IE8 on Win7 (32bit/64bit) is just as vulnerable, re-read that bulletin!
This emergency update includes the CanSecWest fixes where they 0wned a Win7 IE8 system in minutes! There were a hundred Microsoft employees at CanSecWest and they were left scratching their heads because they didn't understand the exploit right away. It was a sophisticated manipulation of realtime memory locations.
a. Get off Windows if you can. You simply don't see these attacks on other OS platforms. Even with all the below precautions we still catch people getting infected with malware....
(Reality... We are stuck with Windows...)
1. Install advanced firewall and web proxy filtering, block all social networks, non-work email, any Pr0n, or non-work related sites, etc. 2. Block foreign international IP ranges such as China, Korea, India, Russia, the Balkins, etc that you really don't need. 3. Remove admin privileges from your users on Windows; only IT staff such as developers and deskside tech's need it. 4. Install anti-virus protection but don't think that covers you completely. 5. Audit where your users are surfing, start blocking things you didn't think of. 6. Be cautious of laptop users who could get infected while on WiFi when not using VPN, etc. 7. Install a good intelligent Packet Analysis system like Netwitness and review it's logs regularly. This is how that Kneber botnet with 74K+ infected systems was discovered.
(Seriously, get the heck off Windows if you can!)
I am not going to argue the Windows is vulnerable because it's popular argument. Windows is vulnerable because it's security is terrible. Yeah every system has vulnerabilities but no one has quite so many as Windows! If it wasn't for Windows, we would not have the problems we have with malware and SPAM. i.e. all SPAM comes from infected Windows boxes and about 90% of all email is SPAM!
Got to do online banking for your small business? Do yourself a favor and go burn a Linux Live CD right now! Then use it for online banking. You won't get infected with that... Many millions getting siphoned from small businesses with online banking because they're Windows computer got hacked by a trojan botnet!
If you have to use Windows, then setup a Citrix farm and lock it down super tight.
I just recently had to pull the plug on my father. He suffered a major heart attack that was unrepairable. He went in for a routine operation and two days after, he had the heart attack. He was rushed from one hospital to another and was given the best medical care possible. He was on an external pacemaker, respirator, liquid cooling blanket (high fever from an infection caused by the surgery), and about 30 different IV medications. He was being kept alive by the machines and drugs. The staff at the Cardiac ICU were outstanding, they revived him 12 times! They were compassionate and explained that every time they revived him they were doing more damage and causing him a great deal of pain. They explained that they would continue until the family said to stop. His outlook was bad, he was not going to survive nor recover. As family members arrived, we were granted access against the visitation rules. We were allowed to have him revived so we could say our peace and to pray with him. We also received his blessing on our decision. As a family we made the decision to not prolong his suffering and after discussing the options, the hospital staff advised turning off the external pacemaker and slowly stopping the heart medications while keeping him sedated and comfortable. They continued some drugs that enhanced his breathing. We waited about five hours until he left this world for the next.
The decision should ALWAYS be with the afflicted or the family. In some nationalized healthcare systems the government performs a financial calculation and then refuses payment or even treatment! In America, you decide how far you want to go to extend life. It is a personal decision. It is your FREEDOM! Even if you don't have insurance in America, you will still be treated and you will still receive the best treatment in the world. You just have to pay for it.
Yes, insurance companies negotiate prices with affiliated hospitals and doctors. When you receive an insurance statement it clearly shows what the doctor or hospital charged you and what the insurance company actually pays them as well as what you owe depending on your coverage. If you work for a large company or state or federal government, you will see a better negotiated price because of the sheer number of employees being covered. Insurance companies make money based on the premiums you and your employer pay into the program. They then bet that most people won't get sick. This is how the insurance company makes money. Same goes for fire insurance, etc.
We are all going to die someday. Most of us will get sick and need healthcare at some point in our lives. The government does not owe you free healthcare! The government is not responsible for your health. All insurance does is protect you from losing everything if you get sick or if your home is destroyed or if you cause a fatal car accident, etc.
I do not want the government to have the power to deny me or my family healthcare because it costs too much. I don't want to go on a waiting list because the government does not have the resources to provide care. I don't want the government to tell me I can't have a knee or hip replacement because I am too old or it costs too much. I don't want the government to tell me they can't at least try to save my father's life because it's hopeless. That is my decision and no one else's! I do not want the government to seize more then half my income to pay for those who should be working and buying their own insurance. I don't want to pay for Joe crack heads habit and treatment. One only needs to look at the legal immigrants entering the USA to understand that they see the opportunity this country provides it's citizens to succeed and that through hard work they can make it too! There are countless success stories of immigrants coming here with nothing and in a generation or two making it really big! I know a Polish family that arrived in the 1960's and the husband and wife worked 2-4 jobs for years to make it possible for their so
1. Stopped issuing LifeTime Service Option 2. Slow to adapt to HD 3. Very expensive to adapt to HD when it was possible 4. Simply could not cut deals with the CableCo's for some reason... (DirectTV on again off again, etc.)
Fixes:
1. Restarted the LifeTime Service Option 2. Released major improvements in a software upgrade 3. Released cheaper HD capable TiVo's
Welcome to the new century, where I don't watch TV much anymore. I dropped my cable down to the bare minimum just so I can turn on the news if something big happens. I will likely cancel cable entirely in the near future. I watch Internet TV now via Boxee and NetFlix and I purchase some items on iTunes. If I really want 1080p HD content, I buy BluRay discs. Otherwise, the TV's get used by video game consoles.
iTunes needs a couch potato subscription model for TV shows. I want to pay a monthly fee, download any TV show, watch it up to a couple of times and then I really don't care about it any more. I will still buy box sets for shows I really love like BattleStar Galactica, etc. But to pay 2 bucks an episode, can get really expensive really quick. Even 99 cents isn't good enough.
The studios won't do this because it will kill the cable companies! The business model needs to change like it did for the music industry and I believe it will eventually but those networks just don't get it yet. They are content houses but the traditional paid advertising model doesn't work any more. I never buy stuff because I saw it in a commercial! It's like Internet advertising before the IT bubble burst. You could actually make a lot of money on advertising and then suddenly the bottom dropped out. That's because in reality people ignore ads or outright block them. The TiVo let's you fast forward through the ads and frankly if you could skip it entirely you would. Right now the cost of a TV commercial is based on number of viewers and their ages based on time of day. But really all those eyeballs are not really paying attention. Just like the Internet where clicks were measured, the clicking stopped. But there is no way to tell if people are actually watching the ads or not. So all that money is wasted in some ways.
I don't know what's going to happen in the future but until advertising becomes something like what was shown in Minority Report, it's not going to work.... Unless you get some Japanese guys eyeballs transplanted, those ads will likely be something you care about.
Oh for the love of Pete! Microsoft is MOST DEFINITELY RESPONSIBLE for rootkits! Sure, their patch is not the direct cause of the BSOD but letting the damn malware into the OS certainly is the real problem. Stop dancing around the spin and address the real problem for once!
It is possible for malware running on a limited user account to execute on Windows and bootstrap itself into place via the HKLM registry where is should not be allowed to write. In addition, it can place executables into C:\Windows\System32 where it should also not be allowed to write or replace files. Next, malware can actually inject code into WINLOGON.EXE while it's running in RAM. Now you must ask yourself, WHAT THE FRAK?!?!
The Zeus bot tool can be downloaded by any luser without a clue to build a custom rootkit via a Win32 Wizard for crying out loud! The bots produced with such a tool incorporate encryption both for the malware files as well as phoning home to the botnet itself. AV software cannot stop it! Once you are rooted, you machine is now owned by the botnet. Even Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky have had their own computers infected by bots produced by Zeus!
