I run Win 95 and IE 5.5. The patch doesn't work. It hangs. Apparently, it was created for Win 98 up, but I can't find any documentation to that effect.
Aaaarrrrrgh! Senior moments are nothing to Microsoft Moments.
Guess I'll be using Netscape exclusively from now on.
I have handed out sheets discussing similar vulnerabilities to corporate IT folk. Then I have asked them what they plan on doing.
Wait for the patch?
Switch OS?
Switch browsers?
Clean up the mess?
Most end up knowing that they will clean up the mess, because "The top guys like Microsoft so much - it has so many features." Nobody is willing to do an honest cost accounting for the top guys.
Until the collective IT folk give an honest accounting of how much MS is really costing them, there will not be a switch away from MS. The moment they do - stampede!
I train people in this stuff...
on
Homepage Usability
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Common Sense?" When I point students to Nielsen's column's on usability, you'd think I invented the holy grail. I see no reason to plagiarize, nor to reinvent the wheel. Until more pages are usable, we need to have more books like this. I wave Web Site Usability at people, along with a couple of other books.
It may seem like common sense, but good page design is hard to implement. In our classes, we make sure that we always have representatives from at least two firms registered for any class. The students then do a usability analysis on pages that they did not create.
When the first student makes "dumb mistakes" on a page, the designer is sure that it's a fluke. When the third person makes the same "mistakes", it's funny to see the designer's jaw drop. Usability is not about being pretty, nor is it about what is expected.
Good usability incorporates page purpose, site purpose, and user expectations to make it easier to accomplish the purpose for the user. If I can't get to my desired item easily, return to it, and help other people find it, the site is not usable for me. End of story.
That thing about oil rigs and shadows in the water? It may seem trivial, but if a major purpose of the website is improved public relations with a potentially hostile audience, little things take on bigger meaning....
Cedar Falls, IA, has had municipal utilities for water, sewage, waste-disposal, electricity, and natural gas since the 1920s. In the mid-80's is was brought to their attention that information might well qualify as a utility.
In a bond election for $5 million of bonds to create cable and broadband services, the current cable provider put up a very large fight - and lost. The citizens voted at an over 85% rate to create broadband/internet/cable as a utility.
The results can be seen at http://www.cfu.net/index.shtml . I get most of my mail from Cedar Falls with addresses ending @cfu.net.
My parents, in their 70's are happy to send and receive multimedia presentations, and to create web pages and mailing lists. They get no static about running Mac OS and other non win items.
I would be happy to switch to a municipal system here - that way there would be some public servant I could shake down when things are going poorly.
(My father-in-law, also in his 70's, ran into the street to beg the competing cable firm to wire him up. Customer satisfaction at its nadir.)
NYC has never been my stomping, nor even my visiting ground. But for five hours I dreaded that my sister-in-law (who consults in E ring, west side, pentagon) was dead. She is alive, but the fear brought home the legacy of hatred.
The temptation is to bomb whoever did this back into the stone age. If we return senseless evil for senseless evil, we will sow a whirlwind for our grandchildren to reap. Let us respond deliberately, and in such a way that not one innocent person is harmed.
Let us respond by examining ourselves and our policies, but not by restricting our freedoms, or requesting that anyone's liberty be restricted. We need to light a candle for those who mourn, and for those lost. We must become a beacon of sanity, hope, and justice. Justice will be done, but let it not be done with an even greater measure of injustice.
I do training. I work as a "continuing education/workplace development computer trainer." That illiterate sounding mouthful means that I am sent to companies that fourwall my time, and I also teach non-credit adult education classes.
If I didn't feel that I had more to offer than the book did, I wouldn't be training. Given that, what is the way to maximize your training budget, and get more out of your training?
Look at the website and read the book beforethe training. Make sure that this really is what you expect.
If more than one person from your organization is attending training, get together beforehand, and list what practical benefits you expect from your training. (i.e. After I go to the CERT conference, I will be able to test several of the latest attacks on our network, and harden our network in ways I do not yet know.)
Contact your instructor beforehand. If you are unable to do this, ask your two big questions as you introduce yourself. A good instructor can customize the training course on the fly.
