security center -> bottom of page -> 'firewall settings'
It's got all the goodies you want, including allowing full-access to specific processes and ports.
The firewall was there in SP1 too though, it's just on-by-default in SP2. I fail to see the big deal with it. It's almost an admision of defeat to install the firewall by default.
Also, if I were MS, I'd ask 'do you share files in your home with Network Places?' with a default of 'no' and remove the 'file and print sharing' service, which is a HUGE security risk.
Sorry pal, service packs aren't magic powder. Anyone with experience in computers should know that. When you're patching your OS, you don't patch over parts that seem funky, it's a recipe for disaster. Patch-fixing might work for Starcraft when the app is broken, but you don't play double-or-nothing with Windows itself.
At work we're running Spybot, Ad-Aware, and a full virus scan before we even THINK of dropping SP2.
SP2 didn't break the PC, SP2 exposed bad practices in PC ownership. (and BTW, I'm no MS fanboy, I'm MS-free at home and a full-time Mac tech).
I work at a boarding school, and we're still trying to prevent it's spread, but I've had great luck with it. Just provided the Desktop staff with slipstreamed install CDs which we have begun using. The small cost of having to disable the firewall (causes more support trouble than it's worth) is a small price to pay to save up to an hour downloading windows updates.
Eventually we're all going to HAVE to upgrade, MS isn't going to support SP1a forever. May as well do it now, if your apps run (don't have any that don't yet).
I really wish MS had a 'rolling' service pack though, that included ALL of the critical updates for a given product. It's going to go back to sucking when I have to drop sixty patches on top of SP2, I'd rather install a 'security rollup'.
I'd install now though, because the upgrade takes so long to install, it's not something you can do in a reactive environment. When the next worm hits, you won't be able to drop SP2 like you dropped the RPC patch, it takes an order of magnitude longer to install.
That's NOT what I'm saying (though I did live on a hill in Pawtucket for the last two years).
What I'm saying is that Pawtucket is going to be beachfront regardless of what we humans do, we only have a moderate say in how fast we get there.
Long before humans made a difference in the climate, the sahara was a lush jungle. Hell, there were icecaps over where I'm sitting right now a couple of thousand years ago.
I really think climate change should be amongst the least of our problems as environmentally-aware people. The real threat comes from toxicity released by our manufacturing processes, which have serious long-term and almost impossible-to-fix consequences. I don't worry as much about the sea-level as I do about what's still left in the sea. I don't want my kids swimming amongst red tides and jellyfish in dumped waste.
As a race, we must be planning for climate change anyway, we should have plans and policies for moving inland as the planet changes, and policies for shifting agriculture from current lands to the fetile land of the future as desertification claims parts of the west and shifts the arable land northwards.
I don't se how my thinking is off, I think we're all being distracted from the things we can change by focusing on the things we can't, for the politicians' sake.
Um, we'll have it even if the entire human race disappeared today. I can't be the only person out there who realizes that the surface temperature, atmospheric composition, ocean salinity, polar caps, etc. are all VERY dynamic things.
We're contributing to climate change, without a doubt, but mother earth herself has a much greater say than our race.
That said, humans are amazingly resourceful, I think we'll do fine with global warming, we'll move up and inland as the ocean rises, no big deal in the long run. We can ship food and people can move relatively freely on the planet, so I don't expect rising oceans or desertification to be nearly as bad as most imagine it.
What I worry about are the toxic chemicals we're dumping, that's something mommy nature really CAN'T deal with well. It'll suck pretty hard if the oceans are reduced to plankton and jellyfish, I sort of like vertebrates. We need to start taxing every pound of plastic produced or something, and start making our 'disposable' commodities (computers, coffee cups, cars) more biodegradeable or recycleable.
What you need to do is to stop terrorists at their source not after they've gotten their goods into the harbours.
Right. I agree. But I don't think you and I are thinking of the same source.
