Another suggestion is if you do not have alot of room to room traffic, and you do not have a 100mb conenction to the net, configure all ports to 10mb. At least that way it takes more than 10 users to flood your 100mbit backbone. And users accessing the net are always throttled by your outbound connection so they won't know the difference.
Or with a some deft scripting and cheap layer 3 switch, slam the offenders down to 256kbps at the first sign of infection. The answer to "why is my Internet slow" is "you've got virus". Per-port bandwidth control at the switch is some sweet magic for student networks.
Anyone with a mass franchise presence suddenly has the potential to power an ISP with a 20 mile range by slapping a $500 antenna on top of their stores.
From the equipment I have seen supportingWiMAX, it is not likely to be an easy or inexpensive proposition like WiFi. Ever wonder why urban areas are littered with cell sites? Coverage is difficult. NLOS is only NLOS to a degree. People will expect coverage inside concrete buildings. (if they don't get it, they'll stick to using GPRS or WCDMA, which do work in concrete buildings)
Then there's interference. Sure the gear is getting smarter, but I wouldn't try to deploy WiMAX in unlicensed space anywhere in the world - it would be a recipe for disaster. In 2.4GHz range outdoor, FHSS systems delivering 2mbps are the last man standing in crowded markets. In 5.8GHz, Trango and Motorola Canopy systems destroy less robust 802.11a systems.
And then there's licensed spectrum. If you do get a hold of some, it's not going to be in big 20mhz channels like in unlicensed territory. I don't care how spectrally efficient these WiMAX systems are, no one is going to get 10mbps per MHz in the real world before 2010.
Why 10mbps/MHz? It's what you'll need to compete with Cable, DSL, and ubiquitous WiFi hotspots (deployed every 50 meters on the end of Cable/DSL lines). Who gives a toss if Intel starts including WiMAX in their chipsets? I've had Thinkpads with infrared for about ten years now. I have a five year old Nokia with Bluetooth. What do I use every day? WiFi.
"When we started doing precise maneuvers, we started seeing excessive propellant consumption," Snoddy said. "The mission as designed, when it runs out of gas, completes itself." There were some navigation errors but no indication of a fuel leak, he said in a conference call. A NASA investigation board will search for the cause of the problem.
Now when it turns out that the fuel system was reporting litres consumed per hour and the central system was thinking gallons per hour, is NASA going to give up on using English units? "472 miles above Earth"? "300 feet of the satellite"? Wankers.
Countries are too hard to protect. Why not just wall off the cities? Passport control could be at every exit of the DC Beltway. Manhattan is an island - shouldn't be too hard to protect it.
Havn't they had something like this comercialy avalible in France for a while IIRC? Its has a ridiculously strong carbon fiber airtank that's presurised at home by a compressor using off the grid electricity. Its basically a small comuter car, but it has decent range and speed.
No, this is a hybrid that charges itself. RTFM, etc.
At some point I read that Ford was considering a hybrid pneumatic system for their heavy trucks. Braking would charge a cylinder which would later be used to drive acceleration, cutting out the dirty work of bringing a truck up to cruising speed. Wish I could find a reference.
Optus will be deplying ADSL 2+ (24/3.5mbps) in 300 exchanges. Nice to see that the Aussies have granted competitive access to their copper. Too bad the fuckwits in New Zealand can't follow a good example.
I concur...and there is no such thing as a frequency where no one will notice you...there is always an amateur radio op or scanner fan checking the spectrum for interesting signals.
Once you get about 3GHz there are not many scanners out there looking.
On the same topic this week, Cringely speculates...
"there are other dirty tricks available to broadband ISPs. Telecom New Zealand, for example, is reportedly planning to alter TCP packet interleaving to discourage VoIP. By bunching all voice packets in the first half of each second, half a second of dead air would be added to every conversation, changing latency in a way that would drive grandmothers everywhere back to their old phone companies. This is because phone conversations happen effectively in real time and so are very sensitive to problems of latency. Where one-way video and audio can use buffering to overcome almost any interleaving issue, it is a deal-breaker for voice."
Perhaps patent offices should implement a sliding scale for filing fees?
Instead of offering volume discounts, make each tier of filing (10, 100, 1000 p.a.) progressively more expensive. Say $75 USD each for the first ten applications, $750 USD each for 11-100, $7500 each for 1000+.
