I pay for SkypeIN and SkypeOut. It's a great deal. Unlimited Skype to Skype and 10,000 minutes per month to and from land lines. I have a real local phone number which displays on peoples caller ID if I so desire. Prices vary by locality, so check. It's about the same yearly as many people pay monthly for their cellular plan.
I have incoming calls redirect to my cellphone and office phone after so many seconds. You can load Skype up on your Windows Mobile, iPhone, and iPod touch with the Apple microphone headphones. While this is in no way a cell phone replacement, it's free minutes if you are near a good WIFI and need to place an outgoing call. There are physical wireless Skype Phones, but the quality is not near the level of a cell phone yet.
You can run Skype on many PC's at the same time and answer on which ever one you are sitting at. I have an ASUS EEE BOX PC at home wall mounted as an IPCCTV server, also running Skype. It's also running on my Laptop at work at the moment. My wife and I often video chat through Skype instead of using our phones. The audio is better quality than what my cellular provider offers.
Hopefully more people will see the benefits of the paid services and Skype will continue.
Did you know, one can copy the entire Firefox profile from one PC to another and from the new PC point the profile to this copied one and you have all the shortcuts, history, everything copied.
As an domain admin I can know a lot about my users by doing this, if I wanted to. I can log into any sites they have passwords save as for those are in my Firefox now too. (I should state now that I don't actually do this, other than with my own test profiles on multiple PCs to make a point.)
firefox.exe -profilemanager
So the solution? Be friends with TrueCrypt and integrate this into Firefox. If a user wants to, they can optionally convert their profile into a secure one. Then when they launch Firefox, they either can open the secure profile (valid truecrypt pwd) or the default profile (anything but the valid pwd.) The profile directory becomes a truecrypt volume mounted by firefox, but ideally without mapping a drive letter. Perhaps a junction point?
So two 64GB drives in RAID0, or even on just on different SATA channels are faster than one 128GB drive.
Spread the word! This will change database disk design for decades to come.
---
I've got several OCZ 32GB SSD with the partitions aligned. Wildly faster for running my VM's off of. Windows boots in about 10 seconds onto a LAN. Don't really see a notable difference with my *small* database servers. That's likely because they load huge pages of the database into RAM and serve it from there. I have yet to try this on a large database server.
I hate when an entertainment show attempts to entertain me by explaining how technology works. Star Trek often over explains technology and builds that into the plot. I enjoyed shows like Star Wars and FireFly more because they leave it to the imagination.
I have the book on the Star Trek universe technology. What makes sense, what doesn't. It's entertaining. But I don't want the show to explain in 30 minutes how to do something so trivial when all they have to do is beam an air bubble into the heart of the ships crew. Don't explain, leave it to my imagination.
I quit doing business with PayPal, and thus eBay, after they wanted direct access to my checking account to do any further business.
What they really need to do is create an escrow service where I send PayPal my $, the seller sends them the goods. Goods are verified by paypal as best as possible with perhaps pictures sent to me. As the buyer, if I'm okay with that verification then they release both the goods and the funds.
A decent fee should be associated with it, even if rejected by buyer. Perhaps arbitration fees for deciding who is at fault for rejection.
This would not be something everyone would use, but when you are dealing with very expensive merchandise that is small such as computer devices it would be nice. A high MP photo of that Cisco management blade that costs over $10,000 would have revealed it was a clone built in China and not authentic.
Flash 10 has the ability to do advanced client side things. For example, it can update the screen with information from a server by posting to a website, by XML, etc. It's pretty good at doing this. 8e6 and Surfcontrol utilize this type of capability in their admin GUIs for example.
Beyond just nice GUIs, one can serve up a special Flash document on a website. When the user opens the web page, a reverse proxy tunnel can be established allowing access into the clients LAN through Flash, bypassing any firewall restrictions. I think that was a previous/. article.
Turn on auditing, and log everything they do. This is easier in a non Microsoft shop, but you can do it there too. You can record READ access to the event log. Bare in mind that a directory listing or a search within Microsoft products count as read access. As a work around, even though they are admins you could revoke their access to your data directories. Sure, they could change that, but this makes READ access logging much easier.
SQL supports the same type of thing.