If you live in the United States, often community colleges have workplace development offices. If the training that is given will allow current employees to do new jobs at a higher rate of pay, or if the training is essential to keeping up the levels, often the training is discounted against your organization's tax levy. With proper attention to skillsets, this means that you can give new people very intensive training at little net cost.
I've found that people who are expected to complete an individual project during the course of training do better than those who create an off-the-book project. Check to see if you can have the course customized for you. It pays off in spades.
Unfortunately, I've also done instructor-led sessions where things went wrong - I've had hearing impaired students who expected me to interpret for myself. (I only know about 100 words of ASL, and my finger-spelling is way too slow.) I've had students who shouldn't even be in a class on HTML, let alone network security. I've had students who I've had to talk to, because since their employer was paying for the class without evidence of completion, they were goofing off and messing it up for all the others.
End of rant? Take what you can get. If you can get conferences or instructor-led training, read the written stuff ahead of time, list the expected benefits, and ask questions early and often. If you don't ask for specific information, you may not get it!
Gramm, Leach and Bliley are three Republican Congressmen
who have all received huge bribes (sometimes called campaign contributions)
from the banking industry.
Sorry. While the rest of this article is factually correct, Leach accepts only private contributions to his campaign fund. He can, however, afford to self-finance. The reason his name was on the bill? He is the former house banking committee chair.
1) How frequently do you have a paid security audit from an outside firm?
2) What sites do you check for security patches and notices for your operating system, database, server software, and management software?
3) What internal risk training does your firm undergo? How frequently do non-IT people have to be refreshed? Are there live exercises? What is awareness within and outside of IT of social engineering attacks?
4) Can you please name the last five major published attacks that targeted a similar OS to yours? What have you done to secure against those attacks?
5) What do you do to keep your IT people pleased to work for you? Who are the people who do your data backups? What background checks were done on these people? What are you doing to keep them happy in their jobs?
6) What is the physical security of your servers? What prevents any person, even "authorized" from walking off with the actual server machines?
Any company that can answer these questions will be much better prepared, and deserves AAA* rates.
Sorry, You are both right and wrong. Typical computer + connection per consumer household would be about $1400.00 for a cheap setup for three years.
Lead removal now averages about $4000.00 per household.
This doesn't even cover the costs of removing lead balancing weights from cars, and eliminating plumbing from before 1963.
I agree that this would have a better effect in the long run, however.
Brain:All I have to do is patent their method of translating funny squiggles, and everybody will have to pay me in order to use the internet! Hah-ha-ha!
Pinky:Yeah. You'll be rich.
Brain:The IETF never violates patents! I'll make gazillions!
Pinky: It says here that they never pay patent fees either. This says they will work on an alternative solution, which doesn't use your patents. What does that mean, Brain?
Brain:What? Let me see that! Curses! Foiled again!
The only people who are really and truly screwed are Walid's investors, or other poor bozos who never looked at IETF's track record. Simple answer. Refuse to hire the WALID folks when they go bust. Tell every company that the WALID folks are the reason the Internet will be harder to use over the coming years. It's not about getting mad. It's about showing the chickens where to roost.
Cell phones are already on some very crowded wireless bands. Anyone who has been in an ICU recently has probably seen the "No Cell Phones, Please" sign. The phones interfere with one of the wireless monitoring schemes out there. Presumably any jammer would do the same...
What would be done so that outgoing cell calls can be sent in an emergency? I have worked as a theater (as opposed to cinema) usher where a 911 call during a heart attack saved a precious 35 seconds.
Any jammer would need to be regulated for radius of jamming; this becomes especially important for those of us who have just given up on landlines, and have paid for a "no fees" monthly long-distance/surfing/local/no-roaming package of minutes.
Last I heard, coverage and usage in U.S. was not nearly as bad as Israel, where members of Knesset take calls while in session.
All that's really needed is good manners and consideration of others. Unfortunately, many people with cell phones suddenly become very important in their own eyes, or at least more important that other people deserving of consideration. If everyone followed the four simple rules of cell phone courtesy, we wouldn't need regulation or legislation or jammers. Many might consider the following four rules as infringing on their right to be jerks whenever they wish:
Take not calls in class, theater, movie, concert, library, nor any other place where speaking in an ordinary voice would be considered disruptive.
