I seriously doubt that any magnet you can get your hands on would erase anything from a hard drive platter.
I'm in the government, and our specifications require that we use this on media that is rejected by our RAIDs. It's a strong enough magnet that you can't wear a watch and use it at the same time.
Don't make the mistake of keeping this tool in your server room next to the to-be-deleted media either: the first time you power it on next to one of your racks you're in for a Very Long Day.
you can read a spirited discussion on the pros/cons of OS X as a virus deterrent. You said that you have tried Linux to little avail--maybe they'd be happier with a non-Windows machine that can still run Microsoft Office?
it can be tough to avoid complacence, particularly when the solution is an impediment in itself.
I do realize that Macs are not immune; indeed, if they were truly immune, Apple wouldn't have to release periodic security updates. OTOH, Mac are not currently affected.
Someday, they may be. Any potential virus would still have propagation issues--it's not as easy to find another Mac that the infected Mac knows about, as it is for a Wintel to find another Wintel. But on the other hand, getting users to install virus protection is problematic, let alone getting them daily updates. We just don't have the culture of paranoia that Windows IT folk do, and the immediate response infrastructure that could potentially be necessary and is pretty well developed on the Windows side. The tools for such aren't available, or if they are available, they aren't well known; they certainly aren't tested and deployed.
Christ, I'm in the biz and I don't run anti-virus on my own machine; it's not worth the trouble. And I can say that since I've NEVER seen a single virus for OS X. But maybe one day one will come, and it'll find the other Macs on my network via BonJour nee Rendezvous using an exploit that Apple learned of a week ago but hasn't released a patch for yet.
Having zero personal experience with this (but hey, it's an Ask Slashdot), I think a porting house would also be able to help you distribute it. Once it's ported it doesn't do you any good if you can't find the market for it, and the way that you reach your Windows demographic may not work for the Linux market.
That aside, it will also be important to know how complicated it is and how soon you want to deliver it. If it'd take one guy a year, but 5 guys 3 mos, maybe it's more important to get it out sooner, so that'll dictate using more of a porting house.
btw: don't forget the Mac market. If you want to take it to Linux, anyways, you're looking at converting to OpenGL, so you may as well get it on the Mac too. Another advantage of the Mac market is that it has a dedicated consumer demographic and attendant distribution marketing channel, so that part would be easier, I think. I think some of the porting houses will do both Linux and Mac porting too.
The better parallel isn't so much the French taking back the Louisiana Purchase, but the Chinese government (through CNOOC) attempting to purchase oil and gas assets by proposing mergers with Western producers.
Not a bad point; maybe it'd be cheaper to buy your way in than to take it by force. However, to bring back the CNOOC example: shares in the stakes might not be for sale. And since we refused to sell CNOOC to China, I feel pretty good about predicting that they'll resort to force to take that oil next--their need for oil isn't going to go away just because the US Congress got it's panties in a bunch, but they tried the easy way to no avail.
So perhaps I'd drop rocks on you, or perhaps I'd buy in--that's an accounting evaluation. But my point remains--just getting their first doesn't give you a birthright to anything.
Now to go offtopic: while China may not take oil by force, yet, any UN sanction against Iran is going to have a damned hard time enforcing it with China. I think China will either block the sanction with a Security Council Veto, or they're counting on it to drive Iran's price for oil down. In any case, their need for oil, which could have been slaked through legitimate ends like buying CNOOC, is now going to drive them to extremes that I think we'll appreciate less, and also be less able to stop.
Why can't you sync iTunes via BlueTooth, since the phone actually has BT? First the mini mouse, now this.
Will this phone be a full iSync citizen, or at least as much as other Moto phones? via BT?
Can you use this phone as a Cell modem? Via BT? And why is it not EDGE capable?
Can you sync photos via iPhoto?
Can you purchase ringtones via iTunes?
