I was in california and could not find a tech job to save my life, so I moved to colorado. Same deal there. An offer from a family friend to move out to a small town in Arkansas turned out to be the best thing ever. There was a major shortage of knowledgable people here and finding work didn't take very long. My first job only paid $12/hr but consider that I also rented a 3 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood close to shopping and schools for $550 a month and gas was a good 50 cents cheaper than california. I did my job, met people, tried my best to get known as a great tech and I now have a great job as a System Admin that I love to death. The cities are full of people looking for your kind of work. Get out of there and go somewhere that needs people that know the things that you do. Of course, you won't find any software companies in small towns but you will find TONS of businesses that have to use computers and networks to get their jobs done, and all those people need someone to work on their computers. Most small towns have a few computer repair businesses that take care of the businesses but the days of walking in and fixing a computer quickly are over. It takes time to get to know someones network and software and you can't do a good job if you're charging an hourly rate like the small computer support businesses do. These areas are perfect for convincing a business that they will save money and get better service if they hire you as their admin. Show them all the things that need to be done on a daily basis like following security advisories, updating computers, checking security, etc. The company I work for pays me quite well and they said their past 3rd party support cost them 3 times as much as I do, and more gets done quicker. Before they would have to wait to get something fixed, sometimes up to 3 days. Now things get fixed immediately and revenues are up because of it.
Well you know, MS took out the ability to crash planes into buildings in Flight Simulator. Everyone says kids copy games in real life, but MS is making sure kids can't copy real life in games.
No, just make sure you make some changes to the pic before applying stenography. Change the size, color depth, tone/hue, whatever, and you'll give it a new MD5 before sticking your message in there. This way comparing to the original gives you an MD5 that's useless.
You don't "buy" software. You purchase a license to use it. Before you are even allowed to install the software you have to agree to their terms. If you don't agree then you take the product back. It's a huge misconception that handing over money means total ownership of something. Saying you own the software you paid for is like saying you own the car you're renting.
The reason people were entombed upon death and the door opened 3 days later was because sometimes people would go into a coma which resembles death. Without the monitoring technology we have now there was no way to tell if someone really was dead. After 3 days you knew if the person really was dead or not because of decomposition. Now this doesn't say anything about whether jesus was resurrected or not, but its just the reason why 3 days in the tomb was significant. The tombs were not permanent burial sites, but temporary ones so a tomb would never become a shrine no matter what happened.
After clicking several links on different counterstrike sites (including the official ones), I finally found the system requirements on the Amazon.com page. Just in case anyone else is looking for them....
Windows 2000/NT/XP Pentium III 500 MHz processor 96 MB RAM 16 MB Video Card 500 MB HD Space
When you have slightly older equipment, this info is important before shelling out $$$.
When people say vinyl has better quality than cd's, they are speaking strictly about quality, not performance. For an extreme example, humans can hear up to around 22kHz. A 22kHz sine wave converted to 44kHz digital then back to 22kHz sine wave becomes horribly distorted. The distortion becomes less as the frequencies drop. People who say they can hear the difference are primarily speaking about analog music, like classical. I personally have heard the difference between a perfect quality vinyl and a cd in some classical music. With music thats digitally created and never really becomes analog you most likely won't be able to hear any difference at all. This difference in quality also was much more apparent when cd's first came out since AD/DA converters were not the quality they are now. If you can find a perfect vinyl record of classical music, a high end turntable, high quality amp and speakers and compare it to one of the first cd players that ever came out playing the same music, you could hear the difference quite easily. Performance comes into play when you start talking about scratched records and cd's. Cd's hold on to their quality much better than vinyl.
