First off, what consulting co. do you work for? I'd love to use them / move there - every contsultant I've ever met with virtually no exception has been only marginally more skillfull than average and they seemed to enjoy the luxury of mistakes more than I ever could.
Corporate work is THE way to go if you want to see any of the more expensive corners of the world. Singapore, for example, is an amazing city, well, except for the weird anti-gum thing, and it's close to all of SE asia (good as a home base) but it's expensive as hell to rent a decent apt. there - most companies will give you an apt.
Also on the list of live-there-if-you're-corporate : tokyo, hong kong (amazing place if you get someone else to pay), NYC, London (makes NYC seem cheap), anywhere in switzerland, the list goes on...
Just find a company that has a lot of overseas offices and get yourself re-assigned to one of them. If you and they are US based they're usually looking for good 'american' people to work in the overseas offices:)
see the problem is who knows what other services the messenger provides? I mean, every time I turn around I find something that I'd love to shut off but something in our outside our network depends on it. Messenger service, for all I know, is also involved in SQL authentication or will fark up the queue messenger because it relies on Messenger to initialize.
OK I know check the dependencies but it's still a dice roll. I decided it's easier to just install Tiny firewall on all the boxes, let 'em talk to eachother all they want but not allow 'lsa services' to chat w/ the internet.
well, these performance differences are pretty impressive though - the AMD averaged around 1186 for the two tests (1202 and 1170) while the intel averaged 678 (0 on the first test ('no Itanium 2 system returned a validated SPECint2000 score...') and 1356 on the second.
Of course, if the itanium scores a 0 on the speed test for the application you wish ran but won't come out in 64 bit form for 2 more years then, well, the performance difference is even bigger:)
Yea, and it doesn't say what the quality of the sound and video recording is. And can you imagine trying to aim/point this thing AT something you're trying to capture (I con't care if the camera swivles, it needs to move in 3 dimensions). What we need is a portable hard drive with a full set of connectors (lan/bluetooth/802.1ab/ethernet/serial (don't forget serial for those pesky old routers:) ) and an optional (detachable) small screen and some sort of expanding keyboard. Is that so much to ask for?
Perfect example - You see, it is very easy to keep a large number of win boxes patched. You can host an update server on your lan, set all your clients (via group policy) to look to it for automatic updates. You decide which updates go on the update server (and out to clients) and, of course, you can set different update times on individual boxes (remotely, via script) to handle reboots and whatnot.
What you might also not know is the update packages MS sends out are horrendeously (sp?) documented, use different (undocumented) switches and have a small chance of blowing up whatever you're patching. This is the biggest patching problem, not the logistics of making the patches run. Are there similar problems with patches in Linux?
I think you just made an important point - "...the few windows boxes I've had to manage..." Of course they've been a pain, you've only had to do a few, never learned the (sometimes hellishly complex and quixotic) details of how to effectively manage Windows. If you had managed a thousand Windows boxes and just a couple linux ones you'd probably feel the linux boxes were a bigger pain.
I'm not saying Windows is easier/harder to amin, just that you need someone with equal experience admin'ing both to make a fair comparison.
So, basically, you can stream, what, a sunny "Hi there bob" before it cuts off? How much MPEG4 does 96Kbs - that's kilobits mind you (or is it bytes) - either way, very, very small file.
heh so the new anti-aircraft technology is just a big dumb jet flying around the sky that's very, very, very loud. Maybe some poor country could snap up some Concordes on sale or something
agreed - I'm working for a small (>10 emp.) business and have been looking for months for an exchange replacement. I've decided to go with Yahoo Calendar (!) which is much, much better than I had thought it could be. Saves the client owning a server too. Of course, you don't get the email-to-calendar niceties that exchange/outlook gives but that's not a huge loss. And it syncs w/ outlook but that's all - you either use the outlook calendar and don't get live on-line data until you sync or you use yahoo's web-based calendar and don't get outlook.
Erm, they can't be patented/trademarked(?) that well since works of commercial art, as I understand it, have few rights to keep people from ripping them off. For example, a fashionable shoe from, say gucci, comes out, next thing you know a dozen orders go in to factories in Brazil to crank out shoes that look exactly like the gucci only 1/4 the price. Nothing illegal. Gucci never sues.
