I work as a Point of Sale Support Analyst and it's much easier to take the extra minute to explain to them how to post void a transaction then have 5 idiots in the center call you back with the same question.
1 idiot usually shows the other 4 idiots and by the time the next batch of idiots is hired because of the turnover, at least 1 idiot from the first batch remains to know how to do it.
Personally I uninstalled this program about 1 minute after installation when I realized it looked like an eager tenth-graders quest to make a Star Trek Skin for Kazaa.
"Look at my Tivo usage logs - I was watching TV at that time!" and "Check the couch! The couch doesn't lie! But I was lying - on the couch!"
Why hasn't Law & Order or any other cop show done an episode where a suspect is ruled out because they were watching Tivo at the time of the crime as proven by the logs on the PVR and his intelligent couch. Sheesh.
In my perfect world you end that episode showing the super smart computer person putting a timer delay on a pronto remote control to simulate TV watching and stacking phone books on the couch to simulate sitting on it... Muahaha...
So, as a Philadelphia area resident can anyone get me a list of infected business/departments so I can fill the positions of the soon-to-be-fired IT Staff?
I rip my thriftstore vinyl to MP3's for fun in just the matter you describe:
Garrard Turntable -> Kenwood KR-2090 (Flea Market, $15) -> SB Live Line-In -> Cooledit Pro -> RazorLame.
A basic noise-removal filter in Cooledit (highlight what should be silence, it'll remove that throughout), save as WAV.
It makes perfectly playable MP3s that sound better then most of the crap you find floating around on Kazaa which has been sampled off a Fisher Price tape recorder into a pair of dollar-store headphones doubling as an emergency microphone.
The client sucks. Really sucks. But so did Gnutella. Hell, it's bleeding edge. I'm happy it works as well as it does.
Two friends and myself hopped on our own little network. And all be damned, it worked.
For 2 of us, after we exited the program it no longer took our private key passphrases. Thus we had to make new keys. This is obviously a really, really bad bug. Or we're just stupid. Somehow I'm inclined to say it's the latter.
The technology behind this is very cool. You essentially get the bastard child of a VPN with the ease of P2P. Setting up your own little secure collborative chat/file trading network is very easy.
This will be a damn nice gadget once we get some better clients. (yay GPL!)
96k mp3? What show were you watching? I specifically remember them saving them in "uncompressed format" at either 44khz or 96khz in RAW Wav.
I wish people would stop knocking windows for this application to. You're simply recording RAW WAVs. You don't need a damn linux workstation to do this (sure it might be a bit more stable).
For anyone who missed the show, the basic mission protocol these guys were following is:
Capture the brittlest/most endanger recordings (those that are in danger of falling apart). Capture these unaltered, via Turntable/wax cylinder/whatever and pipe into a computer and save as a WAV. No DSP processing, no noise reduction.
The only piece of vinyl I remember them throwing out on that show was one where the guy took it out of the envelope and the aceate layer had completely fallen off the platter of the LP. I don't care what kind of technology gets introduced, there's no way you're going to restore paper-thin aceate material so brittle it falls apart when you even touch it.
So now that we're both finished sharing our differing recollections of the show, you at leasst liked the show right? I did!
I assume your referring to the "Save our Sounds" documentary, which I also watched (Thanks Tivo!).
Good observation on the vinyl... these guys - http://www.elpj.com/ - make a Laser Turntable which I agree would probably be a much much better way to record some of the more brittle recorders.
I don't think they're screwing up though. Everyone interviewed seemed like they cared a lot about what they do and respected the job they've been assigned. That one guy was doing some amazing shit with the wax cylinders.
I highly suggest everyone watch this special if it comes back on TV Anytime soon. On Tivo I found it under "Save our Sounds" in the Special Delivery section of TivoLution magazine.
Ah I never intended for anyone to take this seriously (sheesh, even I'm scoffing at my +5 moderation).
I just thought representing 5 gigs a month into a "best-case" use scenario of 24x7 would make it a little easier to realize how terribly ineffecient the capacity is.
Hell, even I don't use my connection for 24x7 - and if you are sucking up that kind of bandwith I think you should be paying more anyways.
So if we re-visit our equation at 6 hours a day you get 27 megs an hour, or 450Kilobytes a second - as you suggest, perfectly average for "normal people" in all reality.
An hour long 260Kb/s video stream will suck up 117 megs.
Or 128Kb/s streaming radio for an hour at 57 megs an hour.
Still adequate. That provides for something like 42 hours of streaming video or 87 hours of 128kbit mp3 streaming.
I'm hopping on the per-megabyte bandwagon though... it just seems like a good idea. If I want to use more of my connection I'd rather be paying it at a metered rate then having to upgrade to "Comcast Silver" which costs twice as much a month.
