I remember nearly choking when I saw an "Admin" actually doing accounting in Excel . . . she typed in a column of figures on the computer, then added them up on her desk calculator and typed the sum into the "spreadsheet".
It's more impressive when it is a senior vice-president of a stock brokerage firm doing that. (about one in five executives at one San Francisco firm used excel that way in 1998. I spent two weeks observing people after I caught one of them adding rows in a spread sheet with a calculator)
It makes me laugh at the "training costs" that Gartner sites in their TCO studies. It's not like they can use what they have.
Legal fees are statutory, but lawyers have a history of corrupting the best of intentions. (I live in San Francisco, a city that has four daily newspapers two of which are dedicated solely to legal news,)
The proposals that have been floated around California have all had problems found with them. Personally I a am starting to view Shakespeare's solution as not completely unreasonable.
why do people in the US have to fight for legal fees when they win a lawsuit? When will it become an automatic part of american civil law? Responsibility for all legal fees when a case is lost will certainly put the brakes on the litigious culture of the US and all its frivolous lawsuits
The downside to your proposal, You do minor damage to my car,, say $200.00, I have an attorney on retainer, for my business, so I have my attoryne spend 200 hours procecuting the case ath $300/hr, so you owe me after I emerge victorious, $60,200. and I just saved myself two monts retainer, And no I won't use small claims because I cannot use my attorney there, and the whole point of the law suit is to exceed my retainer. (the actual damages are just incidental.
Many people suspect that your proposal would lead to litigation that is aimed at reducing legal costs,
I just don't understand where this myth that you cannot get support for debian comes from. With 658 Debian consultants in 59 countries Debian seems to have more support options than most other distributions. I will admit that some of those consultants are single person outfits. But HP is also on the list.
Or use embed.dll to embed firefox in activex and browser detect for IE, feed the IE users firefox and cross browser compatiblity achieved with just a slight (4MB) increase in page size:-)
I for one hope that Debian never "catches up" to Ubuntu,
Ironically I use Debian sid on my laptop because I find the older apps in Ubuntu annoying. (my workstation has sid/experimental. so that should tell you something about my tendencies with software.) In 2001 I usually ran a galeon compiled against a version of mozilla that was less than 48 hours old out of sheer desperation for a usable web browser on linux. I can't imagine doing that now, as konqueror, galeon, firefox, semonkey, and epiphany all work just fine. But qgis nightlies are tempting me at the moment.
There was a tell all book written in the late 1980's by a more or less unknown pro rider about his use of performance enhancing drugs. (I cannot remember the riders name)
The author went out of his way to not accuse Greg LeMond, Andy Hampsten, and Steve Bauer. That was his list of riders that he would not accuse of using.
LeMond went out of his way to not associate with doctors that provided performance enhancing chemicals. That cannot be said for Armstrong. I suspect a lot of the anti-Armstrong sentiment is his public statements that he is clean while associating with Dr. Michele Ferrari until it became clear that he would be suspended if he did not break off his relationship with the doctor. It is strains crediblity as much as someone named in the balco scandal in the US claiming that they never used drugs they just talked to balco about strength trainging exercises.
The ProTour needs to change the culture if they are going to go from 98% using to 98% not using drugs. The same magazines that complain about doping run ads for untested suplements that claim to enhance endurance. The other thing is that I don't ever recall LeMond denying using drugs, but being much more cirumspect about drug use and saying that riders need to have input into these things instead of being handed down from the sports governing body. (LeMond led the only rider revolt that I can recall, when the UCI mandated helmets being worn. There was a race that the riders gathered and did not roll forward. The issue was about helmets being worn on the climbs in the Tour de France.)
This is sort of off topic, but it responds to the parent post.
MURL:http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/> shows you which words are associated with your site. This gives a much clearer idea of how google views your site than pagerank alone, as your pagerank can be fixed by posting links to your site all over the place.
This is also usefull if you are thinking of running adwords on your site, as it gives you an idea of what types of ads will appear on your site.
Interesting that Debian seems to know that passwords were "weak". Only 1 poster here seems to have picked up on that curiosity. How do they know after the fact that a password was weak?