If thee must take calls, set the phone to vibrate, and excuse thyself before taking the call. If the caller has hung up, use thou thy messaging, and return the call.
Take not calls while driving, operating a chainsaw, brushing thy child's teeth, playing an accordian, nor any other activity where concentration and motor coordination are needed.
If a call is paramount, move thou to a quiet place, rather than asking all around thee to quiet. If the reception is bad, assume not that it is the other end, but look thou at the weather, or at thy own degrading battery before shouting. Shouts will not travel better to the cell tower than whispers.
If people followed these rules, then jammers would not be necessary. I teach college classes; my students sometimes need cell phones on to keep track of family or situations at work. They need to take these calls, and can jolly well excuse themselves when the calls come in. If jammers were turned on, I expect enrollment in these classes would drop...
They do show that Rambus was well aware of JEDEC rules requiring patent
disclosure, and of the JEDEC discussions. This is highly relevant to Hyundai's
claims here and in Germany that Rambus violated JEDEC rules to obtain the
broad patent coverage by secretly amending its patent applications to cover
ideas and technology discussed at JEDEC without disclosing this to the
JEDEC members
It is not under question here whether Rambus really could file for those patents. What is under question is whether these undisclosed patents violated existing contracts. If it can be proved that Rambus acted in bad faith on the contracts, all kinds of contract fun comes into place. IANAL, but this looks as those who are will make lots of money off of this. The lawyers may be the only ones who make good on this in the end...
Last month, Scientific American ran an editorial piece on genetic testing in the workplace. It was scathing. There were reactions to it in the CDC and the Departments of Labor and Justice. (Or so I heard from friends who work there.)
This is a day late and a dollar short, but better than nothing.
One resource that educators have is Syllabus, a magazine supported by software and hardware providers of classroom technology solutions.
Much of it is targeted to distance learning.
I teach a few courses over WebCT, and I have found several difficulties - if my courses have a low enrollment, I am not paid enough to justify upgrading the course, but it needs to be done anyway.
If the students have a low bandwidth connection, the connections to some of the associated course files do not work well.
Finally, the course ID setup works well for students who take multiple courses, but the learning curve for WebCT itself is very high for students taking their first course.
Courses which were correspondence courses still have about the same drop out rate as WebCT courses - it all depends on student maturity and motivation.
First a caveat - I have two children, and my sister-in-law has been approached in shopping malls by people who want to use my niece in legitimate modeling jobs - these kids qualify as cute.
Second warning - a dear friend is on medication partly because pictures that were taken of her twenty-five years ago are now circulating forever on the Internet, some in altered condition. The photographer died in jail over ten years ago, but this crime goes on and on and on.
There are three questions here:
Does virtual porn harm any actual living children?
Does virtual porn either encourage or discourage the genuine sexual abuse of actual children?
Where do the first-amendment rights of free speech end? In other words, where does the fist (no pun intended) of pornography bump up against my child's nose?
The answers are:
Yes, if the virtual models are based on photographs of real children. Often, in photorealistic virtual creations, an original model was used. When I mentioned the friend who was in therapy, part of it was learning that her image is now the basis of some very sick virtual scenarios. Unless this child was not based on any living model in any way, there is provable harm. Even if the model is an archetype, such as "Harry Potter" or "Cindy Lou Who", there are many small black-haired boys with glasses or blue-eyed blondes who bear such a close resemblance to those archetypes that they could be harmed as well. The harm is not just in the creation of the pornography, but also in the dissemination of the images.
The research isn't out yet. Some say it encourages child molestation. Others say that it acts as a substitute. I am not capable of judging. Any genuine studies would be unethical; it could only be either after-the-fact questionaires or blood-pressure/arousal studies.
I can't do thought control. If some sicko wants to imagine sex with my child, I can't stop it. If some sicko wants to publish a fantasy of sex with my child, I won't try to stop it, as long as all possible identifying charicteristics are left out. The moment some sicko to publishes fantasies, either written or in images, of sex with my child, or of another child, or of a virtual child that can be easily confused with my child, my child has been harmed.
