Hell, I took the day off from school to a) work on my car and b) watch the launch. I sat for a good sixty minutes watching the screen in total disbelief as did 5 of my friends. I'd like to know how this guy arrived at that statement. If he didn't do any major grunt work in tracking down who did and did not see it and is just "guessing" based on the coverage of CNN at the time then the guys a tard.
We had a customers Gateway machine that often did that exact same thing. Machine would refuse to boot or crash at the BIOS with invalid memory errors. Swapping the outlet to a plug across the room would cause the machine to boot just fine and stay running for months on end. Even moving the plug back to the original outlet would be fine for a while. The kicker is, it wasn't just the computer. Plugging in his palm would cause the palm to reset while sync'ing and glitch during regular use.
Our Fluke meter showed nothing special on the line and an APC UPS showed no spikes nor higher than normal voltage levels.
To this day we call it the haunted outlet and tend to just keep things away from it.
I have to agree, whats the big deal? Hell I ran a 20MB WD drive one afternoon with *no* cover on it what so ever and the damm thing worked just fine for about 4 1/2 hours then started developing a nasty little 'tick tick tick' that I can't say wasn't just the fact the drive was ancient and was dying anyways.
Every system I get I've installed the "base" set of applications, antivirus, patches and so forth and then ghosted a working configuration to an external drive. A base XP will take about 4-6 gigs of storage compressed which sits on your external drive until you need it. I've ghosted my Win2k3 machine and my linux machine all to my external drive.
When (not if) the machine goes south as it did when I was testing the various beta's of Visual Studio, I backed up my important source files and ghost loaded back over my machine. From a screwed up install to a fully working copy of Windows in 11 minutes I call pretty good. Six minutes for my laptop is all it takes.
So when your XP install becomes sluggish, backup the important files, ghost, and spend an hour or two downloading up-to-date patches and installing your new apps.
Once you've done it 20-30 times (over a 3 year period, all from testing software) it's like drinking coffee.
Can't we just go the ultra-silly route and have the spyware companys make EULA's that claim that spyware manufacturer's are not allow to use, download, discuss or benchmark their spyware program without first getting written permission from the anti-spyware maker? This way, RetroCoder would be violating the EULA of the spyware detection developer by installing and discovering that the spyware detection program "finds" their spyware.
Then we can build caged arena's where two men enter...one man leaves. Seem's an easier way to resolve these issues.
Years ago, while working on a project for a medical firm, I found out first hand just how horrible things can go wrong with what we eventually agreed was a "bug" but was more of a "human bug" issue that made me sit up and realize that it's not just programmers who will use our programs.
Without getting to detailed, the end users were allowing certain conditions to go unchecked as the software was telling them it was "OK". There was a rather neat explosion (read, small) that hurt nobody and damaged some equipment because instead of being "OK" it was telling the operator that there was exactly "ZERO K" of space available for data storage on a recording device and the test needed to be shutdown.
Now, the operators were told that when the counter got low the would see a warning and be told to stop the tests so, was it a bug, was it my assumption that these 11.95/hour service techs would "understand" what "0K" means from "OK" (that's a zero(0) and an O there)? Either way, there was some damage, we had a bit of a laugh, but at least nobody got irradiated and died.
A very bizarre thing for Microsoft to do. They just bought Frontbridge, a spam blocking service. Now, they are going after a major number of spammers to, if I get this straight, stop them, thereby lessing the need (and I mean maybe a.01% lessen) for their brand new service to block spam.
A 9.2 on the 'hey I'm bored lets do something fun' scale but minus several hundred on the 'how will this affect our other businesses' scale.
Well, the debate is now over. In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. If that's not the case, then IntelliSense will try to correct what you're typing by using something that has been defined, and which is probably just plain wrong.
I wonder, if in all of that typing, at any point, this guy was ever taught, or even poked around the Tools->Preferences option to discover that you can, with about 9 mouse clicks...turn off intellisense.
And it's still rather easy to write detailed and if need be complex applications without intellisense.
And I dont quite get the, if I have a local variable called id that I reference VS will attempt to show me something similar to it. Mine doesn't. If I dont declare a variable 'id', then it wont appear in my method member list, simple. Intellisense has yet to 'try to correct me'.
Rather good timing that last night on "24" we see Cisco's name all over the screen's at the CTU command center and the actress works in the line "the Cisco network is defending itself" followed immediately by an Alienware laptop on the screen.
