Wisedigs

The service might be missing. Throw the following in an elevated command prompt:

sc create wscsvc type= share start= delayed-auto error= normal binPath= "C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe -k LocalServiceNetworkRestricted" depend= RpcSc/WinMgmt obj= "NT AUTHORITY\LocalService" DisplayName= "Security Center"

sc sdset wscsvc D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWRPLOCRRC;;;IU)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;SU)(A;;CR;;;AU)(A;;CCLCRP;;;S-1-5-80-2006800713-1441093265-249754844-3404434343-1444102779)S:(AU;FA;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;WD)

Imagine you are in your car driving at 120km/h and you realize your brakes don’t work. Eventually you run out of road and you have to make a choice: smash into that tree or fall off the edge of a cliff to certain death? A functional human-being in full possession of their mental faculties would choose the tree trunk. Depending on how clever you are, you might only suffer from minor injuries or no injuries at all.

The driver is the law maker. Law makers have two primary objectives: a) ensure the country is secure enough to a level that corruption isn’t apparent or widespread, b) ensure the laws are ambiguous enough such that the final decision on any matter is left up to the judges. Why is this the case? Laws once in place are hard to change. As a law maker you know you are a human being and you know that one day you, your family, your friends, or someone you know might be prosecuted under this law. In order to protect yourself and the people you care about there has to be a fail-safe, a backdoor. This is where the ambiguity in laws comes in. Judges judge by the laws of the nation, if the law allows for multiple interpretations the interpretation most suitable to the case presented is selected by the judge in an unbiased and fair manner. Judges unfortunately are not unbiased, they are not always just. Judges are merely humans appointed by their leaders. The jury system? Oh please. Do not get me started.

Breaking news: This just in – judges can be influenced by others!

If you were a law maker, would you shoot yourself in the foot? Let’s say you are caught murdering or raping, would you want to be executed? Would you want to be sent to prison for life? As a law maker, you don’t ever expect to turn into a serial-anything because you are not a psycho path and the laws are strict enough to prevent these types of people from getting away. Supposedly. But you might find yourself breaking a law or two, as is common in human nature.

Should we really blame them? Yes and no. No: because if we were the drivers we would make the exact same choices. Yes: because they have chosen to accept man made laws to govern their lives.

Whether you are convinced of the above reality or not, never forget that the statement “ignorance is bliss” is only true for so long; this bliss has an expiry date.

If you want to build your own custom firmware for the Belkin N1 router this guide will explain how to do it for the F5D8232-4 v2. The others should be similar. I will explain this using the Debian distro. The reason for this is the cross compiling tools used by belkin are Debian only executables. You can create your own cross-compiling tools for Cygwin, Ubuntu, Suse, etc if you prefer them over Debian (or you happen to have a box setup) and then use this guide to assist you through the rest of the process.

Cygwin is not recommended as it is very slow and you will spend many minutes twiddling your thumb while it compiles.
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Everyone has heard of culture shock: a state of bewilderment and distress experienced by an individual who is suddenly exposed to a new, strange, or foreign social and cultural environment [dictionary.com]. Generally, it is assumed one goes through this upon leaving their country of residence. Or possibly upon discovering a strange tribe or rural village with unusual habits.

How about traveling from a smaller town, to a bigger town? The feeling shouldn’t really be described as a “shock”, its more like “disgusting”. What the heck am I on about?

In small cities, there is a higher chance of encountering a unique personality vs a personality witnessed before. Everyone is content, people are not too keen on outdoing each other in every department. The environment is relaxed and non-toxic.

Enter the big city mentality: everyone is better than everybody else, they will lie, cheat, steal, do whatever is necessary to protect their image of being the best. Too busy chasing after money to worry about correcting that mentality, or to worry about raising useful offspring. From this we can conclude that big city folks are dumber, in general, than their small city counterparts. It’s simple: when you use up precious brain processing power worrying about how to one-up your neighbour, you end up shutting down the rational and the logical part of the brain. Your brain is no longer giving enough time to other processing units, there is only one unit constantly active using up all the juice. “Oh look she just got a new car” “oh look he just got that $150 haircut” “oh look their house is shinier than ours” “oh look his kids are wearing designer diapers”… It never ends. Everything will be evaluated, judged, and compared to whatever they have.

