She's had a laptop for years. Not a single problem in all that time. Of course, that's because she doesn't turn it on (because it's not set up, yet), or let anyone touch it (they might break it!).
I suppose I should be grateful. Doing family tech support from San Francisco to Budapest would not be fun.
I've been wanting to install Linux on my mom's machine for years. I'll do it eventually. She just has to get a virus one more time and I'll follow through with my threat.
I live 400 miles from my mother. I have tried to help dear mom on numerous occassions over the phone - which is similar to slamming yourself in the head with a large brick.
Once she came up for a visit and brought her computer along for me to fix it. It was so badly screwed up from several viruses that I just formatted and reinstalled windows.
Another time she paid my expenses to come down and fix her system. It was horribly infected with spyware via our friends at Kazaa. There were other fun things on it, too. Fortunately, formatting wasn't necessary this time.
While I was there I removed Microsoft Lookout and installed Pegasus. I also removed Internet Exploder and installed a Mozilla browser. I warned her, if she got another virus infection from using Outlook or IE (meaning she had reinstalled them), I would remove windows, install Linux, and lock down the box so she couldn't mess it up again.
BTW, you can learn a lot about your family when going through their computers. My nephew used my mom's computer a lot. Seems he was very into Asian lesbian porn (which was probably the source of many of the spyware items I found). The look on his face when I asked about it was priceless, especially since I asked him in front of his girlfriend. Yeah, I can be a real bastard, but I bet he doesn't surf for porn on his grandmother's computer anymore!
As for those wonderful forwards from family. I fixed that problem a long time ago. Since I run my own email server, I have it configured to block anything with "fwd: fwd:" in the subject. Family never bothers to clean up the subject, so the typical crap from them is "fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: Email tax proposed!!!!!" They get a bounce message, "Multigenerational forwards rejected by the mail server.", which I am sure they don't understand. That's a good thing because it means they won't try to resend it.
Not a chance. I refuse to give Microsoft any more of my money. Besides, I'm trying to use this project as a way to show that open source is fully capable of doing the job.
Someone would have a popular package if they wrote a nice open source replacement for MS Access's forms and reports. Despite being a rather shitty sql program, MS Access has a very nice implementation of forms and reports.
I've already been fooling around with myodbc. There seems to be a bug in it wherein you must give superuser access to the connection if you want to make changes to the database (not good). I'm still fooling with it so I haven't verified it isn't a mistake on my part.
I just downloaded MySql-Front and will play around with it. Thanks for the info.
I considered a web interface output for the reports, but rejected the idea because printing is far more important than viewing with a monitor and getting exacting printouts via a browser is a pain in the ass.
Worse case, I can always use Crystal Reports. But I would feel so dirty if I used Visual Basic to tie it all together!
I'm looking into Report Manager from Borland. It might do the job, though so far I'm not very impressed with the interface (a bit of a pain to use).
I'm investigating what is required to replace MS Access. Yes, some company made the mistake of basing their important information on that piece of crap.
I plan to use MySQL (probably 4.x) for the back-end. For the front-end, I might use OpenOffice. It seems to handle forms ok. Hopefully, I can figure out how to produce a decent report system in OpenOffice (you'd think that would already be built in).
I've tried to find an open source form/report system, but nothing I could find seemed adequate for the job. Commercial packages were always way too expensive (thousands of dollars).
The pkers, dupers, bots, and excesive lag drove us off of battle.net. Blizzard's refusal to aggressively go after the cheaters was bad enough, but when they accussed the bnetd crowd of piracy, they lost me as a customer. I own two copies of the original Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, a few expansion modules, and Diablo 2 and D2X. I didn't even consider their newest game. They won't get another dime from me. They lost a loyal customer.
Yes, we have our own bnetd realm. No, we do not pirate. Every single person on the realm owns the damn game. Blizzard has no right to tell us we can't play it the way we damn well want. We have realm rules, break them and get booted forever. We've only needed to boot two people so far (one for using cheats, the other for being an annoying asshole).
Blizzard says we are pirates because we don't validate the CD serial number. Well, we can't. Blizzard won't tell us how to do that and won't set up some kind of validation server for us to go through. The bnetd development crowd has offered to work with Blizzard. Blizzard refuses to cooperate.
The people running the diabloii.net (and diabloii chat room) are just as bad. They are so busy kissing the Blizzard ass that they alienated their biggest supporters by banning any and all discussion of bnetd.
So what? The Berne Convention may well be contrary to the Constitution, and according to the Supreme Court...
Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957). The Court ruled:...no agreement with a foreign nation can confer on Congress or any other branch of the Government power which is free from the restraints of the Constitution.
And in case you didn't know, the Constitution is not a small formality.
There is no chance in hell I would own of these. There's just too many things that can go wrong. One example, how does the biometric portion work? Is it instant or do you grab the gun and wait 10 seconds while it validates you? By which time you have been killed by the intruder.
Ok, thanks for the clarification. The quote I had attributed it to the wrong person. I'll make a note of it. Privateers of the 16tth century (but not pirates) are a bit of a hobby with me, so this was a bit outside of my expertise.
"Millions for defence. Not one damned penny for tribute."
I'm pretty sure it was President Andrew Jackson made this statement. Other than that, you pretty well cover the Barbary pirates situation, though you failed to mention that several European countries could have easily dealt with the problem, but refused to do so due to politics - much to the anger of many British naval officers who didn't like to see British sailors in slavery.
But I'm off-topic and will probably be moderated as such (and I deserve it).
I think there is only one way to guarantee DSL competition. Forbid the local phone company from offering it bu require them to lease the lines at a reasonable profit. Turn them into a basic commodity. Anyone, with enough investment, can become a DSL provider on an equal footing with everyone else. What will differentiate them is quality of service, how reasonable is their AUP, price, and speed.
What I want: decent speed with no usage limits (speed is what will limit me), an AUP that allows me to run a server, and no ports blocked. Oh, and at a price I can afford.
I don't care who I get this from, as long as they will be in business for a while (I've been considering cyberonic.com, but I can't believe they can do what they promise at that speed for such a low price and stay in business).
Let's look at the facts: a UN peacekeeping mission, the camp was being protected by mostly Canadian troops. The UN refuses to allow the Canadian troops to use lethal force. How did this become the United States fault?
Oh, right. You're an anonymous coward. It's always the fault of the US.
With the UN in charge, if someone broke the rules the UN would say, "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!', again".
The UN has proven on numerous occassions that they are nothing but pencil pushing bureaucrates who, at best, do nothing, but all too often simply make the situation worse.
Look at Rwanda. Given the job of protecting 100,000 unarmed refugees, the UN security force DID NOTHING when a warlord's army arrived and proceeded to slaughter every man, woman, and child.
So now someone wants to give the UN the job of reducing space junk? No thank you, I'd rather take my chances with out their help.
Your clarifcations are good points. However, exemption #5 was specifically revoked a number of years ago. There is no longer a salary base for overtime exemption.
Keep in mind, "professional" and "skilled" are seperate categories. The former requires a license (as I stated), the latter USED to be exempt at a certain salary. It doesn't matter if you make $100/hour. If the law does not require a license, you deserve overtime pay (excluding other possible exemptions).
BTW, I hope you received overtime pay in your management position since you obviously were not a true manager. The law was crafted in such a way to prevent companies from giving everyone a manager title to avoid paying overtime.
Under California law, there are only two exemptions to paying overtime:
1. You are a manager of at least two people. or 2. You are required, by law, to have a license to work in your profession (e.g. doctor or lawyer). A MSCE does not count since it is not a legal requirement.
There are NO other exemptions. How much you make has nothing to do with whether you get paid overtime or not. That particular exemption was revoked years ago. The employee can receive compensated time off (at time and a half) when working overtime, but there are limits to how much.
Ditto. My unemployment benefits are gone. Nobody is hiring. I'm 43 and can't easily retrain (especially since I have no money to pay for retraining).
California is already one of the highest taxed states in the country. We have sales tax, income tax, employment taxes, and anything else you can think of. We also have idiots like Davis and his cronies sucking money into their personal black holes.
Special note to Governor Davis:
Here's a simple lesson in economics. When there is less money to go around, you must spend less! Even my 12 year old daughter can understand this basic concept. Stop trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of me, I don't have any. Stop driving business out of the state and you might be able to collect some income taxes from a few hundred thousand currently unemployed tech workers. Then you can piss it away with more of your pork-barrel projects that you use to pay off your political pals, you criminal piece of shit.
According to an attorney I knew, who specialized in employment laws, random drug tests are not legal in the state of California (there are some exceptions). This, of course, means nothing in other states.
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She's had a laptop for years. Not a single problem in all that time. Of course, that's because she doesn't turn it on (because it's not set up, yet), or let anyone touch it (they might break it!).
I suppose I should be grateful. Doing family tech support from San Francisco to Budapest would not be fun.
