Great, so when my orginal contract expires, despite the fact that my manager extended the contract, and told IT about it a month ago, my access goes *kablooey*.
This has happened almost every place I've worked with NT user accounts. Almost always, they expire on the day of the original contract expiration date - no matter what - doesn't matter of the contract was extended, or you flipped to be an employee.
"This is probably the strangest business combination I could imagine. Apple specializes in selling low quantities of very expensive items. Wal-Mart specializes in selling high quantities of very cheap items."
Last I checked Apple had sold millions of digital files at around 99 cents each.
Business is good - just get healthcare clients
on
The Engine of US Jobs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I run a small IT consulting business (it's just me) and two of my clients are in health care. Business is good, and these clients are growing like gangbusters.
Long term I worry though, as healthcare isn't fundamentally 'productive' in any sense. It's not making anything new, it's just chewing up a larger and larger percentage of our paychecks in the form of social security, medicare and insurance payments.
I'm still kicking. I almost never post any longer. There are so many users now you are guaranteed that someone has already said what you had to add, by the time you get around to commenting.
I've bought all kinds of compact flourescent replacement bulbs - from high priced to cheapo. Every single one of them has far outlasted a traditional incandescent. I could give a crap about energy savings, the number one reason I bought them was so that I wouldn't have to change bulbs every other week. So far so good, in five years of using them I've had to replace 2.
I was referring to the comparative article on file systems as being incorrect. I have no means of correcting it.
It appears that though the wikipedia entry is technically correct about NTFS, the Win32 APIs used by most applications don't support file names (file + path) longer than 255 characters. I verified this in XP by trying to create nested directories with long names in Explorer. Eventually you get a 'path is too long' error at 255 characters.
"Though the file system supports paths up to ca. 32,000 Unicode characters with each path component (directory or filename) up to 255 characters long, certain names are unusable, since NTFS stores its metadata in regular (albeit hidden and for the most part inaccessible) files; accordingly, user files cannot use these names."
The article incorrectly states "Windows file names can be up to 255 characters, but that includes the full path. A lot characters are wasted if the default storage location is used: "C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\"." I will grant that this may have been a limitation in the past, but XP has had NTFS from the start, and NTFS is by far the most common windows FS today.
I must be too old, all I get are c 1 a l a s and v 1 @ g r 4 SPAM. Perhaps if I bought some, then I'd start getting porn spam so I could put my prescription to good use...
It can happen in an office building to
on
Telecommuting Backlash
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I had a laptop stolen in a secured office building. Each floor required a badge, as did the lobby. A laptop at home is no more or less safe than a laptop at work. In fact, my house is probably harder to break in to than most office buildings.
This is an unfair comparison. For the electric car, you are including generation efficiency (at the power plant) and transmission. You don't appear to be doing this for the gas/diesel car however.
Gasoline requires energy to create it from petroleum, it also requires energy to 'transmit' it from the refinery to the gas station. Are the efficiencies of these steps included in your analysis?
Have you looked at the new version of MS Office? I am no MS fan boy. I've been dealing with their bulky office products for most of my career - their saving grace is that they usually are better, or no worse, than all of the other product out there.
But the new version of MS Office has some extremely innovative user interface and workflow components. It's unlike anything else out there. And no, it's not just copying OS X.
I propose a new rule, if you find yourself penning a knee-jerk response to any positive commentary about Microsoft, just scrub it and start over. Intelligence is marked by the ability to perceive shades of gray, not just black and white. I can recognize that though there are many negative aspects of Microsoft's business practices and products, there are also many positive aspects. And indeed, though MS has grown mostly throw acquisition and mimicry of innovators, it is still very much capable of innovating on its own every once in awhile.
"Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo."
Yes, instead they concentrated on making software people actually pay good money for. Google and Yahoo have revenue based for the most part on ads. MS is not in the ad business, though I am sure they sell a few on MSN, it's not really what they are good at.
MS didn't 'miss the wave', they just continued to make their spectacularly successful products even better, and made a lot of money in the process.