I'm quite sure that the BEST way to stop terrorists from even becoming terroritsts would be to stop forking over millitary support for Israel, a nation run by a radical-religious war criminal that has nukes in violation of the non-proliferation treaty, a country who's treatment of arabs on it's land is even worse than the treatment of blacks in apartheid South Africa. I understood helping Israel out during the cold war, when there was a good chance the middle east would jive more closely with the USSR than us, but why do we continue to give Israel $4B in cash for weapons when they're one of the biggest arms exporters in the world? Did I mention that they conduct espionage and recon from inside our our millitary and government?
Another way to stop terror at it's source would be to stop being chummy with the House of Saud, probably one of the most decadent and corrupt governments in the world. We should keep business down to business with regimes like this, not invite them to dinner with our leaders. We shouldn't have ANY troops in countries in the middle east where we don't have good feelings amongst the populace, that's where terrorists come from.
We should have sent our forces into Afghanistan to pick-out Osama Bin-Laden, not to topple their government. My guess is that we could have done a more 'surgical extraction' by laying down defense between known Taliban forces and places where Osama may have been, then sending marines in to nail (kill or capture) Al-Qaeda and Osama while the army protected that operation from any Taliban forces.
Americans are notorious for implementing 'solutions' that cause more trouble than the problem, that's how we got Osama in the first place. Instead of stepping back and looking at the 'big picture' we expend a tremendous amount of resources and credibility trying to fix symptoms. I don't know why, but that's how we handle most problems, from welfare to medicine, education, farming, the drug war, illegal immigration, foreign policy, mass-transit, and a slew of other problems.
I understand it's not something that can ALWAYS be done at the dentists, but a policy of 'get them out cheap before you need the oral surgeon' combined with a sane approach to deciding when things are bad-enough to warrant the more expensive care would save the industry (and us) a lot of money.
Firefox and Mozilla use the EXACT SAME rendering engine, it's called gecko.
If you use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla, you can see how the same exact bugs are oftne present in all three. Firefox is just Mozilla rendering with a different 'shell', Thunderbird is just Mozilla mail with a similarly-stripped 'shell'.
I don't blame medicine for their deaths. I blame medicine for using their deaths to cash-out instead of pushing the option of 'a serene death at home'.
Seriously, I knew the first girl was dying the day I met her, but every few weeks she'd have a scar from another operation they did to keep her running. Towards the end her skeleton itself was dying and they were removing bones every few weeks.
The other woman was a recovering alcoholic, and I predicted that the chemo would push her liver over the edge. If I could tell by rudimentary knowledge and gut-instinct that she wouldn't survive chemo, why would a doctor try to push it as an option.
There comes a time when you're beat, or you need a lifestyle change more than a doctor. Doctors should be willing to tell people when they see those times coming.
That's what happened. I was prescribed antibiotics because I had a heart murmur and was told that I needed them before any dentistry.
A few days later I had itchy ears, a sinus infection, my stomach hurt, and the back of my throat was speckled white. I figured that I was doomed to thrush.
I went to the ear-nose-throat doctor, and he said that "only really sick people get thrush, you're just overreacting, and you have an ear infection."
He prescribed antibiotics. I threw the slip away, did some reading, and decided to go zero-carb for two weeks. What do you know, I felt so good on low-carb that I gave bread up for over a year. A lot of things got better, including peeling skin on my feet and my allergies (both things doctors wanted me to take different 'scripts for).
I'd hate to see what would have happened if I had just continued down the path I was on, keeping up my 'American' diet and taking the antibiotics, I'd probably be a giant fungal zombie by now, which they could sell me some diflucan to fix.
Curiously, the last two people I know who died died from complications caused from medical treatments, no the diseases they had. One had horrible asthma and the medications destroyed her kidneys (IIRC), and the other's liver went after she was aggressively treated for cancer. The medical industry easily made hundreds of thousands of dollars on these two when they realized that they were going to die anyway. Sick shit.
Sorry, mine WERE impacting, that's why I bothered getting them out at all.