I'd just like to mention that I hate you.
I've been wanting to install Linux on my mom's machine for years. I'll do it eventually. She just has to get a virus one more time and I'll follow through with my threat.
I live 400 miles from my mother. I have tried to help dear mom on numerous occassions over the phone - which is similar to slamming yourself in the head with a large brick.
Once she came up for a visit and brought her computer along for me to fix it. It was so badly screwed up from several viruses that I just formatted and reinstalled windows.
Another time she paid my expenses to come down and fix her system. It was horribly infected with spyware via our friends at Kazaa. There were other fun things on it, too. Fortunately, formatting wasn't necessary this time.
While I was there I removed Microsoft Lookout and installed Pegasus. I also removed Internet Exploder and installed a Mozilla browser. I warned her, if she got another virus infection from using Outlook or IE (meaning she had reinstalled them), I would remove windows, install Linux, and lock down the box so she couldn't mess it up again.
BTW, you can learn a lot about your family when going through their computers. My nephew used my mom's computer a lot. Seems he was very into Asian lesbian porn (which was probably the source of many of the spyware items I found). The look on his face when I asked about it was priceless, especially since I asked him in front of his girlfriend. Yeah, I can be a real bastard, but I bet he doesn't surf for porn on his grandmother's computer anymore!
As for those wonderful forwards from family. I fixed that problem a long time ago. Since I run my own email server, I have it configured to block anything with "fwd: fwd:" in the subject. Family never bothers to clean up the subject, so the typical crap from them is "fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: Email tax proposed!!!!!" They get a bounce message, "Multigenerational forwards rejected by the mail server.", which I am sure they don't understand. That's a good thing because it means they won't try to resend it.
Not a chance. I refuse to give Microsoft any more of my money. Besides, I'm trying to use this project as a way to show that open source is fully capable of doing the job.
Someone would have a popular package if they wrote a nice open source replacement for MS Access's forms and reports. Despite being a rather shitty sql program, MS Access has a very nice implementation of forms and reports.
I've already been fooling around with myodbc. There seems to be a bug in it wherein you must give superuser access to the connection if you want to make changes to the database (not good). I'm still fooling with it so I haven't verified it isn't a mistake on my part.
I just downloaded MySql-Front and will play around with it. Thanks for the info.
I considered a web interface output for the reports, but rejected the idea because printing is far more important than viewing with a monitor and getting exacting printouts via a browser is a pain in the ass.
Worse case, I can always use Crystal Reports. But I would feel so dirty if I used Visual Basic to tie it all together!
I'm looking into Report Manager from Borland. It might do the job, though so far I'm not very impressed with the interface (a bit of a pain to use).
I'm investigating what is required to replace MS Access. Yes, some company made the mistake of basing their important information on that piece of crap.
I plan to use MySQL (probably 4.x) for the back-end. For the front-end, I might use OpenOffice. It seems to handle forms ok. Hopefully, I can figure out how to produce a decent report system in OpenOffice (you'd think that would already be built in).
I've tried to find an open source form/report system, but nothing I could find seemed adequate for the job. Commercial packages were always way too expensive (thousands of dollars).
Any suggestions?
The pkers, dupers, bots, and excesive lag drove us off of battle.net. Blizzard's refusal to aggressively go after the cheaters was bad enough, but when they accussed the bnetd crowd of piracy, they lost me as a customer. I own two copies of the original Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, a few expansion modules, and Diablo 2 and D2X. I didn't even consider their newest game. They won't get another dime from me. They lost a loyal customer.
Yes, we have our own bnetd realm. No, we do not pirate. Every single person on the realm owns the damn game. Blizzard has no right to tell us we can't play it the way we damn well want. We have realm rules, break them and get booted forever. We've only needed to boot two people so far (one for using cheats, the other for being an annoying asshole).
Blizzard says we are pirates because we don't validate the CD serial number. Well, we can't. Blizzard won't tell us how to do that and won't set up some kind of validation server for us to go through. The bnetd development crowd has offered to work with Blizzard. Blizzard refuses to cooperate.
The people running the diabloii.net (and diabloii chat room) are just as bad. They are so busy kissing the Blizzard ass that they alienated their biggest supporters by banning any and all discussion of bnetd.
This is the basis for the "forever minus a day" copyright currently in effect.
And in case you didn't know, the Constitution is not a small formality.
There is no chance in hell I would own of these. There's just too many things that can go wrong. One example, how does the biometric portion work? Is it instant or do you grab the gun and wait 10 seconds while it validates you? By which time you have been killed by the intruder.
