Pretty sure noone in the world wants a website that looks like Cisco's. It's the worst site by a major technology company I've ever used. To get to anything I normally have to login 3-4 times because it randomly forgets your logged in, only to find out that what I was trying to get to was just a link back to where I started. And forget trying to download the software my account privileges say I should be entitled to, I always wind up using someone else's account because despite several attempts on Cisco's part to fix it it STILL won't let me. Honestly for the company that practically runs the internet, their website is just shameful.
The are not being intimidated. If having your name put on website that lists your participation in a public action counts as intimidation then virtually anything does.
So what was the point of the web site then? Would you hold the same position if an evangelical Christian organization published a web site containing the names of people who signed a pro-gay marriage petition, or would that somehow be different?
If I signed a petition of my own free will, in clear understanding of what it was for, in good conscience, then I would not care if they ran tv ads 24/7 on Fox news about it. I don't sign every petition some college kid trying to make a quick buck tosses in my face, so I don't have anything to worry about. I suppose if I signed something I was ashamed of, because it revealed that despite the tolerant face I show in public, I am a close minded bigot that likes to oppress people different from me, I might have a problem with it.
I don't know about their official policy, but reinstalling machines with oem versions of Windows with the key on the sticker is something I do all the time, in fact I did it twice on Friday. 99% of the time you have no activation problems, when you do you call the number and the automated computer voice helps you activate with no issues, including with WGA. What may be your problem is the media used, you need OEM media for OEM keys. I would really like to see a concrete, reproducible example of the problem your talking about.
IPv4 dates back to 1981. At the time, I'm sure handing out Class A's did not seem such a bad idea. Noone at the time expected IPv4 to be the be all end all of network addressing, they expected it to be used for awhile and then replaced by something else. Back in 1980, did you think there would be a personal computer (or several) on every desk and in every home, all connected to a global internet tying every on of them together? This is a good 10 years before most people ever heard of the "Information superhighway". The people participating and building the network, getting it off the ground, got large chunks of addresses to use as they saw fit. That sounds fair to me. Is it fair for people to wait until others made a massive investment in the network, and after it becomes wildly successful, to then demand they byproduct of their investment?
Noone could have expected IPv4 would achieve the status it has today, noone predicted address scarcity being a problem before a better protocol could be designed and implemented. Presumably the designers, being intelligent, reasonable men, expected other intelligent, reasonable men to follow them, capable of implementing upgrades to add new address space as the demand required and the technology was available. Unfortunately the internet devolved into being led by squabbling, political maneuvering, corrupt fuckheads. I don't think it's fair to blame the original designers for that.
No major school system would ever allow this. If you teach them not to believe everything you read, the next step is they don't believe everything they are told. If they don't believe everything they are told, they don't assume their teachers and administrators are correct, and should automatically be listened to and obeyed. As the average modern American school has nothing to do with educating, and everything to do with babysitting, it would be very dangerous to the comfortable low expectations their students and the student's parent's have.
But Dr. Ahmed Jafar of Nigeria is the nice fellow 3 houses down that does my taxes. I guess I better change accountants. I wonder if he has any wealthy relatives in Nigeria he can refer me to to manage my finances.
Sounds like a great idea, and in a sane world it could be implemented fairly easily. In reality though, the banks are looking for a cheap way to limit their own liability (See! We warned you you could be hacked in that configuration!), not put a giant SUE ME PLEASE logo on a cd and mail it out. If whatever executive's nephew, that "knows stuff about computers", and gets a fat consulting contract to develop this cd, fucks it up and it is in fact vulnerable, and it gets exploited, now they are in a position of even more liability.
If you actually read the article, you will realize this is a non-issue. Basically, if you install a new, non provisioned access point, it is vulnerable to being assigned to a fake controller. This won't give access to your network. It will give them control of a rogue AP, but that's about it. There is nothign here you couldn't do if you stuck an AP of your own somewhere nearby. The article gives no method for taking control of an existing provision access point, or gaining access to any data on the network. You can get some ip's of the Cisco controller, but if it's already on the wireless segment of your LAN that's not exactly top secret information. This "attack" is obvious from the very principle of how OTAP works. You plug in an AP, it finds the nearest Cisco controller, and pulls the necessary config. Anyone could see that's not secure. It's a feature designed for convenience in low security networks (aka the majority of wifi installations). Personally, I would never have trusted it to actually work reliably in the first place, and just configured the ap's before installing them.
The articles real motive is clear in the last paragraph:
Customers should also leverage a dedicated independent IDS system, like AirMagnet Enterprise â" capable of detecting wireless snooping with hacking tools to alert staff to the potential of an impending exploit. Furthermore, networking professionals should use such a monitoring system to validate that all corporate APs detected over the air are actually represented at the WLAN controller â" as any corporate AP that is not associated to a controller could be a serious security risk.
