I have a cell, work, fax, and home number, but there are other people that share that home number. My family averages out to about 1.3 numbers per person.
Wow! I can't count! I counted 914 and 516, but I also counted 917 and 347 twice. I was reading them off the map while counting.
You're point about the definition of "NYC metro area" is well taken, so even 5 area codes for 8 million people is over the top.
No matter which way you slice it, the phone companies are not running out of numbers, they are mis-managing numbers. I think it simply is expensive for them to upgrade equipment in the local COs to be able to spread the numbers around more evenly. Someone crunched the numbers (I hope they did that at least) and found out it was less expensive to create whole new area codes and exchanges than to fix the existing ones.
Because they're running out of numbers, and need to use every one they can.
Incorrect. http://www.nanpa.com/pdf/NRUF/October_2005_NPA_Exh aust_Analysis.pdf Most area codes will not be exhausted for many years. The reason we are seeing new area codes is that it is easier to create new area codes for the cellular networks than to reassign existing area codes and exchanges. Most exchanges are not even full.
A single exchange contains 10,000 numbers and therefore an area code contains up to 10,000,000 numbers. There are about 25 cities in that world that have more than 10,000,000 people. http://www.citypopulation.de/World.html They might need two or three area codes. Even accounting for everyone (including children) in New York City (all five boroughs) to have a unique home and work phone, it would require 5 area codes. There are currently 9 area codes for NYC.
One of my biggest peaves with the whole VoIP 911 nonsense is that Vonage is simply trying to comply with the FCC regs, yet all (there are only a few left right?) the legacy telcos are spreading FUD about this like you don't see news stories about people calling 911 and getting disconnected or hung up on if they have Verizon. I have called 911 from a cell and had to be trasferred because the cell carrier needed to connect me with the State Police instead of the local cops nearest to the cell tower, or at least that's what the operator told me.
I don't see the VoIP 911 being any better or worse than cell phone 911.
Here is a pretty good article from BellSouth (ATT now?) with graphics that shows the basics of regular 911 vs cellular 911.
It's kinda sad how true this is. I've been a networking and security consultant for several years and most admins don't give a rats ass about "Disaster Recovery" (let alone backups) or "Business Continuity Planning" even though their jobs may depend on it. That is why people, like myself, are brought in to run audits and tell people how much it will cost them to keep (or get back) their network when a plane crashes into their building. I live in the NYC area, so everyone is acutely aware of the businesses that never came back.
What happens when the library does not have the book you want? Go to another? Bookstore? Still can't find it?
Donate your old books to the library or thrift store.
I'm a bad example for this type of thing, because I collect media of the dead tree, vinyl, tape, and round plastic sorts. I can guarantee that I have books that my local library does not.
I don't sign my cards, and I thank every cashier that asks to see my driver's license. I encourage them to do so in the hope that it will spread and they will do it for everyone.
In my area of NJ, all the libraries have free (to those that walk in) Internet access. I can't speak for the rest of the US.
At least one of the PBS stations broadcast something that looks like Adult Continuing Education classes during the wee hours of the morning (3 AM?). I have seen both physics and maths being taught. There are also several instructional foreign language shows on during the week.
I would love to see cooperatively developed open courseware available on the Internet. I think this is needed on all levels and not just at the University level.
Well, not really, because I travel quite a bit, but I only average being out of the house 3 days a week. I work from home, but I know that it takes a certain work ethic to actually avoid being on/. all day. I worked from home for about 3 years successfully before the last bubble burst. I just returned to it recently and thank God (and those crazy Wall Street types) for improving the job market enough to allow it.
"best person for the job" is a tough nut to crack. I'll give an example that is not uncommon in the US.
The job might require the person to speak on the phone a lot and therefore have a native command of the language. There goes all the recently imported talent. Another requirement might be that they live within a certain distance of the office for emergency on-call situations. If the demographics of the technically qualified local talent pool are 90% white, then what? Would the person then be racist for not hiring someone that was of hispanic descent and spoke English with a Spanish accent?
