I have to admit I didn't have any of those problems when I was running Ubuntu 5.X but one possibility may be for you to consider upgading to 6.X (Dapper Drake). Although it's admittedly still in beta I use it as my primary desktop at work and have found it to be more than stable enough and seems to render everything properly. Anyway, just a thought if all else fails.
Actually, you need to be very careful about that. I had a client attempt to cancel his AOL subscription and he honestly thought he had. But apparently the guy on the other end was able to trick him (anyone who has tried to cancel AOL knows what I'm talking about) into trying it for free for "just another month". The client thought the service would be cancelled at the end of that month. Of course it wasn't. He told his credit card company not to pay AOL and never heard anything after that. Then years later he went to join AOL again only to be told he owed them nearly a thousand dollars in unpaid bills and he would have to pay them before he could get service. You can imagine what he told them to do. But if they had reported that unpaid bill it could have gone on his credit history and he would have had a hard fight to prove he had cancelled his service.
In short, get it in writing or get a confirmation code when cancelling service or you have no proof that you don't owe for the service!
You are obviously extremely technical and more than capable of running whatever you want. I don't think the question is really whether you should be doing this at home or work because it's going to take alot of work to maintain regardless of where you base it out of. Although I obviously agree with the others that you are better off keeping personal stuff at home so you don't lose it suddenly due to things happening at work.
But just for comparison's sake, I do all my e-mail personal (and some family members for free) web hosting, and of course FTP server and remote access on a $200 Walmart Lindows machine with it's standard Celeron 900MHz processor (slightly altered so it now has 256 MB RAM and Windows Small Business Server 2003). I set it up once and just leave it alone. It does just fine for simple personal needs and when it acts up from time to time I reboot it and it's happy again. I rarely touch it except to install core server updates and it does just fine. I had wanted to use a linux distro instead (and originally did) but wasn't technical enough to figure out why I couldn't get the e-mail to work so I gave up and installed Windows Server because you don't need to know much to get it up and running. Which, of course, is the plus and minus of MS software. I'm sure my server could be hacked in a New York minute by someone who targeted it but it's been safe from all the standard attacks so far. I'v ealso managed to get my server acknowledged as safe by using some of the new technologies for verifying server info (AOL was a nuisance but I got OK'ed by them too). Keep in mind I'm just a desktop tech and have no formal training on any server software (except a little OS/2 and Novell like 10 years ago.
Personally, as more ISP's start being forced to share information and likely start to sell it I think having personal sercured and encrypted servers is becoming a viable option for those who use the Internet a great deal and want to be able to have control over their online "stuff". Not to mention it's relatively inexpensive. Especially if you choose a linux option instead of the costlier (but easier for average Joe to be taught to use) MS solution. I go to many people's homes as part of my work and I see more and more complex home networks all the time.
Who said anything about false charges? Annoying and insulting posts are sadly, a part of most message board systems. That's what makes a law like this at best unenforcable and at worst, enforced. In fact, one of the responses to my post could be taken as quite insulting and even harrassing. Now, I have the sense God gave a mealworm to realize the person was (hopefully;) ) trying to be funny. But what if I didn't, and neither did the thousands of others who get annoying or harrassing posts to them on message boards and blogs? It would be a legal processing nightmare.
So here we are stuck with a law that hopefully won't be used by the masses in the way I encouraged (yes, I was partly joking, but not completely). But even if it isn't used that way then it can/will be used in a targeted matter by those with money and legal firepower to put down dissent about them by invoking this law. And there goes any semblance of free speech.
And just to be repetitive, I'm for protection against true one-on-one harrassment and even prosecuting on extreme cases of defamation but this law certainly appears to be far broader than that.
For every -1 Flamebait that appears on Slashdot we should all file a federal lawsuit that must be investigated and tried. Sometimes you just have to prove that something is too stupid to be in the rule book. We'll see how long the justice system can withsatnd a very stupid law that can be invoked by the average citizen. Any takers on a template complaint form to save lawyer fees?:D
And just for clarification, I'm all for protection agains harrassment, but a law against making an anonymous message that annoys someone is ridiculous.
I can still remember getting it when I was 10. It was great. I studied the BASIC coding book that came with it (I've never seen a better layed out tutorial for learning a programming language since) and got very good at coding. Of course, I had lots of practice in repeptition because there was no storage for it yet. It was a couple of years before I got a cassette recorder to be able to store my programs on cassette tapes.
