The wonderful part is that after the FBI cleared the family 2 hours later, AirTran refused to fly the family, and refused to rebook them on their way from Washington to Orlando, Florida.
That was from the/. summary.
So FBI checked the family, told the airline they were harmless, and airline STILL refused to let them fly.
1. Tt takes (sometimes a lot of) time to properly explain it. 2. The overwhelming majority of the users asking for an explanation won't understand a word I'm saying. 3. Some of then get angry at me because they don't understand what I'm saying. 4. People sometimes misunderstand something completely, go hurling in the wrong direction, and you have to use a lot of time to undo the damage.
Basically, in 90% of the cases we're just kicking ourself in the balls tryting to explain things to users.
When people ask for explanation I usually mutter a terse and simplified explanation. If they look genuinely interested, or actually ask sane questions, or give a sign of actually understanding what I just said, then I might consider using more time to explain.
Well, it does have the potential ability to cause DNA recombination errors. Just like you have the potential ability of winning 50 times in the lottery, then get killed by a terrier thrown out of the 33rd floor by a bald 53 and a half year old man wearing only boxers.
the young, hip, supposedly tech-savvy President-Elect uses a Zune. That right there should tell you something.
That he like to listen to music?
Seriously, what's the problem? Let him enjoy his zune, it doesn't hurt you in any way. I have an ipod, and I'm starting to regret buying it. There's loads of better and cheaper alternatives out there, you know. Now, I've never even looked at a zune, so I can't say anything about that, but you're complaining about him not using your favorite brand of mp3 player? You know, its just a music player, not the noodly appendage of FSM or similar.
So... how bad were the budget cuts in *your* school?
Pah, let me tell you.
We had to write uphill, both ways. And we only had ink every 3rd monday, the rest we had to pretend. And by God, if we pretended wrong, we were beat to an inch of our life, then ten more inches.
In the winter we had to open the windows to get some heat into the rooms, and our schoolday lasted for 28 hours. When we did math, we had to count on our fingers, and if we counted wrong, they cut one off. Old Joey over there can only count to three, well, if he had a tounge that is. He lost that in the Spelling Contest of '43.
You kids have it easy with your fancy abacuses and shoes and stuff. We had to crawl to school, naked, with 50kg of rock in our backpack, and our school road went over three mountains and under four rivers. And not those small hills you got nowadays, they were 5000m straight up, and 7000m straight down on the other side.
However, if you're Joe Schmoe, know nothing about how it works, you only know it catches terrorists, then you know you won't get caught, because of course, you're not a terrorist.
Of course, if a terrorist is certain that he won't get caught, then he won't get caught..
I've worked in 2 norwegian isp's. The first one, one of the bigger ones in norway have an average network usage of around 40-50%, with no link over 80% used, even in peak times.
The second, a smaller one more centered on business customers (but also sell to private), the numbers are more around 30% and 50%.
Do you see a difference from US isp's? There's no need to do QoS, because there is no bottleneck in the network. And 15-20 mbit/s download speed is the norm around here.
In fact, around 5-6 years ago my isp did a test of their infrastructure. Want to know how they did it? They sent a mail to all customers saying "Hello, this weekend we're going to test our infrastructure, and we'll set everyone's line to the maximum it can handle. Please try to download as much as you can." - This was when 1mbit was considered fast, and everyone got their line set to max (mostly 8mbit). After that they went out with some very agressive pricing, so I guess the test was a success.
I know there are many differences between usa and norway, especially the number of people, but still.. Quite some contrast, don't you think?
Most people know of var=$(command) or var=`command` but few actually think about how to use it outside scripting.
Let me give you an example. On my old system, I had 6 harddisks, mounted and sorted using the chaos theory as inspiration. But it never bothered me. If I wanted to see a movie, let's say Office Space, I could just do this:
mplayer -fs `locate -i "office space"`
and the film started playing fullscreen. Same for opening documents, and so on. That trick got a few jaw drops, even from people that knows shell scripting / command line pretty well. It just never occurred to them to use it like that.
Using regex or piping to grep you could also pretty easily pick out a specific episode of a series too.
the AI is a little dodgy, but it's passable and an AI ally doesn't put you at an outright disadvantage in the story missions.
Well..... Actually.... I would prefer playing alone, after seeing the AI take all my resources to build a ton of the same unit, methodically study the enemy base, then suicide all his units on the one place the enemy have decent defenses. Repeat until I manage to take out the defenses, then the AI finds another well protected area to suicide against. He also never come to your aid if you're pushed (after he gobbled up all your resources on his suicide missions).
At least the debian / ubuntu system easily support this, using meta packages.
you have an empty package, leys say blah-desktop-graphics that all employees working with graphics have installed. You want to install graphics program Foobar. You add Foobar to your local repository, and release a new version of the metapackage that depends on Foobar. So package manages sees "oh, new version of blah-desktop-graphics. Great, lets grab that. Hm, for that I need Foobar too, so lets grab that one, and install it."
