Funniest story I ever heard involved a 1970's computer-room retrofit into an old commercial chemistry building. The computer room was a big area in the center with a hall completely around it, and small labs all along the outside of the hall. They ran more AC and put in a raised floor, but otherwise just pretty well crammed the mainframe in. One thing they didn't consider was the fire system.
Sprinklers are as bad for chemical labs as for computers, but what the building had instead wasn't much better. The whole installation was pre-Halon; it used a CO2 dump system, with a big tank outside. (I don't know how much the tank held, but it cost them $10,000 to fill it.) In order to smother files without killing people, the CO2 vented at floor level. That's right—under the raised floor of the computer room.
Did I mention that the chemical labs around the outside were still in use? Every time a chemist set something on fire and pulled the panic handle, the system flooded CO2 into the entire building. Foom! Up would fly the floor panels, accompanied by huge clouds of dust.
—Drifting right into the old-fashioned optical smoke detectors. Foom! again. More panels blown loose, more dust flying, panicked chemists fleeing in every direction, babbling in German and Hindustani and Farsi. The system would cycle over and over until the tank was empty.
The fellow that told me about this place was amazed that, although the system got triggered two or three times while he worked there, completely emptying the tank every time, they never shattered any disk platters or CPU boards by flash-freezing them. But he did tell of coming back into the building to find the keypunch operator's potted plant frozen stiff.
ZoneAlarm Pro does that; when it asks the user whether they want to allow or block something at the firewall, it'll give its recommendation, which for the most part is correct.
Maybe so, but ZoneAlarm free edition, at any rate, has some extraordinarily foolish shortfalls.
For instance, if you update Windows or your AV/AS software and ZA gives you the "This program has changed since it last ran" message, ZA won't tell you what settings you had for the program before it was updated.
Also, despite ZoneLab's insistence to the contrary, every time ZA has updated itself, it's erased every program setting in its database. I now keep screenshots of the settings I've decided are correct.
Yes, by specters of intelligence dead and gone, by the skulking shades of competence from days past, by the ghosts of genius too faded and faint to make themselves heard any more...
What I've not seen so far is any comment that discusses how you are supposed to explain to your boss, the guy who has to pay for everything—somebody who is used to buying a truck or a welding machine or a sheet of plastic and then being able to use it any way he wants, including custom modifications—why you can't buy software any more.
It's hard enough to explain software licensing to management, the idea that you only buy the privilege to use the software without being able to rewrite and customize it. (Or even debug it decently. My boss just doesn't seem to understand why "The programmer screwed up" is generally the most detailed answer I can give him when he asks why a program garbled his monthly report or cut the wrong holes in a sheet of stainless steel.)
To management, computers are a capital purchase to be depreciated over several years, and the software that comes with them and makes them useful should be the same thing. Maintenance is for the actual cost of things that get used up or wear out or break, like gasoline and electricity and tires and keyboards. If you want to put a new motor in your truck, you just pay for the damn motor—you don't pay General Motors a fee for the privilege.
My boss gets aggravated enough at the idea that after he pays $20K for a software package, the company expects him to pay another $500 to $1500 per year to get maintenance and updates—but at least the software itself still runs after the first year.
He does understand that tax tables change, and new viruses develop, but it's still a battle to get him to pay for annual updates to antivirus or accounting software.
But if I have to tell him that the software itself will stop working after a year, he's going to go ballistic, and I doubt he's the only boss out there who will. Shifting software to a subscription-only model will simply mean that thousands of small companies will remain on their current software well into the next decade (or until OSS becomes a large enough force in the marketplace to impinge on their awareness).
It's not just the name; it's the associations. I have to deal with Windows to make a living, so I spend a good deal of time on the MS newsgroups. I try to contribute as much help as I receive, so I chose an odd and recognizable nickname (no, it's not Fortran IV), on the theory that people (especially MVPs) will put out a little more effort to help me if they see I'm willing to help others whenever I can.
Originally the MS newsgroups allowed you to post under any name you liked, so that any idiot could claim to be one of the MVPs. A while back (maybe a year ago), the newsgroups underwent a major overhaul; among other changes, you now had to log on to post. Unfortunately, you had to log on with a Passport (Hotmail) ID, and the Passport ID that went with my nickname was dead, because I'd finally gotten sick of Hotmail's crap.
