That's all they ever do. Then rename whatever software it runs "IOS." Cisco is a marketing company, not a technology one.
I hope that's sarcasm. Cisco was founded by the people who basically invented the router. For many years, they've led the pack in developing reliable, high-capacity routers and related networking gear.
They also sell "lower end" stuff and capitalize on their good name, but they've earned that good name by offering highly capable routers and related equipment with telecommunications-grade uptimes.
From a capabilities standpoint, their gear is damned expensive. From a business continuity standpoint, the high price is usually worth it.
without a password voicemail should only accept connections from the owners phone.
Uh, Whoosh?
You missed something here! See, the voicemail IS only accepting connections "from the owner's phone" - and that's determined by the caller ID. However, because Caller ID is easily spoofed in the right environments, this isn't a very secure solution...
Some notes: Android gained more share in the first 3 months this year than iPhone made in a year. Blackberry is still the undisputed champion, and even the sucktastic Windows Mobile is still a pretty considerable player. (I have a WinMo phone, and it's fairly capable, but I can't wait to ditch it for Android in September when my contract's up on the phone!)
Even in their strongest market, Apple is nowhere near a monopoly. That said, Apple's recent shenanigans regarding Flash and programming languages have caused my support for them to cool sharply. I'm feeling pretty frosty towards Apple. After resolving last winter to buy a Mac for my next laptop, I just bought a Dell Precision laptop, on which I'm intending to run Fedora Core Linux.
I would add only one detail: tune the AM radio up near the "high end" of the radio spectrum, around 1500 or so. That's the part of the AM spectrum that's closest to 2400 Mhz, and thus most likely to pick up the interference.
It's a money making scheme - if you look at the "fees" one has to shell out for certificates - has absolutely nothing to do with effort necessary to provide a certificate.
I'm guessing you think the "effort necessary to provide a certificate" is not much more than the cost of computing the hashes for the certificates, right? Everybody knows that OpenSSL is free, open-source, and is available on a freely downloaded Linux ISO and burned to a $0.10 blank DVD, right? And a $25 P4 could calculate thousands of these hashes every hour!
As somebody who almost became a Certificate Authority, I can say that it isn't all that easy. Most of the problem isn't technical at all. In fact, the technical part is basically insignificant. Most of the problem lies in certification, and much of that lies not in the technical and/or organizational solutions, but presenting the technical, organizational, and financial solutions in a way that can be independently verified. (yes, financial too - would you trust a CA that wasn't profitable?)
Do you do backups every night? Maybe you do, but can you prove it? Who does the backups? How do you make sure the backups were done? How do you guarantee that the backups are only handled by qualified personnel? How have you qualified the personnel? How do you handle a failure scenario, or worse, a disaster scenario? In the event of a disaster, how do you *still* ensure that only qualified personnel handle the backups and/or data?
And on, and on, and on. It's a much tougher problem than you could possibly imagine. For our small company (~15 employees) we figured it would cost us between $50,000 and $100,000 to get the necessary audits and certification done, including implementation, to become a certified Certificate Authority. The costs get worse and more expensive as you scale upwards.
Even at $100/certificate, it takes a *lot* of certificates just to break even. I'm not saying that Verisign et al aren't highly profitable, I'm just saying that the reasons they are there are good reasons, even if they are somewhat guilty of gaming the system a bit.
This study is bogus, and I can say why. Let's say you have a web server, and let's say it has a few dozen name-based websites hosted, one of which uses SSL for a shopping cart. If you "scanned" the server by domain name for SSL support, ALL of the name-based virtual hosted domains would "reply" because SSL is IP-specific, not domain specific. Thus, with 25 domains, all would "support" SSL with mis-matched domain names.
This problem is WORSE when you have multiple IPs on a single server (as I've done many times in the past) because even though all the domains "support" ssl and many even have their own legit SSL websites, those SSL IPs will be in a different IP address and thus a different subdomain. (like shopping.domain.com instead of www.domain.com)
Numbers this far out of line simply show gross ignorance about how SSL is actually applied.
