Just go for a broad Information Science degree - that'll give you all the foundation you need in order to learn how to program. Luckily I pick up languages easily, to date I've got BASIC, VB, C, C++, COBOL, PHP, and some Python as well as a few dead languages in the mix.
But the ones I consistently use are VB and PHP. And while you might think SQL is simple - it isn't. It's a very powerful query language. Do a primer in XML too.
There's been a fingerprint database in existence for quite a few years now. The system is known as AFIS or Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
Each state or groups of states connects it AFIS system to the FBI and queries are done through III (Interstate Identification Index). Takes 20 minutes or less if previous positive contact was made with law enforcement.
Bloomberg assumes we're all criminals. We aren't. I'm against the collection of fingerprints or other biometric or biological information for the purpose of a wildcard criminal investigation.
I wonder, has the good mayor ever been fingerprinted? Or had his DNA logges into a database? I doubt it.
Before Ebay had to stop using Open Source software and going with MS provided software.
Good god - if you think Ebay is mostly unusable now just wait and see what happens when the entire operating platform is switched to Microsoft products.
I guess this means the Dell de-crapify script will have to be modified.
Since computers have become a commodity they've gotten bundled with all sorts of crap, MS os's included. But I've been happy with XP now that I took all the pre-installed crap out.
But on our network we vlan'd everything out. All servers on one vlan, I.T. on another vlan, and then major groups on their own vlans. Keeps traffic nice and segregated which is why the I.T. shop has iTunes sharing turned on full blast.
But here's where I notice some performance. We've got all the servers on a gigabit vlan. I can shift a 300MB file between servers in under 20 seconds. Transitioning a 5MB link takes five minutes.
So we did what we could to eliminate latency and we see it in the performance of our network.
It's because they have to innovate. Sure - if you've used Gimp or Photoshop you can save jpegs with tons of compression but jpeg is known as a lossy format to begin with.
How does Microsoft change a lightbulb?
They just redefine darkness as the industry standard.
Light coming from a manned planet would be of a different frequency than natural light sources. Look at our incandescent, fluorescent and LED lights. All have certain spectra that show them to be the result of burning tungsten, ionized gas, or silicon junction spectra.
There has to be life out there somewhere. But the distances are just so vast that without FTL transport we'll never get to meet them.
If you order your laptop without the media they partition a couple of gig for an install image. That way even if you blow your machine away you can always do the Ctrl-Alt-F11 trick and get the OS with all its drivers back on the machine.
Part of it is that the SO isn't technically savvy enough to run emulation or dual-boot for that matter. We tend to forget that many people view computer as appliances and don't want to worry about upkeep, or any other things they can do with it beyond email, web and their particular application that they always use.
That's why I'll only recommend VoIP to those that have a slightly higher than normal understanding of what computers do, and by that I mean that they frequently burp, hickup, and crash. If you're cognizant of that you'll do ok, otherwise you'll have to pay someone big bucks to come and fix it.
Interestingly I noted that the benchmarks pretty much showed there was literally no difference and in some cases the regular Mac Book peformed BETTER than the Mac Book Pro.
What's most amazing is the crowing about features that are on my Dell laptop that I bought back in December. Matter of fact in February I bought another for the SO, but that one had the glossy screen which neither of us really are all that thrilled with. But the screen is wide aspect and 1280x800. Price point is even the same. But the thing that stopped me buying a Mac was software once again. The SO's AutoCad won't run on a Mac.
If you stripped your PC down to bare bones, how many of the components were made in China. And for my purposes I'm including Taiwan in there because the ROC seems to be catering to demands of the PRC lately.
You'd find components made all over the world, including China. My Dell laptop clearly says it was made in Malaysia, but who made the PCB, or the components on the main board?
This is just political bluster. If China wanted to bust our chops they'd just cut off the electronics manufacturing exports to the U.S. Watch what happens then.
My Vonage service has been rock solid. But then it seems like Cox has its shit together in RI and I'm pretty competent at keeping things running.
That being said, I really don't think VoIP is quite ready for the average user. Hell, wireless networks aren't even for the average user. I can't tell you how much money I've made fixing botched up networks, both wired and wireless.
And lately I've been absolutely LOVING Skype. So much so that I think I'll part with the $38 and get my own SkypeIn number. Talk about a cheap second business line.
