1. Does the software install itself without the user's knowledge or consent? 2. Does it monitor user behaviour of any kind? 3. Does it do this monitoring without the user's consent?
Of the items you listed. only item 2 is required of spyware.
The other are properties of viruses and/or worms.
Common rootkit keyloggers are all three, hrmm..
Mabye we should slap up a site comparing Gator feature by feature to your average Enemy-of-McAfee, and let it sink in to the luser base of this product what it really is.
I always carry a knife with me. Case C1, Gerber Gatorback, things of that ilk.. Four inch blades that stand abuse.
Car problems: Has either fixed the problem or kept the problem from becoming so bad I couldn't make it home dozens of times. Used it to extract myself from a wreck once, and once to cut the seatbelt of someone else.
Computer problems: Have basically taken everything imaginable apart with a knife.. It's a flat head, a phillips, a torx, a pry bar and if you're real careful with knife selection a pair of pliers. Have disassembled everything from a PDA to an IBM midrange with only my knife.
Lock outs: Nothing is better for getting your I-forgot-my-keys-ass back in as a knife with a stiff blade. Pop doors, uncatch windows, etc..
Personal protection: Having been a patron of rough redneck bars for as long as I can remember, nothing chills a drunken asshole faster than the prospect of you poking them with a mean looking knife. 99.9% of the time them noticing you reach for the pouch on your belt and they puss. Only twice have I actually had to threaten to have it have an effect, and only once used it as a weapon. (Drunk, barely standing asshole in a Canadian hole-in-the-wall had a thing against long hair hippies. He swung, connected, fell on the floor.. Got back up, cuz I was still standing and now cursing the asshole that suckerpunched me, and tried to grab a stool. Showed him a nice shiny knife, he put the stool down and tried to swing at me again.. Poked him in the sternum when he missed. Bled like a stuck pig, lying on the floor and crying like a baby..
Army Surplus. Go buy some US military pants. Can get em in any size a human comes in, from 90lb-and-6-foot-5 stick to I-replace-the-springs-in-my-Crown-Vic-yearly, and so long as you don't tie the cuff pulls, they look enough like the trendy cargo pants no one will ever notice. They come in black, grey, khaki, artic blue, and artic white..
Side note: Look at the label and price before you buy. If they're not $30ish a pair and made in China (Or are made in China, period) don't buy em. They're cheap knockoffs. The major company that sells to the DoD and to the surplus market puts a nice loud label stating "MADE IN USA" in em, and they last like 10 times longer than the knockoffs.
I have a cell phone, a Palm Vx, knife, screwdrivers.. I need them all. I have a memory like a rusted bear trap (very hard to make anything go click), I have to be in communication with people at all hours of the day (on call ISP tech) and I spend most of my time taking things apart.
If not for the PDA, I'd have to carry a phone book, maps, notebook, and laptop. If not for the phone, I'd have a pager and a pocket full of quarters. If not for the tools, I'd be running back and forth to the toolbox. Don't start on the knife, I'd have that anyway.
At the moment, I have three electronic devices, two full size screwdrivers, the biggest Gerber single blade they make in 60/40 serrate. a 7/16 box wrench, a tape measure, change, a Zippo, and a pack of Lucky Strike in my pockets..
I look like a fool, but I can survive the day..
It honestly has gotten better as newer stuff (the trendy combo devices) hit the market. I used to have a flap in my jacket so I could stuff my 486 Thinkpad in there, plus PCMCIA cards so I could dial up over the cell. PDA fills the role now. Used to carry a pager and small brick sized phone.. Now the phone doubles as the pager, and it's hella small. Smaller than the pager.
Silicone?! Are SCO claiming all fake boobs belong to them, now, too?! Naw.. Darl figures that the stock price is going to sag soon, so he's going to pump it full of silicone..
More genres than four.. There are programmers that write vehicle controllers, ones that write aircraft software, ones that write for RDBMS, ones that write against the back end of one of a thousand specialized software packages. I've worked with the top 1% of about five different specialities, and none of them would overlap significantly.. Sure, one of the embedded guys was pretty hot with hacking an ethernet driver, a couple of the RPG guys were handy in C++, but they're pretty mutually exclusive..
Me, I'm not top 1%. I'm not top 50%. But I can do anything you give me with a moderate amount of expertise.