Running around the security perimeter trying to fight off the hoard after the fact, is futile.
Repeat After Me:
- Windows Cannot Be Secured! - Windows is Insecure! - Windows is a Security Hazard! - TIME TO GET OFF WINDOWS!
Yeah it's going to cost you big time, but it's going to cost a whole lot more if corporations don't start acting soon! Many companies have been hacked and the hackers are going after the financial staff, gaining access to online bank accounts and stealing tens of thousands of dollars! Most business banks provide no recourse nor protection if someone else logs in with your account and wires money to a third world country.
Bingo! It's not the tech knowledge that is most important. That's not to say you don't need the technical knowledge, you obviously, need to keep up your technical skills. However, it's the people and communication skills that are most valued. Can you communicate with difficult people, do you have endless patience, are you willing to follow up as well as being proactive?
I've worked in technical support for over a decade. Many people tried working in this fast paced environment and soon found they were not cut out for it. Endless patience is key as well as not letting yourself get frustrated. Even in the most stressful of situations, I can remain calm and collected.
You need to be able to calm a frustrated user and then earn their trust. You do this by never losing your cool and always keeping your word. Honor and integrity as well as a friendly attitude go a long long way. Follow up after resolution or work around and even a drive by "hello, how are things going?" helps to build a relationship.
Transitioning from help desk to second or third tier support or other lateral support groups with a higher profile will advance your career. Educating yourself for a role in programming or engineering is another possible direction. I would avoid educational trainer roles because they are the first to be cut in a down market. I would also avoid management as that is extremely dangerous, middle management is frequently re-organized and people are cut loose all the time. You have to be very political for management roles.
There are opportunities out there for getting out of the help desk and many large companies who previously outsourced parts of their IT learned some painful lessons and they are now starting to rebuild that which they sold off.
Learn the corporate culture and do everything you can to raise your profile in solving big problems. Befriend those who can help you.
ZFS is primarily a server file system. It's meant to be used with multiple disks. Now getting it to work with USB and Firewire drives is going to take some extra effort on Apple's part. HFS+ for Snow Leopard introduces some compression features which is how Apple was able to reclaim 6GB's of disk space on the Snow Leopard install. Much of that is stripping out non-Intel architectures, and some legacy subsystems/API's but the compression shrinks the OS foot print significantly.
So unless you are running a Mac Pro with 4 hard disks or an XServe you are not likely to be using ZFS anyway. ZFS is still a wonderful file system! It's fantastic on data center SAN's and large disk arrays! It's got some really nice features. But for Apple to implement it they need more time to refine it. As others have said already, many Apple applications have to be changed to take advantage of ZFS, etc. Sun's client base has professional Solaris sysadmins setting up servers and such. ZFS was designed to be easy for sysadmins not the average joe user. Apple needs to refine it and provide automatic behavior and build some easier to use management into Disk Utility for it. Then some monitoring tools, etc.
If we see it anywhere in the future, ZFS will likely be rolled out on the next big cat OS after Snow Leopard and only on OS X Server at first. Then likely, the next OS release may incorporate it on the client. I think they took a look at ZFS long and hard and from a design and engineering perspective put it on the back burner for the next OS cycle after Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard was about optimizing what they had and refining it and sharpening it getting it ready for the future. Focus was on 64bit with 32bit compatibility and to clean up the architecture by stripping out legacy stuff. Apple made a decision to not pursue ZFS at this time, that doesn't mean they won't go back and re-address it at a later date.
I personally, don't see the average Mac user gaining all that much benefit from ZFS unless they are a sysadmin and working with big storage. The average user with large storage needs is better off buying a Drobo device http://www.drobo.com/.
Yeah but Apple doesn't force you to activate the OS. Nothing but one's morals stopping you from installing OS X on more then one computer. The Family Pack is a great idea and most users respect the licensing.
However, Apple does do activation on iWork and their professional apps. Then someone took the trial version of iWork implanted a trojan and released it on the torrent networks as a cracked version. Then thousands of Apple users downloaded and installed the trojan. Many of those computers are now part of a botnet with full Unix scripting abilities!
So yeah, Apple's onto something. They should give up the idea of activation, it just encourages pirates and causes the users to try to steal the software and then it makes Apple look bad when they get hijacked...
They have to pay for data transfers? What the heck is up with that? In the USA we have virtually unlimited downloads and the only time someone runs abreast of that is if they download a heck of a lot in a short period of time. I mean they would have to be transferring 10 DVD ISO's a day before the ISP slaps them and shuts off their Internet connection.
Of course, there are other parts of the world that make the USA's Internet speeds look stupid by comparison. But Australia looks downright dismal if they lock you in with a contract and then mico-bill you once you've exceeded a ridiculously low amount of bandwidth.
I get approximately 20Mbps down and 2Mbps up with the possibility of short bursts of even more speed through a cable TV provider. But it doesn't come close to the pure fiber connections found in some industrialized Asian nations such as Japan or South Korea.
You cannot do what you are trying to do... i.e. you cannot run Linux and port the OS X applications to Linux.
However, you can increase your RAM (2GB+) and run either VMWare Fusion or Parallels virtual machine software. Both have been getting a great deal of updates and improvements. They both offer full screen mode, etc.
Run Linux in a Virtual Machine and you can do everything you want to do at very near native speed. Run WinXP or Vista even. Run FreeBSD, Solaris x86, etc. All in virtual machines.
You just need enough RAM to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Boot and run Mac OS X and load the other operating systems into virtual machines when you need them. Make sure you have the latest Mac firmware and all the latest Mac OS X patches.
Alternatively, you can use BootCamp (free beta download from Apple) to repartition the disk non-destructively and dual boot Linux and Mac OS X if you really want to.
You "might" be able to load OS X into a virtual machine running under Linux but it will likely not work as Mac OS X checks for the Mac hardware at boot. It won't see the hardware completely inside a virtual machine. There have been some hacks to make it work, but they are dependent on Leopard betas that will expire.
No way in hell, will large corporate IT rollout both Vista and Office 2007 at the same time! For starters they are 1.0 releases of a new OS and new Office Suite. Then you've got the end user training issue; the interface has changed so radically that it will require extensive training. I don't know about you but putting 50,000 employees through Vista and Office 2007 training is not going to be cheap by any figment of the imagination! All the hardware will have to be Vista certified and from what I've seen have at least 2GB of RAM! FYI, enterprise hardware on the workstation side doesn't mean state of the art. It means economy desktops and laptops that are consistent over years! The IT staff hasn't been trained on Vista either. Only a handful of our tech's and engineers have even played with Vista RC1/RC2! Our engineers will wait for a release then have to figure out how to shutoff most of the Vista new features because they would be a security hazard or cause incompatibilities in our environment. i.e. we still run SP1 w/SP2 hotfixes without actually running SP2 because it breaks half our legacy apps!
It would be more likely for a large corporation to rollout a customized Ubuntu workstation that includes OpenOffice, FireFox 2.0, and a Citrix client. Authenticate it to LDAP and Siteminder that to ActiveDirectory. Run all the required Windows apps under Citrix Farms and keep our old ratty hardware for another 4 years to save money!
It would be even easier to switch everyone to Apple Mac's, again with the Citrix Farm. Mac OS X will already join into Active Directory better then Linux will. Using Office 2004 for the Mac (yeah I know, Rosetta but still pretty fast) and a plan to go to Open Office (er NeoOffice). OS X is more likely to work with folks cell phones and PDA's.