Article seems to throw around the term "5Gb" making me think "e-gads, 625 megs a month?" but further research into other articles on this subject put the number at 5 gigaBYTES of traffic a month.
Decimals hacked off.. feel free to redo my math with exact precision:
5 gigs / 30 days = 166.66 megs a day. 166.66 megs a day / 24 hour = 6.94 megs an hour 6.94 megs an hour / 60 minutes = 115 kilobytes per minute 115 Kilobytes / 60 seconds = 1.91 kilobytes a second...
"IRock" is not really like the Rio Receiver at all.
What you describe is merely an FM Modulator.
Rio Receiver's and the like play a file stored at a remote location (usually a hard drive on your local LAN) over ethernet or HPNA at their full quality.
FM will introduce lots of distortion and loss of audio signal.
I've got to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time.. it can't get no worse...
.. oh wait, it just did.
Tuesday 11:45 PM, my "cable" light on my cable modem starts blinking: Place call to tech: Me: "Any outages in my area?" Tech: "No. We can schedule a tech to come out on Wed" Me: "Ok"
Friday 5:00PM - it clicks in my head: Me: "You've been calling me for two weeks because apparently someone can't figure out how to write down my provisioning info on a piece of paper (I gave it to them five times). I haven't heard from you lately, did you perhaps provision my cable modem with the wrong MAC Address?" Tech: "Please read the MAC address to me... wait, that third digit should be an E?" Me: "Yes..." Tech: "Check your modem.. it should work now" Me: "Gee, thanks."
They will never make fun of my QIC-120 tape drive mounted below my 24x burner again..
Case in point:
Friend of mine used to run a very successful BBS (gasp?! A BBS?!) in this area I helped out with. At it's peak we had 48 telephone lines, an office, and 600 or some users.
Not to bore you with the details but a partnership was formed, dissolved, and eventually he basically ran out of money.
Fast forward 5 years later:
I'm at his house on an unrelated matter. We start talking about the BBS. He mentions how he's got backups of it somewhere but they're on old 120 meg tapes. So I convince him to ransack his room (and we literally do). Eventually we come up with 5 QIC-120 tapes. What to do? Nobody owns one of these drives anymore.
Ah - but I do! Being a geek who collects old obscure, out of date hardware pays off. I slap the tape drive into my system, collect it to the floppy interface (bleck!) and proceed to load the Coloraod Restore software.
Tape 1 - Bad Tape 2 - Bad Tape 3 - Bad Tape 4 - Good
I restored the data to my hard drive, burned it onto a CD-R, copied the system to another computer, tweaked the broken backup until it worked, and brought it up.
Let's do the timewarp, again - a BBS from 1997 was up in the year 2002 via telnet. I was a god among the users:)
Moral of the story is data mediums age faster then you think! We're only talking 1997 technology here and no one around me had the capabilities to restore it!
I haven't worked in as many schools as you have, but I've encountered the same.
My highschool had NO budget for classroom computers. As a result the computer teacher was glad to take any donations. This resulted in tons of 286's coming through the door.
Being the resident geek, it was my job to get them working. Out of the 30 donations I probably dealt with over a one year span, only 1 came with any form of documentation/original installation media.
I installed DR-DOS on most of the machines. One of the older versions, 7.03 or so I think was free for educational use.
Of course they had me install the same copy of "Number Munchers" onto all 30 machines... but at least the OS was legal!:)
>I know the commands but i only use the >commandline when I need to install something, >its actually easier to install via the >commandline than via graphical installer
[Install] [Next] [Next] [Accept] [Finish] [ Yes]
But I can install GUI programs in my sleep now. Don't make me type!
Slashdot Mirror
So true ...
...
I work as a Point of Sale Support Analyst and it's much easier to take the extra minute to explain to them how to post void a transaction then have 5 idiots in the center call you back with the same question.
1 idiot usually shows the other 4 idiots and by the time the next batch of idiots is hired because of the turnover, at least 1 idiot from the first batch remains to know how to do it.
I'm not bitter
Personally I uninstalled this program about 1 minute after installation when I realized it looked like an eager tenth-graders quest to make a Star Trek Skin for Kazaa.
Terrible, TERRIBLE UI.
Now I have an extra alibi.
... Muahaha...
"Look at my Tivo usage logs - I was watching TV at that time!" and "Check the couch! The couch doesn't lie! But I was lying - on the couch!"
Why hasn't Law & Order or any other cop show done an episode where a suspect is ruled out because they were watching Tivo at the time of the crime as proven by the logs on the PVR and his intelligent couch. Sheesh.