I think racism exists in the tech market as much as anywhere else. I have worked in so many diverse environments because my area of the US (NY/NJ) is so diverse. I have even had conversations with US-born Indian workers where they complain about all the off shore outsourcing to India. Their parents came to the US for a reason and they don't want all the jobs to go back to India. I've had a co-worker of hispanic descent bitch about the "damn Mexican cleaning crew stealing laptops". I've worked with black people from the Caribean and Africa that distance themselves from US born black people because they consider them to be lazy.
I'm not quite sure how this all ties in, but here it goes...
In the past, part of the whole "selling of statistics" deal with MLB had to do with the Players Association (MLBPA), in that, the MLBPA (and in some cases individual players) had to authorize the use of names associated with statistics. This was done because someone was making a profit selling the numbers, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Barry Bonds was one of the people that pulled their name from the authorized list a few years back. When you looked up fantasy baseball statistics, you saw SFOutfielder (or some such nonsense) instead of Barry Bonds.
There are other sources of baseball statistics such as Elias Sports Bureau, STATS, etc. They are not, AFAIK, officially licensed and authorized by MLB. I don't think any of them are any more error prone than MLB itself, so what's the difference?
The book in question has a PDF download option rather than ebook format. PDF is fairly ubiquitous as far as doc formats go.
That said, I prefer dead-tree reading for books. I have read two books electronically, one on my Treo and one published on the web. I had no problem reading either one, but I can see how people would find it difficult or inconvenient to do it.
I have to agree with this somewhat. I've worked in IT the NY/NJ/PA area for about 15 years. I have had my share of run-ins with both IT management and general company management.
I think that the financial industry is the toughest I have worked in. They are not underpaying for the talent in most cases, but employees are "indentured servants" at best. I had a CIO(!) once tell me that I did not understand the politics that go on behind the scenes, and that he would have to switch industries to get another job if he pissed off the wrong person at work. I find that hard to understand, considering that most of the execs that I knew in the financial companies hated each others guts and were perfectly happy having screaming matches in the halls and offices at work.
Sorta back on topic... It is not a pretty thing to see admins and coders abused for not giving "the extra effort to get the job done" when that means working 60 hours a week. Most of the Indian folks I have worked with are 1st generation Americans, so their parents had to go through most of the hoops to get here and not them. They act like everyone else in this area of the US and won't take crap from anyone unless their job is on the line, and sometimes even that won't stop them. The Indian immigrants that I have worked with have been on the opposite side of the fence. They would work crazy hours and almost would not dare to even disagree with an opinion at work.
I once worked for a medium sized company that was big into sponsoring coders from other countries. We had folks from China, India, and Russia. At the time, the best programmers in the place were from the US, but I was told by the VP of Operations (when I questioned the cost of sponsoship) that salary and sponsorhip of a foreign programmer with the equivalent of a MS in CS and a few years foreign work experience was roughly the cost of a US local with a BS in CS and a couple of years' experience. The sponsored coders were also tied to the company in a way that they could not seek a better paying job without some serious wrangling, and to many, the hassle is not worth it.
Really back on topic... I would think old coders would be worth more to industries that are tied to legacy systems that are simply not taught anymore. I worked on the network integration project for the Wachovia/First Union Bank merger. I was upgrading routers/switches in bank branches for a couple of months. It paid the bills during the spring of 2002, when there were no jobs to be had in NY/NJ. I went to a branch on the outskirts of Philly and started my normal procedure when I noticed there was a server running that was not on my work order to be transitioned. I called the NOC and asked if they had any info about it and was told that they had nothing. They asked me if I could check to see what it was running and get more info. The console was logged in (of course) but the monitor was off (anyone banking with Wachovia?) so I just started typing commands at the console to figure out what I was running. OS/2. The NOC told me they no longer supported OS/2. The bank manager indicated that they were never upgraded to the new teller systems, so this server was needed. This is where experience (being old enough) pays off. I had used OS/2 while working at another financial institution in 1992-3. I made my best guess to change the network settings and get it up and running on the new connection. Everything tested OK and the teller machines still worked.