It was a very real relief to me to learn that I could create a new Hotmail account and give it the newsgroup nickname I'd already been using. There's no "karma" system on the MS newsgroups, but there is a certain sense of goodwill and recognition. As any accountant can tell you, goodwill is a real asset (that can have genuine monetary value), and I didn't want to sacrifice any goodwill I might have built up.
Also, I can sympathize with Rob's sense of the arbitrariness of the action, and the lack of recourse. A group I belong to has been being harassed across the 'Net and in the physical world by a single dangerous wacko. Several people I know have had email accounts, blogs, Yahoo groups, and the like nuked for "TOS violations" because this one psycho bitch has complained.
How many of them been able to do anything to stop her, or restore their lost identities, or regain their lost content? None. How many of them have even been able to get an answer from the host service about what their specific "TOS violation" was? None.
These days, a 'Net identity is potentially a valuable property, in a very real sense. Saying, "It's their site and they get to make the rules," just doesn't seem adequate anymore.
The policy probaby [sic] had something to do with rapidly declining customer numbers at AOL as more Americans switch to broadband.
Oh, crap. AOL has always been difficult to escape. Years ago they told my company that their service--which could be ordered over the phone--had to be canceled in writing. After we sent them a letter canceling the service, they continued billing the credit card account for several months.
However, the MS05-39 vulnerability being exploited by Zotob exists in XP systems up to and including SP2, so it probably won't be long before a cousin of Zotob attacks XP.
Yes, but in the 23rd century be sure to avoid Red Shirt Linux. It's marketed for security applications, but it's prone to fatal errors, especially under hostile conditions.
If the program saves every time in UTC, and when displayed, convert it to local time, the user should not need to be worried.
Actually, that's an existing problem in Windows. Any stored UTC date and time (file times, for instance) is converted to local time according to whether DST is currently in effect, not according to whether DST was in effect when the time was stored.
Information from Windows would be more accurate if DST was abolished. (The linked article is four years old, but the problem is still there and Microsoft has stated "this behavior is by design"--meaning they're too lazy to fix it.)
Jeez, am I the only one who ever spent a month trying to forget Combo #5? Anytime I get something like Badgerbadgerbadger stuck in my head, I just play Combo #5 and it's gone...
Here's what I pulled out of my log for a few hours this afternoon:
It's nice to know that even people in the DOJ and at Microsoft are sneaking over to Slashdot while they're at work. (Though I find it hard to believe anybody at Electronic Arts can find the time.)
Note the accompanying probability of 0.13 with each of those items. The list is sorted from highest to lowest probability of truth, or correctness, or some such high-flown concept. So apparently in about one universe out of fifty-nine (according to this list), Spock wears flannel shirts and the deflector keeps bear poop off the Enterprise's hull.
I was getting tired of the constant uninstall/reinstall cycle for Norton AV caused by LiveUpdate failures, but a specific incident finally killed Norton--and Symantec--dead for me.
My boss's laptop developed some sort of flaky problem. (It's been a couple of years and I don't rememeber details.) After several days of poking around in newsgroups and Google, I finally found the problem described in Symantec's knowledge base.
It arose when a particular flawed update to Norton AV was downloaded and installed. I had reinstalled and updated NAV about a week before (it had been shut off for some time because the laptop had no internet or email connection). The cure was to uninstall and reinstall (the Norton panacea). Irritating, but no big deal.
Then I looked at the dates on the knowledge base article and the flawed update. Symantec had identified the problem five months before I downloaded the destructive update, but had not corrected the problem or removed the update from their download database.
Symantec is not a company I will ever trust again for anything related to security. In fact, it is not a company I will ever trust for disk optimization, defragmentation, or any other file-manipulation operation.
This entire set of comments is the sort of fruitless discussion that makes me wish we could just mod the original submission as a troll and get it over with.
This compares weirdly to a story on NPR this afternoon that indicated the gross domestic product of the entire nation of Afghanistan is only about $5bn/year (maybe $200 per capita) of which $2bn comes from the illegal opium trade. The numbers involved in big business get more terrifying every year, even when the company is one of the rare good guys.
Slashdot Mirror
Funniest story I ever heard involved a 1970's computer-room retrofit into an old commercial chemistry building. The computer room was a big area in the center with a hall completely around it, and small labs all along the outside of the hall. They ran more AC and put in a raised floor, but otherwise just pretty well crammed the mainframe in. One thing they didn't consider was the fire system.