Bwahahahahaha! It's not just email my friends... I know network engineers that could seriously cripple the entire WAN, locking everyone else out the system and be on a flight for a tropical foreign nation before anyone knows what happened! It would take months to clean up the mess.
There are countless stories of IT staff with access to the email servers finding out about an impending merger and layoff lists and seriously mucking things up.
Companies demand loyalty, confidentiality, and respect from their IT staff then they stab that same staff in the back. It is not surprising they are afraid. Admins are paranoid nowadays due to outsourcing and other cut backs.
I suspect this is all part of an elaborate plan by Apple.
1. Port to Intel in secret (NeXTStep/OpenStep ran on Intel and several other architectures) - Project Marklar. 2. Release easily hacked developer releases that can be put on generic Intel systems. 3. Release final iMac Intel and MacBookPro systems shipping with Intel version of MacOSX including a "Do Not Steal OS X" msg via a kernel extension filename. 4. Let the hackers crack it in the coming week or two. Give them a taste of what they are missing. 5. Slowly increase the encryption and DRM techniques. 6. The pirates will eventually fail, give up and go buy a Mac after having used OS X for a while. 7. Increased sales!
I concur, IBM sends their best and brightest to those accounts who pay huge sums of contract money. All other accounts are shafted. In fact, once their staff obtains more skill they are moved up the chain from the cheap contracts to the progressively more expensive contracts.
So if your company outsources to IBM and thinks they are saving money; they really are not. The following has been proved true:
1. Cheap contract sold by IBM to company. 2. IBM staffs up from bottom of the barrel incompetent picks off the street. 3. As the IBM staff improve their skills they are transferred to other IBM accounts. 4. The company becomes an IBM training and recruiting ground. Good candidates are sent to more important accounts bad candidates are fired. 5. IBM micro-bills the company for anything above and beyond the stated cheap contract terms. 6. IBM's own incompetent staff are inefficient and via their own mistakes IBM ends up micro-billing the company. 7. The company ends up spending more then they ever spent before on IT functions and their mainframe has been dismantled and is now hosted in an IBM data center along with all their midrange servers. 8. The company is now a hostage to IBM as it will cost a huge amount to switch from IBM back to a company owned and managed infrastructure.
Nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM but perhaps they should be drawn & quartered, flayed, and then shot by firing squad.
The region issue and unskippable portions have to due with the DVD standard to which the DVD Player 'complies'. The content creator puts those lockdowns in there. i.e. MPIAA, production studio, etc. There are ways around those features but then you are breaking the law... Apple has to comply to those features or they will loose their ability to distribute the DVD player at all (they license the codes to unlock DVD's). DVDJon wrote DeCSS so he could simply 'play' DVD's under Linux with a side effect that you can also copy the DVD. DeCSS makes it possible to unlock a DVD without the authorized license codes. Therefore, it bypasses the DVD standard controls. DeCSS is included in most Linux systems so that's why it works so well for you.
I was concerned about Red Cross cash pay outs long before the call center scandal. Whenever anyone is handing out $2k to just about anyone with few questions asked; there exists a large opportunity for fraud. Reports of receivers spending the money at strip bars and liquor stores instead of clothes and essentials; a Gucci bag is not an essential item! Civilian records should have been used to distribute money. i.e. local N.O. tax records, voter registration, phone book (incl. unlisted numbers), SSN, etc. The cards should not have been debit cards, they should have had more restrictions on how the money could be spent. There are many reports of non-N.O. persons collecting money from the Red Cross, and gaining shelter services in Texas, etc. The same sort of fraud occurred after 9/11 with fake firemen seeking glory, and the hundreds of millions dollars being passed out with no checks or balances being performed. I am not against helping those in need but you can't just pass out money without accounting for it properly and making some basic assertions that the receiver is not committing fraud. Now there are more fraud allegations against other charity groups who collected huge sums of money and that money has not yet been distributed or the charities are unwilling to show their accounting books. This little scam where Red Cross call center workers were given the ability to simply issue payments to just about anyone without any checks and balances was just plain irresponsible of the Red Cross. The Red Cross only caught on to the scam by noticing a lot of payments were being picked up in the same region as the call center a location where few refugees were located.
Many have already mentioned it, but what would really happen if Microsoft decided to just give up and pull out of the EU?
i.e.
- Stop shipping Windows operating systems to anyone in the EU. - Pull all Microsoft products from store shelves. Windows, MSOffice, etc., etc., etc. - Invalidate all EU software licenses. - Cut off support for all EU customers. - Close any MS Offices located in the EU, laying off all the workers. - Stage the worlds largest media campaign blasting the EU publicly and stating any nations that pull out of the EU will be instantly re-instated and trade will begin anew.
This would cost Microsoft hundreds of millions and would effect their stock price, but they would recover and would still be making good money. The subsequent public backlash against the EU would be enormous and would hurt the EU economy much more then it will hurt Microsoft. Suddenly all businesses in the EU will be stuck not able to get updates or even patches and zero support. It is not realistic for the EU businesses to migrate to Apple or even Linux. Seeing that Office for the Mac would also be pulled, the only choice being OpenOffice which is not a great choice yet.
There is no law that states Microsoft has to bend over and take it in the EU. There is no law that states they must sell product to EU nations.
Personally, I hate Microsoft, but I hate the EU even more! Were any other company treated the way Microsoft has been treated by the EU; they would have left a long long time ago. As much as I hate Microsoft I hate liberalism, socialism, multi-culturism, and large government even more. I would love to see MS smackdown the EU, it would be an enormous event. What good is Monopoly power if you are not willing to use the power?
RoR (Ruby on Rails) is simply a very nice API for doing web apps with Ruby. It will auto-generate some code via what Rails calls Scaffolding. This is meant to get something working extremely quickly and it allows you to enter some data into a table with minimal fuss. The code it generates is quick and dirty and you are supposed to re-write each method as you move forward. That said, it's not a real code generator in the traditional sense. The Wow factor of the videos on rubyonrails.com show off the Scaffolding but that is only a very small part of Rails development.
Ruby itself is very maintainable because the syntax is so very clean. However, it's up to you to document your code with meaningful comments, check it into CVS or Subversion, and implement your own Unit Tests, and include RDOC tags in your comments, etc. All code regardless of language is maintainable if you eliminate the code monkey bad habits. i.e. if you've been coding in PHP and all your code became unmaintable then it's your own fault and not that of PHP. Ruby in my opinion is better organized then PHP and encourages good code standards but ultimately, it's up to the programmer. If you are a neat freak and are very detail oriented and you tend to go back and cleanup, test your code before you check it into your version control system then your code will always be maintainable.
I like the way the RoR ActiveRecord mapping system; maps my classes to database tables and objects to my records. You can programatically create records in the table by creating additional objects. The scaffolding will read an existing database table and generate working classes so you can utilize CRUD functionality. You don't have to use scaffolding but it comes in handy for me even when I throw it out one method at a time and re-write it.
Seriously, you need to get real. If you as the one and only IS person can keep things afloat then management will never hire you a PFY (pimply faced youth) to be your assistant! It's a small business, they don't have money for an IT department! Never gonna happen, you are the chief geek, get used to it.
