While I wasn't directly responsible for researching the Y2K compliance of our machines, my boss was, so I heard about it. I don't even remember what version was running. Let me give you some additional pieces of info:
1. This WAS a CS department and so it is possible that they had some funky apps or things that weren't explicitly supported by Apple. And thus, we would have paid for upgrading that component
2. I absolutely remember that $400 is what it was going to cost PER machine.
3. We changed all these servers and workstations from NEXTSTEP to Linux the summer of 1999. I don't know if that program was in place when we decided to go with Linux.
4. Like I said, this was a school site and so they might have had some upgrade agreements from the past. Who knows?
5. I really think that the $400 was for upgrading the OS.
That all said, NEXTSTEP rocked because of the easy application builder. But Netsurfer was dog-slow. Although it was cool to have those spiffy looking black PREFECT cubes around.
I found it interesting that immediately after I finished the MediaBay article, there was a stock quote for MediaBay. Its down 6 cents to $0.94. About a year ago, this stock used to be worth $14. Now this isn't a comprehensive stock analysis, but it might say something for the desperation of this company.
I'm surprised no one mentioned NetSurfer. I remember playing with NeXTStep whenever the CS department still had it (they wisely upgraded to Linux rather than pay the $400 per machine to get the OS Y2K compliant.). Netsurfer was the default web browser if I remember correctly. But then I didn't know very much about the OS so I could have this wrong.
I think the funniest part of the article for me is that he infects one of his machines with a Zombie, then tries different personal firewalls to see whether they catch it. ZoneAlarm works well, but BlackICE defender doesn't do anything to help. Then he says:
To anyone who is still stubborn enough to insist that BlackICE Defender is actually good for something: PLEASE do not write to me. I don't want to hear it. I'm a scientist who will not find your mystic beliefs to be compelling. I respect your right to your own opinions, no matter how blatantly they fly in the face of logic and reality. That is, after all, the nature of faith. Happy computing. I suggest prayer.
That's the risk in deploying software that is used for grading purposes. What do you tell a school when they can't rely on the grading system you've used. Software in this category should be examined in the greatest detail. Testing should be extensive, but of course, testing is never extensive enough.
The first thing Non-IT people should do when they know that the IT structure is being attacked is to NOT go to the sysadmin and say, "My Internet's broken."
Post your favorite SPAM messages/stories below. Here is mine. I got a message saying that I was selected to help a poor widow out. Supposedly, her husband had died and had left a bunch of money in a foreign account. She couldn't transfer it to America without alerting the Feds and getting hit with taxes and fees. So she needed a bank account to transfer the funds into and thus avoid estate tax or something. If I helped, I would receive 20% of the $100 Million that was in the account.
Sure! Here is my account number! Please take it and swindle me!
But still, how much does an ad on national TV cost? Does that ad actually nudge enough people to buy X number of Big Macs or Ford Explorers to justify the cost? I guess I always figured that they did, but now I'm not sure.
Even more interesting is what happens if a company advertises for a long time and then suddenly you see no more advertisements. Imagine that all of a sudden, you no longer saw advertisements for McDonnies. What would be your first reaction? I think mine would be, "Has McDonnies gone out of business? I haven't heard about them in a while." So instead, McDonnies keeps us saturated with commercials to make sure we know that they are still around and to give us new fangled burgers.
Also consider the adverts you are going to run. Are you serious enough to get local TV ads or will word of mouth suffice? If the area is small enough and you only want to provide service to that area (i.e., you DON'T want your business to grow and spread out), then word of mouth and perhaps some radio ads might do the trick. Advertising IS important!
check developer's lists
on
Cracking OSX
·
· Score: 2
According to the darwin developer's lists, the kernel started with a core ported from Mach that was a little old. There was discussion of updates and changes (including security fixes) being done in a timely fashion. The conversation died out which leads me to believe that either they continued the discussion off the list and are happily patching the darwin kernel, or they just glazed over that. I'm going with the first one since those darwin people are pretty smart and professional. But it IS interesting...
Not to mention what happens when you edit your Python programs across different text editors AND different platforms. I've already run into many character mapping problems with OSX transfers. Tabs and spaces can get mangled differently by different text editors too!
If the time line for getting D2 out is any indication, the expansion will be out in 2004. I remember seeing a video of D2 in September of 1999 which, although in German, said that D2 was coming out in 3Q 1999. Boy did they miss that mark. My poor college roommate almost gave up waiting for it.
be careful with character mappings
on
OS X
·
· Score: 1
I'm on OSX right now and it IS pretty sweet. Nice to have a stable multi-tasking environment finally, blah blah, (insert everything else good about OSX). BUT, if you install openssh (see www.stepwise.com for installation instructions), be careful using scp. If you use funky characters in your perl scripts, it could bungle the character translation. But more importantly, the translation of line breaks into "^M" is extremely annoying. I've reverted to using NiftySSH in Classic mode to avoid the issue.
Warning: Attempted Joke coming.
on
DVDs On DAT?
