Allowing secret ballots (No one except you knows who you voted for) and ballots that can't be cheated on is nigh impossible. It can't be done even for paper ballots, so why should a machine with thousands of parts involved be able to do it? The only difference with electronic ballots is because people can not see and understand the processes that go on inside them, it is easier for a smaller group of people to alter them without being caught. If someone is molesting paper ballots in some way, it is obvious to anyone who sees it. If someone molests voting machines in some way, it will be undetectable to anyone but a trained expert with prolonged access to the machine.
You can't make a piece of electronics that can't be modified by someone who has physical access to it. You can make it more difficult then it is on modern machines (where it is almost excruciatingly simple) but you still have the problem. At least with paper ballots, the number of people that must be involved to cause large scale manipulation is much larger, and thus much more likely to be caught. Electronic voting machines are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. They aren't any more efficient then paper ballots, their only benefit is they can give results very quickly, which is a benefit to the news media, not anyone else. Does it really matter if it takes an extra day to determine who won an election?
The shuttles are a definitely not the best possible design, we know that now, but at the time they were built they seemed like a good idea. Either way, just because the shuttles aren't the ideal vehicle doesn't mean we should toss the whole program away, which is what we are doing. I live in Floida, and visit the space coast often and know a lot of the "little people" in the space program. They are insanely dedicated, even the people who do jobs others would consider demeaning or unimportant. They knew the people who died in the various NASA accidents way better then the engineers in Houston did, and they work every day to keep the astronauts safe. The majority of them can and will get better paying jobs in the private sector, many of them routinely turned down offers when economic times were better (no one is getting rich at NASA).
There is a ridiculous amount of institutional knowledge in the shuttle program, as well as a culture the defies all the regular government stereotypes. Once the team is disbanded and goes their separate ways we will have lost our best shot as a country at safe sustained manned space flight. We should have had a next generation vehicle ready to transition them too, but politics and the vague promise that somehow commercial space flight will fill in has killed it. Apparently as a country we no longer want to lead in the realms of science and engineering, and are content to have our only government funded innovations come in the form of new banking procedures to steal from the poor and give to the rich.
This is my experience as well. The old "use an up to date AV and don't browse porn sites" line is completely outdated. The modern source of infection is either through using exploits in rarely patched software (Adobe, Flash, Java, etc.) combined with using SEO techniques to boost malware sites to the top of google rankings for big breaking news stories, infecting wordpress and other blog systems en masse, and infecting the servers used to host advertising on major sites (or just buying the advertising straight up and redirecting it to malware after it goes live). A lot of them don't even rely on an exploit, they just make it appear that a site they trust is telling them they need to download something, so they do.
The variants change multiple times a day, and no AV product can keep up. Once installed they install rootkits that hide them from the AV. The rootkit part normally fails on Vista/Win 7, but the usermode still runs, and users will happily click an escalation prompt. The only defense is to lock machines down tight enough nothing unauthorized can be run on them and users don't have admin rights (note that I didnt say don't run as admin. Sudo won't help you here. They will enter the admin credentials anyways, because users are dumb and don't read things) . I've taken to doing some forensics on some of the pc's that come by me with fake av, and about 90% of the time, at the time of the infection they were reasonably up to date, had working AV, and from the browser history were on normal, everyday sites like msn.com or whatever immediately before being infected.
AV is useless for the new generation of exploits, at least in it's current form.
It's generally referred to as the JTAG hack. It requires minor soldering and modification of the 360. It does not work on every revision of the 360 currently. Frankly, if you are not savvy enough to find the info with Google, you are better off not bothering or paying someone else to do it.
The 360 has been hacked for a long time, and has a thriving homebrew scene. I currently have a completely redone dashboard (that replaces the MS one) and a ton of arcade and console emulators on mine. Previous to the current hack (that allows unsigned code execution) their was a hack for the DVD-Rom firmware that allowed you to play with burned disks.
Deep packet inspection of large amounts of traffic was not possible until fairly recently. The technology did not exist to allow ISP's to treat traffic differently. The peering agreements between providers were born out of the difficulty of accurately accounting and billing for traffic. It was cheaper for everyone with roughly similar amounts of traffic to agree to pass each others traffic for free then to spend millions on systems to try to figure out who was owed what. The only reason this hasn't been an issue until now is purely technical in nature. Because of the huge investment to enter the market, plus the network effect and economies of scale inherent, plus the corruption of politicians, make the telecom industry a natural oligopoly, if not a natural monopoly. WIthout regulation, they will abuse their customers to the maximum extent possible, because their customers have little if any choice. Choosing an ISP is like choosing between getting in a cage with a hungry lion or a hungry bear, either way the outcome is unpleasant, just in slightly different ways. There is no avoiding it in the current environment, every business in this situation is going to act this way. The only solution is to either artificially break them up into small pieces, or to artificially regulate their behavior. I'm willing to bet the companies involved would prefer the latter to the former.
The "if you don't like it, switch to another provider" argument is ridiculous if you look at the reality of the situation. There is no true commodity market for internet access, major markets have 2, maybe 3 options, smaller markets only have 1. Of those 2, they will often rely on different technology, so only one may actually meet your needs. Furthermore the costs to switch can be very large, especially for large companies. Furthermore, it will be mostly invisible to the average end user. The costs are going to be born by the websites that want to get their traffic to the customer (using the connection the customer has paid for). If you are Google, having your search results artifically delayed to be slower then Bing results will cost you Money. If you are trying to run a voip service, and the QoS applied by the ISP artificially slows your packets while giving another service priority, your service will be spotty and drop lots of calls, while the other service will work great, even though you both are using the exact same infrastructure.
