If truancy is your problem, the only thing you can do is make attendance a part of the grade. Now, this isn't high school, and presumably the students are adults, so if they want to skip class, no skin off of your nose. It's their money.
But if you want to make them want to come to class, dump the boring lectures. It doesn't matter how they're delivered, in person or by iPod, it's the same boring lecture. Maybe in some of the sciences, where all you are doing is pushing rote learning that's the only way to do it, especially with those 100 person introductory classes, but otherwise, make the classes smaller, dump the lectures in favor of labs and discussions and symposiums and engage the student in really brain stretching, not brain filling.
Just sneak onto his property at midnight, or even 10pm, when the old coot is sound asleep, and open the unit up and sever one of the wires or whatnot inside the unit, then put it all back together.
If he's as old and codgery as you say, he'll just think the unit died.
If he buys a new one, repeat. Eventually he'll stop buying them as a waste of money.
For those of you in the Boston area interested in doing something like this, check out 5w!ts production of The Tomb, at http://www.5-wits.com/
As a part of a regional theater-style (no foam weapons, no beanbags, no mind's eye, more like actual plays and murder mysteries) organization, it's good to see people going out an using their imagination in an interactive fashion. Way better than plunking down in front of the latest crap to come out of hollywood.
No one said they'd be buying the equipment every semester. No one said it would be an extra $450 for people who aren't yet students. The estimated cost per student, with today's numbers, is $450 each. No university would actually slap that onto every student bill today. They'd take out a loan to pay the cost, then parcel it out in smaller chunks to every student over the next (n) years. Did you read the article?
Also, they haven't had 10 years. They've had a matter of weeks at this point. The FCC only recently extended CALEA to apply to Higher Education. Did you read the article?
At this point Higher Ed is being given 18 months to comply, with no assistance or help from anyone. They're being told 'Do it, or else'. Imagine being told you had a year to build a mansion for the state governor, but weren't being paid to do it, and had no tools. You'd have to spend a lot of money in a short amount of time to get it done.
Oh, and the FBI doesn't just want a dump of the traffic, packed up and sent to them. They want the ability to access the University's network remotely, issue a command, and have all data on a network segment duplicated to them, not just captured and sent off in a file or whatnot. Oh, and we still have to obey FERPA and all the other federal guidelines that mean we have to make sure that unauthorized people don't get any of that data. We have to make systems that are as hackproof as possible, then make it so the FBI can hack us at the push of a button, without us being involved or even knowing about it. How do you make such a system so that it can't be compromised readily without you knowing about it?
Disclaimer: I happen to work for a small, young (50 yrs old) University that doesn't have the huge resources to spend millions of dollars casually. We would have to replace every switch on campus, in every building, an every network closet, to have the capability of mirroring traffic on one port to another, which is the only practical way of giving the FBI what they want without flooding them with a dump of our entire network (which we've also considered... sort that!). We've just finished a 3 year and several million dollar project to replace all the switches to supply power to our VoIP devices and our new campuswide wireless network.
Oh yeah, they want to be able to easily capture all the data sent to and from a student's wireless card as well. Remotely.
Don't forget also, while students live on campus, their dorm is legally their home, with all the same rights and privelages as your suburban houseowners.
And Universities and Colleges don't take money from the federal gov't. The Gov't chooses to give it to them in the form of student financial assistance, research funding, etc. Yes, it is up to the University to apply for it, but the Gov't chooses to give it to them, so don't start on Higher Ed. being a taxpayer vampire.
Trust me that the issue of cost is just the first salvo in this fight.
I happen to like Fastbuzz (http://www.fastbuzz.com) as my RSS reader of choice. It's nice because when I go from work to home or to another computer, I don't have to reread the same news each time.
I don't know if there's anything _wrong_ with you, but considering how _easy_ it is to install IE and to use it.... well, you'll find it a real joy to work with.
Odd. When I want to block an RFID tag, I put it an ESD bag. (Electrostatic bag, the kind that come with many computer components). When I ordered an RFID based automated toll-booth system, it came with an ESD bag, and in their FAQ they explicitly state that if you don't want your tag read and your account charged, just put the device in the bag, easy as that.