Just in time for major articles about how bad Cisco's security was that they had some source code stolen./golfclap foxtv
And people wonder why I don't watch television. Sad..just sad.
Troll bait this if you must but, I'm still amazed that people care about TV shows so much that a product like Tivo was even invented. And before I hear a "practice what you preach" cry, I have no TV, just a cable modem, my systems, a radio and everything else I have on dvd.
Thats not to say I dont occasionally watch tv, basically for the new battlestar galactica and a few simpsons episodes.
When I read (mainly on slashdot) what the TV companys are trying to do in controlling basically every aspect of our lives via tape recording flags, HD signals and a never ending onslaught of these fucking ads it saddens me.
You want to really be "the people" and make voices be heard? Turn off the tv's. Get your news from newspapers and screw the rest of it./rant off
I started using a feature that WatchGuard has on their website called ClickAware within 2-3 days of our big "security" speech at some of our clients.
We spent 4 hours discussing spyware, attachment best practices, viruses, adaware, malicious sites and policys on installing web apps.
Shortly afterwards, using the ClickAware site, we send out fake e-mail with ( my personal favorite ) the "Install this Microsoft Patch" message with a phantom 241K attachment.
I can then view the click rate and then match the click's to the internal IP browsing logs to see who's been a bad boy/girl/it.
I'm stunned most of the time when not but 3 days after a rather lengthy, yet energetic, discussion, some 70% of the people ( of 122 e-mails ) actually clicked on the phantom attachment and saw the "If this was real you would be in trouble" message.
As the subject says, I feel like I am wasting my time in performing these security meetings but hell, I'm getting paid for it.
I know there will be the obligatory ( you must suck as a teacher then ) comments but it would be good to see if anyone else has experienced the same thing after doing security discussions with their employees.
But, you, they're allowed to. They're their own rules. They can make rules, and change rules, and ignore rules as they see fit.
Following that thought, I don't see how anyone could complain about Microsoft ever again.
This of course coming from the company who decided to put "do not be an evil company" in their SEC filing. It's good to see hypocrisy in action, even in a so called "nice company" like google.
When my friend calls my Verizon cell phone from France using Skype I get 000-123-4567[89] as the caller ID on my cell...other than that it's the only way I can tell it's him
I typically get 000-000-0000 on my cell once a month or so, answering the call makes a really cool 'beep' sound so either I'm being tracked by forces unknown or Sirius Cybernetics works for Verizon.
The NTRS is based on random telephone survey of 1,001 U.S. adults. The survey was administered during December 1998 and January 1999. A total of 52% of respondents are female and 48% are male.
A 1999 survey making news in 2005? Wtg cnn, way to keep up with the times.
NEWS FLASH ---------- Homes with "low security" can be broken into.
If your home has "low security" as a default option such as an unlocked window or a door that does not have adaquate protection, people can break into them and steal all of your nice stuff.
I dont get it. Microsoft builds the OS. Builds it in such a bad manner that literally hundreds of flaws are left in it, then...goes and buys a company that made a program to protect against their own OS and uses it?
With the programming team at microsoft they couldn't just write their own and bundle it into the OS thereby knocking all other competing products out of the market?
I'm amazed someone at microsoft thought this was a good idea.
Back in the good ol'e days I was swayed with getting a new Atari 800 game as long as I wrote some kind of utility or application that did something new and neat each time.
It encouraged me to dig around through masses of 6502 Assembly books and Basic manuals to learn how to optimize code and use masses of DATA statements versus coding in 6502 Assembly.
The process started anew when I was introduced to my fathers PC-XT (with its 6.5 lb gun metal gray keyboard). I had to write programs first in DOS Basic and then learn the deft art of floppy swaps when I got my hands on the Lattice C86 Compiler.
To this day, I do the same thing with my friends kids. I asked them to write an application (it's hard to imagine a 13 year old writing in C/C++ but..) that does X, Y and Z and offer to help them if they get stuck. So far it's working great. Each time they write an app that works and properly debug and comment it (so we can see they didn't just rip code from an example site) they get rewarded.
These days the rewards are hard to come by as they know more torrent/apps sites than I do but we found a way with eq2 and warcraft. I will offer to pay for a 1 month card for them to use wow or eq2 in return for seeing some progress towards some app they are working on.
