Re: NOW I feel old...

It could have been a fail-over. Various payment systems around here fail-over to dial-up for cashless transactions in the even the Internet goes down... though we all know nothing on the Internet EVER goes down. Also, ISTR there are some compliance differences when using dial-up versus Internet. As well, some insurance carriers will only accept transmittals via direct dial-up. Amazingly enough, in 2013 with e-mail and Internet availability abound, so many business will only send or receive documents via fax.

Paris, paradoxically ON the Internet...

Re: So. Jobs was wrong.

I don't necessarily care, though I have seen demonstrations which lead me to believe it does exist. That and the fact the infallible Jobs admitted to it and apologized. But then I also know people who absolutely refuse to admit it ever existed simply because THEY didn't experience it.

Paris, not certain she exists since I've never experienced her.

Re: That's USA, right?

"Not necessarily, just make the biofuel tax-free, provided it meets certain standards"

That will only go so far. The natural instinct of government is to tax, so if you starve that one on consumable, biofuel in this case, then the tax will need to be made up elsewhere. Arguably for legitimate purposes in the case of transportation as a portion of fuel taxes are used to fund roadways and related "infrastructure." This manifests as some localities (and states like Washington, IIRC) wanting to impose a mileage fee on hybrid and electric vehicles as, obviously, owners of such offending vehicles are not paying their fair share to use the roads.

Paris, tons of tax-free mileage.

Re: SysAdmins versus Ops versus Sec

This could be an explanation of what happened with CenturyLink a week or so ago. It let "embarqservices.net" domain expired which had an impact on its entire IP infrastructure, at least from a down-stream perspective.

I first noticed it when reverse resolution verification prevented me from connecting to one of my edge SSH machines. I hobbled in through the VPN to see what was going on. At first I though it might be a delegation problem with my provider, which happened before when CenturyLink gave its IP space to another customer, but a quick phone call to my old boss (now the administrator of my provider) determined otherwise. We found that it was affecting a large swath of CenturyLink, and syslogs being sent to me from CTL clients were showing IPs rather than names.

It took about 20 minutes to work our way back up to DNS: the servers listed for the CTL network are ns(x).embarqservices.net which had expired, as we figured out via a cached SOA pointing the domain to "pendingdeletion.com" or something of that nature. Funny enough, this saga started around 9:30pm when I noticed the problem, called my provider around 9:45pm, and we figured out the problem around 10:10pm, by then someone at CTL had renewed the domain around 10:00pm-ish. A few rndc flush commands and Windows cache flushes and it was like nothing had ever happened.

There is a contact listed for the domain. And I assume someone got the renewal emails. And my guess is when the domain expired someone was trying to get hold of the pockets without success and whipped out their own credit card to pay the renewal for a year. $35 is a small price to pay to keep your job, I suppose.

Paris, small price to pay...

Re: Sys admins should not be responsible for managing security, they implement it.

Rubbish. In a large enterprise such as Microsoft, Information Systems and Information Security should occur parallel but apart from each other. This ensures that systems management decisions and systems security decisions happen apart while the actions can take place in chorus. Otherwise, security often takes a back seat to the day-to-day operations.

Even for the small guys like us, operations and security often get mis-prioritized between the two and the occasional SSL certificate expiration might go forgotten until the phone calls start coming in about not being able to access email or other services because we were working on a MySQL to Maria migration or new virtual server spin-up. Stayed too late working on it and, whoops!, the 6am phone calls hit us.

Keep operations and security separate in the management process and there is a much better chance of over-all success as each management focus pushes and coordinates priorities for the action team.

Paris, gotta keep 'em separated.

RC hobbyists

Be that as it may, the law will still make the innocent act of attaching a $200 camera kit to your probably-already-more-expensive-than-that RC chopper or plane a crime. Instead of assuming such machines will be used by individuals for nefarious purposes, as seems to be the way of modern legislation, existing privacy laws should be applied to individuals who misuses their toys.

Law enforcement is REACTIVE. PROACTIVE law enforcement gets into the realm of attempting to determine one's intentions before he or she formulates the intention or executes the action, resulting in everyone being a criminal before given the chance to not be one. This makes the abhorrent assumption that people have no other attachment to doing right, or not doing wrong depending upon the theory applied, which is an affront to personal liberties.

Paris, long after the original criminal, Fiona.

Re: There's porn? On the interwebs?

Yup. More and more people are turning to "The Cloud" to store their porn rather than waste valuable hard drive space.

Paris, wasting valuable space...