AKA buy their shit. Surprise surprise, a company that makes a tool to detect exploits in AP's found a "security vulnerability" that their program can help with.
Sounds like Snopes has it exactly right. Look at the "Source" of the quote: A reporter was told by a Duchess that Blair had told her that Bush told him something. Blairs office denies it, and the Duchess neither confirms or denies it. A friend of a friend heard a friend say something is nor a reliable source. Indeed, that is the chain by which virtually all myths, rumours, and tall tales are spread. When the primary source denies it (even if he or his office in this case clearly has an agenda that favors denying it), and there is absolutely no proof otherwise, you have to give the benefit of the doubt to the person being accused. Even at best, you can only claim that Tony Blair said Bush made the statement. Mr. Blair could well have been making a joke at Bush's expense, and the Duchess took it for fact. If you want an example of Bush saying something stupid, there are plenty documented with video cameras. There's no need to resort to I heard from a friend of a friend nonsense.
Exactly, I hate when the Plebians call things based on what they look like, taste like, and are manufactured in identical processes too, instead of where they were made! Indeed the other day I saw a man in the deli order a sandwich! How absurd, as if you could get a layered meat and bread product assembled in Sandwich, in the Kent region of England, in a deli in the United States. I politely tried to correct him, but he persisted in his error, and after my repeated attempts, told me to "Shut-up and fuck off".
If someone is jerking off in public, call the cops. There are creeps and weirdos that come to any public place, ever been to a bus/train station? If someone is traumatized by seeing someone jerking off, they need counseling. Not for ther "trauma" of seeing someone jerking off, but because something so mundane made them feel "traumatized". It's gross, not traumatic. You call the cops, have the guy tossed out for indecent exposure, and move on with your life. Years of sexual abuse as a child? That's trauma. Being forcibly raped? That's trauma. Seeing a guy beat off in public? That's unpleasant. Your IT guy wisely realizes that not impeding the access of other, law abiding patrons of the library is more important then protecting some oversensitive co-ed's sensibilities. Briefly glimpsing a penis (I assume it would be brief, it's not like anyone is gonna hold them down and force them to look) is not the end of the world.
Personally, as long as they do it quietly and clean up after themselves, I would rather have guys jerking it in the corner then women at the next table over talking to their girlfriends about their periods and vaginal infections on their cellphone while I was studying. Yes, that has happened to me, more then once.
Furthermore, your admin is also helping prevent you from wasting university resources. Filtering systems DO NOT WORK. Keyword based systems block more legitimate content then illegitimate. Blacklist based systems block only a tiny fraction of sites, and anyone horny and frustrated enough to wank it in a library is going to keep looking until they find something, and will still cause plenty of false positives. A system that forces users to authenticate won't solve the problem because A. The computers will hardly ever be used, because of the inconvenience, making them a waste of resources in the first place. B. People will walk away and leave them logged in on a routine basis, making it easy for someone looking for an out of the way place to hop on and look at porn to jump on someones computer (assuming they don't just get their own account) and any evidence will be blamed to someone else. C. It still requires someone to catch them "in the act", which is what this is all about preventing anyways.
Sounds like he's the pragmatist. He realizes trying to prevent people from looking at porn on library computers is an impossible task, and not worth the effort and inconvenience to the patrons. You are the idealist, with a lofty vision of a world where you can control everything, and people never accidentally see things they would rather not.
Apple's success in the Ipod wasn't with creating the interface, as always it was due to their marketing. As much as the fanboys don't want to admit it, Apple interfaces aren't that good and using itunes is a lot more painful then using MSC to move music to my Iriver X20, but Apple's marketing centre's around the interface so this gets used a lot in debates about Apple. Few people have been able to point out what makes the Apple interface superior and normally just quote the "it just works" and "think different" catch phrases.
Wow, so Iriver had a better interface before they even sold hard drive based players? IRiver didn't have a product on par with the iPod until a year or more later. We are not talking about who has the best interface now, we are talking at the time it was released. At the time, I remember my friends flash based mp3 player requiring software so terrible it made real player look beautiful. Changing the volume required mashing hard plastic buttons you had to stare at to hit correctly. Playing a particular album required carefully naming your files so they would all be ordered correctly together, then finding it in the list of all the songs.
The iPod ui, on the other hand, was simplicty and elegance. The scroll wheel made moving through the menus very quick and easy, and the tiered id3 tag intelligent views made finding and play all the songs by an artist, all the songs by a genre, a specific song, or an album, very easy. Of the ones I tried, the iPod was also by far the easiest to change the volume on in my pocket, without doing it by accident all the time. Oh, and unlike other players at the time, it made a VERY handy portable hard drive at a time when usb thumb drives were in the sub 128 mb range.
