Equally possible it was answered by a call centre which handles lots of card companies, and the person answering the phone wasn't paying enough attention to the message which flashed up on their screen saying who they should claim to be.
If you're an independent contractor, expect something like 35% tax.
Riiiiighhht. I can just see the tax form now:
TAX FORM 2006/7
Answer all questions in full, or write "NOT APPLICABLE" if the question does not apply
How much money did you earn in the tax year 2006/2007?$103,200 What was the source of this income?Illegally hacking overseas computers, extorting money through making DDoS threats
Obviously, I can't say for sure, but at a wild guess, I'd say that if you're going to be buying such a service from some dodgy hacker type, it's probably a good idea to pay them.
We aren't talking nuclear secrets here, we are talking like bank SSL sessions.
If you've got software on someone elses computer, why bother cracking the bank SSL session? Just run a keylogger and pick up anything which looks like a username/password.
Or, if you want to be really smart (and I bet you anything you like if it hasn't been done yet, sooner or later it will be), replace the DLLs which handle SSL transactions in IE with versions hacked to log what goes on and report back,
Unfortunately, in the real world you've got to be somewhat pragmatic.
Granted, Windows is an ass. But in the business world, there still exist many apps for which there is no half-decent Linux equivalent - generally the kind of thing which doesn't get much work from the "itch-scratching" crowd and is far too boring to spend your free time on - things like accounts and finance software immediately spring to mind.
Even where a half-decent equivalent does exist, there are other things to consider:
1. Migrating the data from the existing system (difficult). 2. Convincing the finance director that price bears little relationship to quality or support in the software world. (You'd have thought a finance person could grasp that idea when supply has much less of an impact on price than demand - ie. how much can we get away with selling this for? - but it's amazing how often that's not the case). 3. Covincing the finance director that it's worth the time invested in learning a new system. Which will be a hard sell, as time is money just as much as a purchased product is - and this man is signing off your wages every month.
ATEOTD, if you're running systems for a living rather than just your own home PC, you've got to decide if you're running a business or pushing a religion. If it's a religion, fine, preach Free software from the rooftops. If it's the real world, you either need to seek out a large company where you can specialise in something which has nothing to do with Windows or a company of any size which doesn't use Windows at all - and these opportunities can be a bit thin on the ground.
I was told Windows XP would be great, it's widely credited with being worse than Windows 98.
I think I know you. You're not some Australian chap who worked for a while in the support department of an IT support company in Dorset, UK, by any chance?
He asked me why I'd want to run NT4 instead of Windows '98, as '98 was "just as stable".
I told that support company that I didn't want to be put through to him again.
This can pervade even further still, when managers start dictating IT from the same mindset.
True story: a manager at my employer felt that our email system was "too complicated" and wanted to spend about £18,000 replacing it with Lotus Notes.
The reason? His email never worked properly.
The reason for this? It had never been configured properly (mainly because of my predecessor's mindset which was "let the user configure everything; we'll document it (but badly) and if it goes wrong it's their problem"). Whenever he got to one of the company offices, email stopped working so he'd grab hold of the first person he found and ask them to fix it.
The solution? Me or my new assistant to configure it properly.
No, but they do replace computers which are broken.
And when a computer is so riddled in spyware that it hardly boots, the concept of wiping and reinstalling is "too difficult" (we'll gloss over the fact that at this point you have little to lose) and you don't know anyone who can "fix" it for free or nearly free, it's effectively "broken"
Not true. You can decide to upgrade immediately or you can decide to be terminated.
Of course, a lot of companies are paying for Windows & office in a combined annual license fee so it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether or not they upgrade.
and as long as you have a user smart enough to avoid the majority or viruses and spyware XP doesn't crash very often.
You also need to avoid dodgy hardware. USB network adapters are an excellent example of hardware which tends to be flaky.
Tell me, why does the driver for a USB network adapter need to sit at a point in the OS where it can bing the whole thing crashing to the ground? (Not that Linux is any better in that regard, but if Windows is so much "better"...)
the article is about not upgrading every PC in your 50-office company
Chances are if your company is that big you're probably under an Open agreement with Microsoft which allows you to install whatever Windows version you damn well please, provided you keep on paying every year.
Yeah I know. But every time someone points out that monopolies only have one set of rules to abide by - their own - a bunch of trolls pop out of the woodwork to warble on about how "Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly because Linux and Apple exist!"
Yes, dictionary definition of monopoly is 100%.
However, "close enough to a monopoly as makes no difference in terms of who sets the rules" is not anything like 100%.
I therefore present my Rubber Troll Mallet (TM) (patent pending). Applied sharply to the head of any troll, they scatter back into the woodwork at a rate of knots.
