Why doesn't he just turn over the network to a non-profit? Then, it's no longer a city run network, but can remain free as long as it gets funding somehow. Donations from the city?:)
I agree that it would be a good idea to carry a handgun. Make sure you check what the deal is with conceal and carry permits in each state. If you're gonna carry, make sure you go to some self defense classes and gun safety. Most experts agree that having a gun on you makes it more likely that it will be used against you instead of saving you, however, with the proper training it definitely can help you.
Note that carrying a weapon is not only for warding off human attackers. If you're trekking across wilderness areas, there are plenty of things out there with big pointy teeth that would like to eat you. I always drop a.45 in my backpack when I go up to the Boundary Waters. I've always been able to scare the bears off by yelling and waving my arms and throwing stuff at them, but that may not always work.
Rattlesnakes do not scare off easily. If you come in close contact with a rattlesnake and it's coiled, the best thing to do if you're close is to shoot it. Make sure you hit it in the head, because they can still strike if you hit it anywhere else. A shotgun works best on snakes, but I've killed those with a.22. If you get bitten by a rattlesnake in the middle of nowhere, there is a possibility of death. But if you don't die, you will likely lose fingers, toes, a foot. Their venom kills the flesh as it spreads throughout your body, and there is no way to bring that flesh back to life. You might look into travelling with some anti-venom. I've never looked into this so I don't know if it's even possible. It may need refrigeration.
I've heard wolves at night, but never actually seen any come close. Coyotes are terrified of people, so are fox. Unless they are rabid. If you see a fox walking around during the day or any other animal which normally is nocturnal, there is a very high chance that it is rabid and could become agressive.
There were a whole bunch of them up there this weekend. Core Duo 1.83 MacBook Pro for $1699, and the 2.0 for $2299. They had iMacs with Intel procs starting at $1099 also.
Keep in mind that it's very easy to get a 40% discount on them, and I'll tell you how right now. If you use it for your job, and have it shipped to your work address, you can write it off on your taxes next yet. It depends on what tax bracket you are in, but for a lot of the people on here it will save them 40%. Of course, you should only do this if you legitimately use it for work.
I have a Sony DMS-8400 petabyte storage array. It's about 3 years old and cost $1.2 million new. I'm no longer using it and it's not doing me any good. It seriously holds a full Petabyte of storage, 1000 terabytes. Drop me an email at austad( at ) signal15 dot com if you're intersted.
Infoblox is a great product for doing this. It's all appliance based, runs Bind (Cricket Liu works for them), and basically everything operates as a grid. I've done a couple of installs of this for clients, and it's a very slick system.
See my article here on this. Bottom line, I don't think it's necessarily a problem with retailers storing PINs, it's a fundamental implementation problem.
Your analogy makes no sense. A lightbulb emits light from the UV to the IR range, and a laser emits a specific frequency which could fall anywhere in there. IR is less dense (wavelength-wise), but it will still burn you. I don't understand where you are coming from here. A laser is powerful at lower wattages than a lightbulb because of its focused directional beam, which you mention, but then go on to argue that higher frequencies are more directional, which they may be, but have you ever seen the radiation map things for a 2.4ghz antenna?
Anyway, it's in the millwatt range, and people aren't putting their heads or their crotches on the access point and nothing is going to happen. This guy that banned wifi is a complete idiot.
As other posters have said, pony up the code, or lose the sale.
However, you may be able to get them agree to audit the code with someone from your company present (which would be great if the auditors had questions) and only audit the code on machines that are not connected to the network, or connected to an isolated network if you need to do network testing w/ it.
A previous company I worked for insisted on auditing a vendors code, and they let us. Our guys fixed about half the bugs with it during the audit, and they required us to do it on an isolated network (no usb keys or anything like that allowed in the room either). No problem for us, why would we need internet access to audit their code?
Just lie a little bit. In reality, they have no business asking, and they can't verify what you tell them. If you're honest with them, expect a salary that is not much more than what you are getting now. Salaries for what I do have been going up quite a bit over the past few years, and once you're at a place, you usually don't get big raises. So, the only way to get a big increase is leave, and tell the new employer what you are looking for, or to lie a little bit on what you are making now. If they want to hire you, they aren't going to undercut what they think your current salary is.