I actually wouldn’t mind all of this, if people feel like they have to prove they are better than someone else, they have already proved to everyone observing that they clearly are not. What I do mind is the fact that you can’t befriend these people. How can you be close friends with someone who judges the colour of your socks to determine whether or not they are in a higher class than you? “Stop looking at my socks you fool!”. Or one who will lie to you to cover up their shortcomings? Or one who will say anything and everything to their friends, even if it means exposing all of your dirty laundry? I am talking about your best friend. So-called.

It does have its advantages though and supporters of the “big city” can you tell all about them.

It isn’t 100% of the population of a big city that thinks like this, you will find pockets of intelligence dispersed throughout. You just have to be picky. And careful.

1. Laptop/netbook
2. Power extension cord, preferably 30 feet. Funny how people end up surrounding wall sockets meant for vacuums and other janitorial purposes. Not sure on the max length allowed through security…
3. Earphones/headphones
4. Teabags – only if you are super cheap and/or starbucks doesn’t cut it for you.
5. Disinfectant spray – when you have to go
6. Cellphone signal blocker – for entertainment
7. Reading/viewing material (e.g. ebooks) – when you are bored with your signal blocker

If you are not mindful of these rules, bad things may happen.

Probability gives ridiculous people the opportunity to reduce events to numbers, then translate these numbers into laws and regulations.

Ever since I started thinking about probability I haven’t been able to get one sentence out of my head: this is flawed. The math behind probability is fun, easy to grasp if you have the right teacher, but is probability practical? Is it something that can be used to dictate the lives of people?

Examine this sentence: the chance of surviving a car crash improves by 30% when wearing a seatbelt. Let’s say the chance of surviving a car crash while wearing a seatbelt is 80%, that means 20% of the time I would not survive if I was in an accident. What’s wrong with what I just said? When speaking to a stats professor, he will explain to you it is not sufficient for you to flip a coin 10 or 20 or even 30 times to get that 50% probability figure. You must flip it a thousand times or more until you can be sure you have determined the correct probability of heads or tails for that coin.

Let’s apply that logic to surviving an accident. How many accidents am I going to be in throughout my entire life? What if that 20% of the time happens to be my first 10 accidents? (That’s a bit ridiculous given it is the chance of NOT surviving, but let’s stick with it just to see how ridiculous this is.) Now we have a problem. Unlike a coin, I don’t have the luxury of experiencing both outcomes indefinitely. This implies that given any accident I am in I may either survive, or I may not. It does not matter if it was a 90% chance of survival! As long as both outcomes are possible and can occur under reasonable circumstances (not 100%+/-0.0001%), what difference does it make to the one who just stepped outside their house that its 60-40, or 90-10?

There are obvious advantages to wearing seatbelts, especially for those with poor motor skills such as toddlers and young children. Seatbelts also provide peace of mind and a false sense of security. Making seatbelts mandatory on adult drivers? Airbags, for example, are another safety mechanism we find in vehicles. The harsh reality is, if the Canadian government truly cared about the safety of the public and their well-being and truly believed that airbags protect people’s lives, cars that are not equipped with airbags would have been banned from the streets long ago. How expensive would that be? Exactly my point. It is not about our safety, not out of concern for us, it is simply a way for them to shift the blame and shift responsibility. It all boils down to one thing: dollars and cents.

Probability isn’t Apple, it is safe to handle. But, as with anything taken for granted, we must be critical of it. It’s nice to be able to attach a number to anything, numbers are easy to understand, easy to manipulate. Numbers make nice pie charts and fancy curves. Putting your trust in numbers is like putting your trust in a piece of metal or cloth. It all amounts to nothing.

Check out the new page added.

I try to find logical arguments for both sides of a story. Sometimes I find myself in no man’s land because at times that is best. Other times I find myself partial to one side. Then as time goes on that changes to being heavily biased or the complete opposite.

The story of Apple. Truly a company that has done wonders. Not in it’s technological advances, certainly many before have accomplished something very similar, but in it’s tactics in increasing market share and hijacking customers and building a huge fan-base. No one even comes close to the strides Apple has made there. Their strategy wasn’t very complex at all:

• give the users something nice to look at
• give the users choices, but not too many choices
• give the users freedom, but not too much freedom
• give the users belief that they have the best, then release something better

Few can blame Apple for this. How many companies have this much control over so many people? None. When you are in a position like this, what do you do? You milk it for all it’s worth. As a smart business man you realize that what goes up must come down. In Apple’s position you want to make enemies. Enemies unwittingly produce allies. Not any sort of allies. The sort of strong, strongly opinionated ones that believe they have their own reasons for their decisions, unlike the others.

