It's easy for a business to "understand the situation" when understanding involves arguing against any legislation that increases your costs or decreases your profits.
They're just protecting the bottom line, nothing to see here.
All that domain registration does is place a few letters in the address bar of people's browsers.
Slightly off-topic for the subject at hand - but it is also necessary for a browser to decide if an ssl certificate is appropriate for a given website, and allows for virtualhosts on a single web server. And allows smtp to work.
Even the colours of the search results are identical, it's hilarious. Looking forward to June 21st when they spell out 'Bing' with little pictures related to summer.
A classic Indiana Jones reference highlighting the folly of choosing something based on how shiny it is get moderated as troll whilst I can get modded insightful for spouting the first nonsensical bs that comes to mind? What's the world coming to!
Why not just encode the genomes of as many species as possible, and bury it somewhere geologically inactive - like the moon - with a big x painted on top of it. Would probably be cheaper.
UC's own inspection found deficiencies last October, but they didn't act on them:
"a safety inspection of the Harran lab by UCLA on 30 October had âoeidentified [the failure of employees to wear required protective clothing] and recommended that laboratory coats must be worn while conducting research and handling hazardous materials in the laboratory.â But it says that the lab âoedid not implement procedures for correcting unsafe and unhealthy conditions, work practices and work procedures in a timely manner based on the severity of the hazard.â"
The article also implies they're not keeping records they are required to. A $30k fine seems entirely justified to me (and apparently to the university, who didn't contest it) - that doesn't mean the woman wasn't being foolishly reckless.
There's plenty of times when the login screen hangs after typing my credentials (usually because of Active Directory problems). Can't cancel and log on as a local user, just got to wait/reboot.
Less often explorer just doesn't seem to start, or takes ages to start. I suspect this happens when Windows installs updates, but I'm not certain. Anyway, it would be much easier to switch to another interface and check what's going on.
Yes - I think it's better to draw that line outside the company who makes a product.
I've never looked at a line of the linux kernel source, but I believe if someone slipped malicious code in there there is a pretty good chance someone would notice it and raise a storm. If malicious code were slipped into windows it'd be much less likely to get spotted.
I'm probably less trusting than most people, but the idea of anyone trusting a company that has been convicted of criminal charges to run you computer with an OS that no one can scrutinise without that company's say-so? No thanks.
The argument is that it's ridiculous to suggest that backwards compatibility is "THE REASON" for MS's success - particularly without presenting evidence of competitors who losing market share due to poor performance in this area.
Windows XP (and a lot of MS OS code before that) had a fundamental security flaw whereby the default setting made the ordinary user run as the superuser
No way! Really? Next you'll be telling me you can't switch to another virtual console if your GUI crashes, or review the OS code to satisfy yourself it's not malicious.
Laws and their sentences are written down for anyone to see.
If part of the tenancy agreement said that they'd boot you out for copyright infringement fair enough. If they've just said that they can evict you at their discretion (as I suspect) then this is very unlike breaking the law and getting judicially punished for it.
Agreed, but whilst it makes me shudder, it also belays any fears that this is a surreptitious plan to start collecting new information about kids which can be sneakily kept to provide useful information about them as adults.
Apologies for the self reply - but just to drive my incredulity home: If they spent half that budget on training (I suspect they spent much less than half), that's less than a £300 per head.
Sure wish I could get some stringent security training for that money. Must be a big government discount.
Well, there is already a myriad of government databases containing more sensitive information than this about everyone: NI/Income tax registers, Electoral registers, the (shudder) NHS system, Council Tax databases, birth certificates, benefits, criminal records etc.
This database just seems to aggregate a subset of this data together for children in an easily searchable place. I don't think the government is creating and *new* information that will be interesting to search when the children become adults.
If by 'dedicated backup box' you mean two offsite machines both of which are themselves in highly secure and robust sites I could be convinced that it's possible to build an effective backup strategy around them.
Our backup strategy for the office (files/databases) is to have a single, off-site 'consolidation server' which we dump transaction logs to real time (with full database dump overnight), and make incremental backups of files every hour throughout the day rsyncing the full current file overnight. Then, this machine is itself backed up using a full weekly/daily differential tape backups.
