Well Said! I couldn't agree more. I do use Firefox (pre vs 12) for casual browsing, but for more important things I do use Opera. Much better security settings and not as big a target.
Back in the dark ages (1980's) IBM mainframe terminals used an analog clock face as the "wait" icon. When Windows came along the hour glass became very popular for pretty much the same thing. I would think that more people in the 1980's knew what an analog clock face was than an hour glass. If you really want some fun with icon images try some of the less mainstream software -- Eagle CAD for circuit board design comes to mind.
I worked at a site with wall mounted racks, but it was all Token Ring and the MAU's did not have any ports on the back and were not powered. I still didn't like them and when I was given the assignment of converting the entire site to Ethernet the wall mounted racks were a pain the butt until I could replace them. For what you are wanting to do I would absolutely want access to both the front and back side of the equipment -- without a wall in the way.
I will give Tax Act a third endorsement even for a fairly complicated form with lots of 1099-B's, foreign tax credits and other weird stuff. I switched from Turbo Tax the year they put DRM on their product and I have never looked back. I have been asking Tax Act for several years to produce a version that would run on Linux and I would buy it every year. Unfortunately I have never gotten a response from them. However, I have been running it on an old Windows 2000 box without problems even thought the version for the 2011 tax year was not supposed to run under W2K. It ran flawlessly.
I might experiment and try to load it under WINE and see what happens now. I have been meaning to do that for a couple of years, but it may be getting critical unless I want to set up an XP box just for Taxes.
I like FOSS software and it is my first choice for most of what I do, but there are some things that I am MORE than willing to pay for when they are done right.
The one time pad could make a comeback in the form of a one time DVD's or maybe even SD or Micro SD chips. I know, it is not scalable due to the problem of distribution. It is also symmetric in that the same "key" encrypts and decrypts, but it is also immune to brute force since your one time key is equal to or longer than the message length. An interesting variation might be to use an image file that is very long, but completely innocent as a pseudo random key and only have two copies of that exact image. The former Soviet Union used a one time cypher for all of their clandestine agent communications.
It may be just my impression, but it seemed that people on public transportation in this state got a little bit more considerate of each other when it was ruled that Concealed Carry Permit holders could carry on public transportation. You just never know anymore.
Although my engineering degree is over 40 years old now, I still remember one exam in Fluid Mechanics where everything was open book and open notes. It didn't help one bit if you didn't understand the concepts. One of the final exam problems was a very complicated siphon system and the numbers that one needed to plug into the applicable equations to calculate flow rate were not too hard to find. However, the problem was rigged so that the highest point on the path of the siphon was more than 33 feet above the source so the equations did not apply. However, this was NOT very obvious. If you understood how a siphon worked, and took the trouble to see whether this one satisfied the conditions necessary, you got full credit for just writing down the flow is zero since the necessary conditions for flow are not met. If you tried to use the numbers that were more obvious to calculate the flow you would get a reasonable answer that was completely wrong. This was one of three very similar problems on the final exam.
Uh, The cost of building these reactors was added into power bills several years ago so, in effect, Georgia Power customers have been paying for this construction before it is built. With the current crop of Politicians in the state unwilling to have any risk assumed by their corporate masters and also unwilling to permit there to be the slightest appearance of the Taxpayers assuming any risk the Public Service Commission approved a rate increase to fund this before construction or even approval. Oh, and it it does not get built for any reason those rates will NOT be refunded.
Uh, the article does not explain what is new about this. Copper clad cable has been around forever. It has been used for High Frequency antennas where the tensile strength of the steel is important and the skin effect keeps the RF currents near the surface. I don't think there is much skin effect at the frequencies they are promoting this cable to be used for. As others have already pointed out, the problem is not limited to electric or communications cable. Plumbing, and HVAC systems are also prime targets. Better regulation of metal recycling and the prosecution of those recyclers who do "look the other way" would go a long way to stopping this problem.
Of course a few more charred bodies like was found on a building roof near here recently when a copper thief THOUGHT the 660 volt power line to the chillers was disconnected and it wasn't could also be a deterrent
These bills are not about piracy of music or movies or anything else. They are about control of ANY content that may be available on the Internet. It means that ANY site can be shut down by CLAIMING it violates the provisions of this act with no due course, proof or recourse of any kind. It is FAR worse than the DMCA. The only thing that will offset the huge amounts of money being poured out to the congrescritters to get this bill passed is for thousands and thousands of voters to contact them and tell them that if it passes they will loose your vote.
