However, I have also seen cases where the person they're talking about really is an incompetent and/or immoral idiot, and what management are parsing as name-calling and a possible shifting of blame is, in actual fact, one of your staff warning you of a significant danger.
While management might not like to believe they've hired someone with those qualities for a role, if it has happened, they would be well served to listen to the bad news being reported and take some action to assess and mitigate that risk!
And regarding your trip. Depending on how long you stay there, if it's more than a week, try to find a neighbourhood pub (a real one preferably, not one of those modern things) and meet the locals.
The decentralised nature of this system will directly threaten Facebook, Twitter et al.
The DNS system works, and scales, because everyone publishing information to the DNS is responsible for the upkeep of the nodes that publish their own records.
Facebook and Twitter, however, have scaling and financial problems. Facebook, so far as I am aware, continues to make a substantial annual loss despite its enormous success, and I have yet to hear that Twitter has managed to turn a profit.
More importantly, the privacy of everyone publishing much of their personal, private correspondence using a small number of centralized agencies is directly threatened -- and it could get particularly messy if, in a few years time, $SOCIALNETWORK fails to become profitable, goes into receivership, and the vast databases of private information are identified by the administrators as the organisation's most valuable asset.
In contrast, a Wave infrastructure, like DNS, will distribute the upkeep and storage of private information to many (hopefully) locally trustworthy systems. Because of social engineering / hacking attacks, leakage of private information can and will still occur, but the impact should hopefully be minimized if the Wave protocol and its implementations have been suitably well engineered.
Creating a portal tunnel between your room and the surface of the Moon would fairly rapidly result in most of the air being evacuated from the Earth and deposited in lunar orbit around it.
This idea definitely falls into the Egon Spengler "That would be Bad" category.
Better idea: create a perpetual motion machine -- free energy -- by opening the exit portal above an entry portal, fixing a turbine in between them, and chucking in some water.
We deployed OTRS locally when we had to deploy something open-source off-the-shelf quickly, and it's proved painful. It might be possible to make it do what you want with more time and customization.
Since then, I've seen RoundUp appear, and it looks most promising, though I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
You can bash the man if you like, but you'd be more convincing if you laid off the ad hominem attacks and got your facts straight:
This latest is just the gasp of a flunkie, uneducated has-been science fiction author whose work is so spectacularly bad that he had never had a commercially successful work.
This is a source plugin for content made available by the BBC, kindly sponsored by the BBC and Canonical. It's still quite basic, but functional.
(Note: this has nothing to do with the iPlayer, it mostly just makes content available in totem which is already available in some form or other on the BBC website now, at least for the time being; server-side things are also still work-in-progress, so expect the occasional hiccups and problems with the content in the feed.)
The totem plugin's implemented in open-source python. Go play!
Why are we hearing about this from the CIA, of all places? I thought counter-intelligence was the purview of the FBI, and signals intelligence the role of the NSA.
"[...] the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse."
Contrast this with a second Ars article from yesterday, where the US Federal Energy Regulation Commission has just approved new security regulations for the organizations (mostly private) that run the US electrical grid. Rather than blaming evil foreign hackers, Ars reports that:
"FERC notes, in its usual bureaucratic style, that "poor vegetation management" has caused most of the problems relating to past regional blackouts."
This all just sounds like an excuse to install packet loggers everywhere.
It's to make sure the downloads aren't watchable any further than their terrestrial broadcasts.
DRM isn't necessary for that; GeoIP lookups and special peering arrangements can achieve this without significant difficulty. Indeed, the MS DRM facilities don't even appear to provide an facility to restrict playback according to the computer's location. (Certainly no mention of such a facility is listed on Microsoft's DRM website.)
They are required to do everything they can to protect their broadcasts, and at the same time to ensure access to them by the public. They have to use DRM, as it's there.
Except they're not using DRM for the radio MP3 downloads, or for the terrestrial broadcasts themselves, or even (so far as is known so far) for the Internet simulcast that was referenced in the consultation document. (Presumably the simulcast will be implemented using multicast, as was available on a testing basis until comparatively recently.)
It makes no logical sense to apply DRM to only this subset of the BBC's distribution channels if the goal is to prevent redistribution of the content by end-users. (Which, arguably, the DRM won't achieve anyway.)
Suggesting it's anything to do with Microsoft is ridiculous, as there is no evidence what-so-ever to support such a claim.
I'm merely speculating. It wouldn't be entirely unrealistic; MS is clearly trying to entrench itself as the DRM provider of choice (observe the rediculous bending-over-backwards to implement DRM at every level in Vista) and the British government has has been moderately keen to be nice to Microsoft in the past. It wouldn't surprise me if Bill (who happened to be here in London yesterday for the Vista launch) had made suggestive noises in that direction.