Re: Reality Check

I only had two issues with the rebooted "Star Trek," the first being its potential to become "Friends in Space." The second deals with Spock's "coming of age." In the original "Star Trek" universe, Spock finds himself after his contact with V-Ger, a very deep and soul-searching interaction with a sentient machine which desired to become human to counterbalance all its logic and immense knowledge. To me, it exemplifies the notion that knowledge and information doesn't produce answers, that a non-logical approach -- leaps of faith, if you will -- are required to adequately describe our own purpose.

The reboot, while entertaining and in some spots emotionally exciting, is not as deep.

Paris, deep...

Excellent list. I have to agree on "The Sarah Connor Chronicles"; I think it could have developed into something much better, especially considering how it looked like it was set to work its way toward "Salvation," which I think was also a bit under-rated.

As for the new "V," I found it interesting enough to keep watching. I think one of its biggest failings was ABC yanking it from Hulu.

Paris, I don't have anything useful for her.

Re: More than a B5 Ripoff

Hear hear.

Re: Babylon 5 dissappointment

You missed out. The Earth Civil War had me absolutely captivated, and pretty much made the series for me. The Shadow Wars seemed a little played out, but still somewhat enjoyable. Then with the Centauri return to power via an unholy alliance with the Shadows and Molari's seeming self-sacrifice. The first season was horrid, IMO, and things picked up with the second season. Even under what's been mentioned as a constant threat of cancellation, it was pretty bold and I would have loved to have seen it go further than it did before the decommissioning, and I believe JMS had it in him to go another decade. I have such a deep place in my heart for B5 that I was genuinely saddened to hear of the passing of Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin) and Jeff Conaway (Zack Allan, also Kenickie in "Grease,) both incredible actors playing compelling characters. Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar was another which caught my imagination. And I'll round it off with my never-ending crush on Patricia Tallman (she's STILL a looker at 55!)

Anyway, DS9 came out around the time I was distracted by a number of other offerings in my life, so it found little room in my television repertoire. Having been able to view a number of episodes later in life, I find two things: first that I'm not certain I would have been able to appreciate DS9's real-Earth grittiness at the time, and at the same time I certainly missed out on the ground-floor of an excellent show. I think the little bit I caught of it at the time made me feel as though it was the inferior competitor to B5, but looking back I have to say they both clearly stand apart and strong on their own merits.

Re: Any Heinlein fans about?

I may have posted a little later than you, having not seen yours. Though I couldn't recall that his name was "Mike" but rather "Mycroft," but the MYCROFTXXX was the secret number to reach "him" by phone.

I never did read "The Cat..." though I have meant to do so for years.

Re: re 2001

So, um, HAL was a Postal mail sorter?

Re: What about written SF?

Hear, hear. I would have voted for the computer from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein. Old girlfriend got me reading him, and it's a good read. IIRC, the computer called itself "MYCROFT." It started out as a bureaucratic tool which suffered "feature creep" of getting tied into one system after another until one day it woke up and was terribly bored so it started playing practical jokes, including mucking about with government payroll. Not evil, but it did ultimately lead the lunar colony revolution against Earth.

Paris, loonier colony.

Re: Game port

That would be it, then. DMX definitely sounds familiar. I am going to double-check this over the weekend when I have access to the equipment, but I recall seeing MIDI triggers available in the control program, and the controller board does seem to communicate via MIDI over USB (per something which popped up at one point or another.)

None of this withstanding, the system likes to lock up and crash. Frequently. Its poor behavior has earned it its own machine to hopefully quell its fiendish and cruel appetite for watching liquored-up patrons stop dancing and stare around in dismay when the lighting system suddenly conks out. What really sucks is it also controls the lighting for the stage shows.

Paris, another staged show.

Re: Game port

Amiga, Golden Hawk MIDI, Bars and Pipes, FTW. Before that my Commodore 64, the Dr. MIDI (I think) interface and Stereo SID Editor (which could output to MIDI, IIRC.) I feel the need to set up the latter again just as a show of my geeky-manhood.

I set up the digital TV and IT infrastructure at a local bar this summer and the lighting guys use a USB lighting control panel which is actually MIDI, and the lights are controlled by MIDI. Neat stuff.

Paris, MIDI-compatible.

Re: It pays to be nice

I'm glad that worked for your Mac. I tried that with my Dell Latitude D430 with a 1.8" hard drive. I was on my third hard drive under warranty, the previous started making loud clacking noises and the system would hang, occasionally bringing about a BSOD. I tried being cheery with Dell up to the point where, even though the drive's own SMART was telling us it was dying, they refused to replace the drive as the increase in the number of bad blocks on the drive didn't trigger Dell's diagnostics (and as I later found from the Office of Michael Dell, Dell does not work pro-actively.) At that point I lashed out and got my replacement hard drive.

