I an currently working at one of the World's larger banks (no, not the largest). We have exceptionally good firewalls but we got hit.
It seems someone from higher management took their notebook home, it was infected. It seems that portables are not in a quarantined sub-LAN. About twenty other systems were hit before it was brought under control.
Sure you may have patches, but it isn't easy rolling them out to thousands of machines.
You have a good point, this is one of CA's problems. They support legacy applications, but they still need a legacy operating system to run it on. An open source platform makes life a lot easier if you want to keep something going that is essentially unaltered.
You are quite right, and I had already mentioned the use of modules as extensions which complicates the issue further. Mod-perl servers, for example would have different vulnerabilities to mod_php.
However as the wosurce is available, it is easier to make exploits that work against different targets.
Another point is simply competition amongst open source projects. One of the best things for Linux is BSD and vice-versa and the same can be said for KDE and Gnome. They are different appraches to a common solution, and each can give the other ideas.
CA's strategy was to buy mature software products and market them together with a support contract. Typically, these products were integral to their clients business and they could make a lot of money out of ongoing support. I don't think anyone can describe SuSE AG and Linux as fitting that mold.
If you bought SuSE and things started getting expensive, then there is RedHat, and vice-versa. Both products are similarly positioned and if one starts getting really unreasonable, there is also room for more competition in the form of professionally supported versions of other distributions.
It doesn't really apply because at least in earlier times (Win2000), many Mircosoft products were relatively independent and didn't share a whole lot other than MFC. It was actually quite remarkable about how much MS were reinventing the wheel throughout their organisation (often square).
The monoculture of having most of the net depending on a single product for an Internet exposed service is bad. I don't refer to the practice of having Microsoft underwear, because it isn't relevant. However if one exploit gets out for Apache, it isn't good to have the entire web 0wn3d before we can do anything about it.
Lets go back to roots (ugh) of the term monoculture: It is the practice of growing a exclsuively a single crop. If you lose it to disease, you have lost the farm (literally).
It could be worse, one common version of IIS - one system 0wn3d, all systems 0wn3d!!!
Seriously, I acknowledge the advantage of open source but have a real gut feeling that if the same system is everywhere then should an exploit happen, it may propagate too fast. It is a key argument against Microsoft's OS Hegemony but, can still apply even if we have the means to fix the bugs.
Apache is cool and this is good for open source. However it would be better is there were more variety (perhaps Zope or others). Each approach has its own advantages or disadvantages.
Luckily many people use different Apache versions or even platforms and certainly different modules, i.e., mod-perl or php so this isn't as bad for a risk factor. I would still like to see more variety and thus hopefully better security.
In other countries, the elections are conducted by civil servants who may hold any political view, but are forbidden from being politically active while they have their jobs.
The problem with Diebold, is that they have taken over the role of some of those conducting the election. It would be less of the problem if the process was verifiable. It isn't and Diebold's CEO is promising to deliver Republican votes. This really doesn't look good. It would look as bad if he was an active Democrat promising to deliver Democratic votes.
The other point is cost. To launch a rocket that with get near enough into space, it will probably be quite sophisticated, hard to manufacture and in real terms, quite expensive.
A truck load of Anfol (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil) as favoured by many terrorists is cheaper, easier to make and more reliable. A friend's personal nightmare is an LPG tanker, which could be made into a poor-man's fuel-air bomb.
The only real issue is where does the thing come down? The UK is crowded, the US a lot less so - but if you launched something near LA, it would probably hit something coming down. I'm fully in favour of a requirement that all rockets above a certain size be tested on ranges.
>
There are already fairly strict requirements on working with pyrotechnics and storing them, and personally, I see solid fuel as just another pyrotechnic.
Re:One word that kill Atkins for me.
on
Hackers On Atkins
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· Score: 1
Really? A short holiday in Dublin was reflected immediately in my waist-line. I was more or less drinking my dinner too!!!
Guniness used to be given to people in Ireland to bulk them up for operations in earlier times. I couldn't describe it as low carb!!!
seems to be about average. Four is about the max, mostly because newer versions of Microsoft software require substantially more memory and processor power.