I am certainly glad that the google's and the yahoo's of the world exert competitive pressure on MS, which helps it overcome its monopolistic inertial. But this impetus is best directed towards adopting and innovating in its core business however. Leave search to google, but if Google Office has some interesting ideas, by all means, MS should use them, improve on them, and hopefully come up with innovative new ideas in an effort to best Google.
This is why Sony Walkmans only ran on Sony batteries. Oh wait, they ran on AAs, an international standard.
Why do you think it would be so hard to come up with a standardized battery? Especially if a government got involved and mandated a standard as part of a transition to an all electric fleet.
"That is YOUR return on investment, not Intel's - and it is very dependent on the timing of your purchase."
The OP talked talked about profits/market cap, and referred to this as "return on investment". I provided one definition of return on investment that was utterly independent of the company's profits. Then I talked about profit margins, which are the company's profit per dollar spent, which are utterly independent of the company's market cap. Either way you slice it, the OP's definition didn't add up.
Note to the financially illiterate: Profits/Market Cap != return on investment.
I could buy 100 shares of AMD at $30 for $3000 today. If the stock goes up to $40/share in a year and I sell, I've made $1000 for an investment of $3000. In the meantime, AMD might have actually lost money that year (yes, companies can lose money and still gain market cap). So in this scenario, even though AMD lost money, I as an owner of that stock, had a return on investment of 33% in one year.
The numbers I'd be more interested in would be their margins. How much profit are they making per dollar they spend?
The big difference with Second Life (SL), which I am sure is hugely 'wasteful' of server CPU, is scripting. Any user can create an object and attach one or more scripts to it. These scripts can communicate with other objects, with Avatars, change the state of the object, create new objects, listen for input, etc... It is not unusually to see a sophisticated Avatar with many hundred object attachments constituting its 'custom'. Each of these objects can have an embedded script, which runs on the server. That's one Avatar. Now think about ten such Avatars congregating in once place, all of these objects interactive with each other, and the each of the Avatars in real time. This requires a lot of processing power, and loads of inter-object communication.
LSL (the name of the scripting language) is interpretted, and oriented towards simplicity, not speed. It's goal is to make it relatively easy for users to create richly interactive and complex objects, at the cost of server CPU.
So yes, per Avatar, I am sure SL uses more server CPU than any other massively multiplayer game, but that's because it offers an extremely rich and customizable experience.
"Some captchas have been solved with more than 90% accuracy by scientists specializing in computer vision research at the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere."
Hell, that's better than my average. They are getting so cryptic, it seems I get them wrong about 25% of the time these days.
Can you tell me, for certain, that in documenting the hole, by actually browsing other company's confidential files, I did not commit a crime? Given prosecutions like that of the original article, I think there are some serious legal questions around this issue. However confidential my correspondence with an HR or legal department, they can't protect you if you actually committed a crime, in fact, in these days of Sarbanes-Oxley, they might feel obligated to turn you in. And don't tell me about attorney-client privelege. A corp attorney's client is the corporation, not the employee's.
There is absolutely no way of telling how HR or legal would have reacted to documented proof that I used corporate computers to access the confidential information of another company. If things had taken a wrong turn, the fact that it was the fault of a programmer at the ASP that this was possible at all would have been entirely forgotten as security escorted me out the door, and legal filed a suit to block unemployment.
Some people might think I was being too paranoid. You are wrong. Until there are electronic whistleblower statutes that protect actions taken in ernest to document a security flaw in a software product, I won't be sticking my neck out on the line to go probing other people's software looking for holes.
You've apparently never worked for a large corporation. My actions would have not fixed the problem and could have cost me my job, or worse. The application was not written by my employer, nor was it my responsibility to QA it. It was a security nightmare. We'd reported previous security issues that did not require 'probing' other client's data, and they had not been fixed, nor did my management seem at all interested in pursuing the issues beyond the ASP's assurance that there really was no issue.