As mentioned above, probably John the Ripper is how the found week passwords. (not knowing this removes some crediblity to your comments as that tool has been around for about a decade. and programs like crack and pwc have been around even longer.)
Running an old kernel is against their own recommendations is something that is a little hard to understand.
Well, all of my friends, I either know in person or have talked at least talked to on the phone so your initial hypothis is not completely correct. I suspect it is because one of the bands I have listed as a friend is using a promo service. (I'll ask them when I have time.) But, all that has to happen is one of your friends lists one of aggregators as a friend and you are on the spider list.
Some interesting things (at least to me) about the spam, is that it only comes in when I am logged in to myspace. clicking on one of them generates about 7 more spam sometimes as few as three, and sometimes as many as ten friend requests.)
It is amazing that the sampling of "friends" that one of the ads had all passed a quick test of looking like real profiles. (no pre-seeding of bogus friends.)
One thing that makes spaming on myspace so appealing is that the click through rate is known, as opposed to email where you just know the union of people that will view images in their browser and opened your email.
It will be interesting to see how myspace holds up under the increase of bots. I have only had one client ask me about a presence on myspace, and no one has asked me to try sending out mass invites on myspaces, I do get requests to send out mass emails all the time. (one of the recent requests was to send a don't forget to vote message to all the registered Democrats in San Francisco that I have emails for. (about 10% of registered voters have turned over their email address to the Department of Elections so it is at least targeted spam.))
I think it was Sergey Brin of Google that commented that myspace is one of the more interesting things on the web today. And I suppose so if you look at from a marketers perspective, you start wondering what will be the Amway, or Tupperware phenomenon of the myspace generation.
I received 55 friend requests today none of them from real people. (Well I haven't looked at all of them, but the few I clicked on were from profiles that identified them selves as 18-22 single female, and all had lots of male "friends" they all more or less looked like ads for dating services, promos for bands, etc.)
It is kind of interesting that myspace seems to hold up under all the spam, even though they don't seem to do much about it (or are at least losing the war badly)
Hmm, time to go check out freshmeat for a myspace invite script.
They're (GNUCash) retooling their backend as SQL . . .
It would be really cool if SQL-Ledger could share the same database as GNUCash.
This would be ideal for Small businesses and small NGO/NPO's that need to outsource accounting but spend a healthy fraction of their money for accountants on travel time.
Integration with CiviCRM, SugarCRM, Vtiger, OSCommerce, and VirtueMart and you would have a compelling package.
If you look at what google publishes about pagerank and compare what they say with the search results returned by google.com you will notice discrepencies.
For example google claims that they do not return urls that contain '&id=' but that is clearly not the case. (Joomla and Mambo sites without seo enabled would have substantially fewer pages returned than they do if this was the case.)
I have come to feel that I can trust google about like I can trust my own contries military. (after independent verifiaction, and I need some reason to believe second source is not compromised.) But there are gems in the statements so I read them and after I am done reading I have more questions than before.
This looks like a small glimps into one component of pagerank. But the article is pretty light on substance.
The thing is, it is very hard for the upper x% to argue for anything other than a meritocracy. Unions serve to make everyone get the same rewards, regardless of effort or ability - so it brings up the slackers and down the hackers, so you can easily see why hackers would be against it.
So Barry Bonds makes the same as Randy Winn? I'm sure Randy will be thrilled to know that.
Unions don't seem to hurt pro athletes. Longshoremen are one of the few groups of workers that are (ajusted for inflation.) making as much now as in the 1950's. The last labor dispute between the ILWU and the ports was over the classification of comupter operators. IIRC the programers wound up being declared skilled laborers and had their pay more than doubled (even after the insanely high dues that the ILWU pays.)
If you are going to attack unions attack one of their many real problems. Lack of cooperation with management, lack of internal controls, lack of solidarity, inept leadership, corruption, participation in election fraud, etc. (I am being a bit redundant and leaving a lot out.)
The idea that if you are exceptional you will do better with out a union feeds into the Horatio Alger myths that Americans grow up with, but the reality is Michael Jordan (union) made a lot more money than Tiger Woods (non-union) is going to.