Allowing ISP's to treat packets differently is giving them a license for legal extortion. They can abuse the fact that to the end-user slowness caused by their ISP and slowness caused by the site itself is indistinguishable to extort money. Furthermore, they can give sites they have a financial interest in priority, without spending a dime on increasing capacity. Furthermore, it creates a barrier to entry to new players that do not have the funds to pay off the ISP's to carry their traffic.
Neutrality to traffic is a fundamental aspect of the internet that is part of why it has been so successful. Allowing protocols, services, and sites, to live and die on their merits without artificial limitation is what has led the boom of internet development. Imagine if in those early days of servers in cases made of LEGO, Google had to negotiate an agreement with every ISP to carry their traffic to their users before they could offer services. And at any time, someone with a bigger warchest could have offered more money to keep them off.
Congress and the FCC have created these monsters, constantly pouring government funds, preferential treatment, monopoly agreements, etc. into them to keep any real competition from occurring. If they don't have the right to place limits on their abuses of the oligopoly position they gave them, who does?
It wasn't what he said, it was the way he said it, and the irony of this old, clueless man, who held an extremely important committee seat, blathering on about something he clearly didn't understand. It sounded like he was repeating an explanation some slick lobbyist had used to explain it to him, that he only half remembered. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that Ted Stevens was not a 100%, bought and paid for shill to industry, with no ethics or redeeming value. He treated congress like a smash and grab for money for his supporters. I'm sad he died in a plane crash instead of prison where he would have been if it weren't for the ineptitude of the prosecutors of his corruption investigation.
Windows does allow services to run as different users. it has since at least windows 2000, probably since NT. Services that interact with the network by default login as network service, which has limited permissions compared to the local system account. In a locked down environment (ie an internet facing or dmz server) you can use even more restricted accounts. A poorly configured Linux server is easy to exploit, in the same way a poorly configured Windows server is easy to exploit. The only difference is there's a larger pool of people with jobs as windows administrators without the skills and knowledge to back it up. As linux becomes ever more popular, expect to see the same thing to happen to it.
Presumably pirates will not have internet access on their long plundering trips across the ocean, and not be able to access the new content as it is released.
I used 64-bit XP for years (skipping Vista completely) on my home machine. I never had a problem with drivers. I never get this idea that gets spouted every time it comes up. Even my printer had a driver. Even most apps that require a driver I never had problems finding 64-bit versions for. Granted, I built my machine myself, using parts from vendors with a reputation with supporting their hardware, so if you bought a box from Dell filled with cheapest parts they could get that week, your experience may have varied. I think a lot of people tried xp64 right after it came out, and couldn't find drivers, and gave up. Of course any MS OS is going to be short on drivers at the start.
Firefox started as the browser that wasn't for your grandma. It had rough edges, pages didn't always display properly, but it was fast and tabbed an light weight with an installer in the single digits. This is how it grew it's user base, Trying to shoehorn it into the browser for grandma is retarded (Chrome already is better for that, by a good margin). Fuck your grandma, I don't want to use the best browser for your grandma. Our requirements are completely different. I want Firefox to be the best browser for me. I want separate url and search fields because I know exactly what I am trying to accomplish. If I want to stick some search terms through google I will, if I want to go to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org I had a specific reason. I want the url bar to make a best effort at turning what I entered into a working url with as little guessing as possible and run with it.
Let chrome be the browser for grandma, they have the resources and the marketing power behind them. Leave Firefox pure to the roots it came from, and focus on technical aspects. If people want to change the ui, the wonderful extension system lets them do just that.
I really think it's precisely because we are so used to being the ones helping and not the ones being helped. For a long time America was the country that could do anything, make anything possible, build anything that could be built. Of course that has always been more myth then reality, but every culture has it's own conceits. Somewhere along the way our political system morphed from the "great experiment" to a system were everyone is afraid of anything that might imply America right now is the greatest country ever in the history of the universe and anyone talking about change or reform is a communist.
In a few hundred years we conquered an untamed continent, and turned it into an economic and industrial powerhouse capable of making everything from corn to lunar landers. Yet now politicians act like it is some impossible effort to fix a few potholes in the highway system we built 50+ years ago. It's ridiculous.
As a Floridian (living in an area drained by the army core of engineers back when converting swampland to usable land via a massive canal system across an entire state was no big deal) who loves our states natural beauty and marshland, I say bring on the Dutch. There's no doubt they have the best hydrological engineers on the planet, large sections of their country continue to exist only because of their expertise. BP and our politicians have completely failed in every aspect of responding to this mess. Whoever turned the Dutch away should be fired as soon as possible. From the very beginning their response has been 100% PR with no substance. Within a week of it happening Obama should have had the best experts in the world on oil spill cleanup and mitigation here, and given them the full force of his executive authority. As the chief executive THATS HIS FUCKING JOB. Not give speeches, not give tv interviews, not spout vitriol at Britian, or play pin the blame on the regulator, but to react to an emergency like this as quickly as possible in a manner Congress (by its bureaucratic nature) can't.
The people affected by this shit couldn't care less if our elected officials have to go hat in hand to Europe and ask for their help (never mind that help was freely offered). That's the job, and by failing to do it he has failed us.