When the cd format was first being worked on, one of the rules was that Beethoven's 9th had to fit on a single disc since it was 74 minutes long. The engineers found that for a disc to hold beethoven's 9th and have the quality of vinyl, it had to be sampled at 16 bit and was 12cm in diameter. This was too big to make portable cd players realistic so its size and sampling rate were decreased, resulting in lesser quality than vinyl. (http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/cd/cd_length_ske ptical.html)
Please, lets all try to understand whats going on before donning the tinfoil hats. (And this is for all the posts trying to equate this story with MPAA/Copyright/MP3's/Big Brother). Nobody is looking at your data. Comcast and the other ISP's blocking infected machines can tell by traffic patterns or by what ports your computer tries to connect to, that you're infected. As soon as a computer connects to the net, there are very predictable traffic patterns that happen and its very VERY easy to tell if a computer is infected by what could be called a traffic fingerprint without snooping a single piece of actual data. Of course, (don tinfoil hats now) Comcast or any isp can look at any piece of data they want if it's traveling through the network *they own* if they believe its gumming up the works, say to see if all 3,348,823 outgoing connections from your computer are emails being fired off from 12,498 variants of the viruses out that are happily running on your pc.
Most local libraries do lend movies. The selection is not the same as blockbuster or other stores. Libraries carry lots of titles that you'll never find in video rental stores, like documentaries, independant movies, and so on. I've seen casettes, cd's, and movies for lend in libraries.
I know, its awful that people quote horrible numbers like 10%. I've been shopping for a server and windows server software has sometimes come to 300% of the cost of the computer. Gee I sure wish people wouldn't quote such wrong numbers! Also, improvement is not the same as innovation. With win3.1, connecting a printer took a bit of work and required knowledge of what was going on. In XP, its pretty much automatic. Nothing changed except how much work you have to do. That is improvement, but nowhere near innovation. Innovation would be creating something new that has never been seen or done before. When XP makes me breakfast in the morning and walks my dog I'll call it innovative. I mean seriously, what about windows (or any O/S) for that matter is truely innovative? The past 10 years has seen them become easier to use, and they have improved, but I'd be very careful saying much innovation has happened.
Not to throw fuel on the fire or anything, but there are actually a large number of successful execs who cannot spell very well. You just need a secretary to proofread and correct memos and email. Memos and email with lots of mistakes can possibly be ones that the writer didn't want anyone else to see, including their secretary. I'm not saying that this happened here, but just mentioning a possibility, since with so few facts possibilities is all we have.
George Carlin once said: "If you stick two things together that have never been stuck together before, some schmuck will buy it" I think there are plenty of schmucks out there willing to buy anything, even if it doesn't exist.
I've been learning BSD for a couple weeks now. I've used windows for years. I have to agree with dcam because the HUGEST source of frustration is manuals and help documents doing the following:
1) The examples don't match what you see on your screen. Like - "run the script in/usr/local/sbin/someprogram" and you try to cd/usr/local/sbin/someprogram to find it doesn't exist there, but its actually in/usr/local/bin or some other obscure place.
2) The help documentation and examples explain things in a way that assumes you already know all about what the example is trying to teach.
3) Skipped steps. I can't count how many times I've seen instructions and examples say something like "Here are the steps you need" and have it not work, only to have a nix geek friend tell you after you bug them to death that there are steps missing.
To people who complain and just say "RTFM", please understand that a rather large percentage of the manuals either really dont help or don't make sense if you don't know what you're doing. The *nix O/S'es really require human interaction to learn if you wan't to get anywhere.
Since printing doesn't work without having to put in a user/pass first, this should tell you that XP doesn't know the user/pass and needs it from you. If you tell XP what it is, all your problems should go away.
Printer sharing isn't hard with XP and 2k/9x *if* you know everything that needs to be set up. If your printer is on XP, the solution is that you have to create a user on the XP machine with a password, and in the 9x/2k machine make sure you log on to microsoft client for networks with the same user/pass as whats on the XP machine, then in XP make sure the printer share permissions includes the 9x/2k user. XP forces you to log on with a user/pass because shared devices/folders don't work without it. 98 was before everyone and their mother were using shared resources and it didn't force you to use user/pass.
