Wipe the machines and do a fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (SP2 = Service Pack 2). Don't even think about trying to clean the viruses off the machines, you'll never have any way to know if you got them all, which is why you have to reformat the drives and do a fresh install of the OS. And make very sure you have Service Pack 2 installed BEFORE you hook the machines up to any network connection of any kind, even your internal LAN. If you hook the box up to the net before SP2 is installed, it may well get infected with a virus before SP2 finishes installing (the mean-time-to-infection of an unprotected machine is frequently estimated at about ten minutes).
Turn on the firewall that is built into XP SP2.
Turn on automatic windows updates (also built into XP SP2).
Set up a password-protected account on the box and don't give the password to the property managers. Don't allow the property manager or anyone else to use the box for email, web surfing, anything.
Only on slashdot would a comment that this exploit is "Not that critical" receive a "Score:4, Insightful" rating.
Last night, while sitting at my machine, I noticed a Java icon appear in my taskbar. "That's wierd," I thought, "I'm not doing anything or hitting any pages that should need the JRE." Since I don't use the JRE much anymore (I installed it while testing a java-based web server) I went to "Add/Remove Programs" and uninstalled j2re-1.4.2_05.
Too late. This morning I browsed to Slashdot and saw the parent article telling me why the Java icon had popped up.
Whatever payload the thing delivered appears to have punched a hole in Norton AntiVirus (the Norton Firewall console is reporting that Norton AntiVirus requires "Urgent Attention" but the annunciator on the AntiVirus tab appears to have been disabled in an effort to hide whatever was done to the AntiVirus). It may also have installed the bat/mumu-a worm (one spyware scanner is reporting an infection by the worm, but Symmantec's bat/mumu-a removal tool reports the machine is clean).
Once a drive has been compromised by something more complicated than a simple virus, there's no way you can ever trust the machine again because there is no way to know what sort of rootkit the exploit delivered.
I've already disconnected the machine from my network and picked up a new hard drive. The old hard drives will go into an external drive housing that I'll only connect to the machine (a) after I have antivirus software reinstalled and (b) only if I absolutely have to pull data from the drive.
"Not that critical" hah! This is by far the most serious attack I've ever been hit with, and I downloaded j2re-1.4.2_05 at most two months ago (elsewhere in the comments someone is reporting that j2re-1.4.2_05 is still available for download from sun.com, I can't confirm that but this is hardly an antiquated version).
You're obviously some young punk pretending to be Andy Rooney.
Any *real* old timer (the kind of person who uses ascii for emphasis instead of that new fangled NCSA-Mosaic html stuff) knows that ram costs $40/meg. Always has, always will.
(if you mod this down, you're too young to remember...)
That vehicle is burned into my childhood, so I, too, have ogled it many times while driving along Cahuenga.
It was built for use in the first movie that I ever walked out of, called "Damnation Alley" (you can find it on imdb). It takes a lot to get a geeky 12 year old to walk out of a science fiction film, but that film did it (mutant cockroaches and all). I don't remember the "Ice Planet Zero" episode, but the chances are good that the vehicle was reused a few times over the years.
Hmmm... lets look at the phrase "hardware capabilities"
"Hardware capabilities" doesn't have a single definition. Are you talking hardware like the Radeon 8500? (which is pretty sweet and fairly common among gamers) or are you talking hardware like the graphics chip in the Intel 810 motherboard set? (which is pretty weak but extremely common among the general public). Believe it or not, a huge number of games are still spec'd to run on low-end chipsets like the i810 because thats what consumers own. Sure, everyone you know has an 8500 or a GeForce4, but you're not a normal person if you're here reading slashdot. Normal people have old machines with slow graphics cards. A modeler that was designed for 8500 cards would be next to useless on a project aimed at i810's, and vice versa.
More importantly, "hardware capabilities" doesn't have a static definition. Graphics hardware is subject to Moore's law (except that the doubling time is even shorter than for CPUs). In the 12-18 months it would take you to write a high quality hardware-oriented modeling tool, graphics chips would run through at least two, possibly 3 generations. Do you design for the current hot chips, since those will be fairly common by the time your software is ready? Or do you try to guess what hardware will do in 18 months even though only a few hardcore gamers will own cards with those features when your tool is released?
Lets assume you've figured out whether you are going for serious gamer hardware or mass market hardware, and you correctly predicted what year you were targeting and guessed the feature set perfectly. Lets even assume you've written it and finished debugging it. Six months later (when the next generation of chips arrives), do you (a) throw away all your work or (b) invest another 6 months completely revising it because NVidia just announced some whizbang new feature that your user interface can't support?
