It got easy after they found the Float stone (it was one of the rocks atop Stonehenge, just nobody noticed it before). The sad part is that your IT tech support will be run by Tiamat. The WarMech will be the front-line helpdesk (i.e., you have to traverse that beast to actually get to where you wanna be anyway..)
While it's been our experience that a lot of tech companies run IPOs for fast cash and then wind up dying shortly afterwards (think of the dot-com bubble bursting), Google is more like investing in your infrastructure; it's an invaluable tool used by a huge segment of the net-aware population, and thus is probably a very safe bet.
For contrast, you can ask yourself how badly those investments in Yahoo! turned out, years after they started themselves as a category-based alternative to the search engines available in the mid-90s.
Mirkon asks: "I'm a potential high school graduate, and have been accepted to a four-year school for furthering my rather biased educational interests. The problem is that while I'm cheap, the school (predictably) isn't. It's still getting itself off the ground, and thus only offers the legal minimum of scholarships" ad infinitum.
It qualifies as tech; it's `rather biased`; it's a new university that isn't established, accredited, etc (as it's getting itself off the ground, according to the above)... So has anybody guessed what he's doing for a living yet?
If he's applying to a videogame university, I'm not sure I wanna help.:)
In the US, standard procedure is to get a loan for the cost of your education; this loan is often sizeable, usually with a low rate of interest accrual, and is to be paid back after your graduation from the learning institution you've chosen to attend.
The author of this entry to "Please help me, Slashdot" has noted early on that he is cheap: The author does not want a loan. He is looking for a scholarship offer -- that is, he would like very much for someone else to pay for his expenses and send him to school for free. (Wouldn't we all have loved that?)
Unfortunately I have nothing useful to add on that front, as the only scholarship I ever took advantage of was a strictly academic one, and only that for going to a tiny, two-year state school. This hasn't prevented me from being in a computer-related field for the last eight years, nor has it prevented me from working as a senior network engineer, or as a field consultant, or down at the Pentagon, or etc.
The person who submitted the story noted that he is a potential high school graduate... my advice would really be to work on converting that "potential" into "actual", and then worry about college as you go. If you have to eat the cost of a loan, so be it -- you're no worse off than everybody else. Get into tech and make it pay for itself in a few years; you wouldn't be the first, and sure wouldn't be the last.:)
Iridium, one of Motorola's biggest all-time money losers. I think the DoD still has a contract with them though, even though their original concept (that of public market penetration) crashed and burned quite hard. The nifty air-droppable and instantly deployable solar satellite phonebooths they proposed for low-lying Africa and other places without appropriate infrastructure likewise didn't come into being, as far as I know.
... so the actual thrust of your complaint has to deal with the fact that, in places that aren't the United States, WiFi is traditionally charged for? And that the sums are not to your liking? Cry me a frickin' river.
WiFi adoption in 2004 will likely exceed expectations in the United States precisely because tons of free hot spots are coming up stateside! Take a look at Baltimore, which is attempting to wire up the entire Inner Harbor area into a gigantic, free hotspot. As for whether or not other international localities will follow suit, it's really up to them -- recall also though that gas prices tend to be higher in Europe as an example that infrastructure there does not equal infrastructure here.
Since the only argument that came out of the article was a long-winded whine about WiFi prices around the mediterranian, and had nothing to do with actual adoption of the technology in the coming year, I'd have been forced to mod it -1, Troll.
Agents, anyone?
on
Spidering Hacks
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· Score: 5, Interesting
A few years ago, the big idea was that by some as-yet undetermined point in the future (say, 2005) all human beings would be freed from having to collect their own data by way of intelligent, semi-autonomous Agents that could be given some loose english-query type tasks and go on their merry way, fetching and organizing and categorizing data by relevance. It's not too far different from the proposed use of scripting talked about above.
The problem comes more in the last assertation of the story; that pulling in all of this data will free up more time for people to spend on the work of analysis. I want to say this isn't accurate, but it probably boils down to what you call "analysis" work.
The problem with spiders, agents, and their like -- yes, even those that are going out and fetching porn -- is that they are able to provide content without context, much as a modern search engine does. I can take Google and get super specific with a query (say, `pirates carribean history -movie -"johnny depp"`). That will probably fetch me back some data that has my keywords in it, much as any script or agent could do.
Unfortunately, while the engine could rank based on keyword visibility and recurrance, as well as applying some algorithms to try and guess whether the data might be good or not (encylcopedias look this way, weblogs about Johnny Depp look that way), the engine itself still has on way to physically read the information and decide if it's at all useful. A high-school website's page with a tidbit of information and some cute animated.gifs could theoretically draw more of a response from the engine than an official historian's personal recollections of his research while he was working on his master's thesis about the Jolly Roger. Any script (or engine) is only what you make of it.