Naw.. Call a couple uni labs, call a couple big-name chemical houses, call a few DoD research facilities. Tell em you're a college student looking for some heavy water to use in your independant study physics course. It's not a verboten compound and is widely used in physics courses. Somebody is going to have some. And you only need a little.
Go classic and recycle, pick up a late 70's Eagle Wagon..
4wd, great ground clearance, can fit any large mammal behind the wheel, large amount of cargo space. The inline 6 was pretty good on mileage, but definatly swap the gnarly carb with something out of the Holley performance catalog. It'll get better gas mileage yet. You could also get a small-block V8 some years, but really it doesn't need it.
Paint it a nice dark color, put some 31x10.50 semi-aggressives all around, and you won't have to feel like a wuss driving a grocery getter.
And while your emissions impact will be larger than a brand new vehicle, you're recycling. No one had to shred trees, strip mine, or do anything negative to the environment because you bought it.
Thought you could do evil tricks with the real IBM MGA boards to make them do graphics.. I know internally they were just drawing indivitual pixels to a framebuffer at least.. Happened to recall they had a res spec, so I peeked, saw it was the same as Herc (2 pixels diff) and lumped them.
Yeah, goffed the CGA res.. Where I remembered that from is beyond me, may have been another CGA mode, heh, and xGA did indeed do 256 colors, from a 65K palette. But VGA I know was originally specced only for 320x200x256 or 320x240x256. Anything above that is not real VGA, but VESAs version of VGA.
Perhaps the fellow meant MCGA? It was out on the market first, and if you bought an IBM name brand it was what you got.
Quick rundown..
MDA/Hercules = 2 colors, 720x360ish CGA = 4 colors, 160x200 usually. EGA = 16 colors, up to 640x350. MCGA = 256 colors, up to 720x400 VGA = 256 colors, 320x200. SVGA, 256 colors, up to 1600x1200. Memory bound and all.
Then there were the ones only computing professionals bought.
RGBI = 16 colors, up to like 640x320. 8514 = 256 colors, 1024x768. EGA-II = 64 colors, 640x400. XGA = 16 colors, 1024x768..
Seem to remember another one around 1985-86, PGA, that was capable of doing 640x480x16bpp.
For example, a WAP is an embedded device.. This can function as a WAP.
An electronic turnstile counter is an embedded device. This can function as an electronic turnstile counter.
These are examples of a PC as an embedded device.. I think you'd have no argument that the vehicle controller in your minivan is an embedded device, right? There's an in-house port of linux, etc, to the older style Chrysler vehicle controllers out there.. Turns your minivan into a PC.
It was only a matter of time before some cheap geek figured out they could stick a micro board in one of those $8 ammo cannisters you find at surplus stores and regged a nifty domain name for it. I know people and companies that have been sticking embedded stuff in the 50cal and 7.68 carbine containers for ten years..
Really, this article should be (-1, Obvious), if not (-1, Been-there-done-that)..
Only the last part was tongue in cheek, I used this way of storing hardware for years. The last part was inspired by a neighbor, who after being invited up for a beer looked at the wall and assumed I was an art-student doing an installation piece. She wanted to take photos, the whole nine yards, despite my dissuasion that I really was just a computer geek too lazy to put up shelves..
Now, Lars could be considered a legal representative of the band Metallica, right?
And Lars just said, on my very own TV, that he (and logically Metallica) don't care if we toss their songs around the net like candy, right?
And Metallica, not the record label, owns copyright on those songs, right?
Cool. Permission from a major copyright holder to p2p..
I think I'll go register ridethelightningmp3s.net and masterofpuppetsmp3s.net later.. I've always thought the new Metallica fans should have heard them when they actually, y'know, didn't suck.
PBS would be banned.. Why risk pissing off some creationist moron next time they run a special on early man that mentions in a offhanded way that Homo Habilis evolved into Homo Sapiens?
And Jerry Falwell would make sure the Teletubbies were unavailable. They're deviant homosexual agents of the devil according to him..
1. Look around your apartment/office/workspace. Find a big ass expanse of wall. 2. Go down to the local hardware, pick up some dressy brass brads. Package of 50, $1.29. 3. Tack the hardware to the wall you selected in step #1 using brads you bought in step #2. A discarded Seagate hard drive works well to pound in the brads.
