Let's pull the zoom lens back out to a statewide standpoint. Florida in general has been beset by one major sex related crime after another. Their CPS is a dog's lunch and is currently paralyzed by the scandals surrounding it.
The bottom line is that when something remotely sex related is found on a public access terminal in Florida, there is a kneejerk reaction to find a scapegoat and lynch that person as quick as possible.
If this were anywhere else in the nation, there would have been a Gaelic shrug and beefier security procedures put into place, no one getting crucified over it.
Not surprised that Gateway's failure rate is so high. I had three 6-10 month old systems go across my bench with fried power packs. Wayy underrated for P4s: 200 watt! I put 300s and 350s into the systems and haven't heard nothing but good news on those systems.
Apple, no major surprise there.. I heard about their power packs on the whitebox IMacs being a fire hazard. Their current problem is video processor failures and LCD issues.
Dell, well, what I can I say? They buy Intel boards and their chips.. Majority of failures on Dells are mainboard related.
EMachines, heh! Boat anchors through and through! Substandard parts just drip from their cases.
Rocket Engines are usually measured in Newton-seconds of thrust impulse.
So taking this formula into effect, let's see how well Carmack's throatless design stacks up to some famous engines.
We'll start with the Legend: The F1 first stage boosters of a Saturn V stack, 33.4 MN (Million Newtons).
The Russian Energia booster in the Vulkan configuration ramps 46 MN.
The Space Shuttle stack can offer up 34.8 MN. But the stack is bulky and can only lift 28,800kg to LEO.
Currently the best US booster is the Titan IV stack. Dishing out 17MN and can haul 21.7K kg to LEO and 5.8K to GTO.
The newer Delta 4 Heavy configuration with solids piggybacked, put a dummy payload into orbit that tipped the scales at 13.1K Kg into GEO transfer orbit.
I don't have the head for formulae, so if someone can crank out some results, would be much appreciated.
Make it easier, instead of cobbling a balloon kit together, go get a inflatable life jacket (type I or II USCG) and hook it into the ROV with something to pull the release cord. Something goes wrong, the tube's inflated and the ROV rises to the surface.
Odds are that the umbilical will get fouled and will have to be cut to free the unit so consider a simple set of shears with a high-tension spring to deal with the cord in case something should happen.
*peers at site, keeps from drooling and having his own ideas*
THey are using a tape drive motor, which is pretty much a DC inductive type. Those kind of motors are pretty popular with their projects.
They have another hydro plant there that uses the 3 phase (polyphase) design that their wind generators utilize.
I'm surprised that most aeromotors don't use polyphase generation for it is very efficient and has a very low drag coefficient in comparison to the conventional alternator/generator designs.
The designs are very frugal on material useage (copper, magnets, supporting frame).
Their shop is powered by a composite power system. They got a bank of batts being charged by several wind turbines, the Lister engine, a couple of hydrogenerators that supply a surprising amount of power considering that they were orginally squirrel cage blowers that came out of a central AC system.
Their power plants are not state of the art, but homebrewing/improvising at it's finest.
This certain russkie has reportedly been a major moving factor behind joker.com. This guy simply needs to be shipped off to Siberia where he can freeze his 'nads off.
Think cake and you'll understand. A 3 layer cake is always better than one. Never let oneself get tricked into thinking that one big layer of defense will keep them out. The French frogs built the Maginot Line and look where it got them. The best defense is not showing the world that you have the systems in the first place. Hostmasking, IP shrouding, wrecking the IP tables to the point where a hacker only winds up either getting rerouted or dev/null.
The 2nd layer is securing the LAN. Standard firewalls on every system are excellent if the 1st layer is breached.
The 3rd layer is terminal access. The usual workstation security applys here. Rotating passes, biokeys, magcards, or a combination of any. One-time pads are nice too.
Keep the scriptkiddies and hackers on their toes by changing the security infrastructure around. Don't get complacent.
How good is your security? How much do you have in your budget to invest in? Keep beating the PHBs and their ilk over the head when it comes to security. Don't let them think that they are safe, for every network is like a glass house.
