I bet non-US sources are probably still the biggest source if you count operations that are knowingly in the business of sending spam, and the majority of the US sources are from zombie armies of owned home computers.
Come on. These things have been around for 5 or 6 years, at least. The first were from a company call Minds@Work, but they're out of business now. Currently the top runners are the Tripper, the Image Vault, and a few others I can't think of. Belkin makes a device that snaps on the iPod and does this. There's an add-on for at least one of the Archos players that does this.
In other news, I've heard that there are these things that you can put in your pocket that carry data around. They're called "floppies"
the hybrid is far, far better for the environment.
Does that count the large amount of added energy and chemical pollution involved with making the batteries, and the eventual cost, energy use and possible pollution of recycling them at the end of their lifetime?
Not ragging on you, I'd just like to see a realistic study.
How much time have you spent? Looks like you've gotten about $1200. This may or may not be a good deal. If it took you 100 hours to do, maybe it's good, maybe not. Personally I'd be a lot better off working 100 extra hours of OT, but others maybe not.
Not if they're actually getting something for what they buy into the deal with.
Yes, but is it your right to decide what their info is worth? I'd be very upset personally if I found that one of my friends had given one of these scammers my email address. I guess it's worth it for sufficiently small values of "friend."
I've been buying refill ink for years, I wasn't aware that I was supposed to be going through Gratis to get them, sorry.
The point was that there was an exceedingly credible witness. There were others there, but everyone else around at the time was union and would not have backed up my friend's story. He just got lucky that there was management around that the guy didn't spot before confessing loudly and obstinately.
Certainly his boss could have fired him. His boss being around the corner would have been just as good, but having a corporate officer there just made it that much sweeter.
Joe average user is going to get confused by download pages. As an example, I went out and saw PDFCreator. Looks good, sez I, went out there, clicked on download, had to read and click another link to get to sourceforge's download page for the project, and once there, saw about 100 download links, mostly for old versions or different language files. There were two "correct" ones, one each with different GhostScript licenses.
Slashdot users aside, most people are NEVER going to download this. People want a big-arsed graphic button that they push to get the latest version. They're barely willing to download an exe and click on that. Downloading and installing needs to be made much simpler!
Thanks for the site though. The front page copy is quite good.
A friend was sysadmin at a manufacturing plant, and the janitor kept plugging into the power conditioned sockets with a very large, power-hungry floor polisher. He was actually blowing power supplies. Every one cost several thousand dollars in service calls to replace the power supply and downtime.
My friend put "COMPUTER USE ONLY" stickers OVER the power-conditioned sockets. The janitor ripped them off to plug in, and blew another power supply.
My friend finally confronted the janitor, who was a really obstinate PITA. He stood there and said "Yeah, I did it, and I'm gonna keep doing it, and I don't give a damn about you or your fu*kin' computers."
This was a automotive union shop, very difficult to get people fired.
But, in a show of karma rarely witnessed by mortals, the VP of the division was standing within earshot but out of sight. When the janitor finished saying he didn't give a damn that he was costing the company $10,000 a week because he was too lazy to go get an extension cord, the VP walked around the corner and said hi. I don't know whether the guy ran to his car or the VP kicked his ass right over the top of it.
Or at least, less US influence. Both the Tour de France and Lance Armstrong were more searched for than NFL. Either less US influence, or those looking for NFL don't know how to use a computer.
The great green Arkelseizure was the creature who's nose the universe was sneezed out of. It is worshipped by the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, which lives in fear of the time of the coming of the great white hankerchief.
It is in fact the Jatravartids that developed deodorant before the wheel, but it's because they had more than 50 ARMS each, not noses.
PLEASE!!! My wife and our church both used WordPerfect for years, and have thousands of documents in that format. Existing conversion utilities, particularly free ones, really don't work well at all. At this point we'd be happy just preserving the text and the basic formatting. Having images and complex formatting import properly would be nice, but at this point we're really just looking for a way out of WP-land. It's kind of hard to believe that it's that hard to read a file format.
I file my discs in binders due to overwhelming volume (if I put them in jewel cases I'd need a warehouse). With that many discs, even with an inventory system to get you to the right binder, you still need labels of some kind to help. I like stickers. I know a lot of people say they cause playback trouble, but I haven't seen it. I've gone through several thousand stickers over many years, and I haven't really had any trouble that I could relate to putting a sticker on.
