Properly installed UTP does not get "old" in any real sense unless there is some environmental issue such as excessive heat or chemical attack. However, as many other posters have mentioned, a great deal of cabling installations are not properly done. UTP should always be installed by certified installers to the latest revision of TIA/EIA-568, currently revision "C". the installation should be certified with a proper cable analyzer such as a Fluke DSP-4300 and the installer should be required to produce a test report for each cable run. Once you know the cabling has been installed to meet the performance requirements of the standard, you know you can rely on it and should not have to worry about problems with your cabling. This is what I do for a living.
People have to trust people. Doctors, lawyers, finalcial advisors, accountants, we all have to trust experts and base our selection on reputation. Some of those experts are crooked some of the time. Unless you are also an expert, how can you always tell?
Your car mechanic installs no parts but charges you $500 for new parts. Short of having another mechanic take the engine apart, how would you know?
Everyone has been taken at some point or other. In most cases, it was not that important. For some, it was their life's savings.
Madoff was one of the elite, a previous NASDAQ chairman and a prominent public figure. People trusted him the way they trust their bank, their brokerage account, their doctor. Even accountants and auditors and others who should have known better trusted him. They are the ones I would now be looking at. They must have known it was too good to be true. The ordinary person had no clue, and you can't expect they would be able to tell something was up.
Often, they are not idiots, they are desperate and don't know where else to turn. Desperate people are ready to believe there is a benefactor willing to help them survive. Walk a mile in their shoes before you condemn them. Madoff's "clients" where not idiots, they were conned by one of the most sophisticated conmen ever. ANYONE can be conned, no matter how smug and clever you are.
"Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. " Should be "Armed with the policy, I could point to that and refuse when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. "
I had this situation with a company I was contracting to. Knowing that the IT guys were installing pirated software, I wrote the management of that company and recommended that the company established a policy that all software was legally obtained and licensed. At that point, management had only two choices, acknowledge the issue and agree, or document that they approved of piracy. Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution.
It must be remembered that Word and it's relatives are only word processors. If you want to combine documents and images and have proper styles and typograpic control, use a layout program. InDesign is the best of the bunch, I have used it for numerous publications and have not found anything it can't do. As for collaboration, InDesign will use WebDAV and will auto-update linked documents.
And interestingly, the head of the Public Utilities Commission in this island made it very clear to me that they do not regulate Internet, only PSTN, Cellphone, and Electricity. So it is not clear how can they require a license for VOIP if they do not regulate Internet? The reality is that the legal structure does not know how to handle VOIP. Is it telephpony, does it constitute providing Dial Tone? If that is the issue, use Dial-tone-less dialing and get around it. In my mind, VOIP is an internet service and should be viewed as such. It is DATA - nothing more. If the user owns a device to convert voice to DATA and back, and uses this device to do so over the internet, this is nobodies business. If you pay for an internet feed, then you should be free to use it how you wish (providing you are doing anything offensive). The VOIP issue has illustrated the intent of the so-called Public Servants to protect the revenues of the multinational monopolies over the interests of the public. Tell me again why we vote for these guys?
In the C&W controlled monopoly islands of the english speaking Caribbean, VOIP was always a gray area. Anyone wanting to offer VOIP services required a telco license and C&W would not sell them an internet connection, but they did not block VOIP use by users. The Governments did not have any real stance on the issue as they did not understand it. Eventually, C&W accepted the inevitable and offered their own service, known as NetSpeak, but only to private users and only tied to a hardware device. There is a large move to VOIP by companies and now I am seeing quasi-governmental pan-caribbean agencies implementing IP PBX installations using Open Source PBX equipment. The last bastion of TDM is the hotels and I think a shift to VOIP is inevitable there also. The incumbent Telco will likely move to entertainment and content as long distance revenue dwindles and they are stuck with the losses of maintaining low return infrastructure. They are already slimming down operations, laying off staff and becoming a sales driven company rather than an engineering company. VOIP will remain legal and radically change the Caribbean, telcos will become content providers and TDM will fade into the past.