More than 10 years ago, I had an ADSL Internet connection with a 1.5 Mb connection speed. (384 Kbps upload) Now, some 10 years later, we still find that the *average* is only just slightly faster than 1 Mbps?
Why run Antivirus from an O/S that is vulnerable? F-prot has a Linux version that works well on the command line, and detects Windows viruses. Set up a Fedora boot CD/Flash disk and run the latest f-prot on it, and relax in the comfort of knowing that you are virus scanning from a position of relative security.
Sometimes it's not about being a good idea. Sometimes it's just about seeing if it's possible. Lots of things are like this... like using a fishing pole for flying your kite, or building a makeshift jet engine out of a turbocharger. It's not necessarily practical, but it can be a bit of fun?
As an employer, I can say with confidence that I'm NOT looking to commoditize my programming team. I WANT developers to be valuable, because when they are valuable, I can charge more for their work. I'm more than happy to pay my developers more, but the difference in value makes it more profitable for me as well.
In my opinion, managers who try to make their programming team lack value are doing the same for their company. And why would you want to work to ensure that your company offers no value?
Better programmers make better software, and better software sells better, for more money. And that means more profits for everybody. Why is this hard to understand?
Analog data, including your film negatives, degrade over time, and can never be recovered. If people care about your stuff, it's much more likely to be around a hundred years from now in digital format than in analog format as long as it isn't locked up in DRM.
Verizon has always seen their customers purely as a source of profit, and has done everything they can to maximize the fees they can charge customers - going as far as disabling bluetooth file exchange on their phones so customers have to send things like pictures via the Verizon network so they incur data charges.
Any business can and should see their customers as a source of profit - what is a customer to a company if not a source of profit? (no profit = don't bother) But Verizon Wireless takes this to whole new levels. Over the past 2 years they have become incredibly adept at actually making stuff up that has no bearing whatsoever. I saw charges like "Account service restoral fee" for $20 on a phone line that had been in continuous service for over a year. And not just one or two, dozens of them that would actually nearly double my bill.
It became this monthly routine - get the bill, go over the bill, find all kinds of bogus charges, call, spend two hours on the phone with a very sincere-sounding customer service rep to ding all the bogus charges, and then pay the adjusted amount. Wash, rinse, repeat until I quit shopping at Verizon Wireless.
I guess it's a system that works for them, and they are good with it; but it's just not for me.
Don't compare the weaknesses of AJAX against the strengths of client side developments without at least mentioning the other way 'round, mmkay?
Client side applications have issues such as:
1) System requirements! You have to have the right type of computer, with the right type of processor and/or O/S, etc. Don't have one? Well you are SCREWED. Porting a client application from one platform to another, even with a decent toolkit can be daunting. Even if the programming language supports cross platform development, does that "cross platform" part include Linux? What about QNX? What about the iPad? Browser-based computing eliminates most of this problem.
2) Environmental differences! Software that works well on computer A might not run at all on computer B despite them being very similar because B installed a shareware program that updated some DLL. Good luck sorting that one out? Web-based applications don't really have these problems outside of the browser discrepancies that exist when you don't write an app with a decent abstraction API (EG: Prototype)
3) Data locality! So you are at work, you save your file, and then you leave. Over the weekend you remember some detail that you want to bang into your document quickly before you forget. Don't have your laptop with you? Well, shucks! Web-based applications don't really have these problems, either. You might have trouble with Internet connectivity, but even in very rural areas this problem is disappearing rapidly.
4) Cheap development! Web developers are easy to come by! The standards are open, the needs are many, and the work is easily commoditizable and thus hiring help isn't so difficult.
'twas a time once, when a pilot made the better part of six figures. Those days are GONE GONE GONE nowadays. Pilots make less than programmers, one of many reasons I'd never want to be a commercial pilot. The biggest expense in an airliner (by FAR) is the fuel. With pilot + copilot making combined less than $100,000 per year and working like dogs for that, pilots are actually a very small part of the expenses for your average airliner.
