I used to have dealings with Intel around 7 years ago. At that time they were largely a Banyan VINES shop. I presume all the Banyan systems have long gone.
A few years ago I used to often need root on Banyan VINES servers for debugging/maintenance issues.
The Bourne shell used by root was modified to log all commands to a number of files in a particular directory (/etc?). The files were written to in a circular fashion - when one file was full, the next would be overwritten.
The really odd thing was that these logs were not written to immediately, but were flushed out sometime in the future, often after the shell had been closed. I never got to find out how this worked, but I assume that the syslog equivalent was responsible.
Of course on this system there were very few tools, and most of them were derived from mid 1980s code. I'm not even sure if it was possible to get a shell from their implemantion of vi - it was a very broken vi implementation.
This logging was pointless, however. The majority of root access was used to query and modify the various security databases via a number of text based tools. If run interactivly these would not log anything.
Something like this has just come up at work here. A customer that runs NT all over want us to send someone to their office at the other end of the country just to install the IIS fixes to one machine.
It amazes me that someone of their nature (a major name) hasn't got anyone competant on site to install this FIX.
Then again, judging by the fact that their standard FIX to performance problems on a Solaris machine was to reboot it, I'm suprised that anything works at all.
It sounds to me like the name of a dodgy 8-bit video game from the mid-1980's - the sort of thing that would be hand-duplicated onto cassette tape by some spotty herbert in his bedroom. There were a lot of bad games around at this time; I even recall one names "3D Sieddab Attack" (reverse the second work)
Wait a minute....
Back in around 1983, Parker Brothers released a cartridge for the Atari VCS based upon the At-At Walker portions of "The Empire Strikes Back". The legendary UK Commodore games author Jeff Minter released a virtual clone of the game called "Attack of the Mutant Camels". There was a later sequel called "Revenge of the Mutant Camels", which was simillar to the title of the third film.
Are the clones Mutant Camels? Has George Lucas ever played "Hover Bover"? Are Jeff Minter and Euan McGregor Related? I think we should be told.
I live in the UK, where copyright on recordings last for only 50 years, coming to affect on 1st January the following year. This means a lot of interesting things can be bought for next to nothing; however the quality of packaging
At thr beginning of each year the CD shops fill up with compliation albums full of tracks that expired at the beginning of the year.
Unfortunatly the record companies are not pleased. In a couple of years Rock n Roll classics will be out of copyright. The big event will be in 2013 when the first Beatles recordings expire. They are trying to get the law changed by then.
I had even sillier questions asked in a telephone interview by a headhunter on behalf of $BIGHARDWARECO. This headhunter had the exclusive contract in the UK for this company.
I've no idea who compiled the questions, but most of them were unanswerable.
The only one that was really answerable was on the layout of the S5 filesystem. I hadn't used that filesystem for mumble years, and I guessed on the precise location.
The other questions included these classics:
What's the significance of memory address $F0000000.
What's the difference between a Unix and a Windows PCI card.
The first was unanswerable without some context, which the headhunter was unable to expand upon. The second was unfathomable. The only difference between PCI cards I've ever ascertained is in those few with a BIOS, which must be processor specific. This didn't register with the headhunter either.
I later learnt that this company had problems recruiting competant staff. I wonder why!
Bloody Johnny Come Latelys with their use of the name 'Illustrator' for a piece of software! Pah!
Back in around 1984 a UK company called Gilsoft created a piece of software called "Illustrator". It was an add-on to their text adventure system - "The Quill" - and allowed the games to be enhanced with graphical images.
In late 1999 I attended an interview with a local IBM Global Services office. Remote sysadmin for a major supermarket chain.
The two interviewers were utterly incompetant. I was asked one technical question, to which the answer was "wc -l". The rest of the interview consisted of one of the interviewers reading off a list of mainly obscure 3rd party products, of which I had experience of half.
I was told in the rejection letter that I didn't have enought Unix experience. If 9 1/2 years was not enough, I've no idea what they were looking for!
Re:Why SMS is so popular ...
on
SMS vs. E-mail?
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· Score: 1
I'm in the UK and take a 25+ mile bus journey to work every day.
Over the past year the number of voice calls on the bus has dropped dramatically, but SMS usage has increased.