Stickers cost 7 cents each at Sam's club, plus about 1 cent for ink if you're refilling ink carts instead of paying the silly amount the mfgs want for their carts. You get full color labels then instead of this goofy thing.
I have not seen any problem. I have at least 300 CD-Rs that were written on with sharpies and have now been sitting on the shelf for 8 years. Recently I tested them an there are no read problems.
It COULD be that it's dependent on brand/quality of CD-R. For instance, I had some CD-Rs that I got from OfficeMax that were total rubbish. I don't remember the brand but they were 4x50 packs shrink-wrapped in a cardboard box for about $10. I wound up throwing the lot away after the first 30 discs.
Those discs had about a billionth of a mm of coating over the reflective layer. I had one of the things start shedding the shiny bit on my hands.
The ones I've not had trouble with for all the years are Kodaks. I've had no trouble with major name brand consumer-grade CD-Rs (Imation, Fuji, etc) either writing on with sharpies or putting stickers on.
Read carefully. The parent was poking fun at the bad grammar in the original post. It said that their Child's Play work had increased their bandwidth; what they meant to say was that it had increased their bandwidth usage. The article would have only been correct if they got a free T1 for doing Child's Play.
I completely agree. I think 98% of the security measures that have been put in place do nothing to increase actual security, and may decrease it by giving the illusion of security and causing a relaxation of other safeguards. I've read "Beyond Fear" too.
As I said, I'm just addressing the allegation that a small number of attacks can be drowned out in the statistical noise. Hell, if you're going to compare against all non-terrorist events, someone could get killed by a mail bomb every day in the US, and it would still be a very small percentage of the millions of packages and letters that get mailed every day.
How many times have buildings been intentionally attacked by airplanes in the last 100 years? Four times? Out of how many millions of flights that have taken place?
Out of all the terrorist attacks that have happened on US soil in the last 100 years, how many were perpetrated via the mails?
Probably a lot. If you count hate crimes in the same bin as terrorist acts (I think they should be), then the percentage drops very low, certainly below 1%, as you include lynchings, arsons, etc, but the number of bombs, booby traps and suspicious substances sent through the mail is not vanishingly small, as a percentage of total terrorist acts.
The more you narrow the definition of terrorism, the higher the percentage becomes. Narrow it enough and it's very high indeed. I'm not familiar with terrorism history before 1980 or so, and it's debatable whether it even matters, since we're living now, not 80 years ago.
From the last 10 years: 9/11 (4 incidents), 1993 WTC bombing, 1995 OK City bombing, unabomber (23 incidents), anthrax attacks (7 incidents?).
Certainly the non-mail-related attacks where very much more serious, partially because it's difficult to deliver 20,000 pounds of fuzed explosives through the mail without arousing suspicion, but nonetheless, when taken as a percentage of actual attacks, mail-based attacks are not "vanishingly small"
If you insist on measuring potential threats based on how many times it has happened on US soil in the last 30 years, then all threats are vanishingly small and there's no point in doing anything.
Just FYI, I don't particularly like cameras either, I'm just addressing the argument that mail based attacks are not significant.
is that true, freedom-loving patriots should carry their Nixon (or Reagan, if you prefer) mask at the ready at all times, in case they have to buy stamps. Or use an ATM. or go into a bank. or a retail store. or walk around in public....
That's really weird, since I have those hundreds of gold Kodak CD-Rs, paid $5+ for them, and burned them on the big white Philips CD burner at 2X, and I have zero bad discs, hardly even any soft read errors; I had to use Nero CD Speed to deep test them to find any trouble at all. I wonder what the difference is between your situation and mine?
I'm not keeping them in particularly great environment either, just stuck on a spindle and thrown on a shelf in the basement.
The temp down there does stay relatively stable at about 60*F and fairly low humidity. That could have something to do with it.
Have you done any CD read testing? I have. I now have over 1000 CDs in long-term (in the basement) storage. I recently pulled out the oldest stack, from 1996 and tested them (50 discs). They were all 100% readable, in fact only 3 or 4 had even soft read errors, and I've seen that on discs fresh off the burner, so I can't even say for sure they have degraded AT ALL, since I didn't do deep testing on them when I archived them.
DVDs are another matter. I'm using them, but I don't trust them at all. I've had plenty test back right off the burner, and lots more unreadable 6 months later. Name brand DVD blanks (both +R and -R). I put 5-10% PAR2 sets on all data DVDs I burn.