The most tedious part of data analysis these days is not providing content (as spiders, scripts, and search engines all do)... it's in providing a frame of context for the choosing, and, ultimately, rejection of sources.
What comes after that sorting process - the assimilation of good data and the drawing of conclusions there-from - that's what I call data analysis. A shame that scripts, spiders, agents, and robots haven't found a way to do that for us.:)
The UKPS will carry out the trials at "various locations" throughout the UK, using four fixed, one mobile, and one portable unit, with one of the locations being a passport office.
It seems like their trial might be a little limited in scope, don't you think? I understand from the article that this trial is being run by the Passport Service, so presumably the various test stations will be deployed for use in areas of entry to and egress from the UK... but damn, they have a world of international travel going through, and only four permanent stations (!) to test with.
I wonder why the numbers are so small.
Other curious questions involve what you'd use a mobile station for -- not portable, but truly mobile, i.e., mounted in a vehicle or similar; stop someone on the street randomly to see if they have a passport and if they're participating in the trial?
-- Another primitive is the "rod" -- a short-range melee weapon favored by light cycle racers, which can be upgraded to a short-range energy cannon (think "shotgun") called the "suffusion" or a sniper rifle called the "LOL". --
Other Weapons for Tron 2.0:
"SPAM" - access a rogue SMTP server and bury attacking enemies in email.
"ASL" - drive enemies crazy by repeatedly demanding that they verify their identity. Note: This is likely to make any neutral characters attack you.
"kthxbye" - dismiss enemies with a wave of the hand and a supercilious manner.
I guess just about anything is fair game for making an FPS out of (judging by that later screenshot - I actually had *no* idea of what kind of game this was strictly by the review text). I'd kind of hoped that some of our older classics would be immune from the rampant intellectual property `upgrading` that our 3D obsessed gaming generation seems to enjoy paying for.
Next thing you know, we'll have a Q*Bert themed MMORPG.:)
The real question is whether entertainment should have boundaries. Is a mass murder FPS acceptable? How about a rape simulator? Or a kiddie porn strategy game?
Excepting the kiddie porn example - which I can't find a way to implement without running afoul of established laws regarding the depiction of minors in sexual situations - the answer to those questions comes by way of normal free market economics. People will buy things that they enjoy, and not buy things that offend them too deeply on a personal level.
Case in point: Grand Theft Auto, a game where you can beat civillians with a baseball bat, roast police alive with a flamethrower, and pick up prostitutes. Each act in itself illegal, beyond the realms of good taste, and morally unacceptable in any kind of company.. And yet, the game is fun, kicks serious ass, and is a major seller.
I can't figure out what the overall goal of the original grant was; were they trying to design some kind of simulation that guards could use in order to figure out how to best deal with complicated, changing environments, much as the United States Army uses game-like simulators to prep for realtime battle conditions?
Or are they trying to make some sort of weird MMORPG out of the jail environment? I mean, it's a frontier that hasn't actually been touched yet. I don't know any MMORPG where you can be an inmate and relive your deepest, darkest OZ fantasies.
Hell, either way kinda works out for the powers that be. As players find new ways to escape, the administration can fix them in the real prison, then release a patch fixing it in the game as well..;) I sure do wonder how they're going to stop inmates that have a wallhack, though.
Similarly, from an `inside the war machine` perspective of the present day, classification guidelines are used not only to protect national secrets but also full details of our infrastructure. While it's obvious we can't openly discuss network address ranges, share classified documents, or do other really insane things, note that the guidelines extend all the way to the very end of the spectrum: We can't discuss the types, locations, numbers, etc. of any of our infrastructure. Period. Not even what kinds of keyboards we use.
Is it insanely overprotective? Damn straight, but that's why it's a good thing. Social engineering becomes a bit trickier when slipping up might not just cost you your job - it might also land you in a federal prison for having betrayed national security on one level or another. That's probably the best part of classifying things. Not only do you get the `duty` aspect, exhorting the employees to protect the `secrets of the nation`, you get to reinforce the concept with very real, very tangible jail time.:)
Two other quick points:
1) It is far easier to extend something's classification than it is to declassify it.
2) The Freedom of Information Act does not apply to any documents bearing a classification stamp.
As such, this move is completely unsurprising.:)
Yay for biases? +1 for an article, though.
on
Longhorn M4 Build Review
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· Score: 4, Interesting
From the article,
The welcome screen is presented, where I am logged in automatically. During the installation I was asked to enter a username, by default this username was given full administration access. Maybe not such a good idea according to some security experts.