There are times when I think the American left and right have more in common with each other than with the "moderates" that back corporate management.
You don't need to be a lawyer to understand its terms. They're written so eloquently and comprehensibly that it is nearly impossible to not understand its terms.
502 randomly selected adults? You cannot draw any conclusion from that other than 502 people agreed to have their dinner interrupted (and even that is a sperious conclusion). 250+ million people living in the US and you expect 502 to represent them? Well, actually, I guess we do...and look at the bang up job Congress is doing....
That this is moderated insightful is just depressing. This is something that is taught in intro to statistics, a class that one needs to understand in order to understand almost all research papers. This is especially distressing considering that this is a site geared towards people that have taken much more than the minimum amount of math and science classes. This would be worth a response on a site aimed at people with little technical knowledge, as is . . .
From what I have heard in the past few weeks liberals and conservatives are much more upset with the supreme courts ruling Kelo v. New London about eminent domain than they are about their calls being recorded.
If you are politically inactive, as most Americans are, what do you care about the NSA spying on you. It may be a bit creepy, but beyond that it has no real day to day implications.
Part of the lack of turnout is because the perception among many voters is that their is basically two branches of one party that is more focused on what is good for the fortune 500 than small businesses or blue collar workers. (the traditional base of the GOP and Democrats respectively.) Maybe an insurgancy by the Constitioun Party and the Green Party would cause people to care, but very few people suspect that this would have been different with the Democrats in charge, in fact many feel that the Democrats have even less respect for civil liberties than the GOP.
Your system is affected just as much as any other. Unless the machine is single-user, all other users on the system will be able to exploit VNC.
This is wrong. A system that only accepts connections via the loopback interface is only subject to privilege escalation attacks. This is a far cry from a remote compromise. In a system with untrusted users this is still a big deal but it is far less problematic than remote compromise.
System administrators should understand that binding a service to loopback is not a valid means of sandboxing insecure software.
True, but it is a valid way of reducing risk. The mantra is defense in depth. If your VNC is only vulnerable to people with local access it is has a greater chance of not being broken into than if it is vulnerable to everyone on the Internet.
If your VNC is bound to the loopback and you are logging to a remote host you have a real chance of finding out who is guilty of privilege escalation. If it is on a public facing interface you have a lot more work trying to identify the guilty party.
There is a well known bug when Linux mounts large XFS file systems via NFS that bothered me regularly - large directories could not be searched, deleted, etc
I would expect that if an end user was willing to help with debugging the problem you would find several kernel developers that would find this a most interesting problem to solve.
But does the person having the problem have the motivation and time to feed bug reports and run tests so the deveopers can isolate the problem?
I have often wondered if RLL drive support is at all close to usable in the 2.6 line, just because I can't imagine who still has one of those disks. (what were they 10-60Meg in capacity or so?)
As far as databases go, MS SQL server comes with better tools than mysql, and generally requires less knowledge to administer.
MS SQL does come with better tools than mysql. But, phpmyadmin (which does not come with mysql but is free) is adequate for most peoples uses. and installed by most hosting companies that offer mysql databases. As far as requiring less knowledge to administer the worms that targeted MSSQL server should have been dead in the water, but because many, many people had grossly misconfigured MSSQL servers they worked, (a database server listening on a public port without strong encryption and reliable authentication in this day and age is grossly misconfigured. period.) So it may be easy to get MSSQL working. Getting it to work properly has historically been problematic. MySQL almost always only listens to 127.0.0.1 by default with it up to the admisitrator to figure out riskier configurations. (FreeBSD Ports is an exception last I checked, but I suppose if you are installing mysql from ports you probably have more than a couple of howto's in front of you.)
Apache might be more configurable but editing Apache configuration XML has been problematic for me the limited times I've had to do it. IIS has most of that exposed in the UI, and there are generally more "30 second how-tos" for doing that stuff with the meta-data editor if you need to.
IIS is more configurable than Apache, but it is sendmail type configurable, you can do anything with it, but trying to figure out what either one is configured to do can be a black art at times. The odds of a neophyte being able to figure out what a custom configuration is doing is slim.
