The referenced comments from the NBs are.doc files. If ISO mandates the use of MS Word.doc files is its existing internal processes what hope that anything other this result?
Having first been unable to use google translate and now google search due to the "Error- Your request appears to be virus related please scan your computer for malware" I do wonder how sound any google analysis of malware is. If they have problems distinguishing between my computer that is not malware infected and the transparent port 80 proxy for my home cable ISP which is shared by 100,000s of computers some of which are obviously malware infected, then what hope a useful analysis of the much more devious and murky world of drive-by installers?
Um what has -1 = 0xFFFF = 65535 not being equal to 2^8-1 got to do with the Excel 100,000 snafu? Surely 2^8 is 256 and not 65536? Or does Excel also display 2^8-1 as 100,000?
>The cost of time alone on setting up a new box to run something else almost immediately negates the benefit in most IT manager's eyes when all they are seeing is consulting time to setup, manage, and maintain a linux box they know almost nothing about.
In my experience most IT manager's have little to no knowledge of either Windows or Linux. The extent of their knowledge seems to revolve around PPT slides on the cost/benefit of outsourcing. If they spent a little time educating themselves on the basics of linux and the myriad solid standards based applications available for it they would bring a real value proposition to their companies rather than just keeping chairs from floating away. Microsoft Windows server licences and CALs are not cheap and since the basic functionality is available for free elsewhere it seems unjustifiable.
Because Windows is stable and fast when cruft like antivirus software isn't dragging it down. On production machines used for software development antivirus etc is a burden rather than a boon.
>Do you drive without buckling your seatbelt and leave all of the windows down so that you will be "thrown clear" in the accident?
If doing up my seatbelt necessitated me buying a more powerful engine and dramatically increased the likelihood of a crash then I would seriously consider not wearing one.
And as a completely unrelated anecdote - my brother crashed his car at 160 km/h, the door broke off and the seat belt snapped. He was thrown out and somehow he ended up with a couple of small cuts and a burn from the seatbelt. The car continued rolling end over end until it was a mess of scrap metal. If he'd been inside it he would be dead. This doesn't mean that seat belts don't help safety, but of themselves they aren't a panacea and outcomes are not as clear cut as you may like to think.
How does an election promise make it onto the front page of Slashdot? Are publicists for the PM of Australia so good that they can get his hollow election promises broadcast into completely unrelated media? Pork barreling is not news.
Oh and on topic... Internet access in Australia is abysmal. My work sometimes takes me back to Australia and its like going to a third world country. In most of Asia Internet access is simple and no one uses modems. In Australia using a modem is normal. My brother good 2Mbps broadband in the back woods of Thailand yesterday and it took 2 days to be installed. I had to get a 2Mbps business Internet connection installed in Singapore. Took 5 working days for the DLC and was pretty cheap - they wanted to install ELL but the cabling up the riser to the basement distribution would take 14 working days and I had time constraints - that would have been cheaper than the DLC. ($850 install and $1200 per month).
At the same time I also had to get a 2Mbps connection installed in the Sydney CBD. What a nightmare. Jumping through hoops, waiting (and waiting) for Telstra. Then they charged $20,000 for the installation and $5,000 per month for access. And took 21 working days to install the circuit. This is in an already wired building in the main street of the biggest city in Australia.
The ONLY reason Howard has said anything about broadband is that it is entirely unacceptable in Australia for both home users and businesses. The opposition has made this an election issue so Howard has made promises knowing that follow through if he is returned to power really doesn't matter as it won't be one of his core* promises.
*For those of you not up to speed on Australian electioneering. Howard coined the phrase "core promises" to describe anything he promised during an election campaign and had some intent of following through - every other promise is a lie which was made with zero intent of ever acting upon. Is broadband a core promise? I'll let history decide.