Meinberg makes a line of products that provide GPS backed NTP servers, as well as PCI/PCI-E cards that give PC's a GPS based clock (with an external antenna). They also make a pretty good NTP server/client for WIndows. It's overkill for most projects, but if you have a large datacenter or need for very accurate time, I would think they could be useful, if nothing else to keep you from having to rely on external time sources (which could be a potential security hole). This research seem more about making an improved and more accurate version of NTP, which is nice I guess, but NTP is already pretty accurate (on a scale of what is actually needed for 99.99% of situations).
This is incredibly naive. The current methods works well, for a very specific reason. MS's real customers are businesses. The home user is an afterthought, so we might as well ignore them. Large businesses have lots of custom applications and integration and scripting. Most of this work was done in a very, very shitty way. The result is things like hard coded paths, relying on unsupported, deprecated, or undocumented functionality of libraries, all sorts of stupid, impossible to maintain bullshit. Most commercial business apps for sale are the same way. The whole thing is held together with bailing wire and happy thoughts. The result is a system that is much, much more likely to break because of patches then a normal system or home user. I have never had a patch break one my personal pc's or one of my apps, but I've seen it happen to corporate pc's all the time. The problem isn't really even Microsoft's, because shitty programmers in shitty conditions making shit can do the same in any os and will.
In the current patch system, we can test individual updates (making it easier to diagnose the cause of the problem) and once we have identified a problem patch, we can still roll out the rest. In a single cumulative version system, it's all or nothing, so if you have a game breaking patch, you get 0 patches until you have fixed the problem. In a perfect world it wouldn't matter, but in a perfect world we wouldn't need patches in the first place.
Add in the fact not all vulnerabilities are created equal, and you have a major problem. If you have two vulnerabilities, both of which cause problems for you when patched, but one is a vulnerability when you open jpgs in mspaint on the third Tuesday of the month, and the other is a remote code execution in your tcp/ip stack, you will want to prioritize the latter over the former. In a monolithic version environment, chances are most companies would be 6 months minimum behind the curve when that big bad vulnerability hit. They would have no choice but to keep plodding along (and frantically adding more programmers would most likely hurt more then it helped at that point), whereas with individual patches they could skip all the intermediate updates and deal with the first.
So instead of playing harmless games like Farmville, or watching TV to relax, we should be making the latest and greatest burning-man rejects? No thanks. Playing Farmville has exactly as much value as your ridiculous car, and wastes a lot less money and resources to do it. There will always be someone who thinks their entertainment of choice is superior to yours. Some would say you were wasting your time building art cars when you could be reading the world's great literature, or seeing the best painters, or learning to make music, etc. While you were busy fucking around with your car, the founders of Zynga were busy building a company that makes them ridiculously wealthy while bringing millions of people some enjoyment. And for the record, I have never played Farmville, nor do I have any interest in it, and I probably watch a total of 3-4 hours of TV a week. But I realize my hobbies would seem quite boring or uninspired to some, even though I enjoy them, and I realize mocking others for enjoying something I don't enjoy makes me the asshole wasting his time, not them.
Seems to me the first step is designing a new high voltage power line that doesn't look like something out of a science gone horribly amok science fiction movie. I realize the when building these things they consider function over form, but the reality is the complete lack of aesthetics is a big factor in why people fight them so hard. They look like big industrial machinery, and in peoples minds that equates to scary and dangerous, especially from their comfy suburban house. Along I-4 here in Central Florida, near Disney World, there is a large transmission tower that is shaped to look like the iconic 3 circles Mickey Mouse design. They combined form and function in a way that turns an eyesore into an attraction.
In the new version of Office (2010), they did realize that was a problem, and changed the menu to make it more obvious. You are referring to the old version (2007). That said, it's something that could easily be resolved with a little informal user training. upgrade a small test group first, collect the questions they most frequently ask, and whip up a document to answer most questions or show them how to do common tasks. Something concise focused to your users is going to be a lot more useful then the generic tour everyone skips. You are going to have the same problem anytime you do a major upgrade though, it's the way it works and the price of progress. The only alternative is to dig your heels in and refuse to change, and that saves you money and time in the short term, but eventually you wind up with something like emacs, which requires extensive retraining to be able to do anything.
I really don't understand the reluctance some people in IT have in regards to upgrading MS products. When you got on the MS train, this was the inevitable result, it's their business model and always has been. You can hold off for awhile, but eventually you will have to decide to keep riding the train or get off. The more you fight it and delay it the harder the inevitable will be. I'm not saying you need to deploy every new version the week it comes out, but a planned, phased in incremental upgrade procedure over time will be better then waiting until you can't possibly delay any longer because MS is dropping support entirely and you are 3 major revisions behind. MS is in the business of selling software, and they want steady recurring income, not sell it once and support it to the end of time for free. If you don't like the upgrade cycle, I won't bother linking the xkcd comic because someone already has, but the world's tiniest open source violin is playing for you. Jump ship and find another solution or get with it, you can't stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist.
Generally slot machines have a posted maximum jackpot. I don't know about this case but in other cases like this the reported "winnings" have far exceeded the maximum the machine is supposed to possibly give out, as posted on the machine. The real issue here is how crappy the engineering must be on these machines, to allow this to happen so often it routinely makes then news. In my opinion all glitches should require a payout of the maximum possible winnings, which must be clearly posted on the machine, regardless of what it "should" have paid out. That would encourage casinos to invest in machines with actual sound engineering principles, without making them unfairly liable for massive amounts of money when a legitimate freak error occurs (even in the best systems, exceedingly rare circumstances could cause errors). It's a slot machine, it's a simple device, if they spend the money on reasonable robustness they can easily achieve extremely low error rates.