The imposition of DRM is pointless, at least if the goal is to limit redistribution of the content. The BBC are already digitally broadcasting all of their content, classical or otherwise, from all of their broadcasting stations in clear. (Crystal Palace is even broadcasting 20Mbit/sec H.264 streams as part of the current HD trials; indeed, my understanding is that the BBC will continue to broadcast in clear when the service goes into full production.)
Presumably OFCOM want to force the BBC to use DRM (they even specified that it should be Windows DRM) in order to buoy the position of Microsoft and/or commercial broadcasters?
In any case, I guess my MythTV server will continue to be useful for some time yet.
If YouTube, et al have done anything, it's show that a different business model can work: the value is not in production of the material, it's in delivering it.
Commercial distributors are very well aware of this fact; they've been profiting from it for decades.
The reason for introducing this new 'broadcast right' is so that they can continue to do so as they have been in the face of competition.
My understanding is that botnets, mostly made up of weakly-secured home machines, are the source of the majority of spam. Thus the main problem is not network administrators not taking good care of their networks (which are usually quickly identified and isolated using blocklists), but rather the woefully insecure configuration of home desktop machines out-of-the-box.
And the blame for that can be squarely placed with Microsoft.
If you have a system which has 50,000 users, then logging in would require that the system check the input passphrase against every single stored password hash until it hit the right one. This is expensive, and doesn't scale.
(Unless, of course, you speed up the backend by storing each end-user's passphrase in clear -- but that's very bad, as a successful attack on one of the authentication servers could immediately reveal the plaintext passphrase of every user.)
So we make users type in their username first. They need to have a username on the system anyway, and it's generally something that's easy to remember and changes infrequently, if at all.
Just yesterday, the UK Home Secretary was in the news saying that "we may have to modify some of our freedoms in the short-term" to protect us from evil terrorists. Given the degree of preparedness demonstrated by various services today, it seems pretty obvious that he was aware of the current situation when he made those remarks -- thus it also seems clear that he was shape people's opinion in preperation for the events that are now unfolding in public today.
Slashdot Mirror
There is truth in what you say; see also The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks for a further discussion along those lines.
However, I have also seen cases where the person they're talking about really is an incompetent and/or immoral idiot, and what management are parsing as name-calling and a possible shifting of blame is, in actual fact, one of your staff warning you of a significant danger.
While management might not like to believe they've hired someone with those qualities for a role, if it has happened, they would be well served to listen to the bad news being reported and take some action to assess and mitigate that risk!
Those traffic lights are designed to protect against such. Advisory locks they 'aint.
A friend of mine put together a list of decent pubs in the area; see: http://ashok.org.uk/thelist/
The decentralised nature of this system will directly threaten Facebook, Twitter et al.
The DNS system works, and scales, because everyone publishing information to the DNS is responsible for the upkeep of the nodes that publish their own records.
Facebook and Twitter, however, have scaling and financial problems. Facebook, so far as I am aware, continues to make a substantial annual loss despite its enormous success, and I have yet to hear that Twitter has managed to turn a profit.
More importantly, the privacy of everyone publishing much of their personal, private correspondence using a small number of centralized agencies is directly threatened -- and it could get particularly messy if, in a few years time, $SOCIALNETWORK fails to become profitable, goes into receivership, and the vast databases of private information are identified by the administrators as the organisation's most valuable asset.
In contrast, a Wave infrastructure, like DNS, will distribute the upkeep and storage of private information to many (hopefully) locally trustworthy systems. Because of social engineering / hacking attacks, leakage of private information can and will still occur, but the impact should hopefully be minimized if the Wave protocol and its implementations have been suitably well engineered.
This is going to be interesting.
I bet you'd get quite a few high-quality contributions if you opened it up as a competition.
You could cheat and use leading zeroes. Or unconventional but entirely valid number bases..
Creating a portal tunnel between your room and the surface of the Moon would fairly rapidly result in most of the air being evacuated from the Earth and deposited in lunar orbit around it.
This idea definitely falls into the Egon Spengler "That would be Bad" category.
Better idea: create a perpetual motion machine -- free energy -- by opening the exit portal above an entry portal, fixing a turbine in between them, and chucking in some water.
We deployed OTRS locally when we had to deploy something open-source off-the-shelf quickly, and it's proved painful. It might be possible to make it do what you want with more time and customization.