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· Score: 1
Well if you really want this to work, you should also place the contents of the DVD on 5000000 DISks. Then you could have the DVD on DIS(ks) and DAT.
RedHat has two links on their front page at redhat.com. Maybe they got scared, although there really isn't anything to be scared of with this particular virus. It is kind of cool that it afflict PE and ELF files.
The best place I have found for a CVS reference is their own web page manual. Everything you would want to need and printable too! I spent one day reading the entire thing and I'm very confident with CVS now.
What? You're telling me that "Hollywood marketers" are lying to me???
But seriously, according to the article, it really does help to have Internet hype:
The success of the 1999 horror movie "The Blair Witch Project" is testament to the Internet's hype potential. The film industry was blindsided by the appearance of block-long lines of ticket-holders who had gotten hooked on the film through its Web site. The movie was made for about $1 million and became one of the most successful independent films in history, grossing $128 million in its first five weeks.
And I thought everyone saw that movie for the artistry!
With the recent story on the flooding of emails to representatives, I want to know how you deal with that flood? Do you rate snail mail a higher priority than email?
There was a recent local report of a hotel in the area (Carbondale, IL) that was running a prOn site out of the hotel! Here is the story from the Southern Illinoisan. Guess they had enough "access."
If you want someone else to decrypt this message you need some way of communicating to them on what to do to decrypt it. How do you tell them? Another encrypted message? Recurse ad infinitum.
Computer scientists (of which I am a part) deal with the same type of information, but we deal with it on a different level: we study programming language theory, algorithms, data structures and the like. How do you contain that data? How do you sort it? Etc.
Even more than that, Computer Science has NOTHING to do with Computers!!! It is the study of what can be computed. If you want to break RSA encryption, you COULD do it on a Cray, or you COULD do it with rocks on toilet paper!!!
I've had little exposure to CE so I can't comment on that...
I agree that there are so many projects out there that start because someone scratches their itch and then gets bogged down in finishing it and documenting it. Mentoring is a wonderful idea.
I am a fairly good coder and have a couple of projects going on. I think I would certainly welcome any help on those projects and would easily be flattered and appreciative of beginners trying to contribute. I think the problem is that people think that they must be 1337 coders in order to contribute to projects. So I say to beginners out there, come to my projects (see sig)! Help out! I'm willing to train with the fairly good skills I have.
Slashdot Mirror
How much of those 'shit' instances can be attributed to "Matsushita" CD-ROMs?
While I wasn't directly responsible for researching the Y2K compliance of our machines, my boss was, so I heard about it. I don't even remember what version was running. Let me give you some additional pieces of info:
1. This WAS a CS department and so it is possible that they had some funky apps or things that weren't explicitly supported by Apple. And thus, we would have paid for upgrading that component
2. I absolutely remember that $400 is what it was going to cost PER machine.
3. We changed all these servers and workstations from NEXTSTEP to Linux the summer of 1999. I don't know if that program was in place when we decided to go with Linux.
4. Like I said, this was a school site and so they might have had some upgrade agreements from the past. Who knows?
5. I really think that the $400 was for upgrading the OS.
That all said, NEXTSTEP rocked because of the easy application builder. But Netsurfer was dog-slow. Although it was cool to have those spiffy looking black PREFECT cubes around.
I found it interesting that immediately after I finished the MediaBay article, there was a stock quote for MediaBay. Its down 6 cents to $0.94. About a year ago, this stock used to be worth $14. Now this isn't a comprehensive stock analysis, but it might say something for the desperation of this company.
I'm surprised no one mentioned NetSurfer. I remember playing with NeXTStep whenever the CS department still had it (they wisely upgraded to Linux rather than pay the $400 per machine to get the OS Y2K compliant.). Netsurfer was the default web browser if I remember correctly. But then I didn't know very much about the OS so I could have this wrong.
I think the funniest part of the article for me is that he infects one of his machines with a Zombie, then tries different personal firewalls to see whether they catch it. ZoneAlarm works well, but BlackICE defender doesn't do anything to help. Then he says:
To anyone who is still stubborn enough to insist that BlackICE Defender is actually good for something: PLEASE do not write to me. I don't want to hear it. I'm a scientist who will not find your mystic beliefs to be compelling. I respect your right to your own opinions, no matter how blatantly they fly in the face of logic and reality. That is, after all, the nature of faith. Happy computing. I suggest prayer.
I love that last part, "I suggest prayer."
That's the risk in deploying software that is used for grading purposes. What do you tell a school when they can't rely on the grading system you've used. Software in this category should be examined in the greatest detail. Testing should be extensive, but of course, testing is never extensive enough.
The first thing Non-IT people should do when they know that the IT structure is being attacked is to NOT go to the sysadmin and say, "My Internet's broken."
Post your favorite SPAM messages/stories below. Here is mine. I got a message saying that I was selected to help a poor widow out. Supposedly, her husband had died and had left a bunch of money in a foreign account. She couldn't transfer it to America without alerting the Feds and getting hit with taxes and fees. So she needed a bank account to transfer the funds into and thus avoid estate tax or something. If I helped, I would receive 20% of the $100 Million that was in the account.
