By adding the Linux community to the hundreds of thousands of Solaris developers, and the nearly three million Java/XML developers, Sun's customers have unified access to the broadest array of innovation in the industry on which to provide services.
Three Million Java/XML developers? Where are they hiding? Or are the vast majority of them still inexperienced rugrats?
I do know a few people do are Java developers, but the C and C++ crowd still outnumbers. Even with the job market as it is today, finding Java developers (well, at least good ones with some experience) is still hard to do. I think that three million figure quite an exaggeration. More like 1/4 of that.
I designed a form of distributed broadcast protocol where instead of having all the streams coming from the broadcast center directly, it would be more peer-to-peer, like multicast but server based for a little more smarts. Essentially you find an active server (your own ISP might have one, and if you're geek enough, you have one) and initiate the request to it. If it already has the stream active for someone, you just join in. If not, it proceeds to find a source for the stream, either by contacting other known servers (for example the upstream backbone ISP) or the originating source (which might then redirect it to a better server). I'm sure there are many other designs like this, but my point is that this kind of thing is fairly trivial to build.
A pay-per-view provider obviously is collecting for each viewer, and assuming no duplication piracy going on (yeah, I know that's a stretch), they get their money per user, and pay out the $0.02 per user hour to the MPEG-4 patent owners.
Now consider a broadcaster who is making the content freely available (things varying from newscasts they produce to webcams). But do they have to pay MPEG-4 royalties? They sure do if they are collecting "remuneration". With the above scheme, they would not have a direct head count. So the licensing says "a surrogate (e.g., standard industry audience measurement) is under consideration". That might work for broadcasters who already depend on such things for high-end advertising. But not everyone does.
Consider a webcam put up by a business that happens to have their corporate headquarters in an office tower ideally situated to see the traffic on a major roadway that sometimes gets jammed up. The webcam shows the road, and is open for anyone to view at any time, and uses the above mentioned distribution scheme. But they also put in some advertising of their own stores (suppose they are a retail business). The draw is that people want to check and see if the roadway is jammed so they can decide which way to commute to work. There is also advertising in place and they might also see a good deal on something they were thinking about buying anyway (yes, sometimes advertising really works without having to click on it). So what are the royalties to be paid? How do you measure this?
I think this is yet another case of someone trying to stick their fingers in more pies than they have fingers. If they could get past that notion, and allow FREE licensing for FREE software (regardless of class of use), and charge the royalty on transmission to the broadcasters (of all categories), then I believe that would really promote the use of the technology.
I wonder if they would end up offering opportunities for open source freeware developers to do testing of their packages in a zSeries environment in a way that IBM failed to do with their highly restricted and limited program.
If Sun wants to have people use the Sparc chip in embedded systems like network routers, then they should make some hardware available to do just that.
I suggest starting with a small box not larger than the old lunchbox machines (e.g. IPC, IPX, LX, etc) and preferrably smaller, with the following features:
UltraSparc CPU
2 DIMM or DDR slots, at least 2GB capacity
SVGA style video, 1MB min video buffer (4MB better)
PS/2 or USB style keyboard and mouse
Integrated IDE based thin CDROM
separate EIDE HD connection (and space in box for it)
proper active ventilation for a HD
dual or trio 10/100 ethernet (so it can be a firewall)
dual serial (console capable as usual)
dual USB (not counting for keyboard/mouse)
dual FireWire
integrated ISDN modem
integrated SDSL/ADSL modem
integrated Cable modem
parallel port
If they sell that beast w/o HD, w/o RAM, but with a 1 GHz CPU, for say $500, I'd bet it will sell fast.
Oh, and if IBM does the same but with a PPC-64 CPU at 1 GHz, I'd bet that would sell fast, too.
