For Windows, Microsoft has a free command line tool, "FCIV.EXE", that will do this (MD5 and/or SHA) and save it all in an XML database for you. It will also then validate the files against that database.
The "not sure they knew how to power it back on" was a tossed-off line for amusement as much as anything - water cooler chit-chat, not serious concern.
They absolutely knew how to shut it down properly, and believed they knew how to bring it back up as well.
But nobody on the Tandem support team had actually DONE it within recent memory, so they were nervous. Wouldn't you be? Hell, maybe the power switch will fail. Not like it's been used much.
I honestly don't know what they were doing with the power to the building, but I know it was off. It's my understanding that the Tandem runs on UPS and/or generator power, but something in the mix there was being replaced or upgraded, so down it had to come.
It wasn't a real concern - it's not like the Tandem team doesn't know how to administer the machine - but there was some special work and research to make sure they were doing it right since it has been done so rarely.
The Tandem systems are now sold by HP (acquired via Compaq) and still known as NonStop.
At my job they're replacing a bunch of Tandem code that runs some of our core IT infrastructure with Wintel servers. It makes me ill to even be near the work, because they're taking something that just quietly works and "upgrading" it to something that doesn't.
For those who don't know, Tandem is a high-availability platform designed to never go down. They had the power off to the building earlier in the year and the Tandem folks weren't sure they knew how to power the system on properly - that's how long it had been running.
CVS creates a subdirectory named CVS, just like SVN creates.svn.
(I'm looking at CVS on a Windows system and SVN on a Unix system, so the CVS name used under Unix or the SVN name used under Windows may be slightly different, but the directories are definitely there.)
Back when Jimmy Carter was president, a good number of countries boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympic games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The athletes at the time, as I recall, were devastated.
It would be nice to see some countries put their money where their mouth is (including the US) and boycott the China Olympics.
Not just over this Internet censorship thing; I'm more interested in the fundamental human rights issues than I am in whether they censor the Internet for visiting foreigners. As a basic fundamental principal and statement of support for human rights, events of worldwide importance and recognition should not be held in countries run by oppressive governments.
I assume there's also some sort of preferred trading status between China and the US; that should go too. Why the hell do we need to be flooded with 80 billion tons of poorly made crap? (OK, I just made that statistic up.)
Unfortunately, as so many other posters has said, the US no longer stands for principles and freedom. We stand for profit.
Perhaps a better analogy would be a real one in the rental car business.
Until recently, Ford owned Hertz, and Hertz's fleet was entirely Ford Motor Company vehicles. Ford spun them off in 2005. Now Hertz is buying cars from GM, Hyundai and Toyota as well as Ford.
That probably started as a pilot program. It probably made the "Auto Rental Weekly News" or whatever as interesting. Everyone else yawned when it went out on the PR news wire from GM, Hyundai and Toyota.
In this case, IBM (a company that used to make laptops and desktops) sold off their laptop and desktop business. A couple years later, they started a pilot program to try laptops from another manufacturer than the one who bought their business unit. It made the news on Slashdot, and everyone else is going to yawn when Apple sends out the blurb on the PR news wire.
I work for a really big company that started as a really little company.
Everyone who was around when it was a little company (and is still alive) is still around. They may not come into work, but they all have the CEO's phone number and the board president's phone number, and they're significant stock-holders, so they're not shy.
I find it unlikely that private schools directly get public funding that otherwise would have gone to the public schools. Public funding, as far as I know, doesn't really go to private schools, except perhaps in the context of subsidies for student transportation to school. (I remember the local Catholic school when I grew up getting their students delivered on the same buses that ultimately went on to the public schools. It was just a stop along the way.)
I think, rather, that his point was that the private schools allowed middle-to-upper income families to avoid the public schools, thereby reducing the interest of much of the public (and a high percentage of property owners and those who bother to vote) in the quality of the public schools.
I bring up "property owners" because, in some (many?) parts of the US the local school districts receive a high percentage of their funding from real estate taxes.
If your kid doesn't go to the public school, and you don't even know anyone who goes to the public school, you don't care if the public school sucks. In fact, you may even be in favor of it if it helps to keep your taxes lower.
Now, if you're actually paying the tuition for private school, if you can save more in tuition than you would pay in increased taxes to make the local public school good, then you're ahead. But most tax payers don't have school-age children, so increased taxes are just more money out of their pocket without any visible direct return to them.