I'm going to pre-empt all those people who will appear squawing about Ubuntu and Apple by pointing out two things:
1. The dictionary definition of a monopoly ("100% of the market") does not have to be true for much the same effects to be felt in the real world. 2. What percentage of desktop PCs (other than their own) do they know of that run Ubuntu?
And Communist theory basically states that eventually the concentration of wealth becomes so great that the poor can't even afford their next meal. They overthrow the incumbents and attempt to set up their own government which is fair to all.
The first part of that has been demonstrated as being broadly accurate many times. The second, rather less so.
Conversely, if someone has broken laws, and does have something to hide (and everyone does), chances are they're even more mad at the invasion of privacy.
I'm coming from the other direction. I've already got LDAP, and a bunch of services which use it over SSL as an authentication backend.
I'm therefore not too concerned about the LDAP connection being sniffed, but there's not a lot of point in securing the LDAP connection if you then use the data exchanged in the SSL-secured connection to authenticate over an unencrypted channel (eg. plain IMAP).
Seems to me that in my case, I'd be better off dedicating my time to dropping support for any services which use LDAP as the authentication backend but are themselves unencrypted.
If track A is mainly quiet, then in the 20 seconds or so in which it mixes to track B (with the CD track mark half way through, the volume dramatically increases and remains high throughout track B, then any normalisation algorithm, looking at the tracks on their own, will bring the levels up on track A and down on track B, completely ruining the mix.
The parameters aren't set in the MP3 file, the parameters are used when encoding the MP3 file. So there may be a noticeable volume change between file A and B, for example.
This should be much less of an issue with RVA, but for some reason very few players seem to support that.
More to the point, if it can detect something, check whether or not the host is patched against it, and block accordingly, you could go one step further and get the patch installed at the same time.
Crossfading doesn't work very well when you're playing an album which consists of solid music from beginning to end, with arbitary track markers there more so you can jump to any particular part of the album than because there is a noticeably different track.
Marrillion's "Misplaced Childhood" album does just this, as does Crash Test Dummies, "God Shuffled His Feet" on some tracks.
Slashdot Mirror
To you, "Irony" means "sort of like iron", doesn't it?
Equally possible it was answered by a call centre which handles lots of card companies, and the person answering the phone wasn't paying enough attention to the message which flashed up on their screen saying who they should claim to be.
If you're an independent contractor, expect something like 35% tax.
Riiiiighhht. I can just see the tax form now:
TAX FORM 2006/7
Answer all questions in full, or write "NOT APPLICABLE" if the question does not apply
How much money did you earn in the tax year 2006/2007? $103,200
What was the source of this income? Illegally hacking overseas computers, extorting money through making DDoS threats
Obviously, I can't say for sure, but at a wild guess, I'd say that if you're going to be buying such a service from some dodgy hacker type, it's probably a good idea to pay them.
We aren't talking nuclear secrets here, we are talking like bank SSL sessions.
If you've got software on someone elses computer, why bother cracking the bank SSL session? Just run a keylogger and pick up anything which looks like a username/password.
Or, if you want to be really smart (and I bet you anything you like if it hasn't been done yet, sooner or later it will be), replace the DLLs which handle SSL transactions in IE with versions hacked to log what goes on and report back,
They're designed to stay under the radar
Well in that case they're not designed very well.
Unfortunately, in the real world you've got to be somewhat pragmatic.
Granted, Windows is an ass. But in the business world, there still exist many apps for which there is no half-decent Linux equivalent - generally the kind of thing which doesn't get much work from the "itch-scratching" crowd and is far too boring to spend your free time on - things like accounts and finance software immediately spring to mind.
Even where a half-decent equivalent does exist, there are other things to consider:
1. Migrating the data from the existing system (difficult).
2. Convincing the finance director that price bears little relationship to quality or support in the software world. (You'd have thought a finance person could grasp that idea when supply has much less of an impact on price than demand - ie. how much can we get away with selling this for? - but it's amazing how often that's not the case).
3. Covincing the finance director that it's worth the time invested in learning a new system. Which will be a hard sell, as time is money just as much as a purchased product is - and this man is signing off your wages every month.
ATEOTD, if you're running systems for a living rather than just your own home PC, you've got to decide if you're running a business or pushing a religion. If it's a religion, fine, preach Free software from the rooftops. If it's the real world, you either need to seek out a large company where you can specialise in something which has nothing to do with Windows or a company of any size which doesn't use Windows at all - and these opportunities can be a bit thin on the ground.
I was told Windows XP would be great, it's widely credited with being worse than Windows 98.
I think I know you. You're not some Australian chap who worked for a while in the support department of an IT support company in Dorset, UK, by any chance?
