RE: [H] Had to happen sooner or later. Man do I feel old!
Wow, about time. I used Eudora 3.0.5 and loved it to death when I used POP exclusively. When they finally learned multi-threading before any other vendor, it was fantastic for downloading HWG mail. Not sure if that came about in 3 or 4. All I know I remember was Eudora 4 was a love-hate relationship. It had pitiful IMAP performance (and I started to like IMAP a lot) and multithreading (which was really handy back). I loved the look and feel of Eudora, but it lost everything in stability as it coupled deeply with HTML rendering. (This should always be an option to be turned explicitly off. Oddly enough, I think Microsoft Outlook is one of the few ones that lets you do this easily). Eudora 4 and later never had the same level of reliability for me. I keep my email app running all day long and I was on a few mailing lists. For whatever reason, Eudora 4.X could not survive the type of workflow I was doing with my email. As for portability, Outlook and Thunderbird lets you move email from one machine to another with either a PST or copying a subdirectory in your Documents and Settings/username over to any other machine. It does not appear that much harder than the nice "copy the entire D:\Eudora" directory bit if you ask me. IMAP is the real protocol for portability, yet Eudora STILL had pitiful performance with it the last I checked. Pegasus and Thunderbird both outperformed it and Thunderbird is probably the most reliable IMAP reader I have yet to encounter. So, I find the entire "eudora is more portable" arguable not quite true. Without reliable IMAP it is less portable, and exporting/importing PSTs or copying a local setting subdir of Thunderbird seems to be of the same level of ease as copying a hardcoded directory from one machine to another. Without a high performance IMAP like Outlook, it's far less fun to use in a truly portable environment. Good riddance if you ask me. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stan Zaske > Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 2:24 AM > To: Hardware List > Subject: [H] Had to happen sooner or later. Man do I feel old! > > Mozilla to free up Eudora > > http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3637356 >
RE: [H] Had to happen sooner or later. Man do I feel old!
> -Original Message- > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Wayne Johnson > Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 12:14 PM > At 09:47 AM 10/17/2006, Carroll Kong typed: > >Without a high performance IMAP like Outlook, it's far less > fun to use > >in a truly portable environment. > > If that's the only criteria then ok. I'm glad that you're > happy but missing features like selective quoting & removing > all the quote marks with a click of the toolbar just to name > a few shall prevent me from using Outlook besides what's up > with top posting? The only thing that's good for is blind > people that use screen readers. I'm on several email lists & > the selective quoting is such a gem that most email apps have > it but not the all mighty Microsoft Outlook. > > I'm an Agent 4.1 user & the fact that it will call MAPI makes > Eudora operate as if it's Agent's built in email app is a > nice touch that Agent programmers didn't have to add. I just > don't need another UseNet app even if it does come with > Penelope integrated that I'll probably stick with Eudora 7.1. > > >--+-- > Wayne D. Johnson I am reasonably pleased. Happy? No. Outlook is still missing things that I prefer to do in Thunderbird. The save-all attachment feature, the intelligent fill-in for from-to email-address based on which IMAP directory you are browsing on. To prevent sending from the wrong address, I had to hack in a special DO_NOT_REPLAY mailbox to warn me if I forgot to set it away from the defaults. :) Thunderbird falls in other areas too though compared to Outlook. I just can't win. No such thing as perfect software. Thankfully I can just open both of them up and access the same set of mailboxes consistently throughout. That's why I value IMAP so greatly since I get the same mail across my laptops and multiple desktops. I can even easily demo different email softwares without going through an arduous trial run and migrating email back and forth before deciding if I really like this software. I can even reach that same mailstore via webmail in a pinch. It remembers my sent mail as well and maintains state on what I read and did not read. POP3 can't really help me in that aspect. Oh I absolutely hate top-posting. It's a real shame they left that in as a default. I tried defaulting to bottom-posting (the way I prefer) but it confused my clients who always did top-posting. In fact, one of them was... so how-can-we-say "challenged", that he thought I forgot to write a response to his email when I had bottom posted the answer. On the other hand, I do see top-posting 'somewhat' useful in the consulting field. It's handy to read back an entire thread since 99% of the participants do not read the emails and when the puck finally gets to them, they have some method of catching up. :) Although the real problem is using EMAIL as a threading type of system. Newsgroups seemed to be FAR superior in that aspect, but try convincing the same people who thought I did not respond to his email because I bottom-posted on how to use a newsgroup reader. - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Another FF vulnerability?
Thane Sherrington wrote: http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2005/03/firefox-spyware-infects-ie.html T --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Anti-Virus] A few members on this list, (me included) believed that new attack vectors would come about from Mozilla's poor, monolithic, inflexible security model and design. Looks like it is happening sooner than I thought. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Another FF vulnerability?
on. A common attack was to send people some virus attachment in a common download folder (for Eudora, some Attach folder) so they could hide a reference to it in their next email to have you run it as a privileged user. Running as a normal user for all your normal activities is a good way to go about it. But is it 100% secure? Nope. Go to one bad trusted site, or run one bad trojan as an administrator (you got fooled into installing it), and it can do some keyboard captures to get your passwords. Awareness is a good thing. Just be more careful when surfing and realize the potential risks involved. Hopefully a nice, more secure solution is on the horizon. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Another FF vulnerability?
CW wrote: I think, though, we are comparing apples to oranges in terms of general usage. While you make reference to "hardened" IE configurations, I can argue you could go to the same extent with any browser.. or moreso, but it's largely irrelevent as the goal is to make the browser "out of the box" better then it's competitor, as that's the way 99% of people will leave it. This is the great misnomer.. the assumption that IE is better because you can trick it out to make it better.. something I will not deny. But it's somewhat like me saying a Honda Civic is the greatest drag car ever because tricked out, it stomps. That doesn't mean that the floor model is the same thing. That's the whole point. Firefox, out of the box, with default configurations, I would trust more then IE, out of the box, default configurations. But if you spend your time hunting for Pr0n or WaReZ, then you pretty much get what you 've got coming ;) CW The problem is, you CANNOT tweak Firefox for security. It has NO ability to do so except rewriting the code yourself. That is the big problem a lot of people do not see. I agree that Firefox out of the box is more "secure" than IE. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Another FF vulnerability?
warpmedia wrote: All browsers need to add a security zone model so one can browse in dumb mode until a feature is needed, & then make damn sure it works as advertised (M$ has come a long way with the XP SP2 version). Sun Java certainly has problems. Agreed. It is unfortunate though that MS has a "local zone" which some software and help files rely on greatly. I wish they would separate it out since it allows for the nasty "read this local URL" attack. That was one of the first attacks that allowed you to bypass the basic security zone controls! age. If avg joe can't figure out how to get more, then tough shit, they had to learn to drive a car too. I would prefer if the average joe knew how to securely browse, etc. However, my point was a matter of flexibiilty. Warpmedia and I both enjoyed flexible controls for those in the "know". We are unhappy that NO such flexibility existed in the alleged "more secure" browsers when we both knew better than to trust anyone. I do not trust Microsoft IE either. There is a reason why I run as a normal user. For example, the local zone bypass attack would have hit me if i blindly trusted that layer of security. Actually, the point is that IE has granular up front security toggles. FF, Opera, and Mozilla do NOT. They also did not include them by design, whereas IE had it in 5.5. Hopefully they will include them in the future but it is disappointing that the "other browser" vendors had the hubris to believe they could be "better" than Microsoft with regards to security. So if Mozzy learns & adds proper per site lockdowns, it's a step in the right direction. As of now they're doing an M$ head-in-the-sand about the real problem. Hence the bad venom coming out of my mouth about them. Agreed. Once Mozilla and Firefox put up granular controls for javascript+java and per session, then in my eyes they are a much closer match against IE. The only drawback being ActiveX, but that is pretty minor. Lastly it seems there's a lot of FF apologists around who would bash M$ in a second for such problems but are just as quick to go easy on their new buddy mozilla. The developers are not much better either. The attacks the Firefox developers did to us on their bugzilla lists (a few others who saw the lack of per session support) was astounding. It was such a negative attitude that it disgusted me. The worst part was, we found out that the reason was "it was too hard to fix given the way Mozilla and Firefox was designed". Then they played it off as "too bad, no one needs such features". By the way, one of the primary reasons Firefox is not used in kiosks... lack of session support. I wonder what their take is on granular security controls. I figured why bother taking nasty counter-criticism, so I did not bother posting a feature request for that one. I could already anticipate the "we do not support Active X so we are 100% secure" kind of responses. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] More defrag results
Thane Sherrington wrote: Two machines: First was at 23%/47% fragmentation - 17% increase in file read speed Second was at 22%/44% fragmentation - 37% increase in file read speed. The second machine was a 7200 8MB WD drive, and the first was an older Maxtor. Could faster drives benefit more from defragging? T Try this with SATA NCQ drives. I am curious on the results. By the way, how big was the file and how are the tests consistently performed? -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Does Creative Labs owe you money?
Brian Weeden wrote: I got a letter about this and just laughed and threw it in the trash. If they win the class action lawsuit you get money... in the form of rebates on Creative products. Hmmm let me think about this. You are suing the company because they either lied to you or made a crappy product, and yet you are willing to buy more of their products as a result. This isn't a case of the consumers getting justice for having been screwed by a company. This is a case of some lawyers finding a crack in the company's legal boilerplate and recruiting consumers to help them get rich off it because the more plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit the more they get paid in fees. And you know the lawyer's fees aren't getting paid in rebates. Hey now, I swore the article said the lawyers were paid with $470,000 worth of Creative Lab's finest equipment. :) -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] [OT] Any BGP4 experts on the list?
Don Couture wrote: I have a few questions about removing BGP4 from our setup. I did not set this up, at the time we had a network admin. I am looking to remove the BGP4 and replace it with hardware load balancing. The hardware part is all worked out I jus have a few questions on the removing of BGP4. Thanks, Don First off, why are you using BGP? It is usually used to backup the same block of IPs INBOUND (assuming you have more than one Internet connection). What exactly are you load balancing? Inbound connections to a server? I presume you wanted to load balance to even the usage of each incoming Internet connection. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] [OT] Any BGP4 experts on the list?
Don Couture wrote: That is how we use it. I am looking to remove it. -Original Message- From: G.Waleed Kavalec [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 9:53 AM To: The Hardware List Subject: Re: [H] [OT] Any BGP4 experts on the list? We use it only for failover between two providers, so I don't think our experience will be applicable. On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 09:51:09 -0500, Don Couture <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I have a few questions about removing BGP4 from our setup. I did not set this up, at the time we had a network admin. I am looking to remove the BGP4 and replace it with hardware load balancing. The hardware part is all worked out I jus have a few questions on the removing of BGP4. Thanks, Don You might want to talk to your ISP first. If the ISP relies on your routers to announce your networks via BGP, then pulling it out will make your network unreachable. Make sure you let the ISP know you will no longer be announcing your networks through BGP, so they can throw static routes to the proper T1s. Then you can remove the BGP configuration from the Cisco routers so it is clear that you are no longer using BGP. Note, that it is not completely necessary to remove the configuration. Once your ISP ignores your BGP requests, it does not matter what your routers tell them. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] [OT] Any BGP4 experts on the list?