I interview a lot of people, and I know every single one of them lies about their current salary when that question comes up (I don't ask it, other managers do). That's fine with me. I'm a big fan of paying people what they are worth instead of undercutting them. It leads to happier employees, and more work gets done.
You can't motivate someone with more cash, but you can certainly de-motivate them with not enough. Bottom line, if you're interviewing, either lie or be straight with what you think you are worth. And if you're hiring someone, don't count pennies when making someone an offer, pay them based on their experience and what others are making in the industry.
Tor is essentially what I think you are trying to describe, but it's an overlay of the current internet. As the parent poster noted, it takes smarts to make the internet work correctly, and letting joe blow run equipment that could potentially disrupt everything probably isn't such a good idea. Even some ISP's manage to screw things up for everyone because they have clueless engineers.
But, after trying just about every FS under the sun for my backups, on Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X, I finally settled on Mac HFS+ with journaling and case-sensitivity enabled. I have a 900GB RAID with it on it, and I'm storing some files that are 7GB+. I haven't had any issues with it at all.
Yep, it means you will probably need a mac, but Linux does have HFS support (I don't know how good it is). But everything is working out great, and supposedly has some sort of auto-defrag, but I'm too lazy to actually verify this.
I had this idea about a year ago and started working on it, and then RSA beat me to the punch. How do you compete against a company for services when you require their equipment and software (that they get for almost nothing)?
They are selling it as a way for banks and other sites to avoid phishing attacks, while allowing customers to only carry around one token. There are some issues with that theory though, and while it may reduce the problem, it cannot eliminate it in its current form. There is a way to fix that though.:)
My old roomie had 6 machines in his room that were on all the time. We put them in front of the air return vent with a sheet of plastic over it to direct all of the hot air into the vent. I left the furnace fan on all the time, so it distributed the heat throughout the house. My furnace lit up only like once a day with this in place. The electric was a bit higher, but it would have been high anyway.
Another thing, if you have central air/heating, keep the fan on all the time. It will actually decrease your heating and cooling costs, and if you buy some 3M filters, it will keep your air much cleaner and reduce dust in the house. Since I started doing this, I noticed about a 10-15% drop in my gas bills, and I have virtually no dust in the house.
I've used them for a few projects and always been happy. Some girl in Azerbaijan turned around some PHP code for me in under an hour, and it cost me $18. It was nicely documented and did exactly what it was supposed to do, which was to connect to two separate databases and transfer data from one to the other. Both DB's had different schemas also.
Just post your project, people will bid on it, and select the coder with the best bid/rating combo. Yeah, it's outsourcing since the best bid will likely come from another country, but if you want it done on the cheap, this is the way to go. The way I look at it is that I'm probably helping someone out who is in a less fortunate living situation than I am.
You are wrong. The majority of ulcers outside the US are caused by H. Pylori bacteria. A good percentage in the US also are caused by it, but it's definitely not the only reason.
Stress increases the amount of acid in your stomach, and people whose stomachs do not produce a thick enough layer of protective mucus can be damaged by it. Damaged areas produce nearly no protective mucus, and it's a downward spiral once the damage is done. This is why it takes so long for them to heal.
I also have an ulcer from a job I had over 2 years ago. I've been tested several times for H. Pylori and a couple of other bacterias that can cause ulcers, and tested negative every time. A double dose if Protonix is making it much better for me and it's slowly healing, but it definitely gets worse if I'm stressed out for a few days.
There are also studies showing that people who have the HPV or Herpes virus also have increased chances of getting an ulcer, but there's no proof that these viruses actually cause it.
As others have stated, dial-up will not make you more secure. That's one of the most ridiculous arguments I've ever heard. If anything, I would venture to say you are less secure. From what I've seen, people on slow dial-up connections are less likely to download critical security updates for their machines, making them more vulnerable than broadband users.
I live in MN, and even though I'm caucasian, I don't really see any issues with racism in IT.
But, one thing that I have noticed is that THIS IS MN. Most people here are white. If anything, it's probably easier to get a job here if you're not white. This is because many organizations are struggling to meet their affirmative action requirements. At a previous job, their online application asked your heritage, and if you were not a whitey, you automatically got an interview.