If you have a few hundred PCs, upgrades are incredibly expensive to put into the field. It is better to wait until a PC is 'retired' and then upgrade the user to a current mode commodity PC.
In Investment banking, the upgrade cycle is two years but the machine would just be moved to the support or development people for another couple of years rather than being junked.
One solution is thin clients, but this moves the power requirement onto blade servers, which whilst nice (it centralises most hardware and software support issues), do not have the commodity advatnage when it comes to price.
The thing is that the economy has been crap, so companies have waited before they upgrade. However that three year cycle is now stretched past four years and substantial numbers of companies are now under-invested in IT.
I agree that the code produced isn't nice, but generally it works. The last version of FP that I used was 2000 and it was useable and the results looked ok under Moz. I didn't like some of the default stuff that it does, but it could be overridden.
However the client needed FP because they were using its management facilities, that is link checking, uploading only of changed files and so on.
Many of the people killed are civillians not soldiers or guerillas. They do not choose to be in a combat area. Anyway didn't GWB declare the war to be over?
Many checkpoints were originally set up badly with incorrect signage. Yes, it is very easy to see a policeman standing with a dayglo jacket on who wants you to stop, but these were military wearing camouflage, next to camouflaged vehicles. Signs should be in Arabic and a good 100 metres and then 50m before the block.
The Windows NT kernel is quite ok - well many of the people who wrote were ex-Digital which had already gone through the secure OS exercise. However around that exec, there is a vast pile of rubbish which compromises it's security.
The root argument against Unix is now largely moot. Many file systems implement ACLs now and the latest kernel implements the NSA's capabilities. NT has had this for a very long time, but it appears that Microsoft doesn't tell its own application developers. Removing administrator level access from subsystems is still very difficult under NT. Suprisingly, UNix does rather better on this because although many subsystems require root, there has been privilege separation for a long time now.
You are quite right. It wouldn't be nice to be underneath one of these things when it fell, but how many grams of explosive could it carry?
Mortars tend to be more favored than rockets by terrorists (they are easier to aim, and can carry more payload as the fuel doesn't go up with it). I have no issues on restrictions on where rocketry can be practiced, but it really doesn't need any further controls until we talk about payloads of a kg or more.
I have shot a firearm. I have not worked at a roadblock (although, I have been through many, operated by guys with AK47s in an area controlled by a regime substantially worse than Saddam's. However, they didn't shoot me!!!!
Because of their mistakes in Northern Ireland, this is one area that the British army are well trained in. It is clear that the US army are not so ROE, or no ROE, they use disproportionate force and go after the wrong targets.
It seems that the cycle isn't as regular as some people think, although it has been 11 years before, all we are talking about is probably a turbulant flow pattern within the Sun itself. Such activity can appear regular for extended periods and then suddenly change.
As for the cars at the check points, there is only one I can think of where people were killed, but the intent was not to kill people. The vehicles are fired on to stop them
No, the shots were fired by panicing, poorly trained soldiers and were to kill not to disable the vehicle.
Shoot a car's engine, and it will stop. Shoot through the windshield and the car will stop too and full of dead occupants.
You have forgotten what works 100% of the time is that terror polarises populations. There are always reprisals on those who are not terrorists but are identified with them. Sometime the reprisal is fairly mild such as prejudice, sometimes it can the execution of populations (i.e., French villages being 'punished' by the Nazis for actions by a few resistance members or ordinary people's houses being leveled by the Israelis even when they have nothing to do with the militants.
Terrorism triggers an overt response from the authorities. The response may make life more difficult for everyone, or it may be much more extreme, alienating the community with which a terrorist is identified and creating new sympathisers.
Microsoft has significantly increased their development staff. By thoustands of developers.
Have you ever read The Mythical Man Month. Adding developers does not necessarily improve a project, indeed it can a) reduce productivity and b) quality. I would say that from their products, Microsoft's real problem is engineering management (and a lack of ethics, but thats another issue). Between N team members, there are (N-1)^2 paths of communication (or opportunities for miscommunication).