Ok I reread your post. I'd made an unwarranted leap and thought you were saying the selection of text using a mouse and then formating it and seeing the changes were available in Microsoft Word prior to MacWrite. The version of Microsoft Word bundled with a mouse in 1983 was a text based thing which did not display anything like WYSIWYG - if I recall correctly only bold and italics could be displayed as the CG card in the PC-AT was only able to display a limited character set (wasn't it int 10?). I think formatted text was displayed in different color blocks to indicate this to the user. The Macintosh and not Windows was the trail blazer when it came to WYSIWYG editing on PCs. I don't think a GUI WYSIWYG version of Word was available on PC until much later, didn't the Macintosh GUI verion of Word predate the Windows GUI version by a couple of years and follow MacWrite?
Also wasn't it the case that selecting text via a pointer was available on earlier systems? I dimly remember being able to use a pointer to select text on an expensive HP workstation which was around in 1978. And of course the roots of many of these things were Xerox Parc.
If Microsoft does have a patent on the process of dragging a pointer to select a block of text so it can be formatted then its a travesty.
Similar word processors followed (MacWrite)....and the first GUI version of Microsoft Word.
Yes MS Word followed and was an imitation of MacWrite. If MS has patented selecting text in a GUI word processor then MacWrite is prior art. I know MacWrite allowed the user to select text so they could format it. I actually waded through the first version of Inside Macintosh and I wrote software for the Macintosh in Pascal using my Lisa development environment. Sure the 128K ROMs did not include style text and style text selections in text records and it was only introduced in the API in the 512K ROMs. But it was still possible to use multiple text records with different styles and juggle them to get a similar effect. If it ever came to requiring prior art I may even be able to find my code dating from late 1984 which did this in the software which I was writing at the time.
>Take something as simple as 'select and modify' where you highlight a word and change the font, size, etc. And even though today this seems intuitive for a WYSIWYG GUI, the concept orginated from the MS Word team and MS could rip this concept out of every GUI based OS and application out there if it was upheld.
If my memory serves me correctly the Mac I bought in 1984 included MacWrite which allowed me to select and modify words and change their font, size, etc.
Prior art? Are you rewriting history? I don't know but surely software patents don't help to foster the software development industry. Isn't the point of patents to foster innovation? It is ludicrous that obvious processes encoded as mathematical algorithms can be patented.
Don't know if it qualifies as a Big Red Button story but the effect was the same. I work in a satellite TV broadcaster. We were standing around in Master Control one afternoon discussing stuff and the cleaning lady snuck in when no one noticed. She proceeded to use a wet rag to wipe down the main switcher and switched every channel to black. It was pretty amazing to see a wall full of monitors (about 100 of them) suddenly go black. For a moment we all thought the SDI router must have melted until we noticed the cleaning woman polishing the desk.
The other thing she did was she worked out that she could get into the machine room with her pass if she went via the emergency exit. We kept finding puddles of water under the raised floor that we couldn't explain until one weekend I noticed her carting a bucket and mop into the machine room to give it a good scrub with a liberal amount of water.
Does this mean the computer will BSOD twice as often or is it actually an exponential increase and the computer will BSOD four times as often? I can just imagine that when (not if) your half of the system freezes there'll be fun and games asking the other user to restart their computer so that your computer starts working again. And all those reboots required when you run Windows Update twice on one computer doesn't bear thinking about.
My home ISP proxies port 80 which is blacklisted by google translate. Whenever I try and translate anything it warns that my request looks like automated spyware or virus requests and asks for a word to be typed. Sometimes it then allows me to translate a phrase or two but usually gives an error saying my computer is infected with viruses and spyware and can't proceed. I definitely can no longer translate entire webpages using google. Ok its a free service and you get what you pay for, or in this case don't?! Anyone ever tried contacting google about their translate service? My what non-productive fun that is. And the ISP is completely unresponsive - pretty hard to change ISPs as they are the only real option. At least babelfish doesn't think my computer is virus infected - its not, its not even windows, its not even IE, I know what processes its running, I know what network traffic it generates and it ain't doing automated google requests.
Anyone know any work arounds? Using "translate this page" is so useful that having it go away sort of sucks.