Do our British compatriots have to give up the keys to their wireless networks? I mean - who knows what's going back and forth across the air, particularly when the traffic never goes out to the public net but stays within a nice little private network that just happens to belong to a terrorist cell.
This just points out how ridiculous the ruling by the Home Office happens to be. In protest everyone should just encrypt everything and overwhelm them with keys.
My first question - how are they even going to know that something is encrypted? Ever look at the binary stream for an MP3 or an MPEG movie? Looks encrypted to me but there are probably repeating bits in there that tip them off to to the fact it isn't an encrypted file.
1.5.0.3 supposedly fixed the memory leakage issue but there was also a setting in about::config that would tell Firefox to release memory when it was minimized.
Earth is considered a Type 0 civilization because we depend on fossil fuels. I wonder if using renewable forms like corn, sugar, sewage, etc. would move us towards type 1.
Average cell phone is 2W or so. Average tower puts out 100W to 200W or more.
I do know that RF at around 50W will cause nasty burns. And RF does have a tendency to heat tissue that's near it. That would be enough to cause mutations to DNA and potentially cancers - the fact that both malignant and benign are being found kind of supports that.
My 1981 Ford Escort had problems with the ignition key cylinder. I found out that you could pop it out and just start the car with a screwdriver.
I used to leave it unlocked with the screwdrive in the glove compartment. Nobody ever touched it. It wasn't exactly a car that was high on the theft list.
As a government employee I get 11 paid holidays and 2 weeks of vacation by default.
Add to that compensatory time and I'm taking 23 days of vacation along with those 11 holidays for 33 days off work. Oh, and my normal work week is 35 hours.
But you're right - in private industry it's usually 8:30AM to 5 or 6PM. And the benefits are horrible.
But there are other factors. One of them is pollution. There is a very strong green movement in Europe. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they didn't abandon rail like we did, or the fact that gasoline is $6 or so a gallon. But the overall amount of pollution is much less in Europe than it is in the United States.
Particulate emissions are insidious and cause a wide range of illness in the U.S. But big industry will NEVER admit to that. The only hope I see is that that paint industry recently had judgement rendered against it for purposely selling lead paint in RI. So maybe the same principles can be applied toward the oil industry. We can only hope.
What is far more interesting are a couple of sentences in the article.
Most significant of which is the one that says NEC is in negotatiations with some of the manufacturers. That and the fact that some of the knock-off goods were up to NEC standards. Talk about the dream of finding an in-place manufacturing setup with cheap labor costs. That's precisely what NEC has gotten.
This is all to protect private information that might be on the local area network of the entity providing wireless connectivity.
At work we put our wireless access on the back side of our WAN connection, and that goes through a proxy with ClamAV on it. They never even touch our internal network.
Sure we took reasonable steps. When I first got my new machine with wireless I saw at least 4 businesses with wide open networks. Went over, introduced myself and showed them how to secure the networks.
What I'd be more worried about is home networks that don't use at a minimum one of the three possible methods of preventing unauthorized access. All one has to do is spend five minutes looking at the documentation for your new wireless router/access point and figure out that they want to employ one of 6 or so combinations of features to secure their network.
I broadcast SSID, but enforce MAC address recognition and WPA key encryption. Bit me in the ass when I had to replace a mini-pci wireless adapter recently. Had to insert the new cards mac address but made sure I deleted the old one. I know how easy it is to spoof but it's just one more layer.
Is that when using Linux, it's very easy to customize it to the point that it deviates significantly from the 'standards'.
We run into this all the time at work. Who built Apache in this dir, or that dir, or who points it to/usr/local/apache2/htdocs and who points it to/var/www/html.
It goes further than that, how about recommended LDAP schemas that have morphed to the unrecognizable. Or non-existent answers to some question, instead getting things like "Install mail toaster" or "use google".
I wouldn't be asking the question if I hadn't googled it first and gotten a confusing list of garbage. Because by and large, that's what is out there. Granted, there are a few good sites but they're few and far between.
I'd rate myself as intermediate with regard to the Linux world. I've run it on the desktop, but my expereience is more in the server realm. I've installed and used Samba, setup Apache, MySQL, done NFS shares etc. But some things still confound me.
What's missing is a clear documentation standard. MAN pages are ok for the most part but even the LDP is woefully short on information. Some of us don't have time to try to backstep and figure things out.
No kidding. Took me a good hour to uninstall all the crap that Dell installed on my M140.