I am surprised that the Slashdot crowd has not come up with the obvious solution. A well placed Claymore or two would discourage repeat offenders.
Seriously, way back in the late 1970's I built a police type siren that would pump out maybe 20 to 30 watts sweeping between 300 and 4000 Hz. I had a hard wired alarm system on the vehicle with the horn speakers INSIDE the car. Trip the alarm and the interior of the vehicle would be about 130 to 140 Db of the worst sound you ever heard -- while you could still hear. If you don't leave stuff within reach of the window it WILL discourage anyone from sticking their head inside to look around.
Back in 1965 I was given an Evelyn Wood Speed reading course as a high school graduation present. One of the main things that course taught was that you DO NOT have to hear the sound of words to understand their meaning. It is also possible to read lines backwards as well as forwards. Dot matrix printers could print that way, and I have been able to read that way for over forty years. One reason I HATED meetings and mismanagement training so much was that the data transmission rate was SO SLOW!
After I took the course I really didn't think I had learned anything or that the techniques worked. That is, until the next year at final exam time in collage when I was WAY behind in some courses. I managed to read the entire textbook twice the night before the final and pulled my grade up by two letter grades.
I used it at times during my career when I had to change technologies in a hurry. I could absorb enough in a weekend to at least be able to spot the sales weasels trying to pull a fast one the following week.
Although the course was taught as a way to read more fiction faster, I almost never used it for that. It was great for absorbing a lot of information very fast, but that is not the point of reading fiction and you loose almost all the real work that the author put into the piece.
I thought one of the points of Linux was the wide choice of distributions and the fact that if you don't like the way something works you can change it! I sampled Ubuntu back a few years ago when I was looking for a distro that suited me. So far I have settled on Mepis and was comfortable with it up until version 11 which I am now running on one machine. I am not sure that it is an improvement over 10.x in any way.
I also have nothing against running more than one distro and using the one that works best for what I want to do. It is so easy to do that either as virtual instance or just multi-boot if you want to give each distro the whole machine. With the size of drives available today that is not a problem.
I do wonder why so much of the change that we see in this and almost everything else these days seems to be just change for change sake and is not really an improvement at all.
This is about as good an idea as car manufacturers welding the hood shut on all their card so only the factory can repair the engine. This is the kind of analogy that needs to be really PUBLICIZED to the Big Box computer shopper.
A "DON'T BUY UEFI" campaign should be started NOW !
Thanks for the comment.
I didn't know it had started quite that early. My dad moved on to commercial stuff and latter some engineering type work with one of the old Baby Bells in the early 1960's and most of the residence work he did was probably in the late 1940's or early 1950's. Of course he learned the trade in the 1930's and that is what he taught me.
Of course your mention of Demarc may make the difference. Before the demarc Bell owned all the wiring and had to fix it if it failed, after the demarc it became the homeowners problem.
In house cable runs are the pits, whether done by Cable company contractors, or just about anyone else these days. My Father was an old time telephone man and "back in the day" cables were ALWAYS fished through the walls, or run down the inside of closets and along baseboards. Now days the OUTSIDE of most houses around here have a web of cables running to each room where there is something that needs to have a cable connection -- whether it is for TV or telephone it does not matter.
Oh, and one cable installer at my neighbors house used a hammer to just knock a hole between the garage and the LIVING ROOM to pull the cable through -- no plate, no cover just an raw open hole.
I still have my Benton Harbor 6 meter Lunch box, and my DX-60B, not to mention the old AR-3 receiver I built when I was about 11 years old. I have one of the tunnel dippers that I got at a ham-fest, but it was somewhat butchered inside and does not work. That is just a partial list, and I would LOVE to see them make a comeback in the kit market.
I used the 6er with a home made beam of either 3 or 4 elements, I can't remember which, and worked all over the us and into Canada a lot back in the early 1960's. Of course we had more sunspots back then.
I am an old geezer geek so I have had to type on everything from a Model 33 TTY and an 026 keypuch machine on up (that was after I was able to give up using the toggle switches to communicate my wishes in Octal. Even the Hex Keypad was an improvement there. It was not uncommon for many of us OLD TIMERS to be using half a dozen or more different keyboard layouts as recently as the early 1980's! Not only were a LOT of the keys in different places they all had a very different "feel" and with a TTY (which was usually punching paper tape -- NOT directly connected to a computer) or the two different model keypunch machines I often used it was much more important NOT to make a typo than it is now! Ever try to backspace over or erase a hole?
