See if you can get approval to for contracting with a uniform-supply company to furnish you and your staff with identical sets of snappy-looking jumpsuits. This will be met skeptically at first but eventually embraced by the group as they realize that: 1) They no longer have to pay for "work clothes" 2) When they are crawling around tracing cables they are not ruining their work attire 3) They no longer have to worry about finding a clean shirt to go to work (assuming you contract with a service that also provides laundering) 4) They no longer have to think about what they're wearing.
I've always thought this would be a great plan for those in the IT trenches, probably since the first time I ruined a tie or pair of new pants crawling under a desk or behind a server rack 20 years ago.
When deploying an 802.1x WLAN infrastructure, the way I provide more bandwidth for an increasing user population is to add access points to my topology. This allows for fewer users per access point, which provides the users with more effective bandwidth. An ancillary benefit is my topology tends to have more fault tolerance with lower degradation in the event of a node failure.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but can you explain how this principle would not work for a cellular data provider's network? Would adding more cells not yield similar benefits?
If the principles are roughly the same, then I would contend that providers may address the challenges of serving more bandwidth over limited spectrum by adding more cells (which granted means they are making a substantial capital investment in their network infrastructure).
I have two children two years apart, in the public school system in the northeast US. Our school district is rated fairly well for the state, better than most but not as good as some.
Now that the context is established, let me say that I have been shocked and somewhat dismayed to see the annual changes to curriculum and approach at the elementary school. While I do understand that gains have been made in understanding childhood development and education, I really struggle to understand this constant churn from year to year. The students struggle with it as well. This is particularly noticeable in basic approaches to reading, spelling, and math. As an example, one year the focus will be on memorizing a list of 10 words, spelling them, and using them in sentences. The next year, the spelling quizzes are gone completely. Maybe this is a response to the standardized testing regimen that all schools are focusing on, but I have a tough time not feeling like this is some kind of ill-considered trend-chasing experiment and our communities' children are the unwitting guinea pigs.
While I'm in rant mode let me also express my surprise to find that precious little time is being spent on learning basic math facts. These children are being exposed to grouping, estimating, while they still don't know their basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division tables. Having these facts committed to memory up front will save them a lot of time and effort down the road when they are trying to digest weightier subject matter. (Before you jump all over me, yes as a parent I have worked with my offspring to get them to know their math facts) Rote memorization may be boring, but it too is a skill that must be learned and why not learn it early on in the same way that's worked for at least the past 200 years? It's *not* broken!
OK so now that the rant is over - yes, caching is good and should be encouraged. Even if the texts are changing daily or weekly and being served "from the cloud" - there are still major performance gains and efficiencies to be found on the network with a little simple cache engine.
Using a service-provider configured, jail-breakable device for financial transactions...
Malware is already an issue on smart phones. Also, I guarantee that this "service" is not free. Everyone involved in the transaction is going to charge something. 3% to ATT or Verizon, 3% to the payer's bank, 3% to the recipient's bank, probably another 3% to some service provider/clearing house vendor, plus complete gov't visibility which means that all taxes are guaranteed to be charged.
Yes, this may be simplified to the point where it's as easy as pulling $1.00 bill out of your pocket to buy your gum, but that $1.00 item is going to double in price to cover all the incidental charges.
Call me a luddite, but I'm perfectly happy to stick with cash.
Time to start placing bets on which will come first:
-LHC discovers Higgs boson particle
-Duke Nukem Forever ships
If the world has an apocolypse-level event like a new ice-age, or Mayan calendar doom, etc. it's considered a push and I get to keep the pot.
The reason I am canceling cable TV soon is because the service is mediocre and the price is NOT reasonable.
And this is why the ISPs are in the process of putting caps on your utilization. Their business model is heavily invested in making sure they have nice predictable recurring revenue from you every month. They are going to get that money one way or the other.
But I have to wonder what the endurance is for this thing. TFA describes the requirements as:
1. Demonstrate precision hover flight within a virtual two-meter diameter sphere for one minute.
2. Demonstrate hover stability in a wind gust flight which required the aircraft to hover and tolerate a two-meter per second (five miles per hour) wind gust from the side, without drifting downwind more than one meter.
3. Demonstrate a continuous hover endurance of eight minutes with no external power source.
4. Fly and demonstrate controlled, transition flight from hover to 11 miles per hour fast forward flight and back to hover flight.