When working for a company I shall not name, we used an ASP for our recruiting software, which company I will also decline to name. This software had a document upload functionality that would allow clients to upload offer letters and such. In trouble shooting an issue with our company's uploads we found it was quite easy to browse to other client's uploads by changing a client ID in a URL. Granted, you had to login to the system to be able to access this URL, but once logged in, there were apparently no security restrictions across clients. We had free access to the offer letters, job applications, any document having to do with the recruiting and hiring process, of other companies - some of them very big names.
Did we do anything about it? Nope. We ignored it. I didn't even bring it up to our managers. Why? Because in documenting the issue we would have most certainly violated the licensing agreement, and a good argument could be made (especially in light of judgements like the one in the article) that we were conducting criminal computer trespass by changing the URL to knowingly access another client's repository. As stupid as that sounds, I was not willing to risk my job, or prison time, when I knew there were probably 15 other such security issues in the product, and my blowing the whistle on this one wasn't going to fix what was essentially a very crappy product.
Huh, even with memory protection programs are more than able to generate a GPF (and the equivalent in Linux) and crash. Apps don't violate memory protection and just restart themselves where they left of. Memory protection merely stops an app from crashing other apps, it doesn't make an app transparently immune to it's own crashes.
I am merely stating that a driver that silently and successfully restarts (which is what AST is promoting here) is more than a little dangerous from the 'lazy driver programmer' perspective. Even if the developer is aware of the restarts, they might be tempted to just let the error go if the restarts are infrequent, and recovery transparent. Whereas, if the driver crashes without restart, or takes down the whole system with a kernel panic or BSOD they have to fix the program.
I never really understood why buggy drivers constantly restarting is a desirable state. Say what you will about the monolithic kernel, but the fact that one bad driver can crash the whole works tends to make people work much harder to create solid drivers that don't crash.
In Andrew Tanenbaum's world, a driver developer can write a driver, and not even realize the thing is being restarted every 5 minutes because of some bug. This sort of thing could even get into a shipping product, with who knows what security and performance implications.
Leave a large hunk of plutonium physically accessible at ground level. Anyone who cannot read the signs, understand the symbols and such, will wander in, irradiate themselves, and then die. It won't take long for the locals to figure things out and develop their own signage.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, so when my orginal contract expires, despite the fact that my manager extended the contract, and told IT about it a month ago, my access goes *kablooey*.
This has happened almost every place I've worked with NT user accounts. Almost always, they expire on the day of the original contract expiration date - no matter what - doesn't matter of the contract was extended, or you flipped to be an employee.
-josh
"This is probably the strangest business combination I could imagine. Apple specializes in selling low quantities of very expensive items. Wal-Mart specializes in selling high quantities of very cheap items."
Last I checked Apple had sold millions of digital files at around 99 cents each.
I run a small IT consulting business (it's just me) and two of my clients are in health care. Business is good, and these clients are growing like gangbusters.
Long term I worry though, as healthcare isn't fundamentally 'productive' in any sense. It's not making anything new, it's just chewing up a larger and larger percentage of our paychecks in the form of social security, medicare and insurance payments.
I'm still kicking. I almost never post any longer. There are so many users now you are guaranteed that someone has already said what you had to add, by the time you get around to commenting.
I've bought all kinds of compact flourescent replacement bulbs - from high priced to cheapo. Every single one of them has far outlasted a traditional incandescent. I could give a crap about energy savings, the number one reason I bought them was so that I wouldn't have to change bulbs every other week. So far so good, in five years of using them I've had to replace 2.
I was referring to the comparative article on file systems as being incorrect. I have no means of correcting it.
It appears that though the wikipedia entry is technically correct about NTFS, the Win32 APIs used by most applications don't support file names (file + path) longer than 255 characters. I verified this in XP by trying to create nested directories with long names in Explorer. Eventually you get a 'path is too long' error at 255 characters.
From the wikipedia entry on NTFS:
"Though the file system supports paths up to ca. 32,000 Unicode characters with each path component (directory or filename) up to 255 characters long, certain names are unusable, since NTFS stores its metadata in regular (albeit hidden and for the most part inaccessible) files; accordingly, user files cannot use these names."