FYI it is strongly encouraged (and considered best practices by Microsoft) to run the edge transport role on a separate server (or VM) in an isolated dmz network. Whats more, exchange (and windows server for that matter) has come a long, long, long way since Pentium 4s were state of the art. MS has it's faults but they have stepped up their game in the server world in recent years. And the network stack was taken directly from BSD (as the BSD license allows them to do legally) so I doubt they are different in any substantial way.
Google's data mining is annoying at best, BP's oil spill is an environmental disaster that will harm millions of people (not to mention wildlife) in ways we can't even begin to calculate yet. Applying the same standard is stupid, because it implies the scale of the problem is in anyway similar. Furthermore, while it is fairly understandable to make mistakes in software systems that will at worst collect data about unencrypted wifi traffic, it is not understandable to make mistakes in a critical safety device that lives and the economic and environmental prosperity of an entire coastline depend on.
Google is in the wrong, and so is BP. But to pretend that the seriousness of the way they are wrong is in the same ballpark is ridiculous, and therefore the expect the same reaction is ridiculous. If you do an employee background check, and one of your employees was fined for littering, the other convicted of theft, manslaughter, criminal negligence, bribing public officials, and destruction of property, you would react in different ways. Thats the difference in severity we are talking about.
A better reason to make them static lengths of time and not based on the arbitrary date someone croaks at. Does an author (or his family) deserve less money because they get hit by a car the day after releasing their book? Pick an arbitrary time period of reasonable length, like say 20 years. That means by the time people are old enough to produce creative content of their own, the work they grew up with an were inspired by is fair game. Imagine how awesome it would be if the Ninja Turtles, GI Joe, Star Wars and Transformers were all public domain? There's already plenty of fan work, but they have to constantly dodge lawyers. There's no doubt that for a certain generation these things are a huge part of their culture, with meaning beyond the original works themselves. A person or company should not be allowed to own the common culture, only keep contributing to it.
He specifically said he needs OS X or Windows to make the district happy. You can disagree with that requirement but that doesn't help anyone. If hes in the position to ask this question I'm pretty sure he is aware of Linux, and vague suggestions of dump Windoze by M$ and use linux to do it with no actual advice of HOW to do it, is not helpful. In a car analogy it's like if someone asked you "which engine option should I order for my Ferrari" and you responded with "Screw Ferrari, they are overpriced, you can build a sports car in your garage from scratch".
XP is dead. If you aren't stuck to a legacy system (as this guy isn't) you would be a complete fool to stick with XP. It would be a mistake you will constantly regret. Most of the things you would want to extend XP's features are built into 7/Server 2003. Remote administration, Patching, Application Control, Network Image Deployment, locking down the desktop like deep freeze does, all can be accomplished with built in (and supported) features. Security is also better (requiring drivers to be signed, built in support for full disk encryption, Memory address randomization, better default settings, better implementation of SFC, etc), and the systems are a lot more usable running as a non-admin without lots of extra scripting work. You also get better ip v6 support, and improved network performance in general. Just the fewer headaches in patching alone makes it worthwhile (even with a WSUS server, I find myself frequently manually updating XP machines, I've never once had to do it on a 7 machine).
The 7/Server 2008 networks we have deployed require substantially less maintenance then the XP networks. Support for XP is being phased out on new hardware, as it is you have to stick to certain long-term support models to get support for XP from the big OEM's (there's a difference between "heres some drivers, good luck" and officially supported). 7 is a mature OS, if it makes you feel better think of it as Vista service pack 3. Furthermore if you don't have the cash to shell out for VLC licenses, expect trouble when Microsoft drops downgrade rights on OEM licenses. Setting up a brand spanking new network with Windows XP is like making a brand new web app from scratch, and designing it in Visual Basic to only work in IE 6. You can do it, and the technology is tried and true, but you will be creating more work for an inferior result that will bite you in the ass in a short time frame. The only reason for not deploying 7 on new hardware where you are not constrained by legacy code is you want to stay in your comfort zone, and are scared to learn new things. If that's the case, you need to GTFO IT, it's the wrong field for you, and you are doing your clients/employers a disservice. Being skeptical of new technology is fine, but being irrationally afraid of it is stupid. As far as Engineering/Science goes, any commercial software package that can't run at all under 7 is probably on it's way out anyways. Whats bleeding edge today will be a generation behind by the time the students get into the real world.
All that said, I think XP/7 is the WRONG way to go. If you want a Windows environment, your best bet will be to buy some thin clients, network boot them with something like ThinStation, and have them RDP to a farm of nice beefy 2008 R2 Terminal Servers. Thin clients are the only thing I've seen hold up to a school environment. Unlike a corporate environment where you can expect the employees to only cause damage out of ignorance, high school students will be actively malicious, and will destroy/break/steal things just to do it. If you lose a thin client, the teacher can yank it out, pull a spare from the closet, and send the old one to be diagnosed/redeployed in your spare time. Because they are stateless, if one is stolen you are out a couple hundred bucks and not any information. It will be easier to setup a consistent environment, and you can shop around to different hardware vendors if needed while maintaining a consistent experience for the students. It will be easier to create flexible lesson plans, install software, and you can often really cut down on licensing costs. Thin client tech has come a long way, and if you spec your servers properly, and have a decent network, you can't tell the difference. I took a class in Solidworks (a ram hungry and CPU hungry 3d CAD program that makes your average office workstation dog slow) that was taught in a lab using thin clients and terminal servers, and it ran better on them then my personal laptop, despite having 20 other users on the same serve
Slashdot Mirror
Allowing secret ballots (No one except you knows who you voted for) and ballots that can't be cheated on is nigh impossible. It can't be done even for paper ballots, so why should a machine with thousands of parts involved be able to do it? The only difference with electronic ballots is because people can not see and understand the processes that go on inside them, it is easier for a smaller group of people to alter them without being caught. If someone is molesting paper ballots in some way, it is obvious to anyone who sees it. If someone molests voting machines in some way, it will be undetectable to anyone but a trained expert with prolonged access to the machine.
