Heck the SIPHONING 5,000 a day from the line they put into the one breach! And that isn't even getting everything coming out of that breach, and there is ANOTHER breach on the line which is gushing oil. The 5,000 a day value is an out and out LIE, and needs to be published as such. The estimates of 20,000-50,000 seem a lot more realistic, which would mean that this would already be the worst spill in history (620,000 - 1,550,000 barrels). And even those seem small considering the rig itself was producing 300,000 - 500,000 barrels a day.
CVT transmissions operate by conical cylinders moving towards or away from each other and a belt running over those two cones makes the gear ratio (i.e. take two ice cream cones, and point the pointy ends at each other, when the two tips of the cones are just touching, that is the smallest gear ratio you can achieve (well really it is a little less because in a CVT, the cones would really be too far away from each other), then as you overlap the two cones so that the point of one cone is now aligned next to the base of the other cone, you can see that dead center between the two cones, it is now wider, and as you move those cones in and out, that the center diameter gets larger or smaller respectively). The belt that is in the middle between the cones is what is connected to the drive shaft of the wheels. That belt relies on the friction of being around the cones (which are rotating by the engine), to pull on the belt, which then turns the shaft which provides power to the wheels. The friction which is between the belt and the cones is the limiting factor for how much torque can be sent to the drive shaft. Once the wheels/drive shaft require more torque to turn than the friction bond between the belt and the cones can handle, the belt simply slips around the cones and does not move. This is why tractor trailers can not use CVT's as their standing momentum can not be overcome as the torque needed is higher than the friction bond between the belt and the cones, and thus the transmission simply slips, the belt heats up from the friction, and fails. This is why the other poster who talked about CVTs being used in commercial vehicles has no clue what he is talking about. The only place they are really used are in consumer class vehicles or ones with very low torque requirements.
Actually, unless the employer has patents on it, or it is a direct line for line copy, he is free to re-invent the wheel, if it is a logical progression of the work. Just look at MS Office, OpenOffice, SunOffice, and the like, and you will see that people are free to create software that has similar function. While the employer does own the copyrights for the work created when he was in employment, it can't re-distribute or sell the software unless all the GPL code is removed or they GPL their changes to it.
this report could help their case in upcoming antitrust discussions.
Or just as easily hurt it. As the report shows a big part of the sales was on Verizon network, which is a market Apple does not exist on. A large portion of those sales "might" have been for Apple's product had it be available on the Verizon network.
The state law does not restrict what the parents may include in a child's lunch, however, the girl's parents did not include the candy, it was given to her by another student (probably a friend)... Still seems very stupid, especially if her parents were to give her other foods lacking in nutritional value.
I have yet to see a feature in a cable company PVR that I can't do with my DIY home built one, and I have MANY features that the cable company PVR does not have. For instance:
Web based scheduling: I can program my PVR from any device in the world which has an internet connection Massive storage space: I have 5TB of usable storage in my PVR, plus the ability to expand and/or use network based storage from servers/NAS Watch recording on different device: I can re-encode my recordings to any format I want for use on any device I want, laptop, PSP, PS3, iPad, iPod, etc Create DVDs: I can create a DVD of my recordings to watch with a normal DVD player, or for storage and delete the show from the DVR Create Blu-Rays: I can create a Blu-Ray of my shows/Movies for watching on standard Blu-Ray players or storage and can delete the original Record by show name: I simply tell my DVR the name of a show/movie/series and then can specify if I want to record new shows/re-runs/or both, and optionally restrict it to only record the show from certain channels (i.e. the HD version), or certain times, otherwise it will record that show/series/movie whenever it finds that it is being broadcast Pause live TV: yep, I can do that Automatically skip commercials: you won't find any PVR from a cable company that will ever do this since they make money off of you being forced to watch that commercial Upscale SD content to 1080p: yep, it does this on the fly, live, and even does things like noise reduction, video artifact removal, edge detection enhancement, color and lumen smoothing, and a lot of other video enhancements on the fly Organize my DVD and Blu-Ray movie collection: yes, it can store my ripped DVDs and Blu-Rays so I don't need to go find the DVD/Blu-Ray disk and insert it into the device to watch my content. The movies all have lots of artwork downloaded from the internet, like movie posters, DVD/Blu-Ray covers, screenshots, synopsis (tunable to not show spoilers, even to the point that it can show one thing if it has been watched or not), fan artwork, film/movie ratings, reviews, etc Organize/group TV series: by series name, season number, and episode number hierarchy, along with all the same information features that are available to my movies, like screen shots of individual episodes, episode synopsis, awards, actors, director, etc. Output DTS-MA and True-HD audio: and many other audio formats Interface and control three 200 disk DVD burner/changers: it controls all three and can use them to burn data to blank DVDs in them or load a disk to playback
That is just to name a few things my DIY PVR can do. You won't a fraction of those features available on something from a cable company.