The article incorrectly states "Windows file names can be up to 255 characters, but that includes the full path. A lot characters are wasted if the default storage location is used: "C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\"." I will grant that this may have been a limitation in the past, but XP has had NTFS from the start, and NTFS is by far the most common windows FS today.
I must be too old, all I get are c 1 a l a s and v 1 @ g r 4 SPAM. Perhaps if I bought some, then I'd start getting porn spam so I could put my prescription to good use...
I had a laptop stolen in a secured office building. Each floor required a badge, as did the lobby. A laptop at home is no more or less safe than a laptop at work. In fact, my house is probably harder to break in to than most office buildings.
This is an unfair comparison. For the electric car, you are including generation efficiency (at the power plant) and transmission. You don't appear to be doing this for the gas/diesel car however.
Gasoline requires energy to create it from petroleum, it also requires energy to 'transmit' it from the refinery to the gas station. Are the efficiencies of these steps included in your analysis?
Have you looked at the new version of MS Office? I am no MS fan boy. I've been dealing with their bulky office products for most of my career - their saving grace is that they usually are better, or no worse, than all of the other product out there.
But the new version of MS Office has some extremely innovative user interface and workflow components. It's unlike anything else out there. And no, it's not just copying OS X.
I propose a new rule, if you find yourself penning a knee-jerk response to any positive commentary about Microsoft, just scrub it and start over. Intelligence is marked by the ability to perceive shades of gray, not just black and white. I can recognize that though there are many negative aspects of Microsoft's business practices and products, there are also many positive aspects. And indeed, though MS has grown mostly throw acquisition and mimicry of innovators, it is still very much capable of innovating on its own every once in awhile.
What percentage of their revenue is generated by ad sales?
"Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo."
Yes, instead they concentrated on making software people actually pay good money for. Google and Yahoo have revenue based for the most part on ads. MS is not in the ad business, though I am sure they sell a few on MSN, it's not really what they are good at.
MS didn't 'miss the wave', they just continued to make their spectacularly successful products even better, and made a lot of money in the process.
I am certainly glad that the google's and the yahoo's of the world exert competitive pressure on MS, which helps it overcome its monopolistic inertial. But this impetus is best directed towards adopting and innovating in its core business however. Leave search to google, but if Google Office has some interesting ideas, by all means, MS should use them, improve on them, and hopefully come up with innovative new ideas in an effort to best Google.
This is why Sony Walkmans only ran on Sony batteries. Oh wait, they ran on AAs, an international standard.
Why do you think it would be so hard to come up with a standardized battery? Especially if a government got involved and mandated a standard as part of a transition to an all electric fleet.
"That is YOUR return on investment, not Intel's - and it is very dependent on the timing of your purchase."
The OP talked talked about profits/market cap, and referred to this as "return on investment". I provided one definition of return on investment that was utterly independent of the company's profits. Then I talked about profit margins, which are the company's profit per dollar spent, which are utterly independent of the company's market cap. Either way you slice it, the OP's definition didn't add up.
Note to the financially illiterate: Profits/Market Cap != return on investment.
I could buy 100 shares of AMD at $30 for $3000 today. If the stock goes up to $40/share in a year and I sell, I've made $1000 for an investment of $3000. In the meantime, AMD might have actually lost money that year (yes, companies can lose money and still gain market cap). So in this scenario, even though AMD lost money, I as an owner of that stock, had a return on investment of 33% in one year.
The numbers I'd be more interested in would be their margins. How much profit are they making per dollar they spend?
The big difference with Second Life (SL), which I am sure is hugely 'wasteful' of server CPU, is scripting. Any user can create an object and attach one or more scripts to it. These scripts can communicate with other objects, with Avatars, change the state of the object, create new objects, listen for input, etc... It is not unusually to see a sophisticated Avatar with many hundred object attachments constituting its 'custom'. Each of these objects can have an embedded script, which runs on the server. That's one Avatar. Now think about ten such Avatars congregating in once place, all of these objects interactive with each other, and the each of the Avatars in real time. This requires a lot of processing power, and loads of inter-object communication.
LSL (the name of the scripting language) is interpretted, and oriented towards simplicity, not speed. It's goal is to make it relatively easy for users to create richly interactive and complex objects, at the cost of server CPU.