Exactly how apt deals with new dependencies under updates can be configured, from ignore, to ask, to install automatically. Since you're deploying a default image, and have already pointed that image to your internal update server, it would just be a small additional step to set that option correctly. As a bonus you have 100% control over what gets pushed to your machines.
If you're going to take precautions, then just encrypt it.
Hell, Windows even have built in encryption, which is keyed to your login password, and really easy to turn on. Not too secure (depends on your login password, leaks file name), but it would have stopped this pretty easily.
Yeah, got a rude awakening there myself. My gmail account was closed a month ago, no prior warning. No way to get to support. No way to actually contact a human.
I still have absolutely no clue why it was closed. I also lost blog, gallery, docs, calendar, site stats, rss reader, notebook... You get the idea. Luckily I didn't have any serious data there, but still. It's a lot of things I used daily just suddenly gone.
And google's ToS says "We can close an account for any reason. Absolutely any reason. Like, we didn't like the color of the sky today is a good reason." Which isn't helping the issue much either.
I've worked in a small'ish call center (200-300 people), and you're (sadly) right.
I fantasized about making something like that on the IVR, followed by a tech question. "How many ip's in a/30 subnet?" - "What is 0E in dec?" - "Please press in the binary representation of 4" - "What is the air velocity of an unladen swallow?"
Well, you get the idea:) Sadly, noone else liked it for some reason;)
Now, let's say I go download a different program..say a browser widget of some kind. While downloading the widget, a UAC prompt pops up saying that the widget wants access to perform an administrative action. Of course I click through--it's just another annoying Windows prompt asking if I'm sure that I want to install this program.
Except that this was the sneaky Desktop Buddy, just waiting for a distraction.
So while Vista's version is more secure, it's not by much, and the convenience of ubuntu's way (plus that it's not needed all the time) makes it an overall win to ubuntu, in my opinion.
I got a pretty rude awakening on just this a few weeks ago.
When I tried to log in to my gmail account, I just got "Sorry, your account have been disabled." No explanation, and absolutely impossible to get a hold of a human or to find the reason why they decided to close my account.
Luckily I had backups of all my data, but it still meant new email address, new daily routines, new blog place, +++. And especially annoying was that a group of us was just starting a hosted project on google code, and me falling out there effectively killed google code for that job.
So all be wary, and the wise man's his warning. For he is right, and this could happen to you. I am not aware of breaking any ToS, and getting someone to at least explain why it was locked have proved impossible. Or to get any hint of the existance of human support at all, for that matter.
BFilter is a filtering web proxy. It was originally intended for removing banner ads only, but since then its capabilities have been greatly extended. Unlike most of the similar tools, it doesn't rely on blacklists (although it does support them). The problem with blacklists is that advertisers are always one step ahead. You see an ad slip through, you update your blacklist, and in case it didn't help, you add a new entry yourself. Once I got tired of that, I decided to write a proxy that would detect ads heuristically, much like modern anti-virus software manages to detect many viruses unknown to it.
It works well on most sites, but it can fuck up some sites, and some require custom tweaks. All in all, a decent alternative to browser adblock plugins.
I too really recommend trying out psyco if your python code take a long time to execute.
From the page:
Benefits
2x to 100x speed-ups, typically 4x, with an unmodified Python interpreter and unmodified source code, just a dynamically loadable C extension module.
Drawbacks
Psyco currently uses a lot of memory. It only runs on Intel 386-compatible processors (under any OS) right now. There are some subtle semantic differences (i.e. bugs) with the way Python works; they should not be apparent in most programs.
In one situation where I had a lot of loops running the execution time went from a bit over 5 minutes, to 10-15 seconds.
There is one thing with steam that kinda piss me off. If the server goes down, none of your games will launch. This have happened to me once, when I was planning to play Portal. The error was in the effect of "Steam server is down. Can not authorize. Can not launch game." It was like that for around 15 minutes.
Apart from that, steam is the best that have happened with pc gaming, with superior ease and prices (compared to norwegian prices).
Slashdot Mirror
The wonderful part is that after the FBI cleared the family 2 hours later, AirTran refused to fly the family, and refused to rebook them on their way from Washington to Orlando, Florida.
That was from the /. summary.
So FBI checked the family, told the airline they were harmless, and airline STILL refused to let them fly.
That's because :
1. Tt takes (sometimes a lot of) time to properly explain it.
2. The overwhelming majority of the users asking for an explanation won't understand a word I'm saying.
3. Some of then get angry at me because they don't understand what I'm saying.
4. People sometimes misunderstand something completely, go hurling in the wrong direction, and you have to use a lot of time to undo the damage.
Basically, in 90% of the cases we're just kicking ourself in the balls tryting to explain things to users.
