When I first moved into my new apartment with my laptop, there was an unsecured wireless network downstairs that gave me (128k) access to the internet. It was slow, but it worked. I fine-tuned some of the settings on it (default 'linksys' with new SSID) and got it working pretty well.
The girl, Jennifer, had a Dell machine, which I believe was a laptop because it wasn't on during the day but was at night, and it was connected to wi-fi. She had the regular stuff installed that Dell provides, MS Works, Musicmatch Jukebox, and so on. She had a Lexmark printer (I forget which model), a Samsung digital camera, and a fair-sized music collection (some good stuff, some crap, typical college kids selection). I could feed you a laundry list of what she actually had installed (thanks to c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu). Fortunately the default Windows XP configuration prevents access to homedirs except by the specific user (I probably could have logged in as her - XP doesn't require passwords by default - but that's going a little too far).
The point is, unsecured wireless can be dangerous. Imagine if I COULD login as her? What if she was using MS Money 2004? It came with my Dell, she probably had it too. What if she didn't have a password on her files? I'd suddenly have access to her financial information. Her name, her accounts, possibly even credit card numbers, where she eats out, where she grocery stops, what bars she goes to, how much money she has, where she shops online. Even without that, I could tell what websites she goes to, her MSN name and profile, e-mail addresses. I could also sniff her traffic and get passwords, read e-mail, everything. I could pretty easily install a trojan, screen-capture program, PC Anywhere. The possibilities are endless.
God, now I'm scaring myself. I think I'll crank up the security on my access point when I get home. Too bad the only other person that uses my net only supports WEP64.
Who'd want to collect a gig of data from some dude in downtown SF to hack his wifi AND manage to clone a mac address?
Not sure about the gig of data, but every wi-fi card I've dealt with has a setting in the drivers to change the MAC address (in fact, my Dell Inspiron has that ability for the wired network card as well).
If my parents had bought me a computer like every other kid in my neighbourhood, and paid me some cushy allowance so I could upgrade it, then all those nights of sitting in my room until 7 AM would have paid off!
How am I supposed to hone my skills if she's always nagging me to 'get a job'? That's what I'm doing! Sigh. Parents these days just don't understand.
And no mom, I'm not a terrorist. They have the ugliest skins.
All those security checks and rules are used to at the airport? Didn't exist back in the 60s and earlier.
A side note, the US is the only country I've been to that allows non-passengers up to the embarkation gates. Anywhere else, you get stopped at customs and can't proceed without a ticket. Curbside check-in, which I'm still fuzzy on, but as I understand basically puts your luggage right on the plane stright from the taxi, is another huge issue.
Let's face it, the US was always behind in security, because despite the good sense of dozens of other countries (Canada, for example, and the UK, Israel, Holland, and so on), the US didn't care about security until they had to - and even then, the rules were so absurd that they served only to provide an assurance - terrorsts are after your lucky charms, but we've put measures into place to make your cereal safe!
It's all BS. The government only cares about security because it's one more thing they can claim when the election rolls around. They can make people afraid in general, then make planes safe, but still not make people safe from planes. They're trying to have it both ways, and it just doesn't work like that.
I dunno, but as long as he makes it clear that whatever features are what he wants to have in the game, if adding them in is reasonable, then he should talk.
I don't know about you guys, but personally, I love talking with friends about theory, however practical or impractical that might be. What would be cool in a game, how you could implement it, races, ships, whatever. I think Mr. Molyneux should talk with the enthusiasm that he has for his games, as long as he's not promising that those features will be there.
Let's be realistic: trees growing doesn't matter. I mean, really, it's immersive, but also irrelevant. I'm not going to notice if it's not there (well I might, but I won't care). That being said though, just talking about the possibility opens up dozens of possibilities in my mind, ideas and theories that I can discuss with my friends, and we can say 'wouldn't it be cool if we made a game that could do this or that or the other thing?'
As long as he's not influencing sales by guaranteeing anything, I'm fine with him saying 'we're working on realtime tree growth and you can watch the textures change as paint dries, and the shorelines will gradually recede or encroach depending on the phase of the moon and the changing climate and passing meteors'. If they really are working on it, then A+, and if it doesn't make it in, then hey, that's the way she goes.