After making matching accounts, printer and file sharing will work like a charm. If you cancel the logon window in 9x/2k, it won't work without prompting you for a user/pass.
Before networking XP, make sure every XP machine has an account with the user/pass of all the computers you're going to be connecting and you'll find that everything works smooth as silk. If it doesn't, map a shared drive on each computer to the others (I use c:\temp) and on boot, they will talk and see each other just fine regardless of the order they boot in. The really nice thing about XP is that the share printer dialogs gives you the option to install printer drivers for 9x/2k so when you set up the printer on 9x/2k, you don't have to install anything.
The shape of the F-117 was caused by limitations in computing power. Computers were not fast enough to create a curved shape and the math of radar reflection was very new, so they had to go with an angled one. The F-117 was designed in 1975 while the B2 started in 1981 after computers were more powerful and "radar math" had advanced significantly. In 1975, the Intel 8080 with 4.8K transistors was new, and in 1981 the 8088 with 29K transistors was new. Huge difference in power back then. Multiple flat panels does keep radar from bouncing back, but when a panel does happen to face the radar, you get a sparkle. The B2 and F-22 are curved because of advances in cpu speeds and because curved shapes reflect less than flat ones. Yes, the angle of the material relative to the direction of radar energy is important, but materials *are* made to absorb radar. The coating itself isn't enough, but the gap between layers acts as a resonator keeping radar from bouncing away as well. When stealth hit its prime, it was found that you could spot stealth aircraft by looking for a "hole" in space. Air reflects a little radar and a stealth aircraft reflected less, so instead of a radar return, you looked for less reflection than you should get. I believe a balance was found so planes would reflect the same amount as the atmosphere, but it's been a couple years since I've researched this.
Radar reflection is caused by the material the radar is hitting, not by its movement. Blades made out of radar absorbing material will be "stealthy" whether they are moving or not. If movement did affect radar signature, then stealth bombers would be visible to radar as they were flying. The only time movement affects radar is with doppler radar, which can only detect objects moving away or toward it, and an approaching helicopter will be more visible than its blades anyway.
I have to agree with buddy here. Do a little math. Locally, pc repair runs $60/hr. The little local computer store sells a new pc (box only) minus hard drive and O/S for $350. Thats 6 hours of labor. Based on these numbers, I give myself 1 hour to find a problem. If I can't find it then its not cost effective to repair it, since repair will take at least 1 hour as well. The 3rd time a computer breaks, we replace it. Reinstalling windows and all applications can take more than 6 hours so whats the point? Might as well spend that time reinstalling on a new box that won't break. PC repair is not cost effective at all for any serious problems, which is why so many small computer repair stores are folding up.
My advice, dont spend ANY money on diagnostics (except for spinrite for hard drives), get a free ram tester (even microsoft has one out), and start teaching people that you don't repair something thats cheaper to replace.
Slightly off topic, but I've done work in vulnerability assesment, forensics, and security testing. The first lesson anyone going in this realm should know is that if you claim that a network is secure and it gets hacked, your credibility goes right into the toilet.
Make sure you stress heavily that the only secure machine is an unplugged machine and all you can do is look for existing security holes, like missed security updates and firmware or poorly set up computers. Make sure your client understands that most security breaches come from a company's own employees. I've worked on projects that found a company's own network was secure, but their ISP had a security hole that allowed us to completely bypass all their security. I've seen post-its on monitors with username/password written on them. One time we had a guy walk into a bank, claim to be a new employee, and get set up on a terminal with an account. I've seen entire IT departments escorted out of a building by security while the Cisco vans pulled up out front to fix a down network because a router was missing a 6 month old firmware update and some skript kiddie took it down. There's nothing like wiping the grin off of a smug IT Admin's face, but it's a scary business if you don't practice a lot of C.Y.A. or try to claim that someone's network is totally secure.
Run a firewall, antivirus, and keep software and firmware updated and you won't have to worry about outside attacks so much. No software can find post-its with account info stuck to a monitor.