That's standard behavior of Win95 and 98 (you're just the admin by nature), Windows NT (you start as the admin account), Windows 2000 (creates an admin account, then prompts you to create a user w/ full administrative rights) and Windows XP (see Win2k).
Does any *nix installation *not* start you off as Root, with the ability to create more accounts?
By the way, Windows installations from Win2k onward will not prompt you to create a local admin account (i.e., Please enter your Username so I can make you an admin, too) provided that you're joining a domain right off the bat -- which, as the installer of this OS, is the only case where your local account's security rights becomes a real concern. If you're doing it at home, for yourself, you're already the installer/admin. You know the admin password. Meaning, the user will know the admin password.
So, non-issue.
I didn't encounter any crashes while playing with Longhorn, even though I would have loved to see what kind of errors I would have gotten. I'm sure a couple of more minutes while browsing would have done provoked Longhorn to squeal.
"I said it died screamin' like a stuck Irish pig!" (with props to Untouchables)
Likewise, I'm sure that me evalating any Linux kernel of your choosing could smash it into a million pieces through careless use of rm * -o , whack Solaris by repeatedly throwing the power while it's doing disk writes, or break any other *nix operating system you choose to name.
*Any* operating system can be broken through maliciously beating on it. "I bet I can make it squeal" doesn't imply "I am going to conduct a fair and extensive beta test of this newest distribution to see where it's faults still lie". It implies "Let's see what we can destroy".:P
Work on your bias. Good work submitting the article; news is news, regardless of the bearer.
Here is an article decrying this story as a hoax; It's not really an article so much as a list of people saying "feh", but at least it's posted on something like a news site.
Slashdot would do well to create the right impression among it's readers; maybe having one of our friendly editors change the story title to reflect it's untruth is advisable.
I was consulting at a company in Rockville, a few miles outside the district. I heard the first plane had hit while I was listening to WGMS, DC's classical station; figured it for a Cessna or something. After I hit my desk I knew something was wrong when I couldn't hit a major news site for confirmation of the story.
We switched the news on; we had a big TV with DirecTV on it in the company kitchen. I had stepped away to try and get word to friends about what had happened, using instant messenging apps, when the second plane hit.
The people in our kitchen reached the instantaneous conclusion that this was not accidental. We watched as the towers burned, saw them fall, heard about the Pentagon being hit. My company employed 65 people there; were they okay?
Workers left to take their children home. I left around 1pm, with F16s and helicopters covering the sky of the DC metro area.
I called my family. They were trying to reach me but couldn't get through due to circuits being jammed. They were terrified that I was there; too many rumors, too little verification that day for us all.
September 11th, 2002:
Last November, my company deployed me to the Pentagon. It started out as one of those "for a week" things, but I wound up involved in a COOP project - Continuity of Operations - directly related to making sure a second 9/11 cannot cripple our nation's defense infrastructure. I'm sitting at my desk, thinking of how much the last year has affected my life (too much work, constant stress, a divorce..) and knowing that the majority of the things that have happened to me of late can be directly traced back to 9/11; were it not for that attack, I would not be where I am now.
I do not know if things are for the better. All I know is that I have been called on to use my meager technical skills to help my country when it was sorely needed. I'm doing my part to make sure we make it through.
After reading the article, I can't imagine that a home user would ever make a point of purchasing a system on the order described. Hardware-level tampering resistance is a good thing for Department of Defense computers, say, but does the average home user, surfing the web and storing recipes, really have to worry about someone leeching that information from residual information that could (maybe) be gleaned from the CPU itself?
Dear lord! Perish the thought.
I can't even imagine most companies having to deploy something on this order to safeguard their data. Hell, I'm not even sure the military needs it.
For reference, the Department of Defense has a series of guides and guidelines for locking systems down to ensure security. These are called STIGs and are created by DISA (Defense Internal Security Agency) and the NSA (National Security Agency). When the guides are applied the machines are as secure as can be made.
Part of the guidelines cover physical security; i.e., if someone can reach your hardware physically without being cleared for it, you fail that part of the check. As such, I can't imagine how Palladium would not be redundant to things we already have in place.
For good security, you can use smartcards with a PKI certificate, anyway. Don't let someone sign on without one, don't let them access data without one, have an active and interested central monitoring and issuing authority and practice good physical security. Save the money you'd spend on Palladium equipment.
Politicos don't operate this way.. :(
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Mega-Geek March?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
While I think the idea of a small, medium, or large-sized march designed to show support for the Open Source cause could never be a prima face bad thing, I'm sad to report that our political players do not and will not care about our issues any more or less because of a demonstration.
The right of assembly is guaranteed by the First Amendment, and it's entire purpose is to provide constitutional protection for a group of people who dislike the government (or hold a contrary opinion to the powers that be) to meet in order to find a way to change things. The assemblies themselves are not the tools of change - and never have been. I'm not sure where people got so confused.