Now if they added a 2nd CPU, ultra fast 3D graphical video, and joystick controls, and sold it for $300... uh, no... I am not going to share this excellent weed with you:-)
If they chose to start selling the boards for $200 each, they'd end up generating huge demand. As it is, they are cutting the market off with the extreme pricing. Of course I know that without economy of scale, the cost to build them is high. But there will be no way to compete with the more popular CPU, despite PPC's clear superiority over the Intel products. Why aren't companies like IBM selling these things in their low and middle range servers?
The REAL problem is the current way jobs are ....
on
Resume Spamming Redux
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The REAL problem is the current way jobs are found, or rather, NOT found. And this existed during the peak of the bubble, making it hard for employers to find good people even though many good people existed looking for work even at that time. That problem is that connecting between employer and employee candidates is so ineffective.
Job boards are the rage. But they have only a small percentage of the jobs. Most of the jobs on the boards are posted by professional recruiters and their firms. But the majority of job openings are not listed there because they are not sent to recruiters. These are "less crucial" openings that don't justify the cost of a headhunter, which can be as much as the employee's full first year salary. And most businesses simply don't want to deal with the hassle and cost of posting all their own job openings on all the job boards. It costs a few thousand to post a single job opening to all the major job boards (there are too many of them).
A better designed job board would help. Doing searches on skills, job functions, and other criteria is in many just a cheap string search. And in those few that do more than a string search, they are often limited to listing just skills alone, instead of also other things like what job function roles one is looking for, or needs. I remember getting calls many times for someone to do a programming job in C++ even though I was only open to network management work. The reason was that I have nearly 20 years experience programming in C (not C++), and some board lumped C and C++ together, and never took into account that this was merely a skill and not what I was actually looking to do. I wonder how many potential employers skipped over my online profile just because I looked like a programmer to them (when searching candidates on these boards, employers see profiles first, and have to take extra steps to see the actual resume).
Then there is the fee to post a job. And the fee to view resumes. While the job boards do need to make money these days (especially considering their investors want to see a return on investment), this still remains a big obstacle to getting jobs listed. Some industry analysts say there are nearly a million job openings in high tech even now; a figure I have some doubts about, but I can't totally discard the possibility because I know the vast majority of them won't be posted on the big boards, even if the market was booming (and certainly not during a recession).
It sure would be a big plus to people looking for work if there was a totally free board (free to post a job, free to post a resume, free to search jobs, and free to search resumes). I've even suggested that employers wanting to hire people on H-1B visas should be required to post on the major boards for 3 months before applying to grant the visa, and a free super job board might even make that viable (and get more Americans back to work at American companies... and maybe similar in other countries, as I hear Germany has a problem similar to H-1B). The problem will be paying for such a board (bandwidth isn't free, now), and advertising probably doesn't cut it anymore.
The NAT in XP is just to get customers hooked. Think of it as a free 2 month trial. Now that you use it and like it, then you get that call from the cable company saying "We have discovered that you are using 2 computers at the same time via your cable service. We are adding the extra outlet fee to your bill to cover the cost, starting effective today. Thank your for using Comcast."
just remember if you are terminated from the position you now hold, you can use the documents you retained against your former employer, assuming there are some juicy tidbits in there.
Having something to hide is not necessarily the same as having done something illegal. Often times you may wish to hide personal and/or confidential information that might be used against you. An example is a list of your customers. That could be used against you by your competitors. Of course you have to have such a list somewhere all the time, but sometimes paper copies are made for certain staff to work with, such as someone assigned to call each customer and make sure they are happy. Once the project is done, that paper copy left lying around poses a risk. If it is just tossed into the trash, your competitor could retrieve it using an age old technique of dumpster diving. So the document should be destroyed by some means appropriate for its level of sensitivity. This is one of the things document retention policies are about.
Some documents may even be appropriate to destroy every copy. Personal correspondence can include some or all of the above mentioned information. It doesn't have to be illegal to be justfiable for the shredder or incinerator (or both).
On the other hand, I've heard of a company actually doing just the opposite. They generated massive quantities of false and misleading documents (probably illegal). Then when the lawyers came marching in to do discovery, guess what they have to sift through.