Surprised nobody had mentioned this one yet...
www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm
I've been watching its progress for years now and am pretty impressed, although it does take some time to get set up for your own personal tastes. Not for those who want to install and instantly use....
Yeah there are tools that let you wipe your hd, but considering the time it takes to complete a 6X wipe, you'd barely get started between the time they knocked on the door and the time they unplugged your machines. If they did find "illegal" data on your system, you're now guilty of trying to conceal evidence and you can kiss any decent defense goodbye.
A long time ago someone told me they wrapped wire a whole bunch of times around their hard drive and connected it to 120VAC and a switch. If needed, hit the switch and your HD gets de-gaussed. Dunno if this would work anymore since HD's seem to be shielded pretty well. That and I'm sure the tools exist that can reconstruct the data anyway.
I used to get Bantha Tracks, and yes there were a few articles about all 9 stories. I think one of them actually gave a very brief description of each story. I remember this well because as a skinny geek when geeks weren't cool yet, it was one of the few chances I ever had to be cool because I knew what all the stories were going to be about.:o)
I used to work at Radio Shack and did a very informal survey. Every time someone came in to buy a new battery for their cordless phone I asked how they cared for the phone and how long the battery lasted. In general, the more it was left on the charger, the shorter the life span. I broke down phone care into 3 groups:
1) Phone left on charger when not used. Battery lifespan was about 1 to 1 1/2 years.
2) Tried to keep phone on charger but forgot a lot. Lifespan about 2-3 years.
3) Kept phone off charger till the little light came on. Life span was 5 to 8 years.
These are pretty cheap batteries but the responses were pretty consistent. I also talked to people who bought standard rechargable batteries and rechargables for RC planes and cars. They answers and life spans matched pretty well.
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I was in california and could not find a tech job to save my life, so I moved to colorado. Same deal there. An offer from a family friend to move out to a small town in Arkansas turned out to be the best thing ever. There was a major shortage of knowledgable people here and finding work didn't take very long. My first job only paid $12/hr but consider that I also rented a 3 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood close to shopping and schools for $550 a month and gas was a good 50 cents cheaper than california.
I did my job, met people, tried my best to get known as a great tech and I now have a great job as a System Admin that I love to death. The cities are full of people looking for your kind of work. Get out of there and go somewhere that needs people that know the things that you do. Of course, you won't find any software companies in small towns but you will find TONS of businesses that have to use computers and networks to get their jobs done, and all those people need someone to work on their computers.
Most small towns have a few computer repair businesses that take care of the businesses but the days of walking in and fixing a computer quickly are over. It takes time to get to know someones network and software and you can't do a good job if you're charging an hourly rate like the small computer support businesses do. These areas are perfect for convincing a business that they will save money and get better service if they hire you as their admin. Show them all the things that need to be done on a daily basis like following security advisories, updating computers, checking security, etc.
The company I work for pays me quite well and they said their past 3rd party support cost them 3 times as much as I do, and more gets done quicker. Before they would have to wait to get something fixed, sometimes up to 3 days. Now things get fixed immediately and revenues are up because of it.
Well you know, MS took out the ability to crash planes into buildings in Flight Simulator. Everyone says kids copy games in real life, but MS is making sure kids can't copy real life in games.
No, just make sure you make some changes to the pic before applying stenography. Change the size, color depth, tone/hue, whatever, and you'll give it a new MD5 before sticking your message in there. This way comparing to the original gives you an MD5 that's useless.
You don't "buy" software. You purchase a license to use it. Before you are even allowed to install the software you have to agree to their terms. If you don't agree then you take the product back. It's a huge misconception that handing over money means total ownership of something. Saying you own the software you paid for is like saying you own the car you're renting.
Unfortunately its not your data. You get the music by agreeing to the terms. Your choice was to get the music with DRM.
It's rather silly to then jump up and down about how you disagree with DRM when you agreed to it in the first place.
