from Dell as a "Home" customer..
Sometimes it doesn't even save you money on your machine, but we all know it increases their margins a little bit - which adds up.
I do happen to do professional tech work, and since I also run into the "what package of documentation and CDs?" problem - I just keep copies of the OEM CDs, as well as the retail versions.. Everytime I see a new slipstreamed version come through, it gets imaged..
That way - I can use my loaner media, and their CD key (which is supposed to be attached to the machine).. There is nothing illegal about doing that, since they obviously have a license to be running it.
AD will never come close to being as cool as NDS. OU's aren't real OU's, you can't have people with the same names in different parts of the tree (represented by different offices, locations, countries, etc). It all comes down to the UPN (user principal name), which doesn't even care about how your tree is setup, thus making all of your OU's just eye candy!
Again, the "features" are already present, and the functionality in alot of products is much more mature.
* IAAMCSE, but I love NetWare, Linux and *BSD *
As other posters have already pointed out, a tiered approach to commercial software is very common.
I will expand on this by saying that it's NOT just commercial software you find this in.
You buy a Dell, or a Compaq server. In order to activate the onboard RAID controller, you plug in a "key". Don't fool yourself by thinking that this key has any of the processor built into it.
They put the entire guts of the RAID card (maybe except for the cache DIMM) on the main board, because then they benefit from the quanitities that these boards are being manufactured in.
However, ONLY customers who want to make use of the RAID features will get it. And you're going to pay a hefty price for a small piece of silicon that unlocks that functionality.
It is in this way that they are still spreading the cost of R&D for the RAID controller to all of their customers, but the users of the RAID card are the ones that really pay for it.
Another example that I have personal experience with.
Avaya makes a voicemail unit called the Merlin Messaging. This unit is capable of providing voicemail/auto-attendant services on up to 12 ports simultaneously, but in order to "activate" those ports - you have to plug in a "port license card", this is nothing more than a propriatary PCMCIA flash card that tells the voicemail 'OK, bring up 6 ports'.
That damn card costs more than the voicemail unit itself, but without it - you've got a very expensive paperweight.. and when you want to upgrade you port count, you just buy a bigger license card, and change some programming on the phone system.
Again - those cards are identical except for their labeling sticker, and whatever is ON the card.. but they're mass-producing a product, and the costs go down per unit when you do that.
Just my two cents. I think it's great when you realize just HOW easy these systems are to haxx0r, and I'd love it if someone who show me how to fabricate my own VM license cards, but I don't think that'll happen anytime soon.:)
This is fabulous! The amount of people that got together to put something like this together is just amazing.
Forget about the amateurish acting, the X-files style lighting (not a feature in my mind), the fact that everything was obviously done in front of a green-screen, and the cinematography/camera settings made it look more like a soap opera than a motion picture shot on celluloid (use filters/plugins to achieve that).
This was awesome.. I watched it all the way through, and that includes the credits. I plan on sending the URL to several people I know in the indy film industry, once the interest dies down a little that is.:)
Wait wait. The network is working great. No problems in the past week. Hey, you haven't done any recovery work so you don't get that extra $1000 that week. The network crashed and you fixed it. Great, here's $1000 but minus $200 because it crashed.
ahem! dude - If that were the case, my accounts receivable would be substantially smaller than it is now.:)
The idea is to have a stable network where people don't call you - and bill them for a service agreement, so you get paid whether something breaks or not.
Have any of you guys SEEN WinXP SP2? It's going to have alot of this crap embedded in it.. Anti-virus, a ZoneAlarm style firewall.. There may even be some Popup stuff for IE included.. ugh - The betas I saw (my roomate is a tester) slowed his machine down significantly.
SVCD's are 480x480 in resolution (yes, that is a square - the DVD player stretches the picture out to get the proper 4:3 aspect ratio).
The standard maximum bitrate for an SVCD is 2,520 kb/sec, but sometime you can get away with more. (depends on the player).
I know with software players (PowerDVD, etc) and having the files on your hard drive, you can exceed that, but you're violating all of the standards to do it.
Contrast that with a DVD, who's resolution is 720x480, with a maximum bitrate of 9,000kb/sec that INCLUDES the audio stream as well.
So basically you're cutting the horizontal resolution of your picture in half, then saying you have a quarter of the bandwidth available to compress it with.
It's true that SVCD's are very useful - especially for anime and the like (since it compresses so well).