Perhaps the march will bring out like-minded people who've kept their feelings in till now, reluctant to express an opinion -- maybe the public will join the throng, shucking off their closed source software for freely available and modifiable source code packages....and maybe the `public` has absolutely no idea of what it is we do - as they never, ever have before. The vox populi will not be the tool of change when the majority of it cannot agree on how to correctly pronounce `Linux`. ("It's lynnux, dude." ``Wrong, it's LINE-ux! You suck!``)
Living in the district I am compelled to restate the obvious: Politicans move because of two things and two things only.
1) Because it will help them stay in office,
2) Because of money.
Our `cause` will not engender any further public support for a re-election campaign, so strike #1 right off the ballot. Too many people use closed source software day in, day out and are too.. hm, unversed? , to get out and compile their own apps - they won't fall in and cheer for us, so the guys in charge will take no note.
Money is the only thing that will bring about change. Save the gas money you would have spent attending the march and donate it to a lobbyist group that works on our behalf. Does no such group exist? If not, create one.
I really think that's the only solution that's ever going to bring our needs out of the dark ages of politics and give us some play in the District.
I recall a user we had on our network who thought it'd be cute to install BlackIce on his box, to better secure it. Nevermind the fact that I, and the rest of the admins at my company, had firewalls in place and had never had an intrusion on our network.
Imagine the fun the first time we try to deploy an antivirus package to his desktop just to be blocked for -- are you sitting down? -- an attempted NetBIOS intrusion.
After the second time we tried to deploy (and failed) BlackIce locked down the system so that it couldn't be accessed across the network by any other workstation, despite our having adminsitrative rights. That was cute.
Just throwing up a little real world example of how annoying these false alarms can be.
So the founders of a company that writes viral spyware, forges search engine hit results, and attempts to earn money by outright lying and deception happen to be violent amoral pieces of tripe with no real place in society?
"Once he is released from prison, Mitnick will be on supervised release for three years, during which time his access to computers and his employment in the computer industry will be severely restricted."
While testifying in a case isn't technically work in the computer industry, consulting definetly would be. Maybe this is outside the scope because we're talking about telco equipment and not computers per se (which, coincidentally, goes back to Mitnick's roots as a marginally talented phreaker and a decent social engineer)?
Or perhaps Mitnick's just an outright idiot. I don't recall him getting wailed on by Sprint during his legal proceedings, so I'm not certain that he's exempted from prosecution by way of double jeopardy. A curious thing, this testimoney.
Lindows is an exciting new Linux based Operating System (OS). This exciting new OS delivers the stability of Linux with the ease of Windows. These computer systems are a perfect low cost alternative to computers preloaded with Microsoft Windows.
Correct as written - there's no phrase explicitly about being able to run Windows applications...but is it sinister? Or just a precursor step to keep Microsoft from bashing the living hell out of any merchant agreement they might have?
DDR is an excellent dancing game produced by Konami, longtime makers of Contra and Castlevania. It's a craze that started out in Japan and has since migrated stateside.
The principles are easy; you pick a dance track to listen to, and as the song plays, steps scroll up from the bottom of the screen. Your controller is actually a gigantic platform with four directional arrows on it, which you step on in time to the music. All you have to do is match the right arrow to the one scrolling by on screen. Easy, right? I mean, come on, we've all got incredible hand/eye coordination due to all our years of video gaming! No problem.
..heh. The game's physically intense and a great workout, in addition to being far more fun than it has any right to be.
Here's the mandatory link to DDR Freak, which has some basic information on the game. And for the Python friendly out there, check out pyDDR, a DDR clone for Python.
Despite all the naysaying, there are definite times when a counter-offer is the way to go. If you truly love your job and the people you work with, and they're finally going to give you that last thing that really completes the picture -- money -- then maybe staying is the way to go.
I hit a situation a couple of years ago, when the dot com bubble was still running strong, where I had gotten a big raise - yet learned that new hires, whom I was training, were making more than 10k above what I was. I went out and fished up another job, brought the offer to my boss (whom I trusted), and told him that I knew I wasn't making fair market value. I told him that I wanted him to know *first*, before announcing my resignation, before I signed this offer letter, printed on the other company's letterhead. I asked him what we could do about this - if my company truly wanted to keep me, or if they were only partly satisfied with my work, and didn't feel I was worth the extra expense.
A few days of negotiation later, my company followed suit, and matched the offer. With the exception of grumbling about the assignments I've been placed on lately - a move precipitated by losing most of our software development contracts, rather than any kind of managerial backlash - the job has stayed good, my relationship with my employer is solid, and I don't have to worry about looking for any low-paying work in today's crunched market.