Up until last December. In September I decided I would go through the regular process of troubleshoot, diagnose, send out a tech to replace a part, repeat. After about a dozen tech visits only to encounter the same problems, tech support offered me a system replacement. Unfortunately, the system they sent me came with no expansion capabilities while I have a stack of PC cards which I use regularly (I know, outdated, but the system even lacked a PC Express slot.) I had to send it back and spoke with the tech who "owned" my case about a more viable replacement, which we found but I had moved into a period when I could not afford to spend more time and an occasionally crashing computer was better than no computer for a week.

In early December I phoned in again and asked if we could continue the process. I was handed off to the Office of Michael Dell where a very nice lady told me Dell would not be replacing my laptop, I would be required to send it in to the depot to check, and I could be without it for up to two weeks. My warranty was due to expire on January 3 or 4, and I was desperate to just get a good hard drive, so I complied. I received it back within a week to discover Dell's depot had it in-hand just long enough to reload Vista (and not all the drivers, mind you,) box it and get it out with the day's FedEx, along with a note stating that no problems had been found. Of course, the hard drive SMART still showed increasing failures.

At this point I realized I wasn't getting anywhere and would just have to wait for the drive to fail, so I went online and purchased an extension to my warranty. To which I later that day received a call from Michael Dell's office telling me my system was no longer qualified for a warranty, my order was cancelled, and I would be receiving a refund.

Fine. So I took my refunded money and went on eBay, found the same model hard drive but faster (a "C" version at 5400 versus the "B" version at 4200) and LO! A better hard drive which hasn't given any signs of failure in almost a year, much better than the previous provided by Dell.

My next laptop won't be from Dell. As well, after relating this experience to several customers, I've been able to move them away from Dell and in some cases have made laptop sales myself, pretty well making up for the aggravation I experienced.

Paris, does not qualify for a warranty.

Re: I was all for this protest..

So you'd be happy just letting this slip because the loudest voice against it is someone who's religious? By this logic, even if you believe abortion is murder you would not speak out against it because the loudest voices against abortion are religious.

Pretty damned sad, IMNSHO. The religious and privacy angles notwithstanding, as I feel these get addressed fairly well, let's look at some numbers. The school system is spending $500,000 ($.5 million) to wrangle students in order to win a $2 million grant, a net gain of $1.5 million. I posit that the $.5 million could be spent on mechanisms which work to entice students to desire participation in an educational environment like, oh, better teachers, better trained teachers (good and dedicated teachers, you know I'm not talking about you,) better curriculum, better extra-curricular activities which can only be enjoyed if the student is fully attendant, and so on. $500,000 goes a long way to encourage and entice rather than coerce, bully, and buy-off.

Net gains in this scenario are a better school, happier and more capable students, students who retain dignity and privacy and develop a sense of doing right for its own merit rather than because they have to, less stressed teachers and administrators, more productive individuals going out into the job market, and $1.5 million. Hell, for that matter, the school might not need $1.5 million in pocket-padding if the $500,000 was put to better use.

Paris, could be put to better use.

Re: Just a thought

"Because old scans aren't medically important and thus it would be a waste of public money?

That would depend. In my case, I'm being denied an insurance claim on a severe accident which has left me with injuries to my back because I have no proof that the injuries shown in a recent MRI weren't present long before as I never had an MRI on that region. An MRI from just five years ago would settle the argument. Fortunately I have the recourse to sue the insurance provider and am doing so.

Paris, obsolete eight years ago, as well.

Re: How do I distinguish bugs from features?

"Microsoft are far more patronising and arrogant than I believed."

The satirical article notwithstanding, I'm of this opinion. For me it started around the time Office 2007 was being released and in a TS2 seminar a Microsoft rep says to us, in similar terms, "our focus groups have allowed us to determine that the Ribbon interface is more ergonomic." The entire audience queried, ergonomic for whom?

I have a number of ideas swirling around in my head right now, about keyboard obsolescence, Kinect for Office 2013, multiple screen switching being the same as multiple maximized windows (on 2400x1500 screen you maximize your browser?!) and so on. But I'm just don't have the wherewithal to bother right now. Have to go pretend to do some work today.

Paris, slightly less ergonomic.

Re: Think of the Children!

Sadly, if ever "proven" (being that plenty of research fails to prove) or simply accepted as reality, this could very well become another child welfare issue. We're already seeing how parents are inadequate at raising their children: not providing the proper nutrition, not providing a proper learning environment, not providing proper supervision and locked entries around pools so other unsupervised children don't break into your property and drown, not providing proper warnings to children to not question the missives of so-called authority and eat competitive foods like (gasp) sour cream and onion crisps at lunch.

