We have had extremely patient Cisco TAC engineers on the phone with us for hours trying to resolve a Catalyst 4507R that kept blowing power supplies, and a VPN Concentrator that refused all connectivity after a firmware upgrade (by the way, we were credited with the discovery of a previously unknown bug). If ever their gears go on the blink, you have TAC engineers leaving messages on YOUR voicemail days after the incident was resolved, following up with you to make sure that you are absolutely satisfied with the resolution.
It's not just the brand, it's the whole support infrastructure with them. Cisco is to the networking world what Dell is to the PC world, in terms of customer support caliber.
To be fair, I have used my share of 3Com NICs and have never had any major problems with them. Oh, sure, with the older cards you had to tweak the settings, but nothing major to which you now refer. That's my experience with their NICs.
Their switches and routers are a different story, I'll grant you that. We had really old 3Com switches and routers in here that are hard to use and not as reliable, and I've personally witnessed before a single Cabletron card taking out connectivity to all the sites of a major East Coast healthcare insurer (who shall remain anonymous). Forget their high-end stuff if you must, but their NICs are better IMHO.
It is interesting that the second article notes that, unlike most other competitors who failed to undercut Cisco's market, Huawei represents a relatively new way of breaking into a market as a competitor from the Far East. The key for Huawei, of course, was to steal and otherwise obtain illegally any proprietary Cisco code that they could find. I suppose this is not at all an "innovative" way of introducing yourself into a new market, as many other companies have done so in the past, some more successfully than others.
You know, a while ago Cisco brought suit against the Chinese technology company Huawei for allegedly stealing Cisco's IOS interface and perhaps even code for their routers. I believe the suit was eventually settled with Huawei agreeing that they will "cease and desist". And now 3Com seems to have buddied up with Huawei and come up with their own line of routers, which seems to be 3Com's attempt to be everything to everybody. The problem is that you can only cram so much technology into the box without charging extra for it, as 3Com is doing. With Cisco's dominance in the market place, sooner or later it will hit you in the bottom line and you will be left with very limited set of choices.
You know, I came across something the other day that reminds me of this idea: That an NP-complete problem can have more number of possible solutions than the total number of atoms in the entire universe.
The implication is that, even if we were to use quantum computers to store states, there are problems out there whose scope will outclass even our very method for attempting to find a solution.
"P=NP?", by the way, is one of the seven millenium problems, along with the Poincare Conjecture most recently making the news, that are waiting to be solved.
I don't think so. Even if he discounts the bits in the addressing architecture responsible for routing and local/global flags and just focuses on the global unicast address space, that still gives you 64 bits (see Section 2.5.4 of RFC3513).
And that's assuming ten billion total world population. It's not just ten addresses; everyone can network his/her own cold-fusion-powered TOASTER to the Internet and we wouldn't run out of IP's anytime soon.
You are right in describing what happens in a "collision" scenario whereby you can get two streams to match each other without knowing what the hash would be. But there is still the problem of "preimage attack", whereby you *CAN* choose an alternative input that has the same hash as another output. Both would be similarly problematic and could potentially be catastrophic should an attacker attempt to compromise, say, a CA system.
Just finished reading SCO's quarterly report, and it irks me that their licensing program is still generating cash flow from companies who may be too cowardly to admit that they paid real money for SCO's FUD.
Here is an idea that is more in the spirit of the aforementioned movie than anything else:
We could start an "I Am A Linux User" movement, and it works pretty simply by gathering signatures from Linux users. We could then send this to SCO and deliberately contrast our "I Am One Of Them And Darn Proud Of It" attitude with that of those shadowy companies who keep pumping money into their coffer but refuse to come out and take a stand.
Like I said, just an idea. I would appreciate some feedback, though.
Judge: You may go ahead with your closing statement. SCO: Yes, Your Honor. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a case about intellec... (looks at watch abruptly) Oh, sorry, I guess the fund ran out just now. Another day, another trial. (Picks up briefcase, then bolts.)