Chances are, whatever you decide, pretty soon you'll find yourself doing exactly what Alias|Wavefront and Discreet and NewTek and etc. are trying to do: build the very best modeler you can, and let the hardware vendors catch up. You don't need that many more doubling times before all those slick features are "hardware capabilities."
When do you think the first feature-length all-CG indy film will hit theaters? (or, if you think that's too fuzzy a question, substitute "under $2M budget" for "indy").
TV cameras were too heavy back in the 1960's, so they just had gyrostabilized binoculars, but the effect was about the same. The binoculars were made by a now-defunct company called ORDCO. LAPD owned several of them which they used in helicopters. There is an episode of Adam-12 (a police show from the late '60s and early '70s) where one of the officers is seen riding in a helicopter and using an ORDCO stabilized binocular to locate a suspect.
the term "gravity wave" is usually taken to mean "wave formed by a process where gravity is significant", like some types of water wave
Not so. The term "gravity wave" has two very different meanings. The definition found in fluid texts (and refered to above) has nothing to do with general relativity.
Einstein's theory of general relativity supports waves in the gravitational field as a natural consequence of the finite speed of light.
You can think of a gravity wave as being an AC-component of the gravitational field, roughly analogous to an oscillating electromagnetic field (although it has nothing to do with electromagnetism because it is a gravitational wave rather than an electromagnetic wave). The DC component of the gravitational field is what we feel pulling us towards the center of the earth, and is roughly analogous to a static electric field. As another commenter pointed out, shielding the AC component is incredibly cool but not the same as an anti-gravity device because the AC component of the gravitational field is miniscule compared to the DC component that we feel pulling us towards the center of the earth.
Has anybody else read the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1987"?
It has some pretty fun clauses, including:
"United States Code Sec. 2520. Recovery of civil damages authorized"
(a) In General. - Except as provided in section 2511(2)(a)(ii), any person whose wire, oral, or electronic communication is intercepted, disclosed, or intentionally used in violation of this chapter may in a civil action recover from the person or entity which engaged in that violation such relief as may be appropriate.
If you want to read the full text of the law, go to your favorite search engine and look for +"Chapter 119" +"United States Code" (I'd post a link, but I doubt if these sites could handle the/. effect)
I heard that CmdrTaco caught some guy selling slashdot moderator points on Ebay and sent JonKatz to his house with a grenade launcher. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
-Don Remember, friends don't let friends moderate drunk.
Slashdot Mirror
Wipe the machines and do a fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (SP2 = Service Pack 2). Don't even think about trying to clean the viruses off the machines, you'll never have any way to know if you got them all, which is why you have to reformat the drives and do a fresh install of the OS. And make very sure you have Service Pack 2 installed BEFORE you hook the machines up to any network connection of any kind, even your internal LAN. If you hook the box up to the net before SP2 is installed, it may well get infected with a virus before SP2 finishes installing (the mean-time-to-infection of an unprotected machine is frequently estimated at about ten minutes).
Turn on the firewall that is built into XP SP2.
Turn on automatic windows updates (also built into XP SP2).
Set up a password-protected account on the box and don't give the password to the property managers. Don't allow the property manager or anyone else to use the box for email, web surfing, anything.
Only on slashdot would a comment that this exploit is "Not that critical" receive a "Score:4, Insightful" rating.
Last night, while sitting at my machine, I noticed a Java icon appear in my taskbar. "That's wierd," I thought, "I'm not doing anything or hitting any pages that should need the JRE." Since I don't use the JRE much anymore (I installed it while testing a java-based web server) I went to "Add/Remove Programs" and uninstalled j2re-1.4.2_05.
Too late. This morning I browsed to Slashdot and saw the parent article telling me why the Java icon had popped up.
Whatever payload the thing delivered appears to have punched a hole in Norton AntiVirus (the Norton Firewall console is reporting that Norton AntiVirus requires "Urgent Attention" but the annunciator on the AntiVirus tab appears to have been disabled in an effort to hide whatever was done to the AntiVirus). It may also have installed the bat/mumu-a worm (one spyware scanner is reporting an infection by the worm, but Symmantec's bat/mumu-a removal tool reports the machine is clean).
Once a drive has been compromised by something more complicated than a simple virus, there's no way you can ever trust the machine again because there is no way to know what sort of rootkit the exploit delivered.
I've already disconnected the machine from my network and picked up a new hard drive. The old hard drives will go into an external drive housing that I'll only connect to the machine (a) after I have antivirus software reinstalled and (b) only if I absolutely have to pull data from the drive.
"Not that critical" hah! This is by far the most serious attack I've ever been hit with, and I downloaded j2re-1.4.2_05 at most two months ago (elsewhere in the comments someone is reporting that j2re-1.4.2_05 is still available for download from sun.com, I can't confirm that but this is hardly an antiquated version).