More than half the battle in IT is just getting an interview, so this worked out quite well for a lot of people. The company even resorted to posting job ads in the south in order to get more people of color in to meet their requirements. So, your recruiter's statement that it would be easy for you to get a job because you're white baffles me. Why would he say that anyway? Sounds like he is a prick.
Anyway, with all of the different people I've worked with, I haven't seen any racism. I'm sure if you're the one who's a victim, it's more obvious. I have seen the race card pulled a couple of times when people got fired, but all 3 times it was without merit. One guy slept 4 hours a day at work, and the other two were email admins and were taking confidential company emails from the execs (relating to a huge lawsuit) and sending off to a third party. The FBI hauled them off.
Every area of the country is different though. It's hard to say. But, of the geeky IT people I know, they just don't care about people's differences, they care about ability.
I don't mind the occasional meeting. However, I used to work at a place that had meetings to discuss more meetings. It was insane. 5-6 hours a day in meetings, usually regarding techy stuff, but with managers who didn't understand technology.
Hey! Something's broken! Let's have a meeting to discuss this critical thing instead of letting our IT guys work on it. And half the time, all of the managers and directors would have a closed door meeting without any tech people to decide what to do, and then come out and start telling people to reboot things, like switches and routers. It was insane.
I've never been so stressed out in my life. The worst part, is I was stressed for no reason. I really didn't do any work there considering I was required in all these meetings where nothing got done. I have a strong suspicion that meetings are they only way for incompetent managers to seem like they are doing something.
Seriously, I hope everyone collectively gives BS the finger. Maybe their peers will have enough of them also and just de-peer them.
It reminds me of the days where net access was charged by minute, only now they are charging people who are serving the content. And those people are already paying hosting fees and bandwidth charges from their provider. Peering agreements exist in order for the internet to exist. I'll let you route traffic on my network if you let me route traffic across yours... But now, it's let me route traffic on your network, and any traffic passing through mine I'm gonna extort money from the people serving the content. That's not how the internet works.
What happens if Google, Yahoo, and other large sites get together and just block BellSouth's IP ranges so no BS customers can use their sites? You bet your ass that BS is going to lose customers if they can't access what they want. I would say that the Yahoo's of the world have got BS by the balls, because they could certainly block BS IP's, and BS could do nothing about it. If I don't want a certain IP range hitting my servers, I have every right to block it.
Note that this will not stop transit traffic from passing through BS's network, but it will certainly piss of BS's customer base.
And Mark Cuban's comments on this? He's an idiot. Maybe he should stick to commenting on things he has actual knowledge of.
I love my mac, but right now I have to use Virtual PC because a very small handful of software that I need only runs on Windows. Because there is no virtual pc for the new Intel Macs, it's imperative that if I'm going to replace my current powerbook, that I have some option for running windows on it.
They go in your ear, which is great. But they don't really block out any background noise. When I'm on a plane, I find myself cranking the volume on my iPod to at least 90% so I can hear the music. Don't get me wrong, I can hear it at lower volumes, but the noise from the plane drowns out much of the less prominent stuff (background instruments, sounds, etc).
Everyone seems to really like the Shure E2C buds. They have a chart on their site that shows how much ambient noise they block, and it's even more than those Bose (or other brands) noise cancelling headphones. I'm not so sure about the noise cancelling phone either. They block out background noise, with what?? More noise. It's an opposing phase though, but it would be interesting to see what kind of effect this would have on the SPL.
Waste of money unless your taxes are simple
on
Best Tax Programs?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Mine are not simple. I tried both Taxcut and the Quicken/Intuit one a couple years ago, and it said I had a $4200 refund coming to me. I took my stuff to a tax guy, and I ended up getting over $6k back.
Go to a real tax guy, not one of those H&R block things. They will hire anyone, give them a couple days of training and send them out to do your taxes. My tax guy charges me $130. He sends me a postage paid envelope in January every year, I drop my stuff in, he calls me with questions, then when it's ready I go in and sign it. I just drop the tax stuff I need in the envelope as it comes in the mail, print out any 401k or stock market stuff I need, and send it off.
No computer program can be a substitute for a guy with 20 years of experience doing taxes. He'll find deductions you never knew you could take. Deductions add up quickly if you're in a high tax bracket.
I may be a little bit biased, but I've been working in the security industry for years. I've touched just about every firewall solution on the market, especially since the company I currently work for sells just about every firewall solution on the market.