You can't make a piece of electronics that can't be modified by someone who has physical access to it. You can make it more difficult then it is on modern machines (where it is almost excruciatingly simple) but you still have the problem. At least with paper ballots, the number of people that must be involved to cause large scale manipulation is much larger, and thus much more likely to be caught. Electronic voting machines are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. They aren't any more efficient then paper ballots, their only benefit is they can give results very quickly, which is a benefit to the news media, not anyone else. Does it really matter if it takes an extra day to determine who won an election?
The shuttles are a definitely not the best possible design, we know that now, but at the time they were built they seemed like a good idea. Either way, just because the shuttles aren't the ideal vehicle doesn't mean we should toss the whole program away, which is what we are doing. I live in Floida, and visit the space coast often and know a lot of the "little people" in the space program. They are insanely dedicated, even the people who do jobs others would consider demeaning or unimportant. They knew the people who died in the various NASA accidents way better then the engineers in Houston did, and they work every day to keep the astronauts safe. The majority of them can and will get better paying jobs in the private sector, many of them routinely turned down offers when economic times were better (no one is getting rich at NASA).
There is a ridiculous amount of institutional knowledge in the shuttle program, as well as a culture the defies all the regular government stereotypes. Once the team is disbanded and goes their separate ways we will have lost our best shot as a country at safe sustained manned space flight. We should have had a next generation vehicle ready to transition them too, but politics and the vague promise that somehow commercial space flight will fill in has killed it. Apparently as a country we no longer want to lead in the realms of science and engineering, and are content to have our only government funded innovations come in the form of new banking procedures to steal from the poor and give to the rich.
This is my experience as well. The old "use an up to date AV and don't browse porn sites" line is completely outdated. The modern source of infection is either through using exploits in rarely patched software (Adobe, Flash, Java, etc.) combined with using SEO techniques to boost malware sites to the top of google rankings for big breaking news stories, infecting wordpress and other blog systems en masse, and infecting the servers used to host advertising on major sites (or just buying the advertising straight up and redirecting it to malware after it goes live). A lot of them don't even rely on an exploit, they just make it appear that a site they trust is telling them they need to download something, so they do.
The variants change multiple times a day, and no AV product can keep up. Once installed they install rootkits that hide them from the AV. The rootkit part normally fails on Vista/Win 7, but the usermode still runs, and users will happily click an escalation prompt. The only defense is to lock machines down tight enough nothing unauthorized can be run on them and users don't have admin rights (note that I didnt say don't run as admin. Sudo won't help you here. They will enter the admin credentials anyways, because users are dumb and don't read things) . I've taken to doing some forensics on some of the pc's that come by me with fake av, and about 90% of the time, at the time of the infection they were reasonably up to date, had working AV, and from the browser history were on normal, everyday sites like msn.com or whatever immediately before being infected.
AV is useless for the new generation of exploits, at least in it's current form.
It's generally referred to as the JTAG hack. It requires minor soldering and modification of the 360. It does not work on every revision of the 360 currently. Frankly, if you are not savvy enough to find the info with Google, you are better off not bothering or paying someone else to do it.
The 360 has been hacked for a long time, and has a thriving homebrew scene. I currently have a completely redone dashboard (that replaces the MS one) and a ton of arcade and console emulators on mine. Previous to the current hack (that allows unsigned code execution) their was a hack for the DVD-Rom firmware that allowed you to play with burned disks.
Deep packet inspection of large amounts of traffic was not possible until fairly recently. The technology did not exist to allow ISP's to treat traffic differently. The peering agreements between providers were born out of the difficulty of accurately accounting and billing for traffic. It was cheaper for everyone with roughly similar amounts of traffic to agree to pass each others traffic for free then to spend millions on systems to try to figure out who was owed what. The only reason this hasn't been an issue until now is purely technical in nature. Because of the huge investment to enter the market, plus the network effect and economies of scale inherent, plus the corruption of politicians, make the telecom industry a natural oligopoly, if not a natural monopoly. WIthout regulation, they will abuse their customers to the maximum extent possible, because their customers have little if any choice. Choosing an ISP is like choosing between getting in a cage with a hungry lion or a hungry bear, either way the outcome is unpleasant, just in slightly different ways. There is no avoiding it in the current environment, every business in this situation is going to act this way. The only solution is to either artificially break them up into small pieces, or to artificially regulate their behavior. I'm willing to bet the companies involved would prefer the latter to the former.
The "if you don't like it, switch to another provider" argument is ridiculous if you look at the reality of the situation. There is no true commodity market for internet access, major markets have 2, maybe 3 options, smaller markets only have 1. Of those 2, they will often rely on different technology, so only one may actually meet your needs. Furthermore the costs to switch can be very large, especially for large companies. Furthermore, it will be mostly invisible to the average end user. The costs are going to be born by the websites that want to get their traffic to the customer (using the connection the customer has paid for). If you are Google, having your search results artifically delayed to be slower then Bing results will cost you Money. If you are trying to run a voip service, and the QoS applied by the ISP artificially slows your packets while giving another service priority, your service will be spotty and drop lots of calls, while the other service will work great, even though you both are using the exact same infrastructure.