Then I had that horrid incident repeated this past weekend when my partners M140 all of a sudden couldn't connect to any wireless network. Spent 3 hours on the phone with Daniel in India, went through system restore, enable/disable, check this, check that, wipe system and start clean but first backup data (Only 3 cd's worth as the machine is 2 months old), and wireless still wouldn't work.
Only difference between that machine and mine is I've got the Intel mini-pci wireless, the other was the Dell 1370.
Finally they confirmed my initial diagnosis (And people wonder why I don't trust other people, honestly!) and sent me a replacement card and didn't ask for the old one to be shipped back.
So if you're in the market, opt for the Intel card. You'll save yourself some headaches. But the one thing I actually like about the M140's is that you can replace pretty much everything but the MB. HD, Wireless Card, Memory and CPU are all accessible via hatches on the bottom of the machine.
Seems that when we relocated our office and put lines into their appropriate hunt groups all sorts of weirdness followed.
Verizon has issued dozens of tickets for the same problems, yet mysteriously the tickets close and the problems aren't fixed.
The problem I'm talking about could EASILY be remedied at the switch level. The main problem is that a few lines had call forward on busy/no answer on them. Do you think our Verizon rep could have told us that? Hell no. Do you think they'd be responsive? Hell no. What was our solution? Read on.
We disconnected the lines and ordered new ones. Of course Verizon was happy because now they got to pocket a number change fee. We're not happy because not only did we have to pay for their incompetence, we had to waste a whole lot of time doing so.
I too remember the monopoly days when Bell tried to stymie every bit of innovation that didn't meet their revenue needs. But then, I was paying $12.00 a month for unlimited local service, and that included leasing a 2500 set. Now I pay $28.98 a month (The damned fees are creeping into VoIP now!) for unlimited local/ld throughout North America, and a raft of features that Verizon would have charged me $80 or so a month for. But then I get zero support.
So since the breakup I pay a little more, get more features, but no service. Nice.
Considering that cancer is pretty much cell mitosis gone amok, I can see why this would be exciting. Couple this with cell apopsis and you might be able to cure the scourge of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I can only hope. But then I've got a witches brew of ALS, cancer and what not in my family.
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Just go for a broad Information Science degree - that'll give you all the foundation you need in order to learn how to program. Luckily I pick up languages easily, to date I've got BASIC, VB, C, C++, COBOL, PHP, and some Python as well as a few dead languages in the mix.
But the ones I consistently use are VB and PHP. And while you might think SQL is simple - it isn't. It's a very powerful query language. Do a primer in XML too.
Ask me why I know about AFIS, III etc.
There's been a fingerprint database in existence for quite a few years now. The system is known as AFIS or Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
Each state or groups of states connects it AFIS system to the FBI and queries are done through III (Interstate Identification Index). Takes 20 minutes or less if previous positive contact was made with law enforcement.
Bloomberg assumes we're all criminals. We aren't. I'm against the collection of fingerprints or other biometric or biological information for the purpose of a wildcard criminal investigation.
I wonder, has the good mayor ever been fingerprinted? Or had his DNA logges into a database? I doubt it.
Before Ebay had to stop using Open Source software and going with MS provided software.
Good god - if you think Ebay is mostly unusable now just wait and see what happens when the entire operating platform is switched to Microsoft products.
I guess this means the Dell de-crapify script will have to be modified.
Since computers have become a commodity they've gotten bundled with all sorts of crap, MS os's included. But I've been happy with XP now that I took all the pre-installed crap out.
But on our network we vlan'd everything out. All servers on one vlan, I.T. on another vlan, and then major groups on their own vlans. Keeps traffic nice and segregated which is why the I.T. shop has iTunes sharing turned on full blast.
But here's where I notice some performance. We've got all the servers on a gigabit vlan. I can shift a 300MB file between servers in under 20 seconds. Transitioning a 5MB link takes five minutes.
So we did what we could to eliminate latency and we see it in the performance of our network.
It's because they have to innovate. Sure - if you've used Gimp or Photoshop you can save jpegs with tons of compression but jpeg is known as a lossy format to begin with.
How does Microsoft change a lightbulb?
They just redefine darkness as the industry standard.
Light coming from a manned planet would be of a different frequency than natural light sources. Look at our incandescent, fluorescent and LED lights. All have certain spectra that show them to be the result of burning tungsten, ionized gas, or silicon junction spectra.