You have to ask, who were his supervisors? Did they not know they had no documentation or passwords before they decided to fire him? If you had a key admin who had sole access to vital information, wouldn't you review your position prior to firing him, such as, implement a policy to store passwords and configs in a secure safe, update your backups, etc. What was the rush to fire him? In my opinion, they got what they deserved. This is a case of bad management and hasty decisions and they should have been censored for their lack of foresight and for elevating this to a ridiculous level. The fact that Childs set conditions under which he would turn over the information indicated he was not keeping the information for malicious reasons. Game over. By and large I regard System Admins like Doctors. They have a right to special access to computer systems, and by implication, special responsibilities to protect that information. They should be held accountable for any misdeeds, punished more harshly for misuse of information, and trusted to access data in a way no layman would be. I had a situation where there was insinuations I had access to emails I should not of. When I explained I had access to the whole server and any information that passed through it, they realized it was ridiculous to make such accusations. I have had clients give me access to their bank account passwords, credit cards, just about every confidential document they own. If you don't trust System Administrators, then how will you have computer systems? Someone has to be trusted and with that trust comes an overriding responsibility to protect those systems, and that's what I see at play here. Childs may have overplayed his own responsibilities but that's not criminal. The reality is, most of the legal system is completely lost with regard to information systems and is terrified of the computer boogey man. They have no idea what they are dealing with.
Wouldn't HIPAA cover this. Why go to all the trouble to regulate the way information can be transmitted if it can be sold on the open market? Something is screwy. I quote Your health information cannot be used or shared without your written permission unless this law allows it. For example, without your authorization, your provider generally cannotâ Give your information to your employer â Use or share your information for marketing or advertising purposes â Share private notes about your mental health counseling sessions
ISPs are exempt provided they do not filter content. This is why no ISP wants to implement any form of control over the type of traffic the users are exchanging, as it then makes them liable for what they do NOT filter. I believe it is called Common Carrier status.
I don't see anything that suggests it is an ethernet cable. If it was ethernet, they would have to state the category. All they state is it is a Denon-Link cable. Is Denon-Link ethernet? How fast?
Nothing. The electrical room lost three walls. No servers were damaged but the fire department wanted to play safe and did not allow them to power up the backup systems. I have servers there, and I agree with the fire people. The internet will survive without us for a day or so.
We are required to pay $10 or so per year to maintain a domain name. If we had to pay $10/year to register an SMTP server, spam would be virtually eliminated, as it would require being up front about operating a mail server. All that would have to happen would be to only accept mail from registered mail servers for the domain they are registered for. Spambots would not function any more. I don't know why this is so difficult to put in place.
Doesn't the FBI/CIA/NSA requiring all ISPs to install listening feeds connecting their main switches to government listening posts? The NSA, whose charters only allows for foreign monitoring, has been involved in domestic spying since 911 and there is no end in sight as the US Government uses fake terror threats to justify all manner of invasions of American civil liberties and the rights of nationals of other nations. I hate going to the US, I feel unwelcome.
There was a news item this morning expressing outrage that China intends to filter (read) all internet traffic during the Olympics, and a US Senator is demanding The President boycott the opening event. Only last year we learned the US Government has required all ISps to provide access to all internet traffci, foreign or internal, so they can snoop. Would someone please explain to me how this is different? I think it would be easier to define who DOESN'T snoop on the internet traffic. I suspect every Government does or wants to snoop the internet traffic flowing through the backbones> Anyone that does not use encryption for confidential information is an idiot. There is no longer any expectation of privacy on packets sent in the clear.
Where did Verizon get teh right to hand out usage information to other businesses? Last I heard the USA was not China, we were not supposed to be subject to monitoring in a Big Brother fashion. Who lets these assholes away with reading our mail, watching our internet usage, censoring our access to information. The culture of the free internet is gone, we are now mice under observation in a lab. Nothing we say or do is private, everything is made available to big business to chew on for opportunities to market to us, extort us, or sue us. And it will only get worse.
Any professional installing Commercial Cabling Systems looks to the standards to define the acceptable systems. Sure, there are lots of solutions that might work over short distances, but the standards call for 90M cable lengths for UTP and that's what installers look for. AMP has a copper 10G solution using shielded pairs that works well. I just completed a training course on the installation of this system and it's impressive. Install this and the future is pretty much proof. It will be a long time before residential systems exceed 10G, I can't get commercial installs to consider it yet.