Depends. If you buy crappy "one-size-fits-all" ink refills from WalMart, sure, the MFG ink is better. I've been buying refill ink for both my Epson and my Canon from inksupply.com for several years, and in my on-the-cubicle-wall, in-the-sun tests, the refill ink actually has better fade resistance than the mfg ink. Also it's about 30 cents for a refill vs $6 per color for mfg ink.
Heck, legitimate businesses often either ignore or don't test their unsubscribe systems.
I signed up for emails from History Channel a year or so ago. A couple of months ago I decided I didn't really want them any more. I clicked on every unsubscribe link they sent me, probably a total of 6 or 8 of them over 2+ months. Finally I sent them an email telling them they'd better honor it or have a lawyer familiar with CAN-SPAM.
To their credit, I got a hand-written email back within 12 hours and I haven't gotten any more promotional emails from them. But it's pretty obvious that their unsubscribe system wasn't working when I tried to use it.
Wow, between this and the budget changes, I'm starting to think that I might actually entertain the hope that I might have to eat my words; When Dubya announced his space initiative, I said it was just electioneering and it'd never get off the ground. I'm still not installing Hope v2.0, but I may just get it ready.
If you're talking about lots and lots of megapixels per exposure, that's pointless for astronomy. There are fixed physical limitations in play. Film and CCDs in the 6 to 10 megapixel range are already imaging all the detail that you can capture in a managable sized aperture. There just isn't detail smaller than that, both because of dawe's limit on arcseconds of detail available per inch of aperture, but also because of atmospheric interference.
If you're talking about creating very large images from mosaics, sure. It's been done, lots, for decades.
As far as creating a super-large image that is explorable, there's a lot better way, and it's been done. In the sky, there's a lot of starfields with neat objects embedded in them occasionally. This means you can mathematically generate the starfields from star positions, and insert scaled images of the neat objects as the explorer moves his view window over them.
To see this in action, pick up a copy of Starry Night. It's a very fun program to just cruise around the sky with.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet almost every single child porn consumer uses Internet Explorer. Obviously IE is a tool for child porn, even though it does have legitimate uses.
And now FireFox is trying to gain market share in the child porn arena!
sheesh.
I bet non-US sources are probably still the biggest source if you count operations that are knowingly in the business of sending spam, and the majority of the US sources are from zombie armies of owned home computers.
Come on. These things have been around for 5 or 6 years, at least. The first were from a company call Minds@Work, but they're out of business now.
Currently the top runners are the Tripper, the Image Vault, and a few others I can't think of.
Belkin makes a device that snaps on the iPod and does this. There's an add-on for at least one of the Archos players that does this.
In other news, I've heard that there are these things that you can put in your pocket that carry data around. They're called "floppies"
the hybrid is far, far better for the environment.
Does that count the large amount of added energy and chemical pollution involved with making the batteries, and the eventual cost, energy use and possible pollution of recycling them at the end of their lifetime?
Not ragging on you, I'd just like to see a realistic study.
How much time have you spent?
Looks like you've gotten about $1200. This may or may not be a good deal. If it took you 100 hours to do, maybe it's good, maybe not. Personally I'd be a lot better off working 100 extra hours of OT, but others maybe not.
Not if they're actually getting something for what they buy into the deal with.
Yes, but is it your right to decide what their info is worth? I'd be very upset personally if I found that one of my friends had given one of these scammers my email address. I guess it's worth it for sufficiently small values of "friend."
I've been buying refill ink for years, I wasn't aware that I was supposed to be going through Gratis to get them, sorry.
The point was that there was an exceedingly credible witness. There were others there, but everyone else around at the time was union and would not have backed up my friend's story. He just got lucky that there was management around that the guy didn't spot before confessing loudly and obstinately.
Certainly his boss could have fired him. His boss being around the corner would have been just as good, but having a corporate officer there just made it that much sweeter.
Joe average user is going to get confused by download pages.
As an example, I went out and saw PDFCreator. Looks good, sez I, went out there, clicked on download, had to read and click another link to get to sourceforge's download page for the project, and once there, saw about 100 download links, mostly for old versions or different language files. There were two "correct" ones, one each with different GhostScript licenses.
Slashdot users aside, most people are NEVER going to download this. People want a big-arsed graphic button that they push to get the latest version. They're barely willing to download an exe and click on that. Downloading and installing needs to be made much simpler!
Thanks for the site though. The front page copy is quite good.