As an alternative, if you are truly concerned about static electricity and insist on storing things in static bags.
1. Look around your apartment/office/workspace. Find a big ass expanse of wall. 2. Go down to the local office supply store, pick up some plastic headed thumbtacks. Package of 100, $1.99. I suggest bright colors. 3. Tack the lips of the static bags to the wall you selected in step #1 using thumbtacks you bought in step #2.
If you want, you can prolong the life of your new storage solution by first lining the wall with adhesive cork. (Under $3 per 1.5x6 foot roll), and you can dress it up with some crown moulding (Under $4 per 8 foot section). If you chose not to, a quart of paint is $3.29 and a quart of spackle is $1.99 when you move.
You now have a vertical storage solution that is not only artsy (impress the ladies, call it "The Woe of Societal Obselecence" and moan about Karl Marx.) but allows you to instantly visually catalogue your hardware! No more coworkers making off with your spare raid controllers, they'll leave a huge visual gap in the wall!
I did piecemeal consulting for a couple years for my bread and butter.
Lessee now...
Top rec would probably to be look into at least limited liability insurance, while it never saved me, I know a couple people that were very very grateful for it saving their asses after something went very wrong..
Second thing? Demand a premium for off hours work. Give them a phone number they can call. Tell them if they need emergency work done, give you a ring. I ran into a fair number of companies that were unwilling to pay the "on call" retainer despite actually needing someone on call, but when someone blew up the HP Laserjet at 5am once a month, they were more than happy to pay me an excessive amount to drag my ass out of bed and fix it for them. Incidental expenses versus month-to-month, I suppose.. Usually ended up making more money this way anyway, although it wasn't nearly as steady..
I saw someone mention loaner equipment.. Oh boy, does loaning equipment ever amaze them.. Just make sure to label it prominently if it's large enough, and let them know in writing at the time you expect it back when the new stuff comes in. Had one disagreement with a customer about a loaner monitor he could have sworn was his and another customer that ended up walking with one of my nicest micro AT systems, the one I took to job sites to clone hard drives because I used it a temporary stop-gap when his NT server died.. He decided it worked better than the old server, and when the new parts came in and I went to install them he asked how much he'd have to pay just to leave it all in place.. I loved that little Olivetti too..:(..
If it's a fixed-cost project, make sure you have every little proposed detail in writing. Too many places will try to weasel you after the fact. It's usually only little things, but when you've just conceded to not install those Ethernet repeaters to save a buck and now the network is flaking, it's not worth your added labor.
Van Halen was looooud.. Man. I sat in front of the speakers at a Slayer gig and I didn't have half the ear bleed I had from much farther back for Hagar and the boys..
I wish they would too.. Microsoft has sued a few times to keep people from seeing their OEM pricing deals and the terms attached to them.. Release the price and bang, class action suit for overcharging in the retail channel. I'm sure if they could prove Dell pays $18/copy and Joe Retail pays $199.99, some enterprising lawyer is going to class action all over dat biznatch.
Aww, come now.. Toss on a heat pump and use the action of decompressing the CO2 into a hot plate! You know you wanna! It also needs it's own remotely-controllable webcam and a GPS locator! That way, when you have a fire, or need to make a hotpocket, yet forgotten where you last needed to do so, you just fire up your browser and take a look at the embedder mini-server on it!
I'll work on it after I'm done adding MP3 playback to my Sony tape deck. I've already got it playing low bitrate.ogg and.wav, and the 360 degree rotating webcam with 802.11b uplink are done, but I don't think it'll be actually useful until it plays mp3s streamed from the cassette.
Oh, it also plays Atari and Commodore tape games too. Takes 20 minutes to load Frogger into Flash, and SID emulation crashes it every time, but those are problems we'll deal with in a consumer firmware upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
(only exception is Debian, which is reasonably popular at ISPs).
:) )
Ever wonder why you get that slow down in your Bittorrent leeching about 1 AM local time? That's when your ISP is syncing its Debian tree.
(Been true at at least four places I know of.
1. Does the software install itself without the user's knowledge or consent?
2. Does it monitor user behaviour of any kind?
3. Does it do this monitoring without the user's consent?
Of the items you listed. only item 2 is required of spyware.
The other are properties of viruses and/or worms.