In effect what is going on here (or at least try to think of it this way) is there is an informal "agreement" between the company (Adobe) and the market (people in Asian countries) to receive the benefit of development of software for their languages in exchange for being paid a handsome reward for this. What is happening is that the company doesn't believe it is getting the reward is should get, and so it is considering to not proceed with further development.
The problem here is when you are dealing with masses of people instead of an individual or another company as the market. Some in the masses "won't carry their share of the weight". When that becomes widespread, it is a problem. Then when the effort to change that starts using tactics like law and Business Software Alliance, then the masses tend to turn against it even more (in these cultures who do not believe in all the nit picking of law).
I am not Chinese nor have I ever been to China. But I do have some respect for their culture in many ways. A lot of it actually makes more sense to me than western (I was born in the USA and have never even been outside of the country). While I will agree that it is true that they (Chinese) will have to adapt to work with businesses in other cultures, I also believe the other businesses will have to do some adapting as well. They should meet half way. It is wrong for the western cultures to assume that the eastern cultures must be the only ones to change.
I rather like the idea of no contracts. You do business with someone as long as they are doing business in a way that satisfies you. If you trust them not too much, then don't extend yourself too much in a way you would lose. If you don't like the way they are doing things, for example if they are shipping you shoddy products, then you stop doing business with them and do business with someone else instead. In the USA, this would just result in businesses "going whining to courts", a process that does not really contribute to the economy, and just fattens sharks.
Not surprisingly, Rick Lane, News Corp.'s vice president for governmental affairs, and the other content industry lawyers think that the computer companies need to get over it. After all, mandates have been a fact of life for the consumer electronics industry -- particularly radio and television equipment -- for decades. Forty years ago, for example, the government told television makers to build UHF-reception capability into all new TVs.
The mandate to add UHF to TV receivers was not a mandate that had as a tradeoff to break VHF reception. The only tradeoff was that it added about $30.00 to the price of a $300.00 TV. TV prices went down from there and the UHF tuner component price went down even faster. The only damage this mandate caused was it destroyed the market for those set top UHF converters.
Of course/. readers know that what the content industry is wanting will destroy the capability to make your own music, trade in free music, and play either of those, as well as the same for movies. This will also hurt independent artists who have not signed their soul over to...
People will be concerned about cost (since they pay for that) and privacy (they pay for that, too, if some hacker comes and snatches confidential data the city has about them). You don't have to specifically say the L-word, but you should campaign on issues like "saving taxpayer money" and "preserving city resident privacy by increasing security in the city IT department". If asked how you would do that say "If I am elected, I would form a special task force to review security, procedures, and cost structure in city government, including the IT department". Avoid saying "Microsoft vs. Linux" specifically, as that would make it appear you have an agenda not specifically associated with city political issues. If asked about that say something like "I will certainly make sure all our options are open, and if a change in software will make things more secure and reduce costs, then I'm all for that and will see to it that it gets done".
They are stable, but wide. The stability is not that stuff falls inward, but that objects would orbit around the point. But, yes, there is a risk that crap can accumulate there. But astronomers have looked and found nothing more than some dust in the Earth-Moon L4/5 points. The Sun-Jupiter and Sun-Saturn L4/5 points do have some big rocks in there.
L4 and L5. Put the communications satellite in the L4 or L5 Earth-moon Lagrange point. These are the stable points. While they won't "view" the exact center of the far side disk, if the observatory is built, say, 45 degrees back from that center, a satellite can view it from L4 or L5. The observatory would still be blocked from Earth noise by a huge mass of the moon, but it would be able to see L4 or L5 (which one depending on which way it was positioned) just above the horizon all the time. And with 3 or 4 active links to it on the Earth, continuous contact could be maintained. While a satellite there would actually be in order around a virtual point, it could be a small orbit, allowing for a fixed antenna at the observatory, and potentially very high bandwidth continuous communications.