An earlier poster replied that Microsoft has had this for years by using RDP. That configuration is not bad, but I would say that the Citrix ICA/IMA architecture has that beat, and more. (ICA/IMA is better at handling burst traffic, and compression is more efficient.)
My company deployed more than twenty-five thin clients in addition to many PC-based virtual sessions that allow the back-end servers to do the number crunching. Each thin client session uses no more than 7-8 Kbps to maintain screen updates, and responsiveness is limited only by the capabilities of the servers and the network bandwidth available.
Your point is well taken: Mixing politics into the job at hand can lead to undesirable consequences. But I was addressing strictly the fact that we have released highly toxic substances into the environment - it was not my goal to remark on the political landscape surrounding the EPA.
Of course, you can take that view and extend it to many, many other areas. Disposal of nuclear waste/by-products, the Kyoto Convention Treaty, the Alaskan Wildlife Preserve and the under-lying oil reserve: These are all examples of what can happen when too much politics are mixed into the bag.
Does the phrase "Wipe After Yourself" mean anything to you? The human species, more than any other, has been directly responsible for vast amounts of pollutants spewed into the environment. So, yeah, it is our problem to solve because we are the ones who caused it.
I don't recall that study, but if that is the case then the situation is more depressing than I had imagined.
Maybe someday when we show a full-body scan of Mars to a bunch of eighth graders, they will point to the Endurance Crater and say that that is where USA is.
From my early days of study, I know that flying a national flag upside-down is actually the international distress signal. So, no, it is unlikely you will be arrested for it (if anything, they are almost obliged, on a moral ground, to assist you anyway they can).
As a fellow American, I am ashamed and embarrassed for my countrymen, many of whom could not even tell where Canada and Mexico are. Such lack of fundamental and basic knowledge is not only humiliating in the international arena, but they also carry real-world penalty and implications as well. This idea of "We Americans Are Too Good To Care for Your Puny Details" attitude is sickening, and the financial penalty is only the beginning of troubles for us Americans. Many who think that fundamental knowledge is too trivial for them to care should understand that there is a reason that they are called "fundamental" or "foundational" - because they will carry the weight of everything else you do.
So at point will people finally start caring about real learning? When a global company had to withdraw one of its products because of stupid mistakes? And is monetary penalty a good motivation for learning? ("We should learn this stuff because we will lose millions if we don't.) Here is where the hacker mentality is a good role model for what we should think: We learn because we enjoy learning, not because we think we can make a million bucks out of it.
I am looking forward to holographic projectors being available. You don't need a screen, you can see 3-D, and combined with the idea of a "touch-projection" technology (think "touch-screen"), we would be onto something like a Holodeck. Doom9 would be extremely cool.
Blaise Pascal is often credited as one of many historical figures responsible, in one way or another, for the development of modern computing. His mathematical achievements, similar to those of Newton, were only part of his preoccupation in life. His famous "Pensees" was a powerful treatise on Christian apologetics (i.e. defense of his faith), and as a philosopher he left a rich legacy to this day.
Hackers and the public can't even agree that "hackers" are NOT "crackers", "warez d00dz", "skript kiddiz", or any such low-life.
Re:Interesting Military Application
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: 1
No, that's not what I mean (and if I put it poorly, it is my fault).
I understand the value of sigintel. What I was trying to point out was the device's tactical value. The ability to turn on the phone without the owner noticing, essentially using the phone to monitor the room, would help special ops make last-minute or on-the-scene decisions. What if you hear an unexpected voice in the safehouse, and that person's being there suddenly changes the situation? What if you learn that there are suddenly hostages involved? What if there are explicit mentions of CBW (chemical-biological weapons) located inside the safehouse? etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
We have had extremely patient Cisco TAC engineers on the phone with us for hours trying to resolve a Catalyst 4507R that kept blowing power supplies, and a VPN Concentrator that refused all connectivity after a firmware upgrade (by the way, we were credited with the discovery of a previously unknown bug). If ever their gears go on the blink, you have TAC engineers leaving messages on YOUR voicemail days after the incident was resolved, following up with you to make sure that you are absolutely satisfied with the resolution.