The reason people were entombed upon death and the door opened 3 days later was because sometimes people would go into a coma which resembles death. Without the monitoring technology we have now there was no way to tell if someone really was dead. After 3 days you knew if the person really was dead or not because of decomposition.
Now this doesn't say anything about whether jesus was resurrected or not, but its just the reason why 3 days in the tomb was significant. The tombs were not permanent burial sites, but temporary ones so a tomb would never become a shrine no matter what happened.
It's possible you can play on 98, but its not "officially" supported. I don't have a 98 machine to test with.
After clicking several links on different counterstrike sites (including the official ones), I finally found the system requirements on the Amazon.com page. Just in case anyone else is looking for them....
Windows 2000/NT/XP
Pentium III 500 MHz processor
96 MB RAM
16 MB Video Card
500 MB HD Space
When you have slightly older equipment, this info is important before shelling out $$$.
My bad, I meant 12 *inches*. It was the same size as a vinyl record. This is what happens when an american tries to switch to metric. :o)
When people say vinyl has better quality than cd's, they are speaking strictly about quality, not performance. For an extreme example, humans can hear up to around 22kHz. A 22kHz sine wave converted to 44kHz digital then back to 22kHz sine wave becomes horribly distorted. The distortion becomes less as the frequencies drop.
e ptical.html)
People who say they can hear the difference are primarily speaking about analog music, like classical. I personally have heard the difference between a perfect quality vinyl and a cd in some classical music. With music thats digitally created and never really becomes analog you most likely won't be able to hear any difference at all.
This difference in quality also was much more apparent when cd's first came out since AD/DA converters were not the quality they are now. If you can find a perfect vinyl record of classical music, a high end turntable, high quality amp and speakers and compare it to one of the first cd players that ever came out playing the same music, you could hear the difference quite easily.
Performance comes into play when you start talking about scratched records and cd's. Cd's hold on to their quality much better than vinyl.
When the cd format was first being worked on, one of the rules was that Beethoven's 9th had to fit on a single disc since it was 74 minutes long. The engineers found that for a disc to hold beethoven's 9th and have the quality of vinyl, it had to be sampled at 16 bit and was 12cm in diameter. This was too big to make portable cd players realistic so its size and sampling rate were decreased, resulting in lesser quality than vinyl. (http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/cd/cd_length_sk
Please, lets all try to understand whats going on before donning the tinfoil hats. (And this is for all the posts trying to equate this story with MPAA/Copyright/MP3's/Big Brother).
Nobody is looking at your data. Comcast and the other ISP's blocking infected machines can tell by traffic patterns or by what ports your computer tries to connect to, that you're infected. As soon as a computer connects to the net, there are very predictable traffic patterns that happen and its very VERY easy to tell if a computer is infected by what could be called a traffic fingerprint without snooping a single piece of actual data. Of course, (don tinfoil hats now) Comcast or any isp can look at any piece of data they want if it's traveling through the network *they own* if they believe its gumming up the works, say to see if all 3,348,823 outgoing connections from your computer are emails being fired off from 12,498 variants of the viruses out that are happily running on your pc.
Most local libraries do lend movies. The selection is not the same as blockbuster or other stores. Libraries carry lots of titles that you'll never find in video rental stores, like documentaries, independant movies, and so on. I've seen casettes, cd's, and movies for lend in libraries.
I know, its awful that people quote horrible numbers like 10%. I've been shopping for a server and windows server software has sometimes come to 300% of the cost of the computer. Gee I sure wish people wouldn't quote such wrong numbers!
Also, improvement is not the same as innovation. With win3.1, connecting a printer took a bit of work and required knowledge of what was going on. In XP, its pretty much automatic. Nothing changed except how much work you have to do. That is improvement, but nowhere near innovation. Innovation would be creating something new that has never been seen or done before. When XP makes me breakfast in the morning and walks my dog I'll call it innovative. I mean seriously, what about windows (or any O/S) for that matter is truely innovative? The past 10 years has seen them become easier to use, and they have improved, but I'd be very careful saying much innovation has happened.