SVCD's are indeed compressed using MPEG2, that's about the only thing you got right.:)
Checkout http://www.vcdhelp.com - That should teach you some things you didn't already know.
I once thought of an idea, but I don't have the resources to develop it.
It's kinda like a quota, but not quite..
The idea is that everyone has a bucket of "points", each point in your bucket represents a message that you can send.
Once your bucket is empty, the rest of your messages are bounced/queued/or something else.
The key here - is when someone writes YOU a message, even if it's completely unrelated.. it GIVES you a point in your bucket.
The end result being spammers can't get their messages through, yet normal business can function (where people dialog back and forth, etc).. It would also work for listservs, if engineered properly. As the list would have its point bucket builtup by all of the posters.
This would all be enforced on the MDA side of the equation. Meaning YOUR ISP wouldn't deliver the message to you, unless it could communicate (out-of-bands probably) with the sender's ISP and confirm they have points left.
Anyone have any information about this, or whether this could actually fly? It makes perfect sense to me, at a very high-level. Now all that has to be done is figure out implementation details (a little more complex).
I got into the habit of answering my phone "This is Joel".. Don't ask me why, but I have.. Anyway - I NEVER, EVER have had to talk to a telemarketer, when they were using a predictive dialer.
I'm guessing it's because the system isn't hearing the "Hello", and is just passively listening for it.. That's when I hang up.:)
- Joel
Slashdot Mirror
Click here to hear a WAV file of the tone.
You can go here for the real TeleZapper website, which is a device that detects when you answer your phone, and plays the tone basically as you're saying "hello".
Asterisk has this sound built-in, so you can trigger it in your dialplan wherever you need.
Wikipedia has great information on the Special Information Tone, and other call progress tones that you probably just take for granted.
No no - It's German.. It means "The Bart! The!"
[Paraphrase of Sideshow Bob]
I can respond to this authoritatively.
7 bb6ce0bde286d88256d6a00452701/71b757789120db828025 701500716e86?OpenDocument&prod=Symantec%20Ghost%20 Solution%20Suite&ver=1.0&src=ent&pcode=sym_ghost_s uite&dtype=corp&svy=&prev=&miniver=sym_ghost_suite _1
c id/2001031312251025?Open&src=ent&docid=20010322102 94225&nsf=ghost.nsf&view=d87bb6ce0bde286d88256d6a0 0452701&dtype=corp&prod=Symantec%20Ghost%20Solutio n%20Suite&ver=1.0&osv=&osv_lvl=&seg=
According to Symantec, you require a license for every computer DEPLOYED with Ghost, regardless of how it happens. (through the console, ghost/multicast, an image from a hard drive, or a drive-to-drive transfer)
I LOVE ghost, and I've been using it since v3.xx (when it was owned by a company named Binary Research) for doing harddrive upgrades. I really wish Symantec would pull their head out of their *** and sell me some sort of "technician license", where for $900 I can use it on as many computers as I want - because I can't afford to have a $25 license disappear everytime I use it on a client's machine in the shop!
Here are some sources you can read to confirm what I'm saying:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/d8
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/do
(Note at the bottom of this particular page:)
Note: You are allowed to install the Ghost console numerous times, however, you must keep track of the total number of licenses used. This includes all clients managed by any console of a given version, plus all copies made with boot disks.
Or Sneaker-Net.. That was always my favorite. :)
NEW YORK - A former America Online software engineer was sentenced yesterday to a year and three months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages.
"I know I've done something very wrong," a soft-spoken and teary Jason Smathers told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein.
The judge credited the 25-year-old former Harpers Ferry, W.Va., resident for his contrition and efforts to help the government before he pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. A plea deal had called for a sentence of at least 1 1/2 years in prison.
In a letter from Smathers to the court, part of which was read into the record by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Siegal, Smathers tried to explain the crimes that AOL has said cost the company at least $300,000 and possibly millions of dollars.
"Cyberspace is a new and strange place," Siegal said Smathers wrote. "I was good at navigating in that frontier, and I became an outlaw."
As the judge indicated he would be lenient toward Smathers, Siegal told Hellerstein that the public needs to learn from the case that the "Internet is not lawless. The public at large has an interest in making sure people respect the same values that apply in everyday life, on the Internet."
The judge said in imposing the reduced sentence that he recognized that Smathers cooperated fully with the government but did not have the kind of information that would have helped to build other criminal cases.