Rule No. 10 "The specification applying to the hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore is highly recommended." (Standard specifications inhibit new technology and innovation, and are frequently obsolete.)
When manufactures put cheap parts into a system, then you get what you pay for.
The tech that put this article together makes some excellent calls regarding modifying the power supply. Companies skimp on them rather badly, usually the customer on the receiving end of a noisy, poorly performing player, or worse, short-lived. Beefing up, loading high quality protection, and filtering components into a power pack WILL always result in a player dishing out high quality.
Not to mention a longer lifespan...
Power supplies are usually on the poor receiving end of system design. Sometimes skimping to the point where the overall lifetime of a system is measured in months, not years.
Some folks think that component level testing and replacement skills are going to be passe`. With articles like these and the need for tweaking better performance out of existing systems, bringing them up to where they supposed to be, those skills will always be in vogue.
I'll be keeping my Simpson 360 for awhile longer, thank you!
The 500 series will shut down ports. If the attacks increase above a preset limit, it'll shut down the outside service and send a alarm to the admin.
We had a 515 at our office protecting a set of macs after someone tried to beat on them with packetting. The lil box shut down the ports and isolated the macs, then started to scream at the admin. Then the PageSentry started to scream at us for it could not ping the remote modem racks. Five minutes later it reset the ports and reopened the access to the 'net.
This is where IT admins get into the deep dip by investing in top-notch gear and THEN, buying up cheap firewall software, expecting it to do the duty of protecting his pride and joy.
To protect the equipment, you will simply tell them to go hardware firewalls, preferably Cisco PIX 500s will do the trick. But be prepared to pay for the name, but the protection that this unit will provide will be worth every penny.
I'll bite charter too.. The company, ironically is a ISP that uses charter as a link to our central office up north in Illinois. Initially it was supposed to be sbc and their "vaunted" DSL service, but 3 days before the office was supposed to open up, the tech came out and declared "19,750 feet". Even though the sales jerk said that we qualified, even after I requested that he do the loop qualification testing. Talk about some loose programming for I did the loop qual on their website after I got the phone #s for the office. I thanked the tech for he did everything in his powers, including discovering a bridge tap 100 feet out and killing it. I fumed for 15 minutes and let their "customer suport" have it with a 5 minute tirade about "fraudulent advertising". I gave the local charter office a ring to get their business account. The dopey-sounding lady on the other end of the line didn't seem to be very happy with me calling, promised me that a business accountant would get in touch with me if I left her a number. I stomped on her lil speech with "LOOK! Do YOU want my business or not?" That froze her train of thought and then gave me a phone # to their business accounts. After sweet-talking the sweet lil thing on the other end of the line up in Colorado and filling her in on the situation and the hell I just went thru with sbc. She proceeded bend a few rules and gave us a next day installation slot. The tech came out 10AM, snaked the cable in, I had the router cocked and ready (fixed IP, more on that later) and was up before 2 PM. The office opened on schedule.
Unfortunately, I cannot give high marks to their administrative sector on managing their IP pools. They jumped the IP addressing on us (we use RADIUS for our clients.) and was not given any kind of notice or indication until the northern office called us and asked to see if our servers were up. Upon replying yes, I checked the router to see what gives and discovered the changed IP. Called their business tech support and found out the hard way that they were playing musical IPs, the goofs. I steamed and asked him "where should I send the bill for the work involved in adjusting our systems and notifying our providers?", the goof gave a shrug. They never did that agian, I can assure you. After playing yoyo several (4-5) times these last couple of months, they seemed to have stabilized.
I'll give charter a 7 on business tech support, a 8 on customer relations (the portland office closed shortly after that incident) and a 5 on stability. Nothing spectactular, but i've seen and rode on better.
Go take a peek at Avast! www.avast.com I've been running the home version and loving it for what it does and does not do. They got a enterprise version, home version, oh and a Linux version too!
