The problem with fibre to the desktop is that it is so expensive to terminate and too fragile to put behind Joe-User's computer. When he starts moving his cables around and bends the fibre, the fibre cable will break internally and will need a replacement. These replacement fibre cables are not cheap, and are far more expensive than Cat6 cables.
The best method of incorporation is simply to have a fibre backbone to the horizontal cross-connect of the facility (Or the local Switch in a small environment), and then have copper running from the switch to the user's desktop.
In this scenario, when Joe-User bends his 'internet cable' in half, he only increases attenuation, and perhaps will need a new $2.00 2metre Cat6 patch cord to support the 10Gbps coming from his wall jack.
This solution is far cheaper and accomodates for the common problems with workstation cables.
I don't remember how I got this list, but I think I picked it up on a slashdot post a while ago. Here's a list that I generally use to give people new to Linux wondering what software to use.
My thanks go out to the original poster whom I cannot remember.
1. Web Browsing? Mozilla/Firefox 2. E-mail? Thunderbird or Evolution 3. Group Calendaring? Mozilla Sunbird + Apache/SSL/WebDAV + iCal 4. Audio CD Archiving? Grip + Ogg Vorbis 5. Advanced Media Player? Xine or MPlayer 6. Audio Streaming of Archived CDs? Icecast + Ices 7. Recording of online streams for archival purposes? ALSA + ALSA Utils + Ogg Vorbis + Any required media player format in Xine or MPlayer 8. Firewall? Linux Kernel + iptables 9. Office Functionality? OpenOffice.org 10. Digital Image Editing? GIMP 11. IM Client? GAIM 12. IM Server? Jabberd 13. File sharing? NFS 14. Sane storage management? LVM 15. File compression? BZip2, GZip, or 7Zip also File Roller if you really need a GUI 16. Digital Photo Management? Gthumb or Nautilus 17. PVR? Mythtv.org 18. Video streaming? VLC (Video LAN Client) 19. X10 Home Automation? Bottlerocket 20. Remote desktop/application serving? VNC 4 21. Remote assistance? x0vncserver or the vnc extension for Xorg 22. VPN/Tunneling? OpenVPN or OpenSSH with TCP port forwarding 23. Web Serving? Apache 24. Mail Serving? Courier 25. Server Based Spam Filtering? ASSP 26. Client Based Spam Filtering? Thunderbird 27. Image Scanning? SANE 28. Audio Editing? Rezound or Audacity 29. Multitrack Audio? Ardour 30. MIDI Sequencing? Rosegarden 31. CD Burning (Data and Audio)? cdrecord + various GUI frontends 32. Simple PC Based Puzzle Games? Too many to list from both the GNOME and KDE projects 33. SpyWare/Malware Prevention Removal? None at this point since I don't use the internet via Windows
That will wait for 4 seconds before calling the mobile so that you have a chance to hang up after you press '123' after calling in.
In my example, you use an IVR with the number '444' which forwards to the IVR 'callme-menu' presented as soon as you pick up your cell, here's the part from my extensions for that:
[callme-menu] exten => s,1,Answer ; Answer the line exten => s,2,DigitTimeout,5 ; Set Digit Timeout to 5 sec exten => s,3,ResponseTimeout,7 ; Set response timeout to 7 sec exten => s,4,Wait(2) ; Wait two seconds to make sure speaker is at ear exten => s,5,Background(what-are-you-wearing) ; Greeting call exten => _9X.,1,SetCallerID(JESSE) exten => _9X.,2,Background(pls-wait-connect-call) exten => _9X.,3,Goto(outbound,${EXTEN:1},1) exten => _9X.,4,Congestion
I hope this helps you. I think I'll put it on the wiki this weekend so more people can screw the system.
I have an 'unlimited incoming local calls' feature on my phone, combined with 100 minutes (practically nothing) of outbound calling per month. I pick up my mobile, dial a number, punch in an extension, and then hang up. This process takes about 5-6 seconds. After I hang up, my home phone number calls my mobile phone and gives me an IVR (Voice Menu) where I can dial out using VOIP long-distance.
The call is free, because it looks like an incoming call from my home, but I'm using my home line to make the VOIP call outbound from my cell phone.
This is my trick; the only inconvenience is that you have to dial a number BEFORE you make outbound calls, but I can live with it. =)
(I kind of hope this doesn't get moded up very much, or else a lot of people will start screwing the system like I do...)