The only way I know to do application tunneling is to use one of the commercial VPN products for PalmOS, MergicVPN http://www.mergic.com/ and AnthaVPN http://www.anthavpn.com/ (which used to be MovianVPN).
IANA developer, but from what I've read, the problems are with the fact that PalmOS was never really meant to be networked or multi-tasking. The old-new version of PalmOS, Cobalt, (which I don't think will ever be used on a treo) was supposed to have this solved with a ground up rebuild rumored to be based partially on BeOS. The new-new version of PalmOS will be some sort of PalmOS-on-Linux hybrid from PalmSource/Access.
I have been using a Palm/Handspring since the PalmIII. I have had each version of the Treo on Sprint (300,600,650) and I think the hardware has gotten better with each revision. The hardware can still be vastly improved, but the OS needs an overhaul and Windows on a Treo is 'the shot heard round the Palm world'. If that does not kick the PalmOS developers in the pants, then I don't know what will. Competition is a good thing and Palm has been resting on its laurels a bit too long.
Tough one... I encourage you, and anyone else reading this, to at least get a demo of the new 4.71 ECM software if you are interested. There is also a new version (5.0? - I'm not a dev guy) coming out in the first half of 2006. Contact sales@configuresoft.com. I don't want to do the hard sell on/., but I guess it's too late for that.
To give an answer to your question, most of the compliance templates settings are enforceable right from the get-go on the Windows side. *nix is another beast altogether, since there is no universal remote management other than scripting. The great part about the 4.71 version is that we've included a scripting conduit in both the Win and *nix clients so once a remediation script has been tested it can be deployed from a central data collector (the ECM app/web/db server) out to all the clients. Then the next scheduled collection will provide the updated compliance report.
I know I stuck my nose in it when I brought it up, but I really geek out over our software.
The sites that I use/need flash for are mlb.com, nba.com, and espn.com. The sports sites tend to use it for both ads and dynamic content, so it's a catch-22.
Re:Hard to admit, but that is quite clever
on
Sober Code Cracked
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· Score: 1
I think you are comparing malware to the wrong "real software". I think a more appropriate comparison might be shareware/freeware apps. There are some very well written apps and some really crappy crash-your-box apps.
As far as writing malware goes, I've got a book (with a 5.25 disk of code samples) of MS-DOS viruses. It was written for educational purposes I'm sure, but when I looked at it for the first time, my reaction was pretty much, "Is that it?" You might want to take a look at the proof of concept code that gets sent out on the bugtraq mailing lists. Some of them are not at all complex, rather they simply pull on doorknobs until they find one open.
Configuresoft http://www.configuresoft.com/ has some great software called ECM for managing continuous compliance standards like SOX, PCI DSS, HIPAA, etc. ECM is in use in 9 of the 25 biggest companies in the world. We even have clients on RedHat and Solaris.
That said, we see companies with the blank password problem all the time. We do compliance assessments (pre-sales) where we ask the CIO and IT management a question like, "How many of your servers have admin-level accounts with blank passwords?" They, of course, say they have none, unless they are honest, in which case, they admit that they do not know. We do our assessment and give the CIO a report that shows 1-2% of the servers have accounts with blank passwords and maybe 50-75% have accounts with passwords older than a year.
Going through an audit sucks, but it sucks less when you can hand some canned reports to the auditors for at least a portion of the audit.
I was escorted out of the building at a previous job (laid off for budget cuts they said) by one of my friends in the department. We stood in the parking lot bitching about the place for about 15 minutes. He resigned a few weeks later. Three other people in the department resigned within a couple of weeks of him.