What I don't understand is why you would have outbound filtering at all for any desktop machines. Having any routes from any desktop to anywhere near the Internet is asking for trouble. Default route them to a dead end occupied by a snort box. Proxy all valid Internet traffic via servers specifically setup for this purpose. Allow those servers to have routes to the Internet or better yet to secondary proxies located in your DMZ and filter inbound and outbound connections from those servers. Have an internal DNS which forwards external resolution requests (non resolvable will do as the criteria) to a box which is simply an alarm and used for logging. Sure your better malicious code can create a back channel on port 80 via a proxy and its hard to notice, but passing a content scanner, virus scanner and IDS over proxied traffic is pretty easy, you can even do it at your leisure as it can all be cached.
I'm constantly amazed at the lack of security in big companies. They allow all sorts of direct connections from desktops to the Internet and then block innocuous stuff like VPN traffic. I woould have thought the first lesson taught in security 1H would be "routes to untrusted networks are BAD".
Big companies have more staff - not necessarily better staff.
Just how does a DNS error page work? Is this a specially crafted UDP packet on port 53? Don't think I've seen one of them. Returning the IP of a charter http server instead of NXDOMAIN for non resolvable domains is NOT a DNS error page (FFS). And thats the problem, its DNS and it should return a DNS error. TCP/IP is not the intraweb. HTML infomercials don't help one iota when you've mistyped a hostname into anything other than a web browser, whereas NXDOMAIN does.
>FaceTime, a Californian firm that specializes in making such consumer applications safe for companies, found in a recent survey that more than half of employees in their 20s and 30s admitted to installing such software over the objections of IT staff."
Fine, install away. What I don't understand is why these apps would work in any sane company without the complete cooperation of the IT department. Surely in this day and age no company larger than a mom and pop setup would have any routes from any PCs directly to the Internet. A default route for IPs outside your local network range that passes a snort box and some other traffic monitoring to a dead end stops much of this and tells you asap that something untoward is generating traffic on your network, also logging non resolvable DNS requests made to your internal DNS server usually tells you when something is up.
By having no external routes, all traffic which requires Internet connectivity must be proxied. Sure many of these apps can now use http proxies instead of direct connections but things like chat, telephony, etc generate huge numbers of hits and simple log monitoring will indicate where and when new apps are installed. If its proxied, its easily controllable.
Of course none of this is material unless you have a clear policy which has been communicated to employees about acceptable use of work computers. Playing whack a mole through technical measures is pointless. If using IM chat is against company policy (for whatever reason) and this is communicated to employees and some people persist in hunting down every web based IM proxy designed to circumvent the no IM chat policies then HR is in a much better position to act than IT.
And if policies become outdated and new consumer software makes business sense then simply review the policy and change accordingly.
If the IT department can't easily ensure compliance with an acceptable use policy then either the IT department is incompetent or the policy is deficient.
Yes I know that two factor authentication can be phished - but its much harder. What I find difficult to believe is that my company's remote access uses better security than my online banking. I have to use a SecurID token and it will lock at the first sign of incorrect access - which is a pain but there you go. Whereas my bank won't even give me any form of reasonable security even though I've asked for it - hell when I first started using them their logon page wasn't even https - so the credentials you entered were sent in a plain text POST. After many accounts were compromised they changed this (made the papers and I got a snail mail with a new password and a request to verify my balance!!).
The bank is obviously failing in its duty of care and should be liable. If I refused to take reasonable steps to protect my account then sure I should be liable but they don't even offer reasonable security in the first place.
No, it sounds like spruiker talk trying to baffle people with BS.
What better way to prove your technology than in the court of public opinion? If they could actualy sell a working device which did what they say the public would beat a path to their door, VCs would be crawling out of the woodwork, they would have no need for this ludicrous publicity stunt.
Cool. Does this mean you dont need gunpowder anymore to blow up your toys? After firecrackers were banned it was pretty hard to wreak suitable destruction, what with the local gunsmith refusing to sell me blackpowder and then the farming supply shop refusing to sell me weed killer and fertiliser, it was just too hard. A cannister full of hydrogen sounds like a hoot.