Here's my trick, get an unlimited incoming call plan from your mobile company, and an asterisk box with VOIP (From my employer in my case). To make outbound calls on the mobile, call the asterisk box from your phone and hang up. Have it generate a call to you after you hang up and present you with an IVR (Voice Menu) where you can dial out. There you have free outbound calling using your VOIP minutes with the luxury of an unlimited incoming mobile phone plan.
All of your long distance will be billed at VOIP rates and not those huge GSM rates.
How's that for making use of both the internet and the phone company's cell phone towers?
I hear you 100%. I've been training in Martial Arts for 13 years now and am fortunately very capable with my body. I compete regularily in tournaments and have been to world championships where the fights are bare-knuckle and full contact; yet for some strange reason, I am not allowed to carry cuticle trimmers (Nail Clippers) onto an airplane in fear that I may stab somebody with them. If we were to really take into consideration the safety of other passengers while people like myself are on the plane, they would have to handcuff me and tie me down to prevent such an attack.
Similarily, it boggles my mind why such restrictions are ever even put in place. If you're going to place a restriction on tools for piracy, you best put a restriction on tools for murder, tools for child-pornography, and hell, why not just put a restriction on that damn Dihydrogen Monoxide (www.dhmo.org), it's the source of all of our problems!
The only problem with this is that you *CANNOT* ban these tools because they're used for a common and greater good. That is the key point. As long as guns are used to keep away The Bad Guy(tm), they'll always be allowed in our society. I'd like to see the face on Sir Tim Berners Lee when they ban his World Wide Web because 'it could be used to pirate music'.
The question is simply "How long can you maintain that source of income?" If you can only get 4 RAM installations completed per day, then it's worth charging $30 for your time, since the day would be worth $120.
If you can continuously have a line of computers with a new stick of ram beside them waiting to be put in and installed all day long, then your $348 an hour would make sense, but in reality, you will never have 12 machines which need ram per hour.
I'm getting a setup from these folks in Coquitlam: www.mxunetworks.com, they do mostly commercial buildings and have an office in Victoria. They work with asterisk and use SIP phones.
Because we're talking about the average Joe getting away from Redmond. Some of them are looking for a solution where they can use their current machines and rid themsleves of the Windows fueled joys called Spyware.
If you are a producer of a linux distro and you do things your own way, that's fine; but don't look for many people merging to your own specific way of 'doing things'. People like things that they're at least semi-familiar with. If developers of linux distro's keep changing 'standards', nobody will want to switch to linux, because as far as they can tell, SuSE is as far different from Fedora as Windows is to FreeBSD.
Microsoft has kept a tradition of 'C:/Program Files/' for installed applications which makes it easy for any windows user to jump from one MS platform to another. These relatively simple standards are just another security blanket that people refuse to let go of when they're tempted to switch operating systems.
Forgive my lack of knowledge in the numerous GNU/Linux organization structures, but if one has to install some applications in/usr/bin/ and others in/etc/program/ while the more restricted programs reside in/home/usr/bin/, how is a person new to the world of Linux supposed to know what goes where!?
I believe the entire movement of a standardization process creates this much needed security blanket that so many desktop users have been reluctant to let go of.
Once again, if you're a producer of a linux distro, you're not the average desktop user, you are not a majority. There is no need to put down a solution that you may never use, which has great potential to the masses.
How can you possibly control the actions of billions of people?
Well you see, the Chinese Ministry of Love is responsible for the identification, monitoring, arrest, and torture of dissidents, real or imagined. They are also responsible for making every Party member love the Party.
And just what exactly do Coal Power plants consist of? Large structures which are not desired to be anywhere near residential areas due to the ugly nature of the beast, and due to the large amount of pollution that they expell into the air.
Heaven forbid that this pollution could 'gasp' kill birds!? Infact, not only does it kill birds, but it harms anybody who is in the direct vicinity.
Windmills being ugly is a matter of opinion, I believe that they look far better off the coast of Copenhagen in Denmark than a coal or gas powerplant. I'm sure if you saw them, you would think so too.
This begs the question though, that in the same circumstances of having a MMS provider being responsible for their traffic, shouldn't ISP's be responsible for the traffic being issued over their lines too? But wait a moment, aren't they released of all liability due to their title as a 'common carrier'?