My boss (CIO) had given his notice a week prior to me being led out and I was told someone (the CEO) felt that I would do some serious harm to the company by being there. I don't think they understood the domino effect. They lost half of the engineering staff in a month. The others after me pretty much said they did not want to work for a company that would let me go for no reason, and that if they would let me go, they would probably get laid off soon anyhow, so they might as well start looking for a better job immediately.
All in all, I am as happy as a clam working where I'm at right now. It's been a while since I worked for a technology/software company, so it feels good to be back in this type of environment.
I was always a little taken aback, when I was a studying music and performing classical and jazz, that we were told not to photocopy any sheet music. We had to buy the sheet music to practice with. I could not grasp who would be making money from stuff that was written over 100 years ago, in the case of classical music and many operas. The people that wrote it certainly are not.
I have to admit that, although I have no use for the Connex right now, the ultra geeky coolness of them makes my mouth water.
The only thing that came to mind about these was what a great distributed cracking tool they would be. I can't recall the first place that I read about the idea (2600? phrack?) of putting a small wall-mount box in a telco closet leaching off the nearest T1. It would be soooo easy. Although I've never done it, I've often planned it out in my head. I worked for a couple companies that had branch offices scattered around the US with no local IT presence. They only site visits were to upgrade servers, switches, or routers. It was pretty rare that anyone would touch anything unless they were expressly told to do so. A box on the wall would go completely unnoticed. During a site visit, we once found a BSD firewall attached to our network in a branch office that had been installed by a previous consulting company. We had not detected it in our remote scans because it was configured to be transparent.
/Dropped honors for regular english 2 years into H.S., not because it was too hard, but because it included countless hours of random busy work that wasn't worth the time.
I was in regular English my first year of high school and was bored to tears. Our teacher used to give me Cs on some of my assignments because "You can do so much better." When I asked her if my paper was better than the other people's in the class, she said "Of course." I responded, "Then why did I get a C and they got a B or A?" She then said, "Because you can do so much better." This was evidently her way of encouraging me. For all her flawed logic (at least in my mind) she did recommend me for the Honors English my second year.
Second year Honors English was also a minor disaster in that the teacher expected everyone to have been in the first year Honors English and therefore did not need to explain anything that had already been explained in the first year. Of course, the course was different for regular English so I pretty much had no clue what stories, poems, and books they were talking about for the first couple of months. I was so behind that it was back to regular English for me.
Third year was so non-descript that I can't even remember who I had, although I oddly want to think that it was the same teacher as my first year. Back to honors for me!
Fourth year Honors English was a dream. We read several great books and plays. Our teacher was all about exposure to different ideas and wanted everyone to participate in discussion. He actually threw out (out of disappointment and not out of anger) 2/3rds of the class one day because he asked who had finished the book due that day. Everyone who had not was told to leave and only come back when they had finished the book and had something to contribute.
I was so upset with myself after graduating because I felt I could have learned so much more had I been interested in English during my first three years. I actually went back and read as many of the books from my first three years as I could find the summer before I started college, just so that I would not feel that way again. Little did I know that first year college English was taught by some grad students that less education and less interest in teaching than my high school English teachers.
Agreed. Even marginally savvy consumers that buy wireless gear at Best Buy can tell when the packaging indicates that the $80 product has ports that can have a printer hookup and the $70 product does not. They simply say, "Cool!" and buy the $80 one.
In the low end consumer market, it's all about profit margins and volume. If Changing to VxWorks and halving the RAM saves Linksys/Cisco a buck per router, then they won't even hesitate. I think the trick here is whether that buck will mean a drop in price to increase volume (good for consumers) or simply higher profit margins (good for Cisco stockholders).
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I have a cell, work, fax, and home number, but there are other people that share that home number. My family averages out to about 1.3 numbers per person.
Wow! I can't count! I counted 914 and 516, but I also counted 917 and 347 twice. I was reading them off the map while counting.