That's when I started making my first information systems. Of course, before long I was writing programs that were too large for the 16K chip to store so I had to cool it unit I got the 32K chip! What a glorious day. Then I learned how to peek and poke the ROM and read information coming in the joystick ports which then opened up the great security system I created with some wires, resistors, and a cannibalized joystick controller.
Actually, I think the author of the book has far more to be worried about. These days it's the person who makes public what many people already know who gets sued by the big boys. So, the real question is, how long before a company uses this technique to find they are vulnerable and then sues the author for a step by step instruction manual on how to get access to their unsecured data?
I don't know what your specific situation is but I thought I would mention that when I noticed my e-mails starting to get rejected by various ISP's (I actually noticed it first with AOL accounts)it turned out to be that many ISPs do an NSLookup on the domain name and if it doesn't resolve it gets blocked. I Went to my ISP and had to ask them to put in an NSLookup value in the DNS system (I had to explain it a bit to the tech I got). But once they did it I haven't had any more trouble with servers rejecting e-mail from my server. You may want to try that. Check out http://postmaster.info.aol.com/tools/dns.html for the test to perform to see if this may be the cause e-mail from your server is being rejected.
In fact, upon brief perusal here is part of the actual summary FTFR:
"Held: One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use
to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirma-
tive steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribu-
tion with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting
acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of
the device's lawful uses. Pp. 10-24. "
So there ya' have it. You have to go above and beyond on showing you really made it just for copyright infringement.
Yeah, that's why I decided that to make up for all of those who got redirected to localhost by opening the document a bunch of times in tabs. Sadly though, they all loaded quite quickly. I'm very disappointed in the/.ers.:P
But if the person didn't already know what PBX meant in this situation would they know what it meant after getting the following result on Acronym Search?...
2 records were found matching PBX
PBX Plastic Bonded Explosive
PBX Private Branch Exchange
Wouldn't want anyone to get the right.. err. wrong idea about geeks after all...;)
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm on the board of a local community council and folks asked about the possibility of providing free internet access in a local park to attract wealthier home owners to the area. We haven't come to a conclusion yet, but one of the questions I brought up was whether or not the council would censor the access to try to prevent folks from downloading free porn in our parks on their laptops. Or, of course we can just leave the whole network wide open which would certainly require much less thought and effort. I think if a community is going to provide a free service that it should have control over that service. If you don't like the terms, pay for your own wireless connection. They are becoming available all over. Naturally, if a community wants to provide free wireless service and a make a point of leaving it wide open to attract folks who don't want to be censored then that's great too. My main issue is that our government should not be taking away the rights of small communities to provide a service to attract folks just because monopolistic Bells want more money.
That would have been nice but it wasn't going to happen. Read up on the Avro Arrow http://www.avroarrow.org/Cancellation.htm to see what happens when Canada competes with the U.S. But, at least the technologies went forward and the talents were put to use, if not for Canada then at least for our Southern Neighbor. I, like those very talented people who made the Avro have also moved South where it is far more advantageous to be smart than my home country (Canada). Sad, but true. Maybe the US government needs to import a few more of us into the military again...;)
I feel your pain on your experience with the old AMD chips. It's true, back in the day I wouldn't have touched them with a 12' memory stick. Every AMD chip I ever ran into did weird glitchy things. But truth be told, after the K5 series AMD started to really pull their stuff together. When they released the Athlon for the first time it was a complete turn around on reliability and performance and they have held to that ever since. I have to tip my hat to the folks at AMD because they started way behind but through actual hard work and a great product they've managed to be a real challenger to Intel. IMHO, go for the AMD chip for a power machine, it's not only an equivalent to better performer but most likely will save you a few bucks at the same time. A win-win situation in my books.:)
Actually, it is possible and done all the time to an extent. I teach blind and visually impaired children and adults to use the computer with speech output. In some cases my clients are working in customer service phone pools. Their headset has two inputs, one from the phone and one from the PC. They are listening to and speaking to the customer while at the same time listening to and inputting information to the PC. It requires a good deal of skill and concentration but you'd be surprised at your odds of speaking to a blind person when you call a customer service phone line.
They did some small scale testing here in Cincinnati, Ohio and the amateur radio community here did our best to watch for interference. There were two separate neighborhoods tested in and we were unable to find any interference so far but we're also not all convinced we were looking in the right places. So, on the plus side, there wasn't any blatant large scal interference from the small test but on the negative side it would have been nice if the utility company had been willing to tell us exactly where the test was being run so we could take a closer look at the lines involved. We'll just have to see. I'd wager that here in Cincinnati we'll see some quick adoption because the utility company here has already been hinting at cut-rate broadband prices to get into the market.