This would prevent overburdening of patent offices (they would have greater resources to cope) without discouraging individuals or small organizations. Can't see who it would harm, and it would certainly prevent abuse except by those with infinite resources.
Does it mean something along the lines of "we were actively attacked by skilled persons who exploited a little-known/unknown flaw" or does it mean "we were sloppy".
It means they were sloppy. People play with URL strings all the time.
It's trivial, especially so in ColdFusion, to make sure that the browser you authenticated is the only one you'll serve a particular document to. PayMaxx and their developer were negligent here without question.
Before people take your advice and start threatening to sue everyone for violating a law, they should make sure the law actually exists where they are and applies to their situation--otherwise they'll just end up looking looking silly.
If a business or other enterprise asks you for your SSN, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested. For example, utility companies and other services ask for a Social Security number, but do not need it; they can do a credit check or identify the person in their records by alternative means.
Giving your number is voluntary, even when you are asked for the number directly. If requested, you should ask why your number is needed, how your number will be used, what law requires you to give your number and what the consequences are if you refuse. The answers to these questions can help you decide if you want to give your Social Security number. The decision is yours.
Obviously there is little protection for Social Security Numbers today if you want to participate in polite (well, consumerist) society. True protection against identity theft is vigilance, and even this can be bought cheaply in the form of credit monitoring services. Of course the alternative is not participating in polite (consumerist) society.:-)
One reason SSN gets on to workstations is poor development practices. Frequently database designers key off of SSN, because it is an easy, pre-existing unique ID for a person. Of course these database designers snapshot a production database and copy to their PC, where they probably have SQL Server, IIS, and eDonkey2k running side by side.
Be warned that trying to set such practices straight is the best way to instantly blacken your yearly review - especially if your boss isn't interested in having his name or department associated with the effort. As far as most mid-level IT managers are concerned, the problem doesn't exist until something bad happens.
Be warned again that if you are an "at will" employee working for a large corporation, don't ever talk about potential security risks within your company and network unless it is explicitly your job to do so.
Due to size restrictions, fitting a CD-ROM drive in the mini enclosure would be impossible with this motherboard.
I'd say his project failed. The whole idea of such a device is to not have all sorts of other bricks (like external media) plugged in. Esp if it is to sit next to the nice 36" LCD TV (of course using DVI connector) and act as a media box.
"We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes."
$200k remote-control weapons are a great way of keeping American kids out of harm's way in Iraq, but once it's a video game, who is going to be sickened by the fact that they just took a life over a megalomaniac's flawed foreign policy? How are young American soldiers going to learn that destroying life for oil is wrong?
With such bots, what's to stop Uncle Sam from sending soldiers to posh hotels in Dubai, bringing them down to the basement for four-hour stints with the VR glasses on to knock off a couple more Iraqis? (Afghans? Pakistanis? Iranians?) All you'll need in the theater is a comms group and some logistics to keep the robots in fresh batteries.
The bottleneck is probably bandwidth, not CPU. A network of drones can send traffic in the GBit/s range, and even if these packets are not replied to and the CPU and memory resources can cope, a lot of damage will still be caused.
The only way to make this work is to block traffic at a site far enough back to cope with the level of traffic(and the size of botnets will only grow, so even a reasonably large network company could be knocked out).
If I were a gambling site (or a porn site for that matter), I'd get my bandwidth from a tier 1 who could help with such problems. I would say to them, "hey, I want DS3 delivered to (insert name of sufficiently warm island out of the reach of Uncle Sam) and I just want http/https 80/443 - anything else, you just chuck it". (Of course I would have an extra T1 and a second IP range for administration and failover) In the case of a tier 1 taking care of such issues, it really is a cpu bound issue, and not a terribly difficult to deal with given the right resources.
(If anyone from AT&T, MCI, or SprinkLink wants to own up to *not* being able to drop 1gbps of botnet traffic without breaking a sweat, please feel free to do so.)
"Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050." Wow. That's impressive. So they're not going to use any products made from plastic, or oil-based paints, lubricants, etc?
By 2050, I'd expect so. Plenty of plastics, paints, and lubricants made from biomass today.
Now whether using soy-based plastic is actually more efficient than using oil-based plastic is a different story, but oil has all sorts of political/social/economic inefficiencies that just don't show up in the base cost of production.
Locate your AP at the outside corner of your flat. Attach a pair of reflectors to the antennas, such that radiation will be concentrated only on your flat.