Endianes plays a very large role when you are dealing with high performance computational models where parts are hand written at the chip level and not in a high-order language to be compiled by a compiler. There are a lot of places where compilers still do not do nearly as well as a skilled programmer will at the instruction level. And this is as a result, very much CPU architecture dependent. Even more so since different CPU's will perform certain instructions faster than others and even then may be better optimized by running a group of 14 instructions to perform a certain task then it would be to run a group of 10 which does the same operation, but needs to utilize a part of a shared chip component which may be in use by another application (think hyper threading and floating point arithmetic unit).
I mean, come on. This is firmware which ONLY WORKS on your Sun/Oracle hardware. If you own the hardware, you should be able to get the latest system firmware. This might be the final straw in terms of me recommending Sun/Oracle hardware anymore. Personally, I loved them. My work loved them as well. But this is getting ridiculous. Ok, I can understand closing off downloads of different patches to the OS. You want updates, get a service contract because the OS was free. But to cut off firmware updates to their hardware? No one does this. You can freely download the firmware from the manufacturer of everything out there for free, because, to use that firmware, you needed to OWN the hardware which means, the company received their money for it... We have thousands of Sun desktops and servers (no exaggeration, literally, thousands) at work. I have been a very happy Sun Unix Administrator for the last 12 years, but I have to say anymore, I can't recommend we keep buying these things (especially as the majority of the codebase has been slowly ported from SPARC to x86 over the last 5 years). I have still been recommending Sun x86 hardware for their ALOM/ILOM interface and very well engineered gear which tends to last for many years longer than a Dell or HP... But the nickle/dimming to death is starting to make it so that it is not worth it to purchase a Sun box with the extra premium when I similar spec'ed Dell for 30% less, and take that extra 30% savings knowing that about 20% of it will be used in needing to replace the box a few years sooner due to hardware failure.
I had a similar experience taking calculus four times at four different schools.
I can up you there... I had to retake a freshman/sophomore level calculus class my last term at college from the SAME SCHOOL because I changed majors and the Computer Science department did would not count the Engineering Department's version of the course (which even used the same books I might add). The Computer Science department's problem was that the Engineering Department taught the same material across 3 calculus courses while the Computer Science Department taught the same material in 4 courses. The reason the Engineering Department taught in 3 was because they had too many other higher level calculus courses to teach and would not be able to fit them all in if they spent 4 terms covering the same material as the Computer Science Department did. And even while I had things like "Systems of Equations 1 and 2", which are essentially the next two levels of calculus at my university, after the Calc 1, 2, 3 (and 4 for non-engineers), I had to go back and take Calc 4 for non-engineers, while my 8 credits in Systems 1 and 2 went towards my "free credits", and I had to retake material that I had already covered years ago again.
Also, a school has to have SOME standards, as the degree that they issue signifies to others some meaning about that person. Without that degree stating that the person has met some level of standards, the value of the degree for everyone holding it is diminished. Now whether or not those standards should extend to attendance is debatable, but there's plenty of justification for the university dictating terms which persons pursuing a degree must meet.
That is what the tests, exams, and pojects are for.... The few exceptions I can see for this would be for things like "Public Speaking", or "Film History", "Directed Study in Voice", or other "performance" classes where being there is needed to actually do the work. For 101 level english lit, math/calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., let them attend or not. The proof will be in the exams. I can tell you for a fact that I showed up to a total of 4 chemistry lectures and 2 biology lectures my Freshman year at college. My time was better spent elsewhere. I also received "A's" in both those subjects all Freshman year. You are now saying to yourself that I must have gone to a crappy college or something, but the reality was that I went to a VERY good High School and took all the AP level courses, I just didn't take the AP exam for college credit because the college I was going to would not accept AP credit for core classes, which as an engineering major, those were part of the core program, and were required to be taken at my college. Those classes were also a complete waste of my time.
As the subject says. Stop using your personal computer(s). Let management know that once you are off-site, you will no longer have email access as you are not going to install this software on your own computer. If they want you to continue to have off-site email access, they can provide you with appropriate equipment. The same goes with you bringing in your laptop to work, stop doing it, and let work provide a laptop.