I get shivers how everyone talks about backup strategies but not restore strategies as if the data fairy will wave a wand to restore your backups when it all goes tits up. We have a regularly rehearsed backup strategy. If we're in the same office, we attempt a pull down from the remote consolidation server. If that is down, or we are in another office etc. we put a copy of the encrypted tape backups on USB drives, courier them over and restore them here.
My biggest bugbear is that the remote consolidation server is not encrypted - we have to trust the hosting partner. We could not find an acceptable method that didn't involve remote plaintext data existing.
We spend about £12k (or about half a junior IT FTE) a year on backups and there is not a single day where I do not worry and personally check that they're working correctly.
Does anyone see any holes or room for improvement? Would be very happy for suggestions to improve.
More specifically, if you they only did black box testing of any complex piece of software then you'd expect there to be some error conditions that you miss, so on a device like this I'd expect there to be white box testing also.
To use a metaphor - consider a car with over complex brakes that rather than being properly designed have been tweaked and fiddled with through successive manufacturing iterations. The testing may well indicate that they perform well in all conceivable circumstances, but I sure wouldn't trust them unless someone knows how they work end to end.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy for a business to "understand the situation" when understanding involves arguing against any legislation that increases your costs or decreases your profits. They're just protecting the bottom line, nothing to see here.
All that domain registration does is place a few letters in the address bar of people's browsers.
Slightly off-topic for the subject at hand - but it is also necessary for a browser to decide if an ssl certificate is appropriate for a given website, and allows for virtualhosts on a single web server. And allows smtp to work.
Even the colours of the search results are identical, it's hilarious. Looking forward to June 21st when they spell out 'Bing' with little pictures related to summer.
Watts is a measurement of joules per second, so if you multiple power by time (as in applying 4x10^15 Watts for 10^-15 seconds) you get 4 joules.
Sorry, that doesn't actually work outside of Slashdot.
A classic Indiana Jones reference highlighting the folly of choosing something based on how shiny it is get moderated as troll whilst I can get modded insightful for spouting the first nonsensical bs that comes to mind? What's the world coming to!
Why not just encode the genomes of as many species as possible, and bury it somewhere geologically inactive - like the moon - with a big x painted on top of it. Would probably be cheaper.
UC's own inspection found deficiencies last October, but they didn't act on them:
"a safety inspection of the Harran lab by UCLA on 30 October had âoeidentified [the failure of employees to wear required protective clothing] and recommended that laboratory coats must be worn while conducting research and handling hazardous materials in the laboratory.â But it says that the lab âoedid not implement procedures for correcting unsafe and unhealthy conditions, work practices and work procedures in a timely manner based on the severity of the hazard.â"
The article also implies they're not keeping records they are required to. A $30k fine seems entirely justified to me (and apparently to the university, who didn't contest it) - that doesn't mean the woman wasn't being foolishly reckless.
I was thinking more before explorer starts.
There's plenty of times when the login screen hangs after typing my credentials (usually because of Active Directory problems). Can't cancel and log on as a local user, just got to wait/reboot.
Less often explorer just doesn't seem to start, or takes ages to start. I suspect this happens when Windows installs updates, but I'm not certain. Anyway, it would be much easier to switch to another interface and check what's going on.
You have to draw the trust line somewhere.
Yes - I think it's better to draw that line outside the company who makes a product.
I've never looked at a line of the linux kernel source, but I believe if someone slipped malicious code in there there is a pretty good chance someone would notice it and raise a storm. If malicious code were slipped into windows it'd be much less likely to get spotted.
I'm probably less trusting than most people, but the idea of anyone trusting a company that has been convicted of criminal charges to run you computer with an OS that no one can scrutinise without that company's say-so? No thanks.
The argument is that it's ridiculous to suggest that backwards compatibility is "THE REASON" for MS's success - particularly without presenting evidence of competitors who losing market share due to poor performance in this area.