I was white-knuckle gripping the chair when my dentist was explaining that he was slicing my much-loved gums. Even scarier was when he explained that he was going to "snap each of them into four pieces and pull the pieces out. This will feel odd." The Best quote of the adventure though, was when he said, "Marc, you've got to stop swallowing that much blood, you really don't want to get a toxic stomach and puke on the way home and have four abcesses in the jaw. Tap my leg if you're about to swallow and I'll suck it out."
Getting this done at the dentist saved me $1200, well worth it.
I disagree. Americans are medically-obsessed. I work at a boarding school, and I end up in the dorms fixing stuff quite a bit. I have yet to see a room without a bottle of 'scripted antibiotics in it. The school newspaper just made a joke about how much ritalin and adderal is abused for 'studying'. We overpay for every piece of plastic and metal that goes into medical care. The list goes on.
When I got a fungal ear infection and my doctor prescribed me antibiotics, which are exactly WHY I got the fungal infection, I stared thinking about it. I haven't taken a prescription since.
When I had to get my wisdom teeth out, I decided to do it at the dentist's office instead of the oral surgeon, I saved over $1200, and the fact that I was awake and could cooperate with the dentist meant that the surgery went smoother and safer, and I recovered much faster because they can really 'beat you up' when you're unconscious. I walked home with some cotton to soak up the blood and a bottle of advil for the rest of the week.
Why on earth would insurance pay for a full-on surgery to extract wisdom teeth? It can be done easily at the dentist's office for a third of the cost.
I really don't think the problem is litigation, it's certainly a problem, but not the major factor in medical costs. The major factor is American aversion to reasonable amounts of blood and pain, coupled with excessive trust in the medical institution and it's practitioners.
OK. My apologies. I _DO_ work in a resnet environment, so I know what it's like. I'm sorry for generalizing, almost all resnet folks are overworked and underbudgeted. But I also see a lot of old-school thinking that prevents implementation of modern solutions. I see a lot of 'lets find a vendor instead'.
I haven't had any trouble with my RADEON original or 7500, the drivers were a bit rough around the edges in xfree-4.2, but 4.3, xorg, and 4.4 have been beautiful. Also, the DRI code lives in the kernel, so you have to be careful about kernel version selection, compile options, and binary-only drivers.
We've got a similar setup with our 'campus manager' 'solution'. I swear, it causes more trouble than the benefits it provides.
RESNET admins, for the most part, are generally control freaks who lack the skills to track down problems on their own, have no idea how to fix them, and need vendors and consultants to handle everything. It usually has a lot to do with occupational succession in a school environment, I think.
Anyway, we're already wasting resources on our 'remediation server' for next year, and our plan, no joke, is to keep all users at XP SP1. FOREVER. We're going to disable the firewall on SP2 machines, opening up our number-one defense from worms, just so we can brag about having 'remediation capabilities'. Oh yeah, our registration system binds to the MAC address, so we have no way to allow wireless in the dorms or student areas.
I keep telling them that the best way to handle the network is to allow all access, but place a small sniffer on every subnet. When something goes horribly wrong we can look at the sniffer to see the source MAC address, then look up the port for that MAC addy on the switch management software and head to that room to fix the problem.
There's no point in investing hundreds of admin man-hours every year to get registration and remediation running when we can get similar results from a few dozen hours of desktop support.
"the person who only cares about "good enough", not "awesome" performance"
Wel I'm one of those people. I almost NEVER use the 3D part of the card, because I'm doing mostly desktop-oriented work. I suppose I drop into Quake2 every now and then, but overall I just need a 2D card.
It's funny to see all these Linux users complain about the latest/greatest cards not having drivers. The xfree/xorg folks have to write the drivers themselves, so it just takes time for them to figure out the cards on their own. I have a RADEON 7500 and it's got _FULL_ 2D and 3D hardware acceleration without binary drivers. The performance of the card is more than enough for my and most user's needs, even games like UT and Quake3 play beautifully on it.