There was the run a while back where somebody discovered the admin page for large industrial printers could be easily searched to find unprotected panels, and that print jobs could be remotely administered... how many million pages of unsavory imagery were printed for the next day or two is anybody's guess...
Talking to my Dad the other day, he describe a cousin of mine as "a good kid"... the problem? He's 31 years old! See, anybody who's had kids will always see the friends of their kids as kids. Which wouldn't be much of a problem except for the increasing longevity of people.
See, the average age of people has been climbing for a long time, and is currently about 55. So, more and more, college students are "college kids". And the "legal age" of 18 becomes increasingly irrelevant as more power is wielded by an increasingly aging population who think of 31 year olds as kids.
Years ago, a webserver that I was admin for was hacked. It was a multi-homed machine with perhaps 300 websites on it, and permissions were all over the map. I did numerous permissions scans and found a nasty dog's breakfast of 777 directories, this works, but I never got approval to do the work to clean it up because of potential customer upset.
So in this case, somebody used a flaw in a vulnerable formmail.cgi (remember that one?) uploaded a perl script in a hidden "dot" directory in a 777 images folder that, when run, masqueraded as a legit process. I never quite figured out how they made the script look like a legit log process, but I did kill the perl script, because it was taking part in a DDOS attack of some servers that were apparently located in the South San Francisco area.
After a bit of reading of the script, I found that it was the classic IRC bot network, and I simply gave myself an appropriate user name and logged in. At the time, the DDOS was going on. There were maybe 200 other machines in the botnet. Orders would come out, like "pf: 192.168.0.1" where the IP address was the target machine.
I watched for a while, then reported everything, including IP address, screen shots, etc. to the FBI. Nothing happened, not even an email back. Part of me died that day.
I use PHP and I love it as a language. It's powerful, stable, and lets me get lots of work done quickly.
That said, you hit on the two biggest annoyances I have with PHP:
1) Argument order: is it myfunction($haystack, $needle) or myfunction($needle, $haystack)? There's no rhyme or reason that I can consider, mostly just random stuff.
2) Function names: Is it going to be isinteger() or is_integer()? And even within a set of otherwise closely rlated functions, while php has is_integer(), is_set() is actually isset(). Who thought this was a good idea?
Again, I don't want to knock PHP too badly, it's a lean mean workhorse of a language, and its many strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses. But couldn't they pick a convention and move to it?
Taking the 15x performance increase over the 1979 Cray, we find that there are about 4 doublings to get 15x (16x) meaning that the android phone roughly compares to a 1985 Supercomputer, which doesn't surprise me at all. My cheap, now antiquated WinMo smart phone easily plays 486-era DOS games in a virtual box emulator, despite being a radically different chipset. (Arm, not x86) So factor in approximately 50% cut in performance due to emulation, and you have my phone demonstrably comparing to (at least!) a midlevel Pentium, and that's a minimum.
Are our brains THAT similar to ones found in a snail?
More similar than you'd think. While there are obvious physiological differences between the different species, animal cells can adapt quickly to very human activity, such as flying airplanes!
PS: If you want "fashion" try spending that $10,000 you save and join a flight club, become a partial owner of an airplane. While people may raise their eyebrows to a $30,000 Lexus, they will NEVER FORGET that you showed up in a private plane!
Slashdot Mirror
PS: f*** you, Steve Jobs.
Sincerely,
YouTube - The largest collection of online video on the planet.
That's all they ever do. Then rename whatever software it runs "IOS." Cisco is a marketing company, not a technology one.
I hope that's sarcasm. Cisco was founded by the people who basically invented the router. For many years, they've led the pack in developing reliable, high-capacity routers and related networking gear.
They also sell "lower end" stuff and capitalize on their good name, but they've earned that good name by offering highly capable routers and related equipment with telecommunications-grade uptimes.