And "those people" were probably not trying to use the system for GAME and PSN as well as linux. The "option" was to choose which features you loose. Going back to the car analogies, it is like saying yes, you have a choice, you can "optionally" do nothing and you keep your upgraded rims package that you purchased, however, your car is no longer street legal and your insurance company is being notified and you can no longer get insurance, and thus can no longer drive it on the road. Or you can have us remove your upgraded rims and install the stock ones, and you stay legal, but you don't get the extra $$$ you paid for it back.
You will note that car companies perform a "recall" on a part or feature that they screwed up and they either refund you the cost of the vehicle if it can't be corrected, or they repair/replace the part with one that does the same features as the original but fixes the flaw that caused the recall event. Sony didn't want to spend the time/money to put a proper fix for the security flaw, or possibly can't fix it, and simply decided to remove it. By the car analogy, the customers deserve their money back if that is the case.
Actually this has everything to do with network neutrality. The ISP went into a business relationship with a search engine and then changed all the DNS entries to redirect all traffic from all other search engines to the one they have a business relationship with. That isn't a "hacked" connection, that was packet re-prioritization at the ultimate level. Instead of sending the packets to where the user wanted, the ISP sent them to their own service to make more money from their services (thru ads etc.), and away from a competing service. That is the very definition of a NON-neutral net, since they are being HOSTILE to other networks and services.
A perfect example of why we need net neutrality rules in place. An ISP should not be allowed to modify packets or redirect packets to/from known destinations.
The netgear WNDR 3700 is running a version of OpenWRT out of the box with a custom interface. OpenWRT has a few builds of their standard distribution which work, with full support being rapidly added. DD-WRT is working hard on adding support for the router as well with at least two test builds being released. Full support should be there within a few months. Again, with it running a customized OpenWRT out of the box, it is only a matter of time for all the router based distributions to have ports which run on it. Add in the fact that it is one of the fastest routers (wan->lan speed, and lan->wan speeds), with some of the best dual band wireless N speeds, a decent amount of RAM, USB ports, gigabit switch/router, and the fastest CPU seen in a consumer class router, you have a very capable device.
Not only that, but in the early 80's, I believe a 747 lost power to all 4 engines while flying through an ash from a volcano. That was the reason why there is a ban on flights when there is ash in the air.
Seriously, if the description given here is what it truly does, then this seems like a good law. Now if only the USA government would pass something like this which would put some balance back into copyright. The breaking of DRM only being illegal when you break copyright, and with it legal to make personal copies, it means people are free to break the DRM of things they bought, like making a backup copy of a movie, or ripping a movie for use on a HTPC without the need of the DVD in the HTPC (or blu-ray, or itunes songs, etc., etc.). Because all you are doing is using the item that you purchased for yourself, and you are free to use it in any way that you want, not simply the way that the copyright owner thinks you should be able to use it.
Seriously, we looked all over for something, but nothing fit. Grant it, we did this back in 2000-2001 timeframe. We setup a mysql database, and wrote up a website with php which was the interface. We scanned in floor plans of the buildings and setup an image clickmap for all the cubicles/locations on the floor plans and had them all point to a unique location_id. The location_id's were one of the keys in the datbase to track the hardware.
So you could litterally navigate to a particular building/floor, and then click on the cube/location and it will then show a list of all the equipment in that area. You can add new hardware to that location or click on a piece of hardware and view its information (CPU type/speed, hostname, IP address, MAC address, RAM, etc..) and if it moved to a new location, you click on a "move" button, and it opens up the list of buildings/floor plans and you simply navigate and click on the place where it moved to, and then update the database record.
We add some more sophisticated features like barcodes to cubicles and to the systems themselves and you can go around with a barcode scanner hooked up to a laptop and simply scan the barcode on a cubicle, and then scan all the barcodes of equipment in the cubicle and it would automatically associate all that equipment with that particular location (and if it was a new piece of equipment, it would open the form to add the equipment into the database).
It is "non-violent" in the sense that the cutting of human flesh and insertion of a foreign body into that flesh is non-violent.... Oh wait, isn't that the same thing that a bullet does, or knife?
I have never worked somewhere that my supervisors did not have access to system passwords.
I regularly supply them with updates to the passwords for our systems that have them.