First plea rejected
He said leniency was appropriate for "someone who tries hard to bare his soul but doesn't have the information the government needs."
In December, Hellerstein rejected the first attempt by Smathers to plead guilty, saying he was not convinced Smathers actually had committed a crime. The judge accepted the plea in February, saying prosecutors had sufficiently explained why he had.
Smathers has admitted that he accepted $28,000 from someone who wanted to pitch an offshore gambling site to AOL customers, knowing that the list of screen names might make its way to others who would send e-mail solicitations.
The judge has recommended $84,000 restitution, triple what Smathers earned. The imposition of restitution was delayed to give AOL a chance to prove that the damages were much greater, after the judge suggested the $300,000 damage figure was subjective.
Prosecutors said Smathers had engaged in the interstate transportation of stolen property and had violated a new federal CAN-SPAM law, short for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, which is meant to diminish unsolicited e-mail about everything from Viagra to mortgages.
In December, the judge said he had dropped his own AOL membership because he received too much spam.
America Online Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., has since launched a major assault on spam, significantly reducing unsolicited e-mail.
Smathers was fired by AOL in June. Authorities said he used another employee's access code to steal the list of AOL customers in 2003 from its headquarters in Dulles, Va.
Still circulating
Smathers allegedly sold the list to Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas, who used it to send unwanted gambling advertisements to subscribers of AOL, the world's largest Internet provider. Charges are pending against Dunaway.
The stolen list of 92 million AOL addresses included multiple addresses used by each of AOL's estimated 30 million customers. It is believed to be still circulating among spammers.
The judge refused a Probation Department recommendation that Smathers be banned from his profession, saying he trusted Smathers had learned his lesson.
hmm.. Could this be the "history" tab you're referring to? Then you can diff it against any of the older edits (with their timestamps to tell how old they are)... then you get your color code you asked for.
Or am I misunderstanding, and you want something else?
- Joel
Generally speaking, not getting media is a choice you make when ordering the machine (at least in the case of Dell). I know some companies don't offer you the choice, and maybe that's one of the OTHER reasons to never buy from Dell as a "Home" customer..
Sometimes it doesn't even save you money on your machine, but we all know it increases their margins a little bit - which adds up.
I do happen to do professional tech work, and since I also run into the "what package of documentation and CDs?" problem - I just keep copies of the OEM CDs, as well as the retail versions.. Everytime I see a new slipstreamed version come through, it gets imaged..
That way - I can use my loaner media, and their CD key (which is supposed to be attached to the machine).. There is nothing illegal about doing that, since they obviously have a license to be running it.
- Joel
Better late than never.. From the discussion thread, he just re-posted his pictures and the build log in PDF format. - Joel
AD will never come close to being as cool as NDS. OU's aren't real OU's, you can't have people with the same names in different parts of the tree (represented by different offices, locations, countries, etc). It all comes down to the UPN (user principal name), which doesn't even care about how your tree is setup, thus making all of your OU's just eye candy! Again, the "features" are already present, and the functionality in alot of products is much more mature. * IAAMCSE, but I love NetWare, Linux and *BSD *
As other posters have already pointed out, a tiered approach to commercial software is very common.
:)
I will expand on this by saying that it's NOT just commercial software you find this in.
You buy a Dell, or a Compaq server. In order to activate the onboard RAID controller, you plug in a "key". Don't fool yourself by thinking that this key has any of the processor built into it.
They put the entire guts of the RAID card (maybe except for the cache DIMM) on the main board, because then they benefit from the quanitities that these boards are being manufactured in.
However, ONLY customers who want to make use of the RAID features will get it. And you're going to pay a hefty price for a small piece of silicon that unlocks that functionality.
It is in this way that they are still spreading the cost of R&D for the RAID controller to all of their customers, but the users of the RAID card are the ones that really pay for it.
Another example that I have personal experience with.
Avaya makes a voicemail unit called the Merlin Messaging. This unit is capable of providing voicemail/auto-attendant services on up to 12 ports simultaneously, but in order to "activate" those ports - you have to plug in a "port license card", this is nothing more than a propriatary PCMCIA flash card that tells the voicemail 'OK, bring up 6 ports'.
That damn card costs more than the voicemail unit itself, but without it - you've got a very expensive paperweight.. and when you want to upgrade you port count, you just buy a bigger license card, and change some programming on the phone system.