So, scan in FontX into Fontmaking Package Y, modify a couple little things, and generate font.
Or, is the problem Fonmaking Package Y doesn't exist? I remember working with font-builders in windoze like 6 years ago, nice, easy gui, it was illustrator-like.
The problem I see with RAM disks (this applies to all the RAM disk posts here) is verification of the media. Anyone could come in with thier own customized CDs and replace the legit ones. Only if you had staff with a trusted computer who regularly checked md5s on the cd could this be avoided. like that will happen.
Could make the disks available for public download and people can bring their own disks in they burn at home:)
Not really sure what the answer is other than using a RAM disk solution raises the effot needed to siphon information off the system so maybe it's just the best possible, but not perfect, solution.
I like that approach, not sure if Windows will cache (write to swap, whatever) the DOS session the linux disto would run under but I suppose I could ensure nothing interesting is in there. Or if it really whiped the RAM then what about the people who have Word open and want to launch I.E.? I don't think the windows session would survive this intact:)
Your second idea is interesting, something I was thinking about - IBM did something called crowds that were basically a peer-to-peer proxy program that would send requests randomly to proxy servers (other nodes on the network) - if a bunch of libraries ran this desktop they'd all be peer'd proxies for eachother, sending encrypted requests through several hops before it goes to the internet. The only way it could be traced to a source is if you could hack the proxies - you'd have to hack a good number of them record the NAT and keys in real time to trace who'se sending what.
At least i think that's how it works. I like the idea of creating a huge national library network of peers - you could run your own gnutella-like network to encourage information sharing between libraries, etc.
clearly part of the system would try to limit the ability to snoop on the goings-on from the ISP - some kind of encrypted, anonymous browsing would be great (I posted above suggesting encrypted communications to an anonymous proxy (only as safe as the proxy is) like triangle boy (if I recall correctly that how it worked) or what ever happened to that IBM program 'crowds'?
I'm interested in any ideas you have on how to secure against ISP-level snooping
yea, I don't like it when people diss posters IQs but I think you are missing the point. bringing up things the FBI will do to counter whatever is set up on the client is good, now how to you counter the countermeasures?
for example, what if all the terminals ran some kind of triangle boy / safe web esque setup? howabout encrypting all the communications to an anonymous proxy so the FBI can sit and sniff at the ISP all day long for all we care. this is just off the top of my head - I'll try to talk to the folks at hactivismo for some real-world solutions.
so keep bringing up flaws in the plan, but at least try to suggest some work arounds while you do it?
I'm not sure that addressing the problem from a technology perspective is a waste of time. Just because a firewall can be hacked through doesn't mean you just don't put one up - the object is never to have 100% whatever (security, anonimity, etc.) but to put up barriers to make it as difficult as possible to snoop, crack, whatever.
I like all the posts saying we need to change law, it's good to focus on that too, but let's make it difficult to enforce while we're working on getting it off the books...
See, that's a really good point - and environment that's safe and anonymous might also be one that would make it difficult for crackers to work from. Talk to me about what things a PC should be able/not able to do to make it cracker-unfriendly.
problem is then the 'free' libraries start costing money - even if you return the book, you have to have the money in your account/credit card (if you have one) to check the book out - this would disallow many paycheck-to-paycheck people from checking out materials.
As to what I meant by anonymous checkout (or how that would be possible), I'm not sure myself, that's why I floated the question - the idea about encrypting the info and erasing it once the book is returned is good.
who cares - this article is what I've been looking for for years (well, not looking too hard, obviously) - i wrote a thesis on how pattern recognition is hard-wired into human's brains, how we're biologically inclined to see and interpret coicidences, but at the time I was working w/ sociologits' work, I never looking into the people listed in the article. I LOVE SLASHDOT (sometimes).
BTW - "The fact that so many suspected cancer clusters have turned out to be statistically insupportable does not mean the energy we spent looking for them has been wasted,'...'You're never going to find the real ones if you don't look at all the ones that don't turn out to be real ones.'
