The box provided by French provider "Free" has a 250 GB HD that is CIFS exported:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox#Quatri.C3.A8me_g.C3.A9n.C3.A9ration_:_version_6_.C2.AB_R.C3.A9volution_.C2.BB

Not good enough. A nic driver that sees a specific code in a buffer, for the next hour sets that specific code in all subsequent packets passing through, and then shuts down after having fried the motherboard. Cue chaos.

Thank you for that. Indent and bracket placing standards are good for consistency, xCase and whatever are nice so that one immediately recognizes variables and functions and whatnot, but the really useful part of a coding standard is the one that says that every function has documentation block which specifies:

- expected behavior
- allowable inputs (NULLs, empty strings, corner cases . . .)
- allowable outputs

Hmmm. Webster DOES have it, defined as "a straight line from the muzzle of an artillery piece to a target". Definitely "citation needed". Dictionary.com says origin 1905-1910. I have taken an instant dislike to the expression, based on perceived lack of usefulness, homophony with almost-synonym, and IMHO probable origin in the misspelling of said synonym. Webster tells me to "like" it on Facebook; if there was a Facebook "dislike" I'd even consider signing up for a Facebook account.

Mutt existed long before Gmail. My first thought when I saw the GMail conversation view was "Mutt does it better". It still does.

The In-Reply-To header is extremely basic, there "in the first place", and the only thing really needed for conversation view. I would be surprised if none of the original designers of the e-mail format had envisioned the use. It "screws up" in GMail because GMail tries to compensate for MUAs who don't set In-Reply-To correctly.

If the ISP was running the Tor node, why not? But the ISP says you are running the Tor node, so that makes it your problem and your consequences to face. You're not saying you were running a Tor node unwittingly, right? Hmmm . . . a virus that installs a Tor node . . .

Probably because that's what people want to pay for. When you have a human on the line, you know that human is paying attention to you and only to you, and that's what you're paying for. IM/chat support *only* doesn't sound professional. However I do agree that WebEx or something similar should absolutely be standard alongside the telephone call, quite simply because it helps the client get satisfied quicker. That makes the customer happy, and also helps the bottom line when customers are paying a flat fee per month or per incident.

Gun? Bad idea. Fines are better, 20-dollar fine in Australia for example. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

Yeah. It actually /is/ good. Except if you happen to know something about computers, unfortunately.

'nuff said

Good luck on getting Netapp/IBM/HDS/EMC agree to cost-free replacement on site in less than four hours.

Out of the 100k passwords how many were unique? Could we have a graph of how many passwords were used how many times? Something that could be analysed to say that in your case about 85% of people used a unique password and 10% used a password in the top 10 or top twenty whatever. This could be used to compare to other datasets to extract a level of cluelessness/cluefulness.

We agree one needs at the very least two environments. When you have lots of money -- or lots of VMs :-) you can have lots of environments. You need a developer free-for-all environment where developers can play, this could be their own machine but sometimes you'll need dedicated machines (hardware, expensive licences, whatever). Then you need testing/QA machines where normally you would not permit developers, and production machines where you do not permit anyone more than necessary.

The packing needs to be done because when you have few people authorized to do installs, then the people who do have that authorization must be able to do any and all installations, and it forces handoff to Operations. I work in a place where we we have so many different applications we need a database to keep track of who is responsible for which part of which application, and it would be (even more of) a nightmare if something had been installed in some unknown or non-standard way.

But there are two reasons for these rules (at least!).

Most people here are taking this from an engineering reliability aspect, and that is a valid concern, but in many companies the rules separating environments are also motivated by security and confidentiality, and are often even based in law and contract agreements. One might hire a team of contractors/temps to develop something, but not only must they have no chance of inserting malicious code anywhere, they must never ever even *see* production data, only dummy data! The classical example is a bank or a hospital, but this could/should also apply to ISPs (mail...), anything that stores SSNs or credit card numbers or passwords, etc.

I have a supplier whose automated system asks for contract number and system ID's and the like. Once, my system was totally down and the different numbers I had were refused by the supplier's IVR. I remembered hearing that some IVR systems detect swearing. I quite deliberately swore a few times at the system, and it beeped and asked "Are you currently experiencing a severity-1 production outage, press one". I did and got a human immediately. I'll never again complain about their system . .

Well, you shouldn't try to remember that, since Ubuntu names in alphabetical order, just like Android. That will roll around in some half a dozen years, but Ubuntu also has YY.MM version numbers, so you know immediately that version 08.04 is over four years old. It's better than Debian where the name is not given alphabetically, but Debian also has a version number when you need it. Geeks make the OS. Geeks like the wacko names. Deal with it.