He asked me why I'd want to run NT4 instead of Windows '98, as '98 was "just as stable".
I told that support company that I didn't want to be put through to him again.
This can pervade even further still, when managers start dictating IT from the same mindset.
True story: a manager at my employer felt that our email system was "too complicated" and wanted to spend about £18,000 replacing it with Lotus Notes.
The reason? His email never worked properly.
The reason for this? It had never been configured properly (mainly because of my predecessor's mindset which was "let the user configure everything; we'll document it (but badly) and if it goes wrong it's their problem"). Whenever he got to one of the company offices, email stopped working so he'd grab hold of the first person he found and ask them to fix it.
The solution? Me or my new assistant to configure it properly.
No, but they do replace computers which are broken.
And when a computer is so riddled in spyware that it hardly boots, the concept of wiping and reinstalling is "too difficult" (we'll gloss over the fact that at this point you have little to lose) and you don't know anyone who can "fix" it for free or nearly free, it's effectively "broken"
It is not up to you to decide.
Not true. You can decide to upgrade immediately or you can decide to be terminated.
Of course, a lot of companies are paying for Windows & office in a combined annual license fee so it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether or not they upgrade.
and as long as you have a user smart enough to avoid the majority or viruses and spyware XP doesn't crash very often.
You also need to avoid dodgy hardware. USB network adapters are an excellent example of hardware which tends to be flaky.
Tell me, why does the driver for a USB network adapter need to sit at a point in the OS where it can bing the whole thing crashing to the ground? (Not that Linux is any better in that regard, but if Windows is so much "better"...)
the article is about not upgrading every PC in your 50-office company
Chances are if your company is that big you're probably under an Open agreement with Microsoft which allows you to install whatever Windows version you damn well please, provided you keep on paying every year.
Yeah I know. But every time someone points out that monopolies only have one set of rules to abide by - their own - a bunch of trolls pop out of the woodwork to warble on about how "Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly because Linux and Apple exist!"
Yes, dictionary definition of monopoly is 100%.
However, "close enough to a monopoly as makes no difference in terms of who sets the rules" is not anything like 100%.
I therefore present my Rubber Troll Mallet (TM) (patent pending). Applied sharply to the head of any troll, they scatter back into the woodwork at a rate of knots.
I'm going to pre-empt all those people who will appear squawing about Ubuntu and Apple by pointing out two things:
1. The dictionary definition of a monopoly ("100% of the market") does not have to be true for much the same effects to be felt in the real world.
2. What percentage of desktop PCs (other than their own) do they know of that run Ubuntu?
And Communist theory basically states that eventually the concentration of wealth becomes so great that the poor can't even afford their next meal. They overthrow the incumbents and attempt to set up their own government which is fair to all.
The first part of that has been demonstrated as being broadly accurate many times. The second, rather less so.
Conversely, if someone has broken laws, and does have something to hide (and everyone does), chances are they're even more mad at the invasion of privacy.
He could wrap it in the User Must Wear Chicken Suit License
Now that sounds like my kind of software license.
It does, if you assume that past behavior is the sole predictor of future behavior.
Not terribly helpful for profiling suicide bombers, then, as very few attack twice.
I'm coming from the other direction. I've already got LDAP, and a bunch of services which use it over SSL as an authentication backend.
I'm therefore not too concerned about the LDAP connection being sniffed, but there's not a lot of point in securing the LDAP connection if you then use the data exchanged in the SSL-secured connection to authenticate over an unencrypted channel (eg. plain IMAP).
Seems to me that in my case, I'd be better off dedicating my time to dropping support for any services which use LDAP as the authentication backend but are themselves unencrypted.
Not true at all.
If track A is mainly quiet, then in the 20 seconds or so in which it mixes to track B (with the CD track mark half way through, the volume dramatically increases and remains high throughout track B, then any normalisation algorithm, looking at the tracks on their own, will bring the levels up on track A and down on track B, completely ruining the mix.
The parameters aren't set in the MP3 file, the parameters are used when encoding the MP3 file. So there may be a noticeable volume change between file A and B, for example.
This should be much less of an issue with RVA, but for some reason very few players seem to support that.
More to the point, if it can detect something, check whether or not the host is patched against it, and block accordingly, you could go one step further and get the patch installed at the same time.
I hope you published it because otherwise they'll get you for patent infringement.
Crossfading doesn't work very well when you're playing an album which consists of solid music from beginning to end, with arbitary track markers there more so you can jump to any particular part of the album than because there is a noticeably different track.
Marrillion's "Misplaced Childhood" album does just this, as does Crash Test Dummies, "God Shuffled His Feet" on some tracks.