Allowing ISP's to treat packets differently is giving them a license for legal extortion. They can abuse the fact that to the end-user slowness caused by their ISP and slowness caused by the site itself is indistinguishable to extort money. Furthermore, they can give sites they have a financial interest in priority, without spending a dime on increasing capacity. Furthermore, it creates a barrier to entry to new players that do not have the funds to pay off the ISP's to carry their traffic.
Neutrality to traffic is a fundamental aspect of the internet that is part of why it has been so successful. Allowing protocols, services, and sites, to live and die on their merits without artificial limitation is what has led the boom of internet development. Imagine if in those early days of servers in cases made of LEGO, Google had to negotiate an agreement with every ISP to carry their traffic to their users before they could offer services. And at any time, someone with a bigger warchest could have offered more money to keep them off.
Congress and the FCC have created these monsters, constantly pouring government funds, preferential treatment, monopoly agreements, etc. into them to keep any real competition from occurring. If they don't have the right to place limits on their abuses of the oligopoly position they gave them, who does?
It wasn't what he said, it was the way he said it, and the irony of this old, clueless man, who held an extremely important committee seat, blathering on about something he clearly didn't understand. It sounded like he was repeating an explanation some slick lobbyist had used to explain it to him, that he only half remembered. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that Ted Stevens was not a 100%, bought and paid for shill to industry, with no ethics or redeeming value. He treated congress like a smash and grab for money for his supporters. I'm sad he died in a plane crash instead of prison where he would have been if it weren't for the ineptitude of the prosecutors of his corruption investigation.
Windows does allow services to run as different users. it has since at least windows 2000, probably since NT. Services that interact with the network by default login as network service, which has limited permissions compared to the local system account. In a locked down environment (ie an internet facing or dmz server) you can use even more restricted accounts. A poorly configured Linux server is easy to exploit, in the same way a poorly configured Windows server is easy to exploit. The only difference is there's a larger pool of people with jobs as windows administrators without the skills and knowledge to back it up. As linux becomes ever more popular, expect to see the same thing to happen to it.
Presumably pirates will not have internet access on their long plundering trips across the ocean, and not be able to access the new content as it is released.
That's probably why he is an artist, and not a mason.
I used 64-bit XP for years (skipping Vista completely) on my home machine. I never had a problem with drivers. I never get this idea that gets spouted every time it comes up. Even my printer had a driver. Even most apps that require a driver I never had problems finding 64-bit versions for. Granted, I built my machine myself, using parts from vendors with a reputation with supporting their hardware, so if you bought a box from Dell filled with cheapest parts they could get that week, your experience may have varied. I think a lot of people tried xp64 right after it came out, and couldn't find drivers, and gave up. Of course any MS OS is going to be short on drivers at the start.
Firefox started as the browser that wasn't for your grandma. It had rough edges, pages didn't always display properly, but it was fast and tabbed an light weight with an installer in the single digits. This is how it grew it's user base, Trying to shoehorn it into the browser for grandma is retarded (Chrome already is better for that, by a good margin). Fuck your grandma, I don't want to use the best browser for your grandma. Our requirements are completely different. I want Firefox to be the best browser for me. I want separate url and search fields because I know exactly what I am trying to accomplish. If I want to stick some search terms through google I will, if I want to go to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org I had a specific reason. I want the url bar to make a best effort at turning what I entered into a working url with as little guessing as possible and run with it.
Let chrome be the browser for grandma, they have the resources and the marketing power behind them. Leave Firefox pure to the roots it came from, and focus on technical aspects. If people want to change the ui, the wonderful extension system lets them do just that.
I really think it's precisely because we are so used to being the ones helping and not the ones being helped. For a long time America was the country that could do anything, make anything possible, build anything that could be built. Of course that has always been more myth then reality, but every culture has it's own conceits. Somewhere along the way our political system morphed from the "great experiment" to a system were everyone is afraid of anything that might imply America right now is the greatest country ever in the history of the universe and anyone talking about change or reform is a communist.
In a few hundred years we conquered an untamed continent, and turned it into an economic and industrial powerhouse capable of making everything from corn to lunar landers. Yet now politicians act like it is some impossible effort to fix a few potholes in the highway system we built 50+ years ago. It's ridiculous.
As a Floridian (living in an area drained by the army core of engineers back when converting swampland to usable land via a massive canal system across an entire state was no big deal) who loves our states natural beauty and marshland, I say bring on the Dutch. There's no doubt they have the best hydrological engineers on the planet, large sections of their country continue to exist only because of their expertise. BP and our politicians have completely failed in every aspect of responding to this mess. Whoever turned the Dutch away should be fired as soon as possible. From the very beginning their response has been 100% PR with no substance. Within a week of it happening Obama should have had the best experts in the world on oil spill cleanup and mitigation here, and given them the full force of his executive authority. As the chief executive THATS HIS FUCKING JOB. Not give speeches, not give tv interviews, not spout vitriol at Britian, or play pin the blame on the regulator, but to react to an emergency like this as quickly as possible in a manner Congress (by its bureaucratic nature) can't.
The people affected by this shit couldn't care less if our elected officials have to go hat in hand to Europe and ask for their help (never mind that help was freely offered). That's the job, and by failing to do it he has failed us.