I never was formally taught touch typing, but a very smart grandmother of mine bought me the touch typing book that was in use in high schools at the time and I did follow the lessons and pretty much taught myself to use the home keys and not look at the keyboard. The one thing I NEVER learned to do well was TRANSCRIBE from another document. That was not the reason I wanted to learn to type. I needed to type in order to be able to WRITE papers for my college classes. I can compose just fine, and that is the skill I needed.
When my employer bought their first PC for use as a word processor back in 1984, I spent each afternoon (and a good bit of the evening) learning both the PC itself and Word Star and then holding a class each morning with the executive secretaries to teach them both the use of the PC and Word Star. However, it was not long before they were not transcribing from hand written pages either. In a very few short years their bosses were doing the writing on their PC's and the secretaries were functioning more as editors to clean up and format what their bosses had written.
Being able to compose and type reasonably fast and accurately without looking at the keyboard is an important skill now. Being able to transcribe text from one document to another at a high rate of speed may be useful in some occupations (court reporter?) but it is not necessary for programming or other more technical trades.
I use G-10 to make circuit boards at home and the best way I have found to cut it is with good metal shears. This does not produce dust or particles in the air. You can even cut curves with a wide arc using an aircraft type left or right cut shear or use lots of short straight cuts to cut a pretty tight outside curve. I have also used a "Nibbling Tool" to nibble away small chunks. Most of what I have done is on single or two sided boards and mother boards are multilayer, but it should work. You could seal the cut edges with either some epoxy or perhaps a "super glue".
Ifn ya ain't from this neck o'th woods ya may not know that the "blue laws" and dry laws were a cooperative effort between the moonshiners and the preachers. Hell, many of the large fine churches in the Old South were built with moonshine or latter legal liquor money!
Even small congregations often had a "sugar daddy" in the booze business that they would turn to when times were hard and they had to meet the mortgage on the church.
Not when one's health insurance has a deductible amount that is sky HI. The trend now, as if you have not noticed, is to make the "consumer" pay in order to reduce health care useage
Truer words have not been spoken -- especially about Cisco Sales weasels. I had one tell me that I couldn't mix brands of Routers and Switches in a network. Specifically that the 3-Com switches we had then would NOT work with their 2600 series routers. They were wrong of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Well Said! I couldn't agree more. I do use Firefox (pre vs 12) for casual browsing, but for more important things I do use Opera. Much better security settings and not as big a target.
Back in the dark ages (1980's) IBM mainframe terminals used an analog clock face as the "wait" icon. When Windows came along the hour glass became very popular for pretty much the same thing. I would think that more people in the 1980's knew what an analog clock face was than an hour glass. If you really want some fun with icon images try some of the less mainstream software -- Eagle CAD for circuit board design comes to mind.
Too bad they only considered the damage caused by playing football. I am sure there are more people damaged by just watching it.
I worked at a site with wall mounted racks, but it was all Token Ring and the MAU's did not have any ports on the back and were not powered. I still didn't like them and when I was given the assignment of converting the entire site to Ethernet the wall mounted racks were a pain the butt until I could replace them. For what you are wanting to do I would absolutely want access to both the front and back side of the equipment -- without a wall in the way.
I will give Tax Act a third endorsement even for a fairly complicated form with lots of 1099-B's, foreign tax credits and other weird stuff. I switched from Turbo Tax the year they put DRM on their product and I have never looked back. I have been asking Tax Act for several years to produce a version that would run on Linux and I would buy it every year. Unfortunately I have never gotten a response from them. However, I have been running it on an old Windows 2000 box without problems even thought the version for the 2011 tax year was not supposed to run under W2K. It ran flawlessly.
I might experiment and try to load it under WINE and see what happens now. I have been meaning to do that for a couple of years, but it may be getting critical unless I want to set up an XP box just for Taxes.
I like FOSS software and it is my first choice for most of what I do, but there are some things that I am MORE than willing to pay for when they are done right.
The one time pad could make a comeback in the form of a one time DVD's or maybe even SD or Micro SD chips. I know, it is not scalable due to the problem of distribution. It is also symmetric in that the same "key" encrypts and decrypts, but it is also immune to brute force since your one time key is equal to or longer than the message length. An interesting variation might be to use an image file that is very long, but completely innocent as a pseudo random key and only have two copies of that exact image. The former Soviet Union used a one time cypher for all of their clandestine agent communications.
It may be just my impression, but it seemed that people on public transportation in this state got a little bit more considerate of each other when it was ruled that Concealed Carry Permit holders could carry on public transportation. You just never know anymore.