If you don't have the time to do this, then you don't really care about it. My.02.
In the US we have moved from having a 1960's type society that is local/national with very similar interests to a society that is very diverse.
What we think is newsworthy varies greatly. I read technical news information, Eve-Online news, and have completely lost interest in local and national news because it is so depressing.
Traditional news sources simply can not cover everything. So having a portal to bring the news an individual want to hear about into a central location is where things are going.
The journalistic sources that can accomplish this will be the victors of this change. I would love to sign into my news account and have detailed journalist analysis of the latest things going on in non Concord space, insights into the specific software packages I use, and what's new in the world of Maltese K9s.
Just repeating news releases and the same thing I can see on CSPAN, sans the spin, as well as bogus headlines such as "We caught Bin Laden" (AP/Reuters) is not going to cut it anymore.
Infinite: lacking limits or bounds; extending beyond measure or comprehension: without beginning or end; endless yourdictionary.com
We are talking theoretical infinities. Some believe that for ever moment there is an infinite number of universes with every possible option.
We also know that physics breaks down are does not apply in various places. We also know that there is a lot about the universe we will never know anything about.
It's all just theory. In my life time we will never know how many intelligent species there are.
The summary says " If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there."
With the implication we are talking advanced civilizations.
Just as our planet has been teaming with life for millions of years, there could be millions of planets in our galaxy with life, some even intelligent. They would not qualify as the 10 advanced civilizations.
In the context of the universe, however, I have to think that life is abundant. If the universe if infinite, then there should also be infinite varieties of life.
>>The usual bureacratic solution in a case like this is to make it illegal to hook-up oscilloscopes to parking meters in San Francisco.
And make the minimum punishment 5 years in jail and %50,000 fine. After all, they do have cameras everywhere, right? It is just a matter of paying someone to sift through the video until they spot the guy doing this, then arrest him.
While I understand that this system's not very secure, I don't know if I think attempting to make it perfectly secure is worth it when the above is good enough. No matter what system they put in place, eventually a way around it could be found. In this case, preventing the crime versus punishing the criminal doesn't seem to make sense.
I am not against DRM, just let me know what the restrictions of the DRM are in plain English. Not some 20 page EULA that I can't understand.
I have rented a DRM movie from the iTunes store to watch on my iPod. $3.99. I knew I had just under a month to start watching it, and then 24 hours to finish watching it. I knew it could only be on my Mac or iPod but not both at the same time. I was fine with that.
I bought a digital CD from Amazon.com knowing it did not have DRM, but that my user code is in the MP3 so if I do share it, it is trackable to me.
Various web sites have DRM in their video files. You can play these for ever, but only as long as that PC has the license. If the PC dies and the site goes belly up, the media is not usable as I can't get the license again. Some require Windows Media player and will not work on OS X. If I know all that, then that's fine too. I can select to avoid these if I desire.
What I don't like is the rules being unclear, and changing. If recording TV to my VCR is fair use, then why can't I record from my HDTV to my Blueray burner as fair use?
Haha., sounds like you are just an a-hole who does not get the point.
I do this. I have multiple test VMs so I can test and snapshot my updates. I have a large batch file to uninstall previous versions of Java, and delete the left over.cabs in ALLUSERPROFILES. I do all this crap. I spend an absurd amount of time doing it. I Wireshark what the built in Adobe update is downloading so I can grab it and install it via Zen since it's not immediately available on the Adobe redistributable site.
What about software like Console One or Websphere which installs ancient versions of Java into non standard locations?
Other vendors release proper updates. Why can't Sun and Adobe?
If you are registered with a reputable registrar...
Say your registration for yourdomain.com expires and you've forgot about it because you were out on vacation for the last month and didn't see the e-mails.
With Network Solutions, they will keep that expired domain around for me to renew, even after it expires. So I don't loose it to a cyber squatter.
I've seen this with domains I've deliberately let go.
If they aren't allowed to do this, then I'm screwed if I forget to renew one of my domains.
I'm with the registrars on this one. It is a nice security feature.
When I replaced my PC this last time I decided to migrate my Internet Explorer and Firefox profiles so I'd not loose my bookmarks.