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I have to admit I didn't have any of those problems when I was running Ubuntu 5.X but one possibility may be for you to consider upgading to 6.X (Dapper Drake). Although it's admittedly still in beta I use it as my primary desktop at work and have found it to be more than stable enough and seems to render everything properly. Anyway, just a thought if all else fails.
Michael
Actually, you need to be very careful about that. I had a client attempt to cancel his AOL subscription and he honestly thought he had. But apparently the guy on the other end was able to trick him (anyone who has tried to cancel AOL knows what I'm talking about) into trying it for free for "just another month". The client thought the service would be cancelled at the end of that month. Of course it wasn't. He told his credit card company not to pay AOL and never heard anything after that. Then years later he went to join AOL again only to be told he owed them nearly a thousand dollars in unpaid bills and he would have to pay them before he could get service. You can imagine what he told them to do. But if they had reported that unpaid bill it could have gone on his credit history and he would have had a hard fight to prove he had cancelled his service.
In short, get it in writing or get a confirmation code when cancelling service or you have no proof that you don't owe for the service!
You are obviously extremely technical and more than capable of running whatever you want. I don't think the question is really whether you should be doing this at home or work because it's going to take alot of work to maintain regardless of where you base it out of. Although I obviously agree with the others that you are better off keeping personal stuff at home so you don't lose it suddenly due to things happening at work.
But just for comparison's sake, I do all my e-mail personal (and some family members for free) web hosting, and of course FTP server and remote access on a $200 Walmart Lindows machine with it's standard Celeron 900MHz processor (slightly altered so it now has 256 MB RAM and Windows Small Business Server 2003). I set it up once and just leave it alone. It does just fine for simple personal needs and when it acts up from time to time I reboot it and it's happy again. I rarely touch it except to install core server updates and it does just fine. I had wanted to use a linux distro instead (and originally did) but wasn't technical enough to figure out why I couldn't get the e-mail to work so I gave up and installed Windows Server because you don't need to know much to get it up and running. Which, of course, is the plus and minus of MS software. I'm sure my server could be hacked in a New York minute by someone who targeted it but it's been safe from all the standard attacks so far. I'v ealso managed to get my server acknowledged as safe by using some of the new technologies for verifying server info (AOL was a nuisance but I got OK'ed by them too). Keep in mind I'm just a desktop tech and have no formal training on any server software (except a little OS/2 and Novell like 10 years ago.
Personally, as more ISP's start being forced to share information and likely start to sell it I think having personal sercured and encrypted servers is becoming a viable option for those who use the Internet a great deal and want to be able to have control over their online "stuff". Not to mention it's relatively inexpensive. Especially if you choose a linux option instead of the costlier (but easier for average Joe to be taught to use) MS solution. I go to many people's homes as part of my work and I see more and more complex home networks all the time.
Who said anything about false charges? Annoying and insulting posts are sadly, a part of most message board systems. That's what makes a law like this at best unenforcable and at worst, enforced. In fact, one of the responses to my post could be taken as quite insulting and even harrassing. Now, I have the sense God gave a mealworm to realize the person was (hopefully ;) ) trying to be funny. But what if I didn't, and neither did the thousands of others who get annoying or harrassing posts to them on message boards and blogs? It would be a legal processing nightmare.
So here we are stuck with a law that hopefully won't be used by the masses in the way I encouraged (yes, I was partly joking, but not completely). But even if it isn't used that way then it can/will be used in a targeted matter by those with money and legal firepower to put down dissent about them by invoking this law. And there goes any semblance of free speech.
And just to be repetitive, I'm for protection against true one-on-one harrassment and even prosecuting on extreme cases of defamation but this law certainly appears to be far broader than that.
For every -1 Flamebait that appears on Slashdot we should all file a federal lawsuit that must be investigated and tried. Sometimes you just have to prove that something is too stupid to be in the rule book. We'll see how long the justice system can withsatnd a very stupid law that can be invoked by the average citizen. Any takers on a template complaint form to save lawyer fees? :D
And just for clarification, I'm all for protection agains harrassment, but a law against making an anonymous message that annoys someone is ridiculous.
That's when I started making my first information systems. Of course, before long I was writing programs that were too large for the 16K chip to store so I had to cool it unit I got the 32K chip! What a glorious day. Then I learned how to peek and poke the ROM and read information coming in the joystick ports which then opened up the great security system I created with some wires, resistors, and a cannibalized joystick controller.
