Re: TI-H: Re: Speedy Calc...

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arned. Please don't get my started on the subject of educators and computers :). My school has a library with a few Power Macs (with a DOScard...oooh! :), and they are the second slowest boxes i have to work with. Playing a single MP3 takes basically all the power the box has. They basically let the students run these boxes, which my friend Murray does a good job of. However, the boxes in the computer lab are worse. A bunch of 486 DX-50's with 24 megs of RAM running Windows 95. They're not too bad at it normally, but the nice guys at Duquesne (the university that my school is affiliated with) decided that we should install a Virus scanner and make it scan ALL executable for ALL patterns before they're run. I can see this as a valid security precaution if you're letting users run just anything they want (which they currently do) but a properly configured system would only allow people to run executables that have (a) been allowed in the registry (i.e. Turbo C++, DevPascal, Netscape, Telnet, that sort of thing). or (b) reside in a certain directory (slightly harder to do, but not impossible with the right additional software). So, now anything we develop in class has to go through a virus scanner before we can see if it works. It took me a minute and 30 seconds to run the following pascal program yesterday: program hithere; uses crt; begin writeln('Goodbye cruel world.'); end. which I ran as a simple test. Because the virus scanner scanned the compiler before it let it run, then the linker, then the symbol table generator, then the executable itself. Granted, nothing takes much longer than this, because most of the program we get forced into writing are no more than 200 lines (although when I tried to run my 10,000 line terminal emulator, the box nicely locked up and died (and yes, it really had to be 10,000 lines, it emulates a lot of different terminals)). Of course, when i disabled the virus scanner on my box, i got bitched at for "altering our security configuration" and "trying to hack our systems." I'm sorry, but I've done Windows 95 security configurations, and their setup doesn't need to be "hacked" it provides the appearence of security while being wide open to anyone with an IQ above 15. Oh, and bringing my noebook into school has become a cardinal sin, because I'm supposedly using it to trade illegal software and porn. However, one thing tops all. Last year I had a linux server sitting in the lab connected to their network and using one of the lab's static IP's. They received an e-mail from someone in canada saying that because the system had bots running on it, it posed a security risk for the university as a whole, and could be used to distribute everything from illegal music (MP3s) to, you guessed it, porn again. The university asked if they could borrow the box for a day under the guise of "seeing why it's sending our switches into 100% usage" They hooked it up to their network and wow, it did absolutely nothing on bootup. Like a good linux box. I later found out that they had tried to examine the hard disk and there was "one cell we couldn't get into, and we think that's where he hid the porn" I'm assuming by cell the meant hard disk partition, and i'm assuming they were trying to look at my swap partition, which would be filled with essentially random data, which could appear to be encrypted, or some obscure file system. Also, they installed some LBA software which i couldn't get rid of without dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda'ing the whole drive. We threatened to sue them for invasion of privacy, destruction of private property, etc. They basically said "because it was on our network, we could legally do anything we wanted to it." We decided that fighting them would be been too expensive. Needless to say, i'm no longer allowed to touch any of the computers in the lab except for pascal development during class, and even then I make sure to use the systems that they have no power over: the ones my father sold to my school, and made sure that the contract said the university had no power over them. Rant complete, flame me privately, thank you. -- Jon Olson -----Original Message----- From: Grant Stockly <gussie@alaska.net> To: ti-hardware@lists.ticalc.org <ti-hardware@lists.ticalc.org> Date: Wednesday, December 02, 1998 7:01 PM Subject: Re: TI-H: Re: Speedy Calc... > >>In a message dated 12/1/98 10:34:02 PM Central Standard Time, morph@jmss.com >>writes: >> >>> This is true...my 95 box never used to crash, and i've been running NT on >>> this box for months now without a reboot, and it hasen't crashed on me >>> yet...although the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death for those who don't >>> know...it's the WindowsNT hard crash screen) screen saver is fun :) >>I run a 95 PC and it crashes less than any Mac I've ever worked with. >>(Although, the Macs I've worked with are education ones, you know, with morons >>running them on a WAN.) > >The people who run education macs don't know a thing. Ever seen a PC in a >school enviornment? > >Grant >
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