When people ask for explanation I usually mutter a terse and simplified explanation. If they look genuinely interested, or actually ask sane questions, or give a sign of actually understanding what I just said, then I might consider using more time to explain.
Well, it does have the potential ability to cause DNA recombination errors. Just like you have the potential ability of winning 50 times in the lottery, then get killed by a terrier thrown out of the 33rd floor by a bald 53 and a half year old man wearing only boxers.
In the same vein, I think we should ban terriers.
the young, hip, supposedly tech-savvy President-Elect uses a Zune. That right there should tell you something.
That he like to listen to music?
Seriously, what's the problem? Let him enjoy his zune, it doesn't hurt you in any way.
I have an ipod, and I'm starting to regret buying it. There's loads of better and cheaper alternatives out there, you know.
Now, I've never even looked at a zune, so I can't say anything about that, but you're complaining about him not using your favorite brand of mp3 player? You know, its just a music player, not the noodly appendage of FSM or similar.
So... how bad were the budget cuts in *your* school?
Pah, let me tell you.
We had to write uphill, both ways. And we only had ink every 3rd monday, the rest we had to pretend. And by God, if we pretended wrong, we were beat to an inch of our life, then ten more inches.
In the winter we had to open the windows to get some heat into the rooms, and our schoolday lasted for 28 hours. When we did math, we had to count on our fingers, and if we counted wrong, they cut one off. Old Joey over there can only count to three, well, if he had a tounge that is. He lost that in the Spelling Contest of '43.
You kids have it easy with your fancy abacuses and shoes and stuff. We had to crawl to school, naked, with 50kg of rock in our backpack, and our school road went over three mountains and under four rivers. And not those small hills you got nowadays, they were 5000m straight up, and 7000m straight down on the other side.
And you know what? We liked it that way!
However, if you're Joe Schmoe, know nothing about how it works, you only know it catches terrorists, then you know you won't get caught, because of course, you're not a terrorist.
Of course, if a terrorist is certain that he won't get caught, then he won't get caught..
I've worked in 2 norwegian isp's. The first one, one of the bigger ones in norway have an average network usage of around 40-50%, with no link over 80% used, even in peak times.
The second, a smaller one more centered on business customers (but also sell to private), the numbers are more around 30% and 50%.
Do you see a difference from US isp's? There's no need to do QoS, because there is no bottleneck in the network. And 15-20 mbit/s download speed is the norm around here.
In fact, around 5-6 years ago my isp did a test of their infrastructure. Want to know how they did it? They sent a mail to all customers saying "Hello, this weekend we're going to test our infrastructure, and we'll set everyone's line to the maximum it can handle. Please try to download as much as you can." - This was when 1mbit was considered fast, and everyone got their line set to max (mostly 8mbit). After that they went out with some very agressive pricing, so I guess the test was a success.
I know there are many differences between usa and norway, especially the number of people, but still.. Quite some contrast, don't you think?
I've heard it a bit more elegantly said :
Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction have to make sense.
This is exceedingly apt, as the norwegian word for fun is ... "morro" :)
Yeah, the norwegian IT press is having a field day with this.
In the folder browser in gnome, just type in ssh://server/path - and use gedit to open the file.
It downloads the file, edits locally, and saves to the server. Simple and easy.
Strategy games makes you better at evaluating choices, and helps you better understand / keep control of (your) economy.
FPS increase reaction times, timing and hand/eye coordination. You also learn to think quickly
RPG's you set a goal and keep working towards that. Some of them have a damn good story to tell, much like a good book.
Most people know of var=$(command) or var=`command` but few actually think about how to use it outside scripting.
Let me give you an example. On my old system, I had 6 harddisks, mounted and sorted using the chaos theory as inspiration. But it never bothered me. If I wanted to see a movie, let's say Office Space, I could just do this:
mplayer -fs `locate -i "office space"`
and the film started playing fullscreen. Same for opening documents, and so on. That trick got a few jaw drops, even from people that knows shell scripting / command line pretty well. It just never occurred to them to use it like that.
Using regex or piping to grep you could also pretty easily pick out a specific episode of a series too.
the AI is a little dodgy, but it's passable and an AI ally doesn't put you at an outright disadvantage in the story missions.
Well..... Actually.... I would prefer playing alone, after seeing the AI take all my resources to build a ton of the same unit, methodically study the enemy base, then suicide all his units on the one place the enemy have decent defenses. Repeat until I manage to take out the defenses, then the AI finds another well protected area to suicide against. He also never come to your aid if you're pushed (after he gobbled up all your resources on his suicide missions).
Needless to say, I really hate that AI.