Ok, thanks for the clarification. The quote I had attributed it to the wrong person. I'll make a note of it. Privateers of the 16tth century (but not pirates) are a bit of a hobby with me, so this was a bit outside of my expertise.
I'm pretty sure it was President Andrew Jackson made this statement. Other than that, you pretty well cover the Barbary pirates situation, though you failed to mention that several European countries could have easily dealt with the problem, but refused to do so due to politics - much to the anger of many British naval officers who didn't like to see British sailors in slavery.
But I'm off-topic and will probably be moderated as such (and I deserve it).
I think there is only one way to guarantee DSL competition. Forbid the local phone company from offering it bu require them to lease the lines at a reasonable profit. Turn them into a basic commodity. Anyone, with enough investment, can become a DSL provider on an equal footing with everyone else. What will differentiate them is quality of service, how reasonable is their AUP, price, and speed.
What I want: decent speed with no usage limits (speed is what will limit me), an AUP that allows me to run a server, and no ports blocked. Oh, and at a price I can afford.
I don't care who I get this from, as long as they will be in business for a while (I've been considering cyberonic.com, but I can't believe they can do what they promise at that speed for such a low price and stay in business).
Let's look at the facts: a UN peacekeeping mission, the camp was being protected by mostly Canadian troops. The UN refuses to allow the Canadian troops to use lethal force. How did this become the United States fault?
Oh, right. You're an anonymous coward. It's always the fault of the US.
With the UN in charge, if someone broke the rules the UN would say, "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!', again".
The UN has proven on numerous occassions that they are nothing but pencil pushing bureaucrates who, at best, do nothing, but all too often simply make the situation worse.
Look at Rwanda. Given the job of protecting 100,000 unarmed refugees, the UN security force DID NOTHING when a warlord's army arrived and proceeded to slaughter every man, woman, and child.
So now someone wants to give the UN the job of reducing space junk? No thank you, I'd rather take my chances with out their help.
NCal computers at http://www.ncalcomputers.com/ can put together a laptop to order. They speak Linux.
Drugs. Lots of drugs.
Q: What's the different between a used car salesman and a computer salesman?
A: The used car salesman knows when he is lying.
Your clarifcations are good points. However, exemption #5 was specifically revoked a number of years ago. There is no longer a salary base for overtime exemption.
Keep in mind, "professional" and "skilled" are seperate categories. The former requires a license (as I stated), the latter USED to be exempt at a certain salary. It doesn't matter if you make $100/hour. If the law does not require a license, you deserve overtime pay (excluding other possible exemptions).
BTW, I hope you received overtime pay in your management position since you obviously were not a true manager. The law was crafted in such a way to prevent companies from giving everyone a manager title to avoid paying overtime.
Under California law, there are only two exemptions to paying overtime:
1. You are a manager of at least two people.
or
2. You are required, by law, to have a license to work in your profession (e.g. doctor or lawyer). A MSCE does not count since it is not a legal requirement.
There are NO other exemptions. How much you make has nothing to do with whether you get paid overtime or not. That particular exemption was revoked years ago. The employee can receive compensated time off (at time and a half) when working overtime, but there are limits to how much.
Oh, and IANAL.
Ditto. My unemployment benefits are gone. Nobody is hiring. I'm 43 and can't easily retrain (especially since I have no money to pay for retraining).
California is already one of the highest taxed states in the country. We have sales tax, income tax, employment taxes, and anything else you can think of. We also have idiots like Davis and his cronies sucking money into their personal black holes.
Special note to Governor Davis:
Here's a simple lesson in economics. When there is less money to go around, you must spend less! Even my 12 year old daughter can understand this basic concept. Stop trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of me, I don't have any. Stop driving business out of the state and you might be able to collect some income taxes from a few hundred thousand currently unemployed tech workers. Then you can piss it away with more of your pork-barrel projects that you use to pay off your political pals, you criminal piece of shit.
I want a do not spam here in California, but not one with a loophole for politicians an charities.
Hell, I don't even like most of the elected talking heads here, anyway.
Drug testing (one time, so far, not random)
According to an attorney I knew, who specialized in employment laws, random drug tests are not legal in the state of California (there are some exceptions). This, of course, means nothing in other states.
Dublin, California, USA == my.home
And yes, those put those damn shamrocks on all the street signs.
Easy to say when you don't have a wife and daughter who rely on you.
My principles will have to take a backseat to their well-being.