I'm no Apple fanboy, I think their hardware is overpriced, and I think if they were given a chance they would be far worse then Microsoft in a monopoly position. I think the iPod was quickly surpassed by better players that were cheaper. But at the time of it's release, the 1st-gen iPod was the slickest shit around, and that was before they were "cool". When I had a first gen iPod, noone who saw it in public had a clue what it was. There were no million dollar silhouette commercial campaigns, there wasn't even an iTunes store. It was still a great fucking UI compared to the wretched pile of shit it was competing against. Before the hype, before the word iPod became synonymous with portable music the way Kleenex is synonymous with tissues, there were geeks who realized a good thing when they saw it.
There wee a ton of mp3 players on the market before the iPod. The almost universal failure was terrible interfaces, both in the player itself, and especially in the software you used to put songs on them. The iPod interface was slick, and it looked stylish in a way that took a lot of the "geek" out of using one in public.
I wish I had mod points. Why on earth would wikipedia be interested in presenting the "image" a celebrity's publicist is trying to push? It's not reality. The whole point of a publicist is to create a perception that is better then reality. I think candid photos of a celebrity on an average day are much better at presenting the truth of what that celebrity looks like. Much like you are not supposed to make articles about yourself, people should be forbidden from uploading photos of themselves, especially if a photo from a neutral source is available.
That's not true. Legends and myths hundreds of years older then Mickey Mouse are also copyrighted, if Disney made an animated movie based on them. Try making a movie about Beauty and the Beast, or Cinderella, and see how long before Disney's lawyers start knocking.
Yes! They also should pay royalties to the family of Homer when they make movies about Troy and the Odysseus. The royal family of England clearly deserves royalties for movies about King Arthur. Tolkien made some great books. An entire genre of fiction is heavily inspired by him. His book was inspired by the myths and legends and stories that came before him. Taking the work of others, making it their own, and then denying it to everyone else is the business of the RIAA. The RIAA is getting bitten by a little poetic justice here, with their own creation being used against them, but it doesn't make that creation any less odious. LOTR is a part of our collective culture, so is Mickey Mouse. Neither of their creator's families deserve to leech off them forever, Neither of their families (or the corporations that bought them) deserve to control what others can create from our culture forever. The ridiculous length of copyright is the reason we don't already have multiple Hobbit movies, competing on their merits. Just like every few years, a movie with a new take on Romeo and Juliet is released, we could have movies based on the rich fantasy world Tolkien started.
It's generally accepted that whatever trade or profession you choose, in order to get paid you have to actually do it. That means farmers need to farm, engineers need to design and build things, mechanics fix cars, and SHOCK writers need to write and musicians needs to play music. Not write once and gather money in perpetuity. Not play once and record it and gather royalty checks for the less of your days. Not be lucky enough to be born the grandchild of a great author, and rather then follow in his footsteps, or really do anything useful, spend your days making deals exploiting your parent's legacy.
If I had to pick someone to make money off the combined exploiting of Tolkiens legacy and the legacy of corrupt politicians, I suppose it would be the Tolkien estate rather then the RIAA. But thats like saying I would rather be robbed by someone who needed the money then someone who was already quite wealthy. Obviously I would really rather not be robbed at all.
Heat may well be less of an issue then you think. Google's analysis of failure rates of hard drives ( see here: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf) showed temperature to be relatively unimportant, and cold drives actually died earlier then hot drives until you get into 45+ degrees Celsius (which is about 113 degrees Farenheit). Room temperature drives had higher failure rates. The data suggests a rule of thumb that the drive should feel warm, but not hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch.
Well the confusion is, unlike your dirt-floor huts full of your own feces, in real countries like America we have clean tile floors with miraculous inventions we call "mops".
You seem confused about what RAID is. You do not need multiple RAID cards. RAID is about performance and uptime, not backups. If you card dies, you buy a new one, format the drives and build new arrays, then restore data from backup. The chances of a RAID controller dieing is much smaller then a hard drive, and is on par with a motherboard failure. If you can't afford the downtime to purchase a new raid card and have it overnighted, then you need a whole redundant server.
Hard drives die, it is inevitable. RAID Lets you keep working when they die, and saves you the hassle of restoring from backup. A RAID card failure stands a good chance of corrupting the arrays and making them unrecoverable EVEN IF you have a spare. Buying 2 extra RAID cards is a waste of money, and is a sign you are doing it wrong. If you are going to have a redundant RAID card, then you might as well have a redundant motherboard, RAM, and CPU because their failure rates will be about the same (They are all made using the same processes and same components). At that point, you might as well just build a redundant server.