You're point about the definition of "NYC metro area" is well taken, so even 5 area codes for 8 million people is over the top.
No matter which way you slice it, the phone companies are not running out of numbers, they are mis-managing numbers. I think it simply is expensive for them to upgrade equipment in the local COs to be able to spread the numbers around more evenly. Someone crunched the numbers (I hope they did that at least) and found out it was less expensive to create whole new area codes and exchanges than to fix the existing ones.
Incorrect. http://www.nanpa.com/pdf/NRUF/October_2005_NPA_Ex
A single exchange contains 10,000 numbers and therefore an area code contains up to 10,000,000 numbers. There are about 25 cities in that world that have more than 10,000,000 people. http://www.citypopulation.de/World.html They might need two or three area codes. Even accounting for everyone (including children) in New York City (all five boroughs) to have a unique home and work phone, it would require 5 area codes. There are currently 9 area codes for NYC.
One of my biggest peaves with the whole VoIP 911 nonsense is that Vonage is simply trying to comply with the FCC regs, yet all (there are only a few left right?) the legacy telcos are spreading FUD about this like you don't see news stories about people calling 911 and getting disconnected or hung up on if they have Verizon. I have called 911 from a cell and had to be trasferred because the cell carrier needed to connect me with the State Police instead of the local cops nearest to the cell tower, or at least that's what the operator told me.
9 11works.html
I don't see the VoIP 911 being any better or worse than cell phone 911.
Here is a pretty good article from BellSouth (ATT now?) with graphics that shows the basics of regular 911 vs cellular 911.
http://contact.bellsouth.com/email/bbs/phase2/how
It's kinda sad how true this is. I've been a networking and security consultant for several years and most admins don't give a rats ass about "Disaster Recovery" (let alone backups) or "Business Continuity Planning" even though their jobs may depend on it. That is why people, like myself, are brought in to run audits and tell people how much it will cost them to keep (or get back) their network when a plane crashes into their building. I live in the NYC area, so everyone is acutely aware of the businesses that never came back.
What happens when the library does not have the book you want? Go to another? Bookstore? Still can't find it?
Donate your old books to the library or thrift store.
I'm a bad example for this type of thing, because I collect media of the dead tree, vinyl, tape, and round plastic sorts. I can guarantee that I have books that my local library does not.
I don't sign my cards, and I thank every cashier that asks to see my driver's license. I encourage them to do so in the hope that it will spread and they will do it for everyone.
Worst episode ever!
In my area of NJ, all the libraries have free (to those that walk in) Internet access. I can't speak for the rest of the US.
At least one of the PBS stations broadcast something that looks like Adult Continuing Education classes during the wee hours of the morning (3 AM?). I have seen both physics and maths being taught. There are also several instructional foreign language shows on during the week.
I would love to see cooperatively developed open courseware available on the Internet. I think this is needed on all levels and not just at the University level.
Ummm... yup.
/. all day. I worked from home for about 3 years successfully before the last bubble burst. I just returned to it recently and thank God (and those crazy Wall Street types) for improving the job market enough to allow it.
Well, not really, because I travel quite a bit, but I only average being out of the house 3 days a week. I work from home, but I know that it takes a certain work ethic to actually avoid being on
"best person for the job" is a tough nut to crack. I'll give an example that is not uncommon in the US.
The job might require the person to speak on the phone a lot and therefore have a native command of the language. There goes all the recently imported talent. Another requirement might be that they live within a certain distance of the office for emergency on-call situations. If the demographics of the technically qualified local talent pool are 90% white, then what? Would the person then be racist for not hiring someone that was of hispanic descent and spoke English with a Spanish accent?
I think racism exists in the tech market as much as anywhere else. I have worked in so many diverse environments because my area of the US (NY/NJ) is so diverse. I have even had conversations with US-born Indian workers where they complain about all the off shore outsourcing to India. Their parents came to the US for a reason and they don't want all the jobs to go back to India. I've had a co-worker of hispanic descent bitch about the "damn Mexican cleaning crew stealing laptops". I've worked with black people from the Caribean and Africa that distance themselves from US born black people because they consider them to be lazy.