Again - those cards are identical except for their labeling sticker, and whatever is ON the card.. but they're mass-producing a product, and the costs go down per unit when you do that.
Just my two cents. I think it's great when you realize just HOW easy these systems are to haxx0r, and I'd love it if someone who show me how to fabricate my own VM license cards, but I don't think that'll happen anytime soon.
- Joel
This is fabulous! The amount of people that got together to put something like this together is just amazing.
:)
Forget about the amateurish acting, the X-files style lighting (not a feature in my mind), the fact that everything was obviously done in front of a green-screen, and the cinematography/camera settings made it look more like a soap opera than a motion picture shot on celluloid (use filters/plugins to achieve that).
This was awesome.. I watched it all the way through, and that includes the credits. I plan on sending the URL to several people I know in the indy film industry, once the interest dies down a little that is.
- Joel
ahem! dude - If that were the case, my accounts receivable would be substantially smaller than it is now. :)
The idea is to have a stable network where people don't call you - and bill them for a service agreement, so you get paid whether something breaks or not.
- Joel
I do use that phrase, but when I say that, I literally mean to search the GOOGLE site.
I don't think I would ever say "go google for french midget porn", then use Yahoo or something.. yuck!
I think that in that context, it's truly become part of the vernacular, but you're not using the term in a generic sense.
- Joel
Have any of you guys SEEN WinXP SP2? It's going to have alot of this crap embedded in it.. Anti-virus, a ZoneAlarm style firewall.. There may even be some Popup stuff for IE included.. ugh - The betas I saw (my roomate is a tester) slowed his machine down significantly.
SVCD's are 480x480 in resolution (yes, that is a square - the DVD player stretches the picture out to get the proper 4:3 aspect ratio).
:)
The standard maximum bitrate for an SVCD is 2,520 kb/sec, but sometime you can get away with more. (depends on the player).
I know with software players (PowerDVD, etc) and having the files on your hard drive, you can exceed that, but you're violating all of the standards to do it.
Contrast that with a DVD, who's resolution is 720x480, with a maximum bitrate of 9,000kb/sec that INCLUDES the audio stream as well.
So basically you're cutting the horizontal resolution of your picture in half, then saying you have a quarter of the bandwidth available to compress it with.
It's true that SVCD's are very useful - especially for anime and the like (since it compresses so well).
SVCD's are indeed compressed using MPEG2, that's about the only thing you got right.
Checkout http://www.vcdhelp.com - That should teach you some things you didn't already know.
- Joel
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/37021.stm
For anyone that is interested in taking a look..
wee! Replying to my own post! :)
This URL appears to have been long-since changed. It seems like the BBC changed the way their entire site works..
Anyone else pull up what the poster mentioned?
Choosy Perverts choose GIF.
(Taken from a FidoNet tagline.. God I miss those days. :)
- Joel
And I don't mean your signature either, which is bastardized cursive, yes, but it doesn't have to be.
IRS Tax Forms, Master Business Applications, Job applications.. They all say "Please print legibly"
I can't even remember how to write in cursive.. Hell, I can't write my name is cursive in a "nice way", I just know how I sign my signature.
My two cents..
- Joel
How many astronomers does it take to take a digital picture of the sky? ......
It's kinda like a quota, but not quite..
The idea is that everyone has a bucket of "points", each point in your bucket represents a message that you can send.
Once your bucket is empty, the rest of your messages are bounced/queued/or something else.
The key here - is when someone writes YOU a message, even if it's completely unrelated.. it GIVES you a point in your bucket.
The end result being spammers can't get their messages through, yet normal business can function (where people dialog back and forth, etc).. It would also work for listservs, if engineered properly. As the list would have its point bucket builtup by all of the posters.
This would all be enforced on the MDA side of the equation. Meaning YOUR ISP wouldn't deliver the message to you, unless it could communicate (out-of-bands probably) with the sender's ISP and confirm they have points left.
Anyone have any information about this, or whether this could actually fly? It makes perfect sense to me, at a very high-level. Now all that has to be done is figure out implementation details (a little more complex).
- Joel
I got into the habit of answering my phone "This is Joel".. Don't ask me why, but I have.. Anyway - I NEVER, EVER have had to talk to a telemarketer, when they were using a predictive dialer. I'm guessing it's because the system isn't hearing the "Hello", and is just passively listening for it.. That's when I hang up. :)
- Joel