From a capabilities standpoint, their gear is damned expensive. From a business continuity standpoint, the high price is usually worth it.
without a password voicemail should only accept connections from the owners phone.
Uh, Whoosh?
You missed something here! See, the voicemail IS only accepting connections "from the owner's phone" - and that's determined by the caller ID. However, because Caller ID is easily spoofed in the right environments, this isn't a very secure solution...
Isn't that the EXACT same thing Apple is doing with their App Store?
Last time I checked, Apple's desktop market share was low, somewhere less than 5%. The iPhone is highly visible, but still not anywhere near a monopoly. In fact, they are only just over a quarter of the smartphone marketshare as of this month.
Some notes: Android gained more share in the first 3 months this year than iPhone made in a year. Blackberry is still the undisputed champion, and even the sucktastic Windows Mobile is still a pretty considerable player. (I have a WinMo phone, and it's fairly capable, but I can't wait to ditch it for Android in September when my contract's up on the phone!)
Even in their strongest market, Apple is nowhere near a monopoly. That said, Apple's recent shenanigans regarding Flash and programming languages have caused my support for them to cool sharply. I'm feeling pretty frosty towards Apple. After resolving last winter to buy a Mac for my next laptop, I just bought a Dell Precision laptop, on which I'm intending to run Fedora Core Linux.
I would add only one detail: tune the AM radio up near the "high end" of the radio spectrum, around 1500 or so. That's the part of the AM spectrum that's closest to 2400 Mhz, and thus most likely to pick up the interference.
It's a money making scheme - if you look at the "fees" one has to shell out for certificates - has absolutely nothing to do with effort necessary to provide a certificate.
I'm guessing you think the "effort necessary to provide a certificate" is not much more than the cost of computing the hashes for the certificates, right? Everybody knows that OpenSSL is free, open-source, and is available on a freely downloaded Linux ISO and burned to a $0.10 blank DVD, right? And a $25 P4 could calculate thousands of these hashes every hour!
As somebody who almost became a Certificate Authority, I can say that it isn't all that easy. Most of the problem isn't technical at all. In fact, the technical part is basically insignificant. Most of the problem lies in certification, and much of that lies not in the technical and/or organizational solutions, but presenting the technical, organizational, and financial solutions in a way that can be independently verified. (yes, financial too - would you trust a CA that wasn't profitable?)
Do you do backups every night? Maybe you do, but can you prove it? Who does the backups? How do you make sure the backups were done? How do you guarantee that the backups are only handled by qualified personnel? How have you qualified the personnel? How do you handle a failure scenario, or worse, a disaster scenario? In the event of a disaster, how do you *still* ensure that only qualified personnel handle the backups and/or data?
And on, and on, and on. It's a much tougher problem than you could possibly imagine. For our small company (~15 employees) we figured it would cost us between $50,000 and $100,000 to get the necessary audits and certification done, including implementation, to become a certified Certificate Authority. The costs get worse and more expensive as you scale upwards.
Even at $100/certificate, it takes a *lot* of certificates just to break even. I'm not saying that Verisign et al aren't highly profitable, I'm just saying that the reasons they are there are good reasons, even if they are somewhat guilty of gaming the system a bit.
This study is bogus, and I can say why. Let's say you have a web server, and let's say it has a few dozen name-based websites hosted, one of which uses SSL for a shopping cart. If you "scanned" the server by domain name for SSL support, ALL of the name-based virtual hosted domains would "reply" because SSL is IP-specific, not domain specific. Thus, with 25 domains, all would "support" SSL with mis-matched domain names.
This problem is WORSE when you have multiple IPs on a single server (as I've done many times in the past) because even though all the domains "support" ssl and many even have their own legit SSL websites, those SSL IPs will be in a different IP address and thus a different subdomain. (like shopping.domain.com instead of www.domain.com)
Numbers this far out of line simply show gross ignorance about how SSL is actually applied.