Two reasons I do not like firewalls which run on top of an OS like Windows, Linux, or BSD: 1. They run a full OS. The device and software are Turing complete, which means that if someone cracks the box somehow, it would allow them to run scripts or compiled apps that do other nastiness (using it to scan your internal network, compromise other machines, etc). In addition, depending on the product, you are responsible for OS updates, not the firewall vendor.
2. Bringing up a device that is not an appliance is not just a quick "slap it in a rack and have it working in 5 minute" ordeal. It's usually something along the lines of procure a box, install the OS, make sure OS works with the hardware (NIC drivers, etc), install firewall software, possibly install management software on your machines which will be managing it, etc. This takes time. What if the box croaks and you need to replace it quickly?
My recommendations: 1. NetScreen. These are custom hardware running ScreenOS. There is no scripting capability on the device, and no compilers out there that would even let you compile apps that run on it. It's manageable via ssh, https, or through a management server called NSM if you like that sort of thing (useful in large deployments). They have options for web filtering and deep inspection for catching nastiness. Additionally, the policies are based not on on IP, but also on Zones. Each interface is dropped into a zone, and those zones are specified when creating rules. This both enhances security, and makes your policy base much simpler when using more than two interfaces.
2. Cisco PIX. While I don't really like the pix, it actually is a decent firewall. It doesn't offer much in the way of advanced features, but it's an appliance, it's straighforward, and quick to implement. On the downside, it's comparable in price to the NetScreen, so there's no real reason to use it unless you absolutely must use Cisco.
On a side note, I don't really like Checkpoint at all. Not only does it run on a full fledged general OS, their licensing is a pain to deal with, I've had major problems with bugs in advanced features, and you MUST install a separate management server and use a GUI to manage the thing. The GUI only runs under windows. I have more reasons I don't like it, but I think the above is reason enough to stay away from it.
Someone got a little crazy with the links. Why not link the work "reported" to the actual message or story describing it, and then put all the other useless nonsense in. I had to open 5 goddamn windows before I found what I was looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't he just turn over the network to a non-profit? Then, it's no longer a city run network, but can remain free as long as it gets funding somehow. Donations from the city? :)
I agree that it would be a good idea to carry a handgun. Make sure you check what the deal is with conceal and carry permits in each state. If you're gonna carry, make sure you go to some self defense classes and gun safety. Most experts agree that having a gun on you makes it more likely that it will be used against you instead of saving you, however, with the proper training it definitely can help you.
.45 in my backpack when I go up to the Boundary Waters. I've always been able to scare the bears off by yelling and waving my arms and throwing stuff at them, but that may not always work.
.22. If you get bitten by a rattlesnake in the middle of nowhere, there is a possibility of death. But if you don't die, you will likely lose fingers, toes, a foot. Their venom kills the flesh as it spreads throughout your body, and there is no way to bring that flesh back to life. You might look into travelling with some anti-venom. I've never looked into this so I don't know if it's even possible. It may need refrigeration.
Note that carrying a weapon is not only for warding off human attackers. If you're trekking across wilderness areas, there are plenty of things out there with big pointy teeth that would like to eat you. I always drop a
Rattlesnakes do not scare off easily. If you come in close contact with a rattlesnake and it's coiled, the best thing to do if you're close is to shoot it. Make sure you hit it in the head, because they can still strike if you hit it anywhere else. A shotgun works best on snakes, but I've killed those with a
I've heard wolves at night, but never actually seen any come close. Coyotes are terrified of people, so are fox. Unless they are rabid. If you see a fox walking around during the day or any other animal which normally is nocturnal, there is a very high chance that it is rabid and could become agressive.
There were a whole bunch of them up there this weekend. Core Duo 1.83 MacBook Pro for $1699, and the 2.0 for $2299. They had iMacs with Intel procs starting at $1099 also.
Keep in mind that it's very easy to get a 40% discount on them, and I'll tell you how right now. If you use it for your job, and have it shipped to your work address, you can write it off on your taxes next yet. It depends on what tax bracket you are in, but for a lot of the people on here it will save them 40%. Of course, you should only do this if you legitimately use it for work.