Don Couture wrote: Thank you, This is the advise I was looking for. From my research I gathered our ISP was responsible for the routes. Am I correct in that only our "failover" ISP will have to be notified. The primary advertises the same routes no matter what. Thanks, Don You might want to talk to your ISP first. If the ISP relies on your routers to announce your networks via BGP, then pulling it out will make your network unreachable. Make sure you let the ISP know you will no longer be announcing your networks through BGP, so they can throw static routes to the proper T1s. Then you can remove the BGP configuration from the Cisco routers so it is clear that you are no longer using BGP. Note, that it is not completely necessary to remove the configuration. Once your ISP ignores your BGP requests, it does not matter what your routers tell them. Every upstream ISP that has a BGP peering session with a Cisco router should be notified. It depends on the ISP's infrastructure. The ISP is generally going to announce the super net of your network address simply because it has other customers in that range. However, whether or not the ISP knows how to reach your network block within their own network depends on how they set it up. Since a static route would override a BGP route, unless they have an elaborate system that will inject a route internally to point to the right T1s after the loss of BGP routes, your network might become unreachable. Given that, you might even want to notify your primary ISP as well as the "failover" ISP to let them know you plan on stopping the BGP session. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
G.Waleed Kavalec wrote: So why not just default it to active and save lives? They need to know where to route the information though to make the 911 call sensible. I am going to presume it is because a normal phone line's actual numbers denotes the locality, where as a "mobile" phone number is not routed necessarily by locality. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58598-2005Mar22.html The article hints at this, as I thought the same thing you did. However, all in all, everyone and their grandma has warned me that 911 is not a given for VoIP. It seems they warned people enough, and I think the last comment in the article about how "it can't work if they cannot provide emergency services" is somewhat ludicrious. Can't you just have a speed dial for your local fire department and police station? Back when we did not have the technology to easily store phone numbers, the need for 911 was very important. I think 911 might also give a faster response time, but at least have the local police station as a backup call with the "other cell phone" they probably got in their "family plan". -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 01:51 PM 23/03/2005, Gary VanderMolen wrote: OTOH, a default 'best guess' by Vonage is better than nothing. After all, we're talking about saving people's lives. Unless the 911 call goes to the wrong location and someone else doesn't get police/fire/ambulance support because they are being wasted looking for a call that has been misrouted. That would be Vonage's fault, so why would they hang themselves out like that? T --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Anti-Virus] Yup, and it would be another Vonage "lawsuit". I can see the headlines now MISDIRECTED 911 CALL, KILLS CHILD How about if people just started to become more responsible again? A cell phone is a privilege. Having your local police and firestation's phone number in your cell phone does not seem "too expensive" of a burden if you care enough. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
Christopher Fisk wrote: On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Chris Reeves wrote: Closer then you'd think. We've had people hack into (try) corporates here in KC, and they were tracked within 1/2 hour or less. If you've got the money to throw at it, and you have the right connections with the right tier1 providers, it can be done. 1/2 hr isn't fast enough for 911. Come on, the users are told they need to enter this information, they are told multiple times. How is this not the users fault? Christopher Fisk Are you out of you mind? It's the fault of Dungeons and Dragons. No wait, it's the fault of television. No, it is the fault of books. No, it is the fault of pornographic material. No, it is the fault of video games! But, the never ever ever ever ever the user's fault. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Converting AVI to DVD.
Wayne Johnson wrote: At 01:57 PM 3/23/2005, CW typed: I've taken tons of DiVX, AVI etc. converted straight to DVD with good fortune with NeroVisions3. No hitch at all; and beautiful for the HDTV captures :) If that doesn't work then you can try WinAVI which does a decent job. --+-- Wayne D. Johnson Ashland, OH, USA 44805 <http://www.wavijo.com> Regarding the conversions, check out the articles in www.videohelp.com -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
Christopher Fisk wrote: On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Wayne Johnson wrote: And you're going to tell 375lb Bubba this ? What are we suppose to do when Bubba thinks he's a genius ? The point is many people can't help that they are stupid & some lazy people can't either. We have many senior citizens that never graduated elementary school & you can't blame people for trying to save a buck especially if they don't have that much to spare. Maybe Vonage should screen their applicants better in which case that is still their fault. Remember Vonage doesn't have to take your money. OK, Fine, you win. it's vonages fault that this couple didn't setup thier 911 service. With that logic it's now Intel's fault when you forget to put your heatsink on your processor when you put it onto the motherboard. I mean yeah, they told you a heatsink was required, but they didn't provide the chip to you with the heatsink ALREADY ATTACHED. That hard drive i dropped and destroyed, that is seagates fault that they didn't have 4 inches of foam all the way around it for the trip from the box to my computer. Where does it end? Christopher Fisk You forgot that it is Comcast's fault when the broadband drops for a few hours and your Vontage phone fails. Every home user should be entitled to fault tolerant, BGP multi-homed fiber with at least 3 distinct runs at least 100 degrees out of phase leaving the home. Double that with guarantees of convergance time of less than 30 seconds and automatic QoS to always guarantee voice quality. Also, 24/7 network monitoring to ensure no one is DoSing your IP either must be provided with 99.999% uptime. Failure to provide this, means the system is a complete and total failure. Who will pay for all of this? Well, the tax payers of course! -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
CW wrote: Trust me, there are things called a mess. Let's say my sister gets 9-11. "So you have an emergency?" "Yes, we have emergency." "OK, where do you live?" "Ok, we're about a mile and a half off of HWY57" "Is there a street address?" "No, we don't have street addresses.. we are not far from Rural Water #1 Tower 2." "OK." By the time people 45 miles away figure out where this is, it would have been 100% easier to call your local sherrifs office who is in the same county you're in, then to call an emergency dispatcher in another county who would have to relay the information. :) CW I learned in elementary school to question what 911 really does. My teacher suggested to use the local police station numbers instead since it can be much faster and more reliable. Where were these people when I learned this in school? -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
Wayne Johnson wrote: At 02:49 PM 3/23/2005, Carroll Kong typed: My teacher suggested to use the local police station numbers instead since it can be much faster and more reliable. & you expect a 6yr old to remember in a panic situation any thing besides 911 ? IMHO that teacher ought to be fired unless they were teaching to use the local numbers unless it was an emergency. FWIW some very intelligent people lose their ability to reason when placed in an emergency situation. --+-- Wayne D. Johnson Ashland, OH, USA 44805 <http://www.wavijo.com> No, but how about *1? -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
Gary VanderMolen wrote: You forgot that it is Comcast's fault when the broadband drops for a few hours and your Vontage phone fails. Every home user should be entitled to fault tolerant, BGP multi-homed fiber with at least 3 distinct runs at least 100 degrees out of phase leaving the home. Double that with guarantees of convergance time of less than 30 seconds and automatic QoS to always guarantee voice quality. Also, 24/7 network monitoring to ensure no one is DoSing your IP either must be provided with 99.999% uptime. Failure to provide this, means the system is a complete and total failure. Who will pay for all of this? Well, the tax payers of course! Your tong-in-cheek scenario does remind me of why I will not consider giving up my $16 per month local landline service. It's cheap peace of mind, and works even during power failures. Gary VanderMolen Yeah, I am a big fan of land lines. I get horrific cell phone reception at the house, but I need it when I go out on site. Honestly, I look a cell phones as a convenience. What were people calling or doing before cell phones existed? I agree with you that if you want "drop dead" simple service, especially with 911 support, keep an existing phone line. Of course, that never stops an attacker from cutting your phone line which is typically visible outside. Even if 911 was in place, if Vontage relies on the Internet, it is inherently less reliable than the telephone company is. Some people believe the Internet is reliable, but the sad part is it is not 100% reliable and can almost never be. The government forced the telephone company's to be extremely reliable (forcing the 99.999% reliability). I am not sure if I necessarily want the government to do that again for ISPs. For starters it would be nearly impossible since no one owns the Internet, which is also the reason why it can never be very reliable. Also, if such a venture took place, it means higher fees from the ISPs or tax dollars. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
Francisco Tapia wrote: What about the GPS thing I mentioned? 1) locates the user in an instant, can route the 911 call approriately. On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:07:17 -0500, Wayne Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Wayne Johnson wrote: FWIW in every "other" situation I would agree. At 02:49 PM 3/23/2005, Christopher Fisk typed: It's Fords fault you didn't wear a seatbelt. To a point it is. Why do they put those annoying buzzers in that go off every couple of minutes if they didn't feel some responsibility ? Why are they required to have air bags if life isn't worth protecting by 3rd parties ? --+-- Wayne D. Johnson Ashland, OH, USA 44805 <http://www.wavijo.com> With all the privacy issues going on... that just seems like an unfortunate step closer to Big Brother. I would strongly prefer that to be an opt-in program, not a DEFAULT program. I also would not like to see such a mechanism built into place so jerks can compile some real-time database for stalkers, hackers, and thieves. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Texas Sues Vonage After Crime Victim Unable to Call 911
Francisco Tapia wrote: I think that Texas winning the lawsuit would invoke Vonage to do something about it, such as spending the money to incorporate a GPS unit within the phone that is auto-activated during 911 calls. Oh, if it only activates during 911, then sounds like a good idea. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Review - Mac Mini
Ben Ruset wrote: The drawback to that is speed. I have noticed that both Firefox and Thunderbird run at about 75% of the speed that they would normally run under Windows. This more than likely has to do with the OS dealing with one big "file" versus smaller files and the registry. I find it hard to believe it is all one file so to speak. I am sure underneath the hood it has files roaming around. In fact, I was fairly certain I read tech support issues where people did have to dig down to find some small files to do certain tweaks. That was not to down play the simplicity of the system. It probably does have a very well oiled package system. Firefox and Thunderbird running 75% slower than on Windows? No, I think you are wrong here. My guess is the problem is not Windows. The problem is Apple hardware is much slower than x86 hardware for cost. My rationale? I have worked with Mozilla and Thunderbird on much slower machines that would be comparable to the Macmini (Dual Pentium III 933). I have seen it on a K6-200. Firefox and Thunderbird are just very slow with regards to response time and load time. Sorry, but the Mozilla people just write some of the slowest applications I have ever seen. To some level, it is almost slower than java applets which is very disappointing given that Firefox and Thunderbird was supposed to be written in C++. The only reason few people notice this is because the defacto standard x86 PC of today is so fast that the speed gap is much smaller than on older machines. To give it some merit, I am not too surprised at your conclusions. I think I would enjoy the Mac environment well if I could afford it (software and hardware). It seems like a Unixy-background but with people who understand UI. That mix alone seems impossible to find nowadays. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H]Used monitors from this site?
j m g wrote: Anyone had any experience with these folks? My 21 inch Hitachi died and I'm looking for a budget replacement and there are some good prices here. Thanks for any info. After studying the lifespans of CRTs and LCDs, it appears that no matter what you buy used will never last as long as a new one. Just pure wear and tear of the tubes and other such parts. It is not to say that a used one is not a good buy. Just keep that in mind when if you buy one especially if you are keen on calibrated monitors. I remember my friend bought a $50 dollar 15" monitor. It lasted a good number of years. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H]Used monitors from this site?