If you are paying for private school now, that tax increase isn't going to go away when your kid graduates. So even for you, over the long haul, higher taxes for better schools may not make financial sense.
If you follow the money, it becomes pretty easy to see why a lot of public schools suck.
I may be detecting a bit of sarcasm in your reply, but honestly, I just can't tell.
There is definitely hypocrisy among some. My sister-in-law and mother-in-law have suddenly become church-going Lutherans (as opposed to theoretical, sleeping in on Sunday, check that box if someone forces you to answer Lutherans) now that my nephew is attending a church school as opposed to a Chicago public school.
On the other hand, my cube neighbor at work is quite religious, and his kids attend (or attended) a Christian high school. He lives in a town where the public schools are quite good.
A public school doesn't have to be the best anywhere, but it should provide a good education and a decent environment. You don't expect the same caliber of education from every college (Harvard and West Podunk Junior College, for example) and the same can apply to primary and secondary education as well.
It isn't disgusting that private schools are allowed to exist. It's disgusting that the public ones suck.
Some parents want a specific type of education for their child. The public schools may not provide that. That is the case where a private school should exist, not because the public schools are substandard.
His mom's the school librarian. According to the article, he stepped up when the network admin left, because it got dumped on her plate.
So in some sense, he is getting paid by his mother being home more and being in a better mood. And he's 12. That's an age when doing stuff for fun is still a big motivator.
If a parent were doing it for free, that would be fine - it's a small, private, religious school. Parent volunteers are very important in that sort of an environment. Just because this volunteer is a student doesn't make it bad.
If you read the article, he was interested in archiving of the sound for purposes of later analysis of the written result, not for playback. Given his apparent resentment of Edison, this may be a claim (in my opinion, not the article's) that didn't actually reflect reality.
The similarity in means between Edison and Edouard-Leon is due to the technology of the time with respect to sound more than to a similar goal. In both, a coneis used to capture sound waves and translate them into physical movement of a stylus. In one case, the stylus creates marks on paper; in another, it creates varying grooves in a wax medium.
It was Edison's use of a medium that preserved the movement of the stylus in a way that could be made to easily cause another stylus to move that gave him the ability to play back the sound. If the largely mechanical technology of the time had a way to follow the written marks and translate them back into motion then Edouard-Leon could have played it back as well.
I was at the Chicago 2008 product launch (Windows 2K8 Server, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008.) Part of the pack of free software they handed out was Vista Ultimate Edition with SP1.
So they're handing it out and yet it isn't done? Yikes.
I agree completely. Corporate IT is a roadblock, not an enabler.
Here's an example. The "software download" area has WinZip 8. Some more modern version of WinZip has a new compression method, but we still have 8.
One of our business partners sent a report compressed with a more modern WinZip.
I finally downloaded the latest WinZip demo version, unzipped the file, then uninstalled it and reinstalled WinZip 8.
I then contacted our corporate IT about getting an updated version out there. The bottom line appeared to be that, as a practical matter, it is impossible for me to make that happen. There was some noise about buying the new software (through the proper software buying channel, of course) and submitting it for certification by corporate IT.
Yeah right. I'm not doing that, it isn't my job. Assholes.
I don't think it's entirely abandoned - I seem to remember an article (perhaps in the Tribune) in the last few years about using the tunnels as fiber conduits rather than digging up downtown Chicago.
There is a bit of irony about this. The tunnels were originally built under the claim of them being for telephone and similar purposes, and the tunnel company kinda "slipped in" the underground rail system without mentioning it.
Now, years later, the tunnels are again being utilized for their original publicized purpose.
Hey, leave DOS out of this. I'm sure I can find DOS systems at work that have been up for many months. We have some that are only power cycled when the power goes off.
Companies routinely make caller ID lie to people they call. There are services that you can pay to do this. There are legitimate business reasons for it.
Now, granted, he may be making the ANI lie instead of the caller ID. Although I don't personally have any idea how to do that, I suspect it isn't real hard either.
So what we have here is a 17 year old Bart Simpson, only he's calling Chief Wiggum instead of Moe, and he's putting people's lives at risk.
I don't care if he's blind - that doesn't get him some sort of special pass to endanger others. He should be arrested, prosecuted, and, if convicted, sentenced in the exact same fashion as if he had sight.