I often pair up with a friend of mine on projects - not necessarily programming directly, but sometimes technical stuff (design, implementation, etc with programs already written). My friend is doing his Master's in CS, and I have one year of an Arts major done. Suffice to say, he's the better programmer.
What I bring to the team, however, is the big picture. I can design in my head in a few moments how things should be laid out and the possibilities of each option, I know enough about languages to pick the proper tool for the job, and I know enough about programming to provide input in that respect when it's needed.
Teaming up two programmers with the same skillsets might be handy from a catching-bugs point of view, but the two of us working together with our completely different skillsets works great from a design-and-implementation point of view, since I can do the design and he can do the implementation, but we each know enough to help with both.
That's what pair programming should be. Not two C wizards sitting down nagging at each other, but two people who know C and who know design, but who are only excellent at one or the other, to bring different skills to the table, and defer to the other in their areas most lacking.
I purchased my (badass) D-Link WAP/Router/Switch for $60 CDN after main-in rebate. That comes out to probably $40 USD per month, so it would take two years to catch up.
If you don't have a wireless NIC in your machine as well, that's more cost - another $150 CDN for the cheapest I've seen. So with wireless PCI NICs running at twice the price of a wireless router, I'm pretty convinced.
The access point is also smaller, easier to store somewhere with good signal, is easily relocated without unplugging, produces less heat, and generally looks nicer than a big ugly 486 machine.
If you were one of the people that gets 600+ messages per day of just pure crap and has had to change e-mail addresses three times in order to start fresh, you wouldn't be saying that.
That being said, just register a hotmail account and put info there. Check it once a week. If you start getting spam, delete it and make a new one.
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it make more sense to create an agency (in the manner of the FCC or CRTC) with the mandate to regulate these types of activities? That one agency, given the ability to pass regulations as the FCC has, would be able to regulate things like SPAM, Spyware, and other interests (viruses perhaps?). They could impose fines for companies that write programs to do this kind of work, publish lists of software banned under the regulations, and so forth.
Just like the acts that created the CRTC and the FCC, it would be a simple matter for Congress to say 'there is a problem, you guys handle it', rather than having to learn the full issue every time something needs to be done.
I could pretty much guarantee that the big names (EA, Take Two, Acclaim, and Square at least, not to mention the other large Japanese developers) have recieved preliminary kits so their developers can start familiarizing themselves with the system and its quirks. For that matter, they've probably had design documentations for more than a year now at least. With the multi-million-dollar blockbusters that these companies produce (EA Sports/NFS, GTA, Tony Hawk, and Final Fantasy, to name a few), these companies are going to be the ones selling PS3s when they come out. The better their launch titles are, the more PS3s Sony is going to sell, so you'd best believe that Sony's going to do everything they can to make sure that these companies have amazing games ready to go at launch (or close to).
That being said, if your target audience is x86 systems anyway, ICC provides an alternative that can significantly (in some cases) boost performance.
I think the key is to write good code first, then take advantage of the optimizations ICC provides second. Intel won't lock anyone in, but they'll put the lock on the door. Whether you close it behind yourself is your own choice.
CMS is also popularly used to refer to correspondance management systems, which led me to believe that this would be a system for management of e-mails, faxes, and mailings and the processing thereof (as we do at my company).
I was disappointed to find that it was actually a content management system, until I realized I want one of those more.
It did this to my roommate's XP install as well. Happy to say my laptop remains as-yet uninhibited.
I should note that I AM running corporate XP instead of the XP Home, but I might switch back to Home and be legit. After I do some research about the benefits/drawbacks (most of which don't matter to me, like joining Domains), then we'll see.
Either way, Windows Update works fine for me, and my roommate installed SP2 recently, and now critical updates notification at least is good as gold. Go figure.
I set up my laptop recently and had to turn this ON from being off by default.