W. D. wrote: At 12:32 3/29/2005, j m g, wrote: Anyone had any experience with these folks? My 21 inch Hitachi died and I'm looking for a budget replacement and there are some good prices here. Thanks for any info. -- -jmg I wouldn't trust them--their URL can't be pasted into emails. Just because their URL cannot be pasted into emails does not mean they are untrustworthy. It just means they are using poor web technology with regards to accessibility. http://www.resellerratings.com/seller5703.html They appear to be pretty good, but I would read through the reviews carefully to make sure they are a good fit for you. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] -OT- How the mighty have fallen
Hayes Elkins wrote: Be sure to click on the picture thumbnail for a then-and-now collage. http://www.thisislondon.com/showbiz/articles/17554519?source=Daily%20Mail In 10 years, expect McGwire's man titties to be twice as large from all that juice that transformed him into the 'roided mountain ape that he is today. Hey, no scary images on the mailing list! :) -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] SMART error question
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 09:21 AM 30/03/2005, Wayne Johnson wrote: IMHO you can take off JoeUser's tin hat & trust the app until you can prove otherwise but as always YMMV & if you decide to take this mission & get caught the Secretary shall disavow any knowledge. :-O Heh heh. The problem here is the app is contradicting itself. The drive says that an error has been logged, but that all tests have completed successfully. Recently, I've been erring on the side of caution with hard drives - if an error happened 400+ hours ago, and tests pass now, then I figure it might have been some external issue, but with the error occuring at the same time as the test, I'm a bit leery of telling a customer that they're fine. T --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Anti-Virus] The application just reads whatever the drive says or what it does (during the test). The nature of wonderful computers! I heard IDE is generally an ugly protocol, maybe it was some weird qwirk. It could be perhaps some qwirk on the cable, drive flaking a bit, maybe the motherboard, etc. I have seen disks that had SMART errors logged but functioned for many hours (months) later. I would keep it under watch. On the side, I am still using two disks that failed tests as part of my RAID0 a few months ago. They are still working fine (but I am unable to re-run the tests on them due to technical issues so I am not sure if they would still fail the tests). -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Plasma TV
Chris Reeves wrote: Then you're getting a crap signal. If you do an A-B, it's a night and day difference with most programming. One of the best programs I've ever seen broadcast in HD is HBO's "Carnivale" Beautiful. Do an A&B between it in HD & regular.. the difference is astounding. But, most people most quickly notice from sports.. where the difference between sports in HD & analog is ungodly. CW -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Veech Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 11:28 PM To: The Hardware List Subject: RE: [H] Plasma TV Is it me or is HD somewhat overrated? I haven't seen an HD signal yet that blows me away. Maybe because I set about 11 feet away, I don't notice a big difference? I was spoiled. The old startup I worked at was able to throw up a 14Mbps HDTV stream from a nature video and boy did it look sharp. Admittedly, at the time we had to show it on a monitor, but to this day that picture quality was orders of magnitude better than any HDTV setup I have seen so far. The thing is, HDTV is usually a dynamic signal from what I heard. It has to be in order to remain cost effective. Think of it like VBR vs CBR except some people can see the difference. It does appear to be better than normal TV but not as dramatic as what I saw. - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Comcast rant
Replies Inline Josh MacCraw wrote: Being that my connection was up, I decide to visit the online support chat people & ask some questions about the "unsupported" modem. The nice woman on the other end tells me that I need a docsis 2.0 modem or I won't be able to get the latest speed increase they're working on. Then retracts that & says docsis 1.1 compliant and I ask "is not the 3100 docsis 1.1?" BANG! down goes my connection, hard. I am not sure if you are on the same Regional Area Network (RAN) as me, but Comcast recently had some issues with one of their Cisco Gigabit Switch Routers (GSR) modules. However, this would be purely a layer 3 (network) issue. The problem appeared to be a malformed packet possibly generated from their new Universal Broadband Routers (UBR) they moved a lot of people over to the past few months. They supposedly fixed it, it is a wait and see scenario now. As a side note, parts of Delaware and New Jersey share the same RAN. If you actually lost your "online connection" light, then the problem I am describing is not related to yours. After they resolved that fiasco, their DNS servers were hosed as well. The Online Support Chat people were not able to help me with my "filtering" issue. Randomly one day, Comcast filtered my outbound requests to my colo server. The Online Support chat people are probably at a similar level as tier 1, with little to no visibility. End result is they are doing some kind of work "upgrading" the network but no one at the local office seemed to know this when I called yesterday plus the cable tech & tech support people were basically trying to get me to buy/rent a new modem w/o knowing their asshole from a black hole concerning what makes my 1.1 modem different from some RCA modem they want me to buy or rent to support "future upgrades". They will eventually upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0, which will provide even faster speeds. The system is fairly complex and they have a tiered out system where the lower end guys have no idea how to troubleshoot some issues nor have the access or tools to do so. I have my fair share of running into those guys and they really have no idea what is going on, nor would they understand it even if I explained it to them. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Comcast rant
Ben Ruset wrote: OK, Cox is good. Comcast, whom Warpmedia has, sucks. At least here in New Jersey were we both live. You are just having some bad luck. Trust me, I am in the same Regional Area Network (RAN) as you are. :) They upgraded the code on their routers, and hopefully it should be okay now. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Comcast rant
warpmedia wrote: Point being from a download perspective were getting 2 to 4 times that for <$100/mo and getting fractional T1 uploads. I can remember all the talk about the upcoming DSL service & how it was impossible to give these speeds for the crazy price of < $100/mo. Granted there is another component to make this work like true t1 or better and thats QOS guarantees with the right to run servers on the circuit but upload/download wise we're already there or beyond. Ben Ruset wrote: DSL is $29.99/month in Jersey. T1's are now anywhere from $600-$1000. The high cost of a T1 has a lot of other benefits, including SLA agreements which is not the same as QoS (none of them offer that directly). These kinds of outages would not be tolerated or they would incur some kind of refund of sorts. Another cost factor is dedicated phone line runs, but you can get that with DSL if you specifically asked for it. Once Fiber Optics Service (FIOS) is deployed en-mass, T1s might go the way of ISDN. Although FIOS is geared towards home users for now and FIOS has been in the works for years. Japan was easily getting ludicrous 10Mb/1Mb links for $40-50/month. Reason? Dense locations allow for easier wiring. New buildings had fiber runs into them and/or ethernet runs to the rooms. This easily lets them leverage more powerful technologies over fiber. You can still run servers if you pay a little more for higher end cable or DSL but then you get close to around $100/month. Admittedly, still a fantastic deal for the small business owner. Also, cable came out first with the best service. @Home provided 6Mbp/2Mbps for about $40-50/month many years ago. Things are easy when you are not paying for it. The investors of @Home (now defunct ATHM) were footing the bill for lax bandwidth controls. The DSL Service was limited greatly by technology and deployment issues. As technology got better, improvements were made to beef up the speeds. As for general core bandwidth costs, new technology advances in Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) gave even more bandwidth up in the core. The limiter in the technology has been reaching the customer base, and getting them wired up. When ADSL2 and DOCSIS 3.0 come out, the speeds will increase once again for everyone and we will all benefit. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Re: Comcast rant
warpmedia wrote: My modem is on UPS, cable surge suppressor & ethernet surge suppressor not too mention I HATE NON-MOTOROLA MODEMS for lack of features. So tell me again what I lose by not renting? Oh, right, when I need a DOCSIS 2.0 modem, I'll have to rent or look for a deal on the sob-5100. Actually DOCSIS can affect what kind of services you will be available to. Rumor has it DOCSIS 3.0 will allow bi-directional speeds. For now, as long as what you have works, might as well stick with it. As to your experience with CC, count yourself lucky among the minority. Personally I've lost over 15hrs+ on the phone in the past 4 years dealing with their problems & BS: I have had some issues with Comcast, but in general it has been pretty good for me. I am too far away from the CO to get anything faster then 1.5Mbps down. If I buy a dedicated DSL line from Covad, I can probably get 3.0Mbps, but it would cost me about 3X more than Personally, the rental has worked better for me. Newer modems when upgrades appear and a new modem if a surge breaks through. I redid my surge protection, if I had done it sooner I might have been okay. Otherwise, so far the rental/lease has given me the advantage since I ended up getting a few cable modems blown. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Re: Comcast rant
Chris Shaw wrote: On Sat, 9 Apr 2005 00:13:37 GMT warpmedia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: As to your experience with CC, count yourself lucky among the minority. I do consider myself lucky, but the rest of the people in my area that I have spoken to CC for, I have had similar experience. So I am considering it a good local CC. As far as problems, I have had alot of the same problems you have had with the others - AOHell, Verizon, Cox, etc. That's where I spent the most time on the phone. But I do use a land line so I don't have to be concerned with using up my minutes. Using cell phones to call support is like using a taxi to go to the grocery store. I do sympathize with you as far as dealing with tech support!! Well, their tier 1 tech support is outsourced. I usually just man handle whoever I get; it's actually occasionally fun. Like... "My cable connection is great, but I can't ping this IP anymore. I can if I use my DSL line or from another server, so I suspect there is a filter". "I am going to run some tests on your cable modem." "My cable connection is fine. I just cannot reach this IP." "I can reach it." "Exactly." "We will submit the request in to the special ops" "... Okay so how long will that be?" "Up to 24 hours." "... Okay." I switch back to DSL and within 24 hours they did fix the issue. I have a few other fun ones like "I keep losing physical connection randomly, can you send a technician to fix the line?" "Can you reboot your cable modem?" "The line is going, it's a physical issue." "Can you reboot the cable modem?" "Okay, the line was cut at one point in time and we patched it up ourselves. Since the weather is changing it is making the signal fluctuate" "If we send a technician and you are wrong, you have to pay for it" "Fine." "Hi I was listening in on the call. We will send a guy ASAP." "Thanks!" Of course, I will not lie. Early on, I got lots of even worse script events. "Hi, I lost physical connectivity." "So what operating system do you run?" "How is that relevant? I lost physical connectivity." "Windows or UNIX?" "Unix" "Sorry that is not supported, bye bye." I call back later and just man handle them by insisting it is not relevant. Hey what can you expect, the script can only parse so much. :) -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] html question
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 01:13 PM 13/04/2005, Winterlight wrote: My yard sign shows the web address in upper case, so I made MYPAGE.HTM uppercase. The neighbor tried to access it and of course they used lower case. I have tried saving the page in FrontPage in both lower case and upper case, but it won't permit me to do that. How do I resolve this? I'm assuming you're on a *nix server, as I believe Windows Server doesn't care about case. Try this - upload your files, then login with Leechftp or some other FTP program and rename them all upper case. But if you're going to do this, I'd make an INDEX.HTM file and an index.htm just to catch both spellings. If he is using Apache, he should use mod_rewrite to lowercase every request so he does not have to maintain every spelling combination. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] PC DVD Playback Issues
Greg Sevart wrote: Yeah, the video card could be holding you back. I would try using PowerDVD, and disable ALL enhancements. BTW, you'll never get DVD playback with ffdshow working smoothly on that slow of a processor. Greg The only thing holding him back is.. OBI-WAN! -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] This has got me stumped - XP crashing
Steve wrote: New install XP. Accessing shares on LAN, copying, pasting etc all OK. *But* if I try to run an executable from a share i.e. any install routine, the process pauses for about 1 sec then reboots. No crash dump, nothing. Back in the day this used to happen to NICs set to the wrong duplex, failed to negotiate and instead of gracefully dropping duplex to half it would crash, or simply the wrong NIC driver. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] NTLDR is missing error & will not boot from cdrom