Presumeably, an ESD bag (which has enough metal in it to accomodate a random static discharge) would create a Faraday cage around the tag, and keep the radio signals from getting in or out of the bag. Now all I have to do is make a shopping bag out of ESD bags.... or just line a backpack, and _bam_. Shoplifter's dream. just remember to close the bag first....
Here's our chance to take the code, find all the bugs and errors, fix it, clean it up, and give it back to Microsoft, 10 times better than when it went out into the wild.... heh. What a way to get the benefits of Open Source code review without actually opening up the whole code base.... *grin*
No problems. First off, he's not trying to sell a _copy_ of anything. Nor is he going to be transferring it via peer to peer. Nor is he going to give out a secret URL address. This will be the file itself, attached to an e-mail message, and removed from all other locations.
Secondly, if that's truly a problem, he can copy the file to CD first (as the iTunes license lets him do) and then ship that.
Pish Posh.
1) Here's that old 'price difference' argument that held water maybe a dozen years ago, but oesn't cut it now. Current cost for OS X, assuming you are purchasing it retail, and not with the purchase of the computer: $130. Retail cost of Windows XP, likewise not included in the cost of the computer: $300. So even paying full OS costs for updated versions of X, it's 2 1/2 years before you equal the cost of a Windows machine. Many places are on a three year refresh anyhow.
2) Usability. Why are you talking about usability in terms of Windows Interoperability? It's a Macintosh, not a Windows slave. Look at usability, not interoperability. Support costs for Macs are far lower because the computers are inherently more usable by the average person. And you want interoperability? Office for Mac. Samba support. Burn DVDs that actually work in DVD players. USB, Ethernet, Firewire, 802.11b, ZeroConf, X11 free and out of the box (not on windows), and support for every major network protocol out there.
3) What you saw today was a class action suit because apple promised full support on all G3 machines, and then was unable to provide some parts of that (notably software DVD support and some graphics updates) for computers released in *1997*. Not recent machines by any stretch of the imagination. I'd like to see you get good XP graphics on a 2 meg video card (And a Pentium 2, introduced in May of that year) from over 6 years ago. I happen to be able to run OS X 10.2 just fine on my 1993 Beige G3, because it doesn't have a DVD drive and I don't use it for graphics. Guess what I use it for? A server in my mixed Mac/Windows/Linux environment. Not a chance that the G3 and G4 are going away in the next 2 years, as far as supported products go.
You present logical arguments, but I don't see the reality backing it up.
At the college I'm at we do something similar. Wireless or Wired we assume the network is insecure, and when you first connect up all you can get is a page where you have to enter your username and password. Behind the scenes it's already got your MAC address information from the routers, and when you enter a valid username and password it puts all that into a database of authorized computers, and will then give you a valid IP address instead of a 10.*.*.* address.
Please note that according to this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education that a lot of the colleges are surprised and upset that the RIAA did not contact them or try to work with them on this. My guess is that it's because the institutions have lawyers who can defend in court the fact that a search engine is not illegal. So skip the lawyers by skipping the college. Oh, and don't tell the students until after the lawsuits are filed.
Re:If Ars Technica is so concerned about usability
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
Also note that it's far cheaper to print the letters than it is to print everything but the letters.
The reason you might be getting quite similar as well as quite dissimilar pairs might just be one of algebra. For instance, in the quadratic equation, you get two roots. I know that in some cases taking the wrong root can give you an exact wrong answer when doing further parts of an equation. Might something similar be accounting for your bad combinations?
I agree with the person who said to finish your degree. I found myself in a similar situation. By the end of my junio year I was just burned up and dragging myself through because it wasn't fun any more. The work wasn't woth it. I was lucky. I was able to switch my Major to history, which I had enough courses under the belt to finish in my senior year (with a Classics Minor). And being in your senior year, last semester, you've probably got your requirements out of the way. Take a look at all the other classes available to you! You may not have the chance to experience them again. College is supposed to be fun, so don't let the ennui get you down.