More than 10 years ago, I had an ADSL Internet connection with a 1.5 Mb connection speed. (384 Kbps upload) Now, some 10 years later, we still find that the *average* is only just slightly faster than 1 Mbps?
The Internetz is right - the nerds HAVE won!
Why run Antivirus from an O/S that is vulnerable? F-prot has a Linux version that works well on the command line, and detects Windows viruses. Set up a Fedora boot CD/Flash disk and run the latest f-prot on it, and relax in the comfort of knowing that you are virus scanning from a position of relative security.
Sometimes it's not about being a good idea. Sometimes it's just about seeing if it's possible. Lots of things are like this... like using a fishing pole for flying your kite, or building a makeshift jet engine out of a turbocharger. It's not necessarily practical, but it can be a bit of fun?
And your experience for a statement like this is.... ?
As an employer, I can say with confidence that I'm NOT looking to commoditize my programming team. I WANT developers to be valuable, because when they are valuable, I can charge more for their work. I'm more than happy to pay my developers more, but the difference in value makes it more profitable for me as well.
In my opinion, managers who try to make their programming team lack value are doing the same for their company. And why would you want to work to ensure that your company offers no value?
Better programmers make better software, and better software sells better, for more money. And that means more profits for everybody. Why is this hard to understand?
Analog data, including your film negatives, degrade over time, and can never be recovered. If people care about your stuff, it's much more likely to be around a hundred years from now in digital format than in analog format as long as it isn't locked up in DRM.
Verizon has always seen their customers purely as a source of profit, and has done everything they can to maximize the fees they can charge customers - going as far as disabling bluetooth file exchange on their phones so customers have to send things like pictures via the Verizon network so they incur data charges.
Any business can and should see their customers as a source of profit - what is a customer to a company if not a source of profit? (no profit = don't bother) But Verizon Wireless takes this to whole new levels. Over the past 2 years they have become incredibly adept at actually making stuff up that has no bearing whatsoever. I saw charges like "Account service restoral fee" for $20 on a phone line that had been in continuous service for over a year. And not just one or two, dozens of them that would actually nearly double my bill.
It became this monthly routine - get the bill, go over the bill, find all kinds of bogus charges, call, spend two hours on the phone with a very sincere-sounding customer service rep to ding all the bogus charges, and then pay the adjusted amount. Wash, rinse, repeat until I quit shopping at Verizon Wireless.
I guess it's a system that works for them, and they are good with it; but it's just not for me.
Don't compare the weaknesses of AJAX against the strengths of client side developments without at least mentioning the other way 'round, mmkay?
Client side applications have issues such as:
1) System requirements! You have to have the right type of computer, with the right type of processor and/or O/S, etc. Don't have one? Well you are SCREWED. Porting a client application from one platform to another, even with a decent toolkit can be daunting. Even if the programming language supports cross platform development, does that "cross platform" part include Linux? What about QNX? What about the iPad? Browser-based computing eliminates most of this problem.
2) Environmental differences! Software that works well on computer A might not run at all on computer B despite them being very similar because B installed a shareware program that updated some DLL. Good luck sorting that one out? Web-based applications don't really have these problems outside of the browser discrepancies that exist when you don't write an app with a decent abstraction API (EG: Prototype)
3) Data locality! So you are at work, you save your file, and then you leave. Over the weekend you remember some detail that you want to bang into your document quickly before you forget. Don't have your laptop with you? Well, shucks! Web-based applications don't really have these problems, either. You might have trouble with Internet connectivity, but even in very rural areas this problem is disappearing rapidly.
4) Cheap development! Web developers are easy to come by! The standards are open, the needs are many, and the work is easily commoditizable and thus hiring help isn't so difficult.
Cite: TFA.
What is this "TFA" of which you speak?
'twas a time once, when a pilot made the better part of six figures. Those days are GONE GONE GONE nowadays. Pilots make less than programmers, one of many reasons I'd never want to be a commercial pilot. The biggest expense in an airliner (by FAR) is the fuel. With pilot + copilot making combined less than $100,000 per year and working like dogs for that, pilots are actually a very small part of the expenses for your average airliner.