From their white paper, "The draft standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is significantly different in some respects from earlier Ethernet standards, primarily in that it will only function over optical fiber, and only operate in full-duplex mode"
There are vendors, such as Tyco Electronic's AMP NetConnect line, that have 10G over copper. Has this been discarded in the standard revision?
What part of "Oil will run out" does everyone miss. I love how everyone is still considering the fine details of whether solar is really cheaper or better as if we have any choice. The only choice is when we wake up and move to solar, whether there will be some oil left for the applications that cannot be run off stored electricity. It would seem obvious to conserve oil for those applications rather than burning oil to power large cities that are not moving and sit close to huge solar resources. If there is a move to serious conservation, maybe oil can be available for centuries to come for the applications that most need it. Generating electricity for a metropolis is not one of them and the fastest way to ensure ultimate collapse of the supply. The world needs to appreciate you cannot run planes on electricity, cannot build sufficient solar resources in low density locations, small islands and artic towns. We need to conserve some oil for the long term, so the issues are far more pressing than is being appreciated. There's a learning curve in any industry that brings efficiency and better design, but we need to start to leverage those advances.
I talked to Meraki about using their mesh network fro a resort I wanted to equip, but when I asked what would happen to our investment if they went belly up, they told me it the network hardware would be unusable if that happened. I said thanks but that's not acceptable. Who would walk a client into that sort of scenario? How many bright hopeful startups have we seen disappear without a mention? It's not like they would ever be honest and tell you they are running low on cash. I wouldn't mind if their service was value added, billing or accounting or something, but the network could still be used in the event they vanished. If the hardware was open and I could install a Open Source version later, I might have done it. Maybe Meraki needs to revisit their model and look at it from a customer's viewpoint.
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>As far as I know, all known life on earth is left handed
Your left or my left?
Properly installed UTP does not get "old" in any real sense unless there is some environmental issue such as excessive heat or chemical attack.
However, as many other posters have mentioned, a great deal of cabling installations are not properly done. UTP should always be installed by certified installers to the latest revision of TIA/EIA-568, currently revision "C". the installation should be certified with a proper cable analyzer such as a Fluke DSP-4300 and the installer should be required to produce a test report for each cable run. Once you know the cabling has been installed to meet the performance requirements of the standard, you know you can rely on it and should not have to worry about problems with your cabling.
This is what I do for a living.
People have to trust people. Doctors, lawyers, finalcial advisors, accountants, we all have to trust experts and base our selection on reputation. Some of those experts are crooked some of the time. Unless you are also an expert, how can you always tell?
Your car mechanic installs no parts but charges you $500 for new parts. Short of having another mechanic take the engine apart, how would you know?
Everyone has been taken at some point or other. In most cases, it was not that important. For some, it was their life's savings.
Madoff was one of the elite, a previous NASDAQ chairman and a prominent public figure. People trusted him the way they trust their bank, their brokerage account, their doctor. Even accountants and auditors and others who should have known better trusted him. They are the ones I would now be looking at. They must have known it was too good to be true. The ordinary person had no clue, and you can't expect they would be able to tell something was up.
False. I have never been conned out of money or property
That you know of.
Often, they are not idiots, they are desperate and don't know where else to turn. Desperate people are ready to believe there is a benefactor willing to help them survive. Walk a mile in their shoes before you condemn them.
Madoff's "clients" where not idiots, they were conned by one of the most sophisticated conmen ever. ANYONE can be conned, no matter how smug and clever you are.
"Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. "
Should be "Armed with the policy, I could point to that and refuse when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. "
I had this situation with a company I was contracting to. Knowing that the IT guys were installing pirated software, I wrote the management of that company and recommended that the company established a policy that all software was legally obtained and licensed. At that point, management had only two choices, acknowledge the issue and agree, or document that they approved of piracy. Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution.
It must be remembered that Word and it's relatives are only word processors. If you want to combine documents and images and have proper styles and typograpic control, use a layout program. InDesign is the best of the bunch, I have used it for numerous publications and have not found anything it can't do.