I was amazed how simple it was to do. In IE I did file/export and exported Favorites and cookies. Then on the new computer all my stored passwords worked. That is very scary. Any time I leave my PC unlocked and walk away, any stored password could be stolen. Firefox was even easier. Copy the profile directory from one C: to another.
That also means any administrator on my network can also steal this information. The thing to learn from this is to never store passwords or account info in Firefox/Internet Explorer.
And then when a patch for Adobe does come out, as an Admin of 600 PC's I have to use Adobe's somewhat broken Update mechanism inside reader to update it. They don't release an MSP patch for SUS/Zenworks deployment until weeks later.
They do need to fix this. Also, how often do you install a piece of software only to end up with Adobe reader 3.01, or 5 installed with it even though you have 9.1.2? That is an issue to.
Sun Java needs to fix their broken updater too. Check out http://secunia.com/advisories/35853/ then realize that I'm the Java updater's not detecting that there is a Java 6 build 14 released. I have to manually go out and download build 14. And when I do that, I'm still left with vulnerable versions of Java 3, 4, 5, and 6 builds 0-4 installed. WTF?
You know, I never understood why short e-mail message have to be "transmitted" to the recipient in SMTP. As such, my e-mail is available for e-discovery requests aimed at the recipient as it's on the recipients computer.
In cases I didn't want that, I stuck an image on my web server and did a link to the https://passwordserver.com/dir1234/abc.jpg with headers set to no-cache. This being a CGI program.
The result is pretty similar TFA, but much easier obtained. P2P isn't going to be opened up on our network for this feature. In my example, the e-mail is also short lived. It's encrypted with no effort on the user, other than "load remote images" if they have that disabled. It's password protected, though not as nicely as this new Crypto key handling method. Once the server sends the JPG one time, it will only send it again to that same IP address with the cookie initially set on the first display as per the CGI script. The server then queues the JPG email up to delete after x many minutes via a database entry and scheduled job.
Now I can delete the message of the e-mail at will. If they don't read it after so many days, I can nuke it. They can print or copy/paste it, but it's not in their Exchange server nor is it on mine.
My attempt was quick and dirty. Places like MessageLabs and POSTINI already offer this service in a much nicer and easier format. We already see health care and banking use these services.
First, why would FTP not be the right size? The transaction was terminated prior to the upload completing. I see that too often.
Robocopy really is a great too do deal with this problem. I have around 20 remote links with unreliable connections, and robocopy is a god send.
Use a command line. 7Z the file to be transmitted into a.7Z archive. Robocopy "\\source\server\path" "\\dest\server\path" filename.7z/ipg:9/z/r:30/w:30/ipg:9 says to wait 9ms between packets. I use 9000 at slow link sites to not overwhelm them./z is restartable mode, the file is dated 1980 until the xfer is complete which makes it easy to ignore these on the receiving server./r:30 is 30 retries before giving up. Default is 1 million./w:30 is 30 second between retry.
The reason to use 7z is to make sure you have a complete file. If the file is partially uploaded to the server, you can realize this by the fact that the.7z archive will not extract.
I went through WIPO arbitration. Someone wanted to take one of my domains away from me. I replied with a proper reply and ended up keeping my domain.
The arbitration goes to an individual or multiple individuals. It really depends on the individual you get. Looking through prior arbitration, I saw how mine could have gone either way.
Obviously they got this idea from HP and the like locking out 3rd party printer ink.
So who is going to be next to do this? APC? I can just see UPS manufactures requiring their specific battery. No more putting a 9 AMP hours battery in a UPS made for 7A.
Then auto manufactures? GMC requiring only GMC replacement batteries, windshield wiper blades, oil filters, and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you implying that eBay stores are not "real resellers?" I was implying they are. It's a matter of opinion I suppose.
1 bit is all it takes. Just beam one bit using the Star Trek transporter into the heart of a human and you have a dead human.
Or another way; 0 bits. All humans already die. It is a built in feature. No add-ons are required.
I pay for SkypeIN and SkypeOut. It's a great deal. Unlimited Skype to Skype and 10,000 minutes per month to and from land lines. I have a real local phone number which displays on peoples caller ID if I so desire. Prices vary by locality, so check. It's about the same yearly as many people pay monthly for their cellular plan.