I have a Sony DMS-8400 petabyte storage array. It's about 3 years old and cost $1.2 million new. I'm no longer using it and it's not doing me any good. It seriously holds a full Petabyte of storage, 1000 terabytes. Drop me an email at austad( at ) signal15 dot com if you're intersted.
Infoblox is a great product for doing this. It's all appliance based, runs Bind (Cricket Liu works for them), and basically everything operates as a grid. I've done a couple of installs of this for clients, and it's a very slick system.
See my article here on this. Bottom line, I don't think it's necessarily a problem with retailers storing PINs, it's a fundamental implementation problem.
a rd-fraud-and-bank-negligence
http://www.signal15.com/articles/2006/03/09/atm-c
Your analogy makes no sense. A lightbulb emits light from the UV to the IR range, and a laser emits a specific frequency which could fall anywhere in there. IR is less dense (wavelength-wise), but it will still burn you. I don't understand where you are coming from here. A laser is powerful at lower wattages than a lightbulb because of its focused directional beam, which you mention, but then go on to argue that higher frequencies are more directional, which they may be, but have you ever seen the radiation map things for a 2.4ghz antenna?
Anyway, it's in the millwatt range, and people aren't putting their heads or their crotches on the access point and nothing is going to happen. This guy that banned wifi is a complete idiot.
As other posters have said, pony up the code, or lose the sale.
However, you may be able to get them agree to audit the code with someone from your company present (which would be great if the auditors had questions) and only audit the code on machines that are not connected to the network, or connected to an isolated network if you need to do network testing w/ it.
A previous company I worked for insisted on auditing a vendors code, and they let us. Our guys fixed about half the bugs with it during the audit, and they required us to do it on an isolated network (no usb keys or anything like that allowed in the room either). No problem for us, why would we need internet access to audit their code?
Just lie a little bit. In reality, they have no business asking, and they can't verify what you tell them. If you're honest with them, expect a salary that is not much more than what you are getting now. Salaries for what I do have been going up quite a bit over the past few years, and once you're at a place, you usually don't get big raises. So, the only way to get a big increase is leave, and tell the new employer what you are looking for, or to lie a little bit on what you are making now. If they want to hire you, they aren't going to undercut what they think your current salary is.
I interview a lot of people, and I know every single one of them lies about their current salary when that question comes up (I don't ask it, other managers do). That's fine with me. I'm a big fan of paying people what they are worth instead of undercutting them. It leads to happier employees, and more work gets done.
You can't motivate someone with more cash, but you can certainly de-motivate them with not enough. Bottom line, if you're interviewing, either lie or be straight with what you think you are worth. And if you're hiring someone, don't count pennies when making someone an offer, pay them based on their experience and what others are making in the industry.
Tor is essentially what I think you are trying to describe, but it's an overlay of the current internet. As the parent poster noted, it takes smarts to make the internet work correctly, and letting joe blow run equipment that could potentially disrupt everything probably isn't such a good idea. Even some ISP's manage to screw things up for everyone because they have clueless engineers.
But, after trying just about every FS under the sun for my backups, on Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X, I finally settled on Mac HFS+ with journaling and case-sensitivity enabled. I have a 900GB RAID with it on it, and I'm storing some files that are 7GB+. I haven't had any issues with it at all.
Yep, it means you will probably need a mac, but Linux does have HFS support (I don't know how good it is). But everything is working out great, and supposedly has some sort of auto-defrag, but I'm too lazy to actually verify this.
You must have worked for Enron!
I had this idea about a year ago and started working on it, and then RSA beat me to the punch. How do you compete against a company for services when you require their equipment and software (that they get for almost nothing)?
:)
They are selling it as a way for banks and other sites to avoid phishing attacks, while allowing customers to only carry around one token. There are some issues with that theory though, and while it may reduce the problem, it cannot eliminate it in its current form. There is a way to fix that though.
My old roomie had 6 machines in his room that were on all the time. We put them in front of the air return vent with a sheet of plastic over it to direct all of the hot air into the vent. I left the furnace fan on all the time, so it distributed the heat throughout the house. My furnace lit up only like once a day with this in place. The electric was a bit higher, but it would have been high anyway.