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Brian, Thanks. A toasted mobo is my working theory. I am hesitant to transfer the disks because they are RAIDs. I don't want to screw up the data if it is recoverable. Further strangeness -- I can boot to a floppy and then access the CDROM. But I cannot get it to boot from the CD. The BIOS boot sequence seems to see the two RAIDs. The SATA RAID set up says the disks are okay. I have not been able to find a diagnostic for the IDE RAID. Not the way I was planning on spending my friday/weekend/week. Thanks for the input. Jim Maki [EMAIL PROTECTED] I would research to see how far you can go without potentially damaging your SATA RAID. After researching that, try this. You did need to isolate the problems. Disconnect all the SATA drives and try to boot up a CDROM. If you have a Knoppix CD even better. Booting from a CDROM should have nothing to do with NTLDR so it seems like your motherboard is not booting in the proper sequence. It might even be some silly BIOS bug. If that still fails, try temporarily disabling the SATA in the BIOS and try to boot off of the CDROM, but I am not sure how SATA RAIDs work so not sure if that will destroy your RAID at all. It would be silly for it to do so, but it would not surprise me. This is just to at least isolate the issue as a motherboard issue or corrupted data. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] NTLDR is missing error & will not boot from cdrom
G.Waleed Kavalec wrote: Some people are saying good things about raid 10 (sriping and mirroring). Any comment? On 4/30/05, Brian Weeden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Glad to hear you learned the lesson the easy way about stripe sets. With RAID 0 you have greater speed but if either of the drives fails you lose ALL your data. And you can only access it through a RAID controller of the same type. RAID 1 (mirroring) is what you want for data security, but it comes at a price since you need 2 drives to do the job of 1 and you lose some write speed, depending on your controller. -- Brian As all things in life, the good stuff is never cheap. RAID 10 requires at least 4 harddisks at 50% capacity and can be terribly expensive to migrate upwards without an intelligent RAID controller that supports RAID extending. Lately I have been a bit disappointed with IDE RAID at least with backplanes. Ah well, we will see. My desktop based RAIDs are fine and I recently broke my RAID10 into a RAID1 with 2 JBODs for much easier migration and backups. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] NTLDR is missing error & will not boot from cdrom
G.Waleed Kavalec wrote: That was my impression. I've been recommending to the boss that we stay with hardware raid 5. It hasn't burned me yet. [Carroll Wrote] As all things in life, the good stuff is never cheap. RAID 10 requires at least 4 harddisks at 50% capacity and can be terribly expensive to migrate upwards without an intelligent RAID controller that supports RAID extending. Lately I have been a bit disappointed with IDE RAID at least with backplanes. Ah well, we will see. My desktop based RAIDs are fine and I recently broke my RAID10 into a RAID1 with 2 JBODs for much easier migration and backups. -- - Carroll Kong Well, RAID5 is susceptible to the same RAID extending issues I mentioned as well. Those are just general RAID controller issues one has to consider. The RAID 10 has never burned me. It's just expensive. With RAID10 the problem is exacerbated due to the larger requirement of 4 disks at a minimum which means more money up front. I only mentioned RAID extending since it is logical to wish to upgrade your entire RAID array from say 360 GB to 720 GB. If you get a controller which does not support RAID extending, it means buying a temporary HDD to backup the data, then buying 4 fresh new disks, rebuilding the array, restoring from backup. Repeat the same issue but with 3 disks for RAID5. The problems are the same. RAID10 is superior to RAID5 in every way but price. RAID5 tends to have significantly inferior write performance compared to RAID10. As usual, you should do your own cost analysis to see if significant writes are worth the cost of going to RAID10 (extra disk). -- - Carroll Kong
[H] Spyware Woes
My friend is infected with a particularly nasty Spyware of sorts. It appears to have modified his control panel's display settings so he cannot change his background anymore. He claims his login has been modified as well from the standard "select a user" setup. He is on Windows XP SP2. Until he brings it in, I cannot do safe mode and run any other significant tests. The only access I have is VNC. Trendmicro scans went through, Adaware, Spybot, etc, they all failed to pick up quite a few of the remaining spywares. After using hijack this, sysinternal tools, and normal registry modifications this is the last bugger remaining. It appeared to have used the old login.scr trick, now the question is how to get the system back in order. I tried modifying the local GPO to indirectly force the controls back, but that did not seem to work. He has a lot of weird stuff from Symantec running, so not sure if that is it. Pretty sure Hijack This did not show anymore unusual controls remaining. Anyone seen this one before? -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Spyware Woes
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 01:33 AM 10/05/2005, Carroll Kong wrote: My friend is infected with a particularly nasty Spyware of sorts. It appears to have modified his control panel's display settings so he cannot change his background anymore. He claims his login has been modified as well from the standard "select a user" setup. If you are familiar with Group Policy Objects (GPO), there is an option to disable the background TAB completely. The background TABs are completedly removed as if a GPO was executed. It was part of the spyware suite's plan to force him to see some silly error message combined with "new favorite" entries that would point to "antispyware" (which was their own spyware). So when you try to change the background, nothing happens? I'm not sure if this is the same thing I ran into last week, but this may work: Run regedit look under hkcu\software\microsoft\currentversion\policies and delete all keys under Active Desktop, System, and Explorer then check the key NoViewContextMenu under hklm\software\microsoft\currentversion\policies\explorer I will check this. Perhaps they did throw up a GPO of sorts (and that would fall under the policies section). Reboot and see if you can change the desktop. If you still can't, may need to search for Active Desktop in regedit and remove additional, identical entries in other keys (like most MS stuff, they stupidly put the same settings in several places. Sorry I was not as clear in my description, but I do not think this is a Active Desktop issue. He can reach the display section of a control panel but the background tab (among other tabs) are missing. If you can't run in Safe Mode, you will have to run the Spyware scans repeatedly to see if you are actually getting rid of the spyware. I actually destroyed/eliminated all the other spywares already. Yes, I am aware of regenerative ones, I can eliminate those as well and it has been done already. I suppose too much experience with killing windows spyware and linux trojans. :) The automated Spyware scans cannot detect or find the altered / damaged control panel though. At this point, it is either a blatantly hijacked winlogon.exe in which case I'll need to just copy one over from another machine, or a very clever hook or CLSID control remaining. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Spyware Woes
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 10:32 AM 10/05/2005, Carroll Kong wrote: I actually destroyed/eliminated all the other spywares already. Yes, I am aware of regenerative ones, I can eliminate those as well and it has been done already. I suppose too much experience with killing windows spyware and linux trojans. :) The automated Spyware scans cannot detect or find the altered / damaged control panel though. Or at least you've destroyed all the ones you could find. I never make the claim to have completely cleaned a system of spyware and viruses, as there's no way to prove it. (Even a clean install may be compromised in some manner.) I'd be interested in hearing what your findings are. T Well, you can probably do a very good job of getting close to 100% proving it, but it would be too cost prohibitive that people would not care to pay you for it. If you run an out of band sniffer off of your PC and monitor it for a few weeks, you can be pretty sure you will see every attempt to go to some spyware site. Spyware is useless unless it can submit the information to the creator. It usually does this via web URL POSTs or through some outbound connection. It's easier to do it through a web URL post since most people ubiquitously allow outbound HTTP access. You can easily analyze the outbound sniffer traces into web reports to let you see which sites their computer has been reaching and compare that to the sites the user thinks they are going to. :) In any event, a lot of people I know of do not care so much about the spyware mining itself but more of the loss of performance and nuisance. The other large amount would be the privacy activists who would prefer to use their computer in peace. As long as I kill the popups, account for every system process running, monitor changed files over time, you can be pretty sure it is OK unless they created a new Windows "kernel mod" like the linux trojans where it can completely trick/hide system functions. I have heard of the existance of a few, but I have not heard of any normal user being infected by one. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Spyware Woes
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 11:26 AM 10/05/2005, Carroll Kong wrote: activists who would prefer to use their computer in peace. As long as I kill the popups, account for every system process running, monitor changed files over time, you can be pretty sure it is OK unless they created a new Windows "kernel mod" like the linux trojans where it can completely trick/hide system functions. I have heard of the existance of a few, but I have not heard of any normal user being infected by one. Man, you are thorough. What do you use to check the processes? Do you just do it manually? T Oh no no, I do not do this for my clients. I only do a lightweight run of this for my friends or relatives who get hit by spyware (ugggh). I am trying to convince them to go with a preventative measure like the normal user concept. If I wanted to I could go to a more exhausive mechanism of doing this to really ensure it's clean. However, since it is for ... friends and relatives, I just try to do enough. (I don't bother with the out of band sniffing for instance). I try to tell them to reinstall since it is easier for me hahaha.I can't tell them a re-format easily because then I have to tell them to recheck what they want to backup (they never have any idea). We were able to identify when the trouble began and just by doing a search for files modified during that time, it gave a ton of clues (and helped us kill a lot of those favorites, desktop shortcuts, and other nasty friggin things they planted). You can try using www.sysinternals.com 's tools which has a process explorer, filemonitor, and registry monitor. Furthermore, I have tried usign "wholockme" which is a fast context menu which finds out what process is locking which file. I also tried using Hijack This which is a very intelligent scanner. These are just good tools to use for custom killing since it's impossible to track every spyware. "Process explorer" traces process inheritance and can find processes by dll name if you can identify them. That's a good way to detect fishy programs. The problem a lot of people slap on resident programs like Symantec and Norton antivirus and what not, and it becomes a bit harder to tell which ones are real or not. It's a lot easier if you kept track of your clean systems and what is considered the norm. Not so easy when you are trying to help on someone else's computer. "File monitor" traces EVERY single file access on your machine. It is pretty insane to see how many tiny disk accesses are really going on in your machine. It is also a good way to tell when you have a suspicious process accessing suspicious files. Although it can be very confusing since... it really is scary why Internet Explorer needs to do a few hundred disk accesses just to open up to a blank page. :) "Registry monitor" traces EVERY single registry access. One of the spywares I found would dynamically rewrite into the registry to redirect your home page. Eventually I found the .dll it was using (and it was running as "runasdll32.exe") which is an anonymous name so it could sometimes be a legitimate program. Since it locked the file with explorer (using the wholockme context menu), I killed explorer, opened task man to open command prompt, renamed the .dll it was using, re-ran explorer, it was okay again. :) I should probaby re-run hijack this to see the initial 'hook' into that .dll. Hijack this helped me find some powerful spyware registry controls as well. I heard a lot about hijack this but never really used it. It seems like the best custom tool out there and seems to save a lot of time. It detects the IE plugins and you can manually identify which ones are bad and eliminate it that way. It also looks into the common registry entries that alter the "startup page". Hijack this also quickly looks at all the startup registry keys (local machine and current user) which makes my life a lot easier as I used to manually back up the run and runonce trees for both LM and CU and kill and manually hunt/backup the targets. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Spyware Woes
Well, I eliminated the weird login screen issue. That was my accidental doing. I was a bit more careless and renamed what I thought was a trojan "logonui.exe". Turns out this is the executable used to get the nice Windows splash screen that my relative enjoyed. I renamed that one properly and regained the splash screen. It is interesting to note that if it does not exist Microsoft gracefully falls back to the old login screen. If he reboots as another user in safe mode, he can regain his display tabs. It might be something corrupted in his profile. I will take a closer look at that again or have him make a new user. Seems like the spyware is gone, it is just some left over damaged parts that the spyware left behind. Sniffles. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Spyware Woes
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 12:58 PM 11/05/2005, Carroll Kong wrote: If he reboots as another user in safe mode, he can regain his display tabs. It might be something corrupted in his profile. Take a look at this registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] "NoDispBackgroundPage"=dword:0001 "NoDispAppearancePage"=dword:0001 Removing this key fixed a similar for me. T Ah thanks, I forgot to look at that registry key. My relative called me late last night and I was quickly scouring the spyware woes thread and missed your earlier suggestion to look into the policies section. Sounds like that has to be it, thanks! -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] New Firefox 1.04 out.