Now if only there was a 64-bit ASM programming book for teenagers out there....
It hurts my head to think down this level. There's plenty of examples to give where the same lack of understanding and ignorance would lead them into a ditch slowly filling in their car with sand but I'm to damm tired and frustrated after having removed fucking gator's calendar application from... a damm windows 2003 server because the ass clown admin thought it was neat.
These people are to damm stupid to use computers. I agree with the CIA guy; let them all take tests.
"I'm sorry, your too fucking stupid to use Internet A, you get to use the Short Bus Internet where your system will regularly crash and you'll have to call your local nine year old to come fix it for you, here's your pass"...
How about an addition to every article regarding servers as to what, if any, additional accessories that you would *think* the high end server providers would actually provide with new machines.
For example, I'm sitting at my desk now setting up a new *ell server with 3 SCSI drives from the factory. Now, the machine can hold 6 total drives yet, the physical pieces of plastic that hold the drives and attach them to the SCSI backplane are not in the machine. Now, I've know this is how *ell ships their servers but really, why should it take 8 phone calls to *ell to track down the right people to get those extra brackets. What if I needed a floppy in a server that didn't come with one? From *ell it's a crap-shoot trying to find one.
So, rants aside (to late), how well do providers backup their products with not just regular service issues but replacement parts and accessories and why on servers with hot-swap SCSI backplanes is it now become the standard to sell a machine bought with 3 drives that can hold 6 and simply not just "throw in" the 3 $4.95 plastic drive cases to hold more drives if I want to install them? (rant off again).
And if I sniff the data and see the packets then what exactly is the action against me? Does it mention any actions that can be brought against the capturer of the data or what happens if you remove the software?
Its 9:32 am my time and since 6:55 am I've been at 4 computers removing a combination of spyware on what we thought were fully patched (at least windows update and hfnetchk pro claims are fully patched) systems.
It's almost a daily event at our office, wake up, get to work, drink coffee, remove daily spyware....
This is one group of our population I would gladly invent a story about a giant goat about to eat earth just to get them the hell off.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I took the day off from school to a) work on my car and b) watch the launch. I sat for a good sixty minutes watching the screen in total disbelief as did 5 of my friends. I'd like to know how this guy arrived at that statement. If he didn't do any major grunt work in tracking down who did and did not see it and is just "guessing" based on the coverage of CNN at the time then the guys a tard.
Didn't need a billion page analysis to point out that horrible fact.
We had a customers Gateway machine that often did that exact same thing. Machine would refuse to boot or crash at the BIOS with invalid memory errors. Swapping the outlet to a plug across the room would cause the machine to boot just fine and stay running for months on end. Even moving the plug back to the original outlet would be fine for a while. The kicker is, it wasn't just the computer. Plugging in his palm would cause the palm to reset while sync'ing and glitch during regular use.
Our Fluke meter showed nothing special on the line and an APC UPS showed no spikes nor higher than normal voltage levels.
To this day we call it the haunted outlet and tend to just keep things away from it.
But can I earn some extra cash by providing counseling to neurotic elevators? What if they decide to experiment by going sideways for a while?
I have to agree, whats the big deal? Hell I ran a 20MB WD drive one afternoon with *no* cover on it what so ever and the damm thing worked just fine for about 4 1/2 hours then started developing a nasty little 'tick tick tick' that I can't say wasn't just the fact the drive was ancient and was dying anyways.
Every system I get I've installed the "base" set of applications, antivirus, patches and so forth and then ghosted a working configuration to an external drive. A base XP will take about 4-6 gigs of storage compressed which sits on your external drive until you need it. I've ghosted my Win2k3 machine and my linux machine all to my external drive.
When (not if) the machine goes south as it did when I was testing the various beta's of Visual Studio, I backed up my important source files and ghost loaded back over my machine. From a screwed up install to a fully working copy of Windows in 11 minutes I call pretty good. Six minutes for my laptop is all it takes.
So when your XP install becomes sluggish, backup the important files, ghost, and spend an hour or two downloading up-to-date patches and installing your new apps.
Once you've done it 20-30 times (over a 3 year period, all from testing software) it's like drinking coffee.
