The age restriction is probably based on house rules, i.e. "In order to host an event here, no one under 18 is allowed in the doors". Large companies sometimes feel disinclined to explain their rules, in much the same way that lazy drivers feel disinclined to use turn signals. "I'm going to do it my way, and fsck the world if they don't like it."
Personally, I'm not sure why we didn't get rid of QWERTY a long time ago. QWERTY was designed to slow us down so that when we typed, the type heads wouldn't get all stuck together. Dvorak was designed to speed us up. When's the last time you were typing on a typewriter PERIOD, much less one old enough to actually have the too-fast-typing problem?
> You know, I remember reading in Richard > Feynman's book, that shortly after he got to > princeton, somebody tried to talk him into > joining a group of NAZI symathizers.
Just because someone tries to recruit you into a movement, doesn't mean you automatically join that movement, or even have the slightest interest in it.
I don't think this touches the Mitnick case even in the slightest.
I do, however, hope that the Linux kernel developers snap it up and examine every nook and cranny. Solaris is EXTREMELY hard to take down under load. Harder than Linux, I dare say.
So, all else aside, I don't think that this can be anything but a boon to the Linux community.
Let's say your company buys a third-party piece of software for use by the support staff. Then let's say this software requires a hybrid of NT and Unix boxes, taking advantage of both platforms where possible. That's why you would do it. Also, if you hire developers who say that something can be accomplished better with NT (for example, they're designing a program that uses PowerBuilder or any other of the zillions of developer tools available only on the Win9x/NT heirarchy), then guess what, it's going to be done with NT.
I've worked in shops that used only *nix, in shops that used only NT, and in shops that used a hybrid of them both. Although I prefer *nix, I have to say that NT *does* have its benefits.
Even Microsoft has a place in this world. If it weren't for MS, the computing industry wouldn't have grown as fast as it has. If they were destroyed, millions of people who either work for them or sell their products worldwide would go unemployed. The economic results would be staggering.
Because you already have a slew of NT machines, and everyone in IT is trained in how to use them. You can migrate to Linux, but that costs lots of time and money. Even though Linux itself is free, it requires a real investment to get people trained on it.
I found out why many large enterprises favor Solaris over other OSes like Linux and *BSD. I don't understand it completely, but from what I remember, Solaris is constantly performing some sort of defragmentation on memory and processes, even when system load and/or memory usage are very low. This affects performance, so you have to run it on beefy hardware.
I've seen the inside of many Sun boxes; they're impressive. Modular board design; eight or sixteen RAM slots; lock-and-load hard drives that snap in place in a fashion similar to how a ZIF-socket CPU does.
You pay for this because the boxes are considerably more expensive than, say, a regular x86 box. However, they are much more scalable. And once that system load shoots up to 100%, they stay reliable, because they are forever optimizing memory, processes, etc.
In addition, Solaris has something called lightweight threads, unlike *BSD (and probably Linux). Instead of forking a new process for every client, which eats up memory unnecessarily, you have fewer processes with each process running a number of lightweight threads. These threads eat up much less memory.
One solution to lack of cable modem access in smaller communities is the concept of "one-way" access. Basically, you get to download over cable, but uploads are over dialup. This is good for small communities, where the cable company doesn't want to spend millions on fiber-optics and numerous other upgrades that are necessary to do "two-way" cable, e.g. both upload and download over the cable.
If you live in an area with one-way cable and run Linux, you *may* be out of luck. If the cable modem is external, you'll probably be able to use it. For example, the SurfBoard modems used in some one-way scenarios are available in both internal and external flavors. The external one basically has you connect to a Web interface and then you hit the connect button and it dials. The internal one doesn't have *official* Linux support, but I did notice support for it in kernel 2.2.12.