When one does component level diagnostics on certain parts (say, memory sticks) one can discover that they underlying problem maybe corroded contact points on the memory or the socket. Customer hands me a system saying "black screen, no boot". I hit the power button and the fans whir to life, no POST. Cutting the power I reach inside and push down on the rockwell socketed BIOS chip, feeling it crunch a lil as it seats. Hit the power agian the system comes to life. Proceeded to reseat all the cables that attach to the board so that the ever-present spectre of corrosion related failures do not arise for some time.
$35.00 later one very happy customer walked out the door.
A GOOD PC tech never should never, EVER forget the fundamentals of component-level analysis.
Cut your sentences down to short and to the point, only THEN you will get results.
I've cut dell support techs off at their knees say ingthat i'm their system tech and have done this, this and this. So guess what? I need this part and that part. Clear cut and concise. The indian/paki has to scramble thru 20 pages of scripting to get the order parts page and then calls his shift super over to authorize it.. 5 mins later the part is en route.
Last year about this time over half of the Texas coastal bend lost service when a branch of the SS7 network got chopped. Cells, 'net backbones, CC validators, and paging services. Come to find out that a contractor screwed up on misjudging the lay of the "do not dig" marks laid out by MCI..
Feh!
The boss said "dig there".
The foreman said "dig there"
The backhoe driver dug there...
Three hours later the 5oclock news came rolling around with the contractors mugs plastered on the screens with the reporters wailing about the fruits of their labors.
Another three hours rolled past until the MCI crews managed to splice the cable back together and get things back on track.
FYI, there was (and most likely will not be) no backup in place in the South Texas region for the SS7 network.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's pull the zoom lens back out to a statewide standpoint. Florida in general has been beset by one major sex related crime after another. Their CPS is a dog's lunch and is currently paralyzed by the scandals surrounding it.
The bottom line is that when something remotely sex related is found on a public access terminal in Florida, there is a kneejerk reaction to find a scapegoat and lynch that person as quick as possible.
If this were anywhere else in the nation, there would have been a Gaelic shrug and beefier security procedures put into place, no one getting crucified over it.
Not surprised that Gateway's failure rate is so high. I had three 6-10 month old systems go across my bench with fried power packs. Wayy underrated for P4s: 200 watt! I put 300s and 350s into the systems and haven't heard nothing but good news on those systems.
Apple, no major surprise there.. I heard about their power packs on the whitebox IMacs being a fire hazard. Their current problem is video processor failures and LCD issues.
Dell, well, what I can I say? They buy Intel boards and their chips.. Majority of failures on Dells are mainboard related.
EMachines, heh! Boat anchors through and through! Substandard parts just drip from their cases.
Rocket Engines are usually measured in Newton-seconds of thrust impulse.
So taking this formula into effect, let's see how well Carmack's throatless design stacks up to some famous engines.
We'll start with the Legend: The F1 first stage boosters of a Saturn V stack, 33.4 MN (Million Newtons).
The Russian Energia booster in the Vulkan configuration ramps 46 MN.
The Space Shuttle stack can offer up 34.8 MN. But the stack is bulky and can only lift 28,800kg to LEO.
Currently the best US booster is the Titan IV stack. Dishing out 17MN and can haul 21.7K kg to LEO and 5.8K to GTO.
The newer Delta 4 Heavy configuration with solids piggybacked, put a dummy payload into orbit that tipped the scales at 13.1K Kg into GEO transfer orbit.
I don't have the head for formulae, so if someone can crank out some results, would be much appreciated.
I remember that fiasco too.. Arianne IV carrying 3 commsats and a research payload broke apart cuz the steering gimbals moved too much.
About 3 billion worth of hardware, but the lightshow was pretty.
Old tricks, fat dog too!
Social Engineering.
Enuf said.
Make it easier, instead of cobbling a balloon kit together, go get a inflatable life jacket (type I or II USCG) and hook it into the ROV with something to pull the release cord. Something goes wrong, the tube's inflated and the ROV rises to the surface.