Did you think of 4chan? For some reason, I did...
There was the run a while back where somebody discovered the admin page for large industrial printers could be easily searched to find unprotected panels, and that print jobs could be remotely administered... how many million pages of unsavory imagery were printed for the next day or two is anybody's guess...
Talking to my Dad the other day, he describe a cousin of mine as "a good kid"... the problem? He's 31 years old! See, anybody who's had kids will always see the friends of their kids as kids. Which wouldn't be much of a problem except for the increasing longevity of people.
See, the average age of people has been climbing for a long time, and is currently about 55. So, more and more, college students are "college kids". And the "legal age" of 18 becomes increasingly irrelevant as more power is wielded by an increasingly aging population who think of 31 year olds as kids.
Years ago, a webserver that I was admin for was hacked. It was a multi-homed machine with perhaps 300 websites on it, and permissions were all over the map. I did numerous permissions scans and found a nasty dog's breakfast of 777 directories, this works, but I never got approval to do the work to clean it up because of potential customer upset.
So in this case, somebody used a flaw in a vulnerable formmail.cgi (remember that one?) uploaded a perl script in a hidden "dot" directory in a 777 images folder that, when run, masqueraded as a legit process. I never quite figured out how they made the script look like a legit log process, but I did kill the perl script, because it was taking part in a DDOS attack of some servers that were apparently located in the South San Francisco area.
After a bit of reading of the script, I found that it was the classic IRC bot network, and I simply gave myself an appropriate user name and logged in. At the time, the DDOS was going on. There were maybe 200 other machines in the botnet. Orders would come out, like "pf: 192.168.0.1" where the IP address was the target machine.
I watched for a while, then reported everything, including IP address, screen shots, etc. to the FBI. Nothing happened, not even an email back. Part of me died that day.
I use PHP and I love it as a language. It's powerful, stable, and lets me get lots of work done quickly.
That said, you hit on the two biggest annoyances I have with PHP:
1) Argument order: is it myfunction($haystack, $needle) or myfunction($needle, $haystack)? There's no rhyme or reason that I can consider, mostly just random stuff.
2) Function names: Is it going to be isinteger() or is_integer()? And even within a set of otherwise closely rlated functions, while php has is_integer(), is_set() is actually isset(). Who thought this was a good idea?
Again, I don't want to knock PHP too badly, it's a lean mean workhorse of a language, and its many strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses. But couldn't they pick a convention and move to it?
Taking the 15x performance increase over the 1979 Cray, we find that there are about 4 doublings to get 15x (16x) meaning that the android phone roughly compares to a 1985 Supercomputer, which doesn't surprise me at all. My cheap, now antiquated WinMo smart phone easily plays 486-era DOS games in a virtual box emulator, despite being a radically different chipset. (Arm, not x86) So factor in approximately 50% cut in performance due to emulation, and you have my phone demonstrably comparing to (at least!) a midlevel Pentium, and that's a minimum.
Honestly, sometimes it's astounding to me just how much processing power we throw away because it's just so cheap. When you read just how much performance this guy gets out of a single-core Dothan it just blows the mind. Underscoring my point: did you know that Mailinator runs entirely on one, not-so-impressive 2 Ghz AMD Athlon and a whopping 1 GB of RAM?
Are our brains THAT similar to ones found in a snail?
More similar than you'd think. While there are obvious physiological differences between the different species, animal cells can adapt quickly to very human activity, such as flying airplanes!
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=241
As I read this (obvious satire) post, I see that it's modded +5 insightful. And, deep down, a little piece of me dies...
PS: If you want "fashion" try spending that $10,000 you save and join a flight club, become a partial owner of an airplane. While people may raise their eyebrows to a $30,000 Lexus, they will NEVER FORGET that you showed up in a private plane!