Ridiculous. Yes folks, I work there. As someone who used to hang around Scientology types (and left when I realized that they're just another band of overzealous religion fiends), and also as someone who's worked both in customer service and in what could be considered "engineering" (but it isn't really called that here), Scientology hasn't got anything to do with the operation of the company. Believe it or not, Sky never tried to make it that way. Your friend was making stuff up. Lots of CEOs are christian or catholic or whatever. Does that automatically mean that everyone in the company has to read the Bible?
There is a PPPoE client for Linux. I'm asking my friend on ICQ right now what it is, but he's probably sleeping. I'll post the site here if he gets back to me before this article drops off into oblivion.
When I used to access ELN news servers over dialup, it was *okay*. When I went to cable, it was pretty fast. I've since left in favor of PacBell DSL, which costs the same but is much faster. I still regularly haunt one of the honda newsgroups; it goes fast enough, but then again, it is all text.
The only people who post to that group are the ones with complaints. But how many people are going to post to newsgroups because they're happy? Some do, but most of them are too busy using the service to spend time posting complements about it without any sort of prompting. Good service is EXPECTED, so it isn't really commented on that much. Bad service is unpleasant, so naturally anyone who dislikes what they're getting is going to get all ranty about it.
ELN's policy is that if you dial up twice at the same time, it's the same as having two computers dialing up at the same time. It uses the same amount of resources, e.g. ELN has to pay for two connections. If you're an ISDN customer, it's different; you can go dual-channel if you wish. Of course, you eat up your alotted time twice as fast. (It doesn't always work, though, because the way the technology works right now, you have to hit two ISDN TAs that are in the same chassis to go dual-channel; if you hit TAs in two separate chassis, you won't get it.)
EarthLink knows how to deal with ISP acquisitions because it has done this before. Last year it acquired all of Sprint's customers. Everyone in technical support was drilled on exactly what settings everyone was supposed to have. Everyone who was user1234@sprintmail.com before the acquisition is still user1234@sprintmail.com. The only diff is that they now use ELN's news servers and they lost their Sprint start page in favor of an ELN start page (which is better, I'm told).
The other big change was that their PPP usernames changed from (for example) 0234DJ@SIA to ELN/0234DJ. That caused some confusion, but all Sprint customers were sent a CD that converted their settings for them. Additionally, the ABC@SIA -> ELN/ABC change didn't take place immediately on all POPs - for many dialup numbers, you could get in either way for a few months.
EarthLink ships a free CD with a product called TotalAccess. You can order this in several flavors. One comes with IE5, one comes with Netscape, and one comes with (I think) both. It works on Win9x and MacOS. It doesn't work with NT, but that's OK because even the oldest NT4 has some version of IE that you can use long enough to download either a newer version of IE or Netscape.
Do you have a USRobotics modem? On some dialup hardware, USR modems get something called "spiralling death" syndrome. They'll route for a short while and then stop. I think the init string that fixes that was S10=255. If you had to hop between ISPs several times before getting one that didn't manifest that problem, the ones you had before probably all used dialup gear that your modem didn't like. There was another company besides USR that had modems with spiralling death but I forgot which.
Some years ago, Microsoft decided to build an ISP business. They don't have any of their own POPs. Rather, they lease them from UUNet. UUNet POPs are pretty much world-class, as far as quality goes.
A few years ago, EarthLink and a few other ISPs signed on to lease POPs from UUNet. UUNet then created the "dial access" infrastructure.
The way it is currently, EarthLink's POP system is like this: If you live in California, you can dial into EarthLink POPs. Most or all calls are routed from the telcos to ELN'S HQ in Pasadena and answered by hardware there. If the nearest ELN POP is congested, you can also use a UUNet, UUNet-DA (their newer "dial access" POPs), PSINet, Level3 or Sprint POP, depending on what's locally available. If you live outside California, the only difference is that there are no ELN POPs.
So really, there isn't any shame in getting MSN, because what you're really getting is UUNet or UUNet-DA. All you need is a dialup number and DNS and mail settings. It will work just like with any other ISP.
