I just setup a Vista box for my cousin. Of course it had 17 updates waiting for it but it was the 32 bit version. He's disable so I also had to install Dragon Naturally Speaking. That runs fairly well on Vista.
The thing that struck me is that out of the box it took over an HOUR for Vista to set itself up. That's completely unacceptable.
The one certain way of telling that the FCC is doing its job protecting consumer interests is when Congress gets involved. I do want to see more about the abuse of FUSF funds though because with all the money we've paid into that system we should have 21st century phone and net access EVERYWHERE!
That is exactly what happened here in Rhode Island. We've been REAL-ID compliant for the past couple of years but just recently a few DMV employees got busted for handing out ID's without going through the correct process. Seems someone on the outside was paying them off.
Something I've been toying with is setting up a node on my network for public access. I already have private access that uses WPA and MAC filtering. Why not get a cheap computer, setup Debian on it then install Squid Proxy and DansGuardian. That way Squid can go by address, while DansGuardian goes by content. Then put a WAP in front of that and leave it wide open.
That way I maintain open access will protecting myself from liability. That's the only way I'll do it. Oh and did I mention that SP/DG box will also throttle bandwidth. Maybe offer 5mbps on that pipe.
The team that built this sweated every moment of the project. Squyers was a hell of a project manager too. But the engineers deserve a hell of a lot of credit. Those rovers were only supposed to last 90 sols. At 1462 that means that Spirit has gone 16 times longer than it should have.
I've seen so many instances of BSOD's on things like gas pumps, ATM's, etc. Windows sucks. Am I using it, yes I am. I'm well familiar with its eccentricities. Would I use it for mission critical projects, hell no.
Of course I used to work with a group that rescued these old pieces of big iron. I've lost touch and I believe the collection was transfered to another group in RI.
The FCC has for a long time not represented the interests of the citizens of the United States. What is needed is to wreck what currently stands and replace it.
How about selecting from a pool of those with either radio amateur or general radiotelephone licenses. Then narrow it to include only those with info, cs, or engineering degrees. From there do lottery selection for FCC commissioners.
I suspect what we'd see out the other end is a much fairer system for bandwidth auctions, management, and one that would be anti-consolidation.
So true. I can count the number of times we had to reboot a Linux system on one hand. I'd need several dozen hands to count the number of Windows reboots we had to perform.
The mail server was a good example. The only thing you needed to do there was monitor disk space. Actually the same was true for database servers and we had to play a few presto change-o games using NFS shares to move things like pdf files to a server that had space. But that's the thing, I find Unix/Linux file shares to be infinitely easier than doing shares on Windows.
I worked for the RI Sec of State's office for nearly four years. In that time I saw us go from a 90% OSS shop to a 50% OSS shop because the incoming I.T. director was a Windows only guy.
But the best part is the Windows migration isn't going so well. I left back in September but they had just bought new servers about five months before. They got no further than Server 2003 being installed on them due to documentation procedures, etc.
One server was to be an Exchange 2003 server to replace the Qmail server they were using. I just got email from someone there the other day and guess what, it's still Qmail.
The big push to Exchange btw was a woman named Catherine Avila, the Director of Administration. She was petrified that I.T. could potentially read her email because Qmail stored everything in the users home folder.
When I'd left the tally for hardware and software was up around $60,000. Both we systems guys loudly protested the Exchange bit. Also told them that if you were going to present an Exchange box to to world, you damn well better put something in front of it to stop the bullshit.
And of course when I left I made a prediction that within two months of my departure there'd be some catastrophic event. Sure enough, their web server crapped. The server in question was a LAMP box, and MySQL needs to be tuned occasionally to fix kludgy indices and queries. And that's what brought their web server down. There was a MySQL slave on the box that started consuming mass CPU cycles because of bad queries.
The PR guy said it was a rootkit. I call bullshit.
Another bureaucracy! When you think about it, under the current system of law we're all violators. For example, I backup my music directory to xdrive. Ooops, I made a copy that anyone I share it with can access.
When will we finally come to the realization that our government has been fully co opted and corrupted by corporations?
I get a verifiable 1.5mb up from Cox. It's fine, I'm not serving out much anyhow as my devel environment doesn't require it.
I realize that clashes with torrents and things like that, but just watch and see what Verizon does. They're famous for luring you in then jacking up the price. The only reason there's any buzz about it is because people have the memory span of a gnat.