5. Demonstrate flying from outdoors to indoors, and back outdoors through a normal-size doorway.
6. Demonstrate flying indoors âheads-downâ(TM) where the pilot operates the aircraft only looking at the live video image stream from the aircraft, without looking at or hearing the aircraft directly.
7. Fly the aircraft in hover and fast forward flight with bird-shaped body and bird-shaped wings.
Based on the current crop of micro RC helicopters, I'd be surprised if this gizmo has enough battery life for more than 10-15 minutes of flight. Any real-world James Bond types out there care to chime in as to whether this is going to be sufficient to support a real-world mission?
Sounds like it would be a lot of fun for messing with coworkers in the cube farm though.
OK so technically you could get a permit, but you have to wonder if prisons are relying on cellular for official communications at this point. It's become so cheap and prevalent - cellular is replacing radio for a lot of field operations comms requirements these days. (No I can't cite anything beyond what I see at my own job where some of the field crews are cellphone only at this point.) Anyway, if that is the case and prisons are using cellular for their own comms - jamming the prisoner comms becomes problematic and probably creates a safety issue for employees.
So instead of taking the time to ponder the discussion and contribute to it in a positive manner, or maybe do a little searching and come up with some new information to add to the conversation you're going to play the pauper and beg for karma points so you can get a good grade? That's really not how things work here. If you add to the conversation, you'll get modded up.
Karma whoring is lower than trolling. I wish I had a mod point to reward you accordingly. Someone please nuke this creep from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
Do you have source material for these statistics? I'm actually not being a pedantic jerk, but I am interested in this and would like to get more info. Yes I has the Google, but I don't think I've seen the material you're referencing.
About an order of magnitude more expensive too... (My 2 cents, ymmv, etc.) I'm curious as to see if HP is going to snap up a couple other "security" companies so HP can be a "security company" like Intel with McAfee, EMC with RSA, and IBM with ISS? What's the price tag on Symantec these days?
If you're going to bring up Hancock, please allow me to mention Simon. Paul Simon that is - who of course predicted this technique back in 1986 in "The Boy in the Bubble."
Need some reminding, "These are the days of lasers in the jungle, Lasers in the jungle somewhere, Staccato signals of constant information"
OK so this is a poor attempt at humor. Couldn't help it - as soon as I read TFA, I got this stupid song ripping through my head.
to say that I flee our new robotic overlords! I figure that this can only mean that both the Mayans and John Cameron were partially correct. The end of days will happen in December 2012 like the Mayans predicted, but it will be due to Skynet achieving self awareness, not any kind of cosmic alignment. I have to admit it is sort of sad to see that mankind will be hunted down by terminators constructed from small Danish building blocks, and not the cool steel cyborgs depicted in the films.
Printed newspapers, while not quite dead yet, certainly appear to be at risk for extinction in my lifetime due to the Internet. Many of the local and regional papers have closed, and the ones that remain are slim shadows of what they were just a couple years ago. (USian perspective, your global village mileage may vary). Vinyl records remain, but (my opinion, I may be wrong) this is a niche medium for some audiophile cranks and collector and has been entirely surpassed by CD, DVD, and MP3. Verging on being pedantic, but 78 records, 8-track tapes, Betamax, regular cassette tapes, 8mm home movie cameras, all of these technologies are essentially dead. OK, so these are incarnations of media, not media types per se.
I'd also suggest that a number of service oriented industries are also taking a severe pounding and may eventually go away entirely - businesses like video rental stores, travel agencies and insurance agencies spring to mind.
Question: What is your process to determine that every computer you've ever owned has never been compromised by malware? Are you doing some kind of checksum on system function and monitoring each inbound and outbound network packet? Not all malware generates a big red flashing skull on your screen. The malware that operates quietly and gives no indication you have a problem is the stuff you need to worry about. Malware frequently actively attacks anti-virus software on top of this; leading to an increasing frequent discussion with users or level 1 support folk along the lines of "what do you mean this machine is infected, the AV didn't pick anything up!" We find these surreptitious infections through layers upon layers of analysis, with many tools watching what's going on. I don't think you can make that kind of definitive statement even if you are running AV software.
The government has had this technology for years. They use these dental implants to send auditory signals to the populace while people are asleep. It's all part of the one-world government conspiracy. Many of the so-called paranoid schizophrenics are really just people who don't tolerate the subconscious aural programming very well. Take a look outside your window for the black helicopter before you mod me down. I'm the guy leaning out the back with the parabolic microphone, waving at you.