As for collaboration, InDesign will use WebDAV and will auto-update linked documents.
And interestingly, the head of the Public Utilities Commission in this island made it very clear to me that they do not regulate Internet, only PSTN, Cellphone, and Electricity. So it is not clear how can they require a license for VOIP if they do not regulate Internet? The reality is that the legal structure does not know how to handle VOIP. Is it telephpony, does it constitute providing Dial Tone? If that is the issue, use Dial-tone-less dialing and get around it. In my mind, VOIP is an internet service and should be viewed as such. It is DATA - nothing more. If the user owns a device to convert voice to DATA and back, and uses this device to do so over the internet, this is nobodies business. If you pay for an internet feed, then you should be free to use it how you wish (providing you are doing anything offensive).
The VOIP issue has illustrated the intent of the so-called Public Servants to protect the revenues of the multinational monopolies over the interests of the public. Tell me again why we vote for these guys?
In the C&W controlled monopoly islands of the english speaking Caribbean, VOIP was always a gray area. Anyone wanting to offer VOIP services required a telco license and C&W would not sell them an internet connection, but they did not block VOIP use by users. The Governments did not have any real stance on the issue as they did not understand it. Eventually, C&W accepted the inevitable and offered their own service, known as NetSpeak, but only to private users and only tied to a hardware device.
There is a large move to VOIP by companies and now I am seeing quasi-governmental pan-caribbean agencies implementing IP PBX installations using Open Source PBX equipment. The last bastion of TDM is the hotels and I think a shift to VOIP is inevitable there also.
The incumbent Telco will likely move to entertainment and content as long distance revenue dwindles and they are stuck with the losses of maintaining low return infrastructure. They are already slimming down operations, laying off staff and becoming a sales driven company rather than an engineering company.
VOIP will remain legal and radically change the Caribbean, telcos will become content providers and TDM will fade into the past.
You have to ask, who were his supervisors? Did they not know they had no documentation or passwords before they decided to fire him? If you had a key admin who had sole access to vital information, wouldn't you review your position prior to firing him, such as, implement a policy to store passwords and configs in a secure safe, update your backups, etc. What was the rush to fire him? In my opinion, they got what they deserved. This is a case of bad management and hasty decisions and they should have been censored for their lack of foresight and for elevating this to a ridiculous level. The fact that Childs set conditions under which he would turn over the information indicated he was not keeping the information for malicious reasons. Game over.
By and large I regard System Admins like Doctors. They have a right to special access to computer systems, and by implication, special responsibilities to protect that information. They should be held accountable for any misdeeds, punished more harshly for misuse of information, and trusted to access data in a way no layman would be.
I had a situation where there was insinuations I had access to emails I should not of. When I explained I had access to the whole server and any information that passed through it, they realized it was ridiculous to make such accusations. I have had clients give me access to their bank account passwords, credit cards, just about every confidential document they own.
If you don't trust System Administrators, then how will you have computer systems? Someone has to be trusted and with that trust comes an overriding responsibility to protect those systems, and that's what I see at play here. Childs may have overplayed his own responsibilities but that's not criminal.
The reality is, most of the legal system is completely lost with regard to information systems and is terrified of the computer boogey man. They have no idea what they are dealing with.
Wouldn't HIPAA cover this. Why go to all the trouble to regulate the way information can be transmitted if it can be sold on the open market? Something is screwy.
I quote
Your health information cannot be used or shared without your written permission unless this law allows it. For example, without your authorization, your provider generally cannotâ Give your information to your employer
â Use or share your information for marketing or advertising purposes
â Share private notes about your mental health counseling sessions
http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/consumer_summary.pdf
ISPs are exempt provided they do not filter content. This is why no ISP wants to implement any form of control over the type of traffic the users are exchanging, as it then makes them liable for what they do NOT filter. I believe it is called Common Carrier status.
Put a keylogger on and have all the keystrokes emailed to you, at some point they are going to order something and will have to put in their address.
I don't see anything that suggests it is an ethernet cable. If it was ethernet, they would have to state the category. All they state is it is a Denon-Link cable. Is Denon-Link ethernet? How fast?