As for php being hard to configure, I have only experienced that if the app coding is seriously brain damaged in places. (see almost all php4 only apps for an example of this which includes a lot of popular software such as sugarcrm.) If the software is hard to configure it has a good chance of containing exploitable coding errors that you probably don't want on your website. Just as you don't want people installing weatherbug on their windows workstations. Some problems really are not the operating systems fault. I would look at changing your forum software if it fits this criteria.
Slashdot Mirror
Selling to bosses just got a little easier. It should be even easier when an unethical law firm trolls the internet for sites to sue.
Website designers that have a clue should see a nice increase in business next year.
It's more impressive when it is a senior vice-president of a stock brokerage firm doing that. (about one in five executives at one San Francisco firm used excel that way in 1998. I spent two weeks observing people after I caught one of them adding rows in a spread sheet with a calculator)
It makes me laugh at the "training costs" that Gartner sites in their TCO studies. It's not like they can use what they have.
Legal fees are statutory, but lawyers have a history of corrupting the best of intentions. (I live in San Francisco, a city that has four daily newspapers two of which are dedicated solely to legal news,)
The proposals that have been floated around California have all had problems found with them. Personally I a am starting to view Shakespeare's solution as not completely unreasonable.
The downside to your proposal, You do minor damage to my car,, say $200.00, I have an attorney on retainer, for my business, so I have my attoryne spend 200 hours procecuting the case ath $300/hr, so you owe me after I emerge victorious, $60,200. and I just saved myself two monts retainer, And no I won't use small claims because I cannot use my attorney there, and the whole point of the law suit is to exceed my retainer. (the actual damages are just incidental.
Many people suspect that your proposal would lead to litigation that is aimed at reducing legal costs,
Um, Debian is HP's linux distribution of choice. HP maintains the Carrier Grade version of Sarge. which they supply to Motorola and others.
I just don't understand where this myth that you cannot get support for debian comes from. With 658 Debian consultants in 59 countries Debian seems to have more support options than most other distributions. I will admit that some of those consultants are single person outfits. But HP is also on the list.
You might want to reexamine your assumptions.
Or use embed.dll to embed firefox in activex and browser detect for IE, feed the IE users firefox and cross browser compatiblity achieved with just a slight (4MB) increase in page size:-)
Ironically I use Debian sid on my laptop because I find the older apps in Ubuntu annoying. (my workstation has sid/experimental. so that should tell you something about my tendencies with software.) In 2001 I usually ran a galeon compiled against a version of mozilla that was less than 48 hours old out of sheer desperation for a usable web browser on linux. I can't imagine doing that now, as konqueror, galeon, firefox, semonkey, and epiphany all work just fine. But qgis nightlies are tempting me at the moment.
There was a tell all book written in the late 1980's by a more or less unknown pro rider about his use of performance enhancing drugs. (I cannot remember the riders name)
The author went out of his way to not accuse Greg LeMond, Andy Hampsten, and Steve Bauer. That was his list of riders that he would not accuse of using.
LeMond went out of his way to not associate with doctors that provided performance enhancing chemicals. That cannot be said for Armstrong. I suspect a lot of the anti-Armstrong sentiment is his public statements that he is clean while associating with Dr. Michele Ferrari until it became clear that he would be suspended if he did not break off his relationship with the doctor. It is strains crediblity as much as someone named in the balco scandal in the US claiming that they never used drugs they just talked to balco about strength trainging exercises.
The ProTour needs to change the culture if they are going to go from 98% using to 98% not using drugs. The same magazines that complain about doping run ads for untested suplements that claim to enhance endurance. The other thing is that I don't ever recall LeMond denying using drugs, but being much more cirumspect about drug use and saying that riders need to have input into these things instead of being handed down from the sports governing body. (LeMond led the only rider revolt that I can recall, when the UCI mandated helmets being worn. There was a race that the riders gathered and did not roll forward. The issue was about helmets being worn on the climbs in the Tour de France.)
This is sort of off topic, but it responds to the parent post.
That should be: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/.
MURL:http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/> shows you which words are associated with your site. This gives a much clearer idea of how google views your site than pagerank alone, as your pagerank can be fixed by posting links to your site all over the place.