That being said, I don't get bluescreens OR reboots in XP in the whole time I've had the laptop, save once, and that was on the stock install. After reinstalling a fresh XP (day one), I have never had a single issue, and I keep my machine running for weeks at a time (not counting downtime for hibernation when going from home to the cafe).
If you get bluescreens in XP, check your drivers, update what you can, and see if there are any incompatibiliities, because on any hardware I've run, I've never had a problem, except from ATI drivers on an old All-in-Wonder Radeon.
I blame lousy hardware for pretty much every bluescreen in XP, because on good hardware, it's rock solid.
So that's the secret! I've been trying to market my SneezGuard firewall technology for years, but all I have to do is rename it to @Choo and I'm gold! Ah, sweet success, I can taste you now!
software price is the #1 cause of piracy. why the hell pirate something when it's easier and cheaper to simply buy it?
Haha, it's so true. I was reading your post and when you mentioned Scenerist being $30k, my first thought was 'I wonder if I can find a torrent for it.' Then you mentioned the second program for cheap, and I thought hey, I could afford to buy that.
I'd still want to have a copy of Scenerist, but I'd never use it. It's just cool to have a $30k piece of software sitting in your burned DVD section (and ironic too!).
id Software lost over a million dollars to record-breaking piracy the weekend before Doom 3's release. Ask Carmack sometime how he feels about that.
id Software lost over a million dollars to record-breaking piracy because people realized Doom 3 was a crappy game before they got a chance to pay for it. My roommate sure pirated it, and it got deleted pretty fast. It's not even worth wasting a DVD on, as far as I'm concerned. I know two people that can play it at a reasonable framerate, and neither of them want to bother because it's a boring, repetative, predictable, and uninspired project.
If it weren't for piracy, I would have bought it the day it came out, and I never would have bought another id Software game until at least two weeks after release. As it is, I realized that there is no way this would ever run well on my machine, despite meeting the system requirements by far, and that even if it did, I wouldn't want it to, because it's uninspiring, repetetive, and predictable.
I can't consider adaptations to be counted under this criteria, because the stories were already written, they just had to adapt them. It's not a hollywood plot, it's a literature one.
That being said...
The Lord of the Rings series suffered badly (moreso in the last than the first) from being incredibly drawn out with boring crap. In a book, I want a lot of character development, but when I go to see a movie, I don't want to suffer through watching someone talk. Movies are a visual medium, and they should make use of that. There's no point in having a good plot if you have to watch the characters talk about it for 30-minute stretches before something actually HAPPENS.
The problem though is that all this exposition is vital to the storyline of the LOTR series, and cutting it out wouldn't make a movie with a lick of sense to it. In that respect, the movie was pretty much damned in this respect from the get-go. Great effects, great acting, great storyline, but as soon as the last battle scene in Return of the King was over, I stopped my DVD player and took out the disc (and have since lost it, but I don't think I could stand to watch it again).
Now, if hollywood could learn to do something on that scale, with that level of detail, that was meant from the start to be a movie, and still pull it off, I'd be sold. Oh well.
I like caller ID, I just hate jackasses. Maybe you should look at the problem and not the symptoms, because it sounds like you do too.
CallerID is an enabling technology, both for those of us with half a clue, and for those people so near functionally retarded that they can't understand the simple concepts of social responsibility. Don't hate the technology, hate the people that do stupid shit with it.
Yes, some people are deadbeats, but there are a lot of people who have lost their jobs and need to choose between food and their gas bill.
Perhaps, but a lot of those people (myself included) don't bother to call in and let us know they can't pay.
I work customer service for a large natural gas distribution company, and most of the people who have had their gas turned off are nice people. Some of them have financial problems, but a lot of them just make honest mistakes (or have honest mistakes made). One customer wasn't even being sent a bill because his new condo didn't have mailboxes set up, so he thought that it was included with the fees he was paying (the other utilities were, at the time). A lot of others don't notice their account number changing when they move, and continue paying the old account.
Now, our company rarely institutes collections action against them - we just turn off the gas and they can call back when they want hot water.