So your distribution doesn't have the "which" command? Or maybe the PATH environment variable doesn't have the default setting with the paths where commands are found on that system? Standardize a few things that let you find other things, then the other things only need to be standardized in what keywords are needed to find them, and not their exact path.
What LSB really needs is some alternatives to choose from. The thing I most dislike about standards, especially those that try to codify existing sloppy practices, is lack of choice and the end to new ideas.
It won't happen because it's a bad idea. This kind of standarization stifles innovation. Of course it is a good idea to have a way for packages to know where things can be found, but that's generally going to be standard executeables, libraries, headers, and various resource files. One of LSB's problems is it's aiming to become the ultimate distribution where everyone else is just forced to make a copy of them.
SysV isn't necessarily the answer. All that/etc/rc[0-6].d/[S|K][0-99]blahblah crap isn't even need to get all the advantages it offers. While BSD has it's problems, too, new work is needed in this area to get a simplified and cleaned up init. I definitely want to get rid of the symlinks which are not needed to do runlevel controls (there is another way). The trouble with standardizing this is that you cutting off the possibility of new development that can improve things. Of course lots of standards tend to do that.
Besides, init should strictly be an administration policy issue, and not a package development or installation issue, at least for those who don't want packages to mess around with init scripts. After having 3 different packages foul up the init scripts on Redhat, and similar problems in the past with Solaris and SCO (SCO has a really really bad form of SysV init scripts), I swore off SysV forever.
Just how secure is it? Are we talking bunker fortress or a couple of hire-a-guards? Are procedures in place to make sure that facilities can be made non-functional in the case of an invasion?
network security (we use closed networks)
So no one has access to the internet from anywhere in the facility?
technology (most crackers don't have access to a huge radio antenna with which to transmit)
Most? Remember Captain Midnight? You're depending on the security not of your facility, but every facility under or near your footprint (which is most everywhere for non-sync satellites). You actually don't need that much power to communicate with a satellite. You do if there is someone else competing. And if the facility is not monitoring it 24x7x365, someone could take control when you are not looking, and you would not be there to grab it back.
obscurity (each satellite has its own command structure, not publicly documented
Certain high security facilities do not allow employees to take any papers or media in or out that's not specifically approved by many levels of mnagament with procedures in place to handle it. Do you got to this extreme? Ever heard of "disgruntled employee"?
execute a DOS attack
It's a matter of degree. Are the commands checksummed against noise? How strongly? Personally for something as critical as a satellite, even a science satellite, I'd use something quite strong to checksum, like MD5 instead of CRC-32. Sure, it's argueably overkill to use MD5, but I would anyway.
Once someone has your frequency, if they have access to any unsecured facility, they can DOS you. And many ham radio ops have enough facility in their backyards. Then if they got the specs from the disgruntled employee, and enough power to keep you from grabbing it back, they can even 0wn it. Even greater danger exists if the commands include uploading new program code.
How many of you think that you could decipher the structure of the command (given the motivation)?
For a company I once worked for, I cracked a competitors file format (so we could convert the data to our format) which included a proprietary compression algorithm for which I had no docs. Considering that I would not feel the multi-million dollar loss if command experiments dunked the satellite into the ocean (or worse), if motivated, and had access to doing occaisional commands on the thing, as well as sniffing the command upstream from nearby the uplink in one of the side lobes, I might be able to figure out enough to... perhaps at least dunk it.
Standards being developed (like SCPS) intend to make satellites 'just another node on the Internet.'
My greatest worry with a lot of these generalized security protocols is not the crypto they provide (IPSEC is plenty solid enough in that area for me), but rather, in the social interface aspects... the way things get routinely configured after the design is all done, by people who never designed anything secure, is the biggest risk I see. And, IMHO, IPSEC is rather exposed in that area due to the complexity of configuring its setup. Most security is.
I'm not looking for the Slashdot population to do my research -- I mostly want opinions on whether cracking a science satellite would be worth the time."
