They've got a monitor pedestal that closely encloses the Mini. As densely packed as that Mac is, there is probably a reason that the case is made of aluminium. I'd be careful about insulating that box.
Sure, if they understood the rules to begin with. Make them sign at the same time that they sign your Acceptable Use Policy. (You do have an AUP, right?)
"Your job REQUIRES access to our computer systems. If you are unable to select passwords that are resistant to automated attacks, then you are unable to fulfill the requirements of your job and are subject to immediate dismissal."
I take your point that the Boss or his Son is hard to fire, whatever their levels of stupidity.
Expirations and complex rules for passwords are lame and work at cross-purposes. So here's what you do: allow your employees to assign any password they like, with the understanding that you are going to try to crack 'em. If you are successful, then they're fired.
For What It's Worth, this very topic came up recently on the linux-390 list, and an informal poll was taken. SuSE outnumbered the competition by a wide margin.
Now, it's very likely that the above poster upgraded his config files blindly and this is what messed up his installation
While this is easy for a Gentoo n00b to do, I've experienced dependency issues similar to what parent described, to-wit:
Apache was broken [...] the error log showed a problem in PHP. For some reason, it missed a package that has to be recompiled every time PHP is upgraded.
If you don't take especial care to re-emerge spamassassin when Perl is upgraded, the former will fail silently (running beneath evolution). Mplayer's ebuild wasn't smart enough to rebuild win32codecs when I turned on its real USE flag. Portage is not perfect!
I tried using Open Office, and after a day of trying to figure out how to do what I did in MSOffice, I just went back to using MSOffice
Few people are going to be fully productive after only a day fiddling around with either OO or MSO. They are both *big* programs, with lots of features and layers of cascading pulldowns.
What you're saying is that you've got better things to do with your time than learn another interface. I understand; inertia can be a powerful thing. If you've already decided that you are going to remain married to Microsoft for the long term then you have little reason to invest the time to learn something new.
But if your needs ever change -- you acquire a combination of Linux and MS-Windows machines, or you want to avoid MS document fingerprinting -- then OO is something you should seriously look at.
While I get a chuckle every time Microsoft is hoist by their own BSOD petard, in this case the production staff is due some kudos for staying cool under fire.
In my other life I do tech for a local community theatre group. Folks, anything can happen during a live performance. No matter how much you might prepare, stuff happens, and it happens in front of everybody. Power can fail, body mikes can break, lamps burn out, RFI can wreak havoc. You can't prepare for every eventuality, but you can handle the situation with grace.
"...one shouldn't underestimate the power of older hardware."
While a little OT, I want to emphasize this. Shortly after I put up Gentoo on a 128MiB 350MHz machine, I was impressed at the responsiveness of the Linux 2.6 kernel. I found myself simultaneously emerge-ing OpenOffice, encoding a CD, browsing the 'net, and listening to a compendium of Who oggfiles... and XMMS wasn't missing a beat. That new dispatcher is cherry.
Yes, it takes 39 hours to emerge OpenOffice on that beater machine, but who cares? Interactive response is still pretty decent. You needn't be in such a hurry to upgrade, unless you're a gamer.
in other words, where right wing lunatics can peddle hate
It appears that Slashdot is where the left wing lunatics peddle hate. Maybe someday we'll get you guys together so you can hash it out.
Gilmore:
"I think there is a giant group in the middle of American politics that knows that things are really wrong in many ways but they don't like the completely polarized left vs. right that was created during the last few years."
We ( and by we I mean people with "funny" names, beards, etc ) are always put in the random search line in airports
My blonde 20-y-o daughter is always searched when she flies in and out of town. So you'll excuse me if I discount your tale of persecution just a skosh.
I'm sure that you have experienced some discrimination. But you're likely seeing more than is really there.
(And BTW: if fewer Muslims whined about their rights being trampled, and more of them confronted the radical fringe, you'd be treated better by the infidels.)
Good catch, Nine Tenths. The Lady Ada was the first person I thought of. Yet they, struggling to find a token woman for their list, come up with some venture capitalist that nobody has ever heard of outside of Silly Valley?
Nat (the Ximian dude) recently hurt himself and has been reduced to being a one-handed typist. In order to stay connected, he's hired someone to take dictation for him. In today's blog entry he talks about the experience, what it's like for a very competent typist to use a dictation system, and thinks aloud about future intelligent speech-to-text applications.
