Some German rap is very good. Remember, hip-hop is urban culture, and Germany has plenty of urban areas. So do France and Great Britain, both of which also have hot hip-hop scenes. And what's great is that each area is adding its own influence to the genre, not just reiterating Reverend Run rhymes in low German. Although, the band mentioned in this topic is just noise, some of it is really good.
It's the integration and unity of races that is growing in modern urban areas that increases the angular velocity of Herr Adolf. The fact that there's some modern clicks and whistles coming out of their Blaupunkt speakers would probably not increase this outrage.
I have the same printer. Works great in OSX. I installed no software. Canon's drivers have been included by default since 10.1 at least.
Have you tried plugging it into the wall and then into the computer?
You may also have to push the button the top, too.
(BTW, if it tells you you're using cups, there's a chance you fucked yourself by installing the open source system "designed" to get cups to work with samba. This system is very beta and breaks the HELL out of panther's printing system...but if you just remove your printer from the list, and plug it back in again, you should heal the damage you did.)
If you don't like the web browser, install a new one. If you don't like the "single desktop" mode, then you don't appreciate the design of the GUI maybe you shouldn't usign a mac in the first place. The Aqua way was intended to work well with one screen, one mouse button, one menu bar, and a dock. If you want more, customize it. Jesus christ, you have to do that in Linux too -- how is this an argument? "I hate that I want to customize the default. I'd rather use another system, where I HAVE to customize the default."
Actually, you're mistaking my point for a logical fallacy.
Yes, YOU can get your news from another source. You have that choice. But you choosing another source is not a force that can force them to stop, because YOU are one person out of the millions of people who rely on BBC for their news. Out of the millions who don't care about your silly point, and feel as I do that the benefits far outweigh your complaint.
Boycotts don't work unless they significantly cut into profits. And nowadays, they rarely do.
Uh, asshole? Check more than one fucking program before gloating. Many, many, many, many of them do not have the Landscape/Portrait button on the Page Setup menu, because as a developer you have to implement your own Page Setup screen. Internet Explorer has it, but textpad does not. MS Word has it (on the second tab), Visual Studio.NET does not. Outlook has two seperate print styles JUST for email, and features landscape and portrait on the second tab as part of a larger, much more complex print form that looks NOTHING like the one in Word.
This is just in the programs I use every day. Every print preview offers different options, each has them in different locations, some are barely useful.
On my mac, the page setup screen is pretty much identical for each of my applications. So's the printing screen.
I did tech support for three and a half years in college. Never burnt out (though I had a few moments of brief, subvocal insanity). My trick was learning what people wanted. If they wanted to learn how to do something, I showed them how. If they wanted me to do it for them, I did that (after all, if a person really wants to be ignorant, teaching them is an exercise in well meant futility). Sometimes, all people wanted was to vent, so I let them do that. As long as they weren't angry at me (and letting them know you're on their "side" is crucial at preventing this), I didn't care.
I looked at it like this: I go to a doctor when my appendix is hurting, because I don't know shit about physiology. This doesn't make me an idiot...it takes YEARS of training to be a doctor. They come to me because they don't know shit about computers, something I've invested years (something like 17 of them) in learning.
Don't knock the responsibility of the software industry here, either.
Consider the printer issue. In the Microsoft world, the Printer is controlled by the printer companies. The printer companies, in an effort to get rich in a low margin market segment, generate TERRIBLE software that is different for each manufacturer and uses completely different terminology. We, the geeks, are used to solving the puzzle of "what does this user interface do." Somebody who is scared that they might break a $200 printer and not know how to fix it will probably do much worse.
In the Mac world, Apple doesn't want printer manufacturers to have the ultimate say. Drivers are bit more basic (based, as they are, on UN*X printing functions). The trade off is, if Apple doesn't support your printer, you probably can't use it.
For this reason, I like printing on the mac better. I like the choices that Windows printing clients give me, but come on...when even simple options, like printing in landscape vs. printing in portrait, are hidden in six pages of "user friendly" options, something's wrong. You can't solve the problem of a complicated interface by adding more TEXT.
A quick aside, remember when printers had BUTTONS? Or a form feed wheel for when they got clogged up? Our laser printer has no buttons at all, and when it runs out of paper, there's no way to tell it to keep going short of restarting it...and you lose a half page, ugh.