Steering a satellite over to hit something like an international space station would seem to be highly unlikely, given the small object sizes and the even larger spatial dimensionals up there. However, the cost of the risk is extremely high. Even so much as having a satellite out of control doing unknown things up there could cause operational impacts, and require aborting missions.
Whatever you design now will be used for how many years? And what will the new security requirements be then? Personally, I would consider every security risk at least in terms of the high cost of impact, and quite likely pretend a high chance of intrusion by a motivated cracker/terrorist. IMHO, it is best to maximize the security everywhere that you can't prove has no risk. And if you have not done so already, take an NRA gun safety class. Then translate the multiple layers of safety you learn there into multiple layers of security, and think like that everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Three Million Java/XML developers? Where are they hiding? Or are the vast majority of them still inexperienced rugrats?
I do know a few people do are Java developers, but the C and C++ crowd still outnumbers. Even with the job market as it is today, finding Java developers (well, at least good ones with some experience) is still hard to do. I think that three million figure quite an exaggeration. More like 1/4 of that.
I designed a form of distributed broadcast protocol where instead of having all the streams coming from the broadcast center directly, it would be more peer-to-peer, like multicast but server based for a little more smarts. Essentially you find an active server (your own ISP might have one, and if you're geek enough, you have one) and initiate the request to it. If it already has the stream active for someone, you just join in. If not, it proceeds to find a source for the stream, either by contacting other known servers (for example the upstream backbone ISP) or the originating source (which might then redirect it to a better server). I'm sure there are many other designs like this, but my point is that this kind of thing is fairly trivial to build.
A pay-per-view provider obviously is collecting for each viewer, and assuming no duplication piracy going on (yeah, I know that's a stretch), they get their money per user, and pay out the $0.02 per user hour to the MPEG-4 patent owners.
Now consider a broadcaster who is making the content freely available (things varying from newscasts they produce to webcams). But do they have to pay MPEG-4 royalties? They sure do if they are collecting "remuneration". With the above scheme, they would not have a direct head count. So the licensing says "a surrogate (e.g., standard industry audience measurement) is under consideration". That might work for broadcasters who already depend on such things for high-end advertising. But not everyone does.
Consider a webcam put up by a business that happens to have their corporate headquarters in an office tower ideally situated to see the traffic on a major roadway that sometimes gets jammed up. The webcam shows the road, and is open for anyone to view at any time, and uses the above mentioned distribution scheme. But they also put in some advertising of their own stores (suppose they are a retail business). The draw is that people want to check and see if the roadway is jammed so they can decide which way to commute to work. There is also advertising in place and they might also see a good deal on something they were thinking about buying anyway (yes, sometimes advertising really works without having to click on it). So what are the royalties to be paid? How do you measure this?
I think this is yet another case of someone trying to stick their fingers in more pies than they have fingers. If they could get past that notion, and allow FREE licensing for FREE software (regardless of class of use), and charge the royalty on transmission to the broadcasters (of all categories), then I believe that would really promote the use of the technology.
I wonder if they would end up offering opportunities for open source freeware developers to do testing of their packages in a zSeries environment in a way that IBM failed to do with their highly restricted and limited program.
If Sun wants to have people use the Sparc chip in embedded systems like network routers, then they should make some hardware available to do just that. I suggest starting with a small box not larger than the old lunchbox machines (e.g. IPC, IPX, LX, etc) and preferrably smaller, with the following features:
If they sell that beast w/o HD, w/o RAM, but with a 1 GHz CPU, for say $500, I'd bet it will sell fast. Oh, and if IBM does the same but with a PPC-64 CPU at 1 GHz, I'd bet that would sell fast, too.
Now if they added a 2nd CPU, ultra fast 3D graphical video, and joystick controls, and sold it for $300 ... uh, no ... I am not going to share this excellent weed with you :-)
If they chose to start selling the boards for $200 each, they'd end up generating huge demand. As it is, they are cutting the market off with the extreme pricing. Of course I know that without economy of scale, the cost to build them is high. But there will be no way to compete with the more popular CPU, despite PPC's clear superiority over the Intel products. Why aren't companies like IBM selling these things in their low and middle range servers?