Just for your knowledge, Unsanity Echo and Mint Audio already support Vorbis playback on the Mac. I'm just waiting for the 1.0 encoder release. Then I will encode all my cd's. Until then, I have encoded a small number of my cds at 160-256 VBR MP3 for listening at work, where I only have a small set of Harmon Kardons that came with my G4 Cube.
I too work at a University (if you read my e-mail address you can guess which one). We use Norton Antivirus as much as possible. We use Ghost and Assimilator on all new machines for Faculty and Staff, including Norton Antivirus. For the Students we produce a software CD every year, cross platform with Stuffit Installer Maker and Install Shield. It includes a variety of software, mostly Internet focused, including Norton Antivirus. We offer an obvious link to download the installer off of our ITS web page. But when it comes to automatic updates, we decided against it. It isn't our responsibility to protect users from their own mistakes. We can only show them the path, but they must walk it. We do what we can, including making sure that Norton will alert users when definitions are out of date, preconfiguring it to monitor opened files, and to run periodic full scans. We warn users via e-mail every time we see an outbreak of a new virus. We even try to filter some things (like kournikova) at the server level. We also provide complete and total support for those who have been afflicted with a virus. We provide network space and instructions so people can avoid floppy disks. We clean our own computers daily, to restrict the spread in public areas. We have a full service centralized Help Desk just for students (one of the top 5 amongst universities) . But we can't tell users how they can or can't use their computers. Generally speaking, we find it works. Most people desire to receive a virus about as much as you or I do, i.e., not at all. They do their part, provided they know how. So we focus on educating the users, providing the tools, and showing the way. We're confident that when our students go out into the corporate world they'll be able to update their own virus definitions, rather than blindly assuming that their corporate IS department will hold their hands and coddle them and make it so they never have to know anything by doing all the work for them. Users aren't that dumb, they just need to be shown the way.
I've always seen the difference 'twixt the two to be the same as any scientist vs. engineer classification. The Scientist is the one who plays with theories, runs experiments, tries to figure out why it works, etc. The Engineer is the one who tries to figure out how it works, and how it can be usefully applied. In the Computer Realm (as a Bachelor of _Arts_ recipient in Computer Science), I've always seen Computer Science as that branch which deals with theories such as compiler optimization, artificial intelligence, database organization, interface design,etc; where as Computer Engineering had more to do with implementations of things, i.e. code organization, fragment reuse, hardware interfacing, data manipulation, and so on and so on. From what I've seen, generally speaking, both branches fall under the generic moniker of "Computer Science Degree" so it behooves you to go after that which makes you happy (good rule of thumb in any situation). Given the fact that most colleges don't require you to declare a major until about halfway through, start by taking those basic classes which are common to both, and dabble in a few electives on wither side of the fence. You'll be in a better position to decide which way you want to go, and feel less like you stuck yourself in a bad situation. And don't forget to spread tings out so you can taste the rich banquet of classes that College Life offers. You may decide that you were only interested in computers for the money, but that history (or philosophy, et al) is your true passion and calling. Not to say you can't have a computer vocation as well, but do what makes you happy, you'll feel better in the long run.
I would like to add that 't just West Coast campus' being hit by napster. I go to Brandeis University in MA, and we too have had issues with napster... in under a week, the bandwidth it was using went from 5% of total bandwidth to 50%.... We have since been forced to limit access to napster.com until we can get our new equipment configured for bandwidth shaping. Laurion
I'd also like to bring up the very good point that your vulnerability is directly related to the systems you are running, and how well they are configured and maintained. For starters, any machine not on a network is almost infinitely more secure than one that is. But if you have to have a computer on a network, you better make sure you have someone who knows what they are doing configure it for security. Or get something that is inherently secure. Not to sound like a fanatic (just a fan), please note the Army's recent decision after counsel with the W3C to switch their web server to a Macintosh. However, it may not be practical or desireable to switch every machine in the operation to something else. The only way to fight knowledge is with knowledge. Fight cyberterrorists by being smarter and better than they are. That alone should take care of most of the script-kiddies. Then you have to worry about those who are smart enough to do it for other reasons...