Thane Sherrington wrote: Beat that speed for fixing vulnerabilities, MS. :) I really think that Firefox and OpenOffice are OSS' greatest hopes. I hope that is not the case. As an OSS fan, I would NOT want to be represented by Firefox. Although I am not sure on OpenOffice since I have not used it in a while and it seemed to improve quite a bit. IE, Opera, and Mozilla (original) never leaked memory up to 90 megs of RAM just because I was sitting on ONE webpage. Nothing fancy either, just my IMP login or maybe maps.google.com. I also rarely reboot, and rarely shut down any programs so the "never happened to me because I always close out my firefox every few hours people" need not reply. Yes, I can go to the same webpage with any other browser, have it sit all day and it will never take that much. It is interesting to note, both Opera and Mozilla had this same bug (I guess Opera has been reading/borrowing code), many months ago. They have since been fixed. Firefox has not. Please, I do not want OSS to be represented by Firefox. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] New Firefox 1.04 out.
Thane Sherrington wrote: If it's going to be represented by something else, then they'd better get moving. Most OSS stuff never gets out to the public, and therefore never moves the movement forward. T Well having some OSS exposure is better than nothing. I just wish we had someone better on the OSS side up there. In a way it follows the natural law of humans marketing and image is everything, the technical details are secondary. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] New Firefox 1.04 out.
Thane Sherrington wrote: At 11:36 AM 12/05/2005, Carroll Kong wrote: Well having some OSS exposure is better than nothing. I just wish we had someone better on the OSS side up there. In a way it follows the natural law of humans marketing and image is everything, the technical details are secondary. Sizzle before steak, as always. The problem with other OSS projects is that the docs are poor, they are poorly promoted, one often can't tell what one is supposed to download, the pages generally suck (at least on sourceforge), and asking often gets the "don't be such a lamer" response so common in OSS circles. T I agree completely. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] New Firefox 1.04 out.
Brian Weeden wrote: What is better for the future of OSS - having a program that is easy to use and popular that has a few flaws, or something that is flawless and rigorous but only the geeks know about and use? Actually what is better is improvements in the existing software by receiving feedback and addressing issues. I would tend to agree that is it okay to have software that works but has a few flaws and is then released. Stepping stone migrations are important and you can't really blast someone for not fixing everything at once. By the way, there is another company called Microsoft who has done this as well, but they aren't open source. I would argue that you need both. Just because a few of us geeks have some issues with it, in reality most common users don't notice them and don't care. They simply want something that is fast, easy to use, and doesn't serve lots of popups and corrupt their system. That's it. They don't care about creating unique secure processes or memory usage or some obscure flaw in the security model. In a perfect world they would care about all those issues like us geeks. However, Firefox initially had the same precise software release model as Microsoft I described. Until they DO address those issues (which incidentally IE does had those features for a while), it is just "another Microsoft" growing along. The reason why I am being more critical with Firefox in particular is because it is supposed to address security when the inherent core design (which is difficult to change according to the developers) is flawed for security! I am happy with simply having so many people going out and downloading and installing it in defiance of IE and the rest of the establishment failing to do any thing about popups, browser hijacks, or security issues. That is a very good first step. It is delaying the inevitable. I really hope Firefox steps up to the plate or else it is just going to be another IE, security holes included. And that point, it is going to have some pretty bad PR and is going to only reinforce the belief that open source is shotty quality which is simply not true (good code is good code, bad code is bad code, regardless of it's licensing). more attacks. But the fact is that it is probably the most popular OSS product out there and the public loves it. I think that far outweighs the few flaws it has. I just hope they do not ruin the OSS image. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Brian Livingston's take on FF
warpmedia wrote: This is nice and all that but even with IE's ass hanging out *I* was less at risk using it during these periods because I had problem features turned off by default and only on for small list of sites. Conversely I am relying on FF's internal sense of whwen to disable features combined with the hope those features are not exploitable, and have been hit twice through java plugin calls that IE blocks with my restricted setup. It would take a previously trusted site with java enabled to do the same damage in IE as what FF let through on any random site. All it takes if for FF to be the more popular browser and exploits will start coming real time like the do for IE. To FF defense, as long as the release patches/updates come before damage is done, all will be well I guess. Still would feel safer if I could find a plugin to do per-site settings for java, js, plugins. etc... with memory. If it's there, I'm not seeing it. I have 1.04 loaded and am giving it a chance as I have with the previous versions. Yeah, that is my take on it as well. IE gave me a granular choice... Firefox did not. The vulnerabilities listed... most of them would not work at all if you ran as a normal user and had a secure setup like warpmedia and I did. Firefox is great stuff, it is just their general game plan is inherently just as flawed as Microsoft's (alleged our supported plugins are 'safe', yours are not). That is the wrong game plan because over time, people will just break through those doors anyway. The right idea is granular controls, not disabling features. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] -OT- Logic question for programmers on the list
Eli Allen wrote: Part of my psychology class was on how to get better results on surveys so.. - Original Message - Maybe add number 6, "No Comment"? LOL! Eli's idea sounds similar to a Stanton survey personality profiler. Thane Sherrington wrote: At 07:35 AM 02/06/2005, Eli Allen wrote: answer doesn't always have the same meaning and allows for detection of what needs to be thrown out by opposing questions) Laziness is not the same thing as actively trying to protest. No it isn't, but I can't be sure which I'm dealing with. T Maybe try a bit of both. Try mixing up the questions a bit and since you are storing the data you can try different algorithms to throw out the best and worst cases. Since you have the static data, you can play with the numbers and see which ones give the most similar results to each other. So you can take the 80th percentile instead (if you had 10 questionaries, you'd throw out 1 entry, one at the top or bottom.), and recalculate the average then. Redo it at 90th percentile (throw out the top or bottom), redo it at 70th and 60th. Or you can find the standard deviation and throw out the top and bottom performers there and recalculate the average again. Keep throwing out certain values and see if any of the results are similar. Once you find the right "tweak", just use that from now on. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Dvorak's take on Intel-Apple
Eli Allen wrote: Just because it doesn't support ActiveX doesn't mean anything. As I said, spyware requires IE because that is the browser most novices use who don't know how to easily avoid spyware. There is nothing inherent about ActiveX other then it being the popular way of doing things so if another interface becomes popular I'm sure spyware will take advantage of it. Being tied to the OS doesn't mean much in terms of spyware either. All the spyware I've seen installs itself by acting as a trojan horse which basically means its an inherent problem in the user, not the OS that spyware needs to work. - Original Message - At 09:00 AM 16/06/2005, Eli Allen wrote: Spyware requires IE because that is the browser most novices use who don't know how to easily avoid spyware. Firefox does support native plugins so don't see how you can say that Firefox is really any different from IE. Except that it doesn't support Active X, IIRC, which is the main way Spyware installs right now. And it isn't tied into the core of the OS as IE is, which has got to be a problem. T I agree 100% with Eli. Exceptions to the rule aside, just like writing software for Microsoft first tends to give you the biggest return since it is the largest market share, the same case with spyware writers. If OS-X has the leading market return, you would see spyware and viruses written for it instead. It is plain and simple economics. Microsoft OSes are default 'administrator' or privileged user, that's the real key of the problem there. I believe OS-X has some kind of user segregation as well, so that should be nice. Linux is the same as well but their GUIs tend to be laden with RPC like daemons with privileges. Sound nasty and familiar? That is exactly what Microsoft does. :) Once every OS has this segregation do you think people will simply stop? Of course not. There are ways to bypass those scenarios (find out where the default installs package in, plant trojans there when you privilege up to administrator). It's the path of least resistance in getting the biggest return for fiendish code writing. Viruses have been around for a very long time and the first one was not exclusive to DOS. Spyware was popular and sensible when Internet access has become ubiquitous. Malware that makes money! What a concept! It is a lot better than the typical geek-empowering fame and fortune scenario. Insecure infrastructures lead to this, not "Active X". -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Tripplite VS APC
joeuser wrote: APC is great but for the value minded Tripplite is the way I go. Clients seem to be satisfied also. This sounds great, but usually "valued minded" means some kind of compromise is being done, it just is not as visible or it's for diminishing returns. In the triplite case it seems you are getting more for less. What is the compromise then? Also, was that statement for UPSes or surge protectors? Thane Sherrington wrote: I've sold APC Surge Protectors for years (before that, I sold Panamax, which I preferred, but people didn't want to pay the premium. I was looking at Tripplite today, and I noticed that they are cheaper and the specs appear to be better. Just wondering on opinions. The ones I'm looking at are below. T Basic power and phone Tripplite TLP707TEL Joules - 1270 Clamping voltage <150 Insurance $50,000 APC Per7T Joules1060 Let through300 Insurance$5 Power/phone/coax TLP808TELTV Joules 3500 Clamping voltage 150 Insurance $15 APC PH8VT3 Joules 2525 Let through 85 Insurance $75000 -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] hanging MS windows update
Winterlight wrote: At 09:59 PM 6/18/2005, you wrote: I have seen this and it is ( or was ) related to Norton firewall in my case. may be just them and it will clear up on it's own. you might try safe mode with networking ( for grins ) fp I don't have Norton anything on my laptop, but it might be some other third party... good idea on the safe mode if it will update in safe mode. I had my first nasty "windows update erroring out" scenario a few days ago in my Thinkpad. I would just keep getting some weird error everytime I would update and there was little information on my specific error. While you just hang for a long long time vs my erroring out after I let it hang for a long time, maybe the solution is the same. For starters, you can look for the WindowsUpdate.log or Windows Update.log (they changed the name after one of the service packs). It should be in the Windows System Root directory (C:\Windows or C:\Winnt, etc). See where you are hanging. And, no, I did not have spyware (so far my systems are practically immune with the hardened IE Zones, firefox usage, mozilla usage, running as a normal user, and common sense) although I rechecked just in case something finally did break through. I turned off automatic updates as a service, and the background intelligent transfer service (BITS 2.0). Then I went to the Windows System Root directory and renamed the SoftwareDistribution to SoftwareDistribution.old. Then retry the Windows Update. -- - Carroll Kong
Re: [H] bx chipset ?