Sprinklers are as bad for chemical labs as for computers, but what the building had instead wasn't much better. The whole installation was pre-Halon; it used a CO2 dump system, with a big tank outside. (I don't know how much the tank held, but it cost them $10,000 to fill it.) In order to smother files without killing people, the CO2 vented at floor level. That's right—under the raised floor of the computer room.
Did I mention that the chemical labs around the outside were still in use? Every time a chemist set something on fire and pulled the panic handle, the system flooded CO2 into the entire building. Foom! Up would fly the floor panels, accompanied by huge clouds of dust.
—Drifting right into the old-fashioned optical smoke detectors. Foom! again. More panels blown loose, more dust flying, panicked chemists fleeing in every direction, babbling in German and Hindustani and Farsi. The system would cycle over and over until the tank was empty.
The fellow that told me about this place was amazed that, although the system got triggered two or three times while he worked there, completely emptying the tank every time, they never shattered any disk platters or CPU boards by flash-freezing them. But he did tell of coming back into the building to find the keypunch operator's potted plant frozen stiff.
For instance, if you update Windows or your AV/AS software and ZA gives you the "This program has changed since it last ran" message, ZA won't tell you what settings you had for the program before it was updated.
Also, despite ZoneLab's insistence to the contrary, every time ZA has updated itself, it's erased every program setting in its database. I now keep screenshots of the settings I've decided are correct.
Yes, by specters of intelligence dead and gone, by the skulking shades of competence from days past, by the ghosts of genius too faded and faint to make themselves heard any more...
What I've not seen so far is any comment that discusses how you are supposed to explain to your boss, the guy who has to pay for everything—somebody who is used to buying a truck or a welding machine or a sheet of plastic and then being able to use it any way he wants, including custom modifications—why you can't buy software any more.
It's hard enough to explain software licensing to management, the idea that you only buy the privilege to use the software without being able to rewrite and customize it. (Or even debug it decently. My boss just doesn't seem to understand why "The programmer screwed up" is generally the most detailed answer I can give him when he asks why a program garbled his monthly report or cut the wrong holes in a sheet of stainless steel.)
To management, computers are a capital purchase to be depreciated over several years, and the software that comes with them and makes them useful should be the same thing. Maintenance is for the actual cost of things that get used up or wear out or break, like gasoline and electricity and tires and keyboards. If you want to put a new motor in your truck, you just pay for the damn motor—you don't pay General Motors a fee for the privilege.
My boss gets aggravated enough at the idea that after he pays $20K for a software package, the company expects him to pay another $500 to $1500 per year to get maintenance and updates—but at least the software itself still runs after the first year.
He does understand that tax tables change, and new viruses develop, but it's still a battle to get him to pay for annual updates to antivirus or accounting software.
But if I have to tell him that the software itself will stop working after a year, he's going to go ballistic, and I doubt he's the only boss out there who will. Shifting software to a subscription-only model will simply mean that thousands of small companies will remain on their current software well into the next decade (or until OSS becomes a large enough force in the marketplace to impinge on their awareness).Originally the MS newsgroups allowed you to post under any name you liked, so that any idiot could claim to be one of the MVPs. A while back (maybe a year ago), the newsgroups underwent a major overhaul; among other changes, you now had to log on to post. Unfortunately, you had to log on with a Passport (Hotmail) ID, and the Passport ID that went with my nickname was dead, because I'd finally gotten sick of Hotmail's crap.
It was a very real relief to me to learn that I could create a new Hotmail account and give it the newsgroup nickname I'd already been using. There's no "karma" system on the MS newsgroups, but there is a certain sense of goodwill and recognition. As any accountant can tell you, goodwill is a real asset (that can have genuine monetary value), and I didn't want to sacrifice any goodwill I might have built up.
Also, I can sympathize with Rob's sense of the arbitrariness of the action, and the lack of recourse. A group I belong to has been being harassed across the 'Net and in the physical world by a single dangerous wacko. Several people I know have had email accounts, blogs, Yahoo groups, and the like nuked for "TOS violations" because this one psycho bitch has complained.
How many of them been able to do anything to stop her, or restore their lost identities, or regain their lost content? None. How many of them have even been able to get an answer from the host service about what their specific "TOS violation" was? None.
These days, a 'Net identity is potentially a valuable property, in a very real sense. Saying, "It's their site and they get to make the rules," just doesn't seem adequate anymore.