Ok, for starters, I am here to defend Apple. If you don't like that, go somewhere else. I've seen a lot of people complaining about Apple starting to use business tactics that they don't like. Well, let's see here. When was the last time you saw a 486 motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium? Or even a pentium motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium 2? On top of this, Apple has never ever said their G3 systems would be upgradeable to G4. For that matter, they never said any of their prior systems would be upgradeable to G3, but lots of third party companies made those upgrades, and believe me, there are companies that are making G4 upgrades, even for those G3 users who installed the ROM which purportedly makes them unupgradeable. No one really knows this for sure, as no one has tried AFAIK. All this hype is about mere rumor, and every last one of you fell into the media pitfall.
Now, for those of you still spouting the rhetoric about apple's prices, I'd like to remind you that the new G4, classified as a supercomputer by the government, thus a weapon (and as of yet, unexportable to other countries), is available for a starting price of 1599. If anyone out there tells me that is too much money to pay for a computer with a top of the line processor, Modem, Ethernet, Firewire, USB, 128-bit video card, and more, plus the wonderful support of Apple (rated very highly every year) and the ease of use and increase in productivity it brings, well, then they really don't know a good deal when they see one.
Those of you complaining about the death of clones: The clone idea was initially to help spread the Mac platform. It didn't. All it did was cut into Apple's own user base far deeper than they could have handled. If Apple didn't kill the clones, the clones would have killed Apple, and we wouldn't be having this debate.
For anyone complaining about the OS: Install LinuxPPC. Or, realize that the OS is getting better with every revision, and the OS X is going to put Microsoft, and particularly NT, to shame.
Myself, I'm looking forward to purchasing a new G4, and selling my old Beige G3, as soon as I have the disposible income to do so. The price is right, the hardware offering more than tempting, and the OS better than ever.
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If truancy is your problem, the only thing you can do is make attendance a part of the grade. Now, this isn't high school, and presumably the students are adults, so if they want to skip class, no skin off of your nose. It's their money.
But if you want to make them want to come to class, dump the boring lectures. It doesn't matter how they're delivered, in person or by iPod, it's the same boring lecture. Maybe in some of the sciences, where all you are doing is pushing rote learning that's the only way to do it, especially with those 100 person introductory classes, but otherwise, make the classes smaller, dump the lectures in favor of labs and discussions and symposiums and engage the student in really brain stretching, not brain filling.
Just sneak onto his property at midnight, or even 10pm, when the old coot is sound asleep, and open the unit up and sever one of the wires or whatnot inside the unit, then put it all back together.
If he's as old and codgery as you say, he'll just think the unit died.
If he buys a new one, repeat. Eventually he'll stop buying them as a waste of money.
For those of you in the Boston area interested in doing something like this, check out 5w!ts production of The Tomb, at http://www.5-wits.com/
As a part of a regional theater-style (no foam weapons, no beanbags, no mind's eye, more like actual plays and murder mysteries) organization, it's good to see people going out an using their imagination in an interactive fashion. Way better than plunking down in front of the latest crap to come out of hollywood.
No one said they'd be buying the equipment every semester. No one said it would be an extra $450 for people who aren't yet students. The estimated cost per student, with today's numbers, is $450 each. No university would actually slap that onto every student bill today. They'd take out a loan to pay the cost, then parcel it out in smaller chunks to every student over the next (n) years. Did you read the article?
Also, they haven't had 10 years. They've had a matter of weeks at this point. The FCC only recently extended CALEA to apply to Higher Education. Did you read the article?
At this point Higher Ed is being given 18 months to comply, with no assistance or help from anyone. They're being told 'Do it, or else'. Imagine being told you had a year to build a mansion for the state governor, but weren't being paid to do it, and had no tools. You'd have to spend a lot of money in a short amount of time to get it done.