Soon we'll add not providing a electromagnetic-free environment for the child.

Paris, mutated by bag phones while in the womb.

Re: Ironic Punishment - use MIRRORS

And here you have it. Asshats who point lasers at aircraft because it's cool and/or fun wind up getting the government involved and screw everyone else who have non-menacing uses for lasers and laser pointers.

Paris, menacing asshat.

No method of compliance checking

Unlike a phone call which clearly informs you who is honoring the "Do Not Call" list, there is (currently) no way for the end user to determine whether or not a web site is honoring your "Do Not Track" request. Once such a mechanism is in place, or some individual or investigative journalist sets out to make these determinations, said violators can be publicly shamed.

But the real question is, will they (the violators) care? The answer is, in all likelihood, a resounding NO. At least unless someone or a group of someones can prove damages and therefore sue the violators. I believe this is due to a large number of consumers having given in to the warped sense of commerce which tells them that the lowest price or best discount, irrespective of the reputation of the entity providing the offer, is the one to choose. In corollary, a smaller number of people -- which do exist, just in comparatively smaller numbers -- genuinely vote with their dollars and will pay a higher amount if it means not dealing with shady characters.

Paris, violating the violator.

Re: The article did not specify the age of his 'girlfriend'!

Son of a ... you friggen got me. I was gonna tell you that you can re-vote a post, but then I saw what you did there.

Re: Not that dangerous

I've been bitten twice by the damned things visiting in the general area you mention. Both times the bite produced the ugliest of weeping sores at the bite site -- my calf in both instances, which makes sense given how I sleep when I do sleep. The timeline for me was a large pustule in the middle of red ring of rock-hard swollen skin, followed soon by little pimple-like nodules growing randomly on and around the swollen ring. The central pustule was weeping within hours of discovery and during the day it and its smaller companions had ruptured and the following two days were perpetual changing out Gauss bandaging, wiping up weeping liquid, removing dried up fluid (really not dry, more like a tree-sap,) and general cleaning to prevent infection.

Within a couple of weeks the weeping had all but stopped and was being held back by a scab just barely capable of holding in fluids, and barely capable of staying in place. Meanwhile the swelling had spread out more but the protrusion from the leg was reduced. About a month after the bite the site had no more swelling, no more oozing, and was just a thick scab about 1/3 inch across. This one remained more resilient to transient abrasions and annoyances, and stayed in place for about another two weeks.

In short, spider bites suck even if they don't kill you. Oh, and did I mention that for an entire month the damned thing itched like nothing I had ever felt before? (Except for the second bite, since I had obviously experienced similar itching the first time.) Oh, God, how it itched, but I experienced no illness associated with the bites. And for the curious who are still here, I did seek advice from my physician who said that so long as I wasn't getting sick, the only thing to do would be an optional course of antibiotics to help prevent infection. The first time I opted for a short course to be on the cautious side, the second I flew solo with no adverse results.

Paris, oh, God, the itching!

Re: I hate to piss on anyones parade but...

"Presumably that's why they are no longer at NASA.

Every single scientific representative to the UN from every country in the world agrees that global warming is at least party a man made problem....There simply is no credible doubt anymore."

Your fallacy is lending so much credence and credibility to so-called authorities. At one time authorities told us the world was flat, the Earth revolved around the Sun, you could buy your relative's way out of Hell, and my grandmother swears killing spiders in the house brings about bad things.

To your quick dismissal of these 49 ex-NASA scientists, I find it equally reasonable to presume this small group of scientists left or were pushed out of NASA merely because of their stance against the ruling "consensus" of AGW. Considering various schemes to commit world governments to the behest of a single ruling body and the prolific ideology of wealth redistribution, I am not at all surprised that scientific representatives to the UN are preaching the End of the World and that we must all repent by way of de-industrialization (or something damn near it.)

While I fail to accept the size of a group is by any means a measure of its credibility, given that the natural state of Man is tyranny and not freedom, I tend to err on the side of the lesser voices who take the more difficult stance to question authority than those who take the easy route to simply accept the "consensus."

Paris, man-caused warming.

Re: Stupid

"Taught by Professor Basil Fawlty"

I refuse to sit idly by while you ruthlessly attack the great Basil Fawlty. In my not-so-humble opinion his greatest mistakes were caused by not listening to his lovely wife.

Take it back this instant, sir.