I wish this was more of an iPhone, with the above features, than just some phone with iTunes slapped on it. As it is, it looks pretty half-baked, and I'm sorry to see Apple endorse it. I think I'm holding out until v 2.0 at least.
Think of it as the ultimate X-Prize. An entire planet for the taking.
Good point. I'll let you colonize Mars, build up some nice infrastructure--then I'll drop rocks on you from orbit. The first person can plant their flag--but unless you can defend it, too, that doesn't do you a whole lot of good. And the value of the Mars settlement is directly proportional to the interest a marauder would have on taking it away.
There's not a lot of legal protection, either, as naturally all of our treaties encompass only earth territories. Even a formal declaration, should there even be one, from the UN that the first person to the New World gets to lay claim to it is only as good as long as it's enforceable--the French planned to take the Louisiana territory back from us, even though we had legally bought it.
So go ahead, lay claim all you want. But you better look over your shoulder, too.
You forgot to mention that price increases are the rewards of undertaking risk. Given that generators are $700, and there's only a 1 in a 100 chance of a hurricane hitting my area and necessitating the use of generators.
If I buy 100 generators, for $700,000, and warehouse them in such a way that they'll be accessible in time of need, I should be able to sell them during such an emergency for at least 100 times what I paid for them--because there's a 99% chance that I'll lose my entire investment. For me to undertake such a risk, I must have the ability to offset that risk in an unusual event.
If this was legal, enterprising folks might indeed warehouse such supplies--which would mean that they would be available in times of need such as this (albeit at inflated prices--still, that would be better than none at all.) As it is, I don't have a warehouse of generators in my area, as it's unlikely that a hurricane will hit here, so unlikely that I would rather put my money in something that has a better return to risk ratio.
Not knowing exactly what you mean by "better", but preview in 10.4 now allows you to add "stickies" to a pdf, as well as to circle selections in red. Both persist through a save/open.
I haven't used Acrobat's annotate tools enough to know how they're better--I'm sure they are, but perhaps Preview's are now sufficient. It's much faster, and I think has a faster search too.
Ok; you might be able to clip a dongle to my keyboard cable that keylogs, maybe you can attach it inside the case so I don't notice it. I guess I'm less worried about being bugged than I am about being either raided, in which case the cops seize my computer and I don't type in my password after; or it being stolen by thieves, who would get to my banking information in Quicken.
I maintain that ex post facto attempts to get information from me would be pretty hard, but I'll concede that some kind of eavesdropping mechanism could steal my secrets and be used to gain access later.
I'd guess that CD-R is here to stay, given that it shows 0 signs of becoming unsupported on newly manufactured HW.
20 years ago, you could have said the same thing about a 3.5" floppy. When the iMac first came out in, what, 98, it was widely denigrated for not having a floppy. It's now getting increasingly harder to get floppy drives on PCs, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were special-order in another 5 years. In 10 years, your.sig file will be larger than the contents of a 1.4 MB floppy, so why would anyone include them on new hardware?
I think the only thing to do about data like this is to keep in on a fileserver, and then move the data as the server gets older. As long as it talks tcp/ip, you'll probably be able to get it off--that's one standard that's not going away for a long time, and will be backwards compatible when it does.
For a princely sum I began doing 'stealth' missions for many distressed spouses.
I'm glad that I use OS X's encrypted home directory, then. I guess you won't be reading my files. You could change my pass by booting to CD (and then I'd know!) but you still couldn't get to my home dir.
Seriously, you ever run into a Mac that had more than a passing effort made at security, and if so were you able to get around the safeguards? Or did you just sub that out?
fwiw, I guess if they wanted you to testify you wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on--a subpoena is a subpoena, and you would either have to ignore it, respect it but stay silent, or 'fess. All would involve legal fees, and I think it could be construed as not legally admissible evidence. In any event, if I was the husband's divorce lawyer, I would ask you some sharp questions.