By directing the power over 90 deg instead of 360, what do you think you have just done? Not only have you increased the transmit power, you've also vastly increased the receive gain.
I was in a situation where I needed broadband in an apartment w/out a connection, and used a DWL AP2000+ in client mode with one of these antennas (styrafoam, a kitchen knife, aluminum foil, and cellotape) to pull a symmetric 3.5mbps from an AP 600 meters down the street.
Make sure to put the reflectors on both antennas and point them both in the same direction. In almost all cases with such APs, only one antenna is transmit, while both receive.
BTW, you can see the overall casualty counts (wounds and deaths separately) at globalsecurity.org. (Notice the running-average plots at the bottom, which show the trends.)
Anyone know where to get an RSS feed or similar machine readable counts of this? How about Iraqi casualties? I would like to see such statistics as widely published as possible.
When researching VOIP this weekend (I am thinking of nixing my home phone for a cell phone and a voip) I found that a call requires 90Kbps of bandwidth.
This depends entirely upon the codec used. 90kbps (full-duplex) would be G.711, while G.729 uses about a third of this:
I haven't figured out why so many people use G.711 - voice doesn't need this much bandwidth, and we all know this from years of working with mp3.
Isn't there a port or something you could block to disable VOIP services? I don't know a whole lot about it but I assume it must use a port that could be firewalled out.
This can be very tricky. SIP uses UDP 5060 to negotiate calls, then picks variable high ports (~16000 I think) but can be run pretty much anywhere.
I have been playing with a WiFi VoIP phone from ZyXel at home for the last few weeks & the performance has been adequate. It really depends heavily on the quality of your Internet connection. Unless you have consistent ping times of 50ms and close to zero jitter to your call termination point, you won't enjoy the experience.
Re:Comprehensive interviews are very important.
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Just think - in any field you can think of - tennis, school, etc. - some people are 'A' players and consistantly outperform others - other people are 'B' and 'C' players, that really don't stack up to the 'A' players.
A company filled with 'A' players will win every time.
Having all 'A' players is not necessarily the path to success.
There's no reason to own the secretaries (Kelly), Security (Pinkerton), Janitorial (Blackburn), AP/AR (EDS [cringe]), Procurement (Ariba [cringe again]) or Payroll (APS), but try to keep 'A' players around who have to interface with these, ahem, organizations, and you'll either be pumping your 'A' players full of SSRIs or you'll be looking for new ones every sixteen months. (Or both!)
In fact some of the most profitable companies in the world (can we say big pharma anyone?) manage to keep very few 'A' players around for just such reasons. (buy me a beer and I'll elaborate)
My point is simply that a company that can not be trusted to keep their computers fully functional, can not be trusted to keep their aircraft fully functional.
And there you are very wrong. There are a million controls on maintenance of aircraft. Every part of a plane has a history and a pile of paperwork to go with it.
If such documentation and controls existed for every component of every software package used by the airlines:
1. New Airline Information Systems would be built by two or three programming shops in the world. 2. They'd be massively expensive 3. They would have lifecycles of 30+ years. 4. The government would audit IT organizations working on the systems and would investigate every system crash.
"unlike VMware which has a "host" operating system and then various Guests"
IBM came to give a demo at my former place of employ about two years ago with an Intel-based XServer and VMWare ESX, which ran directly on the hardware without a host OS. Really slick stuff - one of these monsters could run 30+ instances of Linux, Win2k Server, BSD, etc., great for us as 80% of our boxes averaged 1% CPU load and all our storage was on a SAN. I remember writing a proposal based on this to replace five racks of old machines with one 6U XServer.
for those with a HTML-enabled email client, a cleverly placed (and sized, ie 1 pixel) embedded image to an external site with a unquie string keyed to your email address is yet another trick spammers have for confirming your address.
One of the more important reasons for not having preview-pane turned on in Outlook - if it looks wrong, delete it without opening it. Even with script execution turned off (preventing Javascript exploits), HTML email is a blessing and a curse. Handy to get it from vendors, lousy to get it from spammers.
Slashdot Mirror
Another suggestion is if you do not have alot of room to room traffic, and you do not have a 100mb conenction to the net, configure all ports to 10mb. At least that way it takes more than 10 users to flood your 100mbit backbone. And users accessing the net are always throttled by your outbound connection so they won't know the difference.