There goes my day...
-Don
http://www.gamespot.com/gba/sports/maddennfl2005/n ews_6098784.html
Hah!
You're obviously some young punk pretending to be Andy Rooney.
Any *real* old timer (the kind of person who uses ascii for emphasis instead of that new fangled NCSA-Mosaic html stuff) knows that ram costs $40/meg. Always has, always will.
(if you mod this down, you're too young to remember...)
That vehicle is burned into my childhood, so I, too, have ogled it many times while driving along Cahuenga.
It was built for use in the first movie that I ever walked out of, called "Damnation Alley" (you can find it on imdb). It takes a lot to get a geeky 12 year old to walk out of a science fiction film, but that film did it (mutant cockroaches and all). I don't remember the "Ice Planet Zero" episode, but the chances are good that the vehicle was reused a few times over the years.
Hmmm... lets look at the phrase "hardware capabilities"
"Hardware capabilities" doesn't have a single definition. Are you talking hardware like the Radeon 8500? (which is pretty sweet and fairly common among gamers) or are you talking hardware like the graphics chip in the Intel 810 motherboard set? (which is pretty weak but extremely common among the general public). Believe it or not, a huge number of games are still spec'd to run on low-end chipsets like the i810 because thats what consumers own. Sure, everyone you know has an 8500 or a GeForce4, but you're not a normal person if you're here reading slashdot. Normal people have old machines with slow graphics cards. A modeler that was designed for 8500 cards would be next to useless on a project aimed at i810's, and vice versa.
More importantly, "hardware capabilities" doesn't have a static definition. Graphics hardware is subject to Moore's law (except that the doubling time is even shorter than for CPUs). In the 12-18 months it would take you to write a high quality hardware-oriented modeling tool, graphics chips would run through at least two, possibly 3 generations. Do you design for the current hot chips, since those will be fairly common by the time your software is ready? Or do you try to guess what hardware will do in 18 months even though only a few hardcore gamers will own cards with those features when your tool is released?
Lets assume you've figured out whether you are going for serious gamer hardware or mass market hardware, and you correctly predicted what year you were targeting and guessed the feature set perfectly. Lets even assume you've written it and finished debugging it. Six months later (when the next generation of chips arrives), do you (a) throw away all your work or (b) invest another 6 months completely revising it because NVidia just announced some whizbang new feature that your user interface can't support?
Chances are, whatever you decide, pretty soon you'll find yourself doing exactly what Alias|Wavefront and Discreet and NewTek and etc. are trying to do: build the very best modeler you can, and let the hardware vendors catch up. You don't need that many more doubling times before all those slick features are "hardware capabilities."
Have patience.
When do you think the first feature-length all-CG indy film will hit theaters? (or, if you think that's too fuzzy a question, substitute "under $2M budget" for "indy").
TV cameras were too heavy back in the 1960's, so they just had gyrostabilized binoculars, but the effect was about the same. The binoculars were made by a now-defunct company called ORDCO. LAPD owned several of them which they used in helicopters. There is an episode of Adam-12 (a police show from the late '60s and early '70s) where one of the officers is seen riding in a helicopter and using an ORDCO stabilized binocular to locate a suspect.
Einstein's theory of general relativity supports waves in the gravitational field as a natural consequence of the finite speed of light.
You can think of a gravity wave as being an AC-component of the gravitational field, roughly analogous to an oscillating electromagnetic field (although it has nothing to do with electromagnetism because it is a gravitational wave rather than an electromagnetic wave). The DC component of the gravitational field is what we feel pulling us towards the center of the earth, and is roughly analogous to a static electric field. As another commenter pointed out, shielding the AC component is incredibly cool but not the same as an anti-gravity device because the AC component of the gravitational field is miniscule compared to the DC component that we feel pulling us towards the center of the earth.
Has anybody else read the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1987"?
/. effect)
It has some pretty fun clauses, including:
"United States Code Sec. 2520. Recovery of civil damages authorized"
(a) In General. - Except as provided in section 2511(2)(a)(ii), any person whose
wire, oral, or electronic communication is intercepted, disclosed, or intentionally
used in violation of this chapter may in a civil action recover from the person or entity
which engaged in that violation such relief as may be appropriate.
If you want to read the full text of the law, go to your favorite search engine
and look for +"Chapter 119" +"United States Code" (I'd post a link, but
I doubt if these sites could handle the
cheers,
-Don
Don.Alvarez@SierraNumerics.NoSpamForDinner.com
I heard that CmdrTaco caught some guy selling slashdot moderator points on Ebay
and sent JonKatz to his house with a grenade launcher. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
-Don
Remember, friends don't let friends moderate drunk.
Please don't waste our time with questions like this.