I'd much rather use tort law to get at this than the hammer of censorship. Take a look around you, though. Ask yourself how you would feel if that were your smiling face on top of the most disgusting act you can think of. (Not the most sexual - the most disgusting.) Now, ask yourself about the disemination of that image for the next fifty years.
There is no good solution. There should be no thought control. Eat rage and weep for our children
If you don't have immediate family who would be affected by your change in jobs, then don't involve them. If you have a spouse/siggy o who would be affected if you moved across the country, then involve them.
Both my husband and I have lived in high-tech east coast big cities. Neither of us wants to move back to them. These are the sorts of decisions that make family important. We have to decide who follows whose job, this time. That's also important.
About ten years ago, a friend at a hardware startup had a similar problem - he solved it by quietly telling five people to meet him at his place on Saturday afternoon - bring your families and your resumes, along with information about possible places to work and live. He had a couple of computers and printers so they could update resumes and search for some information. (Yes,
Virginia, you could search with your computer before the World Wide Web was World Wide.)
They held a strategy session that afternoon. Some of the spouses/siggy o's had great ideas on the search, so everybody took time to watch the kids, and circulate around. Six hours later, everybody had a great resume, a plan for their own personal dream job, and better friendships.
They also each had five copies of everybody's resumes, including family resumes. This search was decided on as a community venture. At the end of the interview, if the interviewer asked if they knew of anybody with x skill, they pulled out a buddy resume from their portfolio.
Some people left right away, while others still worked. Within three weeks everybody was at a better job. (This was in much tougher times than these.) Some people had found jobs with other people.
This has since been done with another friend who rented the back two rooms of a restaurant. They all had better jobs within three weeks, again. Don't do this with people you don't trust. Do make sure you involve the families. Do have fun.
CTRL-T was a godsend to me twenty some years ago. If you are trying to do simulations of landslides and load shearing, it's very useful to know whether the system is hung or if it's just your poorly written program that is running slowly.
Although it may be illegal by the ADA, I know of people who were not hired because of health info, and I know another who was denied a mortgage because of a heart ailment.
Slashdot Mirror
Aaaarrrrrgh! Senior moments are nothing to Microsoft Moments.
Guess I'll be using Netscape exclusively from now on.
Most end up knowing that they will clean up the mess, because "The top guys like Microsoft so much - it has so many features." Nobody is willing to do an honest cost accounting for the top guys.
Until the collective IT folk give an honest accounting of how much MS is really costing them, there will not be a switch away from MS. The moment they do - stampede!
It may seem like common sense, but good page design is hard to implement. In our classes, we make sure that we always have representatives from at least two firms registered for any class. The students then do a usability analysis on pages that they did not create.
When the first student makes "dumb mistakes" on a page, the designer is sure that it's a fluke. When the third person makes the same "mistakes", it's funny to see the designer's jaw drop. Usability is not about being pretty, nor is it about what is expected.
Good usability incorporates page purpose, site purpose, and user expectations to make it easier to accomplish the purpose for the user. If I can't get to my desired item easily, return to it, and help other people find it, the site is not usable for me. End of story.
That thing about oil rigs and shadows in the water? It may seem trivial, but if a major purpose of the website is improved public relations with a potentially hostile audience, little things take on bigger meaning....
In a bond election for $5 million of bonds to create cable and broadband services, the current cable provider put up a very large fight - and lost. The citizens voted at an over 85% rate to create broadband/internet/cable as a utility.
The results can be seen at http://www.cfu.net/index.shtml . I get most of my mail from Cedar Falls with addresses ending @cfu.net.
My parents, in their 70's are happy to send and receive multimedia presentations, and to create web pages and mailing lists. They get no static about running Mac OS and other non win items.
I would be happy to switch to a municipal system here - that way there would be some public servant I could shake down when things are going poorly.
(My father-in-law, also in his 70's, ran into the street to beg the competing cable firm to wire him up. Customer satisfaction at its nadir.)
The temptation is to bomb whoever did this back into the stone age. If we return senseless evil for senseless evil, we will sow a whirlwind for our grandchildren to reap. Let us respond deliberately, and in such a way that not one innocent person is harmed.
Let us respond by examining ourselves and our policies, but not by restricting our freedoms, or requesting that anyone's liberty be restricted. We need to light a candle for those who mourn, and for those lost. We must become a beacon of sanity, hope, and justice. Justice will be done, but let it not be done with an even greater measure of injustice.