In my perfect world you end that episode showing the super smart computer person putting a timer delay on a pronto remote control to simulate TV watching and stacking phone books on the couch to simulate sitting on it
So, as a Philadelphia area resident can anyone get me a list of infected business/departments so I can fill the positions of the soon-to-be-fired IT Staff?
Yes - I am partly serious.
Gestapo Internal Memo:
Remember people, when we break into homes with search warrants, you need to take the MOTHERBOARD now too!
I rip my thriftstore vinyl to MP3's for fun in just the matter you describe:
Garrard Turntable -> Kenwood KR-2090 (Flea Market, $15) -> SB Live Line-In -> Cooledit Pro -> RazorLame.
A basic noise-removal filter in Cooledit (highlight what should be silence, it'll remove that throughout), save as WAV.
It makes perfectly playable MP3s that sound better then most of the crap you find floating around on Kazaa which has been sampled off a Fisher Price tape recorder into a pair of dollar-store headphones doubling as an emergency microphone.
Viva la Vinyl!
User 1: Alphanumeric password
User 2: Alphanumeric password
User 3: Alphabetic password
It ate the passphrases on User 1 & 2.
Conclusion:
Stick to alphabetic passwords only for now on the windows client.
Windows Client ..
First things first:
The client sucks. Really sucks. But so did Gnutella. Hell, it's bleeding edge. I'm happy it works as well as it does.
Two friends and myself hopped on our own little network. And all be damned, it worked.
For 2 of us, after we exited the program it no longer took our private key passphrases. Thus we had to make new keys. This is obviously a really, really bad bug. Or we're just stupid. Somehow I'm inclined to say it's the latter.
The technology behind this is very cool. You essentially get the bastard child of a VPN with the ease of P2P. Setting up your own little secure collborative chat/file trading network is very easy.
This will be a damn nice gadget once we get some better clients. (yay GPL!)
96k mp3? What show were you watching? I specifically remember them saving them in "uncompressed format" at either 44khz or 96khz in RAW Wav.
I wish people would stop knocking windows for this application to. You're simply recording RAW WAVs. You don't need a damn linux workstation to do this (sure it might be a bit more stable).
For anyone who missed the show, the basic mission protocol these guys were following is:
Capture the brittlest/most endanger recordings (those that are in danger of falling apart).
Capture these unaltered, via Turntable/wax cylinder/whatever and pipe into a computer and save as a WAV.
No DSP processing, no noise reduction.
The only piece of vinyl I remember them throwing out on that show was one where the guy took it out of the envelope and the aceate layer had completely fallen off the platter of the LP. I don't care what kind of technology gets introduced, there's no way you're going to restore paper-thin aceate material so brittle it falls apart when you even touch it.
So now that we're both finished sharing our differing recollections of the show, you at leasst liked the show right? I did!
I assume your referring to the "Save our Sounds" documentary, which I also watched (Thanks Tivo!).
Good observation on the vinyl... these guys - http://www.elpj.com/ - make a Laser Turntable which I agree would probably be a much much better way to record some of the more brittle recorders.
I don't think they're screwing up though. Everyone interviewed seemed like they cared a lot about what they do and respected the job they've been assigned. That one guy was doing some amazing shit with the wax cylinders.
I highly suggest everyone watch this special if it comes back on TV Anytime soon. On Tivo I found it under "Save our Sounds" in the Special Delivery section of TivoLution magazine.
I currently mess around in The Sims Online playtest every so often.
Last time I checked my Sim didn't have a
"Fuck Shit Up" or "Riot" popup menu.
I guess I'll just have to settle for "Shake Fist", "Berate" and "Throw Up" to boycott the McDonalds items when they show up.
Ah I never intended for anyone to take this seriously (sheesh, even I'm scoffing at my +5 moderation).
I just thought representing 5 gigs a month into a "best-case" use scenario of 24x7 would make it a little easier to realize how terribly ineffecient the capacity is.
Hell, even I don't use my connection for 24x7 - and if you are sucking up that kind of bandwith I think you should be paying more anyways.
So if we re-visit our equation at 6 hours a day you get 27 megs an hour, or 450Kilobytes a second - as you suggest, perfectly average for "normal people" in all reality.
An hour long 260Kb/s video stream will suck up 117 megs.
Or 128Kb/s streaming radio for an hour at 57 megs an hour.
Still adequate. That provides for something like 42 hours of streaming video or 87 hours of 128kbit mp3 streaming.
I'm hopping on the per-megabyte bandwagon though... it just seems like a good idea. If I want to use more of my connection I'd rather be paying it at a metered rate then having to upgrade to "Comcast Silver" which costs twice as much a month.
Article seems to throw around the term "5Gb" making me think "e-gads, 625 megs a month?" but further research into other articles on this subject put the number at 5 gigaBYTES of traffic a month.