A friend was sysadmin at a manufacturing plant, and the janitor kept plugging into the power conditioned sockets with a very large, power-hungry floor polisher. He was actually blowing power supplies. Every one cost several thousand dollars in service calls to replace the power supply and downtime.
My friend put "COMPUTER USE ONLY" stickers OVER the power-conditioned sockets. The janitor ripped them off to plug in, and blew another power supply.
My friend finally confronted the janitor, who was a really obstinate PITA. He stood there and said "Yeah, I did it, and I'm gonna keep doing it, and I don't give a damn about you or your fu*kin' computers."
This was a automotive union shop, very difficult to get people fired.
But, in a show of karma rarely witnessed by mortals, the VP of the division was standing within earshot but out of sight. When the janitor finished saying he didn't give a damn that he was costing the company $10,000 a week because he was too lazy to go get an extension cord, the VP walked around the corner and said hi. I don't know whether the guy ran to his car or the VP kicked his ass right over the top of it.
On the plus side, I got you a xmas gift: it's a mat, and it's got conclusions painted on it...
Woohoo! A-Jumping I Will Go!!!
Or at least, less US influence.
Both the Tour de France and Lance Armstrong were more searched for than NFL. Either less US influence, or those looking for NFL don't know how to use a computer.
I think there is some confusion here.
The great green Arkelseizure was the creature who's nose the universe was sneezed out of. It is worshipped by the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, which lives in fear of the time of the coming of the great white hankerchief.
It is in fact the Jatravartids that developed deodorant before the wheel, but it's because they had more than 50 ARMS each, not noses.
PLEASE!!!
My wife and our church both used WordPerfect for years, and have thousands of documents in that format. Existing conversion utilities, particularly free ones, really don't work well at all.
At this point we'd be happy just preserving the text and the basic formatting. Having images and complex formatting import properly would be nice, but at this point we're really just looking for a way out of WP-land.
It's kind of hard to believe that it's that hard to read a file format.
I file my discs in binders due to overwhelming volume (if I put them in jewel cases I'd need a warehouse).
With that many discs, even with an inventory system to get you to the right binder, you still need labels of some kind to help.
I like stickers. I know a lot of people say they cause playback trouble, but I haven't seen it. I've gone through several thousand stickers over many years, and I haven't really had any trouble that I could relate to putting a sticker on.
Stickers cost 7 cents each at Sam's club, plus about 1 cent for ink if you're refilling ink carts instead of paying the silly amount the mfgs want for their carts. You get full color labels then instead of this goofy thing.
I have not seen any problem. I have at least 300 CD-Rs that were written on with sharpies and have now been sitting on the shelf for 8 years. Recently I tested them an there are no read problems.
It COULD be that it's dependent on brand/quality of CD-R. For instance, I had some CD-Rs that I got from OfficeMax that were total rubbish. I don't remember the brand but they were 4x50 packs shrink-wrapped in a cardboard box for about $10. I wound up throwing the lot away after the first 30 discs.
Those discs had about a billionth of a mm of coating over the reflective layer. I had one of the things start shedding the shiny bit on my hands.
The ones I've not had trouble with for all the years are Kodaks. I've had no trouble with major name brand consumer-grade CD-Rs (Imation, Fuji, etc) either writing on with sharpies or putting stickers on.
Read carefully. The parent was poking fun at the bad grammar in the original post. It said that their Child's Play work had increased their bandwidth; what they meant to say was that it had increased their bandwidth usage.
The article would have only been correct if they got a free T1 for doing Child's Play.
I completely agree. I think 98% of the security measures that have been put in place do nothing to increase actual security, and may decrease it by giving the illusion of security and causing a relaxation of other safeguards. I've read "Beyond Fear" too.
As I said, I'm just addressing the allegation that a small number of attacks can be drowned out in the statistical noise. Hell, if you're going to compare against all non-terrorist events, someone could get killed by a mail bomb every day in the US, and it would still be a very small percentage of the millions of packages and letters that get mailed every day.
How many times have buildings been intentionally attacked by airplanes in the last 100 years? Four times? Out of how many millions of flights that have taken place?
Out of all the terrorist attacks that have happened on US soil in the last 100 years, how many were perpetrated via the mails?
Probably a lot. If you count hate crimes in the same bin as terrorist acts (I think they should be), then the percentage drops very low, certainly below 1%, as you include lynchings, arsons, etc, but the number of bombs, booby traps and suspicious substances sent through the mail is not vanishingly small, as a percentage of total terrorist acts.