I've even seen one woman sending an SMS message on one phone whilst talking on another one.
Then I wondered why the pimps were not getting me any interviews. I asked one pimp to send me a copy of my resume. The document I received was an utter mess. A Word file with the plain text and HTML tags, all badly formatted. Not one attempt had been made to clean the thing up.
Pimps are not known for being intelligent, after all.
Even the little hacking I did was feed by copious amounts of coffee, and I don't usually drink the stuff!
I was up until 2am trailing through the disassembly of a DOS device driver for an obsolete piece of hardware, attempting to find out what I needed to write to which IO ports to enable this device, so I could add them to the Linux driver.
Are there any plans to purge some of the crud from the driver source?
There's a good number of drivers that are not being maintained, mainly for hardware no longer in production. Does anyone really need the XT hard disk driver, for example?
Following any guidelines will still not make the system 100% secure; it will only make it secure against the current known and published exploits. It is more than likely that in future new exploits will appear. There are probably also undocumented exploits out there that are only known to crackers.
I worked for a Banyan reseller. When the sales started to dry up with the onset of NT, Banyan comissions a Gartner Group study that praised Banyan to the skies whilst knocking NT and Netware.
It was very PHB friendly, full of graphs and tables comparing various aspects of TCO - average number of users per admin, number of users per server and so on. I've no idea where the figures actually came from.
Nothing but a bunch of freeloaders , trying to grab something for nothing. They must be suffering from severe hearing loss as well if they listen to MP3s all day.
My later father used vegatable oil with his car 20 years ago. However this wasn't as a fuel source.
His job used to entail visiting schools, colledges and other council establishments in the county, and offer advice on cleaning and building maintenance. During his travels he often came across cleaning and other materials that were unusable and needed to be disposed of. The most common materials were drums vegetable oil past the use-by date and floor polish that had congealed.
He hit on the idea of mixing the two together, and using the mixture, then sprayed the underside of the car as anti-corrosion agent. He nicknamed the mixture 'Jockum Juice', some colloquial Yorkshire term.
So if anyone recalls metallic-green Vauxhall Viva driving around Yorkshire smelling of french-polish and a chippy, you know who to blame!
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have dealings with Intel around 7 years ago. At that time they were largely a Banyan VINES shop. I presume all the Banyan systems have long gone.
The Bourne shell used by root was modified to log all commands to a number of files in a particular directory (/etc?). The files were written to in a circular fashion - when one file was full, the next would be overwritten.
The really odd thing was that these logs were not written to immediately, but were flushed out sometime in the future, often after the shell had been closed. I never got to find out how this worked, but I assume that the syslog equivalent was responsible.
Of course on this system there were very few tools, and most of them were derived from mid 1980s code. I'm not even sure if it was possible to get a shell from their implemantion of vi - it was a very broken vi implementation.
This logging was pointless, however. The majority of root access was used to query and modify the various security databases via a number of text based tools. If run interactivly these would not log anything.
W is also a vowel. The ISO 8852 charset designed for Wales contains both W and Y with accents.
It amazes me that someone of their nature (a major name) hasn't got anyone competant on site to install this FIX.
Then again, judging by the fact that their standard FIX to performance problems on a Solaris machine was to reboot it, I'm suprised that anything works at all.
Wait a minute....
Back in around 1983, Parker Brothers released a cartridge for the Atari VCS based upon the At-At Walker portions of "The Empire Strikes Back". The legendary UK Commodore games author Jeff Minter released a virtual clone of the game called "Attack of the Mutant Camels". There was a later sequel called "Revenge of the Mutant Camels", which was simillar to the title of the third film.
Are the clones Mutant Camels? Has George Lucas ever played "Hover Bover"? Are Jeff Minter and Euan McGregor Related? I think we should be told.
I live in the UK, where copyright on recordings last for only 50 years, coming to affect on 1st January the following year. This means a lot of interesting things can be bought for next to nothing; however the quality of packaging At thr beginning of each year the CD shops fill up with compliation albums full of tracks that expired at the beginning of the year.
Unfortunatly the record companies are not pleased. In a couple of years Rock n Roll classics will be out of copyright. The big event will be in 2013 when the first Beatles recordings expire. They are trying to get the law changed by then.