According to my BRD:
spelt(1) A hardy wheat, Triticum spelta, grown mostly in Europe.
spelt(2) Alternate past tense and past participle of spell.
Mo-ommmm, Great-grandpa's droolin' on the seat again!
so what do you call a moon with no planet?
A binary moon...
I'll sell you one for just $200.
You crook! My classic Eddie Bauer natural nylon jacket with Icelandic alpaca lining only cost $184 (plus S&H).
...wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket...
As opposed to a natural nylon jacket, made from the finest virgin Icelandic nylon harvested from the nests of shore birds.
The policy probaby [sic] had something to do with rapidly declining customer numbers at AOL as more Americans switch to broadband.
Oh, crap. AOL has always been difficult to escape. Years ago they told my company that their service--which could be ordered over the phone--had to be canceled in writing. After we sent them a letter canceling the service, they continued billing the credit card account for several months.
However, the MS05-39 vulnerability being exploited by Zotob exists in XP systems up to and including SP2, so it probably won't be long before a cousin of Zotob attacks XP.
Still doesnt beat ANY Apple OS with or without patches :P
So, your Apple system runs AutoCAD? Or supports a Cincinnati laser control?
In the real world people don't always have a choice. Please don't be snotty just because you do.
You spelled "Minneapolis" wrong.
You spelled "Dallas" wrong.
Yes, but in the 23rd century be sure to avoid Red Shirt Linux. It's marketed for security applications, but it's prone to fatal errors, especially under hostile conditions.
If the program saves every time in UTC, and when displayed, convert it to local time, the user should not need to be worried.
Actually, that's an existing problem in Windows. Any stored UTC date and time (file times, for instance) is converted to local time according to whether DST is currently in effect, not according to whether DST was in effect when the time was stored.
Information from Windows would be more accurate if DST was abolished. (The linked article is four years old, but the problem is still there and Microsoft has stated "this behavior is by design"--meaning they're too lazy to fix it.)
Jeez, am I the only one who ever spent a month trying to forget Combo #5? Anytime I get something like Badgerbadgerbadger stuck in my head, I just play Combo #5 and it's gone...
Jigsaw puzzles
More puzzles
Computer Stupidities (warning: may provoke laughbursts)
Math articles
Quicktime panoramas
The world's most famous debunker
Variously educational, baffling, entertaining, or just pretty.
And I wonder if there's ever been a study on how many people on Slashdot never get the joke.
Here's what I pulled out of my log for a few hours this afternoon:
It's nice to know that even people in the DOJ and at Microsoft are sneaking over to Slashdot while they're at work. (Though I find it hard to believe anybody at Electronic Arts can find the time.)
Note the accompanying probability of 0.13 with each of those items. The list is sorted from highest to lowest probability of truth, or correctness, or some such high-flown concept. So apparently in about one universe out of fifty-nine (according to this list), Spock wears flannel shirts and the deflector keeps bear poop off the Enterprise's hull.
Surely this must be code for something else...
Didn't she get a lot of...um...exercise in Barbarella?
I was getting tired of the constant uninstall/reinstall cycle for Norton AV caused by LiveUpdate failures, but a specific incident finally killed Norton--and Symantec--dead for me.
My boss's laptop developed some sort of flaky problem. (It's been a couple of years and I don't rememeber details.) After several days of poking around in newsgroups and Google, I finally found the problem described in Symantec's knowledge base.
It arose when a particular flawed update to Norton AV was downloaded and installed. I had reinstalled and updated NAV about a week before (it had been shut off for some time because the laptop had no internet or email connection). The cure was to uninstall and reinstall (the Norton panacea). Irritating, but no big deal.
Then I looked at the dates on the knowledge base article and the flawed update. Symantec had identified the problem five months before I downloaded the destructive update, but had not corrected the problem or removed the update from their download database.
Symantec is not a company I will ever trust again for anything related to security. In fact, it is not a company I will ever trust for disk optimization, defragmentation, or any other file-manipulation operation.
This entire set of comments is the sort of fruitless discussion that makes me wish we could just mod the original submission as a troll and get it over with.
This compares weirdly to a story on NPR this afternoon that indicated the gross domestic product of the entire nation of Afghanistan is only about $5bn/year (maybe $200 per capita) of which $2bn comes from the illegal opium trade. The numbers involved in big business get more terrifying every year, even when the company is one of the rare good guys.