Since then, I've seen RoundUp appear, and it looks most promising, though I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
You can bash the man if you like, but you'd be more convincing if you laid off the ad hominem attacks and got your facts straight:
On the contrary; his latest novel "Little Brother" made the New York Times Bestseller list (Childrens), reaching the #8 spot after 6 weeks. It's had multiple print runs, been published in both the US and the UK, where they've sold well, and has been nominated for and granted a range of literary awards.
I'd say that qualifies as a commercially successful work by any reasonable definition!
The BBC is using open formats, protocols and systems to provide this service.
See:
http://uriplay.org/
http://open.bbc.co.uk/rad/uriplay/availablecontent
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555823
The totem plugin's implemented in open-source python. Go play!
Don't worry. They'll only deliver the database on paper.. printed in 8-pt Comic Sans.
Now add the fact that the US Director of National Intelligence has indicated that he wants to obtain the ability to monitor all Internet traffic data:
Contrast this with a second Ars article from yesterday, where the US Federal Energy Regulation Commission has just approved new security regulations for the organizations (mostly private) that run the US electrical grid. Rather than blaming evil foreign hackers, Ars reports that:
This all just sounds like an excuse to install packet loggers everywhere.
(And it's not just the US authorities who want to lock down and control the Internet; the UK also recently indicated a desire to install censorship devices at the ISP level. Good luck with that.)
muslix64
It makes no logical sense to apply DRM to only this subset of the BBC's distribution channels if the goal is to prevent redistribution of the content by end-users. (Which, arguably, the DRM won't achieve anyway.) I'm merely speculating. It wouldn't be entirely unrealistic; MS is clearly trying to entrench itself as the DRM provider of choice (observe the rediculous bending-over-backwards to implement DRM at every level in Vista) and the British government has has been moderately keen to be nice to Microsoft in the past. It wouldn't surprise me if Bill (who happened to be here in London yesterday for the Vista launch) had made suggestive noises in that direction.
The imposition of DRM is pointless, at least if the goal is to limit redistribution of the content. The BBC are already digitally broadcasting all of their content, classical or otherwise, from all of their broadcasting stations in clear. (Crystal Palace is even broadcasting 20Mbit/sec H.264 streams as part of the current HD trials; indeed, my understanding is that the BBC will continue to broadcast in clear when the service goes into full production.)
Presumably OFCOM want to force the BBC to use DRM (they even specified that it should be Windows DRM) in order to buoy the position of Microsoft and/or commercial broadcasters?
In any case, I guess my MythTV server will continue to be useful for some time yet.
Commercial distributors are very well aware of this fact; they've been profiting from it for decades.
The reason for introducing this new 'broadcast right' is so that they can continue to do so as they have been in the face of competition.
Sadly, this is not a new development - this activity has been ongoing for some years. See also: http://www.eff.org/IP/broadcastflag/
My understanding is that botnets, mostly made up of weakly-secured home machines, are the source of the majority of spam. Thus the main problem is not network administrators not taking good care of their networks (which are usually quickly identified and isolated using blocklists), but rather the woefully insecure configuration of home desktop machines out-of-the-box.
And the blame for that can be squarely placed with Microsoft.
Philistine! I'm off to http://[2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085]/.
So nyeeer.
(Unfortunately, SlashCode mangles IPv6 addresses, so don't bother clicking.)
NVidia released new Beta drivers which support this card today.
b etadriver.html
See: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70
I can heartily recommend:
Bootstrapping an Infrastructure.
It describes good design patterns for computer infrastructure design.
Use Kerberos instead.
If you have a system which has 50,000 users, then logging in would require that the system check the input passphrase against every single stored password hash until it hit the right one. This is expensive, and doesn't scale.
(Unless, of course, you speed up the backend by storing each end-user's passphrase in clear -- but that's very bad, as a successful attack on one of the authentication servers could immediately reveal the plaintext passphrase of every user.)
So we make users type in their username first. They need to have a username on the system anyway, and it's generally something that's easy to remember and changes infrequently, if at all.
Just yesterday, the UK Home Secretary was in the news saying that "we may have to modify some of our freedoms in the short-term" to protect us from evil terrorists. Given the degree of preparedness demonstrated by various services today, it seems pretty obvious that he was aware of the current situation when he made those remarks -- thus it also seems clear that he was shape people's opinion in preperation for the events that are now unfolding in public today.
See: Terror 'may force freedom curbs'.
See also screenshot on the Apple website:
g es/indextop20060807.png
http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/ima
Notice the "Teams Directory" window in the background.
Explained beautifully here: http://www.deadtroll.com/sysadmin/