Before you start pointing the finger at the ISP's, you have to think deeper into the repercussions of moderation of their networks. More moderation simply means more people to control what is being passed through; this means more salaries to pay. It wont be like Slashdot where everybody volunteer's, but rather just like any other business where people are paid to do their work. These additional salaries will be paid for by your MMS messages which already cost a hefty amount.
Suddenly somebody is sending child porn over their cell phone. Will the MMS provider be responsible for this content now? I don't believe it is fair to put all of this weight on the shoulders of the ISP, primarily because it's the users of the service who will be hit the hardest in times of moderation.
I don't know about you, but I would rather have a 'free' internet where I can do what ever I want (within a legal boundary) instead of having a MMS provider or ISP monitor and decide what I can and cannot do.
Sometimes people simply have to take their own responsibility for being on these networks.
I work in a mid sized retail store, I have a manager who is a technical, but unfortunately he has not been keeping up with his technical skills. He took some courses on how to install Netware 3.11 way back in the day, and he preaches today that Netware 3.11 is the most stable and best suited fileserver for our POS system.
He believes that our "Communication Server" which simply syncronizes inventories of the retail stores, are adequate running windows 98 and using PCAnywhere 8.1 scripted to transfer some database files from store to store to get them all up to date.
He also believes that our POS system (Which is written in Fox4) is an excellent database tool, because it only needs to be completely re-indexed daily and has so many compatability issues with today's hardware that it can't be the POS system which was made and developed in the late 80's, but rather the hardware today "isn't made like how it used to be."
What I am getting at, is that it doesn't matter if your manager is technical, it's if he understands *today's* technology. I just listen to this guy and laugh to myself while they reboot their 'communications server' daily because 'there must be a virus on it or something'. Heaven forbid it could be the crummy memory management of Windows9x.
Without someone technically inclined informing a manager of what is right and what is not, we'll always be stuck with outdated people in technical jobs. If there is somebody with technical experience who can report to the managers, it gives the store managers something else to worry about instead of learning the newest and greatest database software.
Honestly managers, don't get too technical, leave that up to us and go manage your business, you'll never get both done properly at the same time.
Fortunately I had the next best thing in High School Spanish. The trick is simply going to the #spain channel on efnet and talking nice to some people. You'd be amazed as to how often my teacher would fail my fellow students because they attempted using the primitive babelfish.altavista.com to do their work for them; she could easily spot the syntax errors and mis-spelled english words which were never translated.
Until I see this new process in the works, however, there is nothing that will make me believe it's better than finding another human who can *understand* what you are saying and the context to which you are implying.
I agree with you on making everybody a security expert. People simply don't have enough time to learn how to use a computer, especially if they just want to check their email on it. But if they cannot use their computer without it causing problems to the rest of us on the internet by being a Spam server, they need to take responsibility somehow.
I'm going to go on a strech here. It's similar to driving a car (Please note, I said similar, not the same as). You recieve a license to use a car so that you can drive around in a controlled environment where other people reside: The public roadways. You can do what ever you want on your own environemtn (Own PC) just as you can spin doughnuts in your backyard if you really want to.
You get your license to drive on the public roadways (Networks) and if you choose to not lock your car, then somebody else will steal it and hopefully the police will either take your car away (take your computer away) or they'll take your license away if you were the one actually doing the infraction. (ISP disconnects you from the internet)
If you are caught doing something bad in a car on public roadways, you should be punished; if you choose to turn on that computer that is not secured in any way, shape, or form, you should not be allowed to take the use it. [Don't yell at me yet]. If you're not prepared to get into a car and harness its abilities, then you'll want to start with a car that's attached to a track, like those ones the 4 year olds use in amusement parks. You can consider those tracked cars like Mac's; because with all due respect, you can't become a zombie computer without at least trying.
Until you learn to use a car, you'll never get a license to use it. Until you learn to use a computer, you shouldn't be on the internet.
My two cents. Thanks for your insightful reply CrackerJack9.
Telus, my ISP in British Columbia (Canada) already takes a fairly agressive stance on this situation. In the past few years, they have realized that their clients are idiots and will open up any attachments they get in their email clients, even those great ones with.scr's from v1agra@sh0p0ur31337store.ch.