I have incoming calls redirect to my cellphone and office phone after so many seconds. You can load Skype up on your Windows Mobile, iPhone, and iPod touch with the Apple microphone headphones. While this is in no way a cell phone replacement, it's free minutes if you are near a good WIFI and need to place an outgoing call. There are physical wireless Skype Phones, but the quality is not near the level of a cell phone yet.
You can run Skype on many PC's at the same time and answer on which ever one you are sitting at. I have an ASUS EEE BOX PC at home wall mounted as an IPCCTV server, also running Skype. It's also running on my Laptop at work at the moment. My wife and I often video chat through Skype instead of using our phones. The audio is better quality than what my cellular provider offers.
Hopefully more people will see the benefits of the paid services and Skype will continue.
I think the article is right on the marker.
Did you know, one can copy the entire Firefox profile from one PC to another and from the new PC point the profile to this copied one and you have all the shortcuts, history, everything copied.
As an domain admin I can know a lot about my users by doing this, if I wanted to. I can log into any sites they have passwords save as for those are in my Firefox now too. (I should state now that I don't actually do this, other than with my own test profiles on multiple PCs to make a point.)
firefox.exe -profilemanager
So the solution? Be friends with TrueCrypt and integrate this into Firefox. If a user wants to, they can optionally convert their profile into a secure one. Then when they launch Firefox, they either can open the secure profile (valid truecrypt pwd) or the default profile (anything but the valid pwd.) The profile directory becomes a truecrypt volume mounted by firefox, but ideally without mapping a drive letter. Perhaps a junction point?
So two 64GB drives in RAID0, or even on just on different SATA channels are faster than one 128GB drive.
Spread the word! This will change database disk design for decades to come.
---
I've got several OCZ 32GB SSD with the partitions aligned. Wildly faster for running my VM's off of. Windows boots in about 10 seconds onto a LAN. Don't really see a notable difference with my *small* database servers. That's likely because they load huge pages of the database into RAM and serve it from there. I have yet to try this on a large database server.
I hate when an entertainment show attempts to entertain me by explaining how technology works. Star Trek often over explains technology and builds that into the plot. I enjoyed shows like Star Wars and FireFly more because they leave it to the imagination.
I have the book on the Star Trek universe technology. What makes sense, what doesn't. It's entertaining. But I don't want the show to explain in 30 minutes how to do something so trivial when all they have to do is beam an air bubble into the heart of the ships crew. Don't explain, leave it to my imagination.
I quit doing business with PayPal, and thus eBay, after they wanted direct access to my checking account to do any further business.
What they really need to do is create an escrow service where I send PayPal my $, the seller sends them the goods. Goods are verified by paypal as best as possible with perhaps pictures sent to me. As the buyer, if I'm okay with that verification then they release both the goods and the funds.
A decent fee should be associated with it, even if rejected by buyer. Perhaps arbitration fees for deciding who is at fault for rejection.
This would not be something everyone would use, but when you are dealing with very expensive merchandise that is small such as computer devices it would be nice. A high MP photo of that Cisco management blade that costs over $10,000 would have revealed it was a clone built in China and not authentic.
My thoughts.
Flash 10 has the ability to do advanced client side things. For example, it can update the screen with information from a server by posting to a website, by XML, etc. It's pretty good at doing this. 8e6 and Surfcontrol utilize this type of capability in their admin GUIs for example.
Beyond just nice GUIs, one can serve up a special Flash document on a website. When the user opens the web page, a reverse proxy tunnel can be established allowing access into the clients LAN through Flash, bypassing any firewall restrictions. I think that was a previous /. article.
It's got a lot of features many folks don't use.
Turn on auditing, and log everything they do. This is easier in a non Microsoft shop, but you can do it there too. You can record READ access to the event log. Bare in mind that a directory listing or a search within Microsoft products count as read access. As a work around, even though they are admins you could revoke their access to your data directories. Sure, they could change that, but this makes READ access logging much easier.
SQL supports the same type of thing.
If you don't have the time to do this, then you don't really care about it. My .02.
In the US we have moved from having a 1960's type society that is local/national with very similar interests to a society that is very diverse.