That is policy at my work. No one gets the root passwords without filling out the proper paperwork, including getting supervisor signatures, and approval from the IT lead of the systems which the password is to. The IT lead approval entails having demonstrated the technical knowledge for that specific system(s). You could be someone who has 20 years of IT experience, but if you can't show that you know how that particular system is setup, including knowing what major services it runs and the systems and processes that rely on the server, you won't get root.
NO ONE PERSON EVER holds the ONLY SET OF KEYS to the system. That is fucking retarded administration and anyone doing it needs to be fired.
We have a process in place where root passwords are stored on a secured system. Access to the system heavily restricted. Once you login to the system, a custom shell is run which prints out the list of passwords that you have been approved to have access. The actual full list is not available to everyone. The full list is encrypted and maintained by programs developed in house which give the ability to add new systems and their corresponding passwords, update passwords to existing systems, and add/revoke the users from viewing that particular system. A history of old passwords is also maintained (and is part of what is printed out on the screen to the people who connect). The list is maintained by our Accounts group who are in charge of keeping track of all accounts on all systems and maintain the paperwork/databases showing who has access to what, and are in charge of creating and removing the accounts on all systems (i.e. if someone is fired, the Accounts group disables the person's accounts on all systems that they may have one).
You can make all the arguments about policy and chain of command you want, but the reality of it is policy is regularly broken when it doesn't actually fit the situation.
But that is just it, policy did fit the situation. The policy said he could not give the password to his boss. Due to a single-point of failure, he was willing to give the password(s) to the person allowed by policy to have them, which was the Mayor, but only under the proper way, which meant in person. We don't allow passwords to be transferred in any other manor either. If you need your password reset, the only way to get what we reset the password to is to physically go to a designated password coordinator in your area. They have strict policy for giving you the new password which is done in closed door office and the password is shown to you on a computer screen, and/or where you then have the ability to change the password (in accordance to password complexity policy).
Is this all overkill, not really. Especially for any location which deals with as much money as a large city does, or with protected information, or any of a number of other reasons (maybe it is a secured government network which handles classified information, etc.). A GOOD IT admin knows that protecting the data from idiots is their number one job priority.
He insisted on meeting the mayor in person to hand over the password. That's not rational or defensible.
Actually that is the only way that he could transfer the passwords. Policy for password transfer stated that no passwords were allowed to be transferred over the phone or by email. Thus, the ONLY way to transfer the password was in person. Which is exactly what he did when he spoke with the Mayor in person.
The majority of what you want to do can be done with little more powerful linux based home router/firewall/proxy running a third-party OS like OpenWRT, DD-WRT, or others. If you get a router with a powerful enough CPU and enough RAM, you should be able to have no problems running squid (a proxy service) to restrict access to the internet during your specified time-frames, or to revoke internet access completely (as in your example as a punishment/grounding): http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWTO_:_Ch32_:_Controlling_Web_Access_with_Squid
I would first setup each of your three systems to use MAC Address based DHCP connections to force the specific computer to get a specific IP address. This is easily done using the web-gui on most of the third party linux router OS's out there, or simply by command line using dnsmasq and editing the dnsmasq.conf file (add the following line for each host, "dhcp-host=00:00:00:00:00:00,192.168.1.10,infinite", replacing the "00:00:00:00:00:00" with the MAC address of the specific system, and replace the "192.168.1.10" with the IP address you wish the machine to use). You can also associate a hostname to that IP address, typically by editing a "hosts.dnsmasq" file and putting the IP address followed by a space or tab, and then the name you wish to use, like computer1, or server, or whatever you want to call it so you don't have to remember what the IP address to the host is, just the hostname that you gave it.
For antivirus, that gets a little more complicated when run at the router level, since you need pretty good router hardware for it to work (since it has to inspect each packet, not just read the header and pass it on to the correct system). PacketProtector is an addon/custom version of OpenWRT which does have antivirus integrated into it. However, you would be better doing this at the client level, not the network or server (well run it on the server as well, but just not as remove scans).
Your final question as to remote shutdowns, monitoring, well, you can do that pretty simply yourself just using "ping" to see if it has an IP address and if it responds, well you know it is up and running. And since you have already setup hostnames instead of just using IP addresses, it is a lot easier to just do a "ping kid1" than "ping 192.168.1.10" and know which computer that really is so that you yell at the correct offender...