Odds are that the umbilical will get fouled and will have to be cut to free the unit so consider a simple set of shears with a high-tension spring to deal with the cord in case something should happen.
*peers at site, keeps from drooling and having his own ideas*
THey are using a tape drive motor, which is pretty much a DC inductive type. Those kind of motors are pretty popular with their projects.
They have another hydro plant there that uses the 3 phase (polyphase) design that their wind generators utilize.
I'm surprised that most aeromotors don't use polyphase generation for it is very efficient and has a very low drag coefficient in comparison to the conventional alternator/generator designs.
The designs are very frugal on material useage (copper, magnets, supporting frame).
Their shop is powered by a composite power system. They got a bank of batts being charged by several wind turbines, the Lister engine, a couple of hydrogenerators that supply a surprising amount of power considering that they were orginally squirrel cage blowers that came out of a central AC system.
Their power plants are not state of the art, but homebrewing/improvising at it's finest.
The only question should be:
Extra Crispy or Original Recipe?
Mod parent up and call JMS!
This certain russkie has reportedly been a major moving factor behind joker.com.
This guy simply needs to be shipped off to Siberia where he can freeze his 'nads off.
Think cake and you'll understand. A 3 layer cake is always better than one.
Never let oneself get tricked into thinking that one big layer of defense will keep them out. The French frogs built the Maginot Line and look where it got them.
The best defense is not showing the world that you have the systems in the first place. Hostmasking, IP shrouding, wrecking the IP tables to the point where a hacker only winds up either getting rerouted or dev/null.
The 2nd layer is securing the LAN. Standard firewalls on every system are excellent if the 1st layer is breached.
The 3rd layer is terminal access. The usual workstation security applys here. Rotating passes, biokeys, magcards, or a combination of any. One-time pads are nice too.
Keep the scriptkiddies and hackers on their toes by changing the security infrastructure around. Don't get complacent.
How good is your security? How much do you have in your budget to invest in? Keep beating the PHBs and their ilk over the head when it comes to security. Don't let them think that they are safe, for every network is like a glass house.
But the original hecklers on the muppet show had more venom than what these jokers had to show..
Better scripting fellas!
Rule No. 10
"The specification applying to the hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore is highly recommended." (Standard specifications inhibit new technology and innovation, and are frequently obsolete.)
When things slow down, you think outside the box.
When manufactures put cheap parts into a system, then you get what you pay for.
The tech that put this article together makes some excellent calls regarding modifying the power supply. Companies skimp on them rather badly, usually the customer on the receiving end of a noisy, poorly performing player, or worse, short-lived. Beefing up, loading high quality protection, and filtering components into a power pack WILL always result in a player dishing out high quality.
Not to mention a longer lifespan...
Power supplies are usually on the poor receiving end of system design. Sometimes skimping to the point where the overall lifetime of a system is measured in months, not years.
Some folks think that component level testing and replacement skills are going to be passe`. With articles like these and the need for tweaking better performance out of existing systems, bringing them up to where they supposed to be, those skills will always be in vogue.
I'll be keeping my Simpson 360 for awhile longer, thank you!
The 500 series will shut down ports. If the attacks increase above a preset limit, it'll shut down the outside service and send a alarm to the admin.
We had a 515 at our office protecting a set of macs after someone tried to beat on them with packetting. The lil box shut down the ports and isolated the macs, then started to scream at the admin. Then the PageSentry started to scream at us for it could not ping the remote modem racks. Five minutes later it reset the ports and reopened the access to the 'net.
This is where IT admins get into the deep dip by investing in top-notch gear and THEN, buying up cheap firewall software, expecting it to do the duty of protecting his pride and joy.
To protect the equipment, you will simply tell them to go hardware firewalls, preferably Cisco PIX 500s will do the trick. But be prepared to pay for the name, but the protection that this unit will provide will be worth every penny.
Besides, Why would anyone want to be in front of a microwave emitter dishing out 100+ watts of radiation?
Unless the jerk wants to have FLKs (Funny Looking Kids).