That's not timing, it's luck.
Nothing. The electrical room lost three walls. No servers were damaged but the fire department wanted to play safe and did not allow them to power up the backup systems. I have servers there, and I agree with the fire people. The internet will survive without us for a day or so.
We are required to pay $10 or so per year to maintain a domain name. If we had to pay $10/year to register an SMTP server, spam would be virtually eliminated, as it would require being up front about operating a mail server. All that would have to happen would be to only accept mail from registered mail servers for the domain they are registered for.
Spambots would not function any more. I don't know why this is so difficult to put in place.
Doesn't the FBI/CIA/NSA requiring all ISPs to install listening feeds connecting their main switches to government listening posts?
The NSA, whose charters only allows for foreign monitoring, has been involved in domestic spying since 911 and there is no end in sight as the US Government uses fake terror threats to justify all manner of invasions of American civil liberties and the rights of nationals of other nations. I hate going to the US, I feel unwelcome.
There was a news item this morning expressing outrage that China intends to filter (read) all internet traffic during the Olympics, and a US Senator is demanding The President boycott the opening event.
Only last year we learned the US Government has required all ISps to provide access to all internet traffci, foreign or internal, so they can snoop.
Would someone please explain to me how this is different?
I think it would be easier to define who DOESN'T snoop on the internet traffic. I suspect every Government does or wants to snoop the internet traffic flowing through the backbones> Anyone that does not use encryption for confidential information is an idiot. There is no longer any expectation of privacy on packets sent in the clear.
Where did Verizon get teh right to hand out usage information to other businesses? Last I heard the USA was not China, we were not supposed to be subject to monitoring in a Big Brother fashion. Who lets these assholes away with reading our mail, watching our internet usage, censoring our access to information. The culture of the free internet is gone, we are now mice under observation in a lab. Nothing we say or do is private, everything is made available to big business to chew on for opportunities to market to us, extort us, or sue us. And it will only get worse.
Any professional installing Commercial Cabling Systems looks to the standards to define the acceptable systems. Sure, there are lots of solutions that might work over short distances, but the standards call for 90M cable lengths for UTP and that's what installers look for.
AMP has a copper 10G solution using shielded pairs that works well. I just completed a training course on the installation of this system and it's impressive. Install this and the future is pretty much proof. It will be a long time before residential systems exceed 10G, I can't get commercial installs to consider it yet.
From their white paper,
"The draft standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is significantly different in some respects from earlier Ethernet standards, primarily
in that it will only function over optical fiber, and only operate in full-duplex mode"
There are vendors, such as Tyco Electronic's AMP NetConnect line, that have 10G over copper. Has this been discarded in the standard revision?
What part of "Oil will run out" does everyone miss. I love how everyone is still considering the fine details of whether solar is really cheaper or better as if we have any choice. The only choice is when we wake up and move to solar, whether there will be some oil left for the applications that cannot be run off stored electricity.
It would seem obvious to conserve oil for those applications rather than burning oil to power large cities that are not moving and sit close to huge solar resources. If there is a move to serious conservation, maybe oil can be available for centuries to come for the applications that most need it. Generating electricity for a metropolis is not one of them and the fastest way to ensure ultimate collapse of the supply.
The world needs to appreciate you cannot run planes on electricity, cannot build sufficient solar resources in low density locations, small islands and artic towns. We need to conserve some oil for the long term, so the issues are far more pressing than is being appreciated.
There's a learning curve in any industry that brings efficiency and better design, but we need to start to leverage those advances.
I talked to Meraki about using their mesh network fro a resort I wanted to equip, but when I asked what would happen to our investment if they went belly up, they told me it the network hardware would be unusable if that happened. I said thanks but that's not acceptable.
Who would walk a client into that sort of scenario? How many bright hopeful startups have we seen disappear without a mention? It's not like they would ever be honest and tell you they are running low on cash.
I wouldn't mind if their service was value added, billing or accounting or something, but the network could still be used in the event they vanished. If the hardware was open and I could install a Open Source version later, I might have done it.
Maybe Meraki needs to revisit their model and look at it from a customer's viewpoint.