What we think is newsworthy varies greatly. I read technical news information, Eve-Online news, and have completely lost interest in local and national news because it is so depressing.
Traditional news sources simply can not cover everything. So having a portal to bring the news an individual want to hear about into a central location is where things are going.
The journalistic sources that can accomplish this will be the victors of this change. I would love to sign into my news account and have detailed journalist analysis of the latest things going on in non Concord space, insights into the specific software packages I use, and what's new in the world of Maltese K9s.
Just repeating news releases and the same thing I can see on CSPAN, sans the spin, as well as bogus headlines such as "We caught Bin Laden" (AP/Reuters) is not going to cut it anymore.
My opinion.
Infinite: lacking limits or bounds; extending beyond measure or comprehension: without beginning or end; endless yourdictionary.com
We are talking theoretical infinities. Some believe that for ever moment there is an infinite number of universes with every possible option.
We also know that physics breaks down are does not apply in various places. We also know that there is a lot about the universe we will never know anything about.
It's all just theory. In my life time we will never know how many intelligent species there are.
This the just the market correcting itself. Capitalism at it's best.
The summary says " If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there."
With the implication we are talking advanced civilizations.
Just as our planet has been teaming with life for millions of years, there could be millions of planets in our galaxy with life, some even intelligent. They would not qualify as the 10 advanced civilizations.
In the context of the universe, however, I have to think that life is abundant. If the universe if infinite, then there should also be infinite varieties of life.
>>The usual bureacratic solution in a case like this is to make it illegal to hook-up oscilloscopes to parking meters in San Francisco.
And make the minimum punishment 5 years in jail and %50,000 fine. After all, they do have cameras everywhere, right? It is just a matter of paying someone to sift through the video until they spot the guy doing this, then arrest him.
While I understand that this system's not very secure, I don't know if I think attempting to make it perfectly secure is worth it when the above is good enough. No matter what system they put in place, eventually a way around it could be found. In this case, preventing the crime versus punishing the criminal doesn't seem to make sense.
Maybe instead of having all these different buttons mappings, we can come up with a standard that everyone can use.
Perhaps "The caller you are trying to reach is not answering, leave a message at the beep. Hit # for options. "
then if I need to know the options, which are the same on every damned system, I hit # to hear them.
For paging, press 1, to leave a callback number, press 2, to switch to a different voice mailbox press 3.
(I don't care what the options are, just make them all the same. Alltel is different than Net10 is different than .....
I am not against DRM, just let me know what the restrictions of the DRM are in plain English. Not some 20 page EULA that I can't understand.
I have rented a DRM movie from the iTunes store to watch on my iPod. $3.99. I knew I had just under a month to start watching it, and then 24 hours to finish watching it. I knew it could only be on my Mac or iPod but not both at the same time. I was fine with that.
I bought a digital CD from Amazon.com knowing it did not have DRM, but that my user code is in the MP3 so if I do share it, it is trackable to me.
Various web sites have DRM in their video files. You can play these for ever, but only as long as that PC has the license. If the PC dies and the site goes belly up, the media is not usable as I can't get the license again. Some require Windows Media player and will not work on OS X. If I know all that, then that's fine too. I can select to avoid these if I desire.
What I don't like is the rules being unclear, and changing. If recording TV to my VCR is fair use, then why can't I record from my HDTV to my Blueray burner as fair use?
Haha., sounds like you are just an a-hole who does not get the point.
I do this. I have multiple test VMs so I can test and snapshot my updates. I have a large batch file to uninstall previous versions of Java, and delete the left over .cabs in ALLUSERPROFILES. I do all this crap. I spend an absurd amount of time doing it. I Wireshark what the built in Adobe update is downloading so I can grab it and install it via Zen since it's not immediately available on the Adobe redistributable site.
What about software like Console One or Websphere which installs ancient versions of Java into non standard locations?
Other vendors release proper updates. Why can't Sun and Adobe?
I have an iPod touch. I paid $30 for the iPod headphones with the microphone so I could make Skype calls from the Touch.
I hope Skype's not next. If you already had Google Voice, it doesn't disappear like 1984 on the Kindle did, does it?
If you are registered with a reputable registrar...