The REAL problem is the current way jobs are found, or rather, NOT found. And this existed during the peak of the bubble, making it hard for employers to find good people even though many good people existed looking for work even at that time. That problem is that connecting between employer and employee candidates is so ineffective.
Job boards are the rage. But they have only a small percentage of the jobs. Most of the jobs on the boards are posted by professional recruiters and their firms. But the majority of job openings are not listed there because they are not sent to recruiters. These are "less crucial" openings that don't justify the cost of a headhunter, which can be as much as the employee's full first year salary. And most businesses simply don't want to deal with the hassle and cost of posting all their own job openings on all the job boards. It costs a few thousand to post a single job opening to all the major job boards (there are too many of them).
A better designed job board would help. Doing searches on skills, job functions, and other criteria is in many just a cheap string search. And in those few that do more than a string search, they are often limited to listing just skills alone, instead of also other things like what job function roles one is looking for, or needs. I remember getting calls many times for someone to do a programming job in C++ even though I was only open to network management work. The reason was that I have nearly 20 years experience programming in C (not C++), and some board lumped C and C++ together, and never took into account that this was merely a skill and not what I was actually looking to do. I wonder how many potential employers skipped over my online profile just because I looked like a programmer to them (when searching candidates on these boards, employers see profiles first, and have to take extra steps to see the actual resume).
Then there is the fee to post a job. And the fee to view resumes. While the job boards do need to make money these days (especially considering their investors want to see a return on investment), this still remains a big obstacle to getting jobs listed. Some industry analysts say there are nearly a million job openings in high tech even now; a figure I have some doubts about, but I can't totally discard the possibility because I know the vast majority of them won't be posted on the big boards, even if the market was booming (and certainly not during a recession).
It sure would be a big plus to people looking for work if there was a totally free board (free to post a job, free to post a resume, free to search jobs, and free to search resumes). I've even suggested that employers wanting to hire people on H-1B visas should be required to post on the major boards for 3 months before applying to grant the visa, and a free super job board might even make that viable (and get more Americans back to work at American companies ... and maybe similar in other countries, as I hear Germany has a problem similar to H-1B). The problem will be paying for such a board (bandwidth isn't free, now), and advertising probably doesn't cut it anymore.
The NAT in XP is just to get customers hooked. Think of it as a free 2 month trial. Now that you use it and like it, then you get that call from the cable company saying "We have discovered that you are using 2 computers at the same time via your cable service. We are adding the extra outlet fee to your bill to cover the cost, starting effective today. Thank your for using Comcast."
just remember if you are terminated from the position you now hold, you can use the documents you retained against your former employer, assuming there are some juicy tidbits in there.
Having something to hide is not necessarily the same as having done something illegal. Often times you may wish to hide personal and/or confidential information that might be used against you. An example is a list of your customers. That could be used against you by your competitors. Of course you have to have such a list somewhere all the time, but sometimes paper copies are made for certain staff to work with, such as someone assigned to call each customer and make sure they are happy. Once the project is done, that paper copy left lying around poses a risk. If it is just tossed into the trash, your competitor could retrieve it using an age old technique of dumpster diving. So the document should be destroyed by some means appropriate for its level of sensitivity. This is one of the things document retention policies are about.
Some documents may even be appropriate to destroy every copy. Personal correspondence can include some or all of the above mentioned information. It doesn't have to be illegal to be justfiable for the shredder or incinerator (or both).
On the other hand, I've heard of a company actually doing just the opposite. They generated massive quantities of false and misleading documents (probably illegal). Then when the lawyers came marching in to do discovery, guess what they have to sift through.
In effect what is going on here (or at least try to think of it this way) is there is an informal "agreement" between the company (Adobe) and the market (people in Asian countries) to receive the benefit of development of software for their languages in exchange for being paid a handsome reward for this. What is happening is that the company doesn't believe it is getting the reward is should get, and so it is considering to not proceed with further development.