Unlike RAM, CPU, motherboard, and Raid card failures, hard drive and PSU failures are not about if they might happen, but when. If you have 5+ disks in your server, the chance of having a failure over the course of 5 years is probably very near 100%. Thats why RAID makes sense. Bare metal restores take a lot of time, and the expense of RAID (coupled with with the performance increases you can get) is fairly small compared to the inevitable downtime they will save you. It's also nice not to have to get out of bed at 3 AM everytime a hard drive fails and race to the server room.
There's probably a variety of reasons, but some of them are: 1. Licensing/Ownership issues. Over the course of the 5+ years it takes an engine to become obsolete, a lot of game developers don't exist anymore, have been bought out, merged, changed management, changed publishers, etc. Between commitments to publishers, distributors, creditors, licensors and such, even if they do still exist, it may no longer be clear if they even legally can release the source, and doing so may open them up to legal troubles.
2. Licensed technology. If you licensed tech from other companies, you have to tread careful in regards to the terms of your license and any proprietary code of theirs that may be in your product, or patents that may surface later if someone uses your code to make something of their own.
3. EA. They deserve special mention. Over their history they have a remarkable track record of buying up and coming companies with lots of promise and potential, then taking all their IP and franchises they just spent a ton of money acquiring, and tossing it in a bottomless pit never to be seen again. I don't know exactly WHY they do it, but they do. A lot of the older developers who had old games whose source they can release were gobbled up by EA and disappeared. The chances of EA themselves ever giving out old code it pretty much nill, they make Microsoft look like a bunch of free-love hippies.
4. Embarrassment. Games are generally developed in a serious time crunch, and time may not be taken to make things look pretty. In fact, the patch histories of a lot of games would suggest the code is a complete clusterfuck (for example, in World of Warcraft, every bug fix managed to bring back at least one previous bug from months or years earlier, that seemed completely unrelated). ID planned to license out their tech, and had a lot of time even after it was released cleaning up the code and working with licensees to make their code polished. Like an old high school yearbook, some devs have probably decided some things are better left forgotten.
In theory, eating ice and pissing it out hot is "flushing heat". It's not particularly effective at weight loss though (although enough will give you hypothermia, which can make you lose limbs, which means you would weigh less).
If you allow yourself to get stuck with shitty software that breaks if you sneeze at it, then yeah, patching is a problem. The conficker patch didn't break a single thing at any of our customers sites, we tested and deployed it on all of them in less then a week with 0 issues. MS has gotten a lot better in recent years about testing their updates thoroughly. If you have software that is getting broken on a regular basis by updates, it's probably because the software was a piece of shit to begin with. If it's an internal app, fire your current development team (or at least the management) and get someone who knows how to make a maintainable Windows program that follows MS's guidelines. If it's a vendor app and they dont have solutions for you within a week, much less a month, for such a critical vulnerability, you need to migrate to an alternative as quickly as possible. Testing updates before deployment is always wise, regardless of the platform (and any linux desktop that doesn't have things break by updates occasionally I would like to see). If your testing process takes several months on a critical vulnerability being exploited in the wild, your process is fucked up beyond belief. Leaving a critical vulnerability unpatched for an extended period of time is rolling the dice, regardless of the OS.
It may not be the IT staff's fault, but is definitely the organization's fault. Either their IT staff is incompetent, or underfunded, or too restricted by bureaucracy. If you want to enter the relative cost and difficulty of testing and deploying patches into your total cost of ownership, that's fair. But blaming the cost of this conficker on MS is like blaming a break in on your front door manufacturer when you left the lock they provided unlocked.
Well, at least in your experience they were polite while they were invading your privacy, wasting your time and money, and messing up the contents of your bags. A friendly hello and thank-you while being subjected to pointless security theater makes it all better. I'll bet your glad they didn't decide to exercise the knowledge they learned over their 1 week training course to become a TSA agent to harass you for having the wrong book in your luggage, or a pair of fingernail clippers. I'm glad they stress courtesy while they train them to abuse and violate your rights in ways the much better trained cops would get suspended for. It's kind of like the post office or DMV, most of them are competent and pleasant, but there is the occasional one who is rude, incompetent, and bent on exercising his power to hinder you as much as possible. Except instead of having the option to say fuck it and walk out of their little fiefdom, they have the power to detain you and strip search you.
There is an easy solution to this problem. Take advertising back into your own hands. Don't sign up for some stupid ad network to shovel punch the monkey ads all your site. Forming a relationship with companies your viewers are actually interested in will deliver better results for the advertisers and for your visitors. Don't let them cover your page in huge javascript overlays and other nonsense, doing so shows they don't respect your content or your visitors. Yes, it takes more work, but the end result is better and more profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty sure noone in the world wants a website that looks like Cisco's. It's the worst site by a major technology company I've ever used. To get to anything I normally have to login 3-4 times because it randomly forgets your logged in, only to find out that what I was trying to get to was just a link back to where I started. And forget trying to download the software my account privileges say I should be entitled to, I always wind up using someone else's account because despite several attempts on Cisco's part to fix it it STILL won't let me. Honestly for the company that practically runs the internet, their website is just shameful.