Say your registration for yourdomain.com expires and you've forgot about it because you were out on vacation for the last month and didn't see the e-mails.
With Network Solutions, they will keep that expired domain around for me to renew, even after it expires. So I don't loose it to a cyber squatter.
I've seen this with domains I've deliberately let go.
If they aren't allowed to do this, then I'm screwed if I forget to renew one of my domains.
I'm with the registrars on this one. It is a nice security feature.
When I replaced my PC this last time I decided to migrate my Internet Explorer and Firefox profiles so I'd not loose my bookmarks.
I was amazed how simple it was to do. In IE I did file/export and exported Favorites and cookies. Then on the new computer all my stored passwords worked. That is very scary. Any time I leave my PC unlocked and walk away, any stored password could be stolen. Firefox was even easier. Copy the profile directory from one C: to another.
That also means any administrator on my network can also steal this information. The thing to learn from this is to never store passwords or account info in Firefox/Internet Explorer.
And then when a patch for Adobe does come out, as an Admin of 600 PC's I have to use Adobe's somewhat broken Update mechanism inside reader to update it. They don't release an MSP patch for SUS/Zenworks deployment until weeks later.
They do need to fix this. Also, how often do you install a piece of software only to end up with Adobe reader 3.01, or 5 installed with it even though you have 9.1.2? That is an issue to.
Sun Java needs to fix their broken updater too. Check out http://secunia.com/advisories/35853/ then realize that I'm the Java updater's not detecting that there is a Java 6 build 14 released. I have to manually go out and download build 14. And when I do that, I'm still left with vulnerable versions of Java 3, 4, 5, and 6 builds 0-4 installed. WTF?
You know, I never understood why short e-mail message have to be "transmitted" to the recipient in SMTP. As such, my e-mail is available for e-discovery requests aimed at the recipient as it's on the recipients computer.
In cases I didn't want that, I stuck an image on my web server and did a link to the https://passwordserver.com/dir1234/abc.jpg with headers set to no-cache. This being a CGI program.
The result is pretty similar TFA, but much easier obtained. P2P isn't going to be opened up on our network for this feature. In my example, the e-mail is also short lived. It's encrypted with no effort on the user, other than "load remote images" if they have that disabled. It's password protected, though not as nicely as this new Crypto key handling method. Once the server sends the JPG one time, it will only send it again to that same IP address with the cookie initially set on the first display as per the CGI script. The server then queues the JPG email up to delete after x many minutes via a database entry and scheduled job.
Now I can delete the message of the e-mail at will. If they don't read it after so many days, I can nuke it. They can print or copy/paste it, but it's not in their Exchange server nor is it on mine.
My attempt was quick and dirty. Places like MessageLabs and POSTINI already offer this service in a much nicer and easier format. We already see health care and banking use these services.
First, why would FTP not be the right size? The transaction was terminated prior to the upload completing. I see that too often.
Robocopy really is a great too do deal with this problem. I have around 20 remote links with unreliable connections, and robocopy is a god send.
Use a command line. 7Z the file to be transmitted into a .7Z archive. Robocopy "\\source\server\path" "\\dest\server\path" filename.7z /ipg:9 /z /r:30 /w:30 /ipg:9 says to wait 9ms between packets. I use 9000 at slow link sites to not overwhelm them. /z is restartable mode, the file is dated 1980 until the xfer is complete which makes it easy to ignore these on the receiving server. /r:30 is 30 retries before giving up. Default is 1 million. /w:30 is 30 second between retry.
The reason to use 7z is to make sure you have a complete file. If the file is partially uploaded to the server, you can realize this by the fact that the .7z archive will not extract.
I went through WIPO arbitration. Someone wanted to take one of my domains away from me. I replied with a proper reply and ended up keeping my domain.
The arbitration goes to an individual or multiple individuals. It really depends on the individual you get. Looking through prior arbitration, I saw how mine could have gone either way.
Obviously they got this idea from HP and the like locking out 3rd party printer ink.
So who is going to be next to do this? APC? I can just see UPS manufactures requiring their specific battery. No more putting a 9 AMP hours battery in a UPS made for 7A.
Then auto manufactures? GMC requiring only GMC replacement batteries, windshield wiper blades, oil filters, and such.
I hope not.