The problem here is when you are dealing with masses of people instead of an individual or another company as the market. Some in the masses "won't carry their share of the weight". When that becomes widespread, it is a problem. Then when the effort to change that starts using tactics like law and Business Software Alliance, then the masses tend to turn against it even more (in these cultures who do not believe in all the nit picking of law).
Apparently the email didn't get delivered.
I am not Chinese nor have I ever been to China. But I do have some respect for their culture in many ways. A lot of it actually makes more sense to me than western (I was born in the USA and have never even been outside of the country). While I will agree that it is true that they (Chinese) will have to adapt to work with businesses in other cultures, I also believe the other businesses will have to do some adapting as well. They should meet half way. It is wrong for the western cultures to assume that the eastern cultures must be the only ones to change.
I rather like the idea of no contracts. You do business with someone as long as they are doing business in a way that satisfies you. If you trust them not too much, then don't extend yourself too much in a way you would lose. If you don't like the way they are doing things, for example if they are shipping you shoddy products, then you stop doing business with them and do business with someone else instead. In the USA, this would just result in businesses "going whining to courts", a process that does not really contribute to the economy, and just fattens sharks.
The mandate to add UHF to TV receivers was not a mandate that had as a tradeoff to break VHF reception. The only tradeoff was that it added about $30.00 to the price of a $300.00 TV. TV prices went down from there and the UHF tuner component price went down even faster. The only damage this mandate caused was it destroyed the market for those set top UHF converters.
Of course /. readers know that what the content industry is wanting will destroy the capability to make your own music, trade in free music, and play either of those, as well as the same for movies. This will also hurt independent artists who have not signed their soul over to ...
The BSA supports the DMCA. This press release explains that. Now you know more about these guys and who really gives them their marching orders.
People will be concerned about cost (since they pay for that) and privacy (they pay for that, too, if some hacker comes and snatches confidential data the city has about them). You don't have to specifically say the L-word, but you should campaign on issues like "saving taxpayer money" and "preserving city resident privacy by increasing security in the city IT department". If asked how you would do that say "If I am elected, I would form a special task force to review security, procedures, and cost structure in city government, including the IT department". Avoid saying "Microsoft vs. Linux" specifically, as that would make it appear you have an agenda not specifically associated with city political issues. If asked about that say something like "I will certainly make sure all our options are open, and if a change in software will make things more secure and reduce costs, then I'm all for that and will see to it that it gets done".
Be sure to read this, too.
Didn't he have like a quadruple bypass a few years ago? I quit eating those burgers.
They are stable, but wide. The stability is not that stuff falls inward, but that objects would orbit around the point. But, yes, there is a risk that crap can accumulate there. But astronomers have looked and found nothing more than some dust in the Earth-Moon L4/5 points. The Sun-Jupiter and Sun-Saturn L4/5 points do have some big rocks in there.
L4 and L5. Put the communications satellite in the L4 or L5 Earth-moon Lagrange point. These are the stable points. While they won't "view" the exact center of the far side disk, if the observatory is built, say, 45 degrees back from that center, a satellite can view it from L4 or L5. The observatory would still be blocked from Earth noise by a huge mass of the moon, but it would be able to see L4 or L5 (which one depending on which way it was positioned) just above the horizon all the time. And with 3 or 4 active links to it on the Earth, continuous contact could be maintained. While a satellite there would actually be in order around a virtual point, it could be a small orbit, allowing for a fixed antenna at the observatory, and potentially very high bandwidth continuous communications.
So your distribution doesn't have the "which" command? Or maybe the PATH environment variable doesn't have the default setting with the paths where commands are found on that system? Standardize a few things that let you find other things, then the other things only need to be standardized in what keywords are needed to find them, and not their exact path.
What LSB really needs is some alternatives to choose from. The thing I most dislike about standards, especially those that try to codify existing sloppy practices, is lack of choice and the end to new ideas.