The only real solution is to screw things up enough get overwhelmed and then ask management for help and beg them to hire an assistant. The alternative is to start making some serious automation to make your life easier. Learn some programming like Python or Ruby and get cracking on making it easier to admin user accounts, etc. Oh and stop thinking you are joe IS manager because ya ain't... If you are an experienced IS manager then you got a raw deal and are now the SysAdmin grunt; Time to move on, dude! Basically, you need to face reality, this company will never have a large IT environment like a Fortune 100 company so stop trying to change it to be like a Fortune 100 company IT infrastructure. It sounds like a small business that just can't spend money on staff nor IT gadets.
Alternative, call your local high school and speak with the guidance counselor as well as a computer teacher or two. Find some youthful volunteers who want real world experience. Maybe you can get management to hire one or two of these kids part time. Beats flipping burgers at Mickey D's!
1. Give that high-powered desktop with dual LCD panels to someone who isn't going to waste CPU cycles and gigabytes of RAM running only a web browser, email, and some ssh sessions. Perhaps a developer?!?!
2. Get yourself an old Pentium 400Mhz box, don't bother installing X-Windows, Gnome, nor even KDE. Replace your 2 LCD panels with one VGA 19" or 20" monitor that you've probably got just collecting dust somewhere.
3. Run Pine (novice) or Mutt(pro) for email, ssh, vim or emacs, and Links2 (with Javascript & Graphics) http://links.twibright.com/
4. Use GNU Screen to manage the 3 applications you need to run with unlimited windows including the ability to name and split your screens. Get someone to put screen on those remote boxes if it's not already there so you can keep your session running on the server when you disconnect. This way you can just exit out of screen and logout of your console then return and login again and restore the screen sessions. Heck you could even dial into work and resume all your sessions from home too!
5. Figure out what scripting languages you have available on all those boxes you monitor via ssh and then write scripts in that language.
6. Run your console in high res FrameBuffer mode and use a nicer font, gives you more room to split GNU Screen.
There, productivity problem solved. Also approach your boss and ask for a raise for the amount of money you just saved the company. i.e. they bought an over priced, over powered machine for someone who really doesn't need it.
This is what happens when you ask stupid questions on Slashdot and then brag about how great your workstation is. Well buddy, got news for ya many of us have better workstations!
To top it all off, my team will be able to compile XCode 2.2 apps utilizing all the workstations and even a few G5 XServes (non clustered) in the server room. That alone will cut down our compile time considerably!
Yeah, Yeah, I could build a quad Athlon monster that will be cheaper but I am not paid to build boxes, my company buys them for me.
Not the Universities nor the Professors problem...
on
Is Wi-Fi Ruining College?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not the Universities nor the Professors problem...
If I were teaching, I would tell everyone that I get 'paid' and the school gets your money whether or not you pass or fail. Grow up, this is college. Look to your left and look to your right, next semester either one or both of those individuals will no longer be here.
In order to pass this course, you will need to do all of the assignments on the syllabus and turn them in on time. You will need to attend all the lectures and read the assigned reading. You will need to spend time studying and researching your own answers and you will need to participate in class discussions. You will get out of this course what you put into it.
Now we have some very cool technical toys to share and use in this course but it's up to you to not let them get in the way of learning. So go ahead, surf away and play stupid games, chat with your friends, take a nap on the bean bag chairs, etc. But if you fail this class, it's your own darn fault. If your parents are paying your way, then you will have to explain to them why you failed. There is no such thing as a parent teacher conference in the real world!
The UN is completely corrupt. Don't go linking to how to feed the starving without also mentioning the child rapes and of course the oil for food program! Or how they are trying to get the US to renovate the UN building in NYC and expecting to spend about a billion extra to do so (American Tax Dollars)... Donald Trump testified for over a half hour on just how screwed up the UN was when it came to construction costs and project planning. The UN does more harm then good, it is no better then the League of Nations which proves it's nothing more then history repeating itself. Little good the League of Nations did to prevent WWII. If say the US and UK along with one other like Spain or Australia were to pull out of the UN it would collapse under it's own bloat and weight.
As far as feeding the starving goes; most of the starving people are starving because their local governments are corrupt and evil or they are living in the middle of a freaking desert and need to move. Afghanistan was more interested in growing opium then food and it's proving to be a real bitch to get them to stop as the money is too damn good. So the UN goes to feed the starving people and they rape the children and steal the money. Just do a Google News search on Zimbabwe. Mugabe stole the whites farmland and now they are letting the farmland go to waste, meanwhile millions will now starve because the warlords don't have the farming skills required nor the desire to produce enough food for the people. They just wanted the land as a possession. Zimbabwe is refusing to let the UN build housing for people whose homes the warlords destroyed. Meanwhile, the US Ambassador makes a statement about Mugabe's being responsible for the country's economic crisis and chronic food shortages and Mugabe tells him to "Go to Hell".
If the UN was so great, why the hell didn't they send in troops, kick the crap out of the warlords in Zimbabwe and Somalia (no official government to speak of) and then rebuild the crumbled societies? I'll tell you why, the UN does not care enough to do what is necessary. The UN is full of dictators who only care about their own affairs.
Re:"Upgrade" boycott doesn't ignore Vista
on
Ignore Vista Until 2008
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Big companies have corporate site licenses for Windows without Product Activation, etc. We install WinXP or Win2k from the network. We boot a new machine out of the box with a networkable boot cd and kick off a ghost image onto the hardware. The only people actually installing Windows onto hardware the manual way are engineers putting together a new ghost image. The boxes coming from HP, IBM, etc. are never even booted into the OS that comes with them before they are wiped out. The engineers will probably play around with Vista but it is unlikely they will approve it for rollout to 12,000+ PC's until at least the first service pack.
Analog Media was free until it went digital and you can make unlimited exact duplicate copies and distribute them online where the copying continues into the millions.
1. Digital media was born. 2. MP3 Audio Compression changed a 300MB Lossless WAV file into a 4MB file. 3. Broadband came along and now you can download 4MB in under 4 seconds. 4. BitTorrent made it possible to download huge files such as Movies. 5. Why go to the movie theater when you can have a better experience at home? Why even go to the video store when there is NetFlix? You can even copy the DVD's you rent, just like people did with VHS tapes.
RIAA & MPAA are dealing with 50 year old concepts that have just been rendered obsolete. The entire music and movie industry have just had it's revenue models completely toasted. Of course they are in a panic. They have no idea what to do but to try to slow down the changes and rake in as much dough as they can. The mere thought of exact duplicate copies floating around the Internet just scares the heck out of them. It also makes them think they are losing revenue when they really are not. In fact, their revenue keeps increasing; trouble is they think of it as a loss. Most people who pirate stuff probably would not have bought it in the first place.
Apple has proven that if you build it they will come. Make it easy to find what you are looking for. Make it easy to pay for it and keep the price cheap and people will buy. Breaking the albums into individual songs was brilliant, they sell more music that way then with albums. Now if they did the same with television shows and movies but distributed a higher quality file with the ability to burn it to DVD I would dump Netflix and probably my cable TV in a heartbeat. Of course more of my time is spent on a computer and in reading those old things called books then watching mind numbing television.
Yeah but the more they use the Mac the more they like it and the less they use the Linux box and the Windows box. Believe me, I had 3 Windows boxes and 4 *Nix flavored boxes. Now I am down to a headless Windows box runing UltraVNC and the *Nix flavored boxen plus 2 Apple laptops 2 Apple Desktops (G4 & G5) a Mac Mini and 3 iPods! Ack! They're multiplying!
Slashdot Mirror
IE8 on Win7 (32bit/64bit) is just as vulnerable, re-read that bulletin!