If I didn't feel that I had more to offer than the book did, I wouldn't be training. Given that, what is the way to maximize your training budget, and get more out of your training?
End of rant? Take what you can get. If you can get conferences or instructor-led training, read the written stuff ahead of time, list the expected benefits, and ask questions early and often. If you don't ask for specific information, you may not get it!
Sorry. While the rest of this article is factually correct, Leach accepts only private contributions to his campaign fund. He can, however, afford to self-finance. The reason his name was on the bill? He is the former house banking committee chair.
1) How frequently do you have a paid security audit from an outside firm? 2) What sites do you check for security patches and notices for your operating system, database, server software, and management software? 3) What internal risk training does your firm undergo? How frequently do non-IT people have to be refreshed? Are there live exercises? What is awareness within and outside of IT of social engineering attacks? 4) Can you please name the last five major published attacks that targeted a similar OS to yours? What have you done to secure against those attacks? 5) What do you do to keep your IT people pleased to work for you? Who are the people who do your data backups? What background checks were done on these people? What are you doing to keep them happy in their jobs? 6) What is the physical security of your servers? What prevents any person, even "authorized" from walking off with the actual server machines? Any company that can answer these questions will be much better prepared, and deserves AAA* rates.
Lead removal now averages about $4000.00 per household.
This doesn't even cover the costs of removing lead balancing weights from cars, and eliminating plumbing from before 1963. I agree that this would have a better effect in the long run, however.
Pinky:Yeah. You'll be rich.
Brain:The IETF never violates patents! I'll make gazillions!
Pinky: It says here that they never pay patent fees either. This says they will work on an alternative solution, which doesn't use your patents. What does that mean, Brain?
Brain:What? Let me see that! Curses! Foiled again!
The only people who are really and truly screwed are Walid's investors, or other poor bozos who never looked at IETF's track record. Simple answer. Refuse to hire the WALID folks when they go bust. Tell every company that the WALID folks are the reason the Internet will be harder to use over the coming years. It's not about getting mad. It's about showing the chickens where to roost.
Cell phones are already on some very crowded wireless bands. Anyone who has been in an ICU recently has probably seen the "No Cell Phones, Please" sign. The phones interfere with one of the wireless monitoring schemes out there. Presumably any jammer would do the same...
What would be done so that outgoing cell calls can be sent in an emergency? I have worked as a theater (as opposed to cinema) usher where a 911 call during a heart attack saved a precious 35 seconds.
Any jammer would need to be regulated for radius of jamming; this becomes especially important for those of us who have just given up on landlines, and have paid for a "no fees" monthly long-distance/surfing/local/no-roaming package of minutes.
Last I heard, coverage and usage in U.S. was not nearly as bad as Israel, where members of Knesset take calls while in session.
All that's really needed is good manners and consideration of others. Unfortunately, many people with cell phones suddenly become very important in their own eyes, or at least more important that other people deserving of consideration. If everyone followed the four simple rules of cell phone courtesy, we wouldn't need regulation or legislation or jammers. Many might consider the following four rules as infringing on their right to be jerks whenever they wish:
- Take not calls in class, theater, movie, concert, library, nor any other place where speaking in an ordinary voice would be considered disruptive.
- If thee must take calls, set the phone to vibrate, and excuse thyself before taking the call. If the caller has hung up, use thou thy messaging, and return the call.
- Take not calls while driving, operating a chainsaw, brushing thy child's teeth, playing an accordian, nor any other activity where concentration and motor coordination are needed.
- If a call is paramount, move thou to a quiet place, rather than asking all around thee to quiet. If the reception is bad, assume not that it is the other end, but look thou at the weather, or at thy own degrading battery before shouting. Shouts will not travel better to the cell tower than whispers.
If people followed these rules, then jammers would not be necessary. I teach college classes; my students sometimes need cell phones on to keep track of family or situations at work. They need to take these calls, and can jolly well excuse themselves when the calls come in. If jammers were turned on, I expect enrollment in these classes would drop...Nice to see that story referred to. Hope others read it. I think it's in Dealing in Futures.