I personally have had an account with UPS sent to collections because of a screw-up on their part, though it didn't get that bad. Someone sent me a parcel worth about $110 CDN (plus $30 shipping), and UPS decided to charge me an extra $54 for 'customs brokerage'. I didn't have the money on me when they came to pick it up, so I asked the delivery guy to hold it at the depot ($54 was kind of steep, but considering I was paying $110 for something that was worth $300 easily, I wasn't going to complain).
When I got to the depot a few days later, however, they said that they had shipped it back to the sender. Three months later, I was still getting letters from UPS and the collections agency telling me to pay up, even though I'd called them three times.
I'm not sure why I gave two conflicting examples, but there you have it. With our gas company, customers just need to call in, let us know they won't be able to pay, and we can work something out, instead of them dodging us, ignoring bills, and not returning phone calls until it's too late.
That being said, some companies (UPS for example) are simply incompetant and send closed accounts to collections, maybe for fun, I don't know.
Depending on the size of the city, this may be infeasible, but in Fredericton, NB (50-60k people depending on whether school's in), the entire downtown core (depending on line-of-sight) is wirelessed for free internet access.
Most cities won't be able to do this for the whole city, but it might be worth doing it for major centres, where a lot of tourist, artsy, or university people hang out; coffee shops especially. This sort of thing can increase traffic to local businesses, and can increase revenues to e.g. coffee shops, snack bars, eateries, and so on, because people will leave the house to do their surfing and e-mail, and slouch about in the cafes drinking expensive coffee.
I don't know if this is feasible, financially or technologically, but it's an idea, and it can help local businesses if done right.
Slashdot Mirror
When I first moved into my new apartment with my laptop, there was an unsecured wireless network downstairs that gave me (128k) access to the internet. It was slow, but it worked. I fine-tuned some of the settings on it (default 'linksys' with new SSID) and got it working pretty well.
The girl, Jennifer, had a Dell machine, which I believe was a laptop because it wasn't on during the day but was at night, and it was connected to wi-fi. She had the regular stuff installed that Dell provides, MS Works, Musicmatch Jukebox, and so on. She had a Lexmark printer (I forget which model), a Samsung digital camera, and a fair-sized music collection (some good stuff, some crap, typical college kids selection). I could feed you a laundry list of what she actually had installed (thanks to c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu). Fortunately the default Windows XP configuration prevents access to homedirs except by the specific user (I probably could have logged in as her - XP doesn't require passwords by default - but that's going a little too far).
The point is, unsecured wireless can be dangerous. Imagine if I COULD login as her? What if she was using MS Money 2004? It came with my Dell, she probably had it too. What if she didn't have a password on her files? I'd suddenly have access to her financial information. Her name, her accounts, possibly even credit card numbers, where she eats out, where she grocery stops, what bars she goes to, how much money she has, where she shops online. Even without that, I could tell what websites she goes to, her MSN name and profile, e-mail addresses. I could also sniff her traffic and get passwords, read e-mail, everything. I could pretty easily install a trojan, screen-capture program, PC Anywhere. The possibilities are endless.
God, now I'm scaring myself. I think I'll crank up the security on my access point when I get home. Too bad the only other person that uses my net only supports WEP64.
--Dan
Who'd want to collect a gig of data from some dude in downtown SF to hack his wifi AND manage to clone a mac address?
Not sure about the gig of data, but every wi-fi card I've dealt with has a setting in the drivers to change the MAC address (in fact, my Dell Inspiron has that ability for the wired network card as well).
--Dan
If my parents had bought me a computer like every other kid in my neighbourhood, and paid me some cushy allowance so I could upgrade it, then all those nights of sitting in my room until 7 AM would have paid off!
How am I supposed to hone my skills if she's always nagging me to 'get a job'? That's what I'm doing! Sigh. Parents these days just don't understand.
And no mom, I'm not a terrorist. They have the ugliest skins.
--Dan
All those security checks and rules are used to at the airport? Didn't exist back in the 60s and earlier.
A side note, the US is the only country I've been to that allows non-passengers up to the embarkation gates. Anywhere else, you get stopped at customs and can't proceed without a ticket. Curbside check-in, which I'm still fuzzy on, but as I understand basically puts your luggage right on the plane stright from the taxi, is another huge issue.