This emergency update includes the CanSecWest fixes where they 0wned a Win7 IE8 system in minutes! There were a hundred Microsoft employees at CanSecWest and they were left scratching their heads because they didn't understand the exploit right away. It was a sophisticated manipulation of realtime memory locations.
a. Get off Windows if you can. You simply don't see these attacks on other OS platforms. Even with all the below precautions we still catch people getting infected with malware....
(Reality... We are stuck with Windows...)
1. Install advanced firewall and web proxy filtering, block all social networks, non-work email, any Pr0n, or non-work related sites, etc.
2. Block foreign international IP ranges such as China, Korea, India, Russia, the Balkins, etc that you really don't need.
3. Remove admin privileges from your users on Windows; only IT staff such as developers and deskside tech's need it.
4. Install anti-virus protection but don't think that covers you completely.
5. Audit where your users are surfing, start blocking things you didn't think of.
6. Be cautious of laptop users who could get infected while on WiFi when not using VPN, etc.
7. Install a good intelligent Packet Analysis system like Netwitness and review it's logs regularly. This is how that Kneber botnet with 74K+ infected systems was discovered.
(Seriously, get the heck off Windows if you can!)
I am not going to argue the Windows is vulnerable because it's popular argument. Windows is vulnerable because it's security is terrible. Yeah every system has vulnerabilities but no one has quite so many as Windows! If it wasn't for Windows, we would not have the problems we have with malware and SPAM. i.e. all SPAM comes from infected Windows boxes and about 90% of all email is SPAM!
Got to do online banking for your small business? Do yourself a favor and go burn a Linux Live CD right now! Then use it for online banking. You won't get infected with that... Many millions getting siphoned from small businesses with online banking because they're Windows computer got hacked by a trojan botnet!
If you have to use Windows, then setup a Citrix farm and lock it down super tight.
I just recently had to pull the plug on my father. He suffered a major heart attack that was unrepairable. He went in for a routine operation and two days after, he had the heart attack. He was rushed from one hospital to another and was given the best medical care possible. He was on an external pacemaker, respirator, liquid cooling blanket (high fever from an infection caused by the surgery), and about 30 different IV medications. He was being kept alive by the machines and drugs. The staff at the Cardiac ICU were outstanding, they revived him 12 times! They were compassionate and explained that every time they revived him they were doing more damage and causing him a great deal of pain. They explained that they would continue until the family said to stop. His outlook was bad, he was not going to survive nor recover. As family members arrived, we were granted access against the visitation rules. We were allowed to have him revived so we could say our peace and to pray with him. We also received his blessing on our decision. As a family we made the decision to not prolong his suffering and after discussing the options, the hospital staff advised turning off the external pacemaker and slowly stopping the heart medications while keeping him sedated and comfortable. They continued some drugs that enhanced his breathing. We waited about five hours until he left this world for the next.
The decision should ALWAYS be with the afflicted or the family. In some nationalized healthcare systems the government performs a financial calculation and then refuses payment or even treatment! In America, you decide how far you want to go to extend life. It is a personal decision. It is your FREEDOM! Even if you don't have insurance in America, you will still be treated and you will still receive the best treatment in the world. You just have to pay for it.
Yes, insurance companies negotiate prices with affiliated hospitals and doctors. When you receive an insurance statement it clearly shows what the doctor or hospital charged you and what the insurance company actually pays them as well as what you owe depending on your coverage. If you work for a large company or state or federal government, you will see a better negotiated price because of the sheer number of employees being covered. Insurance companies make money based on the premiums you and your employer pay into the program. They then bet that most people won't get sick. This is how the insurance company makes money. Same goes for fire insurance, etc.
We are all going to die someday. Most of us will get sick and need healthcare at some point in our lives. The government does not owe you free healthcare! The government is not responsible for your health. All insurance does is protect you from losing everything if you get sick or if your home is destroyed or if you cause a fatal car accident, etc.
I do not want the government to have the power to deny me or my family healthcare because it costs too much. I don't want to go on a waiting list because the government does not have the resources to provide care. I don't want the government to tell me I can't have a knee or hip replacement because I am too old or it costs too much. I don't want the government to tell me they can't at least try to save my father's life because it's hopeless. That is my decision and no one else's! I do not want the government to seize more then half my income to pay for those who should be working and buying their own insurance. I don't want to pay for Joe crack heads habit and treatment. One only needs to look at the legal immigrants entering the USA to understand that they see the opportunity this country provides it's citizens to succeed and that through hard work they can make it too! There are countless success stories of immigrants coming here with nothing and in a generation or two making it really big! I know a Polish family that arrived in the 1960's and the husband and wife worked 2-4 jobs for years to make it possible for their so
Mistakes:
1. Stopped issuing LifeTime Service Option
2. Slow to adapt to HD
3. Very expensive to adapt to HD when it was possible
4. Simply could not cut deals with the CableCo's for some reason... (DirectTV on again off again, etc.)
Fixes:
1. Restarted the LifeTime Service Option
2. Released major improvements in a software upgrade
3. Released cheaper HD capable TiVo's
Welcome to the new century, where I don't watch TV much anymore. I dropped my cable down to the bare minimum just so I can turn on the news if something big happens. I will likely cancel cable entirely in the near future. I watch Internet TV now via Boxee and NetFlix and I purchase some items on iTunes. If I really want 1080p HD content, I buy BluRay discs. Otherwise, the TV's get used by video game consoles.
iTunes needs a couch potato subscription model for TV shows. I want to pay a monthly fee, download any TV show, watch it up to a couple of times and then I really don't care about it any more. I will still buy box sets for shows I really love like BattleStar Galactica, etc. But to pay 2 bucks an episode, can get really expensive really quick. Even 99 cents isn't good enough.
The studios won't do this because it will kill the cable companies! The business model needs to change like it did for the music industry and I believe it will eventually but those networks just don't get it yet. They are content houses but the traditional paid advertising model doesn't work any more. I never buy stuff because I saw it in a commercial! It's like Internet advertising before the IT bubble burst. You could actually make a lot of money on advertising and then suddenly the bottom dropped out. That's because in reality people ignore ads or outright block them. The TiVo let's you fast forward through the ads and frankly if you could skip it entirely you would. Right now the cost of a TV commercial is based on number of viewers and their ages based on time of day. But really all those eyeballs are not really paying attention. Just like the Internet where clicks were measured, the clicking stopped. But there is no way to tell if people are actually watching the ads or not. So all that money is wasted in some ways.
I don't know what's going to happen in the future but until advertising becomes something like what was shown in Minority Report, it's not going to work.... Unless you get some Japanese guys eyeballs transplanted, those ads will likely be something you care about.
Oh for the love of Pete! Microsoft is MOST DEFINITELY RESPONSIBLE for rootkits! Sure, their patch is not the direct cause of the BSOD but letting the damn malware into the OS certainly is the real problem. Stop dancing around the spin and address the real problem for once!
It is possible for malware running on a limited user account to execute on Windows and bootstrap itself into place via the HKLM registry where is should not be allowed to write. In addition, it can place executables into C:\Windows\System32 where it should also not be allowed to write or replace files. Next, malware can actually inject code into WINLOGON.EXE while it's running in RAM. Now you must ask yourself, WHAT THE FRAK?!?!
The Zeus bot tool can be downloaded by any luser without a clue to build a custom rootkit via a Win32 Wizard for crying out loud! The bots produced with such a tool incorporate encryption both for the malware files as well as phoning home to the botnet itself. AV software cannot stop it! Once you are rooted, you machine is now owned by the botnet. Even Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky have had their own computers infected by bots produced by Zeus!