In order to stop their networks from becoming ridden with viruses, they simply closed off the accounts of whom ever was infected. Sure people complained, but in the end, there were more people that were satisfied since their computer only needed to be infected with one virus for them to notice. Instead of having a computer with 20+ self-propagating viruses, the user only had one when they realized they needed it fixed.
Joe User's seem to ignore popups and slow-downs of their computers as long as they can still connect to the internet and check their AOL email. As soon as they're disconnected, they will call up the ISP and find out how to get their computer fixed.
If these ISP's can take the same stance against zombies becoming spam servers, it shouldn't be long until Joe User is forced to learn how to use a firewall to protect himself from being disconnected.
As soon as we have ISP's that are *more* responsible for the content going through their networks, we'll have a better internet.
"The federal law makes it unlawful to record telephone conversations except in one party consent cases which permit one party consent recording by state law. What that means is a person can record their own telephone conversations without the knowledge or consent of the other party in those states that allow one party consent."
There are twelve states that require all party consent. They are:
"The federal law makes it unlawful to record telephone conversations except in one party consent cases which permit one party consent recording by state law. What that means is a person can record their own telephone conversations without the knowledge or consent of the other party in those states that allow one party consent."
There are twelve states that require all party consent. They are:
California
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Illinois
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Montana
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Washington
As much as I would like to believe that there are people striving to make automatic automotive technology available tomorrow, I have a sneaking suspicion that some people out there who make a living off of a class 4 license will argue that this cannot and will never replace a human.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with fibre to the desktop is that it is so expensive to terminate and too fragile to put behind Joe-User's computer. When he starts moving his cables around and bends the fibre, the fibre cable will break internally and will need a replacement. These replacement fibre cables are not cheap, and are far more expensive than Cat6 cables.
The best method of incorporation is simply to have a fibre backbone to the horizontal cross-connect of the facility (Or the local Switch in a small environment), and then have copper running from the switch to the user's desktop.
In this scenario, when Joe-User bends his 'internet cable' in half, he only increases attenuation, and perhaps will need a new $2.00 2metre Cat6 patch cord to support the 10Gbps coming from his wall jack.
This solution is far cheaper and accomodates for the common problems with workstation cables.
-Jesse
Jesse.
I don't remember how I got this list, but I think I picked it up on a slashdot post a while ago. Here's a list that I generally use to give people new to Linux wondering what software to use.
My thanks go out to the original poster whom I cannot remember.
1. Web Browsing? Mozilla/Firefox
2. E-mail? Thunderbird or Evolution
3. Group Calendaring? Mozilla Sunbird + Apache/SSL/WebDAV + iCal
4. Audio CD Archiving? Grip + Ogg Vorbis
5. Advanced Media Player? Xine or MPlayer
6. Audio Streaming of Archived CDs? Icecast + Ices
7. Recording of online streams for archival purposes? ALSA + ALSA Utils + Ogg Vorbis + Any required media player format in Xine or MPlayer
8. Firewall? Linux Kernel + iptables
9. Office Functionality? OpenOffice.org
10. Digital Image Editing? GIMP
11. IM Client? GAIM
12. IM Server? Jabberd
13. File sharing? NFS
14. Sane storage management? LVM
15. File compression? BZip2, GZip, or 7Zip also File Roller if you really need a GUI
16. Digital Photo Management? Gthumb or Nautilus
17. PVR? Mythtv.org
18. Video streaming? VLC (Video LAN Client)
19. X10 Home Automation? Bottlerocket
20. Remote desktop/application serving? VNC 4
21. Remote assistance? x0vncserver or the vnc extension for Xorg
22. VPN/Tunneling? OpenVPN or OpenSSH with TCP port forwarding
23. Web Serving? Apache
24. Mail Serving? Courier
25. Server Based Spam Filtering? ASSP
26. Client Based Spam Filtering? Thunderbird
27. Image Scanning? SANE
28. Audio Editing? Rezound or Audacity
29. Multitrack Audio? Ardour
30. MIDI Sequencing? Rosegarden
31. CD Burning (Data and Audio)? cdrecord + various GUI frontends
32. Simple PC Based Puzzle Games? Too many to list from both the GNOME and KDE projects
33. SpyWare/Malware Prevention Removal? None at this point since I don't use the internet via Windows
-Jesse
The parts of my extensions conf that you need to know are:
/var/spool/asterisk/outgoing/callme.call
exten => 123,1,Answer
exten => 123,2,System(/etc/asterisk/callme)
exten => 123,3,Hangup
The 'callme' file is a bash script that looks alittle something like this:
#!/bin/bash
sleep 4
umask 000
(
echo "Channel: IAX2/loginname:password@provider/8885555555"
echo "Callerid: Magic"
echo "MaxRetries:1"
echo "RetryTime: 10"
echo "WaitTime: 30"
echo "Context: internal"
echo "Extension: 444" ; the extension of the IVR
echo "Priority: 1"
) >
That will wait for 4 seconds before calling the mobile so that you have a chance to hang up after you press '123' after calling in.