Let's face it, the US was always behind in security, because despite the good sense of dozens of other countries (Canada, for example, and the UK, Israel, Holland, and so on), the US didn't care about security until they had to - and even then, the rules were so absurd that they served only to provide an assurance - terrorsts are after your lucky charms, but we've put measures into place to make your cereal safe!
It's all BS. The government only cares about security because it's one more thing they can claim when the election rolls around. They can make people afraid in general, then make planes safe, but still not make people safe from planes. They're trying to have it both ways, and it just doesn't work like that.
--Dan
I dunno, but as long as he makes it clear that whatever features are what he wants to have in the game, if adding them in is reasonable, then he should talk.
I don't know about you guys, but personally, I love talking with friends about theory, however practical or impractical that might be. What would be cool in a game, how you could implement it, races, ships, whatever. I think Mr. Molyneux should talk with the enthusiasm that he has for his games, as long as he's not promising that those features will be there.
Let's be realistic: trees growing doesn't matter. I mean, really, it's immersive, but also irrelevant. I'm not going to notice if it's not there (well I might, but I won't care). That being said though, just talking about the possibility opens up dozens of possibilities in my mind, ideas and theories that I can discuss with my friends, and we can say 'wouldn't it be cool if we made a game that could do this or that or the other thing?'
As long as he's not influencing sales by guaranteeing anything, I'm fine with him saying 'we're working on realtime tree growth and you can watch the textures change as paint dries, and the shorelines will gradually recede or encroach depending on the phase of the moon and the changing climate and passing meteors'. If they really are working on it, then A+, and if it doesn't make it in, then hey, that's the way she goes.
--Dan
I often pair up with a friend of mine on projects - not necessarily programming directly, but sometimes technical stuff (design, implementation, etc with programs already written). My friend is doing his Master's in CS, and I have one year of an Arts major done. Suffice to say, he's the better programmer.
What I bring to the team, however, is the big picture. I can design in my head in a few moments how things should be laid out and the possibilities of each option, I know enough about languages to pick the proper tool for the job, and I know enough about programming to provide input in that respect when it's needed.
Teaming up two programmers with the same skillsets might be handy from a catching-bugs point of view, but the two of us working together with our completely different skillsets works great from a design-and-implementation point of view, since I can do the design and he can do the implementation, but we each know enough to help with both.
That's what pair programming should be. Not two C wizards sitting down nagging at each other, but two people who know C and who know design, but who are only excellent at one or the other, to bring different skills to the table, and defer to the other in their areas most lacking.
--Dan
I purchased my (badass) D-Link WAP/Router/Switch for $60 CDN after main-in rebate. That comes out to probably $40 USD per month, so it would take two years to catch up.
If you don't have a wireless NIC in your machine as well, that's more cost - another $150 CDN for the cheapest I've seen. So with wireless PCI NICs running at twice the price of a wireless router, I'm pretty convinced.
The access point is also smaller, easier to store somewhere with good signal, is easily relocated without unplugging, produces less heat, and generally looks nicer than a big ugly 486 machine.
--Dan
If you were one of the people that gets 600+ messages per day of just pure crap and has had to change e-mail addresses three times in order to start fresh, you wouldn't be saying that.
That being said, just register a hotmail account and put info there. Check it once a week. If you start getting spam, delete it and make a new one.
--Dan
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it make more sense to create an agency (in the manner of the FCC or CRTC) with the mandate to regulate these types of activities? That one agency, given the ability to pass regulations as the FCC has, would be able to regulate things like SPAM, Spyware, and other interests (viruses perhaps?). They could impose fines for companies that write programs to do this kind of work, publish lists of software banned under the regulations, and so forth.
Just like the acts that created the CRTC and the FCC, it would be a simple matter for Congress to say 'there is a problem, you guys handle it', rather than having to learn the full issue every time something needs to be done.