One was for "The best library in the known universe - with the worst water" and the other was for the prairie lights bookstore.
Come by and see them sometime. Like all true comic art, they are still funny.
It is not under question here whether Rambus really could file for those patents. What is under question is whether these undisclosed patents violated existing contracts. If it can be proved that Rambus acted in bad faith on the contracts, all kinds of contract fun comes into place. IANAL, but this looks as those who are will make lots of money off of this. The lawyers may be the only ones who make good on this in the end...
These Russians - They went overboard when they moved away from the orthodox calendar. 03-18-2001 13:22:56
This is a day late and a dollar short, but better than nothing.
Best of luck, and keep looking up!
Caveat lector; It is a commercial publication.
If the students have a low bandwidth connection, the connections to some of the associated course files do not work well.
Finally, the course ID setup works well for students who take multiple courses, but the learning curve for WebCT itself is very high for students taking their first course.
Courses which were correspondence courses still have about the same drop out rate as WebCT courses - it all depends on student maturity and motivation.
Second warning - a dear friend is on medication partly because pictures that were taken of her twenty-five years ago are now circulating forever on the Internet, some in altered condition. The photographer died in jail over ten years ago, but this crime goes on and on and on.
There are three questions here:
- Does virtual porn harm any actual living children?
- Does virtual porn either encourage or discourage the genuine sexual abuse of actual children?
- Where do the first-amendment rights of free speech end? In other words, where does the fist (no pun intended) of pornography bump up against my child's nose?
The answers are:- Yes, if the virtual models are based on photographs of real children. Often, in photorealistic virtual creations, an original model was used. When I mentioned the friend who was in therapy, part of it was learning that her image is now the basis of some very sick virtual scenarios. Unless this child was not based on any living model in any way, there is provable harm. Even if the model is an archetype, such as "Harry Potter" or "Cindy Lou Who", there are many small black-haired boys with glasses or blue-eyed blondes who bear such a close resemblance to those archetypes that they could be harmed as well. The harm is not just in the creation of the pornography, but also in the dissemination of the images.
- The research isn't out yet. Some say it encourages child molestation. Others say that it acts as a substitute. I am not capable of judging. Any genuine studies would be unethical; it could only be either after-the-fact questionaires or blood-pressure/arousal studies.
- I can't do thought control. If some sicko wants to imagine sex with my child, I can't stop it. If some sicko wants to publish a fantasy of sex with my child, I won't try to stop it, as long as all possible identifying charicteristics are left out. The moment some sicko to publishes fantasies, either written or in images, of sex with my child, or of another child, or of a virtual child that can be easily confused with my child, my child has been harmed.
I'd much rather use tort law to get at this than the hammer of censorship. Take a look around you, though. Ask yourself how you would feel if that were your smiling face on top of the most disgusting act you can think of. (Not the most sexual - the most disgusting.) Now, ask yourself about the disemination of that image for the next fifty years.There is no good solution. There should be no thought control. Eat rage and weep for our children
Both my husband and I have lived in high-tech east coast big cities. Neither of us wants to move back to them. These are the sorts of decisions that make family important. We have to decide who follows whose job, this time. That's also important.
They held a strategy session that afternoon. Some of the spouses/siggy o's had great ideas on the search, so everybody took time to watch the kids, and circulate around. Six hours later, everybody had a great resume, a plan for their own personal dream job, and better friendships.
They also each had five copies of everybody's resumes, including family resumes. This search was decided on as a community venture. At the end of the interview, if the interviewer asked if they knew of anybody with x skill, they pulled out a buddy resume from their portfolio.
Some people left right away, while others still worked. Within three weeks everybody was at a better job. (This was in much tougher times than these.) Some people had found jobs with other people.
This has since been done with another friend who rented the back two rooms of a restaurant. They all had better jobs within three weeks, again. Don't do this with people you don't trust. Do make sure you involve the families. Do have fun.
CTRL-T was a godsend to me twenty some years ago. If you are trying to do simulations of landslides and load shearing, it's very useful to know whether the system is hung or if it's just your poorly written program that is running slowly.
Although it may be illegal by the ADA, I know of people who were not hired because of health info, and I know another who was denied a mortgage because of a heart ailment.
May this help others in like case.