In my example, you use an IVR with the number '444' which forwards to the IVR 'callme-menu' presented as soon as you pick up your cell, here's the part from my extensions for that:
[callme-menu]
exten => s,1,Answer ; Answer the line
exten => s,2,DigitTimeout,5 ; Set Digit Timeout to 5 sec
exten => s,3,ResponseTimeout,7 ; Set response timeout to 7 sec
exten => s,4,Wait(2) ; Wait two seconds to make sure speaker is at ear
exten => s,5,Background(what-are-you-wearing) ; Greeting call
exten => _9X.,1,SetCallerID(JESSE)
exten => _9X.,2,Background(pls-wait-connect-call)
exten => _9X.,3,Goto(outbound,${EXTEN:1},1)
exten => _9X.,4,Congestion
I hope this helps you. I think I'll put it on the wiki this weekend so more people can screw the system.
=)
-Jesse
I have an 'unlimited incoming local calls' feature on my phone, combined with 100 minutes (practically nothing) of outbound calling per month. I pick up my mobile, dial a number, punch in an extension, and then hang up. This process takes about 5-6 seconds.
After I hang up, my home phone number calls my mobile phone and gives me an IVR (Voice Menu) where I can dial out using VOIP long-distance.
The call is free, because it looks like an incoming call from my home, but I'm using my home line to make the VOIP call outbound from my cell phone.
This is my trick; the only inconvenience is that you have to dial a number BEFORE you make outbound calls, but I can live with it. =)
-Jesse
It's not expensive with the right mind-set.
Observe:
(I kind of hope this doesn't get moded up very much, or else a lot of people will start screwing the system like I do...)
Here's my trick, get an unlimited incoming call plan from your mobile company, and an asterisk box with VOIP (From my employer in my case). To make outbound calls on the mobile, call the asterisk box from your phone and hang up. Have it generate a call to you after you hang up and present you with an IVR (Voice Menu) where you can dial out. There you have free outbound calling using your VOIP minutes with the luxury of an unlimited incoming mobile phone plan.
All of your long distance will be billed at VOIP rates and not those huge GSM rates.
How's that for making use of both the internet and the phone company's cell phone towers?
-Jesse
I hear you 100%.
I've been training in Martial Arts for 13 years now and am fortunately very capable with my body. I compete regularily in tournaments and have been to world championships where the fights are bare-knuckle and full contact; yet for some strange reason, I am not allowed to carry cuticle trimmers (Nail Clippers) onto an airplane in fear that I may stab somebody with them. If we were to really take into consideration the safety of other passengers while people like myself are on the plane, they would have to handcuff me and tie me down to prevent such an attack.
Similarily, it boggles my mind why such restrictions are ever even put in place. If you're going to place a restriction on tools for piracy, you best put a restriction on tools for murder, tools for child-pornography, and hell, why not just put a restriction on that damn Dihydrogen Monoxide (www.dhmo.org), it's the source of all of our problems!
The only problem with this is that you *CANNOT* ban these tools because they're used for a common and greater good. That is the key point. As long as guns are used to keep away The Bad Guy(tm), they'll always be allowed in our society. I'd like to see the face on Sir Tim Berners Lee when they ban his World Wide Web because 'it could be used to pirate music'.
There you have it my friends, Unbelievable.
NO! You can't copy floppy's, that's wrong! See this if you don't believe me!
The question is simply "How long can you maintain that source of income?" If you can only get 4 RAM installations completed per day, then it's worth charging $30 for your time, since the day would be worth $120.
If you can continuously have a line of computers with a new stick of ram beside them waiting to be put in and installed all day long, then your $348 an hour would make sense, but in reality, you will never have 12 machines which need ram per hour.