This is also usefull if you are thinking of running adwords on your site, as it gives you an idea of what types of ads will appear on your site.
As mentioned above, probably John the Ripper is how the found week passwords. (not knowing this removes some crediblity to your comments as that tool has been around for about a decade. and programs like crack and pwc have been around even longer.)
Running an old kernel is against their own recommendations is something that is a little hard to understand.
Finding weak passwords is trivial.
Well, all of my friends, I either know in person or have talked at least talked to on the phone so your initial hypothis is not completely correct. I suspect it is because one of the bands I have listed as a friend is using a promo service. (I'll ask them when I have time.) But, all that has to happen is one of your friends lists one of aggregators as a friend and you are on the spider list.
Some interesting things (at least to me) about the spam, is that it only comes in when I am logged in to myspace. clicking on one of them generates about 7 more spam sometimes as few as three, and sometimes as many as ten friend requests.)
It is amazing that the sampling of "friends" that one of the ads had all passed a quick test of looking like real profiles. (no pre-seeding of bogus friends.)
One thing that makes spaming on myspace so appealing is that the click through rate is known, as opposed to email where you just know the union of people that will view images in their browser and opened your email.
It will be interesting to see how myspace holds up under the increase of bots. I have only had one client ask me about a presence on myspace, and no one has asked me to try sending out mass invites on myspaces, I do get requests to send out mass emails all the time. (one of the recent requests was to send a don't forget to vote message to all the registered Democrats in San Francisco that I have emails for. (about 10% of registered voters have turned over their email address to the Department of Elections so it is at least targeted spam.))
I think it was Sergey Brin of Google that commented that myspace is one of the more interesting things on the web today. And I suppose so if you look at from a marketers perspective, you start wondering what will be the Amway, or Tupperware phenomenon of the myspace generation.
I received 55 friend requests today none of them from real people. (Well I haven't looked at all of them, but the few I clicked on were from profiles that identified them selves as 18-22 single female, and all had lots of male "friends" they all more or less looked like ads for dating services, promos for bands, etc.)
It is kind of interesting that myspace seems to hold up under all the spam, even though they don't seem to do much about it (or are at least losing the war badly)
Hmm, time to go check out freshmeat for a myspace invite script.
It would be really cool if SQL-Ledger could share the same database as GNUCash.
This would be ideal for Small businesses and small NGO/NPO's that need to outsource accounting but spend a healthy fraction of their money for accountants on travel time.
Integration with CiviCRM, SugarCRM, Vtiger, OSCommerce, and VirtueMart and you would have a compelling package.
And they are asking at least $75.00 for it.
upside -- it would be a fun domain to use.
downside -- sco would get $75 more than they deserve.
decisions, decisions.
If you look at what google publishes about pagerank and compare what they say with the search results returned by google.com you will notice discrepencies.
For example google claims that they do not return urls that contain '&id=' but that is clearly not the case. (Joomla and Mambo sites without seo enabled would have substantially fewer pages returned than they do if this was the case.)
I have come to feel that I can trust google about like I can trust my own contries military. (after independent verifiaction, and I need some reason to believe second source is not compromised.) But there are gems in the statements so I read them and after I am done reading I have more questions than before.
This looks like a small glimps into one component of pagerank. But the article is pretty light on substance.
I actually mapped out all the stories of a few of them. (in fifth grade.)
:-)
I remember one of them having a loop. I stopped trying to count the total number of stories after that.
So Barry Bonds makes the same as Randy Winn? I'm sure Randy will be thrilled to know that.
Unions don't seem to hurt pro athletes. Longshoremen are one of the few groups of workers that are (ajusted for inflation.) making as much now as in the 1950's. The last labor dispute between the ILWU and the ports was over the classification of comupter operators. IIRC the programers wound up being declared skilled laborers and had their pay more than doubled (even after the insanely high dues that the ILWU pays.)
If you are going to attack unions attack one of their many real problems. Lack of cooperation with management, lack of internal controls, lack of solidarity, inept leadership, corruption, participation in election fraud, etc. (I am being a bit redundant and leaving a lot out.)