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Heck the SIPHONING 5,000 a day from the line they put into the one breach! And that isn't even getting everything coming out of that breach, and there is ANOTHER breach on the line which is gushing oil. The 5,000 a day value is an out and out LIE, and needs to be published as such. The estimates of 20,000-50,000 seem a lot more realistic, which would mean that this would already be the worst spill in history (620,000 - 1,550,000 barrels). And even those seem small considering the rig itself was producing 300,000 - 500,000 barrels a day.
CVT transmissions operate by conical cylinders moving towards or away from each other and a belt running over those two cones makes the gear ratio (i.e. take two ice cream cones, and point the pointy ends at each other, when the two tips of the cones are just touching, that is the smallest gear ratio you can achieve (well really it is a little less because in a CVT, the cones would really be too far away from each other), then as you overlap the two cones so that the point of one cone is now aligned next to the base of the other cone, you can see that dead center between the two cones, it is now wider, and as you move those cones in and out, that the center diameter gets larger or smaller respectively). The belt that is in the middle between the cones is what is connected to the drive shaft of the wheels. That belt relies on the friction of being around the cones (which are rotating by the engine), to pull on the belt, which then turns the shaft which provides power to the wheels. The friction which is between the belt and the cones is the limiting factor for how much torque can be sent to the drive shaft. Once the wheels/drive shaft require more torque to turn than the friction bond between the belt and the cones can handle, the belt simply slips around the cones and does not move. This is why tractor trailers can not use CVT's as their standing momentum can not be overcome as the torque needed is higher than the friction bond between the belt and the cones, and thus the transmission simply slips, the belt heats up from the friction, and fails. This is why the other poster who talked about CVTs being used in commercial vehicles has no clue what he is talking about. The only place they are really used are in consumer class vehicles or ones with very low torque requirements.
Actually, unless the employer has patents on it, or it is a direct line for line copy, he is free to re-invent the wheel, if it is a logical progression of the work. Just look at MS Office, OpenOffice, SunOffice, and the like, and you will see that people are free to create software that has similar function. While the employer does own the copyrights for the work created when he was in employment, it can't re-distribute or sell the software unless all the GPL code is removed or they GPL their changes to it.
this report could help their case in upcoming antitrust discussions.
Or just as easily hurt it. As the report shows a big part of the sales was on Verizon network, which is a market Apple does not exist on. A large portion of those sales "might" have been for Apple's product had it be available on the Verizon network.
The state law does not restrict what the parents may include in a child's lunch, however, the girl's parents did not include the candy, it was given to her by another student (probably a friend)... Still seems very stupid, especially if her parents were to give her other foods lacking in nutritional value.
I have yet to see a feature in a cable company PVR that I can't do with my DIY home built one, and I have MANY features that the cable company PVR does not have. For instance:
Web based scheduling: I can program my PVR from any device in the world which has an internet connection
Massive storage space: I have 5TB of usable storage in my PVR, plus the ability to expand and/or use network based storage from servers/NAS
Watch recording on different device: I can re-encode my recordings to any format I want for use on any device I want, laptop, PSP, PS3, iPad, iPod, etc
Create DVDs: I can create a DVD of my recordings to watch with a normal DVD player, or for storage and delete the show from the DVR
Create Blu-Rays: I can create a Blu-Ray of my shows/Movies for watching on standard Blu-Ray players or storage and can delete the original
Record by show name: I simply tell my DVR the name of a show/movie/series and then can specify if I want to record new shows/re-runs/or both, and optionally restrict it to only record the show from certain channels (i.e. the HD version), or certain times, otherwise it will record that show/series/movie whenever it finds that it is being broadcast
Pause live TV: yep, I can do that
Automatically skip commercials: you won't find any PVR from a cable company that will ever do this since they make money off of you being forced to watch that commercial
Upscale SD content to 1080p: yep, it does this on the fly, live, and even does things like noise reduction, video artifact removal, edge detection enhancement, color and lumen smoothing, and a lot of other video enhancements on the fly
Organize my DVD and Blu-Ray movie collection: yes, it can store my ripped DVDs and Blu-Rays so I don't need to go find the DVD/Blu-Ray disk and insert it into the device to watch my content. The movies all have lots of artwork downloaded from the internet, like movie posters, DVD/Blu-Ray covers, screenshots, synopsis (tunable to not show spoilers, even to the point that it can show one thing if it has been watched or not), fan artwork, film/movie ratings, reviews, etc
Organize/group TV series: by series name, season number, and episode number hierarchy, along with all the same information features that are available to my movies, like screen shots of individual episodes, episode synopsis, awards, actors, director, etc.