The Verifone terminals I've dealt with (Everest and Omni 7000 series) will discard their encryption keys for the DUKPT if the are disassembled, or even if they're subjected to too hard of a shock. We've taken out a few just by dropping them.
From a "mental model" viewpoint, in the US, the PIN is encrypted practically in the plastic key-caps. An unencrypted PIN is never transmitted across a wire, even in those little PINPad devices that are PIN-entry only peripherals of a typical terminal.
RFID is supported at more than a few gas stations, though. I've seen them at almost every McDonald's I've been in lately.
I haven't had a lot of lab work done, but in watching my wife's experience, it's a fight to get it sent anywhere in a timely fashion, including to the doctor who ordered it.
That battle is typically followed a fight to get the doctor's office to admit they received it once the lab does send it.
I haven't looked at Gnucash in a while, it's probably much better than when I looked.
The last time I remember looking at something that was able to import a QIF file, which is how everyone does "Quicken File Conversion", they weren't able to stitch the QIFs back together - for example, if I transferred $ out of one account into another, that single transaction in Quicken was treated as two, completely unrelated transactions in the imported result.
I don't think you appreciate the lock-in for an accounting package. My financial history for the last 15 years is in Quicken. If I want to know when I bought something, I go look there. I can tell you how much I spent on a P2-450 Dell in 1998. (It was a stinking lot.)
I've played with live CDs. I work in technology. I administer Linux and OpenServer systems.
But I run XP on my personal laptop. The only application I really need from Windows is Quicken, which you can take when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. It sucks that I'm locked in to Windows, and locked in to those Intuit bastards, but there just isn't any way to export all of my history as far as I know, and there isn't another program that could really pull it in and give me all the same features.
Maybe I'll look at running XP within a virtual machine just for Quicken. Except I don't think I have an XP install disk - it came pre-loaded.
Slashdot Mirror
For Windows, Microsoft has a free command line tool, "FCIV.EXE", that will do this (MD5 and/or SHA) and save it all in an XML database for you. It will also then validate the files against that database.
It's part of one of the resource kits.
No, as far as I know HP is nowhere near this. It has been decreed that "we are a Windows shop."
Oh, and Ballmer had our CIO golfing at least once. I'm sure that helped.
The "not sure they knew how to power it back on" was a tossed-off line for amusement as much as anything - water cooler chit-chat, not serious concern.
They absolutely knew how to shut it down properly, and believed they knew how to bring it back up as well.
But nobody on the Tandem support team had actually DONE it within recent memory, so they were nervous. Wouldn't you be? Hell, maybe the power switch will fail. Not like it's been used much.
I honestly don't know what they were doing with the power to the building, but I know it was off. It's my understanding that the Tandem runs on UPS and/or generator power, but something in the mix there was being replaced or upgraded, so down it had to come.
It wasn't a real concern - it's not like the Tandem team doesn't know how to administer the machine - but there was some special work and research to make sure they were doing it right since it has been done so rarely.
The Tandem systems are now sold by HP (acquired via Compaq) and still known as NonStop.
Perhaps it's because they're stupid.
At my job they're replacing a bunch of Tandem code that runs some of our core IT infrastructure with Wintel servers. It makes me ill to even be near the work, because they're taking something that just quietly works and "upgrading" it to something that doesn't.
For those who don't know, Tandem is a high-availability platform designed to never go down. They had the power off to the building earlier in the year and the Tandem folks weren't sure they knew how to power the system on properly - that's how long it had been running.
CVS creates a subdirectory named CVS, just like SVN creates .svn.
(I'm looking at CVS on a Windows system and SVN on a Unix system, so the CVS name used under Unix or the SVN name used under Windows may be slightly different, but the directories are definitely there.)
Back when Jimmy Carter was president, a good number of countries boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympic games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The athletes at the time, as I recall, were devastated.
It would be nice to see some countries put their money where their mouth is (including the US) and boycott the China Olympics.
Not just over this Internet censorship thing; I'm more interested in the fundamental human rights issues than I am in whether they censor the Internet for visiting foreigners. As a basic fundamental principal and statement of support for human rights, events of worldwide importance and recognition should not be held in countries run by oppressive governments.
I assume there's also some sort of preferred trading status between China and the US; that should go too. Why the hell do we need to be flooded with 80 billion tons of poorly made crap? (OK, I just made that statistic up.)