So yes, per Avatar, I am sure SL uses more server CPU than any other massively multiplayer game, but that's because it offers an extremely rich and customizable experience.
"Some captchas have been solved with more than 90% accuracy by scientists specializing in computer vision research at the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere."
Hell, that's better than my average. They are getting so cryptic, it seems I get them wrong about 25% of the time these days.
-josh
Can you tell me, for certain, that in documenting the hole, by actually browsing other company's confidential files, I did not commit a crime? Given prosecutions like that of the original article, I think there are some serious legal questions around this issue. However confidential my correspondence with an HR or legal department, they can't protect you if you actually committed a crime, in fact, in these days of Sarbanes-Oxley, they might feel obligated to turn you in. And don't tell me about attorney-client privelege. A corp attorney's client is the corporation, not the employee's.
There is absolutely no way of telling how HR or legal would have reacted to documented proof that I used corporate computers to access the confidential information of another company. If things had taken a wrong turn, the fact that it was the fault of a programmer at the ASP that this was possible at all would have been entirely forgotten as security escorted me out the door, and legal filed a suit to block unemployment.
Some people might think I was being too paranoid. You are wrong. Until there are electronic whistleblower statutes that protect actions taken in ernest to document a security flaw in a software product, I won't be sticking my neck out on the line to go probing other people's software looking for holes.
You've apparently never worked for a large corporation. My actions would have not fixed the problem and could have cost me my job, or worse. The application was not written by my employer, nor was it my responsibility to QA it. It was a security nightmare. We'd reported previous security issues that did not require 'probing' other client's data, and they had not been fixed, nor did my management seem at all interested in pursuing the issues beyond the ASP's assurance that there really was no issue.
When working for a company I shall not name, we used an ASP for our recruiting software, which company I will also decline to name. This software had a document upload functionality that would allow clients to upload offer letters and such. In trouble shooting an issue with our company's uploads we found it was quite easy to browse to other client's uploads by changing a client ID in a URL. Granted, you had to login to the system to be able to access this URL, but once logged in, there were apparently no security restrictions across clients. We had free access to the offer letters, job applications, any document having to do with the recruiting and hiring process, of other companies - some of them very big names.
Did we do anything about it? Nope. We ignored it. I didn't even bring it up to our managers. Why? Because in documenting the issue we would have most certainly violated the licensing agreement, and a good argument could be made (especially in light of judgements like the one in the article) that we were conducting criminal computer trespass by changing the URL to knowingly access another client's repository. As stupid as that sounds, I was not willing to risk my job, or prison time, when I knew there were probably 15 other such security issues in the product, and my blowing the whistle on this one wasn't going to fix what was essentially a very crappy product.
Huh, even with memory protection programs are more than able to generate a GPF (and the equivalent in Linux) and crash. Apps don't violate memory protection and just restart themselves where they left of. Memory protection merely stops an app from crashing other apps, it doesn't make an app transparently immune to it's own crashes.
I am merely stating that a driver that silently and successfully restarts (which is what AST is promoting here) is more than a little dangerous from the 'lazy driver programmer' perspective. Even if the developer is aware of the restarts, they might be tempted to just let the error go if the restarts are infrequent, and recovery transparent. Whereas, if the driver crashes without restart, or takes down the whole system with a kernel panic or BSOD they have to fix the program.
I never really understood why buggy drivers constantly restarting is a desirable state. Say what you will about the monolithic kernel, but the fact that one bad driver can crash the whole works tends to make people work much harder to create solid drivers that don't crash.
In Andrew Tanenbaum's world, a driver developer can write a driver, and not even realize the thing is being restarted every 5 minutes because of some bug. This sort of thing could even get into a shipping product, with who knows what security and performance implications.
Leave a large hunk of plutonium physically accessible at ground level. Anyone who cannot read the signs, understand the symbols and such, will wander in, irradiate themselves, and then die. It won't take long for the locals to figure things out and develop their own signage.
Stop paying attention to hysterical news reports about bird-flu.