I'm happy to see this suit being filed against Verizon. They're the same Verizon who patented RFC's and then went after VoIP provider Vonage if you recall.
Mine was a TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1 with 4K memory. It got expanded to Level II 16K within a month.
I did the lowercase modification on the motherboard by myself.
About 4 months later I picked up the expansion interface, two disk drives and a voice synthesizer. It was a fully optioned out system by that point. I can remember the speed increase that disk gave you over tape!
And when I noticed dropouts on some of the characters on the screen I knew the machine well enough that I could trace it down to the specific memory chip that had gone bad. Went to Radio Shack, got the replacement chip for a few dollars. Interestingly enough Tandy had socketed all the memory so it was easy to do things like this.
Until the robot gets marked down because you know it will. Once it's around $100 or so I'll buy it then tear it apart to see what makes it tick, then make my own enhancements. Should be interesting since I'm in the process of taking a cheap little robotic dog and enhancing it with an Arduino doing the heavy lifting.
I've worked a few incidents and handled emergency communications. One stands out, the freak snow storm back in 1993. Dumped a hell of a load of snow on the state, took down phone lines, etc. and cell wasn't quite as widespread as it is now.
It's been years since we've seen any kind of natural disaster here in the northeast U.S. and that worries me. Haven't even had a good hurricane roar through here in 20+ years.
Interesting that you should mention the TOS. The TOS he read makes no mention of VPN at all but when he talks to Comcast support they in essence tell him to upgrade to a business package, or use another provider.
It'll be a few years before FIOS makes it to his area, though at&t Uverse service may get there before that. Uverse essentially moves the DSLAM from the central office to the neighborhood and then they use a HDSL connection to the subscriber.
Interestingly Cox has all of Rhode Island while Comcast seems to be dominant in Massachusetts. My friend has Comcast, I have Cox.
He was telling me that Comcast topedoes VPN connections to business entities that originate from residential accounts after four minutes of uptime. Cox does no such thing.
And the arrival of FIOS in RI forced Cox to upgrade their network and they now offer 20/2 net service. That's what I'm using now and its pretty good. Now if only I could find a wireless access point that didn't suck.
Of course I'll never go back into the arms of Verizon. I have such a blind hatred of that company it isn't funny.
Six years ago I was the I.T. Director for a manufacturing firm. I had numerous arguments with the company president about software licensing and how we were dancing on the edge of disaster. I finally left in disgust.
Once I'd left I contact the BSA and told them what I knew. A few days after my first contact they called me and told me they weren't going to pursue. The reason they weren't going to pursue is because the company was on shaky financial ground.
So if you're going to pirate, make sure you're financially unstable.
There has never been a successful failover test of the RI Department of State's Central Voter Registration System. Most of that is because of the obstinacy of the RI Department of Administration.
And State recently suffered a MAJOR web outage. Press says it was hacked, I know better. I used to manage that web server before I was summarily laid off. The MySQL database would start going haywire because it was an ancient version. All you had to do was kill the MySQL slave and restart MySQL and all would be fine.
I cannot for any amount of time believe that any of the teams used a Microsoft product and expected it to be perfect. Open source was the way to go on this one and they blew it.
When I first got my laptop I had a wired connection with Cox that I was paying for but no wireless access point. So for the first couple weeks I piggybacked off a commercial service.
When I got my WAP I visited the commercial site and showed them how to secure their wireless network. So I did something good for using their bandwidth.
Back when I was managing several MySQL servers I was horrified to learn that the original setup used localodbc/localodbc for the database passwords for pretty much everything. In fact it had universal access to ALL databases with S,I,U,D! And they depended on an ancient SonicWall firewall to protect them.
Did an inventory of all databases and then went out and found out who did what to those databases. Created individual logins with express rights (Select, Insert, Update, Delete). Web apps if they were lookup only just got Select, whereas those who wrote would get Select, Insert.
We also blocked port 3306 on our Pix firewall. Good luck hitting those MySQL boxes. Servers have separete networks for internal and external traffic so web servers can communicate with database servers but people outside can only see the web server.
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I just setup a Vista box for my cousin. Of course it had 17 updates waiting for it but it was the 32 bit version. He's disable so I also had to install Dragon Naturally Speaking. That runs fairly well on Vista.