The counter-offer payed off for me.
Every situation is different. Analyze it, use your brain, and make the call. You'll be alright.
Slashdot Mirror
It got easy after they found the Float stone (it was one of the rocks atop Stonehenge, just nobody noticed it before). The sad part is that your IT tech support will be run by Tiamat. The WarMech will be the front-line helpdesk (i.e., you have to traverse that beast to actually get to where you wanna be anyway..)
I wonder if an airship (or zeppelin) based broadband modem would be appropriately called a `z-modem`... ;)
While it's been our experience that a lot of tech companies run IPOs for fast cash and then wind up dying shortly afterwards (think of the dot-com bubble bursting), Google is more like investing in your infrastructure; it's an invaluable tool used by a huge segment of the net-aware population, and thus is probably a very safe bet.
For contrast, you can ask yourself how badly those investments in Yahoo! turned out, years after they started themselves as a category-based alternative to the search engines available in the mid-90s.
Mirkon asks: "I'm a potential high school graduate, and have been accepted to a four-year school for furthering my rather biased educational interests. The problem is that while I'm cheap, the school (predictably) isn't. It's still getting itself off the ground, and thus only offers the legal minimum of scholarships" ad infinitum.
... So has anybody guessed what he's doing for a living yet?
:)
It qualifies as tech; it's `rather biased`; it's a new university that isn't established, accredited, etc (as it's getting itself off the ground, according to the above)
If he's applying to a videogame university, I'm not sure I wanna help.
In the US, standard procedure is to get a loan for the cost of your education; this loan is often sizeable, usually with a low rate of interest accrual, and is to be paid back after your graduation from the learning institution you've chosen to attend.
... my advice would really be to work on converting that "potential" into "actual", and then worry about college as you go. If you have to eat the cost of a loan, so be it -- you're no worse off than everybody else. Get into tech and make it pay for itself in a few years; you wouldn't be the first, and sure wouldn't be the last. :)
The author of this entry to "Please help me, Slashdot" has noted early on that he is cheap: The author does not want a loan. He is looking for a scholarship offer -- that is, he would like very much for someone else to pay for his expenses and send him to school for free. (Wouldn't we all have loved that?)
Unfortunately I have nothing useful to add on that front, as the only scholarship I ever took advantage of was a strictly academic one, and only that for going to a tiny, two-year state school. This hasn't prevented me from being in a computer-related field for the last eight years, nor has it prevented me from working as a senior network engineer, or as a field consultant, or down at the Pentagon, or etc.
The person who submitted the story noted that he is a potential high school graduate
Iridium, one of Motorola's biggest all-time money losers. I think the DoD still has a contract with them though, even though their original concept (that of public market penetration) crashed and burned quite hard. The nifty air-droppable and instantly deployable solar satellite phonebooths they proposed for low-lying Africa and other places without appropriate infrastructure likewise didn't come into being, as far as I know.
... so the actual thrust of your complaint has to deal with the fact that, in places that aren't the United States, WiFi is traditionally charged for? And that the sums are not to your liking? Cry me a frickin' river.
WiFi adoption in 2004 will likely exceed expectations in the United States precisely because tons of free hot spots are coming up stateside! Take a look at Baltimore, which is attempting to wire up the entire Inner Harbor area into a gigantic, free hotspot. As for whether or not other international localities will follow suit, it's really up to them -- recall also though that gas prices tend to be higher in Europe as an example that infrastructure there does not equal infrastructure here.
Since the only argument that came out of the article was a long-winded whine about WiFi prices around the mediterranian, and had nothing to do with actual adoption of the technology in the coming year, I'd have been forced to mod it -1, Troll.
A few years ago, the big idea was that by some as-yet undetermined point in the future (say, 2005) all human beings would be freed from having to collect their own data by way of intelligent, semi-autonomous Agents that could be given some loose english-query type tasks and go on their merry way, fetching and organizing and categorizing data by relevance. It's not too far different from the proposed use of scripting talked about above.
.gifs could theoretically draw more of a response from the engine than an official historian's personal recollections of his research while he was working on his master's thesis about the Jolly Roger. Any script (or engine) is only what you make of it.
... it's in providing a frame of context for the choosing, and, ultimately, rejection of sources.
:)
The problem comes more in the last assertation of the story; that pulling in all of this data will free up more time for people to spend on the work of analysis. I want to say this isn't accurate, but it probably boils down to what you call "analysis" work.
The problem with spiders, agents, and their like -- yes, even those that are going out and fetching porn -- is that they are able to provide content without context, much as a modern search engine does. I can take Google and get super specific with a query (say, `pirates carribean history -movie -"johnny depp"`). That will probably fetch me back some data that has my keywords in it, much as any script or agent could do.