I am the last person to defend the Chinese government - but I read the article and it is not too clear on how they determined that the source is actually the Chinese government? Is it all based on the fact that the traffic is coming from certain IP addresses or is there (hopefully) more than just that to support the conclusion. Not advocating anyone trying to hack google, but if they did - pwning some unpatched pirated copy of Windows in China to use as a launching point wouldn't exactly be the worst approach to keep the heat from finding whoever was doing it.
So does this mean that since my job requires me to carry a cell phone that my insurance rates will be going up? If I leave my job, will I be ineligible for future insurance coverage?
On another topic, I notice in TFA that they reference using a headset instead of talking on the phone. So does this mean that Blue Tooth (which is in the 2.4 GHz range) has less of a health impact than the cellular radio? Here's a hint, Microwaves are in that magical 2.4 GHz range that is shared by WiFi and Blue Tooth. If I had to pick which antenna I'd rather have next to my head, it's probably not the same one that I use to warm my coffee and make popcorn.
Instead of the headlines from the congress types and the opaque denials from the telecomm industry, is there any actual independent science on this? (There probably, is but I am far too lazy to Google).
If you're *that* concerned, consider establishing and IPSEC tunnel across your WLAN. Yes, you will have additional headaches with this, more software, more configuration, and likely more hardware too. However IPSEC tunnel trumps all of the above in my opinion, and should hold up longer than WPA2/CCMP (aka WPA/AES). You could maybe use SSL VPN, but I'm a bit of a paranoid curmudgeon and I've got some concerns about the longterm security of many SSL VPN implementations. This is purely my opinion, offered freely on/. so use your best judgment.
Additional thoughts to ponder on WiFi: 1) All your packets belong to Bob, as Bob has a card in monitor mode and he can pluck them from the air and write them to a cap file. Bob can keep your packets until there is a hole identified with your security. He might even share them with people who are more clever than he is and better able to crack them. 2) Your WiFi works because Bob doesn't feel like spending the time to DoS you right now. Bob isn't terribly 133t, but then he doesn't need 133tness to DoS you. 3) If you're really doing something that must remain confidential - maybe you shouldn't be doing it over wireless in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
See if you can get approval to for contracting with a uniform-supply company to furnish you and your staff with identical sets of snappy-looking jumpsuits. This will be met skeptically at first but eventually embraced by the group as they realize that:
1) They no longer have to pay for "work clothes"
2) When they are crawling around tracing cables they are not ruining their work attire
3) They no longer have to worry about finding a clean shirt to go to work (assuming you contract with a service that also provides laundering)
4) They no longer have to think about what they're wearing.
I've always thought this would be a great plan for those in the IT trenches, probably since the first time I ruined a tie or pair of new pants crawling under a desk or behind a server rack 20 years ago.
When deploying an 802.1x WLAN infrastructure, the way I provide more bandwidth for an increasing user population is to add access points to my topology. This allows for fewer users per access point, which provides the users with more effective bandwidth. An ancillary benefit is my topology tends to have more fault tolerance with lower degradation in the event of a node failure.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but can you explain how this principle would not work for a cellular data provider's network? Would adding more cells not yield similar benefits?
If the principles are roughly the same, then I would contend that providers may address the challenges of serving more bandwidth over limited spectrum by adding more cells (which granted means they are making a substantial capital investment in their network infrastructure).
I have two children two years apart, in the public school system in the northeast US. Our school district is rated fairly well for the state, better than most but not as good as some.
Now that the context is established, let me say that I have been shocked and somewhat dismayed to see the annual changes to curriculum and approach at the elementary school. While I do understand that gains have been made in understanding childhood development and education, I really struggle to understand this constant churn from year to year. The students struggle with it as well. This is particularly noticeable in basic approaches to reading, spelling, and math. As an example, one year the focus will be on memorizing a list of 10 words, spelling them, and using them in sentences. The next year, the spelling quizzes are gone completely. Maybe this is a response to the standardized testing regimen that all schools are focusing on, but I have a tough time not feeling like this is some kind of ill-considered trend-chasing experiment and our communities' children are the unwitting guinea pigs.