The thing that struck me is that out of the box it took over an HOUR for Vista to set itself up. That's completely unacceptable.
The one certain way of telling that the FCC is doing its job protecting consumer interests is when Congress gets involved. I do want to see more about the abuse of FUSF funds though because with all the money we've paid into that system we should have 21st century phone and net access EVERYWHERE!
That is exactly what happened here in Rhode Island. We've been REAL-ID compliant for the past couple of years but just recently a few DMV employees got busted for handing out ID's without going through the correct process. Seems someone on the outside was paying them off.
Something I've been toying with is setting up a node on my network for public access. I already have private access that uses WPA and MAC filtering. Why not get a cheap computer, setup Debian on it then install Squid Proxy and DansGuardian. That way Squid can go by address, while DansGuardian goes by content. Then put a WAP in front of that and leave it wide open.
That way I maintain open access will protecting myself from liability. That's the only way I'll do it. Oh and did I mention that SP/DG box will also throttle bandwidth. Maybe offer 5mbps on that pipe.
And of course they'll continue to flood fake disconnect messages for P2P software. And they'll keep playing games with VPN connections.
The team that built this sweated every moment of the project. Squyers was a hell of a project manager too. But the engineers deserve a hell of a lot of credit. Those rovers were only supposed to last 90 sols. At 1462 that means that Spirit has gone 16 times longer than it should have.
I've seen so many instances of BSOD's on things like gas pumps, ATM's, etc. Windows sucks. Am I using it, yes I am. I'm well familiar with its eccentricities. Would I use it for mission critical projects, hell no.
Of course I used to work with a group that rescued these old pieces of big iron. I've lost touch and I believe the collection was transfered to another group in RI.
The FCC has for a long time not represented the interests of the citizens of the United States. What is needed is to wreck what currently stands and replace it.
How about selecting from a pool of those with either radio amateur or general radiotelephone licenses. Then narrow it to include only those with info, cs, or engineering degrees. From there do lottery selection for FCC commissioners.
I suspect what we'd see out the other end is a much fairer system for bandwidth auctions, management, and one that would be anti-consolidation.
So true. I can count the number of times we had to reboot a Linux system on one hand. I'd need several dozen hands to count the number of Windows reboots we had to perform.
The mail server was a good example. The only thing you needed to do there was monitor disk space. Actually the same was true for database servers and we had to play a few presto change-o games using NFS shares to move things like pdf files to a server that had space. But that's the thing, I find Unix/Linux file shares to be infinitely easier than doing shares on Windows.
I worked for the RI Sec of State's office for nearly four years. In that time I saw us go from a 90% OSS shop to a 50% OSS shop because the incoming I.T. director was a Windows only guy.
But the best part is the Windows migration isn't going so well. I left back in September but they had just bought new servers about five months before. They got no further than Server 2003 being installed on them due to documentation procedures, etc.
One server was to be an Exchange 2003 server to replace the Qmail server they were using. I just got email from someone there the other day and guess what, it's still Qmail.
The big push to Exchange btw was a woman named Catherine Avila, the Director of Administration. She was petrified that I.T. could potentially read her email because Qmail stored everything in the users home folder.
When I'd left the tally for hardware and software was up around $60,000. Both we systems guys loudly protested the Exchange bit. Also told them that if you were going to present an Exchange box to to world, you damn well better put something in front of it to stop the bullshit.
And of course when I left I made a prediction that within two months of my departure there'd be some catastrophic event. Sure enough, their web server crapped. The server in question was a LAMP box, and MySQL needs to be tuned occasionally to fix kludgy indices and queries. And that's what brought their web server down. There was a MySQL slave on the box that started consuming mass CPU cycles because of bad queries.
The PR guy said it was a rootkit. I call bullshit.
Another bureaucracy! When you think about it, under the current system of law we're all violators. For example, I backup my music directory to xdrive. Ooops, I made a copy that anyone I share it with can access.
When will we finally come to the realization that our government has been fully co opted and corrupted by corporations?
I get a verifiable 1.5mb up from Cox. It's fine, I'm not serving out much anyhow as my devel environment doesn't require it.
I realize that clashes with torrents and things like that, but just watch and see what Verizon does. They're famous for luring you in then jacking up the price. The only reason there's any buzz about it is because people have the memory span of a gnat.