Unfortunately, while the engine could rank based on keyword visibility and recurrance, as well as applying some algorithms to try and guess whether the data might be good or not (encylcopedias look this way, weblogs about Johnny Depp look that way), the engine itself still has on way to physically read the information and decide if it's at all useful. A high-school website's page with a tidbit of information and some cute animated
The most tedious part of data analysis these days is not providing content (as spiders, scripts, and search engines all do)
What comes after that sorting process - the assimilation of good data and the drawing of conclusions there-from - that's what I call data analysis. A shame that scripts, spiders, agents, and robots haven't found a way to do that for us.
The UKPS will carry out the trials at "various locations" throughout the UK, using four fixed, one mobile, and one portable unit, with one of the locations being a passport office.
... but damn, they have a world of international travel going through, and only four permanent stations (!) to test with.
It seems like their trial might be a little limited in scope, don't you think? I understand from the article that this trial is being run by the Passport Service, so presumably the various test stations will be deployed for use in areas of entry to and egress from the UK
I wonder why the numbers are so small.
Other curious questions involve what you'd use a mobile station for -- not portable, but truly mobile, i.e., mounted in a vehicle or similar; stop someone on the street randomly to see if they have a passport and if they're participating in the trial?
Help me out on this one, people. :)
;)
--
Another primitive is the "rod" -- a short-range melee weapon favored by light cycle racers, which can be upgraded to a short-range energy cannon (think "shotgun") called the "suffusion" or a sniper rifle called the "LOL".
--
Other Weapons for Tron 2.0:
"SPAM" - access a rogue SMTP server and bury attacking enemies in email.
"ASL" - drive enemies crazy by repeatedly demanding that they verify their identity.
Note: This is likely to make any neutral characters attack you.
"kthxbye" - dismiss enemies with a wave of the hand and a supercilious manner.
Any others?
I guess just about anything is fair game for making an FPS out of (judging by that later screenshot - I actually had *no* idea of what kind of game this was strictly by the review text). I'd kind of hoped that some of our older classics would be immune from the rampant intellectual property `upgrading` that our 3D obsessed gaming generation seems to enjoy paying for.
:)
Next thing you know, we'll have a Q*Bert themed MMORPG.
The real question is whether entertainment should have boundaries. Is a mass murder FPS acceptable? How about a rape simulator? Or a kiddie porn strategy game?
.. And yet, the game is fun, kicks serious ass, and is a major seller.
Excepting the kiddie porn example - which I can't find a way to implement without running afoul of established laws regarding the depiction of minors in sexual situations - the answer to those questions comes by way of normal free market economics. People will buy things that they enjoy, and not buy things that offend them too deeply on a personal level.
Case in point: Grand Theft Auto, a game where you can beat civillians with a baseball bat, roast police alive with a flamethrower, and pick up prostitutes. Each act in itself illegal, beyond the realms of good taste, and morally unacceptable in any kind of company
I can't figure out what the overall goal of the original grant was; were they trying to design some kind of simulation that guards could use in order to figure out how to best deal with complicated, changing environments, much as the United States Army uses game-like simulators to prep for realtime battle conditions?
;) I sure do wonder how they're going to stop inmates that have a wallhack, though.
Or are they trying to make some sort of weird MMORPG out of the jail environment? I mean, it's a frontier that hasn't actually been touched yet. I don't know any MMORPG where you can be an inmate and relive your deepest, darkest OZ fantasies.
Hell, either way kinda works out for the powers that be. As players find new ways to escape, the administration can fix them in the real prison, then release a patch fixing it in the game as well..
Excellent points, sir.
:)
:)
Similarly, from an `inside the war machine` perspective of the present day, classification guidelines are used not only to protect national secrets but also full details of our infrastructure. While it's obvious we can't openly discuss network address ranges, share classified documents, or do other really insane things, note that the guidelines extend all the way to the very end of the spectrum: We can't discuss the types, locations, numbers, etc. of any of our infrastructure. Period. Not even what kinds of keyboards we use.
Is it insanely overprotective? Damn straight, but that's why it's a good thing. Social engineering becomes a bit trickier when slipping up might not just cost you your job - it might also land you in a federal prison for having betrayed national security on one level or another. That's probably the best part of classifying things. Not only do you get the `duty` aspect, exhorting the employees to protect the `secrets of the nation`, you get to reinforce the concept with very real, very tangible jail time.
Two other quick points:
1) It is far easier to extend something's classification than it is to declassify it.
2) The Freedom of Information Act does not apply to any documents bearing a classification stamp.
As such, this move is completely unsurprising.