Half-Life for the Mac, goddamit. Sierra had the thing finished--but didn't go forward to releasing it, purportedly for marketing reasons. So I guess they prefer to lose their entire effort of porting it than spend another 10% to try to sell the thing.
Which meant no Counter-Strike for the Mac, either, naturally.
There are still many a Mac gamer that has a bitter, bitter hatred of Sierra for just this reason.
The OpenGL windowed applications might suffer performance degradation, but that's another story.
That story is interesting in it's own right. My understanding is that CAD and other visualization tools depend on OpenGL, inasmuch as DirectX sucks for 2D, so assuming all that is true:
.513% of the individual's gross salary, per year, unless they're a receptionist, in which case it's half that; or if they're a partner, it's three times that. Take the result, multiply by 2 if they're born on a Saturday, but divide by 3 if they drive a white car.
There, that give you enough to get the things you need? No? Then how about you identify the things you need, and buy those?
Really, it comes down to this: your bosses hired you to give IT recommendations. If they need to compare your recommended costs against some arbitrary metric to see if you're highballing or lowballing, they're trusting the metric more than they're trusting you. There's just to many factors to make that reasonable--the only case that you could use this in is in 5 years, when you plot future budgets against past budgets. By then you should have some correlation between success of a project and IT layouts, and it's tailored to your very specific environment. But until then, buy what you need, have a rainy day fund, and don't spend a dime more.
I think your focus is wrong. Instead of thinking "OSS for Pros", you should be thinking "Lawyers who love Linux". As you said, the legal practice has particular issues that you've had difficulty solving. I don't imagine that an association that included investment bankers, restauranters, and vehicle mechanics would do you much good, even though they all used linux in the course of their business.
Instead, you need something specific to the legal industry, even specific vertical applications. For that I think you'd be better forming an organization specific to that need.
What makes you think that they go 8 days without wanking? They are geeks, afterall. Having to put it in your log book would be a bummer, but zero G might make up for it...
Ugh I just grossed myself out, and that's pretty hard to do.
I find this statement interesting. It seems that if WMDs were found, you would assume they had been planted by some covert group.
Speaking for the OP, as I had the same sentiment, we wouldn't have assumed anything until the source of the material was verified by independent authority. I don't assume anything outside of the information that I am able to reasonably verify, a quality that you seem to be unfamiliar with.
We all believe what we want, and many of us here seem to be using the facts to back up our own notions.
Fact is, no WMDs were found. So what notion does that support? I can tell you my notion that is supported by that fact, but I'll bet you can guess it.
Consider if Saddams government collapsed without American intervention; who would be there to grab the reins of power? Islamic Extremists, backed by Al Queda, ready to bomb, murder, and terrorize anyone who wanted an actual representitive government, just as they are doing now.
And Iraq may yet be left with an extreme Islamist government--the democracy that is there is clearly being propped up by our own presence. And the American public is getting tired of the body count and the cost, so it's starting to look like we may be leaving sooner than later--although by leaving too soon we may leave the democratic government susceptible to overthrow. Or, Iraq may face external enemies (Iran) that it'll be too weak to defend against.
The biggest surprise to me was that some covert group didn't plant WMD components in Iraq to be 'Discovered', I thought it was almost certian we would find WMD's if they existed or not.
Yeah, me too. I guess BushCo was so sure that there were such weapons there that they didn't bother to undertake the deception, or think that they could get away with it. Bet they don't make that mistake again. I was waiting for the debate regarding the source of found WMDs--that we didn't find a goddam thing "does not compute."
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I seriously doubt that any magnet you can get your hands on would erase anything from a hard drive platter.
I'm in the government, and our specifications require that we use this on media that is rejected by our RAIDs. It's a strong enough magnet that you can't wear a watch and use it at the same time.
Don't make the mistake of keeping this tool in your server room next to the to-be-deleted media either: the first time you power it on next to one of your racks you're in for a Very Long Day.