My guess would be that this company, if successful, would produce a card that might be fully supported, but the performance would be less than that of the reverse-engineered xorg drivers. What's the point of making a fully-supported card if the design and fabrication resources will only yield a card that performs worse than the competition?
I'll stick with my generation-behing-cutting-edge ATI cards, thank you very much.
is your sig from the Sage Francis song "makeshift patriot"? If you haven't heard it, I suggest you do. He's a cool guy too, used to listen to him locally and on the college radio.
I'm sitting in the corner of a classroom full of kids checking out slashdot while a computer finishes imaging, and i checked-out your sig. You should really let people know that your sig-link has Work Unsafe images on it, not say "I made a funny".
Speaking as someone who has to implement Macs at work, and likes to keep the Macs MORE functional in our environment than the PCs, this is a steal.
The cost of transition to 10.4 without my being able to learn the OS before it's released is in the multi-thousand dollar range.
Having a copy of OS X server to fiddle with lets this pay for itself (can you say non-production server?).
Getting point-releases on disc is quite important to anyone who has to master images. I'd rather use a 'native' 10.3.6 install than the disc that comes with the next Mac we purchase. There's some value there (though I can usually get one by asking for it from a sales rep).
If you're just some guy who wants to try 'tiger' out on your own, it's a waste of money, but if there are people who you need to stay ahead of and software you need to stay on top of, this has value.
The problem, however, is filtering that kind of traffic in any timely matter
Did you READ TFA? They have multiterabyte 'buffers' to keep the thing fed.
I'm sure after some very simple initial analysis they can safely toss 99.99% of the initial data. They might run a few hours behind during peak hours, but they can catch up later by storing compressed voice in the aforementioned buffers.
can't tell what the data is in any reliable manner without a massive, memory based system
Again, this is what the article is about. There's PLENTY of storage. And for the record, decoding VoIP would be infinitely easier than tapping raw voice, it's already compressed and the vendors are standardized on a few protocols that are not (usually) encrypted.
but it's highly unlikely they've got a bunch of genuses sitting locked up in a bunker somewhere breaking encryption algorithms for them 24/7
Dude! I _KNOW_ people who have done this sort of thing, and people who build ASICs that automate it. Most of the time a fair amount of detective work yeilds better results than attempts at decryption, but Uncle Sam definitely has a bunch of high-end math-heads working on finding vulnerabilities in today's encryption.
I don't particularily see them being able effectivly spy on a whole lot of jack shit
I do. Considering how FEW people use encryption in a non-corporate sense, it would be trivial to at least keep tabs on the folks who have the wherewithall to build secured systems. I have no doubt that if I set-up a secure-comm system for some shady arabs, the feds would be knocking at my door, or worse.
She couldn't install Windows either. And for the record, Mandrake is just as easy, if not easier to install as Windows XP. And the default mandrake install won't get owned in fifteen seconds on the 'net like the Windows install will.
The only real 'desktop ready' OS for the the average person is really OS X, which seems to work even for users who are scared of computers. If you think Windows is 'desktop ready' you haven't paid your dues working helpdesk long enough.
All computing should be managed though, by yourself, a neighborhood geek-for-hire, or a company. I know a LOT of folks who would pay a modest subscription fee to have someone manage their PC remotely and guarantee that software was properly installed, hard drives were healthy and backed-up, and viruses and spyware prevented. Hell, I've got home users who let me lock them out of their own machines (they are 'restricted users'), when they want to install an app they put the CD in, call me up and I do it over VNC.
Slashdot Mirror
security center -> bottom of page -> 'firewall settings'
It's got all the goodies you want, including allowing full-access to specific processes and ports.
The firewall was there in SP1 too though, it's just on-by-default in SP2. I fail to see the big deal with it. It's almost an admision of defeat to install the firewall by default.