From the article,
:P
The welcome screen is presented, where I am logged in automatically. During the installation I was asked to enter a username, by default this username was given full administration access. Maybe not such a good idea according to some security experts.
That's standard behavior of Win95 and 98 (you're just the admin by nature), Windows NT (you start as the admin account), Windows 2000 (creates an admin account, then prompts you to create a user w/ full administrative rights) and Windows XP (see Win2k).
Does any *nix installation *not* start you off as Root, with the ability to create more accounts?
By the way, Windows installations from Win2k onward will not prompt you to create a local admin account (i.e., Please enter your Username so I can make you an admin, too) provided that you're joining a domain right off the bat -- which, as the installer of this OS, is the only case where your local account's security rights becomes a real concern. If you're doing it at home, for yourself, you're already the installer/admin. You know the admin password. Meaning, the user will know the admin password.
So, non-issue.
I didn't encounter any crashes while playing with Longhorn, even though I would have loved to see what kind of errors I would have gotten. I'm sure a couple of more minutes while browsing would have done provoked Longhorn to squeal.
"I said it died screamin' like a stuck Irish pig!"
(with props to Untouchables)
Likewise, I'm sure that me evalating any Linux kernel of your choosing could smash it into a million pieces through careless use of rm * -o , whack Solaris by repeatedly throwing the power while it's doing disk writes, or break any other *nix operating system you choose to name.
*Any* operating system can be broken through maliciously beating on it. "I bet I can make it squeal" doesn't imply "I am going to conduct a fair and extensive beta test of this newest distribution to see where it's faults still lie". It implies "Let's see what we can destroy".
Work on your bias. Good work submitting the article; news is news, regardless of the bearer.
Here is an article decrying this story as a hoax; It's not really an article so much as a list of people saying "feh", but at least it's posted on something like a news site.
Slashdot would do well to create the right impression among it's readers; maybe having one of our friendly editors change the story title to reflect it's untruth is advisable.
September 11th, 2001:
I was consulting at a company in Rockville, a few miles outside the district. I heard the first plane had hit while I was listening to WGMS, DC's classical station; figured it for a Cessna or something. After I hit my desk I knew something was wrong when I couldn't hit a major news site for confirmation of the story.
We switched the news on; we had a big TV with DirecTV on it in the company kitchen. I had stepped away to try and get word to friends about what had happened, using instant messenging apps, when the second plane hit.
The people in our kitchen reached the instantaneous conclusion that this was not accidental. We watched as the towers burned, saw them fall, heard about the Pentagon being hit. My company employed 65 people there; were they okay?
Workers left to take their children home. I left around 1pm, with F16s and helicopters covering the sky of the DC metro area.
I called my family. They were trying to reach me but couldn't get through due to circuits being jammed. They were terrified that I was there; too many rumors, too little verification that day for us all.
September 11th, 2002:
Last November, my company deployed me to the Pentagon. It started out as one of those "for a week" things, but I wound up involved in a COOP project - Continuity of Operations - directly related to making sure a second 9/11 cannot cripple our nation's defense infrastructure. I'm sitting at my desk, thinking of how much the last year has affected my life (too much work, constant stress, a divorce..) and knowing that the majority of the things that have happened to me of late can be directly traced back to 9/11; were it not for that attack, I would not be where I am now.
I do not know if things are for the better. All I know is that I have been called on to use my meager technical skills to help my country when it was sorely needed. I'm doing my part to make sure we make it through.
Would that we all could do the same.
After reading the article, I can't imagine that a home user would ever make a point of purchasing a system on the order described. Hardware-level tampering resistance is a good thing for Department of Defense computers, say, but does the average home user, surfing the web and storing recipes, really have to worry about someone leeching that information from residual information that could (maybe) be gleaned from the CPU itself?
Dear lord! Perish the thought.
I can't even imagine most companies having to deploy something on this order to safeguard their data. Hell, I'm not even sure the military needs it.
For reference, the Department of Defense has a series of guides and guidelines for locking systems down to ensure security. These are called STIGs and are created by DISA (Defense Internal Security Agency) and the NSA (National Security Agency). When the guides are applied the machines are as secure as can be made.
Part of the guidelines cover physical security; i.e., if someone can reach your hardware physically without being cleared for it, you fail that part of the check. As such, I can't imagine how Palladium would not be redundant to things we already have in place.
For good security, you can use smartcards with a PKI certificate, anyway. Don't let someone sign on without one, don't let them access data without one, have an active and interested central monitoring and issuing authority and practice good physical security. Save the money you'd spend on Palladium equipment.
While I think the idea of a small, medium, or large-sized march designed to show support for the Open Source cause could never be a prima face bad thing, I'm sad to report that our political players do not and will not care about our issues any more or less because of a demonstration.