Even in my book, feeding ergot to pointy haired bosses and marketroids sounds a bit harsh:-
Ergotism struck the peasants and killed thousands of people. It was called Holy Fire because of the buring sensations at the extremities from gangrenous ergotism. The people suffered from swollen blisters, rotting flesh, and loss of limbs.
This is so true and really worth keeping in mind whenever you return something. If you are returning something which is defective and the store cannot replace it with a non-defective item then they'll refund your money - its not worth their while doing anything else. Case in point I returned two defective toys on the weekend to a local department store and asked for replacements which they couldn't supply as they were out of stock. The shop assistant then offered to give me gift vouchers instead of a refund. I refused and said I wanted non-defective toys. She said it was store policy to give gift vouchers and not refunds. I then asked if it was store policy to sell defective goods and not give refunds. At this point she gave me my money back. Shame was I really wanted the toys for my friend's kids and now I'll have to look elsewhere for them.
Thats strange. I was recently doing some work at a company in China, when I used their connection for web browsing none of the sites that I thought would be blocked were blocked - and I certainly didn't cause a RST on the public IP address that the connection was NATd through. I was a bit leary at first but using the connection at odd hours on the weekend - the only time I was able to schedule my work - it was really fast, faster than using VPN through a local gateway (in the same city) to my corporate network (which has min 2MB to my squid proxy in a different country). During normal weekday hours the performance was terrible - huge packet loss, lots of latency and very slow throughput, I just chalked this up to incompetence on the part of the local network admins not the great firewall.
I can imagine that home broadband takes a different path than company connections, maybe next time I'll try tcptraceroute.
Have you tried using SSL to your squid proxy? Or is that asking for trouble?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the old human interest story. So which particular PR company is being paid to humanise the face of Gates? And why?
The referenced comments from the NBs are .doc files. If ISO mandates the use of MS Word .doc files is its existing internal processes what hope that anything other this result?
Is the tag part of the ISO approved spec?
Having first been unable to use google translate and now google search due to the "Error- Your request appears to be virus related please scan your computer for malware" I do wonder how sound any google analysis of malware is. If they have problems distinguishing between my computer that is not malware infected and the transparent port 80 proxy for my home cable ISP which is shared by 100,000s of computers some of which are obviously malware infected, then what hope a useful analysis of the much more devious and murky world of drive-by installers?
Um what has -1 = 0xFFFF = 65535 not being equal to 2^8-1 got to do with the Excel 100,000 snafu? Surely 2^8 is 256 and not 65536? Or does Excel also display 2^8-1 as 100,000?
>The cost of time alone on setting up a new box to run something else almost immediately negates the benefit in most IT manager's eyes when all they are seeing is consulting time to setup, manage, and maintain a linux box they know almost nothing about.
In my experience most IT manager's have little to no knowledge of either Windows or Linux. The extent of their knowledge seems to revolve around PPT slides on the cost/benefit of outsourcing. If they spent a little time educating themselves on the basics of linux and the myriad solid standards based applications available for it they would bring a real value proposition to their companies rather than just keeping chairs from floating away. Microsoft Windows server licences and CALs are not cheap and since the basic functionality is available for free elsewhere it seems unjustifiable.
Why?
Because Windows is stable and fast when cruft like antivirus software isn't dragging it down. On production machines used for software development antivirus etc is a burden rather than a boon.
>Do you drive without buckling your seatbelt and leave all of the windows down so that you will be "thrown clear" in the accident?
If doing up my seatbelt necessitated me buying a more powerful engine and dramatically increased the likelihood of a crash then I would seriously consider not wearing one.
And as a completely unrelated anecdote - my brother crashed his car at 160 km/h, the door broke off and the seat belt snapped. He was thrown out and somehow he ended up with a couple of small cuts and a burn from the seatbelt. The car continued rolling end over end until it was a mess of scrap metal. If he'd been inside it he would be dead. This doesn't mean that seat belts don't help safety, but of themselves they aren't a panacea and outcomes are not as clear cut as you may like to think.