Of course, if you get EarthLink, you get more than just UUNet and UUNet-DA. This is beneficial because even though UUNet POPs are great, there are a few dodgy modems out there that just won't talk to them for anything. A common tech support fix (after settings have been verified and the POP itself tested) is to switch a subscriber to a POP on a different backbone (e.g. they were using UUNet, move them to PSI). This actually works from time to time.
I used to work in technical support. It makes much more sense to implement this change and not e-mail everyone about it. For one thing, you don't shoot up the load on all your mail servers for half an hour. For another thing, 95% of your customers don't care, and it doesn't make sense to have 1,894,268 people calling tech support over something that hasn't got anything to do with them. For those who are actually smart enough to know what port 25 is, better that they call technical support, or (God forbid) check the help pages the company spent hundreds of man-hours creating.
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That "sky walk" sucks. No windows or any indication that it's anything other than a dull hall. :)
The age restriction is probably based on house rules, i.e. "In order to host an event here, no one under 18 is allowed in the doors". Large companies sometimes feel disinclined to explain their rules, in much the same way that lazy drivers feel disinclined to use turn signals. "I'm going to do it my way, and fsck the world if they don't like it."
What's that? jmp far ffff:ffff If that's what it is, it won't always work...
No reason why it can't, someone just needs to make a new keyboard map (that is, if there isn't one already!)
Personally, I'm not sure why we didn't get rid of QWERTY a long time ago. QWERTY was designed to slow us down so that when we typed, the type heads wouldn't get all stuck together. Dvorak was designed to speed us up. When's the last time you were typing on a typewriter PERIOD, much less one old enough to actually have the too-fast-typing problem?
> Feynman's book, that shortly after he got to
> princeton, somebody tried to talk him into
> joining a group of NAZI symathizers.
Just because someone tries to recruit you into a movement, doesn't mean you automatically join that movement, or even have the slightest interest in it.
I do, however, hope that the Linux kernel developers snap it up and examine every nook and cranny. Solaris is EXTREMELY hard to take down under load. Harder than Linux, I dare say.
So, all else aside, I don't think that this can be anything but a boon to the Linux community.
I've worked in shops that used only *nix, in shops that used only NT, and in shops that used a hybrid of them both. Although I prefer *nix, I have to say that NT *does* have its benefits.
Every coin has two sides...
Because you already have a slew of NT machines, and everyone in IT is trained in how to use them. You can migrate to Linux, but that costs lots of time and money. Even though Linux itself is free, it requires a real investment to get people trained on it.
I've seen the inside of many Sun boxes; they're impressive. Modular board design; eight or sixteen RAM slots; lock-and-load hard drives that snap in place in a fashion similar to how a ZIF-socket CPU does.
You pay for this because the boxes are considerably more expensive than, say, a regular x86 box. However, they are much more scalable. And once that system load shoots up to 100%, they stay reliable, because they are forever optimizing memory, processes, etc.
In addition, Solaris has something called lightweight threads, unlike *BSD (and probably Linux). Instead of forking a new process for every client, which eats up memory unnecessarily, you have fewer processes with each process running a number of lightweight threads. These threads eat up much less memory.
If you live in an area with one-way cable and run Linux, you *may* be out of luck. If the cable modem is external, you'll probably be able to use it. For example, the SurfBoard modems used in some one-way scenarios are available in both internal and external flavors. The external one basically has you connect to a Web interface and then you hit the connect button and it dials. The internal one doesn't have *official* Linux support, but I did notice support for it in kernel 2.2.12.
EarthLink cable isn't likely to be even remotely involved with Mindspring. It's a deal between ELN and Charter.
Ridiculous. Yes folks, I work there. As someone who used to hang around Scientology types (and left when I realized that they're just another band of overzealous religion fiends), and also as someone who's worked both in customer service and in what could be considered "engineering" (but it isn't really called that here), Scientology hasn't got anything to do with the operation of the company. Believe it or not, Sky never tried to make it that way. Your friend was making stuff up. Lots of CEOs are christian or catholic or whatever. Does that automatically mean that everyone in the company has to read the Bible?