We give our users Mac laptops, which largely corrects this issue.
you can read a spirited discussion on the pros/cons of OS X as a virus deterrent. You said that you have tried Linux to little avail--maybe they'd be happier with a non-Windows machine that can still run Microsoft Office?
it can be tough to avoid complacence, particularly when the solution is an impediment in itself.
I do realize that Macs are not immune; indeed, if they were truly immune, Apple wouldn't have to release periodic security updates. OTOH, Mac are not currently affected.
Someday, they may be. Any potential virus would still have propagation issues--it's not as easy to find another Mac that the infected Mac knows about, as it is for a Wintel to find another Wintel. But on the other hand, getting users to install virus protection is problematic, let alone getting them daily updates. We just don't have the culture of paranoia that Windows IT folk do, and the immediate response infrastructure that could potentially be necessary and is pretty well developed on the Windows side. The tools for such aren't available, or if they are available, they aren't well known; they certainly aren't tested and deployed.
Christ, I'm in the biz and I don't run anti-virus on my own machine; it's not worth the trouble. And I can say that since I've NEVER seen a single virus for OS X. But maybe one day one will come, and it'll find the other Macs on my network via BonJour nee Rendezvous using an exploit that Apple learned of a week ago but hasn't released a patch for yet.
As Jayne says, "that'll be an interesting day."
I got one of these keyboards, and remapped it to the Dvorak layout.
I've been scarred ever since.
Having zero personal experience with this (but hey, it's an Ask Slashdot), I think a porting house would also be able to help you distribute it. Once it's ported it doesn't do you any good if you can't find the market for it, and the way that you reach your Windows demographic may not work for the Linux market.
That aside, it will also be important to know how complicated it is and how soon you want to deliver it. If it'd take one guy a year, but 5 guys 3 mos, maybe it's more important to get it out sooner, so that'll dictate using more of a porting house.
btw: don't forget the Mac market. If you want to take it to Linux, anyways, you're looking at converting to OpenGL, so you may as well get it on the Mac too. Another advantage of the Mac market is that it has a dedicated consumer demographic and attendant distribution marketing channel, so that part would be easier, I think. I think some of the porting houses will do both Linux and Mac porting too.
The better parallel isn't so much the French taking back the Louisiana Purchase, but the Chinese government (through CNOOC) attempting to purchase oil and gas assets by proposing mergers with Western producers.
Not a bad point; maybe it'd be cheaper to buy your way in than to take it by force. However, to bring back the CNOOC example: shares in the stakes might not be for sale. And since we refused to sell CNOOC to China, I feel pretty good about predicting that they'll resort to force to take that oil next--their need for oil isn't going to go away just because the US Congress got it's panties in a bunch, but they tried the easy way to no avail.
So perhaps I'd drop rocks on you, or perhaps I'd buy in--that's an accounting evaluation. But my point remains--just getting their first doesn't give you a birthright to anything.
Now to go offtopic: while China may not take oil by force, yet, any UN sanction against Iran is going to have a damned hard time enforcing it with China. I think China will either block the sanction with a Security Council Veto, or they're counting on it to drive Iran's price for oil down. In any case, their need for oil, which could have been slaked through legitimate ends like buying CNOOC, is now going to drive them to extremes that I think we'll appreciate less, and also be less able to stop.
- Why can't you sync iTunes via BlueTooth, since the phone actually has BT? First the mini mouse, now this.
- Will this phone be a full iSync citizen, or at least as much as other Moto phones? via BT?
- Can you use this phone as a Cell modem? Via BT? And why is it not EDGE capable?
- Can you sync photos via iPhoto?
- Can you purchase ringtones via iTunes?
I wish this was more of an iPhone, with the above features, than just some phone with iTunes slapped on it. As it is, it looks pretty half-baked, and I'm sorry to see Apple endorse it. I think I'm holding out until v 2.0 at least.Think of it as the ultimate X-Prize. An entire planet for the taking.