Meinberg makes a line of products that provide GPS backed NTP servers, as well as PCI/PCI-E cards that give PC's a GPS based clock (with an external antenna). They also make a pretty good NTP server/client for WIndows. It's overkill for most projects, but if you have a large datacenter or need for very accurate time, I would think they could be useful, if nothing else to keep you from having to rely on external time sources (which could be a potential security hole). This research seem more about making an improved and more accurate version of NTP, which is nice I guess, but NTP is already pretty accurate (on a scale of what is actually needed for 99.99% of situations).
This is incredibly naive. The current methods works well, for a very specific reason. MS's real customers are businesses. The home user is an afterthought, so we might as well ignore them. Large businesses have lots of custom applications and integration and scripting. Most of this work was done in a very, very shitty way. The result is things like hard coded paths, relying on unsupported, deprecated, or undocumented functionality of libraries, all sorts of stupid, impossible to maintain bullshit. Most commercial business apps for sale are the same way. The whole thing is held together with bailing wire and happy thoughts. The result is a system that is much, much more likely to break because of patches then a normal system or home user. I have never had a patch break one my personal pc's or one of my apps, but I've seen it happen to corporate pc's all the time. The problem isn't really even Microsoft's, because shitty programmers in shitty conditions making shit can do the same in any os and will.
In the current patch system, we can test individual updates (making it easier to diagnose the cause of the problem) and once we have identified a problem patch, we can still roll out the rest. In a single cumulative version system, it's all or nothing, so if you have a game breaking patch, you get 0 patches until you have fixed the problem. In a perfect world it wouldn't matter, but in a perfect world we wouldn't need patches in the first place.
Add in the fact not all vulnerabilities are created equal, and you have a major problem. If you have two vulnerabilities, both of which cause problems for you when patched, but one is a vulnerability when you open jpgs in mspaint on the third Tuesday of the month, and the other is a remote code execution in your tcp/ip stack, you will want to prioritize the latter over the former. In a monolithic version environment, chances are most companies would be 6 months minimum behind the curve when that big bad vulnerability hit. They would have no choice but to keep plodding along (and frantically adding more programmers would most likely hurt more then it helped at that point), whereas with individual patches they could skip all the intermediate updates and deal with the first.
So instead of playing harmless games like Farmville, or watching TV to relax, we should be making the latest and greatest burning-man rejects? No thanks. Playing Farmville has exactly as much value as your ridiculous car, and wastes a lot less money and resources to do it. There will always be someone who thinks their entertainment of choice is superior to yours. Some would say you were wasting your time building art cars when you could be reading the world's great literature, or seeing the best painters, or learning to make music, etc. While you were busy fucking around with your car, the founders of Zynga were busy building a company that makes them ridiculously wealthy while bringing millions of people some enjoyment. And for the record, I have never played Farmville, nor do I have any interest in it, and I probably watch a total of 3-4 hours of TV a week. But I realize my hobbies would seem quite boring or uninspired to some, even though I enjoy them, and I realize mocking others for enjoying something I don't enjoy makes me the asshole wasting his time, not them.
Seems to me the first step is designing a new high voltage power line that doesn't look like something out of a science gone horribly amok science fiction movie. I realize the when building these things they consider function over form, but the reality is the complete lack of aesthetics is a big factor in why people fight them so hard. They look like big industrial machinery, and in peoples minds that equates to scary and dangerous, especially from their comfy suburban house. Along I-4 here in Central Florida, near Disney World, there is a large transmission tower that is shaped to look like the iconic 3 circles Mickey Mouse design. They combined form and function in a way that turns an eyesore into an attraction.
In the new version of Office (2010), they did realize that was a problem, and changed the menu to make it more obvious. You are referring to the old version (2007). That said, it's something that could easily be resolved with a little informal user training. upgrade a small test group first, collect the questions they most frequently ask, and whip up a document to answer most questions or show them how to do common tasks. Something concise focused to your users is going to be a lot more useful then the generic tour everyone skips. You are going to have the same problem anytime you do a major upgrade though, it's the way it works and the price of progress. The only alternative is to dig your heels in and refuse to change, and that saves you money and time in the short term, but eventually you wind up with something like emacs, which requires extensive retraining to be able to do anything.
I really don't understand the reluctance some people in IT have in regards to upgrading MS products. When you got on the MS train, this was the inevitable result, it's their business model and always has been. You can hold off for awhile, but eventually you will have to decide to keep riding the train or get off. The more you fight it and delay it the harder the inevitable will be. I'm not saying you need to deploy every new version the week it comes out, but a planned, phased in incremental upgrade procedure over time will be better then waiting until you can't possibly delay any longer because MS is dropping support entirely and you are 3 major revisions behind. MS is in the business of selling software, and they want steady recurring income, not sell it once and support it to the end of time for free. If you don't like the upgrade cycle, I won't bother linking the xkcd comic because someone already has, but the world's tiniest open source violin is playing for you. Jump ship and find another solution or get with it, you can't stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist.
Generally slot machines have a posted maximum jackpot. I don't know about this case but in other cases like this the reported "winnings" have far exceeded the maximum the machine is supposed to possibly give out, as posted on the machine. The real issue here is how crappy the engineering must be on these machines, to allow this to happen so often it routinely makes then news. In my opinion all glitches should require a payout of the maximum possible winnings, which must be clearly posted on the machine, regardless of what it "should" have paid out. That would encourage casinos to invest in machines with actual sound engineering principles, without making them unfairly liable for massive amounts of money when a legitimate freak error occurs (even in the best systems, exceedingly rare circumstances could cause errors). It's a slot machine, it's a simple device, if they spend the money on reasonable robustness they can easily achieve extremely low error rates.