Not to throw fuel on the fire or anything, but there are actually a large number of successful execs who cannot spell very well. You just need a secretary to proofread and correct memos and email. Memos and email with lots of mistakes can possibly be ones that the writer didn't want anyone else to see, including their secretary. I'm not saying that this happened here, but just mentioning a possibility, since with so few facts possibilities is all we have.
George Carlin once said: "If you stick two things together that have never been stuck together before, some schmuck will buy it"
I think there are plenty of schmucks out there willing to buy anything, even if it doesn't exist.
I've been learning BSD for a couple weeks now. I've used windows for years. I have to agree with dcam because the HUGEST source of frustration is manuals and help documents doing the following:
/usr/local/sbin/someprogram" and you try to cd /usr/local/sbin/someprogram to find it doesn't exist there, but its actually in /usr/local/bin or some other obscure place.
1) The examples don't match what you see on your screen. Like - "run the script in
2) The help documentation and examples explain things in a way that assumes you already know all about what the example is trying to teach.
3) Skipped steps. I can't count how many times I've seen instructions and examples say something like "Here are the steps you need" and have it not work, only to have a nix geek friend tell you after you bug them to death that there are steps missing.
To people who complain and just say "RTFM", please understand that a rather large percentage of the manuals either really dont help or don't make sense if you don't know what you're doing. The *nix O/S'es really require human interaction to learn if you wan't to get anywhere.
Since printing doesn't work without having to put in a user/pass first, this should tell you that XP doesn't know the user/pass and needs it from you. If you tell XP what it is, all your problems should go away.
Printer sharing isn't hard with XP and 2k/9x *if* you know everything that needs to be set up. If your printer is on XP, the solution is that you have to create a user on the XP machine with a password, and in the 9x/2k machine make sure you log on to microsoft client for networks with the same user/pass as whats on the XP machine, then in XP make sure the printer share permissions includes the 9x/2k user. XP forces you to log on with a user/pass because shared devices/folders don't work without it. 98 was before everyone and their mother were using shared resources and it didn't force you to use user/pass.
After making matching accounts, printer and file sharing will work like a charm. If you cancel the logon window in 9x/2k, it won't work without prompting you for a user/pass.
Before networking XP, make sure every XP machine has an account with the user/pass of all the computers you're going to be connecting and you'll find that everything works smooth as silk.
If it doesn't, map a shared drive on each computer to the others (I use c:\temp) and on boot, they will talk and see each other just fine regardless of the order they boot in.
The really nice thing about XP is that the share printer dialogs gives you the option to install printer drivers for 9x/2k so when you set up the printer on 9x/2k, you don't have to install anything.
The shape of the F-117 was caused by limitations in computing power. Computers were not fast enough to create a curved shape and the math of radar reflection was very new, so they had to go with an angled one. The F-117 was designed in 1975 while the B2 started in 1981 after computers were more powerful and "radar math" had advanced significantly. In 1975, the Intel 8080 with 4.8K transistors was new, and in 1981 the 8088 with 29K transistors was new. Huge difference in power back then.
Multiple flat panels does keep radar from bouncing back, but when a panel does happen to face the radar, you get a sparkle. The B2 and F-22 are curved because of advances in cpu speeds and because curved shapes reflect less than flat ones.
Yes, the angle of the material relative to the direction of radar energy is important, but materials *are* made to absorb radar. The coating itself isn't enough, but the gap between layers acts as a resonator keeping radar from bouncing away as well.
When stealth hit its prime, it was found that you could spot stealth aircraft by looking for a "hole" in space. Air reflects a little radar and a stealth aircraft reflected less, so instead of a radar return, you looked for less reflection than you should get. I believe a balance was found so planes would reflect the same amount as the atmosphere, but it's been a couple years since I've researched this.