I'm getting a setup from these folks in Coquitlam: www.mxunetworks.com, they do mostly commercial buildings and have an office in Victoria. They work with asterisk and use SIP phones.
I hope that helps. =)
Xtrvd.
Customer of above company.
Just wait until Firefox is renamed again. That'll learn em. =)
But hey, at least it's not a tattoo.
Because we're talking about the average Joe getting away from Redmond. Some of them are looking for a solution where they can use their current machines and rid themsleves of the Windows fueled joys called Spyware.
/usr/bin/ and others in /etc/program/ while the more restricted programs reside in /home/usr/bin/, how is a person new to the world of Linux supposed to know what goes where!?
If you are a producer of a linux distro and you do things your own way, that's fine; but don't look for many people merging to your own specific way of 'doing things'. People like things that they're at least semi-familiar with. If developers of linux distro's keep changing 'standards', nobody will want to switch to linux, because as far as they can tell, SuSE is as far different from Fedora as Windows is to FreeBSD.
Microsoft has kept a tradition of 'C:/Program Files/' for installed applications which makes it easy for any windows user to jump from one MS platform to another. These relatively simple standards are just another security blanket that people refuse to let go of when they're tempted to switch operating systems.
Forgive my lack of knowledge in the numerous GNU/Linux organization structures, but if one has to install some applications in
I believe the entire movement of a standardization process creates this much needed security blanket that so many desktop users have been reluctant to let go of.
Once again, if you're a producer of a linux distro, you're not the average desktop user, you are not a majority. There is no need to put down a solution that you may never use, which has great potential to the masses.
-Xtrvd
... wine?
You figure out what I mean by it. =)
Well you see, the Chinese Ministry of Love is responsible for the identification, monitoring, arrest, and torture of dissidents, real or imagined.
They are also responsible for making every Party member love the Party.
Thank you George Orwell.
And just what exactly do Coal Power plants consist of? Large structures which are not desired to be anywhere near residential areas due to the ugly nature of the beast, and due to the large amount of pollution that they expell into the air.
Heaven forbid that this pollution could 'gasp' kill birds!? Infact, not only does it kill birds, but it harms anybody who is in the direct vicinity.
Windmills being ugly is a matter of opinion, I believe that they look far better off the coast of Copenhagen in Denmark than a coal or gas powerplant. I'm sure if you saw them, you would think so too.
The direct link to download them is http://www.phptr.com/promotion/1484?redir=1/
Enjoy.
This begs the question though, that in the same circumstances of having a MMS provider being responsible for their traffic, shouldn't ISP's be responsible for the traffic being issued over their lines too? But wait a moment, aren't they released of all liability due to their title as a 'common carrier'?
Before you start pointing the finger at the ISP's, you have to think deeper into the repercussions of moderation of their networks. More moderation simply means more people to control what is being passed through; this means more salaries to pay. It wont be like Slashdot where everybody volunteer's, but rather just like any other business where people are paid to do their work. These additional salaries will be paid for by your MMS messages which already cost a hefty amount.
Suddenly somebody is sending child porn over their cell phone. Will the MMS provider be responsible for this content now? I don't believe it is fair to put all of this weight on the shoulders of the ISP, primarily because it's the users of the service who will be hit the hardest in times of moderation.
I don't know about you, but I would rather have a 'free' internet where I can do what ever I want (within a legal boundary) instead of having a MMS provider or ISP monitor and decide what I can and cannot do.
Sometimes people simply have to take their own responsibility for being on these networks.
I work in a mid sized retail store, I have a manager who is a technical, but unfortunately he has not been keeping up with his technical skills. He took some courses on how to install Netware 3.11 way back in the day, and he preaches today that Netware 3.11 is the most stable and best suited fileserver for our POS system.
He believes that our "Communication Server" which simply syncronizes inventories of the retail stores, are adequate running windows 98 and using PCAnywhere 8.1 scripted to transfer some database files from store to store to get them all up to date.
He also believes that our POS system (Which is written in Fox4) is an excellent database tool, because it only needs to be completely re-indexed daily and has so many compatability issues with today's hardware that it can't be the POS system which was made and developed in the late 80's, but rather the hardware today "isn't made like how it used to be."