FORC5 wrote:
problem solved, flashed with latest bios and now it will not post at
all. was the correct bios from GB
fate says it was time to upgrade :{) unless someone has a ga-6bx7 bios
laying around ?
thanks
fp
At 09:19 AM 6/22/2005, Thane Sherrington Poked the stick with:
At 01:15 PM 22/06/2005, FORC5 wrote:
have a ga-6bx7 needs a new drive. had a 80gb wd ( will not post )
20gb will not post. 16gb will post.
drive in box ( bad) is a 13 gb
Make sure you have recent BIOS updates (I've gone as big as 120GB on a
BX.) Make sure the drives are set to either master or slave, and not
cable select if they are by themselves.
T
Try booting up without the new harddisk. Two problems can be occuring
1) Your harddisk has too many cylinders, no bios patch will fix this.
You have to set the jumper on your harddisk to force it down to 32GB or
whatever value it is to go under the 4000 or so cylinders. At least
this was the case for a much older TX Chipset board.
2) Your harddisk is having problems with UDMA negotiation. While UDMA
is backwards compatible, there was a bug in the old implementations
where it would hang while negotiating. Download the UDMA utilities from
your hardware vendor to hardlock the UDMA to some value that is support
instead of relying on autonegotiation.
--
- Carroll Kong
Re: [H] Replacing SCSI Plextor 1210S
Thane Sherrington wrote: My old Plextor 1210S has finally become unhappy. It won't reliably burn greater than 4X CDRW disks - so I'm looking for a SCSI replacement. What is as durable as this drive? T I am so scared of that day, because I don't think anyone else makes a SCSI CDRW anymore except Plextor who charges like $200-300ish for it. I'd almost rather just go with an IDE one in a USB/Firewire enclosure. -- - Carroll Kong
[H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks
Hey there, I am trying out Outlook 2003 and so far it seems to have a lot of pros over Thunderbird for my purposes however, it seems like Thunderbird has an edge on a few things! Maybe someone here knows how to help me do the work arounds on Outlook 2003. To put it into perspective, I have multiple IMAP accounts and need to change who I am sending email from very often. 1) In Thunderbird I can select one of my IMAP folders and do "ctrl-n", and automatically the system sets my sender address to the one where my IMAP folder was from. i.e. If I have a [EMAIL PROTECTED] folder, and I press ctrl-n while I am in that folder, it will send it as [EMAIL PROTECTED] If I have a [EMAIL PROTECTED] folder, and I press ctrl-n while I am in that folder, it will send it as [EMAIL PROTECTED] On top of that, it pre-fills my signature correctly! 1) In Outlook Outlook prefills the signature with the 'default' account and does not do the intelligent setting of my sender address at all when using IMAP. When I choose a different account to send it from from the top menubar, it does change the sender address but it will not change my signature. I have to delete my old signature and insert a new signature in place. This is very very primitive. 2) In Thunderbird I can choose a sent mail box per account, and it will automatically mark it as 'READ'. 2) In Outlook I can somewhat do the same using the Rules and Actions wizard. I can get a copy of the sent mail in the proper IMAP box, but I have no idea how to mark it as read by default. There is no option to mark the message as read in the Rules section. Apparently you used to be able to with Outlook XP. I see some custom actions sections, but I have no idea how to make a custom action. Any tips on how to fix these or work around them would be greatly appreciated. -- - Carroll Kong
RE: [H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks
Woohoo! Issue 1 is mitigated since if I reply, Outlook WILL intelligently match the name and put down the proper signature. I kind of like making whole brand new messages, but at least this will not be too bad. Issue 2 isn't too big a deal as I can always just go down the list and set it all as mark as read instead. Now for a new issue! Can I get Outlook to quote on the top and put my reply on the bottom? I guess I will just have to live with this way of thinking now since everyone else seems to be doing it. So far, Thunderbird's biggest advantage is for my laptop where I can easily change the master default outgoing SMTP server for all of my hosts in one go. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Carroll Kong > Sent: Monday, August 29, 2005 11:50 AM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: [H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks > > Hey there, I am trying out Outlook 2003 and so far it seems > to have a lot of pros over Thunderbird for my purposes > however, it seems like Thunderbird has an edge on a few things! > > Maybe someone here knows how to help me do the work arounds > on Outlook 2003. To put it into perspective, I have multiple > IMAP accounts and need to change who I am sending email from > very often. > > 1) In Thunderbird > > I can select one of my IMAP folders and do "ctrl-n", and > automatically the system sets my sender address to the one > where my IMAP folder was from. i.e. If I have a > [EMAIL PROTECTED] folder, and I press ctrl-n while I am in > that folder, it will send it as [EMAIL PROTECTED] If I > have a [EMAIL PROTECTED] folder, and I press > ctrl-n while I am in that folder, it will send it as > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On top of that, it pre-fills > my signature correctly! > > 1) In Outlook > > Outlook prefills the signature with the 'default' account and > does not do the intelligent setting of my sender address at > all when using IMAP. > When I choose a different account to send it from from the > top menubar, it does change the sender address but it will > not change my signature. I have to delete my old signature > and insert a new signature in place. This is very very primitive. > > 2) In Thunderbird > > I can choose a sent mail box per account, and it will > automatically mark it as 'READ'. > > 2) In Outlook > > I can somewhat do the same using the Rules and Actions > wizard. I can get a copy of the sent mail in the proper IMAP > box, but I have no idea how to mark it as read by default. > There is no option to mark the message as read in the Rules > section. Apparently you used to be able to with Outlook XP. > I see some custom actions sections, but I have no idea how to > make a custom action. > > Any tips on how to fix these or work around them would be > greatly appreciated. > > > > -- > > - Carroll Kong
RE: [H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks
Haha, I used to use Eudora but it had horribly slow IMAP support and crashed a lot for me as well while doing some nasty graphical corruption for my system usually requiring a full reboot to fix. Not surprisingly, Microsoft Outlook 2003 is the fastest mailer I have used so far for IMAP and for general UI responsiveness. I can't comment on it's stability since I have not used it that long yet. I am guessing Thunderbird and Firefox use GTK Widgets, because they are both terribly slow on my dual Pentium III 933 machine. I dare not use the Eudora again. - Carroll Kong > >So far, Thunderbird's biggest advantage is for my laptop where I can > >easily change the master default outgoing SMTP server for all of my > >hosts in one go. > > Eudora can do all this & more. ;-) > > > --+-- > Wayne D. Johnson > Ashland, OH, USA 44805 > <http://www.wavijo.com> >
RE: [H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks
> -Original Message- > Sounds like you didn't hear about the big 3 (In,Out & Trash). > If one doesn't use them it's great & the filters beat Outlook > 2k3s hands down but that's JMHO & YMMV. > > Wayne D. Johnson Ah no kidding, eh? I usually did use those mailboxes, so no wonder. I use server-side filtering, so I care not for a client's ability to filter anymore. How about the IMAP performance though? - Carroll Kong
RE: [H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks - Now = What is IMAP and Why would I use it? - Ultra Long
times a very good IMAP client might perform horribly with some IMAP servers! I hear people complaining about how bad Outlook 2003's IMAP is but I could not see how they can say that as it's the best IMAP client I have ever used! My guess is their server is buggy. (I use Courier-IMAPD). Outlook Express 5 was semi-buggy with it but super fast. Outlook 2003 so far is king with regards to both application performance and IMAP performance. Thunderbird is "reasonably fast" but still much slower than Outlook 2003 in both UI responsiveness and IMAP. Pegasus was "slow and semi-buggy" and Eudora was "very very slow and very buggy". Final Comments: I do server-side filtering, and basically the concept of a local In box does not exist for me. There is an Inbox of sorts, but most of it is usually pre-filtered away so my Inbox is lightweight. In fact, I try to ensure all of my email clients never store anything locally because that makes it so much harder for me to backup. Now I have a single place to do mail backups and it will work for every email client and for every machine. "Import" mail? What is that? :) IMAP as a protocol is somewhat sloppy though so it is no surprise so few people implement it well both server side and client side. Sadly, Microsoft's MAPI protocol is much better and even more efficient than IMAP, yet the open source knuckle heads can't get anything out to compete against it. I don't use Microsoft MAPI since Microsoft's client does IMAP better than anything I have seen, so I have no need for better performance and the locked in model of going with MAPI and Exchange. On the side, I am pretty sure Eudora is still horrible with IMAP nowadays. My colleague used it in a college environment a year ago and he said it was pretty poor. Therefore, I was very surprised when you didn't comment on poor IMAP performance. Honestly, if I did not get into IMAP, I would probably still be using Eudora as it was definitely the king for POP3 in my eyes. Problem is, I don't use POP3 anymore and probably never will so goodbye to Eudora for me. - Carroll Kong
RE: [H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks - Now = What is IMAP and Why would Iuseit? - Ultra Long
> -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Greg Sevart > Sent: Monday, August 29, 2005 8:54 PM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: Re: [H] Outlook 2003 Qwirks - Now = What is IMAP and > Why would Iuseit? - Ultra Long > > > 3) Unlike POP3, almost every client implements it improperly which > > usually means "slow performance" or "buggy performance". To double > > the problem, some IMAP servers themselves are slow and buggy so > > sometimes a very good IMAP client might perform horribly with some > > IMAP servers! I hear people complaining about how bad > Outlook 2003's > > IMAP is but I could not see how they can say that as it's the best > > IMAP client I have ever used! My guess is their server is > buggy. (I > > use Courier-IMAPD). Outlook Express 5 was semi-buggy with it but > > super fast. Outlook 2003 so far is king with regards to both > > application performance and IMAP performance. Thunderbird is > > "reasonably fast" but still much slower than Outlook 2003 > in both UI > > responsiveness and IMAP. Pegasus was "slow and semi-buggy" > and Eudora > > was "very very slow and very buggy". > > > > This is the big one for me. I pay a lot of money for top-end > machines and fast access lines. IMAP4, though it has a slew > of benefits and features, is just too damn slow for me. I've > used a variety of clients and a variety of servers...and > while some are certainly better than others, it is still just a dog. > > I also have huge e-mail folders (some around 10,000 > messages), which IMAP tends to choke on. Argument can be made > that I should process and sort my e-mail better...but you > know what, I like it how it is. > > And yes, the protocol is ugly as sin. Ever looked in on a > highly verbose transaction log? Ick. :) > > All that being said, I do use IMAP for machines other than my > primary. On my main machine, though, POP3 over SSL is where > it's at. :) > > > Greg Actually, I was able to easily download 9000 header messages via IMAPS (IMAP over SSL), albeit on a LAN, on the nicely multithreaded Outlook 2003 without any response hiccups. It's just a normal FastEthernet network. It did not take "that" long, maybe a few minutes but what can you expect for an INITIAL header download? So much for the open source mantra that "threads are evil and the work of the devil." Seems like threads is one of the biggest things that still lets me multitask on modern machines (and in my case, an obsolete machine). In fact, that was one of the easiest ways for me to test performance. Pegasus was so bad I had to break out the folders every 400 messages. Outlook Express 5 just downloaded what seemed like a few hundred at a time with no problem but sometimes it would bug out with some IMAP commands. Thunderbird was slower than Outlook Express 5 but slightly more stable with IMAP and it was a bit sluggish. Outlook 2003 creamed all of these with excellent caching and speedy, responsive download speeds. What IMAP client and IMAP server are you using because I have had nothing but excellent performance and believe me, on a dual Pentium III 933, performance means a lot to me. (Firefox is slow as nuts for me, I am a UI response freak). I do break out my directories, and probably should do so a bit more often. Woot, just tested a download of one of my Nanog folders. 7560 headers downloaded in about 161 seconds while I was able to easily multitask with other windows. :) The real-time downloading seems so fast I would swear it was local. Compare that to Eudora... oh man you could FEEL each download as you read each email. Here I can get maybe 150 ms response time between each email as it downloads (as I hit the 'next' email consecutively without really reading). Outlook 2003 and Courier IMAPD has not choked on me yet :). The other non Outlook clients have though. - Carroll Kong