Radar reflection is caused by the material the radar is hitting, not by its movement. Blades made out of radar absorbing material will be "stealthy" whether they are moving or not. If movement did affect radar signature, then stealth bombers would be visible to radar as they were flying.
The only time movement affects radar is with doppler radar, which can only detect objects moving away or toward it, and an approaching helicopter will be more visible than its blades anyway.
I have to agree with buddy here. Do a little math. Locally, pc repair runs $60/hr. The little local computer store sells a new pc (box only) minus hard drive and O/S for $350. Thats 6 hours of labor. Based on these numbers, I give myself 1 hour to find a problem. If I can't find it then its not cost effective to repair it, since repair will take at least 1 hour as well. The 3rd time a computer breaks, we replace it. Reinstalling windows and all applications can take more than 6 hours so whats the point? Might as well spend that time reinstalling on a new box that won't break. PC repair is not cost effective at all for any serious problems, which is why so many small computer repair stores are folding up. My advice, dont spend ANY money on diagnostics (except for spinrite for hard drives), get a free ram tester (even microsoft has one out), and start teaching people that you don't repair something thats cheaper to replace.
Slightly off topic, but I've done work in vulnerability assesment, forensics, and security testing. The first lesson anyone going in this realm should know is that if you claim that a network is secure and it gets hacked, your credibility goes right into the toilet.
Make sure you stress heavily that the only secure machine is an unplugged machine and all you can do is look for existing security holes, like missed security updates and firmware or poorly set up computers. Make sure your client understands that most security breaches come from a company's own employees. I've worked on projects that found a company's own network was secure, but their ISP had a security hole that allowed us to completely bypass all their security. I've seen post-its on monitors with username/password written on them. One time we had a guy walk into a bank, claim to be a new employee, and get set up on a terminal with an account. I've seen entire IT departments escorted out of a building by security while the Cisco vans pulled up out front to fix a down network because a router was missing a 6 month old firmware update and some skript kiddie took it down. There's nothing like wiping the grin off of a smug IT Admin's face, but it's a scary business if you don't practice a lot of C.Y.A. or try to claim that someone's network is totally secure.
Run a firewall, antivirus, and keep software and firmware updated and you won't have to worry about outside attacks so much. No software can find post-its with account info stuck to a monitor.
Surprised nobody had mentioned this one yet...
www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm
I've been watching its progress for years now and am pretty impressed, although it does take some time to get set up for your own personal tastes. Not for those who want to install and instantly use....
Yeah there are tools that let you wipe your hd, but considering the time it takes to complete a 6X wipe, you'd barely get started between the time they knocked on the door and the time they unplugged your machines. If they did find "illegal" data on your system, you're now guilty of trying to conceal evidence and you can kiss any decent defense goodbye. A long time ago someone told me they wrapped wire a whole bunch of times around their hard drive and connected it to 120VAC and a switch. If needed, hit the switch and your HD gets de-gaussed. Dunno if this would work anymore since HD's seem to be shielded pretty well. That and I'm sure the tools exist that can reconstruct the data anyway.
I used to get Bantha Tracks, and yes there were a few articles about all 9 stories. I think one of them actually gave a very brief description of each story. I remember this well because as a skinny geek when geeks weren't cool yet, it was one of the few chances I ever had to be cool because I knew what all the stories were going to be about. :o)
I used to work at Radio Shack and did a very informal survey. Every time someone came in to buy a new battery for their cordless phone I asked how they cared for the phone and how long the battery lasted. In general, the more it was left on the charger, the shorter the life span. I broke down phone care into 3 groups: 1) Phone left on charger when not used. Battery lifespan was about 1 to 1 1/2 years. 2) Tried to keep phone on charger but forgot a lot. Lifespan about 2-3 years. 3) Kept phone off charger till the little light came on. Life span was 5 to 8 years. These are pretty cheap batteries but the responses were pretty consistent. I also talked to people who bought standard rechargable batteries and rechargables for RC planes and cars. They answers and life spans matched pretty well.