Oh, and the FBI doesn't just want a dump of the traffic, packed up and sent to them. They want the ability to access the University's network remotely, issue a command, and have all data on a network segment duplicated to them, not just captured and sent off in a file or whatnot. Oh, and we still have to obey FERPA and all the other federal guidelines that mean we have to make sure that unauthorized people don't get any of that data. We have to make systems that are as hackproof as possible, then make it so the FBI can hack us at the push of a button, without us being involved or even knowing about it. How do you make such a system so that it can't be compromised readily without you knowing about it?
Disclaimer: I happen to work for a small, young (50 yrs old) University that doesn't have the huge resources to spend millions of dollars casually. We would have to replace every switch on campus, in every building, an every network closet, to have the capability of mirroring traffic on one port to another, which is the only practical way of giving the FBI what they want without flooding them with a dump of our entire network (which we've also considered... sort that!). We've just finished a 3 year and several million dollar project to replace all the switches to supply power to our VoIP devices and our new campuswide wireless network.
Oh yeah, they want to be able to easily capture all the data sent to and from a student's wireless card as well. Remotely.
Don't forget also, while students live on campus, their dorm is legally their home, with all the same rights and privelages as your suburban houseowners.
And Universities and Colleges don't take money from the federal gov't. The Gov't chooses to give it to them in the form of student financial assistance, research funding, etc. Yes, it is up to the University to apply for it, but the Gov't chooses to give it to them, so don't start on Higher Ed. being a taxpayer vampire.
Trust me that the issue of cost is just the first salvo in this fight.
Did you read the article?
I happen to like Fastbuzz (http://www.fastbuzz.com) as my RSS reader of choice. It's nice because when I go from work to home or to another computer, I don't have to reread the same news each time.
I don't know if there's anything _wrong_ with you, but considering how _easy_ it is to install IE and to use it.... well, you'll find it a real joy to work with.
Odd. When I want to block an RFID tag, I put it an ESD bag. (Electrostatic bag, the kind that come with many computer components). When I ordered an RFID based automated toll-booth system, it came with an ESD bag, and in their FAQ they explicitly state that if you don't want your tag read and your account charged, just put the device in the bag, easy as that. Presumeably, an ESD bag (which has enough metal in it to accomodate a random static discharge) would create a Faraday cage around the tag, and keep the radio signals from getting in or out of the bag. Now all I have to do is make a shopping bag out of ESD bags.... or just line a backpack, and _bam_. Shoplifter's dream. just remember to close the bag first....
Here's our chance to take the code, find all the bugs and errors, fix it, clean it up, and give it back to Microsoft, 10 times better than when it went out into the wild.... heh. What a way to get the benefits of Open Source code review without actually opening up the whole code base.... *grin*
No problems. First off, he's not trying to sell a _copy_ of anything. Nor is he going to be transferring it via peer to peer. Nor is he going to give out a secret URL address. This will be the file itself, attached to an e-mail message, and removed from all other locations. Secondly, if that's truly a problem, he can copy the file to CD first (as the iTunes license lets him do) and then ship that.
Pish Posh. 1) Here's that old 'price difference' argument that held water maybe a dozen years ago, but oesn't cut it now. Current cost for OS X, assuming you are purchasing it retail, and not with the purchase of the computer: $130. Retail cost of Windows XP, likewise not included in the cost of the computer: $300. So even paying full OS costs for updated versions of X, it's 2 1/2 years before you equal the cost of a Windows machine. Many places are on a three year refresh anyhow. 2) Usability. Why are you talking about usability in terms of Windows Interoperability? It's a Macintosh, not a Windows slave. Look at usability, not interoperability. Support costs for Macs are far lower because the computers are inherently more usable by the average person. And you want interoperability? Office for Mac. Samba support. Burn DVDs that actually work in DVD players. USB, Ethernet, Firewire, 802.11b, ZeroConf, X11 free and out of the box (not on windows), and support for every major network protocol out there. 3) What you saw today was a class action suit because apple promised full support on all G3 machines, and then was unable to provide some parts of that (notably software DVD support and some graphics updates) for computers released in *1997*. Not recent machines by any stretch of the imagination. I'd like to see you get good XP graphics on a 2 meg video card (And a Pentium 2, introduced in May of that year) from over 6 years ago. I happen to be able to run OS X 10.2 just fine on my 1993 Beige G3, because it doesn't have a DVD drive and I don't use it for graphics. Guess what I use it for? A server in my mixed Mac/Windows/Linux environment. Not a chance that the G3 and G4 are going away in the next 2 years, as far as supported products go. You present logical arguments, but I don't see the reality backing it up.