Another thing, if you have central air/heating, keep the fan on all the time. It will actually decrease your heating and cooling costs, and if you buy some 3M filters, it will keep your air much cleaner and reduce dust in the house. Since I started doing this, I noticed about a 10-15% drop in my gas bills, and I have virtually no dust in the house.
RentACoder
I've used them for a few projects and always been happy. Some girl in Azerbaijan turned around some PHP code for me in under an hour, and it cost me $18. It was nicely documented and did exactly what it was supposed to do, which was to connect to two separate databases and transfer data from one to the other. Both DB's had different schemas also.
Just post your project, people will bid on it, and select the coder with the best bid/rating combo. Yeah, it's outsourcing since the best bid will likely come from another country, but if you want it done on the cheap, this is the way to go. The way I look at it is that I'm probably helping someone out who is in a less fortunate living situation than I am.
You are wrong. The majority of ulcers outside the US are caused by H. Pylori bacteria. A good percentage in the US also are caused by it, but it's definitely not the only reason.
Stress increases the amount of acid in your stomach, and people whose stomachs do not produce a thick enough layer of protective mucus can be damaged by it. Damaged areas produce nearly no protective mucus, and it's a downward spiral once the damage is done. This is why it takes so long for them to heal.
I also have an ulcer from a job I had over 2 years ago. I've been tested several times for H. Pylori and a couple of other bacterias that can cause ulcers, and tested negative every time. A double dose if Protonix is making it much better for me and it's slowly healing, but it definitely gets worse if I'm stressed out for a few days.
There are also studies showing that people who have the HPV or Herpes virus also have increased chances of getting an ulcer, but there's no proof that these viruses actually cause it.
As others have stated, dial-up will not make you more secure. That's one of the most ridiculous arguments I've ever heard. If anything, I would venture to say you are less secure. From what I've seen, people on slow dial-up connections are less likely to download critical security updates for their machines, making them more vulnerable than broadband users.
I live in MN, and even though I'm caucasian, I don't really see any issues with racism in IT.
But, one thing that I have noticed is that THIS IS MN. Most people here are white. If anything, it's probably easier to get a job here if you're not white. This is because many organizations are struggling to meet their affirmative action requirements. At a previous job, their online application asked your heritage, and if you were not a whitey, you automatically got an interview.
More than half the battle in IT is just getting an interview, so this worked out quite well for a lot of people. The company even resorted to posting job ads in the south in order to get more people of color in to meet their requirements. So, your recruiter's statement that it would be easy for you to get a job because you're white baffles me. Why would he say that anyway? Sounds like he is a prick.
Anyway, with all of the different people I've worked with, I haven't seen any racism. I'm sure if you're the one who's a victim, it's more obvious. I have seen the race card pulled a couple of times when people got fired, but all 3 times it was without merit. One guy slept 4 hours a day at work, and the other two were email admins and were taking confidential company emails from the execs (relating to a huge lawsuit) and sending off to a third party. The FBI hauled them off.
Every area of the country is different though. It's hard to say. But, of the geeky IT people I know, they just don't care about people's differences, they care about ability.
I don't mind the occasional meeting. However, I used to work at a place that had meetings to discuss more meetings. It was insane. 5-6 hours a day in meetings, usually regarding techy stuff, but with managers who didn't understand technology.
Hey! Something's broken! Let's have a meeting to discuss this critical thing instead of letting our IT guys work on it. And half the time, all of the managers and directors would have a closed door meeting without any tech people to decide what to do, and then come out and start telling people to reboot things, like switches and routers. It was insane.
I've never been so stressed out in my life. The worst part, is I was stressed for no reason. I really didn't do any work there considering I was required in all these meetings where nothing got done. I have a strong suspicion that meetings are they only way for incompetent managers to seem like they are doing something.
Seriously, I hope everyone collectively gives BS the finger. Maybe their peers will have enough of them also and just de-peer them.
It reminds me of the days where net access was charged by minute, only now they are charging people who are serving the content. And those people are already paying hosting fees and bandwidth charges from their provider. Peering agreements exist in order for the internet to exist. I'll let you route traffic on my network if you let me route traffic across yours... But now, it's let me route traffic on your network, and any traffic passing through mine I'm gonna extort money from the people serving the content. That's not how the internet works.