Ethically speaking, you can argue Apple’s tactics are disgusting. Things like purposely disabling features to await a future release of a product. Or handicapping older hardware to highlight advantages of owning the latest model. Or cutting corners during the manufacturing process to maximize profits. Or have the confidence that you can charge customers whatever you desire, knowing that they will buy in regardless.

How many people would buy the exact same laptop twice, or three times? What if you were to release a laptop without video output or a DVD drive, and then release one later on that has video output, then one yet again with both? Given enough time, the dedicated consumers will eventually buy all three.

Eventually users will catch on. How long will it take? Who knows. People can’t be stupid forever.. or can they.

If you are looking for a solution, head to the end of this article.

With the coming of Vista Microsoft decided it was time for them to rewrite the networking layer in the Windows operating system. Like it or not, what networking started out as being in the days of Windows 3.11 has changed drastically. Unfortunately, the new implementation is not perfect and that is easily justifiable.

Rather than explore the boring details we will jump to those that are responsible for millions of gray hair strands all over the IT world. The first being Receive Window Auto-Tuning. In previous versions of Windows, the TCP Receive Window (RWIN) was a constant you set it once and live with it regardless of your connection speed fluctuations. Now you are asking, what the heck is RWIN? In one sentence, it is the amount of packet data that can be transmitted to the receiver without waiting for acknowledgment. If you aren’t familiar with TCP, every packet sent must be acknowledged by the receiver. As packets are acknowledged they are removed from the receive window and new packets are loaded and transmitted.

An example to explain RWIN and its impact on bandwidth: Imagine the receiver is far away and I need to send him a 1000KB file. Let’s say RWIN is 10KB, and I, being the sender, can transmit 10KB in 10ms. It takes the receiver 20ms to receive 10KB. I initiate the sending and it takes me 10ms to saturate the receive window. Now I am waiting for the receiver to acknowledge. Total time spent by the sender waiting is 30ms! And the process repeats until the entire file is transmitted. We can improve this it seems. Let us set RWIN to 30KB. Now it takes me 30ms to transmit 30KB. By the time I have sent the last packet, I am receiving acknowledgments for the first packets. I can continue transmitting constantly without delay until I am done!

The above example illustrates the importance of an appropriately configured RWIN. In an ideal world, the PC should keep track of multiple RWIN values. This is because every network is loaded differently, with varying capabilities and latencies. A proper networking implementation should keep track of all the paths it has been to and keep track of the ideal RWIN values for each. Of course this solution is not ideal (given infinite resources, the impossible becomes possible) and we have to resort to a single possible value for RWIN at any given time.

Windows XP’s implementation of RWIN was quite primitive. With Vista and 7, Microsoft have introduced an auto-tuning layer for optimizing RWIN based on delay and transmission quality and probably 100,000 other variables. The good? Terrific for large high-latency WANs and local area networks. The bad? There is a “setting period” for autotuning. Beyond this setting period it remains somewhat permanent, until something drastically changes or traffic increases to one particular destination. This leads to strange behaviour at times, with data transmitting very quickly and poorly. To explain this one needs to examine the network packets with autotuning enabled/disabled (this is explained later).

Open up a command shell (Start > Run > cmd or Windows Key+R > cmd) and let’s take a look at your TCP settings:

C:\>netsh int tcp show global

netsh is the network shell, it contains almost every network setting one can imagine. The parameter we are interested in is “Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level”. It is probably set to “normal”. You can experiment with four possible values:

• normal
• highlyrestricted
• experimental
• disabled

To set it to one of the above values:

C:\>netsh int tcp set global autotuning=disabled

Check the globals again to make sure it has set. If you see a message at the bottom with something about heuristics it means the value is being overridden. To disable heuristics:

C:\>netsh int tcp set global heuristics=disabled

Upon modifying any TCP settings, a restart is required.

So when does this setting really matter? For the average user, it is probably just fine as it is. But if you use your PC as a server this might impact you significantly. The best way to determine what is best for your computer is to test systematically. And to really see autotuning at work, get a copy of Wireshark (PortableApp version recommended) and monitor those packets. Ideally you want to test local transfers and WAN transfers with access to both sender and receiver.

Everything in this article also applies to Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2.