The more you narrow the definition of terrorism, the higher the percentage becomes. Narrow it enough and it's very high indeed. I'm not familiar with terrorism history before 1980 or so, and it's debatable whether it even matters, since we're living now, not 80 years ago.
From the last 10 years: 9/11 (4 incidents), 1993 WTC bombing, 1995 OK City bombing, unabomber (23 incidents), anthrax attacks (7 incidents?).
Mail-related terrorism attacks: 30
Non-mail-related attacks: 6
Certainly the non-mail-related attacks where very much more serious, partially because it's difficult to deliver 20,000 pounds of fuzed explosives through the mail without arousing suspicion, but nonetheless, when taken as a percentage of actual attacks, mail-based attacks are not "vanishingly small"
If you insist on measuring potential threats based on how many times it has happened on US soil in the last 30 years, then all threats are vanishingly small and there's no point in doing anything.
Just FYI, I don't particularly like cameras either, I'm just addressing the argument that mail based attacks are not significant.
is that true, freedom-loving patriots should carry their Nixon (or Reagan, if you prefer) mask at the ready at all times, in case they have to buy stamps. Or use an ATM. or go into a bank. or a retail store. or walk around in public....
That's really weird, since I have those hundreds of gold Kodak CD-Rs, paid $5+ for them, and burned them on the big white Philips CD burner at 2X, and I have zero bad discs, hardly even any soft read errors; I had to use Nero CD Speed to deep test them to find any trouble at all. I wonder what the difference is between your situation and mine?
I'm not keeping them in particularly great environment either, just stuck on a spindle and thrown on a shelf in the basement.
The temp down there does stay relatively stable at about 60*F and fairly low humidity. That could have something to do with it.
Have you done any CD read testing? I have. I now have over 1000 CDs in long-term (in the basement) storage. I recently pulled out the oldest stack, from 1996 and tested them (50 discs). They were all 100% readable, in fact only 3 or 4 had even soft read errors, and I've seen that on discs fresh off the burner, so I can't even say for sure they have degraded AT ALL, since I didn't do deep testing on them when I archived them.
DVDs are another matter. I'm using them, but I don't trust them at all. I've had plenty test back right off the burner, and lots more unreadable 6 months later. Name brand DVD blanks (both +R and -R). I put 5-10% PAR2 sets on all data DVDs I burn.
Depends. If you buy crappy "one-size-fits-all" ink refills from WalMart, sure, the MFG ink is better. I've been buying refill ink for both my Epson and my Canon from inksupply.com for several years, and in my on-the-cubicle-wall, in-the-sun tests, the refill ink actually has better fade resistance than the mfg ink. Also it's about 30 cents for a refill vs $6 per color for mfg ink.
Heck, legitimate businesses often either ignore or don't test their unsubscribe systems.
I signed up for emails from History Channel a year or so ago. A couple of months ago I decided I didn't really want them any more. I clicked on every unsubscribe link they sent me, probably a total of 6 or 8 of them over 2+ months. Finally I sent them an email telling them they'd better honor it or have a lawyer familiar with CAN-SPAM.
To their credit, I got a hand-written email back within 12 hours and I haven't gotten any more promotional emails from them. But it's pretty obvious that their unsubscribe system wasn't working when I tried to use it.
Wow, between this and the budget changes, I'm starting to think that I might actually entertain the hope that I might have to eat my words; When Dubya announced his space initiative, I said it was just electioneering and it'd never get off the ground. I'm still not installing Hope v2.0, but I may just get it ready.
If you're talking about lots and lots of megapixels per exposure, that's pointless for astronomy. There are fixed physical limitations in play. Film and CCDs in the 6 to 10 megapixel range are already imaging all the detail that you can capture in a managable sized aperture. There just isn't detail smaller than that, both because of dawe's limit on arcseconds of detail available per inch of aperture, but also because of atmospheric interference.
If you're talking about creating very large images from mosaics, sure. It's been done, lots, for decades.
As far as creating a super-large image that is explorable, there's a lot better way, and it's been done. In the sky, there's a lot of starfields with neat objects embedded in them occasionally. This means you can mathematically generate the starfields from star positions, and insert scaled images of the neat objects as the explorer moves his view window over them.
To see this in action, pick up a copy of Starry Night. It's a very fun program to just cruise around the sky with.