The lesson is, stupidity knows no boundaries.
I'm not quite sure how this all ties in, but here it goes...
In the past, part of the whole "selling of statistics" deal with MLB had to do with the Players Association (MLBPA), in that, the MLBPA (and in some cases individual players) had to authorize the use of names associated with statistics. This was done because someone was making a profit selling the numbers, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Barry Bonds was one of the people that pulled their name from the authorized list a few years back. When you looked up fantasy baseball statistics, you saw SFOutfielder (or some such nonsense) instead of Barry Bonds.
There are other sources of baseball statistics such as Elias Sports Bureau, STATS, etc. They are not, AFAIK, officially licensed and authorized by MLB. I don't think any of them are any more error prone than MLB itself, so what's the difference?
The book in question has a PDF download option rather than ebook format. PDF is fairly ubiquitous as far as doc formats go.
That said, I prefer dead-tree reading for books. I have read two books electronically, one on my Treo and one published on the web. I had no problem reading either one, but I can see how people would find it difficult or inconvenient to do it.
As a kid, my dentist had a Pong console in his waiting room. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Glory days, baby, glory days...
I have to agree with this somewhat. I've worked in IT the NY/NJ/PA area for about 15 years. I have had my share of run-ins with both IT management and general company management.
I think that the financial industry is the toughest I have worked in. They are not underpaying for the talent in most cases, but employees are "indentured servants" at best. I had a CIO(!) once tell me that I did not understand the politics that go on behind the scenes, and that he would have to switch industries to get another job if he pissed off the wrong person at work. I find that hard to understand, considering that most of the execs that I knew in the financial companies hated each others guts and were perfectly happy having screaming matches in the halls and offices at work.
Sorta back on topic... It is not a pretty thing to see admins and coders abused for not giving "the extra effort to get the job done" when that means working 60 hours a week. Most of the Indian folks I have worked with are 1st generation Americans, so their parents had to go through most of the hoops to get here and not them. They act like everyone else in this area of the US and won't take crap from anyone unless their job is on the line, and sometimes even that won't stop them. The Indian immigrants that I have worked with have been on the opposite side of the fence. They would work crazy hours and almost would not dare to even disagree with an opinion at work.
I once worked for a medium sized company that was big into sponsoring coders from other countries. We had folks from China, India, and Russia. At the time, the best programmers in the place were from the US, but I was told by the VP of Operations (when I questioned the cost of sponsoship) that salary and sponsorhip of a foreign programmer with the equivalent of a MS in CS and a few years foreign work experience was roughly the cost of a US local with a BS in CS and a couple of years' experience. The sponsored coders were also tied to the company in a way that they could not seek a better paying job without some serious wrangling, and to many, the hassle is not worth it.
Really back on topic... I would think old coders would be worth more to industries that are tied to legacy systems that are simply not taught anymore. I worked on the network integration project for the Wachovia/First Union Bank merger. I was upgrading routers/switches in bank branches for a couple of months. It paid the bills during the spring of 2002, when there were no jobs to be had in NY/NJ. I went to a branch on the outskirts of Philly and started my normal procedure when I noticed there was a server running that was not on my work order to be transitioned. I called the NOC and asked if they had any info about it and was told that they had nothing. They asked me if I could check to see what it was running and get more info. The console was logged in (of course) but the monitor was off (anyone banking with Wachovia?) so I just started typing commands at the console to figure out what I was running. OS/2. The NOC told me they no longer supported OS/2. The bank manager indicated that they were never upgraded to the new teller systems, so this server was needed. This is where experience (being old enough) pays off. I had used OS/2 while working at another financial institution in 1992-3. I made my best guess to change the network settings and get it up and running on the new connection. Everything tested OK and the teller machines still worked.