Or with a some deft scripting and cheap layer 3 switch, slam the offenders down to 256kbps at the first sign of infection. The answer to "why is my Internet slow" is "you've got virus". Per-port bandwidth control at the switch is some sweet magic for student networks.
Anyone with a mass franchise presence suddenly has the potential to power an ISP with a 20 mile range by slapping a $500 antenna on top of their stores.
From the equipment I have seen supporting WiMAX, it is not likely to be an easy or inexpensive proposition like WiFi. Ever wonder why urban areas are littered with cell sites? Coverage is difficult. NLOS is only NLOS to a degree. People will expect coverage inside concrete buildings. (if they don't get it, they'll stick to using GPRS or WCDMA, which do work in concrete buildings)
Then there's interference. Sure the gear is getting smarter, but I wouldn't try to deploy WiMAX in unlicensed space anywhere in the world - it would be a recipe for disaster. In 2.4GHz range outdoor, FHSS systems delivering 2mbps are the last man standing in crowded markets. In 5.8GHz, Trango and Motorola Canopy systems destroy less robust 802.11a systems.
And then there's licensed spectrum. If you do get a hold of some, it's not going to be in big 20mhz channels like in unlicensed territory. I don't care how spectrally efficient these WiMAX systems are, no one is going to get 10mbps per MHz in the real world before 2010.
Why 10mbps/MHz? It's what you'll need to compete with Cable, DSL, and ubiquitous WiFi hotspots (deployed every 50 meters on the end of Cable/DSL lines). Who gives a toss if Intel starts including WiMAX in their chipsets? I've had Thinkpads with infrared for about ten years now. I have a five year old Nokia with Bluetooth. What do I use every day? WiFi.
"When we started doing precise maneuvers, we started seeing excessive propellant consumption," Snoddy said. "The mission as designed, when it runs out of gas, completes itself."
There were some navigation errors but no indication of a fuel leak, he said in a conference call. A NASA investigation board will search for the cause of the problem.
Now when it turns out that the fuel system was reporting litres consumed per hour and the central system was thinking gallons per hour, is NASA going to give up on using English units? "472 miles above Earth"? "300 feet of the satellite"? Wankers.
Countries are too hard to protect. Why not just wall off the cities? Passport control could be at every exit of the DC Beltway. Manhattan is an island - shouldn't be too hard to protect it.
Havn't they had something like this comercialy avalible in France for a while IIRC? Its has a ridiculously strong carbon fiber airtank that's presurised at home by a compressor using off the grid electricity. Its basically a small comuter car, but it has decent range and speed.
No, this is a hybrid that charges itself. RTFM, etc.
At some point I read that Ford was considering a hybrid pneumatic system for their heavy trucks. Braking would charge a cylinder which would later be used to drive acceleration, cutting out the dirty work of bringing a truck up to cruising speed. Wish I could find a reference.
Looks like the first large-scale Huawei ADSL deployment will be in Australia:
d =Huawei+snags+Optus+deal/
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=11321&he
Optus will be deplying ADSL 2+ (24/3.5mbps) in 300 exchanges. Nice to see that the Aussies have granted competitive access to their copper. Too bad the fuckwits in New Zealand can't follow a good example.
I concur...and there is no such thing as a frequency where no one will notice you...there is always an amateur radio op or scanner fan checking the spectrum for interesting signals.
Once you get about 3GHz there are not many scanners out there looking.
On the same topic this week, Cringely speculates...
r ch/thread.html/
"there are other dirty tricks available to broadband ISPs. Telecom New Zealand, for example, is reportedly planning to alter TCP packet interleaving to discourage VoIP. By bunching all voice packets in the first half of each second, half a second of dead air would be added to every conversation, changing latency in a way that would drive grandmothers everywhere back to their old phone companies. This is because phone conversations happen effectively in real time and so are very sensitive to problems of latency. Where one-way video and audio can use buffering to overcome almost any interleaving issue, it is a deal-breaker for voice."
This has certainly pissed off a few Kiwis, as seen on the NZNOG list: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2005-Ma
Perhaps patent offices should implement a sliding scale for filing fees?
Instead of offering volume discounts, make each tier of filing (10, 100, 1000 p.a.) progressively more expensive. Say $75 USD each for the first ten applications, $750 USD each for 11-100, $7500 each for 1000+.
This would prevent overburdening of patent offices (they would have greater resources to cope) without discouraging individuals or small organizations. Can't see who it would harm, and it would certainly prevent abuse except by those with infinite resources.
