Most PC's brought into a shop are infected with something, this one intentionally, and it would have been grinding the disk from the continuous video writes. I'm surprised no one looked for and found their spyware. Reseat ram + grinding == bad chip and it's swapping? Just another virus ridden windows pc? I wouldn't have suspected intentionally installed spyware, but I would have checked for the malicious type and I'd like to think I'da found their spyware and informed them of it.

When did it become normal to have no clue how much money you have and accidentally overdraft your banking account? How about keep track of your finances so when you have $10 you don't try to take $20 out? You can even check your balance on that very same atm! How about reading the little sign that says what the atm charges and use a FREE atm? Personal responsibility, hello????

Ya, I tried to used the emc package for a while. I didn't care for having to use their proprietary programming language to extend or customize it. It was also expensive for what it did. There always seemed to be missing functionality like 'so how do we make it query a radius server to see if it's up?' oh that'll be in the NEXT version, you should upgrade for the low low price of only $300,000. Repeat. Oh, we're sorry, you need another $150,000 module to do that, no wait.. time to upgrade again! Another $200k! Oh doesn't support that feature either, maybe you can write a way to monitor it in our proprietary programming language that no one knows and isn't documented? Oh your annual service contract is $75k a year.

Here's my opinion on the EMC product line.

Oh, sendmail isn't probably 'vulnerable', it definitely is. That's why sendmail has FEATURE(`conncontrol', ,`terminate'), to limit simultaneous sessions per client. Spammers have been abusing it for eons. I put vulnerable in quotes because that feature is configurable, but not a default. If your daemon doesn't have a way of dealing with these things (apache does with a module), there's always

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --syn --dport 80 -m connlimit --connlimit-above 10 -j DROP

I have a cat6 cable certifier. You can make cords by hand that certifies to cat6 the majority of the time. Something that isn't cat6 compliant isn't going to hurt your 100base, you only need cat5e for gigabit, cat5 for 100base. You can't tell if you meet cat6 spec without the $10k certifier.

A lot of people put rj45 mod ends on solid wire (instead of stranded). Then when the wire moves it pulls on the pins and 'goes bad'. Premade patch cords are always stranded, ones you make usually are using solid wire. If you use solid wire from jack to jack and tie it down, then use premade patch cords made from stranded wire from jack to device, you're fine. Or buy stranded wire and make your own. Putting a rj45 mod end on stranded wire is a little bit challenging. Your best bet is solid wire from jack to jack, tied down, prebought short patch cords from jack to device.

Six year old laptops arn't that bad? I'd even say $50 is a good deal if it still worked. Laptops from that time period seem to be ebaying for $100-$300. Six years ago we'd be looking at a pentium 4, 2.2-3ghz, 512mb memory, 20 gig hard drive. That'd run windows xp or ubuntu just fine.

no need, looking at goatse is adequate punishment in and of itself