.. feel free to redo my math with exact precision:
Decimals hacked off
5 gigs / 30 days = 166.66 megs a day.
166.66 megs a day / 24 hour = 6.94 megs an hour
6.94 megs an hour / 60 minutes = 115 kilobytes per minute
115 Kilobytes / 60 seconds = 1.91 kilobytes a second...
and 1.91 kilobytes * 8 = 15.28 kilobits a second.
Comcast Online - 1994 speed at 2002 prices.
Sheesh, the guy totally gave himself away. Any self-respecting geek would be storing that all in a relational-database.
....
The redundancies of a spreadsheet, aieee
"IRock" is not really like the Rio Receiver at all.
What you describe is merely an FM Modulator.
Rio Receiver's and the like play a file stored at a remote location (usually a hard drive on your local LAN) over ethernet or HPNA at their full quality.
FM will introduce lots of distortion and loss of audio signal.
This is just speculation, but I've noticed Comcast's DNS Servers (68.80.0.5 and 68.80.0.6) trying to connect to port 1214 on my machine once or twice.
Screwed up misdirected traffic, or KaZaa scanning. Any comments? Anyone else notice this?
Now, if only I can play it with my deaf friends ..
"Sounds Like - pickle!"
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
Random NYTimes.com login generator.
Halleujah.
This is exactly how it is where I work.
If it's not on H - it's gone. If it's not checked into the document library (Novell GroupWise) - it's gone.
At any time if there's a probably with a system, it gets Ghosted. Plain and simple.
Wipe a hard drive once - they get the idea of central data storage fast.
I've got to admit it's getting better, ...
... wait, that third digit should be an E?"
a little better all the time.. it can't get no worse
.. oh wait, it just did.
Tuesday 11:45 PM, my "cable" light on my cable modem starts blinking:
Place call to tech:
Me: "Any outages in my area?"
Tech: "No. We can schedule a tech to come out on Wed"
Me: "Ok"
Friday 5:00PM - it clicks in my head:
Me: "You've been calling me for two weeks because apparently someone can't figure out how to write down my provisioning info on a piece of paper (I gave it to them five times). I haven't heard from you lately, did you perhaps provision my cable modem with the wrong MAC Address?"
Tech: "Please read the MAC address to me
Me: "Yes..."
Tech: "Check your modem.. it should work now"
Me: "Gee, thanks."
They will never make fun of my QIC-120 tape drive mounted below my 24x burner again ..
:)
Case in point:
Friend of mine used to run a very successful BBS (gasp?! A BBS?!) in this area I helped out with. At it's peak we had 48 telephone lines, an office, and 600 or some users.
Not to bore you with the details but a partnership was formed, dissolved, and eventually he basically ran out of money.
Fast forward 5 years later:
I'm at his house on an unrelated matter. We start talking about the BBS. He mentions how he's got backups of it somewhere but they're on old 120 meg tapes. So I convince him to ransack his room (and we literally do). Eventually we come up with 5 QIC-120 tapes. What to do? Nobody owns one of these drives anymore.
Ah - but I do! Being a geek who collects old obscure, out of date hardware pays off. I slap the tape drive into my system, collect it to the floppy interface (bleck!) and proceed to load the Coloraod Restore software.
Tape 1 - Bad
Tape 2 - Bad
Tape 3 - Bad
Tape 4 - Good
I restored the data to my hard drive, burned it onto a CD-R, copied the system to another computer, tweaked the broken backup until it worked, and brought it up.
Let's do the timewarp, again - a BBS from 1997 was up in the year 2002 via telnet. I was a god among the users
Moral of the story is data mediums age faster then you think! We're only talking 1997 technology here and no one around me had the capabilities to restore it!
"However, there *are* compression schemes designed specifically for lossless digital audio compression, and they work fairly well. "
Anyone who is interested in that comment might want to visit:
http://www.monkeysaudio.com
I haven't worked in as many schools as you have, but I've encountered the same.
:)
My highschool had NO budget for classroom computers. As a result the computer teacher was glad to take any donations. This resulted in tons of 286's coming through the door.
Being the resident geek, it was my job to get them working. Out of the 30 donations I probably dealt with over a one year span, only 1 came with any form of documentation/original installation media.
I installed DR-DOS on most of the machines. One of the older versions, 7.03 or so I think was free for educational use.
Of course they had me install the same copy of "Number Munchers" onto all 30 machines... but at least the OS was legal!
"M.J." "clingy" "wet" "shirts"
...
Anyone else have a sudden renewed interest in seeing this film now
>I know the commands but i only use the >commandline when I need to install something, >its actually easier to install via the >commandline than via graphical installer
[ Yes]
[Install]
[Next]
[Next]
[Accept]
[Finish]
But I can install GUI programs in my sleep now. Don't make me type!