Good point. I'll let you colonize Mars, build up some nice infrastructure--then I'll drop rocks on you from orbit. The first person can plant their flag--but unless you can defend it, too, that doesn't do you a whole lot of good. And the value of the Mars settlement is directly proportional to the interest a marauder would have on taking it away.
There's not a lot of legal protection, either, as naturally all of our treaties encompass only earth territories. Even a formal declaration, should there even be one, from the UN that the first person to the New World gets to lay claim to it is only as good as long as it's enforceable--the French planned to take the Louisiana territory back from us, even though we had legally bought it.
So go ahead, lay claim all you want. But you better look over your shoulder, too.
You forgot to mention that price increases are the rewards of undertaking risk. Given that generators are $700, and there's only a 1 in a 100 chance of a hurricane hitting my area and necessitating the use of generators.
If I buy 100 generators, for $700,000, and warehouse them in such a way that they'll be accessible in time of need, I should be able to sell them during such an emergency for at least 100 times what I paid for them--because there's a 99% chance that I'll lose my entire investment. For me to undertake such a risk, I must have the ability to offset that risk in an unusual event.
If this was legal, enterprising folks might indeed warehouse such supplies--which would mean that they would be available in times of need such as this (albeit at inflated prices--still, that would be better than none at all.) As it is, I don't have a warehouse of generators in my area, as it's unlikely that a hurricane will hit here, so unlikely that I would rather put my money in something that has a better return to risk ratio.
If Preview had better annotatin facilities
Not knowing exactly what you mean by "better", but preview in 10.4 now allows you to add "stickies" to a pdf, as well as to circle selections in red. Both persist through a save/open.
I haven't used Acrobat's annotate tools enough to know how they're better--I'm sure they are, but perhaps Preview's are now sufficient. It's much faster, and I think has a faster search too.
hardware keyloggers, trojaned bootloaders
Ok; you might be able to clip a dongle to my keyboard cable that keylogs, maybe you can attach it inside the case so I don't notice it. I guess I'm less worried about being bugged than I am about being either raided, in which case the cops seize my computer and I don't type in my password after; or it being stolen by thieves, who would get to my banking information in Quicken.
I maintain that ex post facto attempts to get information from me would be pretty hard, but I'll concede that some kind of eavesdropping mechanism could steal my secrets and be used to gain access later.
I'd guess that CD-R is here to stay, given that it shows 0 signs of becoming unsupported on newly manufactured HW.
20 years ago, you could have said the same thing about a 3.5" floppy. When the iMac first came out in, what, 98, it was widely denigrated for not having a floppy. It's now getting increasingly harder to get floppy drives on PCs, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were special-order in another 5 years. In 10 years, your .sig file will be larger than the contents of a 1.4 MB floppy, so why would anyone include them on new hardware?
I think the only thing to do about data like this is to keep in on a fileserver, and then move the data as the server gets older. As long as it talks tcp/ip, you'll probably be able to get it off--that's one standard that's not going away for a long time, and will be backwards compatible when it does.
For a princely sum I began doing 'stealth' missions for many distressed spouses.
I'm glad that I use OS X's encrypted home directory, then. I guess you won't be reading my files. You could change my pass by booting to CD (and then I'd know!) but you still couldn't get to my home dir.
Seriously, you ever run into a Mac that had more than a passing effort made at security, and if so were you able to get around the safeguards? Or did you just sub that out?
fwiw, I guess if they wanted you to testify you wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on--a subpoena is a subpoena, and you would either have to ignore it, respect it but stay silent, or 'fess. All would involve legal fees, and I think it could be construed as not legally admissible evidence. In any event, if I was the husband's divorce lawyer, I would ask you some sharp questions.
Half-Life for the Mac, goddamit. Sierra had the thing finished--but didn't go forward to releasing it, purportedly for marketing reasons. So I guess they prefer to lose their entire effort of porting it than spend another 10% to try to sell the thing.