With a deadline of a 1000 years [...] it gives new meaning to putting stuff off till tommorow.
Au contraire, Pierre. Here's my perspective, from the far side of 50 years of age: retirement is too damn close for me to screw around now. I can't change careers. I don't dare quit my fat job. I'll never go to grad school. I've only got 15 years left to feather my nest for retirement. I have no options.
If I turned on the television tomorrow morning and Diane Sawyer was telling me that I had a thousand years left, I'd quit my job faster than you can blink. I'd do something different.
I think that people procrastinate because they have too little time, not because they have too much.
"Doing it together" has brought us little more than diplomatic hassle, policy wars and engineering delays.
The Race for Space was an expensive bugger, but it was also a time of great innovation.
I welcome the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Japanese. Go Arianespace! Whose idea was it to replace two lumbering bureaucracies with a single humongous multinational lumbering bureaucracy?
No thanks. I got a throbber for Belkin when the news broke that their routers hijacked HTTP requests.
Yeah, maybe they fixed it after the subsequent uproar. But I don't remember that they ever issued an apology. Tell me that they fired somebody over this, and I'll think about buying another Belkin product.
... um, repeatedly. No fooling, "geek conference"? Put up a shell window and cycle through a longish make. If the h/w you're showing off is fast, anybody who's ever suffered through a kernel build on a 350MHz Deceleron will be impressed as those cc warnings flash by.
Of course, in order to require you to work at home, the company has to subsidize your broadband connection. No telecommuter will have to pay for their home connection -- just like health insurance, right? Part of the package!
But since the company owns your broadband connection, they can assert control over it. Betcha they audit every website you cruise, and betcha they insert a netnanny proxy with a Victorian attitude. Goodbye P2P, goodbye IRC.
When employers become de facto ISPs, with "group rates" from cable companies and telcos -- that'll be the end of cheap broadband for individuals. Again, just like health insurance. If you want real Internet access without strings, you'll pay through the nose. I imagine that most people will accept what they get for "free".
Last July I installed
John the Ripper on my home firewall. John is
a password cracker, something like crack and l0phtcrack.
I wanted to
see how vulnerable my own passwords were.
From what I can tell, John runs a dictionary-based attack against your
master.passwd file, then runs the dictionary with various shifts in
capitalization, then runs the dictionary again with an assortment of
numeric
digits inserted into its guesses.
Finally John just runs a brute-force attack, generating passwords
with successively longer and longer lengths until it lucks out.
In my case John finally did luck out, finding one of my passwords after 18 days
of crunching numbers. This particular account had a
relatively weak password -- though no dictionary attack would have found it,
it was still only five bytes long.
That's a wakeup call for me. I've been using shorter passwords for
years, thinking that by avoiding common words I was safe. But I can
see that they're breakable now.
It's one thing for someone to preach that you should really have longer passwords; it's
quite another to see it for yourself. If your passwords are easy to
guess, or are variants of dictionary words, or can be generated easily by
brute force -- there are widely available tools that can give
the keys to the city to any lowlife that wants into your machine.
Run one of the password crackers on your own system today, and become
enlightened! And don't be comforted by the 18 days it took to crack
my easy five-character password on a 300MHz Celeron notebook: there's also a
distributed version of John the Ripper that divides up the work
of cracking your password file among many computers.
The more I learn about security, and the tighter I make my systems,
the more afraid I am. If you aren't afraid, you are either very very good
at what you do -- and I humbly bow before you -- or you haven't much of a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
They've got a monitor pedestal that closely encloses the Mini. As densely packed as that Mac is, there is probably a reason that the case is made of aluminium. I'd be careful about insulating that box.
I take your point that the Boss or his Son is hard to fire, whatever their levels of stupidity.
Just. Like. That.
For What It's Worth, this very topic came up recently on the linux-390 list, and an informal poll was taken. SuSE outnumbered the competition by a wide margin.
If you don't take especial care to re-emerge spamassassin when Perl is upgraded, the former will fail silently (running beneath evolution). Mplayer's ebuild wasn't smart enough to rebuild win32codecs when I turned on its real USE flag. Portage is not perfect!
Lessig accompanied Barlow on that trip to Brazil, and wrote a pair of inspirational blog entries.