Although my engineering degree is over 40 years old now, I still remember one exam in Fluid Mechanics where everything was open book and open notes. It didn't help one bit if you didn't understand the concepts. One of the final exam problems was a very complicated siphon system and the numbers that one needed to plug into the applicable equations to calculate flow rate were not too hard to find. However, the problem was rigged so that the highest point on the path of the siphon was more than 33 feet above the source so the equations did not apply. However, this was NOT very obvious. If you understood how a siphon worked, and took the trouble to see whether this one satisfied the conditions necessary, you got full credit for just writing down the flow is zero since the necessary conditions for flow are not met. If you tried to use the numbers that were more obvious to calculate the flow you would get a reasonable answer that was completely wrong. This was one of three very similar problems on the final exam.
Uh, The cost of building these reactors was added into power bills several years ago so, in effect, Georgia Power customers have been paying for this construction before it is built. With the current crop of Politicians in the state unwilling to have any risk assumed by their corporate masters and also unwilling to permit there to be the slightest appearance of the Taxpayers assuming any risk the Public Service Commission approved a rate increase to fund this before construction or even approval. Oh, and it it does not get built for any reason those rates will NOT be refunded.
Uh, the article does not explain what is new about this. Copper clad cable has been around forever. It has been used for High Frequency antennas where the tensile strength of the steel is important and the skin effect keeps the RF currents near the surface. I don't think there is much skin effect at the frequencies they are promoting this cable to be used for. As others have already pointed out, the problem is not limited to electric or communications cable. Plumbing, and HVAC systems are also prime targets. Better regulation of metal recycling and the prosecution of those recyclers who do "look the other way" would go a long way to stopping this problem.
Of course a few more charred bodies like was found on a building roof near here recently when a copper thief THOUGHT the 660 volt power line to the chillers was disconnected and it wasn't could also be a deterrent
These bills are not about piracy of music or movies or anything else. They are about control of ANY content that may be available on the Internet. It means that ANY site can be shut down by CLAIMING it violates the provisions of this act with no due course, proof or recourse of any kind. It is FAR worse than the DMCA. The only thing that will offset the huge amounts of money being poured out to the congrescritters to get this bill passed is for thousands and thousands of voters to contact them and tell them that if it passes they will loose your vote.
HAVE YOU CALLED YOUR CONGRESS CRITTER?
I am surprised that the Slashdot crowd has not come up with the obvious solution. A well placed Claymore or two would discourage repeat offenders.
Seriously, way back in the late 1970's I built a police type siren that would pump out maybe 20 to 30 watts sweeping between 300 and 4000 Hz. I had a hard wired alarm system on the vehicle with the horn speakers INSIDE the car. Trip the alarm and the interior of the vehicle would be about 130 to 140 Db of the worst sound you ever heard -- while you could still hear. If you don't leave stuff within reach of the window it WILL discourage anyone from sticking their head inside to look around.
Back in 1965 I was given an Evelyn Wood Speed reading course as a high school graduation present. One of the main things that course taught was that you DO NOT have to hear the sound of words to understand their meaning. It is also possible to read lines backwards as well as forwards. Dot matrix printers could print that way, and I have been able to read that way for over forty years. One reason I HATED meetings and mismanagement training so much was that the data transmission rate was SO SLOW!
After I took the course I really didn't think I had learned anything or that the techniques worked. That is, until the next year at final exam time in collage when I was WAY behind in some courses. I managed to read the entire textbook twice the night before the final and pulled my grade up by two letter grades.
I used it at times during my career when I had to change technologies in a hurry. I could absorb enough in a weekend to at least be able to spot the sales weasels trying to pull a fast one the following week.
Although the course was taught as a way to read more fiction faster, I almost never used it for that. It was great for absorbing a lot of information very fast, but that is not the point of reading fiction and you loose almost all the real work that the author put into the piece.
I thought one of the points of Linux was the wide choice of distributions and the fact that if you don't like the way something works you can change it! I sampled Ubuntu back a few years ago when I was looking for a distro that suited me. So far I have settled on Mepis and was comfortable with it up until version 11 which I am now running on one machine. I am not sure that it is an improvement over 10.x in any way.
I also have nothing against running more than one distro and using the one that works best for what I want to do. It is so easy to do that either as virtual instance or just multi-boot if you want to give each distro the whole machine. With the size of drives available today that is not a problem.
I do wonder why so much of the change that we see in this and almost everything else these days seems to be just change for change sake and is not really an improvement at all.
This is about as good an idea as car manufacturers welding the hood shut on all their card so only the factory can repair the engine. This is the kind of analogy that needs to be really PUBLICIZED to the Big Box computer shopper.