At least the debian / ubuntu system easily support this, using meta packages.
you have an empty package, leys say blah-desktop-graphics that all employees working with graphics have installed. You want to install graphics program Foobar. You add Foobar to your local repository, and release a new version of the metapackage that depends on Foobar. So package manages sees "oh, new version of blah-desktop-graphics. Great, lets grab that. Hm, for that I need Foobar too, so lets grab that one, and install it."
Exactly how apt deals with new dependencies under updates can be configured, from ignore, to ask, to install automatically. Since you're deploying a default image, and have already pointed that image to your internal update server, it would just be a small additional step to set that option correctly. As a bonus you have 100% control over what gets pushed to your machines.
If you're going to take precautions, then just encrypt it.
Hell, Windows even have built in encryption, which is keyed to your login password, and really easy to turn on. Not too secure (depends on your login password, leaks file name), but it would have stopped this pretty easily.
Correction:
So the two scammers made $500K over 3 years, from which they didn't pay other trucking companies for the work.
That was kinda the whole scam.
It could also mean, that for every 1 mill blocked, 100.000 of them shouldn't get blocked..
Starting to get a bit confused myself when I start thinking of it.
Of 1 million requests, it blocks X of them, where 100.000 of those shouldn't get blocked? Who knows..
Yeah, got a rude awakening there myself. My gmail account was closed a month ago, no prior warning. No way to get to support. No way to actually contact a human.
I still have absolutely no clue why it was closed. I also lost blog, gallery, docs, calendar, site stats, rss reader, notebook... You get the idea. Luckily I didn't have any serious data there, but still. It's a lot of things I used daily just suddenly gone.
And google's ToS says "We can close an account for any reason. Absolutely any reason. Like, we didn't like the color of the sky today is a good reason." Which isn't helping the issue much either.
I've worked in a small'ish call center (200-300 people), and you're (sadly) right.
I fantasized about making something like that on the IVR, followed by a tech question. "How many ip's in a /30 subnet?" - "What is 0E in dec?" - "Please press in the binary representation of 4" - "What is the air velocity of an unladen swallow?"
Well, you get the idea :) Sadly, noone else liked it for some reason ;)
Now, let's say I go download a different program..say a browser widget of some kind. While downloading the widget, a UAC prompt pops up saying that the widget wants access to perform an administrative action. Of course I click through--it's just another annoying Windows prompt asking if I'm sure that I want to install this program.
Except that this was the sneaky Desktop Buddy, just waiting for a distraction.
So while Vista's version is more secure, it's not by much, and the convenience of ubuntu's way (plus that it's not needed all the time) makes it an overall win to ubuntu, in my opinion.
I got a pretty rude awakening on just this a few weeks ago.
When I tried to log in to my gmail account, I just got "Sorry, your account have been disabled."
No explanation, and absolutely impossible to get a hold of a human or to find the reason why they decided to close my account.
Luckily I had backups of all my data, but it still meant new email address, new daily routines, new blog place, +++. And especially annoying was that a group of us was just starting a hosted project on google code, and me falling out there effectively killed google code for that job.
So all be wary, and the wise man's his warning. For he is right, and this could happen to you. I am not aware of breaking any ToS, and getting someone to at least explain why it was locked have proved impossible. Or to get any hint of the existance of human support at all, for that matter.
Try BFfilter.
From the page:
BFilter is a filtering web proxy. It was originally intended for removing banner ads only, but since then its capabilities have been greatly extended. Unlike most of the similar tools, it doesn't rely on blacklists (although it does support them). The problem with blacklists is that advertisers are always one step ahead. You see an ad slip through, you update your blacklist, and in case it didn't help, you add a new entry yourself. Once I got tired of that, I decided to write a proxy that would detect ads heuristically, much like modern anti-virus software manages to detect many viruses unknown to it.
It works well on most sites, but it can fuck up some sites, and some require custom tweaks. All in all, a decent alternative to browser adblock plugins.
Aug 2008
Download : 134.68 GB
Upload : 152.07 GB
Total : 286.75 GB
Running my own web server, downloading and uploading a bit, surfing, streaming videos, playing games. It adds up :)
I too really recommend trying out psyco if your python code take a long time to execute.
From the page:
Benefits
2x to 100x speed-ups, typically 4x, with an unmodified Python interpreter and unmodified source code, just a dynamically loadable C extension module.
Drawbacks
Psyco currently uses a lot of memory. It only runs on Intel 386-compatible processors (under any OS) right now. There are some subtle semantic differences (i.e. bugs) with the way Python works; they should not be apparent in most programs.
In one situation where I had a lot of loops running the execution time went from a bit over 5 minutes, to 10-15 seconds.
There is one thing with steam that kinda piss me off. If the server goes down, none of your games will launch. This have happened to me once, when I was planning to play Portal. The error was in the effect of "Steam server is down. Can not authorize. Can not launch game." It was like that for around 15 minutes.
Apart from that, steam is the best that have happened with pc gaming, with superior ease and prices (compared to norwegian prices).