--Dan
I could pretty much guarantee that the big names (EA, Take Two, Acclaim, and Square at least, not to mention the other large Japanese developers) have recieved preliminary kits so their developers can start familiarizing themselves with the system and its quirks. For that matter, they've probably had design documentations for more than a year now at least. With the multi-million-dollar blockbusters that these companies produce (EA Sports/NFS, GTA, Tony Hawk, and Final Fantasy, to name a few), these companies are going to be the ones selling PS3s when they come out. The better their launch titles are, the more PS3s Sony is going to sell, so you'd best believe that Sony's going to do everything they can to make sure that these companies have amazing games ready to go at launch (or close to).
--Dan
That being said, if your target audience is x86 systems anyway, ICC provides an alternative that can significantly (in some cases) boost performance.
I think the key is to write good code first, then take advantage of the optimizations ICC provides second. Intel won't lock anyone in, but they'll put the lock on the door. Whether you close it behind yourself is your own choice.
--Dan
CMS is also popularly used to refer to correspondance management systems, which led me to believe that this would be a system for management of e-mails, faxes, and mailings and the processing thereof (as we do at my company).
I was disappointed to find that it was actually a content management system, until I realized I want one of those more.
--Dan
Enh, bittorrent's probably faster anyway.
--Dan
It did this to my roommate's XP install as well. Happy to say my laptop remains as-yet uninhibited.
I should note that I AM running corporate XP instead of the XP Home, but I might switch back to Home and be legit. After I do some research about the benefits/drawbacks (most of which don't matter to me, like joining Domains), then we'll see.
Either way, Windows Update works fine for me, and my roommate installed SP2 recently, and now critical updates notification at least is good as gold. Go figure.
--Dan
I set up my laptop recently and had to turn this ON from being off by default.
That being said, I don't get bluescreens OR reboots in XP in the whole time I've had the laptop, save once, and that was on the stock install. After reinstalling a fresh XP (day one), I have never had a single issue, and I keep my machine running for weeks at a time (not counting downtime for hibernation when going from home to the cafe).
If you get bluescreens in XP, check your drivers, update what you can, and see if there are any incompatibiliities, because on any hardware I've run, I've never had a problem, except from ATI drivers on an old All-in-Wonder Radeon.
I blame lousy hardware for pretty much every bluescreen in XP, because on good hardware, it's rock solid.
--Dan
So that's the secret! I've been trying to market my SneezGuard firewall technology for years, but all I have to do is rename it to @Choo and I'm gold! Ah, sweet success, I can taste you now!
--Dan
They forgot to mention this device as well. A coworker has it, he says it's fantastic in terms of quality, features, and software.
--Dan
software price is the #1 cause of piracy. why the hell pirate something when it's easier and cheaper to simply buy it?
Haha, it's so true. I was reading your post and when you mentioned Scenerist being $30k, my first thought was 'I wonder if I can find a torrent for it.' Then you mentioned the second program for cheap, and I thought hey, I could afford to buy that.
I'd still want to have a copy of Scenerist, but I'd never use it. It's just cool to have a $30k piece of software sitting in your burned DVD section (and ironic too!).
--Dan
id Software lost over a million dollars to record-breaking piracy the weekend before Doom 3's release. Ask Carmack sometime how he feels about that.
id Software lost over a million dollars to record-breaking piracy because people realized Doom 3 was a crappy game before they got a chance to pay for it. My roommate sure pirated it, and it got deleted pretty fast. It's not even worth wasting a DVD on, as far as I'm concerned. I know two people that can play it at a reasonable framerate, and neither of them want to bother because it's a boring, repetative, predictable, and uninspired project.
If it weren't for piracy, I would have bought it the day it came out, and I never would have bought another id Software game until at least two weeks after release. As it is, I realized that there is no way this would ever run well on my machine, despite meeting the system requirements by far, and that even if it did, I wouldn't want it to, because it's uninspiring, repetetive, and predictable.
That's my rant for the day.
--Dan
I can't consider adaptations to be counted under this criteria, because the stories were already written, they just had to adapt them. It's not a hollywood plot, it's a literature one.
That being said...