Re: Stupid

I will reiterate my prior-posted beliefs as: if HP *does* jump back into the smart-phone market, build it on WebOS and manufacture with QUALITY rather than that Fisher-Price bullshit it continued from Palm (with apologies to Fisher-Price) and I believe it will do well.

Otherwise HP will be producing YAWP or YAAP (Yet Another Windows/Android Phone) and be completely unable to distinguish itself from the rest of the field. Well, other than quality. Though not knowing what the Pre app catalog was like in the hey-day of WebOS, the thought strikes me that if HP can graft a bunch of WebOS-like features on top of Android it may have something there, particularly with the apps available for Android.

Yeah, I know, I'm starting to sound like a WebOS fan-boy. I went from a Sony-Ericsson whore (really loved Java Platform with all its short-comings, mainly SE-related) and need a new home.

Paris, like me, whore to homeless.

Re: New Headline...

Tongue-in-cheek, I realize. I am compelled none-the-less to mention that I have seen this technology in action. At an NSA conference within the past year I, as well as any other participants interested, was shown a sample scenario which went something like this:

"Locate a man in his 20s with this tattoo driving a red car. Follow this car noting all of its stops. If it meets a white truck, disengage the car and follow the truck. Make note of the direction the red car takes."

Best of all, this is near the exact plain language fed to the drone's control system, along with pictures when appropriate. The drone performing this action is capable of circling and monitoring a large metropolitan area to accomplish its task. As well, the video it uses is extremely hi-def. While the actual fidelity is classified, I was informed it is well above what is capable with home entertainment equipment.

The video was incredibly impressive and frightening at the same time. This is immense power, and with such power comes responsibility.

Paris, does she watch the watchers?

Re: Again...

Taken for face value, remember that it wasn't Anonymous who took credit for the outage, but rather an individual who identifies with Anonymous. More of the "lone wolf," if you will.

With everything going on, there could be a number of lies and trolling happening right now so none of us can really speak with authority on what transpired.

Paris, speaking without authority.

2/10, you got me to respond. You know, there is such a thing as The Weather Channel. And every local market I visit has some kind of local antennae-based weather channel. To fall, for a moment, into tongue-in-cheek stereotyping: Fox had to gush over the token Republican female subservient to her husband trying to gain power, and the rest had to spend time bashing and mocking her and her husband and his party for the blatant sexism and racism on display.

There's a reason people hate politics.

Paris, there's a reason for her, too.

Re: So what's he expect MR to be doing?

Let's not forget that Mr. President was still campaigning and fund raising during this event. Lest we also forget the Evil Republican governors of the affected states (Jindal, Bryant, and Bentley) returned -- or never left -- home, giving the convention a miss to be on-hand for the impending disaster.

For perspective, let's remember, too, that while Mr. President may have worked behind-the-scenes during the Tennessee floods, it took several days to make a public statement other than a White House web site posting. Perhaps he'll tweet a supportive shout-out to LA and Miss. while he's having breakfast with Joe or during his campaign meetings in the afternoon.

Paris, she points fingers, too.

And the whole dog thing; my family traveled quite a lot across the mid-west when I was young. Am I alone in recalling seeing people travel with dog carriers on their cars way back when? I didn't see it often, but frequently enough at that young age to take the practice as acceptable. Not to mention the jealousy... riding on the roof of the car at 55 MPH must have been much more fun than the bed of a truck!

Re: ATZ

Hayes clones, in particular. Real Hayes modems waited for a break in the data stream of about 1.5 seconds (the guard time, IIRC) before accepting ath or ath0 to hang up the modem. If no break in the data occurred, the ath was ignored and treated as part of the stream.

I recall running into that problem with a Hayes-"compatible" modem when uploading a document which detailed AT commands. It turned out that having any data between the +++ and the ath0 command did not matter, the modem still interpreted it as a switch to command mode and *click*. (I don't remember if this was my Emerson 2400 or Wang 9600.) Switched over to a real Hayes and the problem went away.

Ah, the good old days.

Paris, because she misses the BBS days and QWK readers, too.

Re: Breaking news: Stores teach employees to sell stuff

Yeah, to some degree. Back in the old days when I sold shoes, tacos, and computers, I was trained, taught, and learned to know my products and understand the customer. That never included not admitting that a product could be flawed nor power tactics which put me in charge of a sale. Take ownership, yes; give guidance and advice, yes; but never to seize a position of power over the customer. Nothing pisses of a customer more than realizing at some point they were duped or manipulated.

Provided they ever realize it at all. In my current life I have dealt with customers who believe the salesman of MegaMiniSoftwareCorporation, Inc. is actually their friend and confidant and said salesman would never tell them an untruth or statement lacking in fact.

Paris, taking power over us all.