Why does Linux need those standards? Pretty soon this way all the distributions will be just alike, and all equally bad.
Nothing wrong with binaries. Just do:
and there you have it, your binaries are installedIt won't happen because it's a bad idea. This kind of standarization stifles innovation. Of course it is a good idea to have a way for packages to know where things can be found, but that's generally going to be standard executeables, libraries, headers, and various resource files. One of LSB's problems is it's aiming to become the ultimate distribution where everyone else is just forced to make a copy of them.
SysV isn't necessarily the answer. All that /etc/rc[0-6].d/[S|K][0-99]blahblah crap isn't even need to get all the advantages it offers. While BSD has it's problems, too, new work is needed in this area to get a simplified and cleaned up init. I definitely want to get rid of the symlinks which are not needed to do runlevel controls (there is another way). The trouble with standardizing this is that you cutting off the possibility of new development that can improve things. Of course lots of standards tend to do that.
Besides, init should strictly be an administration policy issue, and not a package development or installation issue, at least for those who don't want packages to mess around with init scripts. After having 3 different packages foul up the init scripts on Redhat, and similar problems in the past with Solaris and SCO (SCO has a really really bad form of SysV init scripts), I swore off SysV forever.
Just how secure is it? Are we talking bunker fortress or a couple of hire-a-guards? Are procedures in place to make sure that facilities can be made non-functional in the case of an invasion?
So no one has access to the internet from anywhere in the facility?
Most? Remember Captain Midnight? You're depending on the security not of your facility, but every facility under or near your footprint (which is most everywhere for non-sync satellites). You actually don't need that much power to communicate with a satellite. You do if there is someone else competing. And if the facility is not monitoring it 24x7x365, someone could take control when you are not looking, and you would not be there to grab it back.
Certain high security facilities do not allow employees to take any papers or media in or out that's not specifically approved by many levels of mnagament with procedures in place to handle it. Do you got to this extreme? Ever heard of "disgruntled employee"?
It's a matter of degree. Are the commands checksummed against noise? How strongly? Personally for something as critical as a satellite, even a science satellite, I'd use something quite strong to checksum, like MD5 instead of CRC-32. Sure, it's argueably overkill to use MD5, but I would anyway.
Once someone has your frequency, if they have access to any unsecured facility, they can DOS you. And many ham radio ops have enough facility in their backyards. Then if they got the specs from the disgruntled employee, and enough power to keep you from grabbing it back, they can even 0wn it. Even greater danger exists if the commands include uploading new program code.
For a company I once worked for, I cracked a competitors file format (so we could convert the data to our format) which included a proprietary compression algorithm for which I had no docs. Considering that I would not feel the multi-million dollar loss if command experiments dunked the satellite into the ocean (or worse), if motivated, and had access to doing occaisional commands on the thing, as well as sniffing the command upstream from nearby the uplink in one of the side lobes, I might be able to figure out enough to ... perhaps at least dunk it.
My greatest worry with a lot of these generalized security protocols is not the crypto they provide (IPSEC is plenty solid enough in that area for me), but rather, in the social interface aspects ... the way things get routinely configured after the design is all done, by people who never designed anything secure, is the biggest risk I see. And, IMHO, IPSEC is rather exposed in that area due to the complexity of configuring its setup. Most security is.
Steering a satellite over to hit something like an international space station would seem to be highly unlikely, given the small object sizes and the even larger spatial dimensionals up there. However, the cost of the risk is extremely high. Even so much as having a satellite out of control doing unknown things up there could cause operational impacts, and require aborting missions.
Whatever you design now will be used for how many years? And what will the new security requirements be then? Personally, I would consider every security risk at least in terms of the high cost of impact, and quite likely pretend a high chance of intrusion by a motivated cracker/terrorist. IMHO, it is best to maximize the security everywhere that you can't prove has no risk. And if you have not done so already, take an NRA gun safety class. Then translate the multiple layers of safety you learn there into multiple layers of security, and think like that everywhere.