Unfortunately, as so many other posters has said, the US no longer stands for principles and freedom. We stand for profit.
Perhaps a better analogy would be a real one in the rental car business.
Until recently, Ford owned Hertz, and Hertz's fleet was entirely Ford Motor Company vehicles. Ford spun them off in 2005. Now Hertz is buying cars from GM, Hyundai and Toyota as well as Ford.
That probably started as a pilot program. It probably made the "Auto Rental Weekly News" or whatever as interesting. Everyone else yawned when it went out on the PR news wire from GM, Hyundai and Toyota.
In this case, IBM (a company that used to make laptops and desktops) sold off their laptop and desktop business. A couple years later, they started a pilot program to try laptops from another manufacturer than the one who bought their business unit. It made the news on Slashdot, and everyone else is going to yawn when Apple sends out the blurb on the PR news wire.
Bill will always be around.
I work for a really big company that started as a really little company.
Everyone who was around when it was a little company (and is still alive) is still around. They may not come into work, but they all have the CEO's phone number and the board president's phone number, and they're significant stock-holders, so they're not shy.
I find it unlikely that private schools directly get public funding that otherwise would have gone to the public schools. Public funding, as far as I know, doesn't really go to private schools, except perhaps in the context of subsidies for student transportation to school. (I remember the local Catholic school when I grew up getting their students delivered on the same buses that ultimately went on to the public schools. It was just a stop along the way.)
I think, rather, that his point was that the private schools allowed middle-to-upper income families to avoid the public schools, thereby reducing the interest of much of the public (and a high percentage of property owners and those who bother to vote) in the quality of the public schools.
I bring up "property owners" because, in some (many?) parts of the US the local school districts receive a high percentage of their funding from real estate taxes.
If your kid doesn't go to the public school, and you don't even know anyone who goes to the public school, you don't care if the public school sucks. In fact, you may even be in favor of it if it helps to keep your taxes lower.
Now, if you're actually paying the tuition for private school, if you can save more in tuition than you would pay in increased taxes to make the local public school good, then you're ahead. But most tax payers don't have school-age children, so increased taxes are just more money out of their pocket without any visible direct return to them.
If you are paying for private school now, that tax increase isn't going to go away when your kid graduates. So even for you, over the long haul, higher taxes for better schools may not make financial sense.
If you follow the money, it becomes pretty easy to see why a lot of public schools suck.
I may be detecting a bit of sarcasm in your reply, but honestly, I just can't tell. There is definitely hypocrisy among some. My sister-in-law and mother-in-law have suddenly become church-going Lutherans (as opposed to theoretical, sleeping in on Sunday, check that box if someone forces you to answer Lutherans) now that my nephew is attending a church school as opposed to a Chicago public school. On the other hand, my cube neighbor at work is quite religious, and his kids attend (or attended) a Christian high school. He lives in a town where the public schools are quite good. A public school doesn't have to be the best anywhere, but it should provide a good education and a decent environment. You don't expect the same caliber of education from every college (Harvard and West Podunk Junior College, for example) and the same can apply to primary and secondary education as well.
It isn't disgusting that private schools are allowed to exist. It's disgusting that the public ones suck.
Some parents want a specific type of education for their child. The public schools may not provide that. That is the case where a private school should exist, not because the public schools are substandard.
His mom's the school librarian. According to the article, he stepped up when the network admin left, because it got dumped on her plate.
So in some sense, he is getting paid by his mother being home more and being in a better mood. And he's 12. That's an age when doing stuff for fun is still a big motivator.
If a parent were doing it for free, that would be fine - it's a small, private, religious school. Parent volunteers are very important in that sort of an environment. Just because this volunteer is a student doesn't make it bad.
And maybe it gets him out of gym class.
If you read the article, he was interested in archiving of the sound for purposes of later analysis of the written result, not for playback. Given his apparent resentment of Edison, this may be a claim (in my opinion, not the article's) that didn't actually reflect reality.
The similarity in means between Edison and Edouard-Leon is due to the technology of the time with respect to sound more than to a similar goal. In both, a coneis used to capture sound waves and translate them into physical movement of a stylus. In one case, the stylus creates marks on paper; in another, it creates varying grooves in a wax medium.