While I'm in rant mode let me also express my surprise to find that precious little time is being spent on learning basic math facts. These children are being exposed to grouping, estimating, while they still don't know their basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division tables. Having these facts committed to memory up front will save them a lot of time and effort down the road when they are trying to digest weightier subject matter. (Before you jump all over me, yes as a parent I have worked with my offspring to get them to know their math facts) Rote memorization may be boring, but it too is a skill that must be learned and why not learn it early on in the same way that's worked for at least the past 200 years? It's *not* broken!
OK so now that the rant is over - yes, caching is good and should be encouraged. Even if the texts are changing daily or weekly and being served "from the cloud" - there are still major performance gains and efficiencies to be found on the network with a little simple cache engine.
Using a service-provider configured, jail-breakable device for financial transactions... Malware is already an issue on smart phones. Also, I guarantee that this "service" is not free. Everyone involved in the transaction is going to charge something. 3% to ATT or Verizon, 3% to the payer's bank, 3% to the recipient's bank, probably another 3% to some service provider/clearing house vendor, plus complete gov't visibility which means that all taxes are guaranteed to be charged. Yes, this may be simplified to the point where it's as easy as pulling $1.00 bill out of your pocket to buy your gum, but that $1.00 item is going to double in price to cover all the incidental charges. Call me a luddite, but I'm perfectly happy to stick with cash.
Mmmm Soylent Green...........
Excellent - a great new vector for MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) - you may know this better as "flesh-eating bacteria"
Mega Maid is indeed the correct solution to this problem. Get me President Skroob at once!
Time to start placing bets on which will come first: -LHC discovers Higgs boson particle -Duke Nukem Forever ships If the world has an apocolypse-level event like a new ice-age, or Mayan calendar doom, etc. it's considered a push and I get to keep the pot.
The reason I am canceling cable TV soon is because the service is mediocre and the price is NOT reasonable.
And this is why the ISPs are in the process of putting caps on your utilization. Their business model is heavily invested in making sure they have nice predictable recurring revenue from you every month. They are going to get that money one way or the other.
Based on the current crop of micro RC helicopters, I'd be surprised if this gizmo has enough battery life for more than 10-15 minutes of flight. Any real-world James Bond types out there care to chime in as to whether this is going to be sufficient to support a real-world mission?
Sounds like it would be a lot of fun for messing with coworkers in the cube farm though.
Use a jammer, go to jail. Ironic isn't it. http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/index.htm?job=operations_2&id=cellular
OK so technically you could get a permit, but you have to wonder if prisons are relying on cellular for official communications at this point. It's become so cheap and prevalent - cellular is replacing radio for a lot of field operations comms requirements these days. (No I can't cite anything beyond what I see at my own job where some of the field crews are cellphone only at this point.) Anyway, if that is the case and prisons are using cellular for their own comms - jamming the prisoner comms becomes problematic and probably creates a safety issue for employees.
An on-topic, and insightful first post? Are you new here? Well done, nonetheless!
So instead of taking the time to ponder the discussion and contribute to it in a positive manner, or maybe do a little searching and come up with some new information to add to the conversation you're going to play the pauper and beg for karma points so you can get a good grade? That's really not how things work here. If you add to the conversation, you'll get modded up.
Karma whoring is lower than trolling. I wish I had a mod point to reward you accordingly. Someone please nuke this creep from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
Do you have source material for these statistics? I'm actually not being a pedantic jerk, but I am interested in this and would like to get more info. Yes I has the Google, but I don't think I've seen the material you're referencing.
About an order of magnitude more expensive too... (My 2 cents, ymmv, etc.) I'm curious as to see if HP is going to snap up a couple other "security" companies so HP can be a "security company" like Intel with McAfee, EMC with RSA, and IBM with ISS? What's the price tag on Symantec these days?
If you're going to bring up Hancock, please allow me to mention Simon. Paul Simon that is - who of course predicted this technique back in 1986 in "The Boy in the Bubble."
Need some reminding,
"These are the days of lasers in the jungle,
Lasers in the jungle somewhere,
Staccato signals of constant information"
OK so this is a poor attempt at humor. Couldn't help it - as soon as I read TFA, I got this stupid song ripping through my head.
to say that I flee our new robotic overlords! I figure that this can only mean that both the Mayans and John Cameron were partially correct. The end of days will happen in December 2012 like the Mayans predicted, but it will be due to Skynet achieving self awareness, not any kind of cosmic alignment. I have to admit it is sort of sad to see that mankind will be hunted down by terminators constructed from small Danish building blocks, and not the cool steel cyborgs depicted in the films.