The are not being intimidated. If having your name put on website that lists your participation in a public action counts as intimidation then virtually anything does.
So what was the point of the web site then? Would you hold the same position if an evangelical Christian organization published a web site containing the names of people who signed a pro-gay marriage petition, or would that somehow be different?
If I signed a petition of my own free will, in clear understanding of what it was for, in good conscience, then I would not care if they ran tv ads 24/7 on Fox news about it. I don't sign every petition some college kid trying to make a quick buck tosses in my face, so I don't have anything to worry about. I suppose if I signed something I was ashamed of, because it revealed that despite the tolerant face I show in public, I am a close minded bigot that likes to oppress people different from me, I might have a problem with it.
I don't know about their official policy, but reinstalling machines with oem versions of Windows with the key on the sticker is something I do all the time, in fact I did it twice on Friday. 99% of the time you have no activation problems, when you do you call the number and the automated computer voice helps you activate with no issues, including with WGA. What may be your problem is the media used, you need OEM media for OEM keys. I would really like to see a concrete, reproducible example of the problem your talking about.
IPv4 dates back to 1981. At the time, I'm sure handing out Class A's did not seem such a bad idea. Noone at the time expected IPv4 to be the be all end all of network addressing, they expected it to be used for awhile and then replaced by something else. Back in 1980, did you think there would be a personal computer (or several) on every desk and in every home, all connected to a global internet tying every on of them together? This is a good 10 years before most people ever heard of the "Information superhighway". The people participating and building the network, getting it off the ground, got large chunks of addresses to use as they saw fit. That sounds fair to me. Is it fair for people to wait until others made a massive investment in the network, and after it becomes wildly successful, to then demand they byproduct of their investment?
Noone could have expected IPv4 would achieve the status it has today, noone predicted address scarcity being a problem before a better protocol could be designed and implemented. Presumably the designers, being intelligent, reasonable men, expected other intelligent, reasonable men to follow them, capable of implementing upgrades to add new address space as the demand required and the technology was available. Unfortunately the internet devolved into being led by squabbling, political maneuvering, corrupt fuckheads. I don't think it's fair to blame the original designers for that.
No major school system would ever allow this. If you teach them not to believe everything you read, the next step is they don't believe everything they are told. If they don't believe everything they are told, they don't assume their teachers and administrators are correct, and should automatically be listened to and obeyed. As the average modern American school has nothing to do with educating, and everything to do with babysitting, it would be very dangerous to the comfortable low expectations their students and the student's parent's have.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/taint
Seems to think the "to soil" meaning came first, independent of the slang meaning referring to your perineum.
But Dr. Ahmed Jafar of Nigeria is the nice fellow 3 houses down that does my taxes. I guess I better change accountants. I wonder if he has any wealthy relatives in Nigeria he can refer me to to manage my finances.
Sounds like a great idea, and in a sane world it could be implemented fairly easily. In reality though, the banks are looking for a cheap way to limit their own liability (See! We warned you you could be hacked in that configuration!), not put a giant SUE ME PLEASE logo on a cd and mail it out. If whatever executive's nephew, that "knows stuff about computers", and gets a fat consulting contract to develop this cd, fucks it up and it is in fact vulnerable, and it gets exploited, now they are in a position of even more liability.
If you actually read the article, you will realize this is a non-issue. Basically, if you install a new, non provisioned access point, it is vulnerable to being assigned to a fake controller. This won't give access to your network. It will give them control of a rogue AP, but that's about it. There is nothign here you couldn't do if you stuck an AP of your own somewhere nearby. The article gives no method for taking control of an existing provision access point, or gaining access to any data on the network. You can get some ip's of the Cisco controller, but if it's already on the wireless segment of your LAN that's not exactly top secret information. This "attack" is obvious from the very principle of how OTAP works. You plug in an AP, it finds the nearest Cisco controller, and pulls the necessary config. Anyone could see that's not secure. It's a feature designed for convenience in low security networks (aka the majority of wifi installations). Personally, I would never have trusted it to actually work reliably in the first place, and just configured the ap's before installing them.
The articles real motive is clear in the last paragraph:
Customers should also leverage a dedicated independent IDS system, like AirMagnet Enterprise â" capable of detecting wireless snooping with hacking tools to alert staff to the potential of an impending exploit. Furthermore, networking professionals should use such a monitoring system to validate that all corporate APs detected over the air are actually represented at the WLAN controller â" as any corporate AP that is not associated to a controller could be a serious security risk.