Yup, now those were the good ol' days...
Proof right here: http://www.thinkgeek.com/pcmods/cables/6b35/
Actually, I think the author of the book has far more to be worried about. These days it's the person who makes public what many people already know who gets sued by the big boys. So, the real question is, how long before a company uses this technique to find they are vulnerable and then sues the author for a step by step instruction manual on how to get access to their unsecured data?
I don't know what your specific situation is but I thought I would mention that when I noticed my e-mails starting to get rejected by various ISP's (I actually noticed it first with AOL accounts)it turned out to be that many ISPs do an NSLookup on the domain name and if it doesn't resolve it gets blocked. I Went to my ISP and had to ask them to put in an NSLookup value in the DNS system (I had to explain it a bit to the tech I got). But once they did it I haven't had any more trouble with servers rejecting e-mail from my server. You may want to try that. Check out http://postmaster.info.aol.com/tools/dns.html for the test to perform to see if this may be the cause e-mail from your server is being rejected.
In fact, upon brief perusal here is part of the actual summary FTFR:
"Held: One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirma- tive steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribu- tion with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses. Pp. 10-24. "
So there ya' have it. You have to go above and beyond on showing you really made it just for copyright infringement.
Yeah, that's why I decided that to make up for all of those who got redirected to localhost by opening the document a bunch of times in tabs. Sadly though, they all loaded quite quickly. I'm very disappointed in the /.ers. :P
But if the person didn't already know what PBX meant in this situation would they know what it meant after getting the following result on Acronym Search?... 2 records were found matching PBX PBX Plastic Bonded Explosive PBX Private Branch Exchange Wouldn't want anyone to get the right.. err. wrong idea about geeks after all... ;)
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm on the board of a local community council and folks asked about the possibility of providing free internet access in a local park to attract wealthier home owners to the area. We haven't come to a conclusion yet, but one of the questions I brought up was whether or not the council would censor the access to try to prevent folks from downloading free porn in our parks on their laptops. Or, of course we can just leave the whole network wide open which would certainly require much less thought and effort. I think if a community is going to provide a free service that it should have control over that service. If you don't like the terms, pay for your own wireless connection. They are becoming available all over. Naturally, if a community wants to provide free wireless service and a make a point of leaving it wide open to attract folks who don't want to be censored then that's great too. My main issue is that our government should not be taking away the rights of small communities to provide a service to attract folks just because monopolistic Bells want more money.
That would have been nice but it wasn't going to happen. Read up on the Avro Arrow http://www.avroarrow.org/Cancellation.htm to see what happens when Canada competes with the U.S. But, at least the technologies went forward and the talents were put to use, if not for Canada then at least for our Southern Neighbor. I, like those very talented people who made the Avro have also moved South where it is far more advantageous to be smart than my home country (Canada). Sad, but true. Maybe the US government needs to import a few more of us into the military again... ;)
I feel your pain on your experience with the old AMD chips. It's true, back in the day I wouldn't have touched them with a 12' memory stick. Every AMD chip I ever ran into did weird glitchy things. But truth be told, after the K5 series AMD started to really pull their stuff together. When they released the Athlon for the first time it was a complete turn around on reliability and performance and they have held to that ever since. I have to tip my hat to the folks at AMD because they started way behind but through actual hard work and a great product they've managed to be a real challenger to Intel. IMHO, go for the AMD chip for a power machine, it's not only an equivalent to better performer but most likely will save you a few bucks at the same time. A win-win situation in my books. :)
Actually, it is possible and done all the time to an extent. I teach blind and visually impaired children and adults to use the computer with speech output. In some cases my clients are working in customer service phone pools. Their headset has two inputs, one from the phone and one from the PC. They are listening to and speaking to the customer while at the same time listening to and inputting information to the PC. It requires a good deal of skill and concentration but you'd be surprised at your odds of speaking to a blind person when you call a customer service phone line.
They did some small scale testing here in Cincinnati, Ohio and the amateur radio community here did our best to watch for interference. There were two separate neighborhoods tested in and we were unable to find any interference so far but we're also not all convinced we were looking in the right places. So, on the plus side, there wasn't any blatant large scal interference from the small test but on the negative side it would have been nice if the utility company had been willing to tell us exactly where the test was being run so we could take a closer look at the lines involved. We'll just have to see. I'd wager that here in Cincinnati we'll see some quick adoption because the utility company here has already been hinting at cut-rate broadband prices to get into the market.
Michael