The idea that if you are exceptional you will do better with out a union feeds into the Horatio Alger myths that Americans grow up with, but the reality is Michael Jordan (union) made a lot more money than Tiger Woods (non-union) is going to.
There are times when I think the American left and right have more in common with each other than with the "moderates" that back corporate management.
Unless of course you are AT&T
That this is moderated insightful is just depressing. This is something that is taught in intro to statistics, a class that one needs to understand in order to understand almost all research papers. This is especially distressing considering that this is a site geared towards people that have taken much more than the minimum amount of math and science classes. This would be worth a response on a site aimed at people with little technical knowledge, as is . . .
From what I have heard in the past few weeks liberals and conservatives are much more upset with the supreme courts ruling Kelo v. New London about eminent domain than they are about their calls being recorded.
If you are politically inactive, as most Americans are, what do you care about the NSA spying on you. It may be a bit creepy, but beyond that it has no real day to day implications.
Part of the lack of turnout is because the perception among many voters is that their is basically two branches of one party that is more focused on what is good for the fortune 500 than small businesses or blue collar workers. (the traditional base of the GOP and Democrats respectively.) Maybe an insurgancy by the Constitioun Party and the Green Party would cause people to care, but very few people suspect that this would have been different with the Democrats in charge, in fact many feel that the Democrats have even less respect for civil liberties than the GOP.
This is wrong. A system that only accepts connections via the loopback interface is only subject to privilege escalation attacks. This is a far cry from a remote compromise. In a system with untrusted users this is still a big deal but it is far less problematic than remote compromise.
True, but it is a valid way of reducing risk. The mantra is defense in depth. If your VNC is only vulnerable to people with local access it is has a greater chance of not being broken into than if it is vulnerable to everyone on the Internet.
If your VNC is bound to the loopback and you are logging to a remote host you have a real chance of finding out who is guilty of privilege escalation. If it is on a public facing interface you have a lot more work trying to identify the guilty party.
I would expect that if an end user was willing to help with debugging the problem you would find several kernel developers that would find this a most interesting problem to solve.
But does the person having the problem have the motivation and time to feed bug reports and run tests so the deveopers can isolate the problem?
I have often wondered if RLL drive support is at all close to usable in the 2.6 line, just because I can't imagine who still has one of those disks. (what were they 10-60Meg in capacity or so?)
MS SQL does come with better tools than mysql. But, phpmyadmin (which does not come with mysql but is free) is adequate for most peoples uses. and installed by most hosting companies that offer mysql databases. As far as requiring less knowledge to administer the worms that targeted MSSQL server should have been dead in the water, but because many, many people had grossly misconfigured MSSQL servers they worked, (a database server listening on a public port without strong encryption and reliable authentication in this day and age is grossly misconfigured. period.) So it may be easy to get MSSQL working. Getting it to work properly has historically been problematic. MySQL almost always only listens to 127.0.0.1 by default with it up to the admisitrator to figure out riskier configurations. (FreeBSD Ports is an exception last I checked, but I suppose if you are installing mysql from ports you probably have more than a couple of howto's in front of you.)
IIS is more configurable than Apache, but it is sendmail type configurable, you can do anything with it, but trying to figure out what either one is configured to do can be a black art at times. The odds of a neophyte being able to figure out what a custom configuration is doing is slim.
As for php being hard to configure, I have only experienced that if the app coding is seriously brain damaged in places. (see almost all php4 only apps for an example of this which includes a lot of popular software such as sugarcrm.) If the software is hard to configure it has a good chance of containing exploitable coding errors that you probably don't want on your website. Just as you don't want people installing weatherbug on their windows workstations. Some problems really are not the operating systems fault. I would look at changing your forum software if it fits this criteria.
You grossly over simplify our system.
For example "which is heavier a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?"
31 grams in an ounce of gold. (troy ounces)
28 grams in an ounce of feathers. (imperial ounces)
373 grams in a pound of gold (12 ounces in a troy pound)
454 grams in a pound of feathers (16 ounces in an imperial pound)
So counter intitively a pound of feathers is heaver than a pound of gold. But 16 ounces of gold does weigh more than 16 ounces of feathers.
Want to get into get into measures of volume? They make our systems of measuring mass seem sane.