It was Edison's use of a medium that preserved the movement of the stylus in a way that could be made to easily cause another stylus to move that gave him the ability to play back the sound. If the largely mechanical technology of the time had a way to follow the written marks and translate them back into motion then Edouard-Leon could have played it back as well.
This results in some peculiar situations, btw. The age of consent may be 17, but a photo of a 17-yo is still child pornography.
So it's legal to actually have sex with the 17-yo, but not take a picture of them nekkid.
How does that make sense?
I was at the Chicago 2008 product launch (Windows 2K8 Server, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008.) Part of the pack of free software they handed out was Vista Ultimate Edition with SP1.
So they're handing it out and yet it isn't done? Yikes.
I agree completely. Corporate IT is a roadblock, not an enabler.
Here's an example. The "software download" area has WinZip 8. Some more modern version of WinZip has a new compression method, but we still have 8.
One of our business partners sent a report compressed with a more modern WinZip.
I finally downloaded the latest WinZip demo version, unzipped the file, then uninstalled it and reinstalled WinZip 8.
I then contacted our corporate IT about getting an updated version out there. The bottom line appeared to be that, as a practical matter, it is impossible for me to make that happen. There was some noise about buying the new software (through the proper software buying channel, of course) and submitting it for certification by corporate IT.
Yeah right. I'm not doing that, it isn't my job. Assholes.
I don't think it's entirely abandoned - I seem to remember an article (perhaps in the Tribune) in the last few years about using the tunnels as fiber conduits rather than digging up downtown Chicago.
There is a bit of irony about this. The tunnels were originally built under the claim of them being for telephone and similar purposes, and the tunnel company kinda "slipped in" the underground rail system without mentioning it.
Now, years later, the tunnels are again being utilized for their original publicized purpose.
Hey, leave DOS out of this. I'm sure I can find DOS systems at work that have been up for many months. We have some that are only power cycled when the power goes off.
It's too simple to not be able to do that.
Companies routinely make caller ID lie to people they call. There are services that you can pay to do this. There are legitimate business reasons for it.
Now, granted, he may be making the ANI lie instead of the caller ID. Although I don't personally have any idea how to do that, I suspect it isn't real hard either.
So what we have here is a 17 year old Bart Simpson, only he's calling Chief Wiggum instead of Moe, and he's putting people's lives at risk.
I don't care if he's blind - that doesn't get him some sort of special pass to endanger others. He should be arrested, prosecuted, and, if convicted, sentenced in the exact same fashion as if he had sight.
Mod this AC up, this is spot-on.
The Verifone terminals I've dealt with (Everest and Omni 7000 series) will discard their encryption keys for the DUKPT if the are disassembled, or even if they're subjected to too hard of a shock. We've taken out a few just by dropping them.
From a "mental model" viewpoint, in the US, the PIN is encrypted practically in the plastic key-caps. An unencrypted PIN is never transmitted across a wire, even in those little PINPad devices that are PIN-entry only peripherals of a typical terminal.
RFID is supported at more than a few gas stations, though. I've seen them at almost every McDonald's I've been in lately.
I haven't had a lot of lab work done, but in watching my wife's experience, it's a fight to get it sent anywhere in a timely fashion, including to the doctor who ordered it.
That battle is typically followed a fight to get the doctor's office to admit they received it once the lab does send it.
I haven't looked at Gnucash in a while, it's probably much better than when I looked.
The last time I remember looking at something that was able to import a QIF file, which is how everyone does "Quicken File Conversion", they weren't able to stitch the QIFs back together - for example, if I transferred $ out of one account into another, that single transaction in Quicken was treated as two, completely unrelated transactions in the imported result.
I know about quicken online.
It doesn't support the import of existing Quicken data, and it's missing some other features too.
I don't think you appreciate the lock-in for an accounting package. My financial history for the last 15 years is in Quicken. If I want to know when I bought something, I go look there. I can tell you how much I spent on a P2-450 Dell in 1998. (It was a stinking lot.)
I've played with live CDs. I work in technology. I administer Linux and OpenServer systems.
But I run XP on my personal laptop. The only application I really need from Windows is Quicken, which you can take when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. It sucks that I'm locked in to Windows, and locked in to those Intuit bastards, but there just isn't any way to export all of my history as far as I know, and there isn't another program that could really pull it in and give me all the same features.
Maybe I'll look at running XP within a virtual machine just for Quicken. Except I don't think I have an XP install disk - it came pre-loaded.