Does it mean something along the lines of "we were actively attacked by skilled persons who exploited a little-known/unknown flaw" or does it mean "we were sloppy".
It means they were sloppy. People play with URL strings all the time.
It's trivial, especially so in ColdFusion, to make sure that the browser you authenticated is the only one you'll serve a particular document to. PayMaxx and their developer were negligent here without question.
Before people take your advice and start threatening to sue everyone for violating a law, they should make sure the law actually exists where they are and applies to their situation--otherwise they'll just end up looking looking silly.
n duser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=78
:-)
Let your fingers do the walking: http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/ssa.cfg/php/e
If a business or other enterprise asks you for your SSN, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested. For example, utility companies and other services ask for a Social Security number, but do not need it; they can do a credit check or identify the person in their records by alternative means.
Giving your number is voluntary, even when you are asked for the number directly. If requested, you should ask why your number is needed, how your number will be used, what law requires you to give your number and what the consequences are if you refuse. The answers to these questions can help you decide if you want to give your Social Security number. The decision is yours.
Obviously there is little protection for Social Security Numbers today if you want to participate in polite (well, consumerist) society. True protection against identity theft is vigilance, and even this can be bought cheaply in the form of credit monitoring services. Of course the alternative is not participating in polite (consumerist) society.
One reason SSN gets on to workstations is poor development practices. Frequently database designers key off of SSN, because it is an easy, pre-existing unique ID for a person. Of course these database designers snapshot a production database and copy to their PC, where they probably have SQL Server, IIS, and eDonkey2k running side by side.
Be warned that trying to set such practices straight is the best way to instantly blacken your yearly review - especially if your boss isn't interested in having his name or department associated with the effort. As far as most mid-level IT managers are concerned, the problem doesn't exist until something bad happens.
Be warned again that if you are an "at will" employee working for a large corporation, don't ever talk about potential security risks within your company and network unless it is explicitly your job to do so.
Due to size restrictions, fitting a CD-ROM drive in the mini enclosure would be impossible with this motherboard.
I'd say his project failed. The whole idea of such a device is to not have all sorts of other bricks (like external media) plugged in. Esp if it is to sit next to the nice 36" LCD TV (of course using DVI connector) and act as a media box.
See James Bond, Goldeneye
John Pike of GlobalSecurity had an apt quote in a related Wired article:
"We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes."
$200k remote-control weapons are a great way of keeping American kids out of harm's way in Iraq, but once it's a video game, who is going to be sickened by the fact that they just took a life over a megalomaniac's flawed foreign policy? How are young American soldiers going to learn that destroying life for oil is wrong?
With such bots, what's to stop Uncle Sam from sending soldiers to posh hotels in Dubai, bringing them down to the basement for four-hour stints with the VR glasses on to knock off a couple more Iraqis? (Afghans? Pakistanis? Iranians?) All you'll need in the theater is a comms group and some logistics to keep the robots in fresh batteries.
Sick, wrong, and I'll have no part of it.
The bottleneck is probably bandwidth, not CPU. A network of drones can send traffic in the GBit/s range, and even if these packets are not replied to and the CPU and memory resources can cope, a lot of damage will still be caused.
The only way to make this work is to block traffic at a site far enough back to cope with the level of traffic(and the size of botnets will only grow, so even a reasonably large network company could be knocked out).
If I were a gambling site (or a porn site for that matter), I'd get my bandwidth from a tier 1 who could help with such problems. I would say to them, "hey, I want DS3 delivered to (insert name of sufficiently warm island out of the reach of Uncle Sam) and I just want http/https 80/443 - anything else, you just chuck it". (Of course I would have an extra T1 and a second IP range for administration and failover) In the case of a tier 1 taking care of such issues, it really is a cpu bound issue, and not a terribly difficult to deal with given the right resources.
(If anyone from AT&T, MCI, or SprinkLink wants to own up to *not* being able to drop 1gbps of botnet traffic without breaking a sweat, please feel free to do so.)
"Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050." Wow. That's impressive. So they're not going to use any products made from plastic, or oil-based paints, lubricants, etc?
By 2050, I'd expect so. Plenty of plastics, paints, and lubricants made from biomass today.
http://www.google.com/search?q=soy+plastic
Now whether using soy-based plastic is actually more efficient than using oil-based plastic is a different story, but oil has all sorts of political/social/economic inefficiencies that just don't show up in the base cost of production.