We've got armadillos in our trousers! (Armadillos in danger of extinction? I doubt it, though they are leprous little buggers... http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1306/is-it-true-that-armadillos-carry-leprosy
Printed newspapers, while not quite dead yet, certainly appear to be at risk for extinction in my lifetime due to the Internet. Many of the local and regional papers have closed, and the ones that remain are slim shadows of what they were just a couple years ago. (USian perspective, your global village mileage may vary). Vinyl records remain, but (my opinion, I may be wrong) this is a niche medium for some audiophile cranks and collector and has been entirely surpassed by CD, DVD, and MP3. Verging on being pedantic, but 78 records, 8-track tapes, Betamax, regular cassette tapes, 8mm home movie cameras, all of these technologies are essentially dead. OK, so these are incarnations of media, not media types per se.
I'd also suggest that a number of service oriented industries are also taking a severe pounding and may eventually go away entirely - businesses like video rental stores, travel agencies and insurance agencies spring to mind.
Question: What is your process to determine that every computer you've ever owned has never been compromised by malware? Are you doing some kind of checksum on system function and monitoring each inbound and outbound network packet? Not all malware generates a big red flashing skull on your screen. The malware that operates quietly and gives no indication you have a problem is the stuff you need to worry about. Malware frequently actively attacks anti-virus software on top of this; leading to an increasing frequent discussion with users or level 1 support folk along the lines of "what do you mean this machine is infected, the AV didn't pick anything up!" We find these surreptitious infections through layers upon layers of analysis, with many tools watching what's going on. I don't think you can make that kind of definitive statement even if you are running AV software.
Nothing unusual with Oracle killing the fun.
The government has had this technology for years. They use these dental implants to send auditory signals to the populace while people are asleep. It's all part of the one-world government conspiracy. Many of the so-called paranoid schizophrenics are really just people who don't tolerate the subconscious aural programming very well. Take a look outside your window for the black helicopter before you mod me down. I'm the guy leaning out the back with the parabolic microphone, waving at you.
I am the last person to defend the Chinese government - but I read the article and it is not too clear on how they determined that the source is actually the Chinese government? Is it all based on the fact that the traffic is coming from certain IP addresses or is there (hopefully) more than just that to support the conclusion. Not advocating anyone trying to hack google, but if they did - pwning some unpatched pirated copy of Windows in China to use as a launching point wouldn't exactly be the worst approach to keep the heat from finding whoever was doing it.
So does this mean that since my job requires me to carry a cell phone that my insurance rates will be going up? If I leave my job, will I be ineligible for future insurance coverage?
On another topic, I notice in TFA that they reference using a headset instead of talking on the phone. So does this mean that Blue Tooth (which is in the 2.4 GHz range) has less of a health impact than the cellular radio? Here's a hint, Microwaves are in that magical 2.4 GHz range that is shared by WiFi and Blue Tooth. If I had to pick which antenna I'd rather have next to my head, it's probably not the same one that I use to warm my coffee and make popcorn.
Instead of the headlines from the congress types and the opaque denials from the telecomm industry, is there any actual independent science on this? (There probably, is but I am far too lazy to Google).
If you're *that* concerned, consider establishing and IPSEC tunnel across your WLAN. Yes, you will have additional headaches with this, more software, more configuration, and likely more hardware too. However IPSEC tunnel trumps all of the above in my opinion, and should hold up longer than WPA2/CCMP (aka WPA/AES). You could maybe use SSL VPN, but I'm a bit of a paranoid curmudgeon and I've got some concerns about the longterm security of many SSL VPN implementations. This is purely my opinion, offered freely on /. so use your best judgment.
Additional thoughts to ponder on WiFi:
1) All your packets belong to Bob, as Bob has a card in monitor mode and he can pluck them from the air and write them to a cap file. Bob can keep your packets until there is a hole identified with your security. He might even share them with people who are more clever than he is and better able to crack them.
2) Your WiFi works because Bob doesn't feel like spending the time to DoS you right now. Bob isn't terribly 133t, but then he doesn't need 133tness to DoS you.
3) If you're really doing something that must remain confidential - maybe you shouldn't be doing it over wireless in the first place.