How does an election promise make it onto the front page of Slashdot? Are publicists for the PM of Australia so good that they can get his hollow election promises broadcast into completely unrelated media? Pork barreling is not news.
Oh and on topic... Internet access in Australia is abysmal. My work sometimes takes me back to Australia and its like going to a third world country. In most of Asia Internet access is simple and no one uses modems. In Australia using a modem is normal. My brother good 2Mbps broadband in the back woods of Thailand yesterday and it took 2 days to be installed. I had to get a 2Mbps business Internet connection installed in Singapore. Took 5 working days for the DLC and was pretty cheap - they wanted to install ELL but the cabling up the riser to the basement distribution would take 14 working days and I had time constraints - that would have been cheaper than the DLC. ($850 install and $1200 per month).
At the same time I also had to get a 2Mbps connection installed in the Sydney CBD. What a nightmare. Jumping through hoops, waiting (and waiting) for Telstra. Then they charged $20,000 for the installation and $5,000 per month for access. And took 21 working days to install the circuit. This is in an already wired building in the main street of the biggest city in Australia.
The ONLY reason Howard has said anything about broadband is that it is entirely unacceptable in Australia for both home users and businesses. The opposition has made this an election issue so Howard has made promises knowing that follow through if he is returned to power really doesn't matter as it won't be one of his core* promises.
*For those of you not up to speed on Australian electioneering. Howard coined the phrase "core promises" to describe anything he promised during an election campaign and had some intent of following through - every other promise is a lie which was made with zero intent of ever acting upon. Is broadband a core promise? I'll let history decide.
Ok I reread your post. I'd made an unwarranted leap and thought you were saying the selection of text using a mouse and then formating it and seeing the changes were available in Microsoft Word prior to MacWrite. The version of Microsoft Word bundled with a mouse in 1983 was a text based thing which did not display anything like WYSIWYG - if I recall correctly only bold and italics could be displayed as the CG card in the PC-AT was only able to display a limited character set (wasn't it int 10?). I think formatted text was displayed in different color blocks to indicate this to the user. The Macintosh and not Windows was the trail blazer when it came to WYSIWYG editing on PCs. I don't think a GUI WYSIWYG version of Word was available on PC until much later, didn't the Macintosh GUI verion of Word predate the Windows GUI version by a couple of years and follow MacWrite?
Also wasn't it the case that selecting text via a pointer was available on earlier systems? I dimly remember being able to use a pointer to select text on an expensive HP workstation which was around in 1978. And of course the roots of many of these things were Xerox Parc.
If Microsoft does have a patent on the process of dragging a pointer to select a block of text so it can be formatted then its a travesty.
Similar word processors followed (MacWrite) ....and the first GUI version of Microsoft Word.
Yes MS Word followed and was an imitation of MacWrite. If MS has patented selecting text in a GUI word processor then MacWrite is prior art. I know MacWrite allowed the user to select text so they could format it. I actually waded through the first version of Inside Macintosh and I wrote software for the Macintosh in Pascal using my Lisa development environment. Sure the 128K ROMs did not include style text and style text selections in text records and it was only introduced in the API in the 512K ROMs. But it was still possible to use multiple text records with different styles and juggle them to get a similar effect. If it ever came to requiring prior art I may even be able to find my code dating from late 1984 which did this in the software which I was writing at the time.
>Take something as simple as 'select and modify' where you highlight a word and change the font, size, etc. And even though today this seems intuitive for a WYSIWYG GUI, the concept orginated from the MS Word team and MS could rip this concept out of every GUI based OS and application out there if it was upheld.
If my memory serves me correctly the Mac I bought in 1984 included MacWrite which allowed me to select and modify words and change their font, size, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite
Prior art? Are you rewriting history? I don't know but surely software patents don't help to foster the software development industry. Isn't the point of patents to foster innovation? It is ludicrous that obvious processes encoded as mathematical algorithms can be patented.