At the college I'm at we do something similar. Wireless or Wired we assume the network is insecure, and when you first connect up all you can get is a page where you have to enter your username and password. Behind the scenes it's already got your MAC address information from the routers, and when you enter a valid username and password it puts all that into a database of authorized computers, and will then give you a valid IP address instead of a 10.*.*.* address.
Easy. They 'cut corners' to save manufacturing costs.
Please note that according to this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education that a lot of the colleges are surprised and upset that the RIAA did not contact them or try to work with them on this. My guess is that it's because the institutions have lawyers who can defend in court the fact that a search engine is not illegal. So skip the lawyers by skipping the college. Oh, and don't tell the students until after the lawsuits are filed.
Also note that it's far cheaper to print the letters than it is to print everything but the letters.
The reason you might be getting quite similar as well as quite dissimilar pairs might just be one of algebra. For instance, in the quadratic equation, you get two roots. I know that in some cases taking the wrong root can give you an exact wrong answer when doing further parts of an equation. Might something similar be accounting for your bad combinations?
I agree with the person who said to finish your degree. I found myself in a similar situation. By the end of my junio year I was just burned up and dragging myself through because it wasn't fun any more. The work wasn't woth it. I was lucky. I was able to switch my Major to history, which I had enough courses under the belt to finish in my senior year (with a Classics Minor). And being in your senior year, last semester, you've probably got your requirements out of the way. Take a look at all the other classes available to you! You may not have the chance to experience them again. College is supposed to be fun, so don't let the ennui get you down.
Just for your knowledge, Unsanity Echo and Mint Audio already support Vorbis playback on the Mac. I'm just waiting for the 1.0 encoder release. Then I will encode all my cd's. Until then, I have encoded a small number of my cds at 160-256 VBR MP3 for listening at work, where I only have a small set of Harmon Kardons that came with my G4 Cube.
I too work at a University (if you read my e-mail address you can guess which one). We use Norton Antivirus as much as possible. We use Ghost and Assimilator on all new machines for Faculty and Staff, including Norton Antivirus. For the Students we produce a software CD every year, cross platform with Stuffit Installer Maker and Install Shield. It includes a variety of software, mostly Internet focused, including Norton Antivirus. We offer an obvious link to download the installer off of our ITS web page. But when it comes to automatic updates, we decided against it. It isn't our responsibility to protect users from their own mistakes. We can only show them the path, but they must walk it. We do what we can, including making sure that Norton will alert users when definitions are out of date, preconfiguring it to monitor opened files, and to run periodic full scans. We warn users via e-mail every time we see an outbreak of a new virus. We even try to filter some things (like kournikova) at the server level. We also provide complete and total support for those who have been afflicted with a virus. We provide network space and instructions so people can avoid floppy disks. We clean our own computers daily, to restrict the spread in public areas. We have a full service centralized Help Desk just for students (one of the top 5 amongst universities) . But we can't tell users how they can or can't use their computers. Generally speaking, we find it works. Most people desire to receive a virus about as much as you or I do, i.e., not at all. They do their part, provided they know how. So we focus on educating the users, providing the tools, and showing the way. We're confident that when our students go out into the corporate world they'll be able to update their own virus definitions, rather than blindly assuming that their corporate IS department will hold their hands and coddle them and make it so they never have to know anything by doing all the work for them. Users aren't that dumb, they just need to be shown the way.