Output DTS-MA and True-HD audio: and many other audio formats
Interface and control three 200 disk DVD burner/changers: it controls all three and can use them to burn data to blank DVDs in them or load a disk to playback
That is just to name a few things my DIY PVR can do. You won't a fraction of those features available on something from a cable company.
Endianes plays a very large role when you are dealing with high performance computational models where parts are hand written at the chip level and not in a high-order language to be compiled by a compiler. There are a lot of places where compilers still do not do nearly as well as a skilled programmer will at the instruction level. And this is as a result, very much CPU architecture dependent. Even more so since different CPU's will perform certain instructions faster than others and even then may be better optimized by running a group of 14 instructions to perform a certain task then it would be to run a group of 10 which does the same operation, but needs to utilize a part of a shared chip component which may be in use by another application (think hyper threading and floating point arithmetic unit).
I mean, come on. This is firmware which ONLY WORKS on your Sun/Oracle hardware. If you own the hardware, you should be able to get the latest system firmware. This might be the final straw in terms of me recommending Sun/Oracle hardware anymore. Personally, I loved them. My work loved them as well. But this is getting ridiculous. Ok, I can understand closing off downloads of different patches to the OS. You want updates, get a service contract because the OS was free. But to cut off firmware updates to their hardware? No one does this. You can freely download the firmware from the manufacturer of everything out there for free, because, to use that firmware, you needed to OWN the hardware which means, the company received their money for it... We have thousands of Sun desktops and servers (no exaggeration, literally, thousands) at work. I have been a very happy Sun Unix Administrator for the last 12 years, but I have to say anymore, I can't recommend we keep buying these things (especially as the majority of the codebase has been slowly ported from SPARC to x86 over the last 5 years). I have still been recommending Sun x86 hardware for their ALOM/ILOM interface and very well engineered gear which tends to last for many years longer than a Dell or HP... But the nickle/dimming to death is starting to make it so that it is not worth it to purchase a Sun box with the extra premium when I similar spec'ed Dell for 30% less, and take that extra 30% savings knowing that about 20% of it will be used in needing to replace the box a few years sooner due to hardware failure.
I had a similar experience taking calculus four times at four different schools.
I can up you there... I had to retake a freshman/sophomore level calculus class my last term at college from the SAME SCHOOL because I changed majors and the Computer Science department did would not count the Engineering Department's version of the course (which even used the same books I might add). The Computer Science department's problem was that the Engineering Department taught the same material across 3 calculus courses while the Computer Science Department taught the same material in 4 courses. The reason the Engineering Department taught in 3 was because they had too many other higher level calculus courses to teach and would not be able to fit them all in if they spent 4 terms covering the same material as the Computer Science Department did. And even while I had things like "Systems of Equations 1 and 2", which are essentially the next two levels of calculus at my university, after the Calc 1, 2, 3 (and 4 for non-engineers), I had to go back and take Calc 4 for non-engineers, while my 8 credits in Systems 1 and 2 went towards my "free credits", and I had to retake material that I had already covered years ago again.
Also, a school has to have SOME standards, as the degree that they issue signifies to others some meaning about that person. Without that degree stating that the person has met some level of standards, the value of the degree for everyone holding it is diminished. Now whether or not those standards should extend to attendance is debatable, but there's plenty of justification for the university dictating terms which persons pursuing a degree must meet.
That is what the tests, exams, and pojects are for.... The few exceptions I can see for this would be for things like "Public Speaking", or "Film History", "Directed Study in Voice", or other "performance" classes where being there is needed to actually do the work. For 101 level english lit, math/calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., let them attend or not. The proof will be in the exams. I can tell you for a fact that I showed up to a total of 4 chemistry lectures and 2 biology lectures my Freshman year at college. My time was better spent elsewhere. I also received "A's" in both those subjects all Freshman year. You are now saying to yourself that I must have gone to a crappy college or something, but the reality was that I went to a VERY good High School and took all the AP level courses, I just didn't take the AP exam for college credit because the college I was going to would not accept AP credit for core classes, which as an engineering major, those were part of the core program, and were required to be taken at my college. Those classes were also a complete waste of my time.
I guess I broke the law but the drm was nicely removed. Now if only computers could playback 1080P without choking on their own spit.
They can, you just need software/hardware which works properly (i.e. x.264 GPU offload engine).