AKA buy their shit. Surprise surprise, a company that makes a tool to detect exploits in AP's found a "security vulnerability" that their program can help with.
Sounds like Snopes has it exactly right. Look at the "Source" of the quote: A reporter was told by a Duchess that Blair had told her that Bush told him something. Blairs office denies it, and the Duchess neither confirms or denies it. A friend of a friend heard a friend say something is nor a reliable source. Indeed, that is the chain by which virtually all myths, rumours, and tall tales are spread. When the primary source denies it (even if he or his office in this case clearly has an agenda that favors denying it), and there is absolutely no proof otherwise, you have to give the benefit of the doubt to the person being accused. Even at best, you can only claim that Tony Blair said Bush made the statement. Mr. Blair could well have been making a joke at Bush's expense, and the Duchess took it for fact. If you want an example of Bush saying something stupid, there are plenty documented with video cameras. There's no need to resort to I heard from a friend of a friend nonsense.
Exactly, I hate when the Plebians call things based on what they look like, taste like, and are manufactured in identical processes too, instead of where they were made! Indeed the other day I saw a man in the deli order a sandwich! How absurd, as if you could get a layered meat and bread product assembled in Sandwich, in the Kent region of England, in a deli in the United States. I politely tried to correct him, but he persisted in his error, and after my repeated attempts, told me to "Shut-up and fuck off".
If someone is jerking off in public, call the cops. There are creeps and weirdos that come to any public place, ever been to a bus/train station? If someone is traumatized by seeing someone jerking off, they need counseling. Not for ther "trauma" of seeing someone jerking off, but because something so mundane made them feel "traumatized". It's gross, not traumatic. You call the cops, have the guy tossed out for indecent exposure, and move on with your life. Years of sexual abuse as a child? That's trauma. Being forcibly raped? That's trauma. Seeing a guy beat off in public? That's unpleasant. Your IT guy wisely realizes that not impeding the access of other, law abiding patrons of the library is more important then protecting some oversensitive co-ed's sensibilities. Briefly glimpsing a penis (I assume it would be brief, it's not like anyone is gonna hold them down and force them to look) is not the end of the world.
Personally, as long as they do it quietly and clean up after themselves, I would rather have guys jerking it in the corner then women at the next table over talking to their girlfriends about their periods and vaginal infections on their cellphone while I was studying. Yes, that has happened to me, more then once.
Furthermore, your admin is also helping prevent you from wasting university resources. Filtering systems DO NOT WORK. Keyword based systems block more legitimate content then illegitimate. Blacklist based systems block only a tiny fraction of sites, and anyone horny and frustrated enough to wank it in a library is going to keep looking until they find something, and will still cause plenty of false positives. A system that forces users to authenticate won't solve the problem because
A. The computers will hardly ever be used, because of the inconvenience, making them a waste of resources in the first place.
B. People will walk away and leave them logged in on a routine basis, making it easy for someone looking for an out of the way place to hop on and look at porn to jump on someones computer (assuming they don't just get their own account) and any evidence will be blamed to someone else.
C. It still requires someone to catch them "in the act", which is what this is all about preventing anyways.
Sounds like he's the pragmatist. He realizes trying to prevent people from looking at porn on library computers is an impossible task, and not worth the effort and inconvenience to the patrons. You are the idealist, with a lofty vision of a world where you can control everything, and people never accidentally see things they would rather not.
Apple's success in the Ipod wasn't with creating the interface, as always it was due to their marketing. As much as the fanboys don't want to admit it, Apple interfaces aren't that good and using itunes is a lot more painful then using MSC to move music to my Iriver X20, but Apple's marketing centre's around the interface so this gets used a lot in debates about Apple. Few people have been able to point out what makes the Apple interface superior and normally just quote the "it just works" and "think different" catch phrases.
Wow, so Iriver had a better interface before they even sold hard drive based players? IRiver didn't have a product on par with the iPod until a year or more later. We are not talking about who has the best interface now, we are talking at the time it was released. At the time, I remember my friends flash based mp3 player requiring software so terrible it made real player look beautiful. Changing the volume required mashing hard plastic buttons you had to stare at to hit correctly. Playing a particular album required carefully naming your files so they would all be ordered correctly together, then finding it in the list of all the songs.
The iPod ui, on the other hand, was simplicty and elegance. The scroll wheel made moving through the menus very quick and easy, and the tiered id3 tag intelligent views made finding and play all the songs by an artist, all the songs by a genre, a specific song, or an album, very easy. Of the ones I tried, the iPod was also by far the easiest to change the volume on in my pocket, without doing it by accident all the time. Oh, and unlike other players at the time, it made a VERY handy portable hard drive at a time when usb thumb drives were in the sub 128 mb range.