There has to be life out there somewhere. But the distances are just so vast that without FTL transport we'll never get to meet them.
If you order your laptop without the media they partition a couple of gig for an install image. That way even if you blow your machine away you can always do the Ctrl-Alt-F11 trick and get the OS with all its drivers back on the machine.
Part of it is that the SO isn't technically savvy enough to run emulation or dual-boot for that matter. We tend to forget that many people view computer as appliances and don't want to worry about upkeep, or any other things they can do with it beyond email, web and their particular application that they always use.
That's why I'll only recommend VoIP to those that have a slightly higher than normal understanding of what computers do, and by that I mean that they frequently burp, hickup, and crash. If you're cognizant of that you'll do ok, otherwise you'll have to pay someone big bucks to come and fix it.
Interestingly I noted that the benchmarks pretty much showed there was literally no difference and in some cases the regular Mac Book peformed BETTER than the Mac Book Pro.
What's most amazing is the crowing about features that are on my Dell laptop that I bought back in December. Matter of fact in February I bought another for the SO, but that one had the glossy screen which neither of us really are all that thrilled with. But the screen is wide aspect and 1280x800. Price point is even the same. But the thing that stopped me buying a Mac was software once again. The SO's AutoCad won't run on a Mac.
If you stripped your PC down to bare bones, how many of the components were made in China. And for my purposes I'm including Taiwan in there because the ROC seems to be catering to demands of the PRC lately.
You'd find components made all over the world, including China. My Dell laptop clearly says it was made in Malaysia, but who made the PCB, or the components on the main board?
This is just political bluster. If China wanted to bust our chops they'd just cut off the electronics manufacturing exports to the U.S. Watch what happens then.
My Vonage service has been rock solid. But then it seems like Cox has its shit together in RI and I'm pretty competent at keeping things running.
That being said, I really don't think VoIP is quite ready for the average user. Hell, wireless networks aren't even for the average user. I can't tell you how much money I've made fixing botched up networks, both wired and wireless.
And lately I've been absolutely LOVING Skype. So much so that I think I'll part with the $38 and get my own SkypeIn number. Talk about a cheap second business line.
Do our British compatriots have to give up the keys to their wireless networks? I mean - who knows what's going back and forth across the air, particularly when the traffic never goes out to the public net but stays within a nice little private network that just happens to belong to a terrorist cell.
This just points out how ridiculous the ruling by the Home Office happens to be. In protest everyone should just encrypt everything and overwhelm them with keys.
My first question - how are they even going to know that something is encrypted? Ever look at the binary stream for an MP3 or an MPEG movie? Looks encrypted to me but there are probably repeating bits in there that tip them off to to the fact it isn't an encrypted file.
1.5.0.3 supposedly fixed the memory leakage issue but there was also a setting in about::config that would tell Firefox to release memory when it was minimized.
Earth is considered a Type 0 civilization because we depend on fossil fuels. I wonder if using renewable forms like corn, sugar, sewage, etc. would move us towards type 1.
Average cell phone is 2W or so. Average tower puts out 100W to 200W or more.
I do know that RF at around 50W will cause nasty burns. And RF does have a tendency to heat tissue that's near it. That would be enough to cause mutations to DNA and potentially cancers - the fact that both malignant and benign are being found kind of supports that.
My 1981 Ford Escort had problems with the ignition key cylinder. I found out that you could pop it out and just start the car with a screwdriver.
I used to leave it unlocked with the screwdrive in the glove compartment. Nobody ever touched it. It wasn't exactly a car that was high on the theft list.
As a government employee I get 11 paid holidays and 2 weeks of vacation by default.
Add to that compensatory time and I'm taking 23 days of vacation along with those 11 holidays for 33 days off work. Oh, and my normal work week is 35 hours.
But you're right - in private industry it's usually 8:30AM to 5 or 6PM. And the benefits are horrible.
But there are other factors. One of them is pollution. There is a very strong green movement in Europe. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they didn't abandon rail like we did, or the fact that gasoline is $6 or so a gallon. But the overall amount of pollution is much less in Europe than it is in the United States.
Particulate emissions are insidious and cause a wide range of illness in the U.S. But big industry will NEVER admit to that. The only hope I see is that that paint industry recently had judgement rendered against it for purposely selling lead paint in RI. So maybe the same principles can be applied toward the oil industry. We can only hope.
What is far more interesting are a couple of sentences in the article.