Also, if I were MS, I'd ask 'do you share files in your home with Network Places?' with a default of 'no' and remove the 'file and print sharing' service, which is a HUGE security risk.
Sorry pal, service packs aren't magic powder. Anyone with experience in computers should know that. When you're patching your OS, you don't patch over parts that seem funky, it's a recipe for disaster. Patch-fixing might work for Starcraft when the app is broken, but you don't play double-or-nothing with Windows itself.
At work we're running Spybot, Ad-Aware, and a full virus scan before we even THINK of dropping SP2.
SP2 didn't break the PC, SP2 exposed bad practices in PC ownership. (and BTW, I'm no MS fanboy, I'm MS-free at home and a full-time Mac tech).
I work at a boarding school, and we're still trying to prevent it's spread, but I've had great luck with it. Just provided the Desktop staff with slipstreamed install CDs which we have begun using. The small cost of having to disable the firewall (causes more support trouble than it's worth) is a small price to pay to save up to an hour downloading windows updates.
Eventually we're all going to HAVE to upgrade, MS isn't going to support SP1a forever. May as well do it now, if your apps run (don't have any that don't yet).
I really wish MS had a 'rolling' service pack though, that included ALL of the critical updates for a given product. It's going to go back to sucking when I have to drop sixty patches on top of SP2, I'd rather install a 'security rollup'.
I'd install now though, because the upgrade takes so long to install, it's not something you can do in a reactive environment. When the next worm hits, you won't be able to drop SP2 like you dropped the RPC patch, it takes an order of magnitude longer to install.
That's NOT what I'm saying (though I did live on a hill in Pawtucket for the last two years).
What I'm saying is that Pawtucket is going to be beachfront regardless of what we humans do, we only have a moderate say in how fast we get there.
Long before humans made a difference in the climate, the sahara was a lush jungle. Hell, there were icecaps over where I'm sitting right now a couple of thousand years ago.
I really think climate change should be amongst the least of our problems as environmentally-aware people. The real threat comes from toxicity released by our manufacturing processes, which have serious long-term and almost impossible-to-fix consequences. I don't worry as much about the sea-level as I do about what's still left in the sea. I don't want my kids swimming amongst red tides and jellyfish in dumped waste.
As a race, we must be planning for climate change anyway, we should have plans and policies for moving inland as the planet changes, and policies for shifting agriculture from current lands to the fetile land of the future as desertification claims parts of the west and shifts the arable land northwards.
I don't se how my thinking is off, I think we're all being distracted from the things we can change by focusing on the things we can't, for the politicians' sake.
Um, we'll have it even if the entire human race disappeared today. I can't be the only person out there who realizes that the surface temperature, atmospheric composition, ocean salinity, polar caps, etc. are all VERY dynamic things.
We're contributing to climate change, without a doubt, but mother earth herself has a much greater say than our race.
That said, humans are amazingly resourceful, I think we'll do fine with global warming, we'll move up and inland as the ocean rises, no big deal in the long run. We can ship food and people can move relatively freely on the planet, so I don't expect rising oceans or desertification to be nearly as bad as most imagine it.
What I worry about are the toxic chemicals we're dumping, that's something mommy nature really CAN'T deal with well. It'll suck pretty hard if the oceans are reduced to plankton and jellyfish, I sort of like vertebrates. We need to start taxing every pound of plastic produced or something, and start making our 'disposable' commodities (computers, coffee cups, cars) more biodegradeable or recycleable.
...to fix their copy machine until yesterday when Microsoft settled with them for $0.5BN?
I think he meant "Microwavings and Accidental Two-Year Olds."
What you need to do is to stop terrorists at their source not after they've gotten their goods into the harbours.
Right. I agree. But I don't think you and I are thinking of the same source.