I'm no Apple fanboy, I think their hardware is overpriced, and I think if they were given a chance they would be far worse then Microsoft in a monopoly position. I think the iPod was quickly surpassed by better players that were cheaper. But at the time of it's release, the 1st-gen iPod was the slickest shit around, and that was before they were "cool". When I had a first gen iPod, noone who saw it in public had a clue what it was. There were no million dollar silhouette commercial campaigns, there wasn't even an iTunes store. It was still a great fucking UI compared to the wretched pile of shit it was competing against. Before the hype, before the word iPod became synonymous with portable music the way Kleenex is synonymous with tissues, there were geeks who realized a good thing when they saw it.
There wee a ton of mp3 players on the market before the iPod. The almost universal failure was terrible interfaces, both in the player itself, and especially in the software you used to put songs on them. The iPod interface was slick, and it looked stylish in a way that took a lot of the "geek" out of using one in public.
I wish I had mod points. Why on earth would wikipedia be interested in presenting the "image" a celebrity's publicist is trying to push? It's not reality. The whole point of a publicist is to create a perception that is better then reality. I think candid photos of a celebrity on an average day are much better at presenting the truth of what that celebrity looks like. Much like you are not supposed to make articles about yourself, people should be forbidden from uploading photos of themselves, especially if a photo from a neutral source is available.
That's not true. Legends and myths hundreds of years older then Mickey Mouse are also copyrighted, if Disney made an animated movie based on them. Try making a movie about Beauty and the Beast, or Cinderella, and see how long before Disney's lawyers start knocking.
Yes! They also should pay royalties to the family of Homer when they make movies about Troy and the Odysseus. The royal family of England clearly deserves royalties for movies about King Arthur. Tolkien made some great books. An entire genre of fiction is heavily inspired by him. His book was inspired by the myths and legends and stories that came before him. Taking the work of others, making it their own, and then denying it to everyone else is the business of the RIAA. The RIAA is getting bitten by a little poetic justice here, with their own creation being used against them, but it doesn't make that creation any less odious. LOTR is a part of our collective culture, so is Mickey Mouse. Neither of their creator's families deserve to leech off them forever, Neither of their families (or the corporations that bought them) deserve to control what others can create from our culture forever. The ridiculous length of copyright is the reason we don't already have multiple Hobbit movies, competing on their merits. Just like every few years, a movie with a new take on Romeo and Juliet is released, we could have movies based on the rich fantasy world Tolkien started.
It's generally accepted that whatever trade or profession you choose, in order to get paid you have to actually do it. That means farmers need to farm, engineers need to design and build things, mechanics fix cars, and SHOCK writers need to write and musicians needs to play music. Not write once and gather money in perpetuity. Not play once and record it and gather royalty checks for the less of your days. Not be lucky enough to be born the grandchild of a great author, and rather then follow in his footsteps, or really do anything useful, spend your days making deals exploiting your parent's legacy.
If I had to pick someone to make money off the combined exploiting of Tolkiens legacy and the legacy of corrupt politicians, I suppose it would be the Tolkien estate rather then the RIAA. But thats like saying I would rather be robbed by someone who needed the money then someone who was already quite wealthy. Obviously I would really rather not be robbed at all.
Heat may well be less of an issue then you think. Google's analysis of failure rates of hard drives ( see here: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf) showed temperature to be relatively unimportant, and cold drives actually died earlier then hot drives until you get into 45+ degrees Celsius (which is about 113 degrees Farenheit). Room temperature drives had higher failure rates. The data suggests a rule of thumb that the drive should feel warm, but not hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch.
Well the confusion is, unlike your dirt-floor huts full of your own feces, in real countries like America we have clean tile floors with miraculous inventions we call "mops".
You seem confused about what RAID is. You do not need multiple RAID cards. RAID is about performance and uptime, not backups. If you card dies, you buy a new one, format the drives and build new arrays, then restore data from backup. The chances of a RAID controller dieing is much smaller then a hard drive, and is on par with a motherboard failure. If you can't afford the downtime to purchase a new raid card and have it overnighted, then you need a whole redundant server.
Hard drives die, it is inevitable. RAID Lets you keep working when they die, and saves you the hassle of restoring from backup. A RAID card failure stands a good chance of corrupting the arrays and making them unrecoverable EVEN IF you have a spare. Buying 2 extra RAID cards is a waste of money, and is a sign you are doing it wrong. If you are going to have a redundant RAID card, then you might as well have a redundant motherboard, RAM, and CPU because their failure rates will be about the same (They are all made using the same processes and same components). At that point, you might as well just build a redundant server.