I wonder how they determine if the coincidence is a coincidence. That is, just because the thing that looks like a cancer cluster actually turns out to statistically be a non-cluster, isn't there a chance that a real cluster might also happen to be identical to a non-cluster?
mmm, the coincidence of coincidence - catchy title, no?
*sigh* every action has an equal and opposite reaction. OK so this isn't physics, but it's a convenient metaphore. Technology has consistently provided escapes for the traps technology has engendered. Will this continue or will the heights technology climbs make each wall higher and higher, requireing more and more sophisticated technology to overcome it and thus fewer people will have access to it. They (cap. T) will be satisfied if 95% of the people are enumerated, or 97% or some percent less than 100.
You see, this is where open source needs to pick up, it needs to be more and more accessible by the technically less-than-literate. Only if the response to technological oppression is as dispersed and available as the oppression itself will it be useful as a tool to combat this "orwellian nightmare".
I'm constantly thinking this - how to keep (too much) power concentrated in the hands of the elite, either Our elite or Theirs. That is, presuming, that anyone wants to be saved, that they consider it a nightmare - this I'm not so sure of
Yea, but so do all VCRs. And most movies worth watching are only on VHS - go to any decent (i.e. small, privately-owned) video store and 3/4ths or more of thier stock will be in VHS. The tapes are butt-ugly, I hate them, but it's still like the early days of the CD when if you wanted to listen to anything less-than-mainstream you still needed your trusty record player.
My vote, replace the VCR, and buy a DVD if you have the spare cash.
totally MS-centric. But sometimes you're given an environment where you have no say on the servers being used or the technology in the website itself (as I have) in which case finding a MS-centric development site is a godsend:)
I'm so psyched no one mentioned this yet, for ASP and other windy-type stuff (including db and webserver config, etc.) 15seconds.com is really, really good. One of the first places I go, always. The examples are practical and not trivial, and the writing is clear.
I also use webmonkey when I need to learn the very basics (it's good for introductions to topics you know absolutely nothing about).
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First off, what consulting co. do you work for? I'd love to use them / move there - every contsultant I've ever met with virtually no exception has been only marginally more skillfull than average and they seemed to enjoy the luxury of mistakes more than I ever could.
:)
Corporate work is THE way to go if you want to see any of the more expensive corners of the world. Singapore, for example, is an amazing city, well, except for the weird anti-gum thing, and it's close to all of SE asia (good as a home base) but it's expensive as hell to rent a decent apt. there - most companies will give you an apt.
Also on the list of live-there-if-you're-corporate : tokyo, hong kong (amazing place if you get someone else to pay), NYC, London (makes NYC seem cheap), anywhere in switzerland, the list goes on...
Just find a company that has a lot of overseas offices and get yourself re-assigned to one of them. If you and they are US based they're usually looking for good 'american' people to work in the overseas offices
see the problem is who knows what other services the messenger provides? I mean, every time I turn around I find something that I'd love to shut off but something in our outside our network depends on it. Messenger service, for all I know, is also involved in SQL authentication or will fark up the queue messenger because it relies on Messenger to initialize.
OK I know check the dependencies but it's still a dice roll. I decided it's easier to just install Tiny firewall on all the boxes, let 'em talk to eachother all they want but not allow 'lsa services' to chat w/ the internet.
well, these performance differences are pretty impressive though - the AMD averaged around 1186 for the two tests (1202 and 1170) while the intel averaged 678 (0 on the first test ('no Itanium 2 system returned a validated SPECint2000 score...') and 1356 on the second.
:)
Of course, if the itanium scores a 0 on the speed test for the application you wish ran but won't come out in 64 bit form for 2 more years then, well, the performance difference is even bigger
Yea, and it doesn't say what the quality of the sound and video recording is. And can you imagine trying to aim/point this thing AT something you're trying to capture (I con't care if the camera swivles, it needs to move in 3 dimensions). What we need is a portable hard drive with a full set of connectors (lan/bluetooth/802.1ab/ethernet/serial (don't forget serial for those pesky old routers:) ) and an optional (detachable) small screen and some sort of expanding keyboard. Is that so much to ask for?