I've always seen the difference 'twixt the two to be the same as any scientist vs. engineer classification. The Scientist is the one who plays with theories, runs experiments, tries to figure out why it works, etc. The Engineer is the one who tries to figure out how it works, and how it can be usefully applied. In the Computer Realm (as a Bachelor of _Arts_ recipient in Computer Science), I've always seen Computer Science as that branch which deals with theories such as compiler optimization, artificial intelligence, database organization, interface design ,etc; where as Computer Engineering had more to do with implementations of things, i.e. code organization, fragment reuse, hardware interfacing, data manipulation, and so on and so on. From what I've seen, generally speaking, both branches fall under the generic moniker of "Computer Science Degree" so it behooves you to go after that which makes you happy (good rule of thumb in any situation). Given the fact that most colleges don't require you to declare a major until about halfway through, start by taking those basic classes which are common to both, and dabble in a few electives on wither side of the fence. You'll be in a better position to decide which way you want to go, and feel less like you stuck yourself in a bad situation. And don't forget to spread tings out so you can taste the rich banquet of classes that College Life offers. You may decide that you were only interested in computers for the money, but that history (or philosophy, et al) is your true passion and calling. Not to say you can't have a computer vocation as well, but do what makes you happy, you'll feel better in the long run.
I would like to add that 't just West Coast campus' being hit by napster. I go to Brandeis University in MA, and we too have had issues with napster... in under a week, the bandwidth it was using went from 5% of total bandwidth to 50%.... We have since been forced to limit access to napster.com until we can get our new equipment configured for bandwidth shaping. Laurion
I'd also like to bring up the very good point that your vulnerability is directly related to the systems you are running, and how well they are configured and maintained. For starters, any machine not on a network is almost infinitely more secure than one that is. But if you have to have a computer on a network, you better make sure you have someone who knows what they are doing configure it for security. Or get something that is inherently secure. Not to sound like a fanatic (just a fan), please note the Army's recent decision after counsel with the W3C to switch their web server to a Macintosh. However, it may not be practical or desireable to switch every machine in the operation to something else. The only way to fight knowledge is with knowledge. Fight cyberterrorists by being smarter and better than they are. That alone should take care of most of the script-kiddies. Then you have to worry about those who are smart enough to do it for other reasons...
A good chance to let people know the differenceetween hacking and cracking..... Laurion
- Ok, for starters, I am here to defend Apple. If you don't like that, go somewhere else. I've seen a lot of people complaining about Apple starting to use business tactics that they don't like. Well, let's see here. When was the last time you saw a 486 motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium? Or even a pentium motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium 2? On top of this, Apple has never ever said their G3 systems would be upgradeable to G4. For that matter, they never said any of their prior systems would be upgradeable to G3, but lots of third party companies made those upgrades, and believe me, there are companies that are making G4 upgrades, even for those G3 users who installed the ROM which purportedly makes them unupgradeable. No one really knows this for sure, as no one has tried AFAIK. All this hype is about mere rumor, and every last one of you fell into the media pitfall.
- Now, for those of you still spouting the rhetoric about apple's prices, I'd like to remind you that the new G4, classified as a supercomputer by the government, thus a weapon (and as of yet, unexportable to other countries), is available for a starting price of 1599. If anyone out there tells me that is too much money to pay for a computer with a top of the line processor, Modem, Ethernet, Firewire, USB, 128-bit video card, and more, plus the wonderful support of Apple (rated very highly every year) and the ease of use and increase in productivity it brings, well, then they really don't know a good deal when they see one.
- Those of you complaining about the death of clones: The clone idea was initially to help spread the Mac platform. It didn't. All it did was cut into Apple's own user base far deeper than they could have handled. If Apple didn't kill the clones, the clones would have killed Apple, and we wouldn't be having this debate.
- For anyone complaining about the OS: Install LinuxPPC. Or, realize that the OS is getting better with every revision, and the OS X is going to put Microsoft, and particularly NT, to shame.
Myself, I'm looking forward to purchasing a new G4, and selling my old Beige G3, as soon as I have the disposible income to do so. The price is right, the hardware offering more than tempting, and the OS better than ever.