Most significant of which is the one that says NEC is in negotatiations with some of the manufacturers. That and the fact that some of the knock-off goods were up to NEC standards. Talk about the dream of finding an in-place manufacturing setup with cheap labor costs. That's precisely what NEC has gotten.
so in the long run it isn't a total loss for NEC.
This is all to protect private information that might be on the local area network of the entity providing wireless connectivity.
At work we put our wireless access on the back side of our WAN connection, and that goes through a proxy with ClamAV on it. They never even touch our internal network.
Sure we took reasonable steps. When I first got my new machine with wireless I saw at least 4 businesses with wide open networks. Went over, introduced myself and showed them how to secure the networks.
What I'd be more worried about is home networks that don't use at a minimum one of the three possible methods of preventing unauthorized access. All one has to do is spend five minutes looking at the documentation for your new wireless router/access point and figure out that they want to employ one of 6 or so combinations of features to secure their network.
I broadcast SSID, but enforce MAC address recognition and WPA key encryption. Bit me in the ass when I had to replace a mini-pci wireless adapter recently. Had to insert the new cards mac address but made sure I deleted the old one. I know how easy it is to spoof but it's just one more layer.
Is that when using Linux, it's very easy to customize it to the point that it deviates significantly from the 'standards'.
/usr/local/apache2/htdocs and who points it to /var/www/html.
We run into this all the time at work. Who built Apache in this dir, or that dir, or who points it to
It goes further than that, how about recommended LDAP schemas that have morphed to the unrecognizable. Or non-existent answers to some question, instead getting things like "Install mail toaster" or "use google".
I wouldn't be asking the question if I hadn't googled it first and gotten a confusing list of garbage. Because by and large, that's what is out there. Granted, there are a few good sites but they're few and far between.
I'd rate myself as intermediate with regard to the Linux world. I've run it on the desktop, but my expereience is more in the server realm. I've installed and used Samba, setup Apache, MySQL, done NFS shares etc. But some things still confound me.
What's missing is a clear documentation standard. MAN pages are ok for the most part but even the LDP is woefully short on information. Some of us don't have time to try to backstep and figure things out.
No kidding. Took me a good hour to uninstall all the crap that Dell installed on my M140.
Then I had that horrid incident repeated this past weekend when my partners M140 all of a sudden couldn't connect to any wireless network. Spent 3 hours on the phone with Daniel in India, went through system restore, enable/disable, check this, check that, wipe system and start clean but first backup data (Only 3 cd's worth as the machine is 2 months old), and wireless still wouldn't work.
Only difference between that machine and mine is I've got the Intel mini-pci wireless, the other was the Dell 1370.
Finally they confirmed my initial diagnosis (And people wonder why I don't trust other people, honestly!) and sent me a replacement card and didn't ask for the old one to be shipped back.
So if you're in the market, opt for the Intel card. You'll save yourself some headaches. But the one thing I actually like about the M140's is that you can replace pretty much everything but the MB. HD, Wireless Card, Memory and CPU are all accessible via hatches on the bottom of the machine.
Seems that when we relocated our office and put lines into their appropriate hunt groups all sorts of weirdness followed.
Verizon has issued dozens of tickets for the same problems, yet mysteriously the tickets close and the problems aren't fixed.
The problem I'm talking about could EASILY be remedied at the switch level. The main problem is that a few lines had call forward on busy/no answer on them. Do you think our Verizon rep could have told us that? Hell no. Do you think they'd be responsive? Hell no. What was our solution? Read on.
We disconnected the lines and ordered new ones. Of course Verizon was happy because now they got to pocket a number change fee. We're not happy because not only did we have to pay for their incompetence, we had to waste a whole lot of time doing so.
I too remember the monopoly days when Bell tried to stymie every bit of innovation that didn't meet their revenue needs. But then, I was paying $12.00 a month for unlimited local service, and that included leasing a 2500 set. Now I pay $28.98 a month (The damned fees are creeping into VoIP now!) for unlimited local/ld throughout North America, and a raft of features that Verizon would have charged me $80 or so a month for. But then I get zero support.
So since the breakup I pay a little more, get more features, but no service. Nice.
Considering that cancer is pretty much cell mitosis gone amok, I can see why this would be exciting. Couple this with cell apopsis and you might be able to cure the scourge of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I can only hope. But then I've got a witches brew of ALS, cancer and what not in my family.