Sure! Here is my account number! Please take it and swindle me!
But still, how much does an ad on national TV cost? Does that ad actually nudge enough people to buy X number of Big Macs or Ford Explorers to justify the cost? I guess I always figured that they did, but now I'm not sure.
Even more interesting is what happens if a company advertises for a long time and then suddenly you see no more advertisements. Imagine that all of a sudden, you no longer saw advertisements for McDonnies. What would be your first reaction? I think mine would be, "Has McDonnies gone out of business? I haven't heard about them in a while." So instead, McDonnies keeps us saturated with commercials to make sure we know that they are still around and to give us new fangled burgers.
Also consider the adverts you are going to run. Are you serious enough to get local TV ads or will word of mouth suffice? If the area is small enough and you only want to provide service to that area (i.e., you DON'T want your business to grow and spread out), then word of mouth and perhaps some radio ads might do the trick. Advertising IS important!
According to the darwin developer's lists, the kernel started with a core ported from Mach that was a little old. There was discussion of updates and changes (including security fixes) being done in a timely fashion. The conversation died out which leads me to believe that either they continued the discussion off the list and are happily patching the darwin kernel, or they just glazed over that. I'm going with the first one since those darwin people are pretty smart and professional. But it IS interesting...
Not to mention what happens when you edit your Python programs across different text editors AND different platforms. I've already run into many character mapping problems with OSX transfers. Tabs and spaces can get mangled differently by different text editors too!
If the time line for getting D2 out is any indication, the expansion will be out in 2004. I remember seeing a video of D2 in September of 1999 which, although in German, said that D2 was coming out in 3Q 1999. Boy did they miss that mark. My poor college roommate almost gave up waiting for it.
I'm on OSX right now and it IS pretty sweet. Nice to have a stable multi-tasking environment finally, blah blah, (insert everything else good about OSX). BUT, if you install openssh (see www.stepwise.com for installation instructions), be careful using scp. If you use funky characters in your perl scripts, it could bungle the character translation. But more importantly, the translation of line breaks into "^M" is extremely annoying. I've reverted to using NiftySSH in Classic mode to avoid the issue.
Well if you really want this to work, you should also place the contents of the DVD on 5000000 DISks. Then you could have the DVD on DIS(ks) and DAT.
No Applause, just throw money.
Correct. Sorry. I meant RedHat posted it. Not actually found the virus and was the first to break the news.
RedHat has two links on their front page at redhat.com. Maybe they got scared, although there really isn't anything to be scared of with this particular virus. It is kind of cool that it afflict PE and ELF files.
The best place I have found for a CVS reference is their own web page manual. Everything you would want to need and printable too! I spent one day reading the entire thing and I'm very confident with CVS now.
What? You're telling me that "Hollywood marketers" are lying to me???
But seriously, according to the article, it really does help to have Internet hype:
The success of the 1999 horror movie "The Blair Witch Project" is testament to the Internet's hype potential. The film industry was blindsided by the appearance of block-long lines of ticket-holders who had gotten hooked on the film through its Web site. The movie was made for about $1 million and became one of the most successful independent films in history, grossing $128 million in its first five weeks.
And I thought everyone saw that movie for the artistry!
With the recent story on the flooding of emails to representatives, I want to know how you deal with that flood? Do you rate snail mail a higher priority than email?
There was a recent local report of a hotel in the area (Carbondale, IL) that was running a prOn site out of the hotel! Here is the story from the Southern Illinoisan. Guess they had enough "access."
If you want someone else to decrypt this message you need some way of communicating to them on what to do to decrypt it. How do you tell them? Another encrypted message? Recurse ad infinitum.
This is the reason why Public-Key is so popular.
Computer scientists (of which I am a part) deal with the same type of information, but we deal with it on a different level: we study programming language theory, algorithms, data structures and the like. How do you contain that data? How do you sort it? Etc.
Even more than that, Computer Science has NOTHING to do with Computers!!! It is the study of what can be computed. If you want to break RSA encryption, you COULD do it on a Cray, or you COULD do it with rocks on toilet paper!!!
I've had little exposure to CE so I can't comment on that...
According to the article, (who quoted the CEO of the company), the tools merely FINDS the open-shares. From the article:
Rogers also points out that ShareSniffer only locates open shares, it doesn't access them. The user does that through normal Windows functionality.
Sounds familar.....
I agree that there are so many projects out there that start because someone scratches their itch and then gets bogged down in finishing it and documenting it. Mentoring is a wonderful idea.
I am a fairly good coder and have a couple of projects going on. I think I would certainly welcome any help on those projects and would easily be flattered and appreciative of beginners trying to contribute. I think the problem is that people think that they must be 1337 coders in order to contribute to projects. So I say to beginners out there, come to my projects (see sig)! Help out! I'm willing to train with the fairly good skills I have.