Common rootkit keyloggers are all three, hrmm..
Mabye we should slap up a site comparing Gator feature by feature to your average Enemy-of-McAfee, and let it sink in to the luser base of this product what it really is.
And just think, that's what Diebold has running their voting machines.
Old school IDE hotswap:
Make IDE support a module.
Use a modern IDE controller.
Add a $9 four pole switch to the plug powering the hard drive.
Boot from SCSI.
Need to swap the disc? Unmount, rmmod, power down, swap, power up, mount.
I always carry a knife with me. Case C1, Gerber Gatorback, things of that ilk.. Four inch blades that stand abuse.
Car problems:
Has either fixed the problem or kept the problem from becoming so bad I couldn't make it home dozens of times. Used it to extract myself from a wreck once, and once to cut the seatbelt of someone else.
Computer problems:
Have basically taken everything imaginable apart with a knife.. It's a flat head, a phillips, a torx, a pry bar and if you're real careful with knife selection a pair of pliers. Have disassembled everything from a PDA to an IBM midrange with only my knife.
Lock outs:
Nothing is better for getting your I-forgot-my-keys-ass back in as a knife with a stiff blade. Pop doors, uncatch windows, etc..
Personal protection:
Having been a patron of rough redneck bars for as long as I can remember, nothing chills a drunken asshole faster than the prospect of you poking them with a mean looking knife. 99.9% of the time them noticing you reach for the pouch on your belt and they puss. Only twice have I actually had to threaten to have it have an effect, and only once used it as a weapon. (Drunk, barely standing asshole in a Canadian hole-in-the-wall had a thing against long hair hippies. He swung, connected, fell on the floor.. Got back up, cuz I was still standing and now cursing the asshole that suckerpunched me, and tried to grab a stool. Showed him a nice shiny knife, he put the stool down and tried to swing at me again.. Poked him in the sternum when he missed. Bled like a stuck pig, lying on the floor and crying like a baby..
Army Surplus. Go buy some US military pants. Can get em in any size a human comes in, from 90lb-and-6-foot-5 stick to I-replace-the-springs-in-my-Crown-Vic-yearly, and so long as you don't tie the cuff pulls, they look enough like the trendy cargo pants no one will ever notice. They come in black, grey, khaki, artic blue, and artic white..
Side note: Look at the label and price before you buy. If they're not $30ish a pair and made in China (Or are made in China, period) don't buy em. They're cheap knockoffs. The major company that sells to the DoD and to the surplus market puts a nice loud label stating "MADE IN USA" in em, and they last like 10 times longer than the knockoffs.
It's not consumerism, it's convenience.
I have a cell phone, a Palm Vx, knife, screwdrivers.. I need them all. I have a memory like a rusted bear trap (very hard to make anything go click), I have to be in communication with people at all hours of the day (on call ISP tech) and I spend most of my time taking things apart.
If not for the PDA, I'd have to carry a phone book, maps, notebook, and laptop. If not for the phone, I'd have a pager and a pocket full of quarters. If not for the tools, I'd be running back and forth to the toolbox. Don't start on the knife, I'd have that anyway.
At the moment, I have three electronic devices, two full size screwdrivers, the biggest Gerber single blade they make in 60/40 serrate. a 7/16 box wrench, a tape measure, change, a Zippo, and a pack of Lucky Strike in my pockets..
I look like a fool, but I can survive the day..
It honestly has gotten better as newer stuff (the trendy combo devices) hit the market. I used to have a flap in my jacket so I could stuff my 486 Thinkpad in there, plus PCMCIA cards so I could dial up over the cell. PDA fills the role now. Used to carry a pager and small brick sized phone.. Now the phone doubles as the pager, and it's hella small. Smaller than the pager.
Silicone?! Are SCO claiming all fake boobs belong to them, now, too?!
Naw.. Darl figures that the stock price is going to sag soon, so he's going to pump it full of silicone..
Hey, it worked for his wife!
More genres than four.. There are programmers that write vehicle controllers, ones that write aircraft software, ones that write for RDBMS, ones that write against the back end of one of a thousand specialized software packages. I've worked with the top 1% of about five different specialities, and none of them would overlap significantly.. Sure, one of the embedded guys was pretty hot with hacking an ethernet driver, a couple of the RPG guys were handy in C++, but they're pretty mutually exclusive..