What happens if Google, Yahoo, and other large sites get together and just block BellSouth's IP ranges so no BS customers can use their sites? You bet your ass that BS is going to lose customers if they can't access what they want. I would say that the Yahoo's of the world have got BS by the balls, because they could certainly block BS IP's, and BS could do nothing about it. If I don't want a certain IP range hitting my servers, I have every right to block it.
Note that this will not stop transit traffic from passing through BS's network, but it will certainly piss of BS's customer base.
And Mark Cuban's comments on this? He's an idiot. Maybe he should stick to commenting on things he has actual knowledge of.
I love my mac, but right now I have to use Virtual PC because a very small handful of software that I need only runs on Windows. Because there is no virtual pc for the new Intel Macs, it's imperative that if I'm going to replace my current powerbook, that I have some option for running windows on it.
They go in your ear, which is great. But they don't really block out any background noise. When I'm on a plane, I find myself cranking the volume on my iPod to at least 90% so I can hear the music. Don't get me wrong, I can hear it at lower volumes, but the noise from the plane drowns out much of the less prominent stuff (background instruments, sounds, etc).
Everyone seems to really like the Shure E2C buds. They have a chart on their site that shows how much ambient noise they block, and it's even more than those Bose (or other brands) noise cancelling headphones. I'm not so sure about the noise cancelling phone either. They block out background noise, with what?? More noise. It's an opposing phase though, but it would be interesting to see what kind of effect this would have on the SPL.
Mine are not simple. I tried both Taxcut and the Quicken/Intuit one a couple years ago, and it said I had a $4200 refund coming to me. I took my stuff to a tax guy, and I ended up getting over $6k back.
Go to a real tax guy, not one of those H&R block things. They will hire anyone, give them a couple days of training and send them out to do your taxes. My tax guy charges me $130. He sends me a postage paid envelope in January every year, I drop my stuff in, he calls me with questions, then when it's ready I go in and sign it. I just drop the tax stuff I need in the envelope as it comes in the mail, print out any 401k or stock market stuff I need, and send it off.
No computer program can be a substitute for a guy with 20 years of experience doing taxes. He'll find deductions you never knew you could take. Deductions add up quickly if you're in a high tax bracket.
I may be a little bit biased, but I've been working in the security industry for years. I've touched just about every firewall solution on the market, especially since the company I currently work for sells just about every firewall solution on the market.
Two reasons I do not like firewalls which run on top of an OS like Windows, Linux, or BSD:
1. They run a full OS. The device and software are Turing complete, which means that if someone cracks the box somehow, it would allow them to run scripts or compiled apps that do other nastiness (using it to scan your internal network, compromise other machines, etc). In addition, depending on the product, you are responsible for OS updates, not the firewall vendor.
2. Bringing up a device that is not an appliance is not just a quick "slap it in a rack and have it working in 5 minute" ordeal. It's usually something along the lines of procure a box, install the OS, make sure OS works with the hardware (NIC drivers, etc), install firewall software, possibly install management software on your machines which will be managing it, etc. This takes time. What if the box croaks and you need to replace it quickly?
My recommendations:
1. NetScreen. These are custom hardware running ScreenOS. There is no scripting capability on the device, and no compilers out there that would even let you compile apps that run on it. It's manageable via ssh, https, or through a management server called NSM if you like that sort of thing (useful in large deployments). They have options for web filtering and deep inspection for catching nastiness. Additionally, the policies are based not on on IP, but also on Zones. Each interface is dropped into a zone, and those zones are specified when creating rules. This both enhances security, and makes your policy base much simpler when using more than two interfaces.
2. Cisco PIX. While I don't really like the pix, it actually is a decent firewall. It doesn't offer much in the way of advanced features, but it's an appliance, it's straighforward, and quick to implement. On the downside, it's comparable in price to the NetScreen, so there's no real reason to use it unless you absolutely must use Cisco.
On a side note, I don't really like Checkpoint at all. Not only does it run on a full fledged general OS, their licensing is a pain to deal with, I've had major problems with bugs in advanced features, and you MUST install a separate management server and use a GUI to manage the thing. The GUI only runs under windows. I have more reasons I don't like it, but I think the above is reason enough to stay away from it.
Someone got a little crazy with the links. Why not link the work "reported" to the actual message or story describing it, and then put all the other useless nonsense in. I had to open 5 goddamn windows before I found what I was looking for.