A "DON'T BUY UEFI" campaign should be started NOW !
Thanks for the comment. I didn't know it had started quite that early. My dad moved on to commercial stuff and latter some engineering type work with one of the old Baby Bells in the early 1960's and most of the residence work he did was probably in the late 1940's or early 1950's. Of course he learned the trade in the 1930's and that is what he taught me. Of course your mention of Demarc may make the difference. Before the demarc Bell owned all the wiring and had to fix it if it failed, after the demarc it became the homeowners problem.
In house cable runs are the pits, whether done by Cable company contractors, or just about anyone else these days. My Father was an old time telephone man and "back in the day" cables were ALWAYS fished through the walls, or run down the inside of closets and along baseboards. Now days the OUTSIDE of most houses around here have a web of cables running to each room where there is something that needs to have a cable connection -- whether it is for TV or telephone it does not matter. Oh, and one cable installer at my neighbors house used a hammer to just knock a hole between the garage and the LIVING ROOM to pull the cable through -- no plate, no cover just an raw open hole.
I still have my Benton Harbor 6 meter Lunch box, and my DX-60B, not to mention the old AR-3 receiver I built when I was about 11 years old. I have one of the tunnel dippers that I got at a ham-fest, but it was somewhat butchered inside and does not work. That is just a partial list, and I would LOVE to see them make a comeback in the kit market.
I used the 6er with a home made beam of either 3 or 4 elements, I can't remember which, and worked all over the us and into Canada a lot back in the early 1960's. Of course we had more sunspots back then.
I am an old geezer geek so I have had to type on everything from a Model 33 TTY and an 026 keypuch machine on up (that was after I was able to give up using the toggle switches to communicate my wishes in Octal. Even the Hex Keypad was an improvement there. It was not uncommon for many of us OLD TIMERS to be using half a dozen or more different keyboard layouts as recently as the early 1980's! Not only were a LOT of the keys in different places they all had a very different "feel" and with a TTY (which was usually punching paper tape -- NOT directly connected to a computer) or the two different model keypunch machines I often used it was much more important NOT to make a typo than it is now! Ever try to backspace over or erase a hole?
I never was formally taught touch typing, but a very smart grandmother of mine bought me the touch typing book that was in use in high schools at the time and I did follow the lessons and pretty much taught myself to use the home keys and not look at the keyboard. The one thing I NEVER learned to do well was TRANSCRIBE from another document. That was not the reason I wanted to learn to type. I needed to type in order to be able to WRITE papers for my college classes. I can compose just fine, and that is the skill I needed.
When my employer bought their first PC for use as a word processor back in 1984, I spent each afternoon (and a good bit of the evening) learning both the PC itself and Word Star and then holding a class each morning with the executive secretaries to teach them both the use of the PC and Word Star. However, it was not long before they were not transcribing from hand written pages either. In a very few short years their bosses were doing the writing on their PC's and the secretaries were functioning more as editors to clean up and format what their bosses had written.
Being able to compose and type reasonably fast and accurately without looking at the keyboard is an important skill now. Being able to transcribe text from one document to another at a high rate of speed may be useful in some occupations (court reporter?) but it is not necessary for programming or other more technical trades.
I use G-10 to make circuit boards at home and the best way I have found to cut it is with good metal shears. This does not produce dust or particles in the air. You can even cut curves with a wide arc using an aircraft type left or right cut shear or use lots of short straight cuts to cut a pretty tight outside curve. I have also used a "Nibbling Tool" to nibble away small chunks. Most of what I have done is on single or two sided boards and mother boards are multilayer, but it should work. You could seal the cut edges with either some epoxy or perhaps a "super glue".
Well said and very true.
Ifn ya ain't from this neck o'th woods ya may not know that the "blue laws" and dry laws were a cooperative effort between the moonshiners and the preachers. Hell, many of the large fine churches in the Old South were built with moonshine or latter legal liquor money! Even small congregations often had a "sugar daddy" in the booze business that they would turn to when times were hard and they had to meet the mortgage on the church.
Uh, and would your Sig. apply to Roger?
Not when one's health insurance has a deductible amount that is sky HI. The trend now, as if you have not noticed, is to make the "consumer" pay in order to reduce health care useage
Truer words have not been spoken -- especially about Cisco Sales weasels. I had one tell me that I couldn't mix brands of Routers and Switches in a network. Specifically that the 3-Com switches we had then would NOT work with their 2600 series routers. They were wrong of course.