Don't know if it qualifies as a Big Red Button story but the effect was the same. I work in a satellite TV broadcaster. We were standing around in Master Control one afternoon discussing stuff and the cleaning lady snuck in when no one noticed. She proceeded to use a wet rag to wipe down the main switcher and switched every channel to black. It was pretty amazing to see a wall full of monitors (about 100 of them) suddenly go black. For a moment we all thought the SDI router must have melted until we noticed the cleaning woman polishing the desk.
The other thing she did was she worked out that she could get into the machine room with her pass if she went via the emergency exit. We kept finding puddles of water under the raised floor that we couldn't explain until one weekend I noticed her carting a bucket and mop into the machine room to give it a good scrub with a liberal amount of water.
She doesn't work here anymore.
Does this mean the computer will BSOD twice as often or is it actually an exponential increase and the computer will BSOD four times as often? I can just imagine that when (not if) your half of the system freezes there'll be fun and games asking the other user to restart their computer so that your computer starts working again. And all those reboots required when you run Windows Update twice on one computer doesn't bear thinking about.
Maybe not arrested but they may well go all Rodney King on you for being a smartass.
My home ISP proxies port 80 which is blacklisted by google translate. Whenever I try and translate anything it warns that my request looks like automated spyware or virus requests and asks for a word to be typed. Sometimes it then allows me to translate a phrase or two but usually gives an error saying my computer is infected with viruses and spyware and can't proceed. I definitely can no longer translate entire webpages using google. Ok its a free service and you get what you pay for, or in this case don't?! Anyone ever tried contacting google about their translate service? My what non-productive fun that is. And the ISP is completely unresponsive - pretty hard to change ISPs as they are the only real option. At least babelfish doesn't think my computer is virus infected - its not, its not even windows, its not even IE, I know what processes its running, I know what network traffic it generates and it ain't doing automated google requests.
Anyone know any work arounds? Using "translate this page" is so useful that having it go away sort of sucks.
What I don't understand is why you would have outbound filtering at all for any desktop machines. Having any routes from any desktop to anywhere near the Internet is asking for trouble. Default route them to a dead end occupied by a snort box. Proxy all valid Internet traffic via servers specifically setup for this purpose. Allow those servers to have routes to the Internet or better yet to secondary proxies located in your DMZ and filter inbound and outbound connections from those servers. Have an internal DNS which forwards external resolution requests (non resolvable will do as the criteria) to a box which is simply an alarm and used for logging. Sure your better malicious code can create a back channel on port 80 via a proxy and its hard to notice, but passing a content scanner, virus scanner and IDS over proxied traffic is pretty easy, you can even do it at your leisure as it can all be cached.
I'm constantly amazed at the lack of security in big companies. They allow all sorts of direct connections from desktops to the Internet and then block innocuous stuff like VPN traffic. I woould have thought the first lesson taught in security 1H would be "routes to untrusted networks are BAD".
Big companies have more staff - not necessarily better staff.
Thanks for the heads up but I wouldn't even P2P their "music" let alone buy it.
Just how does a DNS error page work? Is this a specially crafted UDP packet on port 53? Don't think I've seen one of them. Returning the IP of a charter http server instead of NXDOMAIN for non resolvable domains is NOT a DNS error page (FFS). And thats the problem, its DNS and it should return a DNS error. TCP/IP is not the intraweb. HTML infomercials don't help one iota when you've mistyped a hostname into anything other than a web browser, whereas NXDOMAIN does.
>FaceTime, a Californian firm that specializes in making such consumer applications safe for companies, found in a recent survey that more than half of employees in their 20s and 30s admitted to installing such software over the objections of IT staff."
Fine, install away. What I don't understand is why these apps would work in any sane company without the complete cooperation of the IT department. Surely in this day and age no company larger than a mom and pop setup would have any routes from any PCs directly to the Internet. A default route for IPs outside your local network range that passes a snort box and some other traffic monitoring to a dead end stops much of this and tells you asap that something untoward is generating traffic on your network, also logging non resolvable DNS requests made to your internal DNS server usually tells you when something is up.