What I am getting at, is that it doesn't matter if your manager is technical, it's if he understands *today's* technology. I just listen to this guy and laugh to myself while they reboot their 'communications server' daily because 'there must be a virus on it or something'. Heaven forbid it could be the crummy memory management of Windows9x.
Without someone technically inclined informing a manager of what is right and what is not, we'll always be stuck with outdated people in technical jobs. If there is somebody with technical experience who can report to the managers, it gives the store managers something else to worry about instead of learning the newest and greatest database software.
Honestly managers, don't get too technical, leave that up to us and go manage your business, you'll never get both done properly at the same time.
Fortunately I had the next best thing in High School Spanish. The trick is simply going to the #spain channel on efnet and talking nice to some people. You'd be amazed as to how often my teacher would fail my fellow students because they attempted using the primitive babelfish.altavista.com to do their work for them; she could easily spot the syntax errors and mis-spelled english words which were never translated.
Until I see this new process in the works, however, there is nothing that will make me believe it's better than finding another human who can *understand* what you are saying and the context to which you are implying.
I agree with you on making everybody a security expert. People simply don't have enough time to learn how to use a computer, especially if they just want to check their email on it. But if they cannot use their computer without it causing problems to the rest of us on the internet by being a Spam server, they need to take responsibility somehow.
I'm going to go on a strech here. It's similar to driving a car (Please note, I said similar, not the same as). You recieve a license to use a car so that you can drive around in a controlled environment where other people reside: The public roadways. You can do what ever you want on your own environemtn (Own PC) just as you can spin doughnuts in your backyard if you really want to.
You get your license to drive on the public roadways (Networks) and if you choose to not lock your car, then somebody else will steal it and hopefully the police will either take your car away (take your computer away) or they'll take your license away if you were the one actually doing the infraction. (ISP disconnects you from the internet)
If you are caught doing something bad in a car on public roadways, you should be punished; if you choose to turn on that computer that is not secured in any way, shape, or form, you should not be allowed to take the use it. [Don't yell at me yet]. If you're not prepared to get into a car and harness its abilities, then you'll want to start with a car that's attached to a track, like those ones the 4 year olds use in amusement parks.
You can consider those tracked cars like Mac's; because with all due respect, you can't become a zombie computer without at least trying.
Until you learn to use a car, you'll never get a license to use it. Until you learn to use a computer, you shouldn't be on the internet.
My two cents.
Thanks for your insightful reply CrackerJack9.
Telus, my ISP in British Columbia (Canada) already takes a fairly agressive stance on this situation. In the past few years, they have realized that their clients are idiots and will open up any attachments they get in their email clients, even those great ones with .scr's from v1agra@sh0p0ur31337store.ch.
In order to stop their networks from becoming ridden with viruses, they simply closed off the accounts of whom ever was infected. Sure people complained, but in the end, there were more people that were satisfied since their computer only needed to be infected with one virus for them to notice. Instead of having a computer with 20+ self-propagating viruses, the user only had one when they realized they needed it fixed.
Joe User's seem to ignore popups and slow-downs of their computers as long as they can still connect to the internet and check their AOL email. As soon as they're disconnected, they will call up the ISP and find out how to get their computer fixed.
If these ISP's can take the same stance against zombies becoming spam servers, it shouldn't be long until Joe User is forced to learn how to use a firewall to protect himself from being disconnected.
As soon as we have ISP's that are *more* responsible for the content going through their networks, we'll have a better internet.
From http://www.pimall.com/nais/n.recordlaw.html/
"The federal law makes it unlawful to record telephone conversations except in one party consent cases which permit one party consent recording by state law. What that means is a person can record their own telephone conversations without the knowledge or consent of the other party in those states that allow one party consent."
There are twelve states that require all party consent. They are:
California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan , Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington.
There are 38 states that permit one party consent. See the URL for more details.
From http://www.pimall.com/nais/n.recordlaw.html
"The federal law makes it unlawful to record telephone conversations except in one party consent cases which permit one party consent recording by state law. What that means is a person can record their own telephone conversations without the knowledge or consent of the other party in those states that allow one party consent."
There are twelve states that require all party consent. They are:
California
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Illinois
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Montana
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Washington
See the above URL for other state restrictions.
As much as I would like to believe that there are people striving to make automatic automotive technology available tomorrow, I have a sneaking suspicion that some people out there who make a living off of a class 4 license will argue that this cannot and will never replace a human.