Perfect example - You see, it is very easy to keep a large number of win boxes patched. You can host an update server on your lan, set all your clients (via group policy) to look to it for automatic updates. You decide which updates go on the update server (and out to clients) and, of course, you can set different update times on individual boxes (remotely, via script) to handle reboots and whatnot.
What you might also not know is the update packages MS sends out are horrendeously (sp?) documented, use different (undocumented) switches and have a small chance of blowing up whatever you're patching. This is the biggest patching problem, not the logistics of making the patches run. Are there similar problems with patches in Linux?
Funny sig btw
I think you just made an important point - "...the few windows boxes I've had to manage..." Of course they've been a pain, you've only had to do a few, never learned the (sometimes hellishly complex and quixotic) details of how to effectively manage Windows. If you had managed a thousand Windows boxes and just a couple linux ones you'd probably feel the linux boxes were a bigger pain.
I'm not saying Windows is easier/harder to amin, just that you need someone with equal experience admin'ing both to make a fair comparison.
So, basically, you can stream, what, a sunny "Hi there bob" before it cuts off? How much MPEG4 does 96Kbs - that's kilobits mind you (or is it bytes) - either way, very, very small file.
heh so the new anti-aircraft technology is just a big dumb jet flying around the sky that's very, very, very loud. Maybe some poor country could snap up some Concordes on sale or something
Links to anything better? In the same class? Even remotely as good (ok this is at least in the latter category). I've not found any...
agreed - I'm working for a small (>10 emp.) business and have been looking for months for an exchange replacement. I've decided to go with Yahoo Calendar (!) which is much, much better than I had thought it could be. Saves the client owning a server too. Of course, you don't get the email-to-calendar niceties that exchange/outlook gives but that's not a huge loss. And it syncs w/ outlook but that's all - you either use the outlook calendar and don't get live on-line data until you sync or you use yahoo's web-based calendar and don't get outlook.
Erm, they can't be patented/trademarked(?) that well since works of commercial art, as I understand it, have few rights to keep people from ripping them off. For example, a fashionable shoe from, say gucci, comes out, next thing you know a dozen orders go in to factories in Brazil to crank out shoes that look exactly like the gucci only 1/4 the price. Nothing illegal. Gucci never sues.
So, scan in FontX into Fontmaking Package Y, modify a couple little things, and generate font.
Or, is the problem Fonmaking Package Y doesn't exist? I remember working with font-builders in windoze like 6 years ago, nice, easy gui, it was illustrator-like.
Or we you just trolling and I bit?
The problem I see with RAM disks (this applies to all the RAM disk posts here) is verification of the media. Anyone could come in with thier own customized CDs and replace the legit ones. Only if you had staff with a trusted computer who regularly checked md5s on the cd could this be avoided. like that will happen.
:)
Could make the disks available for public download and people can bring their own disks in they burn at home
Not really sure what the answer is other than using a RAM disk solution raises the effot needed to siphon information off the system so maybe it's just the best possible, but not perfect, solution.
I like that approach, not sure if Windows will cache (write to swap, whatever) the DOS session the linux disto would run under but I suppose I could ensure nothing interesting is in there. Or if it really whiped the RAM then what about the people who have Word open and want to launch I.E.? I don't think the windows session would survive this intact :)
Your second idea is interesting, something I was thinking about - IBM did something called crowds that were basically a peer-to-peer proxy program that would send requests randomly to proxy servers (other nodes on the network) - if a bunch of libraries ran this desktop they'd all be peer'd proxies for eachother, sending encrypted requests through several hops before it goes to the internet. The only way it could be traced to a source is if you could hack the proxies - you'd have to hack a good number of them record the NAT and keys in real time to trace who'se sending what.
At least i think that's how it works. I like the idea of creating a huge national library network of peers - you could run your own gnutella-like network to encourage information sharing between libraries, etc.
clearly part of the system would try to limit the ability to snoop on the goings-on from the ISP - some kind of encrypted, anonymous browsing would be great (I posted above suggesting encrypted communications to an anonymous proxy (only as safe as the proxy is) like triangle boy (if I recall correctly that how it worked) or what ever happened to that IBM program 'crowds'?