I'm quite sure that the BEST way to stop terrorists from even becoming terroritsts would be to stop forking over millitary support for Israel, a nation run by a radical-religious war criminal that has nukes in violation of the non-proliferation treaty, a country who's treatment of arabs on it's land is even worse than the treatment of blacks in apartheid South Africa. I understood helping Israel out during the cold war, when there was a good chance the middle east would jive more closely with the USSR than us, but why do we continue to give Israel $4B in cash for weapons when they're one of the biggest arms exporters in the world? Did I mention that they conduct espionage and recon from inside our our millitary and government?
Another way to stop terror at it's source would be to stop being chummy with the House of Saud, probably one of the most decadent and corrupt governments in the world. We should keep business down to business with regimes like this, not invite them to dinner with our leaders. We shouldn't have ANY troops in countries in the middle east where we don't have good feelings amongst the populace, that's where terrorists come from.
We should have sent our forces into Afghanistan to pick-out Osama Bin-Laden, not to topple their government. My guess is that we could have done a more 'surgical extraction' by laying down defense between known Taliban forces and places where Osama may have been, then sending marines in to nail (kill or capture) Al-Qaeda and Osama while the army protected that operation from any Taliban forces.
Americans are notorious for implementing 'solutions' that cause more trouble than the problem, that's how we got Osama in the first place. Instead of stepping back and looking at the 'big picture' we expend a tremendous amount of resources and credibility trying to fix symptoms. I don't know why, but that's how we handle most problems, from welfare to medicine, education, farming, the drug war, illegal immigration, foreign policy, mass-transit, and a slew of other problems.
This is ging to become the computing equivalent to 'about the size of a volkswagen beetle' isn't it?
I can just hear it:
NEW SUPERCOMPUTER RUNS OS X AT 2.7x NATIVE SPEED UNDER PEARPC!!!
I understand it's not something that can ALWAYS be done at the dentists, but a policy of 'get them out cheap before you need the oral surgeon' combined with a sane approach to deciding when things are bad-enough to warrant the more expensive care would save the industry (and us) a lot of money.
Firefox and Mozilla use the EXACT SAME rendering engine, it's called gecko.
If you use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla, you can see how the same exact bugs are oftne present in all three. Firefox is just Mozilla rendering with a different 'shell', Thunderbird is just Mozilla mail with a similarly-stripped 'shell'.
But it's only about an hour of your life, and while you're lucid, you are totally numbed-up in the mouth.
I think it would be good for people to experience that kind of thing, and it's $1200.
There's very little I wouldn't do for an hour to save $1200.
Wait, that's not true, there's a lot I wouldn't do, but if it's MY blood I don't really mind.
I don't blame medicine for their deaths. I blame medicine for using their deaths to cash-out instead of pushing the option of 'a serene death at home'.
Seriously, I knew the first girl was dying the day I met her, but every few weeks she'd have a scar from another operation they did to keep her running. Towards the end her skeleton itself was dying and they were removing bones every few weeks.
The other woman was a recovering alcoholic, and I predicted that the chemo would push her liver over the edge. If I could tell by rudimentary knowledge and gut-instinct that she wouldn't survive chemo, why would a doctor try to push it as an option.
There comes a time when you're beat, or you need a lifestyle change more than a doctor. Doctors should be willing to tell people when they see those times coming.
That's what happened. I was prescribed antibiotics because I had a heart murmur and was told that I needed them before any dentistry.
A few days later I had itchy ears, a sinus infection, my stomach hurt, and the back of my throat was speckled white. I figured that I was doomed to thrush.
I went to the ear-nose-throat doctor, and he said that "only really sick people get thrush, you're just overreacting, and you have an ear infection."
He prescribed antibiotics. I threw the slip away, did some reading, and decided to go zero-carb for two weeks. What do you know, I felt so good on low-carb that I gave bread up for over a year. A lot of things got better, including peeling skin on my feet and my allergies (both things doctors wanted me to take different 'scripts for).
I'd hate to see what would have happened if I had just continued down the path I was on, keeping up my 'American' diet and taking the antibiotics, I'd probably be a giant fungal zombie by now, which they could sell me some diflucan to fix.