Locate your AP at the outside corner of your flat. Attach a pair of reflectors to the antennas, such that radiation will be concentrated only on your flat.
e x.html
By directing the power over 90 deg instead of 360, what do you think you have just done? Not only have you increased the transmit power, you've also vastly increased the receive gain.
Reflector templates can be found here:
http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template/ind
I was in a situation where I needed broadband in an apartment w/out a connection, and used a DWL AP2000+ in client mode with one of these antennas (styrafoam, a kitchen knife, aluminum foil, and cellotape) to pull a symmetric 3.5mbps from an AP 600 meters down the street.
Make sure to put the reflectors on both antennas and point them both in the same direction. In almost all cases with such APs, only one antenna is transmit, while both receive.
BTW, you can see the overall casualty counts (wounds and deaths separately) at globalsecurity.org. (Notice the running-average plots at the bottom, which show the trends.)
Anyone know where to get an RSS feed or similar machine readable counts of this? How about Iraqi casualties? I would like to see such statistics as widely published as possible.
When researching VOIP this weekend (I am thinking of nixing my home phone for a cell phone and a voip) I found that a call requires 90Kbps of bandwidth.
This depends entirely upon the codec used. 90kbps (full-duplex) would be G.711, while G.729 uses about a third of this:
http://www.terracall.com/FAQs_white_1.aspx
I haven't figured out why so many people use G.711 - voice doesn't need this much bandwidth, and we all know this from years of working with mp3.
Isn't there a port or something you could block to disable VOIP services? I don't know a whole lot about it but I assume it must use a port that could be firewalled out.
This can be very tricky. SIP uses UDP 5060 to negotiate calls, then picks variable high ports (~16000 I think) but can be run pretty much anywhere.
I have been playing with a WiFi VoIP phone from ZyXel at home for the last few weeks & the performance has been adequate. It really depends heavily on the quality of your Internet connection. Unless you have consistent ping times of 50ms and close to zero jitter to your call termination point, you won't enjoy the experience.
Just think - in any field you can think of - tennis, school, etc. - some people are 'A' players and consistantly outperform others - other people are 'B' and 'C' players, that really don't stack up to the 'A' players.
A company filled with 'A' players will win every time.
Having all 'A' players is not necessarily the path to success.
There's no reason to own the secretaries (Kelly), Security (Pinkerton), Janitorial (Blackburn), AP/AR (EDS [cringe]), Procurement (Ariba [cringe again]) or Payroll (APS), but try to keep 'A' players around who have to interface with these, ahem, organizations, and you'll either be pumping your 'A' players full of SSRIs or you'll be looking for new ones every sixteen months. (Or both!)
In fact some of the most profitable companies in the world (can we say big pharma anyone?) manage to keep very few 'A' players around for just such reasons. (buy me a beer and I'll elaborate)
My point is simply that a company that can not be trusted to keep their computers fully functional, can not be trusted to keep their aircraft fully functional.
And there you are very wrong. There are a million controls on maintenance of aircraft. Every part of a plane has a history and a pile of paperwork to go with it.
If such documentation and controls existed for every component of every software package used by the airlines:
1. New Airline Information Systems would be built by two or three programming shops in the world.
2. They'd be massively expensive
3. They would have lifecycles of 30+ years.
4. The government would audit IT organizations working on the systems and would investigate every system crash.
"unlike VMware which has a "host" operating system and then various Guests"
IBM came to give a demo at my former place of employ about two years ago with an Intel-based XServer and VMWare ESX, which ran directly on the hardware without a host OS. Really slick stuff - one of these monsters could run 30+ instances of Linux, Win2k Server, BSD, etc., great for us as 80% of our boxes averaged 1% CPU load and all our storage was on a SAN. I remember writing a proposal based on this to replace five racks of old machines with one 6U XServer.
for those with a HTML-enabled email client, a cleverly placed (and sized, ie 1 pixel) embedded image to an external site with a unquie string keyed to your email address is yet another trick spammers have for confirming your address.
One of the more important reasons for not having preview-pane turned on in Outlook - if it looks wrong, delete it without opening it. Even with script execution turned off (preventing Javascript exploits), HTML email is a blessing and a curse. Handy to get it from vendors, lousy to get it from spammers.
Anyone care that Orasis (the story author) = Justin Chapweske?
Shameless self-promotion of closed-source software, $25k USD for a dev-kit, and Taco fell for it. uugh.