Which meant no Counter-Strike for the Mac, either, naturally.
There are still many a Mac gamer that has a bitter, bitter hatred of Sierra for just this reason.
I think he's pretty much given up on Hollywood now.
Which I guess doesn't help a Watchmen movie get made, dammit. But really, it would suck too. There's just no way it could be done.
The OpenGL windowed applications might suffer performance degradation, but that's another story.
That story is interesting in it's own right. My understanding is that CAD and other visualization tools depend on OpenGL, inasmuch as DirectX sucks for 2D, so assuming all that is true:
I'd be interested in any observations.
*drumroll*
.513% of the individual's gross salary, per year, unless they're a receptionist, in which case it's half that; or if they're a partner, it's three times that. Take the result, multiply by 2 if they're born on a Saturday, but divide by 3 if they drive a white car.
There, that give you enough to get the things you need? No? Then how about you identify the things you need, and buy those?
Really, it comes down to this: your bosses hired you to give IT recommendations. If they need to compare your recommended costs against some arbitrary metric to see if you're highballing or lowballing, they're trusting the metric more than they're trusting you. There's just to many factors to make that reasonable--the only case that you could use this in is in 5 years, when you plot future budgets against past budgets. By then you should have some correlation between success of a project and IT layouts, and it's tailored to your very specific environment. But until then, buy what you need, have a rainy day fund, and don't spend a dime more.
I wish I could'a paid someone to see the last Matrix for me. Then I would still have my geek creds, but would have two hours of my life back.
Are you saying that you'd prefer we live in a country that has the environmental problems of China? At least we'd be working 16 hour days, right?
I think your focus is wrong. Instead of thinking "OSS for Pros", you should be thinking "Lawyers who love Linux". As you said, the legal practice has particular issues that you've had difficulty solving. I don't imagine that an association that included investment bankers, restauranters, and vehicle mechanics would do you much good, even though they all used linux in the course of their business.
Instead, you need something specific to the legal industry, even specific vertical applications. For that I think you'd be better forming an organization specific to that need.
What makes you think that they go 8 days without wanking? They are geeks, afterall. Having to put it in your log book would be a bummer, but zero G might make up for it...
Ugh I just grossed myself out, and that's pretty hard to do.
DROMs laying around with
News at 11! Microsoft implicated in the torture of Iraqis!
I find this statement interesting. It seems that if WMDs were found, you would assume they had been planted by some covert group.
Speaking for the OP, as I had the same sentiment, we wouldn't have assumed anything until the source of the material was verified by independent authority. I don't assume anything outside of the information that I am able to reasonably verify, a quality that you seem to be unfamiliar with.
We all believe what we want, and many of us here seem to be using the facts to back up our own notions.
Fact is, no WMDs were found. So what notion does that support? I can tell you my notion that is supported by that fact, but I'll bet you can guess it.
Consider if Saddams government collapsed without American intervention; who would be there to grab the reins of power? Islamic Extremists, backed by Al Queda, ready to bomb, murder, and terrorize anyone who wanted an actual representitive government, just as they are doing now.
And Iraq may yet be left with an extreme Islamist government--the democracy that is there is clearly being propped up by our own presence. And the American public is getting tired of the body count and the cost, so it's starting to look like we may be leaving sooner than later--although by leaving too soon we may leave the democratic government susceptible to overthrow. Or, Iraq may face external enemies (Iran) that it'll be too weak to defend against.
The biggest surprise to me was that some covert group didn't plant WMD components in Iraq to be 'Discovered', I thought it was almost certian we would find WMD's if they existed or not.
Yeah, me too. I guess BushCo was so sure that there were such weapons there that they didn't bother to undertake the deception, or think that they could get away with it. Bet they don't make that mistake again. I was waiting for the debate regarding the source of found WMDs--that we didn't find a goddam thing "does not compute."