The Lord of the Rings series suffered badly (moreso in the last than the first) from being incredibly drawn out with boring crap. In a book, I want a lot of character development, but when I go to see a movie, I don't want to suffer through watching someone talk. Movies are a visual medium, and they should make use of that. There's no point in having a good plot if you have to watch the characters talk about it for 30-minute stretches before something actually HAPPENS.
The problem though is that all this exposition is vital to the storyline of the LOTR series, and cutting it out wouldn't make a movie with a lick of sense to it. In that respect, the movie was pretty much damned in this respect from the get-go. Great effects, great acting, great storyline, but as soon as the last battle scene in Return of the King was over, I stopped my DVD player and took out the disc (and have since lost it, but I don't think I could stand to watch it again).
Now, if hollywood could learn to do something on that scale, with that level of detail, that was meant from the start to be a movie, and still pull it off, I'd be sold. Oh well.
--Dan
Kinda reminded me of the TV series 'Stargate: SG-1' when I first saw the previews on apple.com/trailers/ .... Because they used the same theme music!
I don't know if it's still the same, but I know it had the SG-1 music in the background (confirmed this with my roommate).
Couldn't figure it out. Not only that, it was poorly cut SG-1 theme music (jumped all over the place, but not in time with the clips in the trailer).
--Dan
So from my mind, this is a Good Thing, and I'd like to see it on my OS X/Linux machines as well.
Statically compile your kernel without firewire and USB mass storage support (Linux). Dunno about OSX.
--Dan
I like caller ID, I just hate jackasses. Maybe you should look at the problem and not the symptoms, because it sounds like you do too.
CallerID is an enabling technology, both for those of us with half a clue, and for those people so near functionally retarded that they can't understand the simple concepts of social responsibility. Don't hate the technology, hate the people that do stupid shit with it.
--Dan
Yes, some people are deadbeats, but there are a lot of people who have lost their jobs and need to choose between food and their gas bill.
Perhaps, but a lot of those people (myself included) don't bother to call in and let us know they can't pay.
I work customer service for a large natural gas distribution company, and most of the people who have had their gas turned off are nice people. Some of them have financial problems, but a lot of them just make honest mistakes (or have honest mistakes made). One customer wasn't even being sent a bill because his new condo didn't have mailboxes set up, so he thought that it was included with the fees he was paying (the other utilities were, at the time). A lot of others don't notice their account number changing when they move, and continue paying the old account.
Now, our company rarely institutes collections action against them - we just turn off the gas and they can call back when they want hot water.
I personally have had an account with UPS sent to collections because of a screw-up on their part, though it didn't get that bad. Someone sent me a parcel worth about $110 CDN (plus $30 shipping), and UPS decided to charge me an extra $54 for 'customs brokerage'. I didn't have the money on me when they came to pick it up, so I asked the delivery guy to hold it at the depot ($54 was kind of steep, but considering I was paying $110 for something that was worth $300 easily, I wasn't going to complain).
When I got to the depot a few days later, however, they said that they had shipped it back to the sender. Three months later, I was still getting letters from UPS and the collections agency telling me to pay up, even though I'd called them three times.
I'm not sure why I gave two conflicting examples, but there you have it. With our gas company, customers just need to call in, let us know they won't be able to pay, and we can work something out, instead of them dodging us, ignoring bills, and not returning phone calls until it's too late.
That being said, some companies (UPS for example) are simply incompetant and send closed accounts to collections, maybe for fun, I don't know.
--Dan
Depending on the size of the city, this may be infeasible, but in Fredericton, NB (50-60k people depending on whether school's in), the entire downtown core (depending on line-of-sight) is wirelessed for free internet access.
Most cities won't be able to do this for the whole city, but it might be worth doing it for major centres, where a lot of tourist, artsy, or university people hang out; coffee shops especially. This sort of thing can increase traffic to local businesses, and can increase revenues to e.g. coffee shops, snack bars, eateries, and so on, because people will leave the house to do their surfing and e-mail, and slouch about in the cafes drinking expensive coffee.
I don't know if this is feasible, financially or technologically, but it's an idea, and it can help local businesses if done right.
--Dan