FYI it is strongly encouraged (and considered best practices by Microsoft) to run the edge transport role on a separate server (or VM) in an isolated dmz network. Whats more, exchange (and windows server for that matter) has come a long, long, long way since Pentium 4s were state of the art. MS has it's faults but they have stepped up their game in the server world in recent years. And the network stack was taken directly from BSD (as the BSD license allows them to do legally) so I doubt they are different in any substantial way.
Google's data mining is annoying at best, BP's oil spill is an environmental disaster that will harm millions of people (not to mention wildlife) in ways we can't even begin to calculate yet. Applying the same standard is stupid, because it implies the scale of the problem is in anyway similar. Furthermore, while it is fairly understandable to make mistakes in software systems that will at worst collect data about unencrypted wifi traffic, it is not understandable to make mistakes in a critical safety device that lives and the economic and environmental prosperity of an entire coastline depend on.
Google is in the wrong, and so is BP. But to pretend that the seriousness of the way they are wrong is in the same ballpark is ridiculous, and therefore the expect the same reaction is ridiculous. If you do an employee background check, and one of your employees was fined for littering, the other convicted of theft, manslaughter, criminal negligence, bribing public officials, and destruction of property, you would react in different ways. Thats the difference in severity we are talking about.
A better reason to make them static lengths of time and not based on the arbitrary date someone croaks at. Does an author (or his family) deserve less money because they get hit by a car the day after releasing their book? Pick an arbitrary time period of reasonable length, like say 20 years. That means by the time people are old enough to produce creative content of their own, the work they grew up with an were inspired by is fair game. Imagine how awesome it would be if the Ninja Turtles, GI Joe, Star Wars and Transformers were all public domain? There's already plenty of fan work, but they have to constantly dodge lawyers. There's no doubt that for a certain generation these things are a huge part of their culture, with meaning beyond the original works themselves. A person or company should not be allowed to own the common culture, only keep contributing to it.
He specifically said he needs OS X or Windows to make the district happy. You can disagree with that requirement but that doesn't help anyone. If hes in the position to ask this question I'm pretty sure he is aware of Linux, and vague suggestions of dump Windoze by M$ and use linux to do it with no actual advice of HOW to do it, is not helpful. In a car analogy it's like if someone asked you "which engine option should I order for my Ferrari" and you responded with "Screw Ferrari, they are overpriced, you can build a sports car in your garage from scratch".
XP is dead. If you aren't stuck to a legacy system (as this guy isn't) you would be a complete fool to stick with XP. It would be a mistake you will constantly regret. Most of the things you would want to extend XP's features are built into 7/Server 2003. Remote administration, Patching, Application Control, Network Image Deployment, locking down the desktop like deep freeze does, all can be accomplished with built in (and supported) features. Security is also better (requiring drivers to be signed, built in support for full disk encryption, Memory address randomization, better default settings, better implementation of SFC, etc), and the systems are a lot more usable running as a non-admin without lots of extra scripting work. You also get better ip v6 support, and improved network performance in general. Just the fewer headaches in patching alone makes it worthwhile (even with a WSUS server, I find myself frequently manually updating XP machines, I've never once had to do it on a 7 machine).
The 7/Server 2008 networks we have deployed require substantially less maintenance then the XP networks. Support for XP is being phased out on new hardware, as it is you have to stick to certain long-term support models to get support for XP from the big OEM's (there's a difference between "heres some drivers, good luck" and officially supported). 7 is a mature OS, if it makes you feel better think of it as Vista service pack 3. Furthermore if you don't have the cash to shell out for VLC licenses, expect trouble when Microsoft drops downgrade rights on OEM licenses. Setting up a brand spanking new network with Windows XP is like making a brand new web app from scratch, and designing it in Visual Basic to only work in IE 6. You can do it, and the technology is tried and true, but you will be creating more work for an inferior result that will bite you in the ass in a short time frame. The only reason for not deploying 7 on new hardware where you are not constrained by legacy code is you want to stay in your comfort zone, and are scared to learn new things. If that's the case, you need to GTFO IT, it's the wrong field for you, and you are doing your clients/employers a disservice. Being skeptical of new technology is fine, but being irrationally afraid of it is stupid. As far as Engineering/Science goes, any commercial software package that can't run at all under 7 is probably on it's way out anyways. Whats bleeding edge today will be a generation behind by the time the students get into the real world.
All that said, I think XP/7 is the WRONG way to go. If you want a Windows environment, your best bet will be to buy some thin clients, network boot them with something like ThinStation, and have them RDP to a farm of nice beefy 2008 R2 Terminal Servers. Thin clients are the only thing I've seen hold up to a school environment. Unlike a corporate environment where you can expect the employees to only cause damage out of ignorance, high school students will be actively malicious, and will destroy/break/steal things just to do it. If you lose a thin client, the teacher can yank it out, pull a spare from the closet, and send the old one to be diagnosed/redeployed in your spare time. Because they are stateless, if one is stolen you are out a couple hundred bucks and not any information. It will be easier to setup a consistent environment, and you can shop around to different hardware vendors if needed while maintaining a consistent experience for the students. It will be easier to create flexible lesson plans, install software, and you can often really cut down on licensing costs. Thin client tech has come a long way, and if you spec your servers properly, and have a decent network, you can't tell the difference. I took a class in Solidworks (a ram hungry and CPU hungry 3d CAD program that makes your average office workstation dog slow) that was taught in a lab using thin clients and terminal servers, and it ran better on them then my personal laptop, despite having 20 other users on the same serve