...and maybe the `public` has absolutely no idea of what it is we do - as they never, ever have before. The vox populi will not be the tool of change when the majority of it cannot agree on how to correctly pronounce `Linux`. ("It's lynnux, dude." ``Wrong, it's LINE-ux! You suck!``)
.. hm, unversed? , to get out and compile their own apps - they won't fall in and cheer for us, so the guys in charge will take no note.
The right of assembly is guaranteed by the First Amendment, and it's entire purpose is to provide constitutional protection for a group of people who dislike the government (or hold a contrary opinion to the powers that be) to meet in order to find a way to change things. The assemblies themselves are not the tools of change - and never have been. I'm not sure where people got so confused.
Perhaps the march will bring out like-minded people who've kept their feelings in till now, reluctant to express an opinion -- maybe the public will join the throng, shucking off their closed source software for freely available and modifiable source code packages.
Living in the district I am compelled to restate the obvious: Politicans move because of two things and two things only.
1) Because it will help them stay in office,
2) Because of money.
Our `cause` will not engender any further public support for a re-election campaign, so strike #1 right off the ballot. Too many people use closed source software day in, day out and are too
Money is the only thing that will bring about change. Save the gas money you would have spent attending the march and donate it to a lobbyist group that works on our behalf. Does no such group exist? If not, create one.
I really think that's the only solution that's ever going to bring our needs out of the dark ages of politics and give us some play in the District.
I recall a user we had on our network who thought it'd be cute to install BlackIce on his box, to better secure it. Nevermind the fact that I, and the rest of the admins at my company, had firewalls in place and had never had an intrusion on our network.
Imagine the fun the first time we try to deploy an antivirus package to his desktop just to be blocked for -- are you sitting down? -- an attempted NetBIOS intrusion.
After the second time we tried to deploy (and failed) BlackIce locked down the system so that it couldn't be accessed across the network by any other workstation, despite our having adminsitrative rights. That was cute.
Just throwing up a little real world example of how annoying these false alarms can be.
So the founders of a company that writes viral spyware, forges search engine hit results, and attempts to earn money by outright lying and deception happen to be violent amoral pieces of tripe with no real place in society?
:)
My, I'm shocked.
"Once he is released from prison, Mitnick will be on supervised release for three years, during which time his access to computers and his employment in the computer industry will be severely restricted."
While testifying in a case isn't technically work in the computer industry, consulting definetly would be. Maybe this is outside the scope because we're talking about telco equipment and not computers per se (which, coincidentally, goes back to Mitnick's roots as a marginally talented phreaker and a decent social engineer)?
Or perhaps Mitnick's just an outright idiot. I don't recall him getting wailed on by Sprint during his legal proceedings, so I'm not certain that he's exempted from prosecution by way of double jeopardy. A curious thing, this testimoney.
Correct as written - there's no phrase explicitly about being able to run Windows applications. ..but is it sinister? Or just a precursor step to keep Microsoft from bashing the living hell out of any merchant agreement they might have?
The principles are easy; you pick a dance track to listen to, and as the song plays, steps scroll up from the bottom of the screen. Your controller is actually a gigantic platform with four directional arrows on it, which you step on in time to the music. All you have to do is match the right arrow to the one scrolling by on screen. Easy, right? I mean, come on, we've all got incredible hand/eye coordination due to all our years of video gaming! No problem.
Here's the mandatory link to DDR Freak, which has some basic information on the game. And for the Python friendly out there, check out pyDDR, a DDR clone for Python.
Despite all the naysaying, there are definite times when a counter-offer is the way to go. If you truly love your job and the people you work with, and they're finally going to give you that last thing that really completes the picture -- money -- then maybe staying is the way to go.
I hit a situation a couple of years ago, when the dot com bubble was still running strong, where I had gotten a big raise - yet learned that new hires, whom I was training, were making more than 10k above what I was. I went out and fished up another job, brought the offer to my boss (whom I trusted), and told him that I knew I wasn't making fair market value. I told him that I wanted him to know *first*, before announcing my resignation, before I signed this offer letter, printed on the other company's letterhead. I asked him what we could do about this - if my company truly wanted to keep me, or if they were only partly satisfied with my work, and didn't feel I was worth the extra expense.
A few days of negotiation later, my company followed suit, and matched the offer. With the exception of grumbling about the assignments I've been placed on lately - a move precipitated by losing most of our software development contracts, rather than any kind of managerial backlash - the job has stayed good, my relationship with my employer is solid, and I don't have to worry about looking for any low-paying work in today's crunched market.
The counter-offer payed off for me.
Every situation is different. Analyze it, use your brain, and make the call. You'll be alright.