I'll bite charter too.. The company, ironically is a ISP that uses charter as a link to our central office up north in Illinois. Initially it was supposed to be sbc and their "vaunted" DSL service, but 3 days before the office was supposed to open up, the tech came out and declared "19,750 feet". Even though the sales jerk said that we qualified, even after I requested that he do the loop qualification testing. Talk about some loose programming for I did the loop qual on their website after I got the phone #s for the office.
I thanked the tech for he did everything in his powers, including discovering a bridge tap 100 feet out and killing it.
I fumed for 15 minutes and let their "customer suport" have it with a 5 minute tirade about "fraudulent advertising".
I gave the local charter office a ring to get their business account. The dopey-sounding lady on the other end of the line didn't seem to be very happy with me calling, promised me that a business accountant would get in touch with me if I left her a number. I stomped on her lil speech with "LOOK! Do YOU want my business or not?" That froze her train of thought and then gave me a phone # to their business accounts. After sweet-talking the sweet lil thing on the other end of the line up in Colorado and filling her in on the situation and the hell I just went thru with sbc. She proceeded bend a few rules and gave us a next day installation slot. The tech came out 10AM, snaked the cable in, I had the router cocked and ready (fixed IP, more on that later) and was up before 2 PM.
The office opened on schedule.
Unfortunately, I cannot give high marks to their administrative sector on managing their IP pools. They jumped the IP addressing on us (we use RADIUS for our clients.) and was not given any kind of notice or indication until the northern office called us and asked to see if our servers were up. Upon replying yes, I checked the router to see what gives and discovered the changed IP. Called their business tech support and found out the hard way that they were playing musical IPs, the goofs. I steamed and asked him "where should I send the bill for the work involved in adjusting our systems and notifying our providers?", the goof gave a shrug.
They never did that agian, I can assure you.
After playing yoyo several (4-5) times these last couple of months, they seemed to have stabilized.
I'll give charter a 7 on business tech support, a 8 on customer relations (the portland office closed shortly after that incident) and a 5 on stability. Nothing spectactular, but i've seen and rode on better.
Go take a peek at Avast! www.avast.com I've been running the home version and loving it for what it does and does not do.
They got a enterprise version, home version, oh and a Linux version too!
When one does component level diagnostics on certain parts (say, memory sticks) one can discover that they underlying problem maybe corroded contact points on the memory or the socket. Customer hands me a system saying "black screen, no boot". I hit the power button and the fans whir to life, no POST. Cutting the power I reach inside and push down on the rockwell socketed BIOS chip, feeling it crunch a lil as it seats. Hit the power agian the system comes to life. Proceeded to reseat all the cables that attach to the board so that the ever-present spectre of corrosion related failures do not arise for some time.
$35.00 later one very happy customer walked out the door.
A GOOD PC tech never should never, EVER forget the fundamentals of component-level analysis.
Small claims for suffering and any surcharges that they throw at you will help things along.
*phews!*
big lungs = big mouth.
Cut your sentences down to short and to the point, only THEN you will get results.
I've cut dell support techs off at their knees say ingthat i'm their system tech and have done this, this and this. So guess what? I need this part and that part. Clear cut and concise. The indian/paki has to scramble thru 20 pages of scripting to get the order parts page and then calls his shift super over to authorize it.. 5 mins later the part is en route.
Hand the check and bills to the local AG and your PUC. Let them drop the hammer on their hands for screwing up this badly.
Last year about this time over half of the Texas coastal bend lost service when a branch of the SS7 network got chopped. Cells, 'net backbones, CC validators, and paging services. Come to find out that a contractor screwed up on misjudging the lay of the "do not dig" marks laid out by MCI..
Feh!
The boss said "dig there".
The foreman said "dig there"
The backhoe driver dug there...
Three hours later the 5oclock news came rolling around with the contractors mugs plastered on the screens with the reporters wailing about the fruits of their labors.
Another three hours rolled past until the MCI crews managed to splice the cable back together and get things back on track.
FYI, there was (and most likely will not be) no backup in place in the South Texas region for the SS7 network.