RE: [H] It's bad, really bad - Katrina - Governement Plan to stop Hurricanes
Actually it is very funny someone should mention this. The government DID have a department designed to stop hurricanes, called Project Stormfury. They were using airplanes equipped with certain chemicals (silver iodide?) to help reduce the winds of a hurricane. ... How come no one heard of them? Not surprisingly they tried and while it looked like it worked, it turned out that the hurricanes would have reduced their winds naturally. It ran from 1962 to 1983 so about 20 years of tax dollars went into it. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/sfury.html - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Wayne Johnson > Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 9:40 PM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: Re: [H] It's bad, really bad - Katrina > > At 08:48 PM 8/31/2005, jeff.lane typed: > >Another good trick > > Didn't you know the federal gov't is suppose to build a sea > wall all along the Gulf & Atlantic coast without raising our > taxes that can withstand the worst case scenario hurricane. I > don't know what they can do to prevent damage from tornados & > blizzards tho. > > > --+-- > Wayne D. Johnson > Ashland, OH, USA 44805 > <http://www.wavijo.com> >
RE: [H] It's bad, really bad - Katrina
It's funny you should mention this as well. I just recovered from my computer woes. See, I had a RAID1 hardware mirror with 3Ware and I detected what seemed to be a harddisk failure. No problem, I should have high availability and tolerant this fault nicely. So, how come I had to end up ripping the 3ware out and reinstalling on a normal IDE disk? (a few times too!) Because sometimes the best designs are not going to work without a lot of field testing. Either that or the goals are too ambitious (kind of like those surge protectors that supposedly can stop direct hits of lighting). For the record, the RAID somewhat worked, but it didn't provide the fault tolerance which I was looking for. I ended up losing so many man hours, I was MUCH better off relying on my network server's RAID and backing up data there. No data was lost thankfully but I did not benefit from high availability because the RAID system failed for me. Next time I am going to go SCSI RAID, but for now, no more RAID. It's not that the designers are liars or crooks, just it's a bit hard to test for hurricane resistance when you can't just say "hey let's go test this against a category 5 hurricane!". If I could run into this issue when I had the ability to do field testing, imagine running into scenarios where you are up against a force of nature that does not appear that often. That said, like my RAID scenario, I paid a lot of extra money and spent extra time accomodating and ensuring the RAID1 was setup to work. When push came to shove, my RAID1 solution did not provide all the features I wanted anyway, so I wasted all those resources for nothing. It's hard to pre-design for certain things, and you might end up spending more money without getting what you really want. In that sense, you were better off spending it elsewhere, ala opportunity costs. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Wayne Johnson > Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 8:22 PM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: Re: [H] It's bad, really bad - Katrina > > At 07:53 PM 8/31/2005, Al typed: > >Not to prevent hurricanes, but to prevent the depth of the disaster > >caused by it. > > The casinos in MS were supposedly designed for level 5 > hurricane & look what happened to them. > > > --+-- > Wayne D. Johnson > Ashland, OH, USA 44805 > <http://www.wavijo.com> > >
RE: [H] AMD board and CPU
I'm not an AMD guru, but I had a nearly identical setup to you! Old dual P3-933 on Tyan Thunder workstation. I ran into some odd problems with it so I finally decided to upgrade to AMD (I haven't used AMD since the K6-200 days). I went with the MSI NF4 K8N 7125 NEO4-F and 3000+ ATHLON 64 939P. It's probably a touch bit more expensive than your choice but you can always drop the clock down. I'm always worried about the chipsets myself, but I think the latest 64 bit offerings from AMD seem more stable than the Socket A selection (which wasn't that horrible either if you knew how to get around the weirdness). - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Winterlight > Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 2:58 AM > To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com > Subject: [H] AMD board and CPU > > I have a old,k dual 1GB Tyan 250 setup that is used for > storage with my old PATA collection, as well as Video > recording with a AIW 9600 PRO. The board is giving me > problems, so I am thinking of upgrading to a AMD setup. I > haven't worked with AMD since the K62 days. > > I don't want to spend any real money for this, it is just my > third computer that I rarely turn on, but it is useful to have it > > Newegg has these for around $150, but I have no idea > what it is! I know the Sempron isn't their fastest chip, but > this a 64 bit setup isn't it? How does this chip compare to a > P4 ... is it suppose to be equal to a 3100 > > MSI K8T Neo-V Socket 754 VIA K8T800 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail $55 > > AMD Sempron 64 3100+ Palermo 800MHz FSB Socket 754 Processor > Model SDA3100BXBOX - Retail $100 > > I need the AGP slot and I don't need anything on board... I > have a SMC GB NIC PCI card and a PCI SB Live Value and a > Antec 550 True Value Xeon PS with a 20 pin ATX adaptor. I > just need the board and the CPU. And I want no problems ... > just reliable computing. > > Could a AMD guru let me know if this sound like a good value? >
[H] Thane - Smartmon successful harddisk failure prediction
Ok it took a long time to finally fail but it did. A while ago (I couldn't find the reference in my archives so it must have been a while) smartmon tools diagnosed two of my maxtor harddisks are "failing". Since then, I actually used them as a RAID0 for my squid cache. (the most disposable of all data... web cache!). Well, one of them failed maybe 1 month ago, and now the other one failed yesterday. It took a little while to fully fail out like this but at least I had a pretty good early warning on it. - Carroll Kong
RE: [H] Thane - Smartmon successful harddisk failure prediction
Interesting! I have had a maxtor drive fail with a read error at 13034 hours, and it's still okay at 23355 hours. However, that is one disk out of the 3 others which I already started seeing errors hit up faster so your assessment is probably correct for the general populace. The other 2 were the ones that just failed recently (although my load is much less and since I keep the disks on all the time it probably lessened the strain in some ways). I don't think you want to really muck with the CVS. That's basically the ever changing version of code aka Beta code. Unless they have a really good feature you needed, I wouldn't think about it. There is a 2005-11-05 CVS snapshot (which is a precomplied version) for windows packaged with cygwin http://cygwin.com/packages/ Otherwise, you can probably somehow get the free version of Microsoft's C compiler (no gui) to start compiling it. It isn't worth the effort to compile it yourself in my opinion. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Thane Sherrington (S) > Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 12:12 PM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: Re: [H] Thane - Smartmon successful harddisk failure > prediction > > At 11:56 AM 14/12/2005, Carroll Kong wrote: > >Well, one of them failed maybe 1 month ago, and now the other one > >failed yesterday. It took a little while to fully fail out > like this > >but at least I had a pretty good early warning on it. > > I have found that if Smartmon self-tests pass, but there are > recent historical errors (say within the last 1000 hours) > then it is likely that the hard drive will fail within a > short (days or weeks) period of time. I now recommend any > drive in this state to be replaced. > > BTW, maybe you can help me with this. The CVS is updated > daily (according to the Smartmon list) but I have no idea how > or if I can take that CVS and compile it for Windows. Do you > know if I can, and if so, how I would do it? I've asked on > the Smartmon list several times with no results (I think they > feel it's a stupid question, and it probably is, but I have to start > somewhere.) > > T >
RE: [H] AMD board and CPU
I think the reason I picked the Venice over the Clawhammer was the smaller die so it is even cooler? I'm not sure if the Clawhammer supports the "cool and steady" daemon that AMD has. Basically it's a daemon that runs in the background to keep the CPU cool by detecting idle time and lowering the power. I usually hate running such things but it seems to work great under Windows 2000. >From my old dual P3-933, the new AMD 64 bit cpu runs MUCH MUCH cooler than the old setup and more megahertz than my 2 old CPUs combined. :) I did have a Soundblaster Audigy 2 PCI card in it before, but when I used it's firewire at the same time I did notice some slight instability. I blame it on the card since I have crashed with it before on the old motherboard as well. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Winterlight > Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2005 1:21 AM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: RE: [H] AMD board and CPU > > Thanks for the advice. Your right about the chipset don't > want VIA. That is what is on my Tyan Tiger, and what is > probably causing my problem. So what do you think about a > > MSI K8N Neo-V Socket 754 NVIDIA nForce3 250 ATX AMD > Motherboard with a AMD Athlon 64 2800 retail box I notice > some Athlons show as Clawhammer what is the difference? > > I can do this combo for $170.00 ... I have been doing Xeon > dual setups and high end P4 for the last two years so this > seems like nothing! :) Oddly enough selling off the compents > of my Dual PIII = Crucial ECC RAM and the two matching PIIIs > I will probably make money on the deal! > > If you buy a board like this with onboard NIC and sound can > you be assured of 64bit drivers? The only thing I wish the > board had was a GB NIC. > > > > > > At 06:02 AM 12/14/2005, you wrote: > > > I'm not an AMD guru, but I had a nearly identical setup > to you! Old dual > P3-933 on Tyan Thunder workstation. I ran into some > odd problems with it so > I finally decided to upgrade to AMD (I haven't used AMD > since the K6-200 > days). > > I went with the MSI NF4 K8N 7125 NEO4-F and 3000+ > ATHLON 64 939P. It's > probably a touch bit more expensive than your choice > but you can always drop > the clock down. I'm always worried about the chipsets > myself, but I think > the latest 64 bit offerings from AMD seem more stable > than the Socket A > selection (which wasn't that horrible either if you > knew how to get around > the weirdness). > > > > - Carroll Kong > > > -Original Message- > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of Winterlight > > Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 2:58 AM > > To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com > > Subject: [H] AMD board and CPU > > > > I have a old,k dual 1GB Tyan 250 setup that is used for > > storage with my old PATA collection, as well as Video > > recording with a AIW 9600 PRO. The board is giving me > > problems, so I am thinking of upgrading to a AMD setup. I > > haven't worked with AMD since the K62 days. > > > > I don't want to spend any real money for this, it is just my > > third computer that I rarely turn on, but it is > useful to have it > > > > Newegg has these for around $150, but I have no idea > > what it is! I know the Sempron isn't their fastest chip, but > > this a 64 bit setup isn't it? How does this chip compare to a > > P4 ... is it suppose to be equal to a 3100 > > > > MSI K8T Neo-V Socket 754 VIA K8T800 ATX AMD > Motherboard - Retail $55 > > > > AMD Sempron 64 3100+ Palermo 800MHz FSB Socket 754 Processor > > Model SDA3100BXBOX - Retail $100 > > > > I need the AGP slot and I don't need anything on board... I > > have a SMC GB NIC PCI card and a PCI SB Live Value and a > > Antec 550 True Value Xeon PS with a 20 pin ATX adaptor. I > > just need the board and the CPU. And I want no problems ... > > just reliable computing. > > > > Could a AMD guru let me know if this sound like a good value? > > > >
RE: [H] -LO- Firefox stability issues?