As the subject says. Stop using your personal computer(s). Let management know that once you are off-site, you will no longer have email access as you are not going to install this software on your own computer. If they want you to continue to have off-site email access, they can provide you with appropriate equipment. The same goes with you bringing in your laptop to work, stop doing it, and let work provide a laptop.
And "those people" were probably not trying to use the system for GAME and PSN as well as linux. The "option" was to choose which features you loose. Going back to the car analogies, it is like saying yes, you have a choice, you can "optionally" do nothing and you keep your upgraded rims package that you purchased, however, your car is no longer street legal and your insurance company is being notified and you can no longer get insurance, and thus can no longer drive it on the road. Or you can have us remove your upgraded rims and install the stock ones, and you stay legal, but you don't get the extra $$$ you paid for it back.
You will note that car companies perform a "recall" on a part or feature that they screwed up and they either refund you the cost of the vehicle if it can't be corrected, or they repair/replace the part with one that does the same features as the original but fixes the flaw that caused the recall event. Sony didn't want to spend the time/money to put a proper fix for the security flaw, or possibly can't fix it, and simply decided to remove it. By the car analogy, the customers deserve their money back if that is the case.
Actually this has everything to do with network neutrality. The ISP went into a business relationship with a search engine and then changed all the DNS entries to redirect all traffic from all other search engines to the one they have a business relationship with. That isn't a "hacked" connection, that was packet re-prioritization at the ultimate level. Instead of sending the packets to where the user wanted, the ISP sent them to their own service to make more money from their services (thru ads etc.), and away from a competing service. That is the very definition of a NON-neutral net, since they are being HOSTILE to other networks and services.
A perfect example of why we need net neutrality rules in place. An ISP should not be allowed to modify packets or redirect packets to/from known destinations.
The netgear WNDR 3700 is running a version of OpenWRT out of the box with a custom interface. OpenWRT has a few builds of their standard distribution which work, with full support being rapidly added. DD-WRT is working hard on adding support for the router as well with at least two test builds being released. Full support should be there within a few months. Again, with it running a customized OpenWRT out of the box, it is only a matter of time for all the router based distributions to have ports which run on it. Add in the fact that it is one of the fastest routers (wan->lan speed, and lan->wan speeds), with some of the best dual band wireless N speeds, a decent amount of RAM, USB ports, gigabit switch/router, and the fastest CPU seen in a consumer class router, you have a very capable device.
Not only that, but in the early 80's, I believe a 747 lost power to all 4 engines while flying through an ash from a volcano. That was the reason why there is a ban on flights when there is ash in the air.
Seriously, if the description given here is what it truly does, then this seems like a good law. Now if only the USA government would pass something like this which would put some balance back into copyright. The breaking of DRM only being illegal when you break copyright, and with it legal to make personal copies, it means people are free to break the DRM of things they bought, like making a backup copy of a movie, or ripping a movie for use on a HTPC without the need of the DVD in the HTPC (or blu-ray, or itunes songs, etc., etc.). Because all you are doing is using the item that you purchased for yourself, and you are free to use it in any way that you want, not simply the way that the copyright owner thinks you should be able to use it.
Seriously, we looked all over for something, but nothing fit. Grant it, we did this back in 2000-2001 timeframe. We setup a mysql database, and wrote up a website with php which was the interface. We scanned in floor plans of the buildings and setup an image clickmap for all the cubicles/locations on the floor plans and had them all point to a unique location_id. The location_id's were one of the keys in the datbase to track the hardware.
So you could litterally navigate to a particular building/floor, and then click on the cube/location and it will then show a list of all the equipment in that area. You can add new hardware to that location or click on a piece of hardware and view its information (CPU type/speed, hostname, IP address, MAC address, RAM, etc..) and if it moved to a new location, you click on a "move" button, and it opens up the list of buildings/floor plans and you simply navigate and click on the place where it moved to, and then update the database record.
We add some more sophisticated features like barcodes to cubicles and to the systems themselves and you can go around with a barcode scanner hooked up to a laptop and simply scan the barcode on a cubicle, and then scan all the barcodes of equipment in the cubicle and it would automatically associate all that equipment with that particular location (and if it was a new piece of equipment, it would open the form to add the equipment into the database).
It is "non-violent" in the sense that the cutting of human flesh and insertion of a foreign body into that flesh is non-violent.... Oh wait, isn't that the same thing that a bullet does, or knife?
I have never worked somewhere that my supervisors did not have access to system passwords.
I regularly supply them with updates to the passwords for our systems that have them.