What you're saying is that you've got better things to do with your time than learn another interface. I understand; inertia can be a powerful thing. If you've already decided that you are going to remain married to Microsoft for the long term then you have little reason to invest the time to learn something new.
But if your needs ever change -- you acquire a combination of Linux and MS-Windows machines, or you want to avoid MS document fingerprinting -- then OO is something you should seriously look at.
In my other life I do tech for a local community theatre group. Folks, anything can happen during a live performance. No matter how much you might prepare, stuff happens, and it happens in front of everybody. Power can fail, body mikes can break, lamps burn out, RFI can wreak havoc. You can't prepare for every eventuality, but you can handle the situation with grace.
It sounds to me like the Microsofties did fine.
Yes, it takes 39 hours to emerge OpenOffice on that beater machine, but who cares? Interactive response is still pretty decent. You needn't be in such a hurry to upgrade, unless you're a gamer.
I'm sure that you have experienced some discrimination. But you're likely seeing more than is really there.
(And BTW: if fewer Muslims whined about their rights being trampled, and more of them confronted the radical fringe, you'd be treated better by the infidels.)
Yeah, these "top ten" lists are a crock.
Nat (the Ximian dude) recently hurt himself and has been reduced to being a one-handed typist. In order to stay connected, he's hired someone to take dictation for him. In today's blog entry he talks about the experience, what it's like for a very competent typist to use a dictation system, and thinks aloud about future intelligent speech-to-text applications.
If I turned on the television tomorrow morning and Diane Sawyer was telling me that I had a thousand years left, I'd quit my job faster than you can blink. I'd do something different.
I think that people procrastinate because they have too little time, not because they have too much.
... 'cause they likely have your IP address and your printer serial anyway.
The Race for Space was an expensive bugger, but it was also a time of great innovation.
I welcome the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Japanese. Go Arianespace! Whose idea was it to replace two lumbering bureaucracies with a single humongous multinational lumbering bureaucracy?
When I close my eyes and imagine him on the VSS Enterprise, I think of thisrather than the captain's chair.
Yeah, maybe they fixed it after the subsequent uproar. But I don't remember that they ever issued an apology. Tell me that they fired somebody over this, and I'll think about buying another Belkin product.
... um, repeatedly. No fooling, "geek conference"? Put up a shell window and cycle through a longish make. If the h/w you're showing off is fast, anybody who's ever suffered through a kernel build on a 350MHz Deceleron will be impressed as those cc warnings flash by.
He also referred to the "Quito Skyhook" (in Friday).
Of course, in order to require you to work at home, the company has to subsidize your broadband connection. No telecommuter will have to pay for their home connection -- just like health insurance, right? Part of the package!
But since the company owns your broadband connection, they can assert control over it. Betcha they audit every website you cruise, and betcha they insert a netnanny proxy with a Victorian attitude. Goodbye P2P, goodbye IRC.
When employers become de facto ISPs, with "group rates" from cable companies and telcos -- that'll be the end of cheap broadband for individuals. Again, just like health insurance. If you want real Internet access without strings, you'll pay through the nose. I imagine that most people will accept what they get for "free".
From what I can tell, John runs a dictionary-based attack against your master.passwd file, then runs the dictionary with various shifts in capitalization, then runs the dictionary again with an assortment of numeric digits inserted into its guesses.
Finally John just runs a brute-force attack, generating passwords with successively longer and longer lengths until it lucks out.
In my case John finally did luck out, finding one of my passwords after 18 days of crunching numbers. This particular account had a relatively weak password -- though no dictionary attack would have found it, it was still only five bytes long. That's a wakeup call for me. I've been using shorter passwords for years, thinking that by avoiding common words I was safe. But I can see that they're breakable now.
It's one thing for someone to preach that you should really have longer passwords; it's quite another to see it for yourself. If your passwords are easy to guess, or are variants of dictionary words, or can be generated easily by brute force -- there are widely available tools that can give the keys to the city to any lowlife that wants into your machine.
Run one of the password crackers on your own system today, and become enlightened! And don't be comforted by the 18 days it took to crack my easy five-character password on a 300MHz Celeron notebook: there's also a distributed version of John the Ripper that divides up the work of cracking your password file among many computers.
The more I learn about security, and the tighter I make my systems, the more afraid I am. If you aren't afraid, you are either very very good at what you do -- and I humbly bow before you -- or you haven't much of a clue.