Running around the security perimeter trying to fight off the hoard after the fact, is futile.
Repeat After Me:
- Windows Cannot Be Secured!
- Windows is Insecure!
- Windows is a Security Hazard!
- TIME TO GET OFF WINDOWS!
Yeah it's going to cost you big time, but it's going to cost a whole lot more if corporations don't start acting soon! Many companies have been hacked and the hackers are going after the financial staff, gaining access to online bank accounts and stealing tens of thousands of dollars! Most business banks provide no recourse nor protection if someone else logs in with your account and wires money to a third world country.
Bingo! It's not the tech knowledge that is most important. That's not to say you don't need the technical knowledge, you obviously, need to keep up your technical skills. However, it's the people and communication skills that are most valued. Can you communicate with difficult people, do you have endless patience, are you willing to follow up as well as being proactive?
I've worked in technical support for over a decade. Many people tried working in this fast paced environment and soon found they were not cut out for it. Endless patience is key as well as not letting yourself get frustrated. Even in the most stressful of situations, I can remain calm and collected.
You need to be able to calm a frustrated user and then earn their trust. You do this by never losing your cool and always keeping your word. Honor and integrity as well as a friendly attitude go a long long way. Follow up after resolution or work around and even a drive by "hello, how are things going?" helps to build a relationship.
Transitioning from help desk to second or third tier support or other lateral support groups with a higher profile will advance your career. Educating yourself for a role in programming or engineering is another possible direction. I would avoid educational trainer roles because they are the first to be cut in a down market. I would also avoid management as that is extremely dangerous, middle management is frequently re-organized and people are cut loose all the time. You have to be very political for management roles.
There are opportunities out there for getting out of the help desk and many large companies who previously outsourced parts of their IT learned some painful lessons and they are now starting to rebuild that which they sold off.
Learn the corporate culture and do everything you can to raise your profile in solving big problems. Befriend those who can help you.
ZFS is primarily a server file system. It's meant to be used with multiple disks. Now getting it to work with USB and Firewire drives is going to take some extra effort on Apple's part. HFS+ for Snow Leopard introduces some compression features which is how Apple was able to reclaim 6GB's of disk space on the Snow Leopard install. Much of that is stripping out non-Intel architectures, and some legacy subsystems/API's but the compression shrinks the OS foot print significantly.
So unless you are running a Mac Pro with 4 hard disks or an XServe you are not likely to be using ZFS anyway. ZFS is still a wonderful file system! It's fantastic on data center SAN's and large disk arrays! It's got some really nice features. But for Apple to implement it they need more time to refine it. As others have said already, many Apple applications have to be changed to take advantage of ZFS, etc. Sun's client base has professional Solaris sysadmins setting up servers and such. ZFS was designed to be easy for sysadmins not the average joe user. Apple needs to refine it and provide automatic behavior and build some easier to use management into Disk Utility for it. Then some monitoring tools, etc.
If we see it anywhere in the future, ZFS will likely be rolled out on the next big cat OS after Snow Leopard and only on OS X Server at first. Then likely, the next OS release may incorporate it on the client. I think they took a look at ZFS long and hard and from a design and engineering perspective put it on the back burner for the next OS cycle after Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard was about optimizing what they had and refining it and sharpening it getting it ready for the future. Focus was on 64bit with 32bit compatibility and to clean up the architecture by stripping out legacy stuff. Apple made a decision to not pursue ZFS at this time, that doesn't mean they won't go back and re-address it at a later date.
I personally, don't see the average Mac user gaining all that much benefit from ZFS unless they are a sysadmin and working with big storage. The average user with large storage needs is better off buying a Drobo device http://www.drobo.com/.
Yeah but Apple doesn't force you to activate the OS. Nothing but one's morals stopping you from installing OS X on more then one computer. The Family Pack is a great idea and most users respect the licensing.
However, Apple does do activation on iWork and their professional apps. Then someone took the trial version of iWork implanted a trojan and released it on the torrent networks as a cracked version. Then thousands of Apple users downloaded and installed the trojan. Many of those computers are now part of a botnet with full Unix scripting abilities!
So yeah, Apple's onto something. They should give up the idea of activation, it just encourages pirates and causes the users to try to steal the software and then it makes Apple look bad when they get hijacked...
They have to pay for data transfers? What the heck is up with that? In the USA we have virtually unlimited downloads and the only time someone runs abreast of that is if they download a heck of a lot in a short period of time. I mean they would have to be transferring 10 DVD ISO's a day before the ISP slaps them and shuts off their Internet connection.
Of course, there are other parts of the world that make the USA's Internet speeds look stupid by comparison. But Australia looks downright dismal if they lock you in with a contract and then mico-bill you once you've exceeded a ridiculously low amount of bandwidth.
I get approximately 20Mbps down and 2Mbps up with the possibility of short bursts of even more speed through a cable TV provider. But it doesn't come close to the pure fiber connections found in some industrialized Asian nations such as Japan or South Korea.
You cannot do what you are trying to do... i.e. you cannot run Linux and port the OS X applications to Linux.
However, you can increase your RAM (2GB+) and run either VMWare Fusion or Parallels virtual machine software. Both have been getting a great deal of updates and improvements. They both offer full screen mode, etc.
Run Linux in a Virtual Machine and you can do everything you want to do at very near native speed. Run WinXP or Vista even. Run FreeBSD, Solaris x86, etc. All in virtual machines.
You just need enough RAM to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Boot and run Mac OS X and load the other operating systems into virtual machines when you need them. Make sure you have the latest Mac firmware and all the latest Mac OS X patches.
Alternatively, you can use BootCamp (free beta download from Apple) to repartition the disk non-destructively and dual boot Linux and Mac OS X if you really want to.
You "might" be able to load OS X into a virtual machine running under Linux but it will likely not work as Mac OS X checks for the Mac hardware at boot. It won't see the hardware completely inside a virtual machine. There have been some hacks to make it work, but they are dependent on Leopard betas that will expire.
No way in hell, will large corporate IT rollout both Vista and Office 2007 at the same time! For starters they are 1.0 releases of a new OS and new Office Suite. Then you've got the end user training issue; the interface has changed so radically that it will require extensive training. I don't know about you but putting 50,000 employees through Vista and Office 2007 training is not going to be cheap by any figment of the imagination! All the hardware will have to be Vista certified and from what I've seen have at least 2GB of RAM! FYI, enterprise hardware on the workstation side doesn't mean state of the art. It means economy desktops and laptops that are consistent over years! The IT staff hasn't been trained on Vista either. Only a handful of our tech's and engineers have even played with Vista RC1/RC2! Our engineers will wait for a release then have to figure out how to shutoff most of the Vista new features because they would be a security hazard or cause incompatibilities in our environment. i.e. we still run SP1 w/SP2 hotfixes without actually running SP2 because it breaks half our legacy apps!
It would be more likely for a large corporation to rollout a customized Ubuntu workstation that includes OpenOffice, FireFox 2.0, and a Citrix client. Authenticate it to LDAP and Siteminder that to ActiveDirectory. Run all the required Windows apps under Citrix Farms and keep our old ratty hardware for another 4 years to save money!
It would be even easier to switch everyone to Apple Mac's, again with the Citrix Farm. Mac OS X will already join into Active Directory better then Linux will. Using Office 2004 for the Mac (yeah I know, Rosetta but still pretty fast) and a plan to go to Open Office (er NeoOffice). OS X is more likely to work with folks cell phones and PDA's.