The two SSH clients I know of are pssh http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/ and tussh http://www.tussh.com/. I use pssh, and it has saved my bacon on a couple of occasions.
The only way I know to do application tunneling is to use one of the commercial VPN products for PalmOS, MergicVPN http://www.mergic.com/ and AnthaVPN http://www.anthavpn.com/ (which used to be MovianVPN).
IANA developer, but from what I've read, the problems are with the fact that PalmOS was never really meant to be networked or multi-tasking. The old-new version of PalmOS, Cobalt, (which I don't think will ever be used on a treo) was supposed to have this solved with a ground up rebuild rumored to be based partially on BeOS. The new-new version of PalmOS will be some sort of PalmOS-on-Linux hybrid from PalmSource/Access.
I have been using a Palm/Handspring since the PalmIII. I have had each version of the Treo on Sprint (300,600,650) and I think the hardware has gotten better with each revision. The hardware can still be vastly improved, but the OS needs an overhaul and Windows on a Treo is 'the shot heard round the Palm world'. If that does not kick the PalmOS developers in the pants, then I don't know what will. Competition is a good thing and Palm has been resting on its laurels a bit too long.
Tough one... I encourage you, and anyone else reading this, to at least get a demo of the new 4.71 ECM software if you are interested. There is also a new version (5.0? - I'm not a dev guy) coming out in the first half of 2006. Contact sales@configuresoft.com. I don't want to do the hard sell on /., but I guess it's too late for that.
To give an answer to your question, most of the compliance templates settings are enforceable right from the get-go on the Windows side. *nix is another beast altogether, since there is no universal remote management other than scripting. The great part about the 4.71 version is that we've included a scripting conduit in both the Win and *nix clients so once a remediation script has been tested it can be deployed from a central data collector (the ECM app/web/db server) out to all the clients. Then the next scheduled collection will provide the updated compliance report.
I know I stuck my nose in it when I brought it up, but I really geek out over our software.
I'm a big fan of flashblock.
The sites that I use/need flash for are mlb.com, nba.com, and espn.com. The sports sites tend to use it for both ads and dynamic content, so it's a catch-22.
I think you are comparing malware to the wrong "real software". I think a more appropriate comparison might be shareware/freeware apps. There are some very well written apps and some really crappy crash-your-box apps.
As far as writing malware goes, I've got a book (with a 5.25 disk of code samples) of MS-DOS viruses. It was written for educational purposes I'm sure, but when I looked at it for the first time, my reaction was pretty much, "Is that it?" You might want to take a look at the proof of concept code that gets sent out on the bugtraq mailing lists. Some of them are not at all complex, rather they simply pull on doorknobs until they find one open.
Disclaimer:I work for Configuresoft
Configuresoft http://www.configuresoft.com/ has some great software called ECM for managing continuous compliance standards like SOX, PCI DSS, HIPAA, etc. ECM is in use in 9 of the 25 biggest companies in the world. We even have clients on RedHat and Solaris.
That said, we see companies with the blank password problem all the time. We do compliance assessments (pre-sales) where we ask the CIO and IT management a question like, "How many of your servers have admin-level accounts with blank passwords?" They, of course, say they have none, unless they are honest, in which case, they admit that they do not know. We do our assessment and give the CIO a report that shows 1-2% of the servers have accounts with blank passwords and maybe 50-75% have accounts with passwords older than a year.
Going through an audit sucks, but it sucks less when you can hand some canned reports to the auditors for at least a portion of the audit.
I was escorted out of the building at a previous job (laid off for budget cuts they said) by one of my friends in the department. We stood in the parking lot bitching about the place for about 15 minutes. He resigned a few weeks later. Three other people in the department resigned within a couple of weeks of him.