Curiously, the last two people I know who died died from complications caused from medical treatments, no the diseases they had. One had horrible asthma and the medications destroyed her kidneys (IIRC), and the other's liver went after she was aggressively treated for cancer. The medical industry easily made hundreds of thousands of dollars on these two when they realized that they were going to die anyway. Sick shit.
Sorry, mine WERE impacting, that's why I bothered getting them out at all.
I was white-knuckle gripping the chair when my dentist was explaining that he was slicing my much-loved gums. Even scarier was when he explained that he was going to "snap each of them into four pieces and pull the pieces out. This will feel odd." The Best quote of the adventure though, was when he said, "Marc, you've got to stop swallowing that much blood, you really don't want to get a toxic stomach and puke on the way home and have four abcesses in the jaw. Tap my leg if you're about to swallow and I'll suck it out."
Getting this done at the dentist saved me $1200, well worth it.
I disagree. Americans are medically-obsessed. I work at a boarding school, and I end up in the dorms fixing stuff quite a bit. I have yet to see a room without a bottle of 'scripted antibiotics in it. The school newspaper just made a joke about how much ritalin and adderal is abused for 'studying'. We overpay for every piece of plastic and metal that goes into medical care. The list goes on.
When I got a fungal ear infection and my doctor prescribed me antibiotics, which are exactly WHY I got the fungal infection, I stared thinking about it. I haven't taken a prescription since.
When I had to get my wisdom teeth out, I decided to do it at the dentist's office instead of the oral surgeon, I saved over $1200, and the fact that I was awake and could cooperate with the dentist meant that the surgery went smoother and safer, and I recovered much faster because they can really 'beat you up' when you're unconscious. I walked home with some cotton to soak up the blood and a bottle of advil for the rest of the week.
Why on earth would insurance pay for a full-on surgery to extract wisdom teeth? It can be done easily at the dentist's office for a third of the cost.
I really don't think the problem is litigation, it's certainly a problem, but not the major factor in medical costs. The major factor is American aversion to reasonable amounts of blood and pain, coupled with excessive trust in the medical institution and it's practitioners.
OK. My apologies. I _DO_ work in a resnet environment, so I know what it's like. I'm sorry for generalizing, almost all resnet folks are overworked and underbudgeted. But I also see a lot of old-school thinking that prevents implementation of modern solutions. I see a lot of 'lets find a vendor instead'.
I haven't had any trouble with my RADEON original or 7500, the drivers were a bit rough around the edges in xfree-4.2, but 4.3, xorg, and 4.4 have been beautiful. Also, the DRI code lives in the kernel, so you have to be careful about kernel version selection, compile options, and binary-only drivers.
We've got a similar setup with our 'campus manager' 'solution'. I swear, it causes more trouble than the benefits it provides.
RESNET admins, for the most part, are generally control freaks who lack the skills to track down problems on their own, have no idea how to fix them, and need vendors and consultants to handle everything. It usually has a lot to do with occupational succession in a school environment, I think.
Anyway, we're already wasting resources on our 'remediation server' for next year, and our plan, no joke, is to keep all users at XP SP1. FOREVER. We're going to disable the firewall on SP2 machines, opening up our number-one defense from worms, just so we can brag about having 'remediation capabilities'. Oh yeah, our registration system binds to the MAC address, so we have no way to allow wireless in the dorms or student areas.
I keep telling them that the best way to handle the network is to allow all access, but place a small sniffer on every subnet. When something goes horribly wrong we can look at the sniffer to see the source MAC address, then look up the port for that MAC addy on the switch management software and head to that room to fix the problem.
There's no point in investing hundreds of admin man-hours every year to get registration and remediation running when we can get similar results from a few dozen hours of desktop support.
"the person who only cares about "good enough", not "awesome" performance"
Wel I'm one of those people. I almost NEVER use the 3D part of the card, because I'm doing mostly desktop-oriented work. I suppose I drop into Quake2 every now and then, but overall I just need a 2D card.