Bwahahahahaha! It's not just email my friends... I know network engineers that could seriously cripple the entire WAN, locking everyone else out the system and be on a flight for a tropical foreign nation before anyone knows what happened! It would take months to clean up the mess.
There are countless stories of IT staff with access to the email servers finding out about an impending merger and layoff lists and seriously mucking things up.
Companies demand loyalty, confidentiality, and respect from their IT staff then they stab that same staff in the back. It is not surprising they are afraid. Admins are paranoid nowadays due to outsourcing and other cut backs.
I suspect this is all part of an elaborate plan by Apple.
1. Port to Intel in secret (NeXTStep/OpenStep ran on Intel and several other architectures) - Project Marklar.
2. Release easily hacked developer releases that can be put on generic Intel systems.
3. Release final iMac Intel and MacBookPro systems shipping with Intel version of MacOSX including a "Do Not Steal OS X" msg via a kernel extension filename.
4. Let the hackers crack it in the coming week or two. Give them a taste of what they are missing.
5. Slowly increase the encryption and DRM techniques.
6. The pirates will eventually fail, give up and go buy a Mac after having used OS X for a while.
7. Increased sales!
I concur, IBM sends their best and brightest to those accounts who pay huge sums of contract money. All other accounts are shafted.
In fact, once their staff obtains more skill they are moved up the chain from the cheap contracts to the progressively more expensive contracts.
So if your company outsources to IBM and thinks they are saving money; they really are not. The following has been proved true:
1. Cheap contract sold by IBM to company.
2. IBM staffs up from bottom of the barrel incompetent picks off the street.
3. As the IBM staff improve their skills they are transferred to other IBM accounts.
4. The company becomes an IBM training and recruiting ground. Good candidates are sent to more important accounts bad candidates are fired.
5. IBM micro-bills the company for anything above and beyond the stated cheap contract terms.
6. IBM's own incompetent staff are inefficient and via their own mistakes IBM ends up micro-billing the company.
7. The company ends up spending more then they ever spent before on IT functions and their mainframe has been dismantled and is now hosted in an IBM data center along with all their midrange servers.
8. The company is now a hostage to IBM as it will cost a huge amount to switch from IBM back to a company owned and managed infrastructure.
Nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM but perhaps they should be drawn & quartered, flayed, and then shot by firing squad.
The region issue and unskippable portions have to due with the DVD standard to which the DVD Player 'complies'. The content creator puts those lockdowns in there. i.e. MPIAA, production studio, etc. There are ways around those features but then you are breaking the law... Apple has to comply to those features or they will loose their ability to distribute the DVD player at all (they license the codes to unlock DVD's). DVDJon wrote DeCSS so he could simply 'play' DVD's under Linux with a side effect that you can also copy the DVD. DeCSS makes it possible to unlock a DVD without the authorized license codes. Therefore, it bypasses the DVD standard controls. DeCSS is included in most Linux systems so that's why it works so well for you.
I was concerned about Red Cross cash pay outs long before the call center scandal. Whenever anyone is handing out $2k to just about anyone with few questions asked; there exists a large opportunity for fraud. Reports of receivers spending the money at strip bars and liquor stores instead of clothes and essentials; a Gucci bag is not an essential item! Civilian records should have been used to distribute money. i.e. local N.O. tax records, voter registration, phone book (incl. unlisted numbers), SSN, etc. The cards should not have been debit cards, they should have had more restrictions on how the money could be spent. There are many reports of non-N.O. persons collecting money from the Red Cross, and gaining shelter services in Texas, etc. The same sort of fraud occurred after 9/11 with fake firemen seeking glory, and the hundreds of millions dollars being passed out with no checks or balances being performed. I am not against helping those in need but you can't just pass out money without accounting for it properly and making some basic assertions that the receiver is not committing fraud. Now there are more fraud allegations against other charity groups who collected huge sums of money and that money has not yet been distributed or the charities are unwilling to show their accounting books. This little scam where Red Cross call center workers were given the ability to simply issue payments to just about anyone without any checks and balances was just plain irresponsible of the Red Cross. The Red Cross only caught on to the scam by noticing a lot of payments were being picked up in the same region as the call center a location where few refugees were located.
Many have already mentioned it, but what would really happen if Microsoft decided to just give up and pull out of the EU?
i.e.
- Stop shipping Windows operating systems to anyone in the EU.
- Pull all Microsoft products from store shelves. Windows, MSOffice, etc., etc., etc.
- Invalidate all EU software licenses.
- Cut off support for all EU customers.
- Close any MS Offices located in the EU, laying off all the workers.
- Stage the worlds largest media campaign blasting the EU publicly and stating any nations that pull out of the EU will be instantly re-instated and trade will begin anew.
This would cost Microsoft hundreds of millions and would effect their stock price, but they would recover and would still be making good money. The subsequent public backlash against the EU would be enormous and would hurt the EU economy much more then it will hurt Microsoft. Suddenly all businesses in the EU will be stuck not able to get updates or even patches and zero support. It is not realistic for the EU businesses to migrate to Apple or even Linux. Seeing that Office for the Mac would also be pulled, the only choice being OpenOffice which is not a great choice yet.
There is no law that states Microsoft has to bend over and take it in the EU. There is no law that states they must sell product to EU nations.
Personally, I hate Microsoft, but I hate the EU even more! Were any other company treated the way Microsoft has been treated by the EU; they would have left a long long time ago. As much as I hate Microsoft I hate liberalism, socialism, multi-culturism, and large government even more. I would love to see MS smackdown the EU, it would be an enormous event. What good is Monopoly power if you are not willing to use the power?
RoR (Ruby on Rails) is simply a very nice API for doing web apps with Ruby. It will auto-generate some code via what Rails calls Scaffolding. This is meant to get something working extremely quickly and it allows you to enter some data into a table with minimal fuss. The code it generates is quick and dirty and you are supposed to re-write each method as you move forward. That said, it's not a real code generator in the traditional sense. The Wow factor of the videos on rubyonrails.com show off the Scaffolding but that is only a very small part of Rails development.
Ruby itself is very maintainable because the syntax is so very clean. However, it's up to you to document your code with meaningful comments, check it into CVS or Subversion, and implement your own Unit Tests, and include RDOC tags in your comments, etc. All code regardless of language is maintainable if you eliminate the code monkey bad habits. i.e. if you've been coding in PHP and all your code became unmaintable then it's your own fault and not that of PHP. Ruby in my opinion is better organized then PHP and encourages good code standards but ultimately, it's up to the programmer. If you are a neat freak and are very detail oriented and you tend to go back and cleanup, test your code before you check it into your version control system then your code will always be maintainable.
I like the way the RoR ActiveRecord mapping system; maps my classes to database tables and objects to my records. You can programatically create records in the table by creating additional objects. The scaffolding will read an existing database table and generate working classes so you can utilize CRUD functionality. You don't have to use scaffolding but it comes in handy for me even when I throw it out one method at a time and re-write it.
Easy, just call CDW, problem solved: http://www.cdw.com/webcontent/land/page/media_cent er.asp
Be like Fred!
Seriously, you need to get real. If you as the one and only IS person can keep things afloat then management will never hire you a PFY (pimply faced youth) to be your assistant! It's a small business, they don't have money for an IT department! Never gonna happen, you are the chief geek, get used to it.
The only real solution is to screw things up enough get overwhelmed and then ask management for help and beg them to hire an assistant. The alternative is to start making some serious automation to make your life easier. Learn some programming like Python or Ruby and get cracking on making it easier to admin user accounts, etc. Oh and stop thinking you are joe IS manager because ya ain't... If you are an experienced IS manager then you got a raw deal and are now the SysAdmin grunt; Time to move on, dude! Basically, you need to face reality, this company will never have a large IT environment like a Fortune 100 company so stop trying to change it to be like a Fortune 100 company IT infrastructure. It sounds like a small business that just can't spend money on staff nor IT gadets.