Me, I'm not top 1%. I'm not top 50%. But I can do anything you give me with a moderate amount of expertise.
Naw.. Call a couple uni labs, call a couple big-name chemical houses, call a few DoD research facilities. Tell em you're a college student looking for some heavy water to use in your independant study physics course. It's not a verboten compound and is widely used in physics courses. Somebody is going to have some. And you only need a little.
Go classic and recycle, pick up a late 70's Eagle Wagon..
4wd, great ground clearance, can fit any large mammal behind the wheel, large amount of cargo space. The inline 6 was pretty good on mileage, but definatly swap the gnarly carb with something out of the Holley performance catalog. It'll get better gas mileage yet. You could also get a small-block V8 some years, but really it doesn't need it.
Paint it a nice dark color, put some 31x10.50 semi-aggressives all around, and you won't have to feel like a wuss driving a grocery getter.
And while your emissions impact will be larger than a brand new vehicle, you're recycling. No one had to shred trees, strip mine, or do anything negative to the environment because you bought it.
...cheapskate companies do not use MS certified employess that cause the problem
MS certified monkeys are still monkeys.
You need admins who are not monkeys, not "Certified" "professional" monkeys that paid $2K for a week long cram course.
Thought you could do evil tricks with the real IBM MGA boards to make them do graphics.. I know internally they were just drawing indivitual pixels to a framebuffer at least.. Happened to recall they had a res spec, so I peeked, saw it was the same as Herc (2 pixels diff) and lumped them.
Yeah, goffed the CGA res.. Where I remembered that from is beyond me, may have been another CGA mode, heh, and xGA did indeed do 256 colors, from a 65K palette. But VGA I know was originally specced only for 320x200x256 or 320x240x256. Anything above that is not real VGA, but VESAs version of VGA.
Perhaps the fellow meant MCGA? It was out on the market first, and if you bought an IBM name brand it was what you got.
Quick rundown..
MDA/Hercules = 2 colors, 720x360ish
CGA = 4 colors, 160x200 usually.
EGA = 16 colors, up to 640x350.
MCGA = 256 colors, up to 720x400
VGA = 256 colors, 320x200.
SVGA, 256 colors, up to 1600x1200. Memory bound and all.
Then there were the ones only computing professionals bought.
RGBI = 16 colors, up to like 640x320.
8514 = 256 colors, 1024x768.
EGA-II = 64 colors, 640x400.
XGA = 16 colors, 1024x768..
Seem to remember another one around 1985-86, PGA, that was capable of doing 640x480x16bpp.
I dunno..
For example, a WAP is an embedded device.. This can function as a WAP.
An electronic turnstile counter is an embedded device. This can function as an electronic turnstile counter.
These are examples of a PC as an embedded device.. I think you'd have no argument that the vehicle controller in your minivan is an embedded device, right? There's an in-house port of linux, etc, to the older style Chrysler vehicle controllers out there.. Turns your minivan into a PC.
The line is quite thin between the two..
It was only a matter of time before some cheap geek figured out they could stick a micro board in one of those $8 ammo cannisters you find at surplus stores and regged a nifty domain name for it. I know people and companies that have been sticking embedded stuff in the 50cal and 7.68 carbine containers for ten years..
Really, this article should be (-1, Obvious), if not (-1, Been-there-done-that)..
Only the last part was tongue in cheek, I used this way of storing hardware for years. The last part was inspired by a neighbor, who after being invited up for a beer looked at the wall and assumed I was an art-student doing an installation piece. She wanted to take photos, the whole nine yards, despite my dissuasion that I really was just a computer geek too lazy to put up shelves..
I saw that too.
Now, Lars could be considered a legal representative of the band Metallica, right?
And Lars just said, on my very own TV, that he (and logically Metallica) don't care if we toss their songs around the net like candy, right?
And Metallica, not the record label, owns copyright on those songs, right?
Cool. Permission from a major copyright holder to p2p..
I think I'll go register ridethelightningmp3s.net and masterofpuppetsmp3s.net later.. I've always thought the new Metallica fans should have heard them when they actually, y'know, didn't suck.
PBS would be banned.. Why risk pissing off some creationist moron next time they run a special on early man that mentions in a offhanded way that Homo Habilis evolved into Homo Sapiens?