It's not just the brand, it's the whole support infrastructure with them. Cisco is to the networking world what Dell is to the PC world, in terms of customer support caliber.
To be fair, I have used my share of 3Com NICs and have never had any major problems with them. Oh, sure, with the older cards you had to tweak the settings, but nothing major to which you now refer. That's my experience with their NICs.
Their switches and routers are a different story, I'll grant you that. We had really old 3Com switches and routers in here that are hard to use and not as reliable, and I've personally witnessed before a single Cabletron card taking out connectivity to all the sites of a major East Coast healthcare insurer (who shall remain anonymous). Forget their high-end stuff if you must, but their NICs are better IMHO.
It is interesting that the second article notes that, unlike most other competitors who failed to undercut Cisco's market, Huawei represents a relatively new way of breaking into a market as a competitor from the Far East. The key for Huawei, of course, was to steal and otherwise obtain illegally any proprietary Cisco code that they could find. I suppose this is not at all an "innovative" way of introducing yourself into a new market, as many other companies have done so in the past, some more successfully than others.
You know, a while ago Cisco brought suit against the Chinese technology company Huawei for allegedly stealing Cisco's IOS interface and perhaps even code for their routers. I believe the suit was eventually settled with Huawei agreeing that they will "cease and desist". And now 3Com seems to have buddied up with Huawei and come up with their own line of routers, which seems to be 3Com's attempt to be everything to everybody. The problem is that you can only cram so much technology into the box without charging extra for it, as 3Com is doing. With Cisco's dominance in the market place, sooner or later it will hit you in the bottom line and you will be left with very limited set of choices.
You know, I came across something the other day that reminds me of this idea: That an NP-complete problem can have more number of possible solutions than the total number of atoms in the entire universe.
The implication is that, even if we were to use quantum computers to store states, there are problems out there whose scope will outclass even our very method for attempting to find a solution.
"P=NP?", by the way, is one of the seven millenium problems, along with the Poincare Conjecture most recently making the news, that are waiting to be solved.
I don't think so. Even if he discounts the bits in the addressing architecture responsible for routing and local/global flags and just focuses on the global unicast address space, that still gives you 64 bits (see Section 2.5.4 of RFC3513).
(2^64)/10000000000 = 1844674407.37 (approximately)
And that's assuming ten billion total world population. It's not just ten addresses; everyone can network his/her own cold-fusion-powered TOASTER to the Internet and we wouldn't run out of IP's anytime soon.
...they open up the specs for creating viruses and spreading them onto the Internet.
Oh... wait...
You are right in describing what happens in a "collision" scenario whereby you can get two streams to match each other without knowing what the hash would be. But there is still the problem of "preimage attack", whereby you *CAN* choose an alternative input that has the same hash as another output. Both would be similarly problematic and could potentially be catastrophic should an attacker attempt to compromise, say, a CA system.
Just finished reading SCO's quarterly report, and it irks me that their licensing program is still generating cash flow from companies who may be too cowardly to admit that they paid real money for SCO's FUD.
Here is an idea that is more in the spirit of the aforementioned movie than anything else:
We could start an "I Am A Linux User" movement, and it works pretty simply by gathering signatures from Linux users. We could then send this to SCO and deliberately contrast our "I Am One Of Them And Darn Proud Of It" attitude with that of those shadowy companies who keep pumping money into their coffer but refuse to come out and take a stand.
Like I said, just an idea. I would appreciate some feedback, though.
Judge: You may go ahead with your closing statement.
SCO: Yes, Your Honor. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a case about intellec... (looks at watch abruptly) Oh, sorry, I guess the fund ran out just now. Another day, another trial. (Picks up briefcase, then bolts.)
An earlier poster replied that Microsoft has had this for years by using RDP. That configuration is not bad, but I would say that the Citrix ICA/IMA architecture has that beat, and more. (ICA/IMA is better at handling burst traffic, and compression is more efficient.)