Can't we just go the ultra-silly route and have the spyware companys make EULA's that claim that spyware manufacturer's are not allow to use, download, discuss or benchmark their spyware program without first getting written permission from the anti-spyware maker? This way, RetroCoder would be violating the EULA of the spyware detection developer by installing and discovering that the spyware detection program "finds" their spyware.
Then we can build caged arena's where two men enter...one man leaves. Seem's an easier way to resolve these issues.
Years ago, while working on a project for a medical firm, I found out first hand just how horrible things can go wrong with what we eventually agreed was a "bug" but was more of a "human bug" issue that made me sit up and realize that it's not just programmers who will use our programs.
Without getting to detailed, the end users were allowing certain conditions to go unchecked as the software was telling them it was "OK". There was a rather neat explosion (read, small) that hurt nobody and damaged some equipment because instead of being "OK" it was telling the operator that there was exactly "ZERO K" of space available for data storage on a recording device and the test needed to be shutdown.
Now, the operators were told that when the counter got low the would see a warning and be told to stop the tests so, was it a bug, was it my assumption that these 11.95/hour service techs would "understand" what "0K" means from "OK" (that's a zero(0) and an O there)? Either way, there was some damage, we had a bit of a laugh, but at least nobody got irradiated and died.
A very bizarre thing for Microsoft to do. They just bought Frontbridge, a spam blocking service. Now, they are going after a major number of spammers to, if I get this straight, stop them, thereby lessing the need (and I mean maybe a .01% lessen) for their brand new service to block spam.
A 9.2 on the 'hey I'm bored lets do something fun' scale but minus several hundred on the 'how will this affect our other businesses' scale.
Well, the debate is now over. In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. If that's not the case, then IntelliSense will try to correct what you're typing by using something that has been defined, and which is probably just plain wrong.
I wonder, if in all of that typing, at any point, this guy was ever taught, or even poked around the Tools->Preferences option to discover that you can, with about 9 mouse clicks...turn off intellisense.
And it's still rather easy to write detailed and if need be complex applications without intellisense.
And I dont quite get the, if I have a local variable called id that I reference VS will attempt to show me something similar to it. Mine doesn't. If I dont declare a variable 'id', then it wont appear in my method member list, simple. Intellisense has yet to 'try to correct me'.
Rather good timing that last night on "24" we see Cisco's name all over the screen's at the CTU command center and the actress works in the line "the Cisco network is defending itself" followed immediately by an Alienware laptop on the screen.
/golfclap foxtv
Just in time for major articles about how bad Cisco's security was that they had some source code stolen.
And people wonder why I don't watch television. Sad..just sad.
I think we just found the next google competition, at least it's more fun to say than nigritude ultramarine.
Hey, if you click on the stats tracking URL you can see that IE is down to 60% and Firefox is up to 29.1% on that site.
http://extremetracking.com/open?login=madsenlg
Troll bait this if you must but, I'm still amazed that people care about TV shows so much that a product like Tivo was even invented. And before I hear a "practice what you preach" cry, I have no TV, just a cable modem, my systems, a radio and everything else I have on dvd.
/rant off
Thats not to say I dont occasionally watch tv, basically for the new battlestar galactica and a few simpsons episodes.
When I read (mainly on slashdot) what the TV companys are trying to do in controlling basically every aspect of our lives via tape recording flags, HD signals and a never ending onslaught of these fucking ads it saddens me.
You want to really be "the people" and make voices be heard? Turn off the tv's. Get your news from newspapers and screw the rest of it.
I started using a feature that WatchGuard has on their website called ClickAware within 2-3 days of our big "security" speech at some of our clients.
We spent 4 hours discussing spyware, attachment best practices, viruses, adaware, malicious sites and policys on installing web apps.
Shortly afterwards, using the ClickAware site, we send out fake e-mail with ( my personal favorite ) the "Install this Microsoft Patch" message with a phantom 241K attachment.
I can then view the click rate and then match the click's to the internal IP browsing logs to see who's been a bad boy/girl/it.
I'm stunned most of the time when not but 3 days after a rather lengthy, yet energetic, discussion, some 70% of the people ( of 122 e-mails ) actually clicked on the phantom attachment and saw the "If this was real you would be in trouble" message.
As the subject says, I feel like I am wasting my time in performing these security meetings but hell, I'm getting paid for it.
I know there will be the obligatory ( you must suck as a teacher then ) comments but it would be good to see if anyone else has experienced the same thing after doing security discussions with their employees.