That's okay. Firefox will take up to 80 megs of ram with a single window, single tab, doing nothing on a single page. Firefox has had this feature for a long time, whereas Opera and Mozilla which appeared to have this 'issue' fixed it a while ago as far as I know. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Julian Hale > Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2005 2:22 AM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: Re: [H] -LO- Firefox stability issues? > > At 11:08 PM 12/22/2005, you wrote: > >I stand somewhat corrected in that after coming in from work tonight > >and having Firefox running all day it is now using 56,624k. > So it does > >eat memory albeit an insignificant amount in my case. Are > you sure you > >guys are using the latest version? @:D> > > I'm running 1.0.5, not 1.5.0, but it's taking up 109,192K of > physical memory, and 128,956K of virtual. That's 5 windows > open, and 37 different tabs. Still, with "only" 512mb of > memory, I'm left with 190,000K of physical memory free, so > it's not like it's bringing my system to it's knees. > > Julian >
RE: [H] Nutty Steve Gibson claims WMF bug was planted by Microsoft
Oh man, this guy reminds me of Ken Rockwell of the digital photography realm. I'm sorry but Steve Gibson is far from a security expert, although he does say a lot of wild things and his web site is obviously designed to sell his products. Ironically, that is not so much different from Ken Rockwell either except Ken does it just to generate ad hits. There might be some remotely useful concepts that come out of Steve's diatribe, but I'm sorry, he's just not the real deal in any sense of the word. He seems to fall under the class of "say outrageous stories to get tons of hits on your website, then sell them stuff or generate ad hits!" So, I was interested in reading the Windows XP RAW Socket "issue". The most common internet application uses RAW sockets: ping.exe (or ping for those Unix heads). ICMP packets has to be created via RAW sockets so Steve's claim seemed like it ready for an instant shoot down. It seems that grc.com does note this, and at first everything he says seems to make sense. There used to be a slight barrier to creating RAW sockets and now it is gone. 3rd party shims to allow RAW sockets would have made it a bit harder, but honestly, I doubt by much. Look at how advanced spyware hooks have become and it has nothing to do with RAW sockets, just pure user stupidity. So, I was going to give Steve some partial credit until I realized, there doesn't seem to be much point in spoofing IP addresses if you are behind a NATed device since the NATed device will always translate your outbound packets as well. In fact, some NAT translation devices might even REFUSE to translate IPs that are not considered local yet are showing up locally. In other words, Steve Gibson's claim that RAW sockets would make XP the choice of zombies because of it's ability to spoof IPs does not seem to be practical in the least for hackers. I would dare to say a large chunk of people are behind a NATed device rather than directly out in the open. Also, tons of people are purchasing firewall software which at least would help decrease the number of instant zombies. Also, why would I bother spoofing IPs on my zombies if I can take over a large number of zombies from major networks such as AOL and Comcast? Economically with regards to time spent, a hacker would just be far better off relying on initial spyware deployments to get a large enough spread to get the zombies needed to DoS any target successfully. Given that I have worked with Comcast with regards to DoSes, they admit being somewhat helpless against defending their own users from DoSes. It's a bit hard to convince the NOC to add "on-the-fly" access-control lists (firewall rules) to production routers just to protect an end user. They have enough issues as it is and throwing up potentially 30-40 acls (and this is WITHOUT spoofing) is hard enough. Yes, if they were spoofing it would be even worse especially if it was a high priority target such as a server. I'll admit that XP having more direct RAW socket support is an interesting revelation, but it certainly isn't enough to go running along with as a security hole of the century. Simply put, if Steve Gibson has more practical experience in the field with regards to security issues, maybe he would realize that some of his claims just aren't practical because a real hacker can achieve it far easily in other ways. I'm sure Gibson is also a little miffled about the major DDoS that blasted his website a while ago. Although, I'm sure if we could find out the majority of the systems that nailed him on that, it would be unix based OSes or server class Windows oses. While grc.com admitted that unix servers are the ideal platform for spoofers types, you aren't going to find XP machines at colo locations where they have significant bandwidth per successful hack ratios. In short, yeah Gibson, it was horrible you got DDoSed and finding ways to stop it would be great. No, it was not because of Windows XP's RAW Socket support. As for the WMF thing, you got to be kidding me. Planted by Microsoft? Microsoft already has tons of ways to allegedly "backdoor" information into the system, why would they used a be-fangled difficult attack vector? I don't think Gibson has had a lot of experience in developing large software base. I'm beginning to wonder if Gibson has a lot of real world experience to begin with. As many have agreed, the real Microsoft security problem is the fact that it runs as "administrator" by default. Harden that up a bit more and you will nearly all of these security issues mysteriously disappear. Hopefully Microsoft will get to a stage where this will be easier to do for most users. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of joeuser > Sent: Friday, January 20,
RE: [H] Nutty Steve Gibson claims WMF bug was planted by Microsoft
No security solution is 100% proof from anything. A normal user is still able to do whatever a normal user could do, including opening HTTP sessions with odd requests (aka spyware). You could load up spyware but it could not be embedded as deeply as a normal user. At least under Unix it would also make it impossible to randomly create 'raw' sockets as Gibson insists is so deadly. But, running as this user should make clean up far easier. When you can do nasty embedded object tricks and other nasty super persistent spyware, the time to clean gets a bit higher and annoying. Installing those nasty kernel layer directory hiding spywares/viruses is just a lot harder as a normal user if not impossible. Those are the ones that eat up mega time for me. If you still got deeply infected, you would have to see how they got infected. Perhaps the spyware has placed itself into the TEMP directory as a normal user, so when you installed any software as an administrator, the spyware was installed instead. Or perhaps the file permissions allowed normal users to have write access everywhere making the "limited user" nearly equal to the administrator anyway. There are ways around every security barrier, ultimately it's up to the user with eternal vigilence to stop potential security issues. Furthermore, there have been some cases of IE where you could elevate privileges from normal user to administrator user. It's also why I promote hardening IE (all built into the browser right now, way before firefox, and more secure than firefox when setup properly), but I realize it's not practical for most people. Then the conditions for becoming infecting are so ridiculously hard that as long as you are somewhat careful, you are immune. Basically, I am still able to do everything I want to do, I do not run antivirus software, I have never gotten spyware or a virus (yes I can hear the chants of people insisting I must have one). I hope one day Microsoft can streamline this method for others. So, my suggestion isn't the panacreas of windows security. Only an intelligent user can really deter that significantly. However, I strongly believe it's the right path to take in comparison to calling up Holy War to stop the RAW sockets or insisting Microsoft is backdooring the world with an incredibly difficult attack vector compared to half a dozen other ways. Of course, my suggestion would not generate lots of hits on a website though. It's not nearly as exciting as nay saying a new OS or insisting there is a huge conspiracy theory. - Carroll Kong > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Thane Sherrington (S) > Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 11:13 AM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: RE: [H] Nutty Steve Gibson claims WMF bug was > planted by Microsoft > > At 11:30 AM 24/01/2006, Carroll Kong wrote: > >As many have agreed, the real Microsoft security problem is the fact > >that it runs as "administrator" by default. Harden that up > a bit more > >and you will nearly all of these security issues mysteriously > >disappear. Hopefully Microsoft will get to a stage where > this will be > >easier to do for most users. > > I'm not sure on that. I had a machine in a few weeks ago > where all the users were limited users (I had to boot into > Safe Mode to get in as Administrator.) So in theory there > should have been no or very little spyware on the system, but > it was loaded up with it. If running as a non-Admin user is > supposed to protect users, shouldn't this machine have been > largely immune to infection? > > T
RE: [H] Nutty Steve Gibson claims WMF bug was planted by Microsoft
> And yes, getting massive zombie swarms to use in an attack is > much easier but IP spoofing is still a huge advantage. If I > am getting attacked from a set of machines, I can just tell > my ISP or firewall to filter out packets from those specific > addresses. Attack over. But if each of those zombies is > spoofing a random IP address and keeps changing it every few > seconds, now I can't filter the attack as easily. And did > you even read the section about spoofing the addresses of the > hub routers? That was the second attack that hit him, using > spoofed packets. Yes, and there are enough hosts out there to do this with or without XP RAW sockets. Would it have been much worse with the addition of XP hosts? Maybe, but after a certain point you have enough DoS power that it's diminishing returns. By the way, did you also know that nearly all IP spoofing can be defeated if all ISPs properly configured their edge routers? Most of them do not do it because it is additional work, planning, and load on their routers. > Sure, the doomsday scenario he predicted didn't come totally true. > Why? Because there is no incentive. Instead of evolving > towards malicious destruction of the net, the hacker > community has evolved towards MAKING MONEY. Nowadays, all > the exploits, hacks, and attacks you see are mainly aimed > towards getting code installed for the purpose of delivering > adware, spyware, or malware. There is still some DDoS > attacks that are done for profit or ransom, but there is a > whole lot more money to be made in the other rackets. And I > really believe that is why Gibson's prediction of mass DDoS > attacks never came true. Right, there is no incentive which is the number one reason why a lot of people were never significantly afraid of 'hackers' wiping out things like root DNS servers and such. Who would be dumb enough to wipe out their own infrastructure except a megalomanic? I never could understand the allure of writing viruses that would wipe out people's harddisks for fun. > Of course his predictions about spyware and the such DID come true. > Shields Up isn't the best program out right now, but a few > years ago it was the ONLY program and it was pretty damn good > for its time. > Once again the market evolved and now there are tons of > companies making anti-spyware, malware, and adware products. > All of them are building on the original concept and work > that Gibson did. I don't know about giving Gibson credit for originating the idea. That's always a tough cookie to crack, but he was probably one of the more visible ones early on. Well, the spyware idea is an ancient idea from ages of lore. The idea that your computer is watching you and logging everything you do. That's the kind of stuff people were fearful of even in the DOS days but it was just ridiculously impractical. Or those who insist Windows 3.11 is the last one without the mysterious Backdoor (tm)! Many respectable security experts long since argued ActiveX was a dangerous technology during the ActiveX vs Javascript wars (back when Netscape was still alive) and this was probably before Gibson mentioned the word "spyware". > I am willing to overlook Gibson's flair for the dramatic, the > occasional pimping of his products, and him being wrong on a > few details. Name one site on the net that doesn't do those > things. And most of his products he doesn't charge for - > like the software he wrote to detect the WMF bug. I still > find his dissection of internet and computer security issues > very interesting and very useful. > > -- > Brian Well, it isn't related to 'computers' but www.bythom.com is pretty good. :) You don't have to charge for information to be indirectly using it for economic gain. In fact, that's the new small business model for this type of thing. But I digress. I did say earlier he has some things to say and offer, but all in all take it with a grain of salt. There are tons of other security experts who are far more respectable and even then you shouldn't always take what they say as gospel. - Carroll Kong