That's ludicrous. EarthLink is not run by scientology.
There is a PPPoE client for Linux. I'm asking my friend on ICQ right now what it is, but he's probably sleeping. I'll post the site here if he gets back to me before this article drops off into oblivion.
When I used to access ELN news servers over dialup, it was *okay*. When I went to cable, it was pretty fast. I've since left in favor of PacBell DSL, which costs the same but is much faster. I still regularly haunt one of the honda newsgroups; it goes fast enough, but then again, it is all text.
The only people who post to that group are the ones with complaints. But how many people are going to post to newsgroups because they're happy? Some do, but most of them are too busy using the service to spend time posting complements about it without any sort of prompting. Good service is EXPECTED, so it isn't really commented on that much. Bad service is unpleasant, so naturally anyone who dislikes what they're getting is going to get all ranty about it.
ELN's policy is that if you dial up twice at the same time, it's the same as having two computers dialing up at the same time. It uses the same amount of resources, e.g. ELN has to pay for two connections. If you're an ISDN customer, it's different; you can go dual-channel if you wish. Of course, you eat up your alotted time twice as fast. (It doesn't always work, though, because the way the technology works right now, you have to hit two ISDN TAs that are in the same chassis to go dual-channel; if you hit TAs in two separate chassis, you won't get it.)
The other big change was that their PPP usernames changed from (for example) 0234DJ@SIA to ELN/0234DJ. That caused some confusion, but all Sprint customers were sent a CD that converted their settings for them. Additionally, the ABC@SIA -> ELN/ABC change didn't take place immediately on all POPs - for many dialup numbers, you could get in either way for a few months.
EarthLink ships a free CD with a product called TotalAccess. You can order this in several flavors. One comes with IE5, one comes with Netscape, and one comes with (I think) both. It works on Win9x and MacOS. It doesn't work with NT, but that's OK because even the oldest NT4 has some version of IE that you can use long enough to download either a newer version of IE or Netscape.
Do you have a USRobotics modem? On some dialup hardware, USR modems get something called "spiralling death" syndrome. They'll route for a short while and then stop. I think the init string that fixes that was S10=255. If you had to hop between ISPs several times before getting one that didn't manifest that problem, the ones you had before probably all used dialup gear that your modem didn't like. There was another company besides USR that had modems with spiralling death but I forgot which.
A few years ago, EarthLink and a few other ISPs signed on to lease POPs from UUNet. UUNet then created the "dial access" infrastructure.
The way it is currently, EarthLink's POP system is like this: If you live in California, you can dial into EarthLink POPs. Most or all calls are routed from the telcos to ELN'S HQ in Pasadena and answered by hardware there. If the nearest ELN POP is congested, you can also use a UUNet, UUNet-DA (their newer "dial access" POPs), PSINet, Level3 or Sprint POP, depending on what's locally available. If you live outside California, the only difference is that there are no ELN POPs.
So really, there isn't any shame in getting MSN, because what you're really getting is UUNet or UUNet-DA. All you need is a dialup number and DNS and mail settings. It will work just like with any other ISP.
Of course, if you get EarthLink, you get more than just UUNet and UUNet-DA. This is beneficial because even though UUNet POPs are great, there are a few dodgy modems out there that just won't talk to them for anything. A common tech support fix (after settings have been verified and the POP itself tested) is to switch a subscriber to a POP on a different backbone (e.g. they were using UUNet, move them to PSI). This actually works from time to time.
I used to work in technical support. It makes much more sense to implement this change and not e-mail everyone about it. For one thing, you don't shoot up the load on all your mail servers for half an hour. For another thing, 95% of your customers don't care, and it doesn't make sense to have 1,894,268 people calling tech support over something that hasn't got anything to do with them. For those who are actually smart enough to know what port 25 is, better that they call technical support, or (God forbid) check the help pages the company spent hundreds of man-hours creating.