Unlike RAM, CPU, motherboard, and Raid card failures, hard drive and PSU failures are not about if they might happen, but when. If you have 5+ disks in your server, the chance of having a failure over the course of 5 years is probably very near 100%. Thats why RAID makes sense. Bare metal restores take a lot of time, and the expense of RAID (coupled with with the performance increases you can get) is fairly small compared to the inevitable downtime they will save you. It's also nice not to have to get out of bed at 3 AM everytime a hard drive fails and race to the server room.
There's probably a variety of reasons, but some of them are:
1. Licensing/Ownership issues. Over the course of the 5+ years it takes an engine to become obsolete, a lot of game developers don't exist anymore, have been bought out, merged, changed management, changed publishers, etc. Between commitments to publishers, distributors, creditors, licensors and such, even if they do still exist, it may no longer be clear if they even legally can release the source, and doing so may open them up to legal troubles.
2. Licensed technology. If you licensed tech from other companies, you have to tread careful in regards to the terms of your license and any proprietary code of theirs that may be in your product, or patents that may surface later if someone uses your code to make something of their own.
3. EA. They deserve special mention. Over their history they have a remarkable track record of buying up and coming companies with lots of promise and potential, then taking all their IP and franchises they just spent a ton of money acquiring, and tossing it in a bottomless pit never to be seen again. I don't know exactly WHY they do it, but they do. A lot of the older developers who had old games whose source they can release were gobbled up by EA and disappeared. The chances of EA themselves ever giving out old code it pretty much nill, they make Microsoft look like a bunch of free-love hippies.
4. Embarrassment. Games are generally developed in a serious time crunch, and time may not be taken to make things look pretty. In fact, the patch histories of a lot of games would suggest the code is a complete clusterfuck (for example, in World of Warcraft, every bug fix managed to bring back at least one previous bug from months or years earlier, that seemed completely unrelated). ID planned to license out their tech, and had a lot of time even after it was released cleaning up the code and working with licensees to make their code polished. Like an old high school yearbook, some devs have probably decided some things are better left forgotten.
In theory, eating ice and pissing it out hot is "flushing heat". It's not particularly effective at weight loss though (although enough will give you hypothermia, which can make you lose limbs, which means you would weigh less).
If you allow yourself to get stuck with shitty software that breaks if you sneeze at it, then yeah, patching is a problem. The conficker patch didn't break a single thing at any of our customers sites, we tested and deployed it on all of them in less then a week with 0 issues. MS has gotten a lot better in recent years about testing their updates thoroughly. If you have software that is getting broken on a regular basis by updates, it's probably because the software was a piece of shit to begin with. If it's an internal app, fire your current development team (or at least the management) and get someone who knows how to make a maintainable Windows program that follows MS's guidelines. If it's a vendor app and they dont have solutions for you within a week, much less a month, for such a critical vulnerability, you need to migrate to an alternative as quickly as possible. Testing updates before deployment is always wise, regardless of the platform (and any linux desktop that doesn't have things break by updates occasionally I would like to see). If your testing process takes several months on a critical vulnerability being exploited in the wild, your process is fucked up beyond belief. Leaving a critical vulnerability unpatched for an extended period of time is rolling the dice, regardless of the OS.
It may not be the IT staff's fault, but is definitely the organization's fault. Either their IT staff is incompetent, or underfunded, or too restricted by bureaucracy. If you want to enter the relative cost and difficulty of testing and deploying patches into your total cost of ownership, that's fair. But blaming the cost of this conficker on MS is like blaming a break in on your front door manufacturer when you left the lock they provided unlocked.
Well, at least in your experience they were polite while they were invading your privacy, wasting your time and money, and messing up the contents of your bags. A friendly hello and thank-you while being subjected to pointless security theater makes it all better. I'll bet your glad they didn't decide to exercise the knowledge they learned over their 1 week training course to become a TSA agent to harass you for having the wrong book in your luggage, or a pair of fingernail clippers. I'm glad they stress courtesy while they train them to abuse and violate your rights in ways the much better trained cops would get suspended for. It's kind of like the post office or DMV, most of them are competent and pleasant, but there is the occasional one who is rude, incompetent, and bent on exercising his power to hinder you as much as possible. Except instead of having the option to say fuck it and walk out of their little fiefdom, they have the power to detain you and strip search you.
There is an easy solution to this problem. Take advertising back into your own hands. Don't sign up for some stupid ad network to shovel punch the monkey ads all your site. Forming a relationship with companies your viewers are actually interested in will deliver better results for the advertisers and for your visitors. Don't let them cover your page in huge javascript overlays and other nonsense, doing so shows they don't respect your content or your visitors. Yes, it takes more work, but the end result is better and more profitable.