Following that thought, I don't see how anyone could complain about Microsoft ever again.
This of course coming from the company who decided to put "do not be an evil company" in their SEC filing. It's good to see hypocrisy in action, even in a so called "nice company" like google.
It gives hope to us all.
When my friend calls my Verizon cell phone from France using Skype I get 000-123-4567[89] as the caller ID on my cell...other than that it's the only way I can tell it's him
I typically get 000-000-0000 on my cell once a month or so, answering the call makes a really cool 'beep' sound so either I'm being tracked by forces unknown or Sirius Cybernetics works for Verizon.
A 1999 survey making news in 2005? Wtg cnn, way to keep up with the times.
NEWS FLASH
----------
Homes with "low security" can be broken into.
If your home has "low security" as a default option such as an unlocked window or a door that does not have adaquate protection, people can break into them and steal all of your nice stuff.
Movie at 11.
I dont get it. Microsoft builds the OS. Builds it in such a bad manner that literally hundreds of flaws are left in it, then...goes and buys a company that made a program to protect against their own OS and uses it?
With the programming team at microsoft they couldn't just write their own and bundle it into the OS thereby knocking all other competing products out of the market?
I'm amazed someone at microsoft thought this was a good idea.
Back in the good ol'e days I was swayed with getting a new Atari 800 game as long as I wrote some kind of utility or application that did something new and neat each time.
It encouraged me to dig around through masses of 6502 Assembly books and Basic manuals to learn how to optimize code and use masses of DATA statements versus coding in 6502 Assembly.
The process started anew when I was introduced to my fathers PC-XT (with its 6.5 lb gun metal gray keyboard). I had to write programs first in DOS Basic and then learn the deft art of floppy swaps when I got my hands on the Lattice C86 Compiler.
To this day, I do the same thing with my friends kids. I asked them to write an application (it's hard to imagine a 13 year old writing in C/C++ but..) that does X, Y and Z and offer to help them if they get stuck. So far it's working great. Each time they write an app that works and properly debug and comment it (so we can see they didn't just rip code from an example site) they get rewarded.
These days the rewards are hard to come by as they know more torrent/apps sites than I do but we found a way with eq2 and warcraft. I will offer to pay for a 1 month card for them to use wow or eq2 in return for seeing some progress towards some app they are working on.
Now if only there was a 64-bit ASM programming book for teenagers out there....
It hurts my head to think down this level. There's plenty of examples to give where the same lack of understanding and ignorance would lead them into a ditch slowly filling in their car with sand but I'm to damm tired and frustrated after having removed fucking gator's calendar application from ... a damm windows 2003 server because the ass clown admin thought it was neat.
These people are to damm stupid to use computers. I agree with the CIA guy; let them all take tests.
"I'm sorry, your too fucking stupid to use Internet A, you get to use the Short Bus Internet where your system will regularly crash and you'll have to call your local nine year old to come fix it for you, here's your pass"...
How about an addition to every article regarding servers as to what, if any, additional accessories that you would *think* the high end server providers would actually provide with new machines.
For example, I'm sitting at my desk now setting up a new *ell server with 3 SCSI drives from the factory. Now, the machine can hold 6 total drives yet, the physical pieces of plastic that hold the drives and attach them to the SCSI backplane are not in the machine. Now, I've know this is how *ell ships their servers but really, why should it take 8 phone calls to *ell to track down the right people to get those extra brackets. What if I needed a floppy in a server that didn't come with one? From *ell it's a crap-shoot trying to find one.
So, rants aside (to late), how well do providers backup their products with not just regular service issues but replacement parts and accessories and why on servers with hot-swap SCSI backplanes is it now become the standard to sell a machine bought with 3 drives that can hold 6 and simply not just "throw in" the 3 $4.95 plastic drive cases to hold more drives if I want to install them? (rant off again).
And if I sniff the data and see the packets then what exactly is the action against me? Does it mention any actions that can be brought against the capturer of the data or what happens if you remove the software?
Its 9:32 am my time and since 6:55 am I've been at 4 computers removing a combination of spyware on what we thought were fully patched (at least windows update and hfnetchk pro claims are fully patched) systems.
It's almost a daily event at our office, wake up, get to work, drink coffee, remove daily spyware....
This is one group of our population I would gladly invent a story about a giant goat about to eat earth just to get them the hell off.