My company deployed more than twenty-five thin clients in addition to many PC-based virtual sessions that allow the back-end servers to do the number crunching. Each thin client session uses no more than 7-8 Kbps to maintain screen updates, and responsiveness is limited only by the capabilities of the servers and the network bandwidth available.
...to run all those hotfixes.
It's not clear to me how "bitch" can mean "female". Someone I used to work with called his guy friends "bitches".
Your point is well taken: Mixing politics into the job at hand can lead to undesirable consequences. But I was addressing strictly the fact that we have released highly toxic substances into the environment - it was not my goal to remark on the political landscape surrounding the EPA.
Of course, you can take that view and extend it to many, many other areas. Disposal of nuclear waste/by-products, the Kyoto Convention Treaty, the Alaskan Wildlife Preserve and the under-lying oil reserve: These are all examples of what can happen when too much politics are mixed into the bag.
Yes, but advertising embarrassing man-made disasters? What is the product that they are trying to sell? Petroleum-digesting bacteria?
Does the phrase "Wipe After Yourself" mean anything to you? The human species, more than any other, has been directly responsible for vast amounts of pollutants spewed into the environment. So, yeah, it is our problem to solve because we are the ones who caused it.
I don't recall that study, but if that is the case then the situation is more depressing than I had imagined.
Maybe someday when we show a full-body scan of Mars to a bunch of eighth graders, they will point to the Endurance Crater and say that that is where USA is.
Very sad.
From my early days of study, I know that flying a national flag upside-down is actually the international distress signal. So, no, it is unlikely you will be arrested for it (if anything, they are almost obliged, on a moral ground, to assist you anyway they can).
As a fellow American, I am ashamed and embarrassed for my countrymen, many of whom could not even tell where Canada and Mexico are. Such lack of fundamental and basic knowledge is not only humiliating in the international arena, but they also carry real-world penalty and implications as well. This idea of "We Americans Are Too Good To Care for Your Puny Details" attitude is sickening, and the financial penalty is only the beginning of troubles for us Americans. Many who think that fundamental knowledge is too trivial for them to care should understand that there is a reason that they are called "fundamental" or "foundational" - because they will carry the weight of everything else you do.
So at point will people finally start caring about real learning? When a global company had to withdraw one of its products because of stupid mistakes? And is monetary penalty a good motivation for learning? ("We should learn this stuff because we will lose millions if we don't.) Here is where the hacker mentality is a good role model for what we should think: We learn because we enjoy learning, not because we think we can make a million bucks out of it.
You put out a story as big as XP SP2, and suddenly all the Windows users in /. come out of the woodworks.
I am looking forward to holographic projectors being available. You don't need a screen, you can see 3-D, and combined with the idea of a "touch-projection" technology (think "touch-screen"), we would be onto something like a Holodeck. Doom9 would be extremely cool.
Darl McBride: All your Unixes are FINALLY belong to us!!!
Blaise Pascal is often credited as one of many historical figures responsible, in one way or another, for the development of modern computing. His mathematical achievements, similar to those of Newton, were only part of his preoccupation in life. His famous "Pensees" was a powerful treatise on Christian apologetics (i.e. defense of his faith), and as a philosopher he left a rich legacy to this day.
Hackers and the public can't even agree that "hackers" are NOT "crackers", "warez d00dz", "skript kiddiz", or any such low-life.
No, that's not what I mean (and if I put it poorly, it is my fault).
I understand the value of sigintel. What I was trying to point out was the device's tactical value. The ability to turn on the phone without the owner noticing, essentially using the phone to monitor the room, would help special ops make last-minute or on-the-scene decisions. What if you hear an unexpected voice in the safehouse, and that person's being there suddenly changes the situation? What if you learn that there are suddenly hostages involved? What if there are explicit mentions of CBW (chemical-biological weapons) located inside the safehouse? etc. etc.