Unfortunatly I've got to use his crap at work. This means that I'll be handing in my resignation tomorrow.
If Bill Gates was a European, he'd have been jailed by now!.
B*ll*cks!. Forgot to press preview!.
I've no idea who compiled the questions, but most of them were unanswerable.
The only one that was really answerable was on the layout of the S5 filesystem. I hadn't used that filesystem for mumble years, and I guessed on the precise location. The other questions included these classics:
What's the significance of memory address $F0000000.
What's the difference between a Unix and a Windows PCI card.
The first was unanswerable without some context, which the headhunter was unable to expand upon. The second was unfathomable. The only difference between PCI cards I've ever ascertained is in those few with a BIOS, which must be processor specific. This didn't register with the headhunter either.
I later learnt that this company had problems recruiting competant staff. I wonder why!
An expenive suit.
A very expenisive car.
The ability to be able to lie convincingly.
The ability to recommend the product that gives you the most comission, no matter how unsuitable it is for the client's needs.
Complete ignorance of networking.
Most consultants I've met have been like this!
Back in around 1984 a UK company called Gilsoft created a piece of software called "Illustrator". It was an add-on to their text adventure system - "The Quill" - and allowed the games to be enhanced with graphical images.
Up yours, Adobe!
In late 1999 I attended an interview with a local IBM Global Services office. Remote sysadmin for a major supermarket chain.
The two interviewers were utterly incompetant. I was asked one technical question, to which the answer was "wc -l". The rest of the interview consisted of one of the interviewers reading off a list of mainly obscure 3rd party products, of which I had experience of half.
I was told in the rejection letter that I didn't have enought Unix experience. If 9 1/2 years was not enough, I've no idea what they were looking for!
Over the past year the number of voice calls on the bus has dropped dramatically, but SMS usage has increased.
I've even seen one woman sending an SMS message on one phone whilst talking on another one.
Then I wondered why the pimps were not getting me any interviews. I asked one pimp to send me a copy of my resume. The document I received was an utter mess. A Word file with the plain text and HTML tags, all badly formatted. Not one attempt had been made to clean the thing up.
Pimps are not known for being intelligent, after all.
They'd recently had a delivery of kits of the more obscure German WWII aircraft. These kits were produced in Germany by Huma.
The paintings on the box had the swastika replaced by a group of four squares, the sort of image you'd get if you added extra bars to a swastika.
This logo looks remarkably like the Windows logo to me. Even more offensive.
Best browser by far - pah! Can't even render alpha-channel PNG images properly!
I was up until 2am trailing through the disassembly of a DOS device driver for an obsolete piece of hardware, attempting to find out what I needed to write to which IO ports to enable this device, so I could add them to the Linux driver.
There's a good number of drivers that are not being maintained, mainly for hardware no longer in production. Does anyone really need the XT hard disk driver, for example?
I must have spent too much time in arcades 20 years ago.....
Is just like the Atari VCS port of Pacman - an utter waste of money!
Where's Manchester United or Rupert Murdock.
Following any guidelines will still not make the system 100% secure; it will only make it secure against the current known and published exploits. It is more than likely that in future new exploits will appear. There are probably also undocumented exploits out there that are only known to crackers.
It was very PHB friendly, full of graphs and tables comparing various aspects of TCO - average number of users per admin, number of users per server and so on. I've no idea where the figures actually came from.
I've distrusted Gartner ever since.
Nothing but a bunch of freeloaders , trying to grab something for nothing. They must be suffering from severe hearing loss as well if they listen to MP3s all day.
His job used to entail visiting schools, colledges and other council establishments in the county, and offer advice on cleaning and building maintenance. During his travels he often came across cleaning and other materials that were unusable and needed to be disposed of. The most common materials were drums vegetable oil past the use-by date and floor polish that had congealed.
He hit on the idea of mixing the two together, and using the mixture, then sprayed the underside of the car as anti-corrosion agent. He nicknamed the mixture 'Jockum Juice', some colloquial Yorkshire term.
So if anyone recalls metallic-green Vauxhall Viva driving around Yorkshire smelling of french-polish and a chippy, you know who to blame!