And Jerry Falwell would make sure the Teletubbies were unavailable. They're deviant homosexual agents of the devil according to him..
1. Look around your apartment/office/workspace. Find a big ass expanse of wall.
2. Go down to the local hardware, pick up some dressy brass brads. Package of 50, $1.29.
3. Tack the hardware to the wall you selected in step #1 using brads you bought in step #2. A discarded Seagate hard drive works well to pound in the brads.
As an alternative, if you are truly concerned about static electricity and insist on storing things in static bags.
1. Look around your apartment/office/workspace. Find a big ass expanse of wall.
2. Go down to the local office supply store, pick up some plastic headed thumbtacks. Package of 100, $1.99. I suggest bright colors.
3. Tack the lips of the static bags to the wall you selected in step #1 using thumbtacks you bought in step #2.
If you want, you can prolong the life of your new storage solution by first lining the wall with adhesive cork. (Under $3 per 1.5x6 foot roll), and you can dress it up with some crown moulding (Under $4 per 8 foot section). If you chose not to, a quart of paint is $3.29 and a quart of spackle is $1.99 when you move.
You now have a vertical storage solution that is not only artsy (impress the ladies, call it "The Woe of Societal Obselecence" and moan about Karl Marx.) but allows you to instantly visually catalogue your hardware! No more coworkers making off with your spare raid controllers, they'll leave a huge visual gap in the wall!
I think this last one has been the best of the lot tho..
I did piecemeal consulting for a couple years for my bread and butter.
:(..
Lessee now...
Top rec would probably to be look into at least limited liability insurance, while it never saved me, I know a couple people that were very very grateful for it saving their asses after something went very wrong..
Second thing? Demand a premium for off hours work. Give them a phone number they can call. Tell them if they need emergency work done, give you a ring. I ran into a fair number of companies that were unwilling to pay the "on call" retainer despite actually needing someone on call, but when someone blew up the HP Laserjet at 5am once a month, they were more than happy to pay me an excessive amount to drag my ass out of bed and fix it for them. Incidental expenses versus month-to-month, I suppose.. Usually ended up making more money this way anyway, although it wasn't nearly as steady..
I saw someone mention loaner equipment.. Oh boy, does loaning equipment ever amaze them.. Just make sure to label it prominently if it's large enough, and let them know in writing at the time you expect it back when the new stuff comes in. Had one disagreement with a customer about a loaner monitor he could have sworn was his and another customer that ended up walking with one of my nicest micro AT systems, the one I took to job sites to clone hard drives because I used it a temporary stop-gap when his NT server died.. He decided it worked better than the old server, and when the new parts came in and I went to install them he asked how much he'd have to pay just to leave it all in place.. I loved that little Olivetti too..
If it's a fixed-cost project, make sure you have every little proposed detail in writing. Too many places will try to weasel you after the fact. It's usually only little things, but when you've just conceded to not install those Ethernet repeaters to save a buck and now the network is flaking, it's not worth your added labor.
Van Halen was looooud.. Man. I sat in front of the speakers at a Slayer gig and I didn't have half the ear bleed I had from much farther back for Hagar and the boys..
I wish they would too.. Microsoft has sued a few times to keep people from seeing their OEM pricing deals and the terms attached to them.. Release the price and bang, class action suit for overcharging in the retail channel. I'm sure if they could prove Dell pays $18/copy and Joe Retail pays $199.99, some enterprising lawyer is going to class action all over dat biznatch.
Aww, come now.. Toss on a heat pump and use the action of decompressing the CO2 into a hot plate! You know you wanna! It also needs it's own remotely-controllable webcam and a GPS locator! That way, when you have a fire, or need to make a hotpocket, yet forgotten where you last needed to do so, you just fire up your browser and take a look at the embedder mini-server on it!
.ogg and .wav, and the 360 degree rotating webcam with 802.11b uplink are done, but I don't think it'll be actually useful until it plays mp3s streamed from the cassette.
I'll work on it after I'm done adding MP3 playback to my Sony tape deck. I've already got it playing low bitrate
Oh, it also plays Atari and Commodore tape games too. Takes 20 minutes to load Frogger into Flash, and SID emulation crashes it every time, but those are problems we'll deal with in a consumer firmware upgrade.