By having no external routes, all traffic which requires Internet connectivity must be proxied. Sure many of these apps can now use http proxies instead of direct connections but things like chat, telephony, etc generate huge numbers of hits and simple log monitoring will indicate where and when new apps are installed. If its proxied, its easily controllable.
Of course none of this is material unless you have a clear policy which has been communicated to employees about acceptable use of work computers. Playing whack a mole through technical measures is pointless. If using IM chat is against company policy (for whatever reason) and this is communicated to employees and some people persist in hunting down every web based IM proxy designed to circumvent the no IM chat policies then HR is in a much better position to act than IT.
And if policies become outdated and new consumer software makes business sense then simply review the policy and change accordingly.
If the IT department can't easily ensure compliance with an acceptable use policy then either the IT department is incompetent or the policy is deficient.
Yes I know that two factor authentication can be phished - but its much harder. What I find difficult to believe is that my company's remote access uses better security than my online banking. I have to use a SecurID token and it will lock at the first sign of incorrect access - which is a pain but there you go. Whereas my bank won't even give me any form of reasonable security even though I've asked for it - hell when I first started using them their logon page wasn't even https - so the credentials you entered were sent in a plain text POST. After many accounts were compromised they changed this (made the papers and I got a snail mail with a new password and a request to verify my balance!!).
The bank is obviously failing in its duty of care and should be liable. If I refused to take reasonable steps to protect my account then sure I should be liable but they don't even offer reasonable security in the first place.
No, it sounds like spruiker talk trying to baffle people with BS.
What better way to prove your technology than in the court of public opinion? If they could actualy sell a working device which did what they say the public would beat a path to their door, VCs would be crawling out of the woodwork, they would have no need for this ludicrous publicity stunt.
Cool. Does this mean you dont need gunpowder anymore to blow up your toys? After firecrackers were banned it was pretty hard to wreak suitable destruction, what with the local gunsmith refusing to sell me blackpowder and then the farming supply shop refusing to sell me weed killer and fertiliser, it was just too hard. A cannister full of hydrogen sounds like a hoot.
Yes... just like a calculator is another 'convinience' for people who are clearly far too STUPID to do math.
:)
Yes... just like a dictionary is another 'convinience' (sic) for people who are clearly far too STUPID to spell.
Even in my book, feeding ergot to pointy haired bosses and marketroids sounds a bit harsh:-
Ergotism struck the peasants and killed thousands of people. It was called Holy Fire because of the buring sensations at the extremities from gangrenous ergotism. The people suffered from swollen blisters, rotting flesh, and loss of limbs.
(Yeah I know what you meant)
This is so true and really worth keeping in mind whenever you return something. If you are returning something which is defective and the store cannot replace it with a non-defective item then they'll refund your money - its not worth their while doing anything else. Case in point I returned two defective toys on the weekend to a local department store and asked for replacements which they couldn't supply as they were out of stock. The shop assistant then offered to give me gift vouchers instead of a refund. I refused and said I wanted non-defective toys. She said it was store policy to give gift vouchers and not refunds. I then asked if it was store policy to sell defective goods and not give refunds. At this point she gave me my money back. Shame was I really wanted the toys for my friend's kids and now I'll have to look elsewhere for them.
Thats strange. I was recently doing some work at a company in China, when I used their connection for web browsing none of the sites that I thought would be blocked were blocked - and I certainly didn't cause a RST on the public IP address that the connection was NATd through. I was a bit leary at first but using the connection at odd hours on the weekend - the only time I was able to schedule my work - it was really fast, faster than using VPN through a local gateway (in the same city) to my corporate network (which has min 2MB to my squid proxy in a different country). During normal weekday hours the performance was terrible - huge packet loss, lots of latency and very slow throughput, I just chalked this up to incompetence on the part of the local network admins not the great firewall.
I can imagine that home broadband takes a different path than company connections, maybe next time I'll try tcptraceroute.
Have you tried using SSL to your squid proxy? Or is that asking for trouble?