I'm happy to see this suit being filed against Verizon. They're the same Verizon who patented RFC's and then went after VoIP provider Vonage if you recall.
I hope their FIOS is a complete failure.
Mine was a TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1 with 4K memory. It got expanded to Level II 16K within a month.
I did the lowercase modification on the motherboard by myself.
About 4 months later I picked up the expansion interface, two disk drives and a voice synthesizer. It was a fully optioned out system by that point. I can remember the speed increase that disk gave you over tape!
And when I noticed dropouts on some of the characters on the screen I knew the machine well enough that I could trace it down to the specific memory chip that had gone bad. Went to Radio Shack, got the replacement chip for a few dollars. Interestingly enough Tandy had socketed all the memory so it was easy to do things like this.
I loved that machine and my DC-1 modem.
Until the robot gets marked down because you know it will. Once it's around $100 or so I'll buy it then tear it apart to see what makes it tick, then make my own enhancements. Should be interesting since I'm in the process of taking a cheap little robotic dog and enhancing it with an Arduino doing the heavy lifting.
I've worked a few incidents and handled emergency communications. One stands out, the freak snow storm back in 1993. Dumped a hell of a load of snow on the state, took down phone lines, etc. and cell wasn't quite as widespread as it is now.
It's been years since we've seen any kind of natural disaster here in the northeast U.S. and that worries me. Haven't even had a good hurricane roar through here in 20+ years.
Interesting that you should mention the TOS. The TOS he read makes no mention of VPN at all but when he talks to Comcast support they in essence tell him to upgrade to a business package, or use another provider.
It'll be a few years before FIOS makes it to his area, though at&t Uverse service may get there before that. Uverse essentially moves the DSLAM from the central office to the neighborhood and then they use a HDSL connection to the subscriber.
Interestingly Cox has all of Rhode Island while Comcast seems to be dominant in Massachusetts. My friend has Comcast, I have Cox.
He was telling me that Comcast topedoes VPN connections to business entities that originate from residential accounts after four minutes of uptime. Cox does no such thing.
And the arrival of FIOS in RI forced Cox to upgrade their network and they now offer 20/2 net service. That's what I'm using now and its pretty good. Now if only I could find a wireless access point that didn't suck.
Of course I'll never go back into the arms of Verizon. I have such a blind hatred of that company it isn't funny.
If I'll be able to see my account activity on Vonage now. Because while I can't see it with Firefox, I can see it with IE which annoys me to no end.
Six years ago I was the I.T. Director for a manufacturing firm. I had numerous arguments with the company president about software licensing and how we were dancing on the edge of disaster. I finally left in disgust.
Once I'd left I contact the BSA and told them what I knew. A few days after my first contact they called me and told me they weren't going to pursue. The reason they weren't going to pursue is because the company was on shaky financial ground.
So if you're going to pirate, make sure you're financially unstable.
There has never been a successful failover test of the RI Department of State's Central Voter Registration System. Most of that is because of the obstinacy of the RI Department of Administration.
And State recently suffered a MAJOR web outage. Press says it was hacked, I know better. I used to manage that web server before I was summarily laid off. The MySQL database would start going haywire because it was an ancient version. All you had to do was kill the MySQL slave and restart MySQL and all would be fine.
I cannot for any amount of time believe that any of the teams used a Microsoft product and expected it to be perfect. Open source was the way to go on this one and they blew it.
When I first got my laptop I had a wired connection with Cox that I was paying for but no wireless access point. So for the first couple weeks I piggybacked off a commercial service.
When I got my WAP I visited the commercial site and showed them how to secure their wireless network. So I did something good for using their bandwidth.
Back when I was managing several MySQL servers I was horrified to learn that the original setup used localodbc/localodbc for the database passwords for pretty much everything. In fact it had universal access to ALL databases with S,I,U,D! And they depended on an ancient SonicWall firewall to protect them.
Did an inventory of all databases and then went out and found out who did what to those databases. Created individual logins with express rights (Select, Insert, Update, Delete). Web apps if they were lookup only just got Select, whereas those who wrote would get Select, Insert.
We also blocked port 3306 on our Pix firewall. Good luck hitting those MySQL boxes. Servers have separete networks for internal and external traffic so web servers can communicate with database servers but people outside can only see the web server.