As for your other issues, well WinFS may be interesting because finally we enough horse power to drive it. There have been plenty of attempts to do this before, for example, MUMPS which was orihginally a dedicated operating system (built around RSX-11M) sitting on top of a database file system.
The system was quite nice for certain kinds of applications and it eas very sucessful for medical book-keeping. However, the user only saw complete applications, not the raw database.
As for the Look, well we should wait a little there. Personally, I don't like the cost of XP's flashy GUI - the processor and memory cost.
As for the command line, we shall see. Unix processes are lightweight, the NT kenel's aren't (XP is still essentially an NT Kernel). Unix commands are built around the assumption that it doesn't matter if you fire up half a dozen processes to solve a small problem. I see some conceptual problems there.
I disagree that it is trivial, but I do agree that it isn't that bad. Frontpage may contain much suckage but it does manage a site (as long as only one person does the updates). Where it falls down is when more than one person is updating the site.
Re:Random examples of movie computing
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Linux in Movies?
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· Score: 1
Likewise, the computer displays on Hal in "2001: A Space Oddyssey" were also just traditional cel animation.
But the cells were computer generated (by IBM Hursley Park Research Centre). Handling that kind of stuff real time then was out of the question. IBM hoped for a credit but they forgot about putting it in the contract, so the studio pushed them out of the way.
Yes, publishers may sit a long time on a book which really should be out of print, but they declare it to be on back-order possibly to be filled in a few months (or years).
The question is with software that should be obsolete. The software was typically written for obsolete hardware environments. However, it is of interest to the emulator crowd. The problems is that some people with the rights to the old games want to hold onto them. Not that they can reuse the code, but they might be able to theoretically reimplement it on a newer platform such as a mobile phone. In most cases, the reimplementation never happens, but the company wants those rights as they are still an asset on the balance sheet.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems someone from higher management took their notebook home, it was infected. It seems that portables are not in a quarantined sub-LAN. About twenty other systems were hit before it was brought under control.
Sure you may have patches, but it isn't easy rolling them out to thousands of machines.
You have a good point, this is one of CA's problems. They support legacy applications, but they still need a legacy operating system to run it on. An open source platform makes life a lot easier if you want to keep something going that is essentially unaltered.
However as the wosurce is available, it is easier to make exploits that work against different targets.
Another point is simply competition amongst open source projects. One of the best things for Linux is BSD and vice-versa and the same can be said for KDE and Gnome. They are different appraches to a common solution, and each can give the other ideas.
If you bought SuSE and things started getting expensive, then there is RedHat, and vice-versa. Both products are similarly positioned and if one starts getting really unreasonable, there is also room for more competition in the form of professionally supported versions of other distributions.
It doesn't really apply because at least in earlier times (Win2000), many Mircosoft products were relatively independent and didn't share a whole lot other than MFC. It was actually quite remarkable about how much MS were reinventing the wheel throughout their organisation (often square).
Lets go back to roots (ugh) of the term monoculture: It is the practice of growing a exclsuively a single crop. If you lose it to disease, you have lost the farm (literally).
Seriously, I acknowledge the advantage of open source but have a real gut feeling that if the same system is everywhere then should an exploit happen, it may propagate too fast. It is a key argument against Microsoft's OS Hegemony but, can still apply even if we have the means to fix the bugs.
Luckily many people use different Apache versions or even platforms and certainly different modules, i.e., mod-perl or php so this isn't as bad for a risk factor. I would still like to see more variety and thus hopefully better security.
The problem with Diebold, is that they have taken over the role of some of those conducting the election. It would be less of the problem if the process was verifiable. It isn't and Diebold's CEO is promising to deliver Republican votes. This really doesn't look good. It would look as bad if he was an active Democrat promising to deliver Democratic votes.
A truck load of Anfol (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil) as favoured by many terrorists is cheaper, easier to make and more reliable. A friend's personal nightmare is an LPG tanker, which could be made into a poor-man's fuel-air bomb.