I'm interested in any ideas you have on how to secure against ISP-level snooping
yea, I don't like it when people diss posters IQs but I think you are missing the point. bringing up things the FBI will do to counter whatever is set up on the client is good, now how to you counter the countermeasures?
for example, what if all the terminals ran some kind of triangle boy / safe web esque setup? howabout encrypting all the communications to an anonymous proxy so the FBI can sit and sniff at the ISP all day long for all we care. this is just off the top of my head - I'll try to talk to the folks at hactivismo for some real-world solutions.
so keep bringing up flaws in the plan, but at least try to suggest some work arounds while you do it?
I'm not sure that addressing the problem from a technology perspective is a waste of time. Just because a firewall can be hacked through doesn't mean you just don't put one up - the object is never to have 100% whatever (security, anonimity, etc.) but to put up barriers to make it as difficult as possible to snoop, crack, whatever.
I like all the posts saying we need to change law, it's good to focus on that too, but let's make it difficult to enforce while we're working on getting it off the books...
See, that's a really good point - and environment that's safe and anonymous might also be one that would make it difficult for crackers to work from. Talk to me about what things a PC should be able/not able to do to make it cracker-unfriendly.
problem is then the 'free' libraries start costing money - even if you return the book, you have to have the money in your account/credit card (if you have one) to check the book out - this would disallow many paycheck-to-paycheck people from checking out materials.
As to what I meant by anonymous checkout (or how that would be possible), I'm not sure myself, that's why I floated the question - the idea about encrypting the info and erasing it once the book is returned is good.
And "language is a virus" (William Burroughs)
who cares - this article is what I've been looking for for years (well, not looking too hard, obviously) - i wrote a thesis on how pattern recognition is hard-wired into human's brains, how we're biologically inclined to see and interpret coicidences, but at the time I was working w/ sociologits' work, I never looking into the people listed in the article. I LOVE SLASHDOT (sometimes).
BTW - "The fact that so many suspected cancer clusters have turned out to be statistically insupportable does not mean the energy we spent looking for them has been wasted,'...'You're never going to find the real ones if you don't look at all the ones that don't turn out to be real ones.'
I wonder how they determine if the coincidence is a coincidence. That is, just because the thing that looks like a cancer cluster actually turns out to statistically be a non-cluster, isn't there a chance that a real cluster might also happen to be identical to a non-cluster?
mmm, the coincidence of coincidence - catchy title, no?
*sigh* every action has an equal and opposite reaction. OK so this isn't physics, but it's a convenient metaphore. Technology has consistently provided escapes for the traps technology has engendered. Will this continue or will the heights technology climbs make each wall higher and higher, requireing more and more sophisticated technology to overcome it and thus fewer people will have access to it. They (cap. T) will be satisfied if 95% of the people are enumerated, or 97% or some percent less than 100.
You see, this is where open source needs to pick up, it needs to be more and more accessible by the technically less-than-literate. Only if the response to technological oppression is as dispersed and available as the oppression itself will it be useful as a tool to combat this "orwellian nightmare".
I'm constantly thinking this - how to keep (too much) power concentrated in the hands of the elite, either Our elite or Theirs. That is, presuming, that anyone wants to be saved, that they consider it a nightmare - this I'm not so sure of
"...let you navigate scene by scene"
Yea, but so do all VCRs. And most movies worth watching are only on VHS - go to any decent (i.e. small, privately-owned) video store and 3/4ths or more of thier stock will be in VHS. The tapes are butt-ugly, I hate them, but it's still like the early days of the CD when if you wanted to listen to anything less-than-mainstream you still needed your trusty record player.
My vote, replace the VCR, and buy a DVD if you have the spare cash.
totally MS-centric. But sometimes you're given an environment where you have no say on the servers being used or the technology in the website itself (as I have) in which case finding a MS-centric development site is a godsend :)
OH, I forgot 4guysfromrolla.com is good too, for the same kind of stuff 15seconds does...
I'm so psyched no one mentioned this yet, for ASP and other windy-type stuff (including db and webserver config, etc.) 15seconds.com is really, really good. One of the first places I go, always. The examples are practical and not trivial, and the writing is clear.
I also use webmonkey when I need to learn the very basics (it's good for introductions to topics you know absolutely nothing about).