Backwards compatibility isn't even that strong for MS. Windows XP broke plenty of apps (do a few searches the 'Why Applications Break' section of http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HFd8VyyU0e0C&pg=PA272&lpg=PA272&dq=%22windows+xp+breaks+apps%22&source=bl&ots=17EPij89Oa&sig=w9JKvyFhrcftGtww5SSha3qGyi8&hl=en&ei=qd8WSs2jMs-MjAfwppTwDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4 is a good place to start). Ditto Vista. Windows 7 is so bad at it they're suggesting you continue to run some apps in Windows XP. Would that be two VM's for Windows 8? What a mess.
Lot's of things go into making MS and Windows in particular a successful platform.
Yep he's right.
Not aggressive marketing or flagrant violation of antitrust laws. Certainly not stability of security. Inovation? Forget it.
It's backwards compatibility for the win, ever since version 1.
Windows XP (and a lot of MS OS code before that) had a fundamental security flaw whereby the default setting made the ordinary user run as the superuser
No way! Really? Next you'll be telling me you can't switch to another virtual console if your GUI crashes, or review the OS code to satisfy yourself it's not malicious.
Laws and their sentences are written down for anyone to see.
If part of the tenancy agreement said that they'd boot you out for copyright infringement fair enough. If they've just said that they can evict you at their discretion (as I suspect) then this is very unlike breaking the law and getting judicially punished for it.
Slightly tangy? like lemonade
Sounds more like 'a defect occured in QAing replicated discs'.
So you ping and then you sleep()?
TODO: Insert geek related sex-joke here
And after all this, then - ONLY THEN - are you finally ready to post on Slashdot.
Agreed, but whilst it makes me shudder, it also belays any fears that this is a surreptitious plan to start collecting new information about kids which can be sneakily kept to provide useful information about them as adults.
Apologies for the self reply - but just to drive my incredulity home: If they spent half that budget on training (I suspect they spent much less than half), that's less than a £300 per head.
Sure wish I could get some stringent security training for that money. Must be a big government discount.
Well, there is already a myriad of government databases containing more sensitive information than this about everyone: NI/Income tax registers, Electoral registers, the (shudder) NHS system, Council Tax databases, birth certificates, benefits, criminal records etc.
This database just seems to aggregate a subset of this data together for children in an easily searchable place. I don't think the government is creating and *new* information that will be interesting to search when the children become adults.
390,000 people will have access to the database, but will have gone through stringent security training.
That's great, but having people know security through (unspecified) 'stringent training' is no guarantee it will be carried out effectively.
Oh, and at a nearly a quarter of a billion pounds, forgive my curiosity about precisely what value this is expected provide.
Sounds like a rabid white elephant with dangerously sharp tusks.
If by 'dedicated backup box' you mean two offsite machines both of which are themselves in highly secure and robust sites I could be convinced that it's possible to build an effective backup strategy around them.
Our backup strategy for the office (files/databases) is to have a single, off-site 'consolidation server' which we dump transaction logs to real time (with full database dump overnight), and make incremental backups of files every hour throughout the day rsyncing the full current file overnight. Then, this machine is itself backed up using a full weekly/daily differential tape backups.
I get shivers how everyone talks about backup strategies but not restore strategies as if the data fairy will wave a wand to restore your backups when it all goes tits up. We have a regularly rehearsed backup strategy. If we're in the same office, we attempt a pull down from the remote consolidation server. If that is down, or we are in another office etc. we put a copy of the encrypted tape backups on USB drives, courier them over and restore them here.
My biggest bugbear is that the remote consolidation server is not encrypted - we have to trust the hosting partner. We could not find an acceptable method that didn't involve remote plaintext data existing.
We spend about £12k (or about half a junior IT FTE) a year on backups and there is not a single day where I do not worry and personally check that they're working correctly.
Does anyone see any holes or room for improvement? Would be very happy for suggestions to improve.
Backups: Not hard to get right, just very easy to get wrong.
More specifically, if you they only did black box testing of any complex piece of software then you'd expect there to be some error conditions that you miss, so on a device like this I'd expect there to be white box testing also.
To use a metaphor - consider a car with over complex brakes that rather than being properly designed have been tweaked and fiddled with through successive manufacturing iterations. The testing may well indicate that they perform well in all conceivable circumstances, but I sure wouldn't trust them unless someone knows how they work end to end.