Alternative, call your local high school and speak with the guidance counselor as well as a computer teacher or two. Find some youthful volunteers who want real world experience. Maybe you can get management to hire one or two of these kids part time. Beats flipping burgers at Mickey D's!
1. Give that high-powered desktop with dual LCD panels to someone who isn't going to waste CPU cycles and gigabytes of RAM running only a web browser, email, and some ssh sessions. Perhaps a developer?!?!
0 0/images/I1_hw_ppworksblade2500_mon_img_lg.jpg
2. Get yourself an old Pentium 400Mhz box, don't bother installing X-Windows, Gnome, nor even KDE. Replace your 2 LCD panels with one VGA 19" or 20" monitor that you've probably got just collecting dust somewhere.
3. Run Pine (novice) or Mutt(pro) for email, ssh, vim or emacs, and Links2 (with Javascript & Graphics) http://links.twibright.com/
4. Use GNU Screen to manage the 3 applications you need to run with unlimited windows including the ability to name and split your screens. Get someone to put screen on those remote boxes if it's not already there so you can keep your session running on the server when you disconnect. This way you can just exit out of screen and logout of your console then return and login again and restore the screen sessions. Heck you could even dial into work and resume all your sessions from home too!
5. Figure out what scripting languages you have available on all those boxes you monitor via ssh and then write scripts in that language.
6. Run your console in high res FrameBuffer mode and use a nicer font, gives you more room to split GNU Screen.
There, productivity problem solved. Also approach your boss and ask for a raise for the amount of money you just saved the company. i.e. they bought an over priced, over powered machine for someone who really doesn't need it.
This is what happens when you ask stupid questions on Slashdot and then brag about how great your workstation is. Well buddy, got news for ya many of us have better workstations!
I've got one of these babies sitting on my desk:
- http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/sunblade25
Which is about to be replaced by this:
- http://www.apple.com/powermac/dualcore.html (Quad CPU's Baby!)
- 76.6 Gigaflops / 16 GB's of RAM
- Dual 23" Displays http://www.apple.com/displays/
- Down the hall will be a few of these http://www.apple.com/xserve/workgroupcluster/
To top it all off, my team will be able to compile XCode 2.2 apps utilizing all the workstations and even a few G5 XServes (non clustered) in the server room. That alone will cut down our compile time considerably!
Yeah, Yeah, I could build a quad Athlon monster that will be cheaper but I am not paid to build boxes, my company buys them for me.
Not the Universities nor the Professors problem...
If I were teaching, I would tell everyone that I get 'paid' and the school gets your money whether or not you pass or fail. Grow up, this is college. Look to your left and look to your right, next semester either one or both of those individuals will no longer be here.
In order to pass this course, you will need to do all of the assignments on the syllabus and turn them in on time. You will need to attend all the lectures and read the assigned reading. You will need to spend time studying and researching your own answers and you will need to participate in class discussions. You will get out of this course what you put into it.
Now we have some very cool technical toys to share and use in this course but it's up to you to not let them get in the way of learning. So go ahead, surf away and play stupid games, chat with your friends, take a nap on the bean bag chairs, etc. But if you fail this class, it's your own darn fault. If your parents are paying your way, then you will have to explain to them why you failed. There is no such thing as a parent teacher conference in the real world!
The UN is completely corrupt. Don't go linking to how to feed the starving without also mentioning the child rapes and of course the oil for food program! Or how they are trying to get the US to renovate the UN building in NYC and expecting to spend about a billion extra to do so (American Tax Dollars)... Donald Trump testified for over a half hour on just how screwed up the UN was when it came to construction costs and project planning. The UN does more harm then good, it is no better then the League of Nations which proves it's nothing more then history repeating itself. Little good the League of Nations did to prevent WWII. If say the US and UK along with one other like Spain or Australia were to pull out of the UN it would collapse under it's own bloat and weight.
As far as feeding the starving goes; most of the starving people are starving because their local governments are corrupt and evil or they are living in the middle of a freaking desert and need to move. Afghanistan was more interested in growing opium then food and it's proving to be a real bitch to get them to stop as the money is too damn good. So the UN goes to feed the starving people and they rape the children and steal the money. Just do a Google News search on Zimbabwe. Mugabe stole the whites farmland and now they are letting the farmland go to waste, meanwhile millions will now starve because the warlords don't have the farming skills required nor the desire to produce enough food for the people. They just wanted the land as a possession. Zimbabwe is refusing to let the UN build housing for people whose homes the warlords destroyed. Meanwhile, the US Ambassador makes a statement about Mugabe's being responsible for the country's economic crisis and chronic food shortages and Mugabe tells him to "Go to Hell".
If the UN was so great, why the hell didn't they send in troops, kick the crap out of the warlords in Zimbabwe and Somalia (no official government to speak of) and then rebuild the crumbled societies? I'll tell you why, the UN does not care enough to do what is necessary. The UN is full of dictators who only care about their own affairs.
Big companies have corporate site licenses for Windows without Product Activation, etc. We install WinXP or Win2k from the network. We boot a new machine out of the box with a networkable boot cd and kick off a ghost image onto the hardware. The only people actually installing Windows onto hardware the manual way are engineers putting together a new ghost image. The boxes coming from HP, IBM, etc. are never even booted into the OS that comes with them before they are wiped out. The engineers will probably play around with Vista but it is unlikely they will approve it for rollout to 12,000+ PC's until at least the first service pack.
Analog Media was free until it went digital and you can make unlimited exact duplicate copies and distribute them online where the copying continues into the millions.
1. Digital media was born.
2. MP3 Audio Compression changed a 300MB Lossless WAV file into a 4MB file.
3. Broadband came along and now you can download 4MB in under 4 seconds.
4. BitTorrent made it possible to download huge files such as Movies.
5. Why go to the movie theater when you can have a better experience at home? Why even go to the video store when there is NetFlix? You can even copy the DVD's you rent, just like people did with VHS tapes.
RIAA & MPAA are dealing with 50 year old concepts that have just been rendered obsolete. The entire music and movie industry have just had it's revenue models completely toasted. Of course they are in a panic. They have no idea what to do but to try to slow down the changes and rake in as much dough as they can. The mere thought of exact duplicate copies floating around the Internet just scares the heck out of them. It also makes them think they are losing revenue when they really are not. In fact, their revenue keeps increasing; trouble is they think of it as a loss. Most people who pirate stuff probably would not have bought it in the first place.
Apple has proven that if you build it they will come. Make it easy to find what you are looking for. Make it easy to pay for it and keep the price cheap and people will buy. Breaking the albums into individual songs was brilliant, they sell more music that way then with albums. Now if they did the same with television shows and movies but distributed a higher quality file with the ability to burn it to DVD I would dump Netflix and probably my cable TV in a heartbeat. Of course more of my time is spent on a computer and in reading those old things called books then watching mind numbing television.
Yeah but the more they use the Mac the more they like it and the less they use the Linux box and the Windows box. Believe me, I had 3 Windows boxes and 4 *Nix flavored boxes. Now I am down to a headless Windows box runing UltraVNC and the *Nix flavored boxen plus 2 Apple laptops 2 Apple Desktops (G4 & G5) a Mac Mini and 3 iPods! Ack! They're multiplying!