My boss (CIO) had given his notice a week prior to me being led out and I was told someone (the CEO) felt that I would do some serious harm to the company by being there. I don't think they understood the domino effect. They lost half of the engineering staff in a month. The others after me pretty much said they did not want to work for a company that would let me go for no reason, and that if they would let me go, they would probably get laid off soon anyhow, so they might as well start looking for a better job immediately.
All in all, I am as happy as a clam working where I'm at right now. It's been a while since I worked for a technology/software company, so it feels good to be back in this type of environment.
I was always a little taken aback, when I was a studying music and performing classical and jazz, that we were told not to photocopy any sheet music. We had to buy the sheet music to practice with. I could not grasp who would be making money from stuff that was written over 100 years ago, in the case of classical music and many operas. The people that wrote it certainly are not.
x .html and Sullivan died in 1900 http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/other_sullivan/html /index.html. Who gets paid for their work now? Am I just paying the company that printed the paper and the person who arranged the music for 3 flutes and banjo?
On that note (pun intended), I am assuming you are only making an example of Gilbert and Sullivan collecting royalties. Gilbert died in 1908 http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/other_gilbert/inde
I have to admit that, although I have no use for the Connex right now, the ultra geeky coolness of them makes my mouth water.
The only thing that came to mind about these was what a great distributed cracking tool they would be. I can't recall the first place that I read about the idea (2600? phrack?) of putting a small wall-mount box in a telco closet leaching off the nearest T1. It would be soooo easy. Although I've never done it, I've often planned it out in my head. I worked for a couple companies that had branch offices scattered around the US with no local IT presence. They only site visits were to upgrade servers, switches, or routers. It was pretty rare that anyone would touch anything unless they were expressly told to do so. A box on the wall would go completely unnoticed. During a site visit, we once found a BSD firewall attached to our network in a branch office that had been installed by a previous consulting company. We had not detected it in our remote scans because it was configured to be transparent.
I was in regular English my first year of high school and was bored to tears. Our teacher used to give me Cs on some of my assignments because "You can do so much better." When I asked her if my paper was better than the other people's in the class, she said "Of course." I responded, "Then why did I get a C and they got a B or A?" She then said, "Because you can do so much better." This was evidently her way of encouraging me. For all her flawed logic (at least in my mind) she did recommend me for the Honors English my second year.
Second year Honors English was also a minor disaster in that the teacher expected everyone to have been in the first year Honors English and therefore did not need to explain anything that had already been explained in the first year. Of course, the course was different for regular English so I pretty much had no clue what stories, poems, and books they were talking about for the first couple of months. I was so behind that it was back to regular English for me.
Third year was so non-descript that I can't even remember who I had, although I oddly want to think that it was the same teacher as my first year. Back to honors for me!
Fourth year Honors English was a dream. We read several great books and plays. Our teacher was all about exposure to different ideas and wanted everyone to participate in discussion. He actually threw out (out of disappointment and not out of anger) 2/3rds of the class one day because he asked who had finished the book due that day. Everyone who had not was told to leave and only come back when they had finished the book and had something to contribute.
I was so upset with myself after graduating because I felt I could have learned so much more had I been interested in English during my first three years. I actually went back and read as many of the books from my first three years as I could find the summer before I started college, just so that I would not feel that way again. Little did I know that first year college English was taught by some grad students that less education and less interest in teaching than my high school English teachers.
Agreed. Even marginally savvy consumers that buy wireless gear at Best Buy can tell when the packaging indicates that the $80 product has ports that can have a printer hookup and the $70 product does not. They simply say, "Cool!" and buy the $80 one.
In the low end consumer market, it's all about profit margins and volume. If Changing to VxWorks and halving the RAM saves Linksys/Cisco a buck per router, then they won't even hesitate. I think the trick here is whether that buck will mean a drop in price to increase volume (good for consumers) or simply higher profit margins (good for Cisco stockholders).
Any chance of getting this .ogg? My torrent client is trying to connect to peers, but I have not gotten anything yet.