The only real issue is where does the thing come down? The UK is crowded, the US a lot less so - but if you launched something near LA, it would probably hit something coming down. I'm fully in favour of a requirement that all rockets above a certain size be tested on ranges.
> There are already fairly strict requirements on working with pyrotechnics and storing them, and personally, I see solid fuel as just another pyrotechnic.
Guniness used to be given to people in Ireland to bulk them up for operations in earlier times. I couldn't describe it as low carb!!!
If you have a few hundred PCs, upgrades are incredibly expensive to put into the field. It is better to wait until a PC is 'retired' and then upgrade the user to a current mode commodity PC.
In Investment banking, the upgrade cycle is two years but the machine would just be moved to the support or development people for another couple of years rather than being junked.
One solution is thin clients, but this moves the power requirement onto blade servers, which whilst nice (it centralises most hardware and software support issues), do not have the commodity advatnage when it comes to price.
The thing is that the economy has been crap, so companies have waited before they upgrade. However that three year cycle is now stretched past four years and substantial numbers of companies are now under-invested in IT.
However the client needed FP because they were using its management facilities, that is link checking, uploading only of changed files and so on.
Many checkpoints were originally set up badly with incorrect signage. Yes, it is very easy to see a policeman standing with a dayglo jacket on who wants you to stop, but these were military wearing camouflage, next to camouflaged vehicles. Signs should be in Arabic and a good 100 metres and then 50m before the block.
The joke is that many of those firewalls are running Linux or xBSD. Is BillG advocating non-microsoft software then?
The root argument against Unix is now largely moot. Many file systems implement ACLs now and the latest kernel implements the NSA's capabilities. NT has had this for a very long time, but it appears that Microsoft doesn't tell its own application developers. Removing administrator level access from subsystems is still very difficult under NT. Suprisingly, UNix does rather better on this because although many subsystems require root, there has been privilege separation for a long time now.
Mortars tend to be more favored than rockets by terrorists (they are easier to aim, and can carry more payload as the fuel doesn't go up with it). I have no issues on restrictions on where rocketry can be practiced, but it really doesn't need any further controls until we talk about payloads of a kg or more.
Because of their mistakes in Northern Ireland, this is one area that the British army are well trained in. It is clear that the US army are not so ROE, or no ROE, they use disproportionate force and go after the wrong targets.
It seems that the cycle isn't as regular as some people think, although it has been 11 years before, all we are talking about is probably a turbulant flow pattern within the Sun itself. Such activity can appear regular for extended periods and then suddenly change.
Shoot a car's engine, and it will stop. Shoot through the windshield and the car will stop too and full of dead occupants.
Terrorism triggers an overt response from the authorities. The response may make life more difficult for everyone, or it may be much more extreme, alienating the community with which a terrorist is identified and creating new sympathisers.
As for your other issues, well WinFS may be interesting because finally we enough horse power to drive it. There have been plenty of attempts to do this before, for example, MUMPS which was orihginally a dedicated operating system (built around RSX-11M) sitting on top of a database file system.
The system was quite nice for certain kinds of applications and it eas very sucessful for medical book-keeping. However, the user only saw complete applications, not the raw database.
As for the Look, well we should wait a little there. Personally, I don't like the cost of XP's flashy GUI - the processor and memory cost.
As for the command line, we shall see. Unix processes are lightweight, the NT kenel's aren't (XP is still essentially an NT Kernel). Unix commands are built around the assumption that it doesn't matter if you fire up half a dozen processes to solve a small problem. I see some conceptual problems there.
I disagree that it is trivial, but I do agree that it isn't that bad. Frontpage may contain much suckage but it does manage a site (as long as only one person does the updates). Where it falls down is when more than one person is updating the site.
The question is with software that should be obsolete. The software was typically written for obsolete hardware environments. However, it is of interest to the emulator crowd. The problems is that some people with the rights to the old games want to hold onto them. Not that they can reuse the code, but they might be able to theoretically reimplement it on a newer platform such as a mobile phone. In most cases, the reimplementation never happens, but the company wants those rights as they are still an asset on the balance sheet.