It's funny to see all these Linux users complain about the latest/greatest cards not having drivers. The xfree/xorg folks have to write the drivers themselves, so it just takes time for them to figure out the cards on their own. I have a RADEON 7500 and it's got _FULL_ 2D and 3D hardware acceleration without binary drivers. The performance of the card is more than enough for my and most user's needs, even games like UT and Quake3 play beautifully on it.
My guess would be that this company, if successful, would produce a card that might be fully supported, but the performance would be less than that of the reverse-engineered xorg drivers. What's the point of making a fully-supported card if the design and fabrication resources will only yield a card that performs worse than the competition?
I'll stick with my generation-behing-cutting-edge ATI cards, thank you very much.
is your sig from the Sage Francis song "makeshift patriot"? If you haven't heard it, I suggest you do. He's a cool guy too, used to listen to him locally and on the college radio.
dude! not fscking funny!
I'm sitting in the corner of a classroom full of kids checking out slashdot while a computer finishes imaging, and i checked-out your sig. You should really let people know that your sig-link has Work Unsafe images on it, not say "I made a funny".
Speaking as someone who has to implement Macs at work, and likes to keep the Macs MORE functional in our environment than the PCs, this is a steal.
The cost of transition to 10.4 without my being able to learn the OS before it's released is in the multi-thousand dollar range.
Having a copy of OS X server to fiddle with lets this pay for itself (can you say non-production server?).
Getting point-releases on disc is quite important to anyone who has to master images. I'd rather use a 'native' 10.3.6 install than the disc that comes with the next Mac we purchase. There's some value there (though I can usually get one by asking for it from a sales rep).
If you're just some guy who wants to try 'tiger' out on your own, it's a waste of money, but if there are people who you need to stay ahead of and software you need to stay on top of, this has value.
The problem, however, is filtering that kind of traffic in any timely matter
Did you READ TFA? They have multiterabyte 'buffers' to keep the thing fed.
I'm sure after some very simple initial analysis they can safely toss 99.99% of the initial data. They might run a few hours behind during peak hours, but they can catch up later by storing compressed voice in the aforementioned buffers.
can't tell what the data is in any reliable manner without a massive, memory based system
Again, this is what the article is about. There's PLENTY of storage. And for the record, decoding VoIP would be infinitely easier than tapping raw voice, it's already compressed and the vendors are standardized on a few protocols that are not (usually) encrypted.
but it's highly unlikely they've got a bunch of genuses sitting locked up in a bunker somewhere breaking encryption algorithms for them 24/7
Dude! I _KNOW_ people who have done this sort of thing, and people who build ASICs that automate it. Most of the time a fair amount of detective work yeilds better results than attempts at decryption, but Uncle Sam definitely has a bunch of high-end math-heads working on finding vulnerabilities in today's encryption.
I don't particularily see them being able effectivly spy on a whole lot of jack shit
I do. Considering how FEW people use encryption in a non-corporate sense, it would be trivial to at least keep tabs on the folks who have the wherewithall to build secured systems. I have no doubt that if I set-up a secure-comm system for some shady arabs, the feds would be knocking at my door, or worse.
She couldn't install Windows either. And for the record, Mandrake is just as easy, if not easier to install as Windows XP. And the default mandrake install won't get owned in fifteen seconds on the 'net like the Windows install will.
The only real 'desktop ready' OS for the the average person is really OS X, which seems to work even for users who are scared of computers. If you think Windows is 'desktop ready' you haven't paid your dues working helpdesk long enough.
All computing should be managed though, by yourself, a neighborhood geek-for-hire, or a company. I know a LOT of folks who would pay a modest subscription fee to have someone manage their PC remotely and guarantee that software was properly installed, hard drives were healthy and backed-up, and viruses and spyware prevented. Hell, I've got home users who let me lock them out of their own machines (they are 'restricted users'), when they want to install an app they put the CD in, call me up and I do it over VNC.