That is policy at my work. No one gets the root passwords without filling out the proper paperwork, including getting supervisor signatures, and approval from the IT lead of the systems which the password is to. The IT lead approval entails having demonstrated the technical knowledge for that specific system(s). You could be someone who has 20 years of IT experience, but if you can't show that you know how that particular system is setup, including knowing what major services it runs and the systems and processes that rely on the server, you won't get root.
NO ONE PERSON EVER holds the ONLY SET OF KEYS to the system. That is fucking retarded administration and anyone doing it needs to be fired.
We have a process in place where root passwords are stored on a secured system. Access to the system heavily restricted. Once you login to the system, a custom shell is run which prints out the list of passwords that you have been approved to have access. The actual full list is not available to everyone. The full list is encrypted and maintained by programs developed in house which give the ability to add new systems and their corresponding passwords, update passwords to existing systems, and add/revoke the users from viewing that particular system. A history of old passwords is also maintained (and is part of what is printed out on the screen to the people who connect). The list is maintained by our Accounts group who are in charge of keeping track of all accounts on all systems and maintain the paperwork/databases showing who has access to what, and are in charge of creating and removing the accounts on all systems (i.e. if someone is fired, the Accounts group disables the person's accounts on all systems that they may have one).
You can make all the arguments about policy and chain of command you want, but the reality of it is policy is regularly broken when it doesn't actually fit the situation.
But that is just it, policy did fit the situation. The policy said he could not give the password to his boss. Due to a single-point of failure, he was willing to give the password(s) to the person allowed by policy to have them, which was the Mayor, but only under the proper way, which meant in person. We don't allow passwords to be transferred in any other manor either. If you need your password reset, the only way to get what we reset the password to is to physically go to a designated password coordinator in your area. They have strict policy for giving you the new password which is done in closed door office and the password is shown to you on a computer screen, and/or where you then have the ability to change the password (in accordance to password complexity policy).
Is this all overkill, not really. Especially for any location which deals with as much money as a large city does, or with protected information, or any of a number of other reasons (maybe it is a secured government network which handles classified information, etc.). A GOOD IT admin knows that protecting the data from idiots is their number one job priority.
He insisted on meeting the mayor in person to hand over the password. That's not rational or defensible.
Actually that is the only way that he could transfer the passwords. Policy for password transfer stated that no passwords were allowed to be transferred over the phone or by email. Thus, the ONLY way to transfer the password was in person. Which is exactly what he did when he spoke with the Mayor in person.
Enough said...
The majority of what you want to do can be done with little more powerful linux based home router/firewall/proxy running a third-party OS like OpenWRT, DD-WRT, or others. If you get a router with a powerful enough CPU and enough RAM, you should be able to have no problems running squid (a proxy service) to restrict access to the internet during your specified time-frames, or to revoke internet access completely (as in your example as a punishment/grounding): http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWTO_:_Ch32_:_Controlling_Web_Access_with_Squid
I would first setup each of your three systems to use MAC Address based DHCP connections to force the specific computer to get a specific IP address. This is easily done using the web-gui on most of the third party linux router OS's out there, or simply by command line using dnsmasq and editing the dnsmasq.conf file (add the following line for each host, "dhcp-host=00:00:00:00:00:00,192.168.1.10,infinite", replacing the "00:00:00:00:00:00" with the MAC address of the specific system, and replace the "192.168.1.10" with the IP address you wish the machine to use). You can also associate a hostname to that IP address, typically by editing a "hosts.dnsmasq" file and putting the IP address followed by a space or tab, and then the name you wish to use, like computer1, or server, or whatever you want to call it so you don't have to remember what the IP address to the host is, just the hostname that you gave it.
For antivirus, that gets a little more complicated when run at the router level, since you need pretty good router hardware for it to work (since it has to inspect each packet, not just read the header and pass it on to the correct system). PacketProtector is an addon/custom version of OpenWRT which does have antivirus integrated into it. However, you would be better doing this at the client level, not the network or server (well run it on the server as well, but just not as remove scans).
Your final question as to remote shutdowns, monitoring, well, you can do that pretty simply yourself just using "ping" to see if it has an IP address and if it responds, well you know it is up and running. And since you have already setup hostnames instead of just using IP addresses, it is a lot easier to just do a "ping kid1" than "ping 192.168.1.10" and know which computer that really is so that you yell at the correct offender...
Ever heard of it? You know, that thing which forces a password check for a user session to anything contained in the directory tree...