But I have no clue what goes on in today's modern multi-processor-controlled engine
God, I see this argument everywhere, and it enrages me to no end. Know what goes on in today's chip controlled engine? The same things that used to go on with ANALOG controls in older engines. Monitoring and control of the mixture of gasoline. Monitoring of heat and vibration. You know, stuff that people used to screw up all the time, stuff that would screw up on its own and the car would need to get tuned up -- carburetor cleaned and tweaked, ignition timing adjusted, etc.
The stuff that the computer controls on your car is unlikely to break. So it doesn't matter that you "don't know what's going on" -- the parts that are causing the problem are still accessible. Car sluggish? Check your gas line, your emissions system, your injectors, you'll find one of them is clogged. If anything, the computer controls HELP you diagnose the problem. For example, they'll tell you if your engine is knocking and they're compensating by adjusting the mix (either more air or more gas). You can still fix the problem...you just know it's not the carburetor's fault. I wish I had assurance that on my '73 Superbug!
I guess what I'm saying is, I don't see where spending a day tweaking your operating system is more valuable than a day spent figuring out how your damn car works, when the car is more expensive to own (and often, to repair).
Wow, that's a pretty crass estimate of what he said. To me, it looks more like he's implying to his friends and family, "I used to have the problems you had. I got tired of figuring out how to solve them, so I switched platforms to something that works better for me. Obviously, if I'm not willing to figure out something for myself, I'm quite reluctant to figure it out for somebody else. You want my advice, you're asking for trouble, sticking with a machine that confounds you."
You know, some people don't have time to learn the complex intricacies of three seperate computer systems just in case somebody has a problem with one of them. Some people instead try to get things done, like giving lecture tours or making films or composing slashdot posts or playing a musical instrument or having sex with women.
Personally, I would never be so cruel as to tell encourage any of my friends to use BSD or Linux. If a person is too busy (or too lazy) to read how to clean a virus on one of one of the thousands of internet sites that explain how to do so, telling them to use an operating system which prides itself on customization, choice and actualization seems foolish. You can't counter a deficit of information by forcing a person to abandon what little knowledge they've gained for a system that asks them more questions.
What humans do you know? Admitting wrongdoing is so hard, even our goddamn vice president can't do it.
We live in a world where some people are telling you only what they want to tell you, while others are just making it up. Getting all upset because somebody CORRECTS a mistake seems like the last thing we should be doing.
If the BBC doesn't want to list their corrections, there's no force that will make them. So it's not going to happen. If you don't like it, you can get your news from another source, but in my experience all the other sources are a lot worse.
I guess we disagree here, then. I believe that information from a public entity should be as accurate as possible...I mean, I get annoyed that libraries have books with factual errors in them, or that they host fictional works on the paranormal next to non-fiction works on computing theory (stupid Dewey and his muddled Decimal system, Library of Congress, so much better). Therefore, if a news agency reports that a house is on fire and it actually isn't, I'd rather they pull the article than post something like "House on fire! (update) Not really." On the digest, the former method is much quicker.
Your "hiding things when they screw up" argument is kind of silly, since we caught them. To err is human. To expect them to be proud of it and display it publically is insane.
However, this is an editorial piece. And in an editorial piece, there is no right or wrong...merely popular or unpopular. To change an editorial piece's factual basis is OK, but to change verbage based on popularity is a very sleazy, CBS sort of thing to do.
Uh, if they say something that's wrong on an immutable medium like the internet, why shouldn't they change it? The reason you have to write a retraction of a false story in a newspaper is you can't just go back and fix it -- even if you wish you could.
Do you expect them to just LEAVE the false statement where people might believe it? They're a respectable news entity, they're not SLASHDOT, for christ's sake.
As long as they aren't denying that the story was different in the past -- I've got no problem with this. I can change the text on my website when I change my mind...why can't they?
Here, here. I like open source software, but there's a big difference between thinking that it is a good idea for a bunch of smart people to work together in their free time to make an operating system that can't be handled unfairly for economic reasons, and thinking that Open Source is the One True Path to Freedom and all commercial software vendors are necessarily spiteful jackals looking to lock us all down in patent fees, inferior products and pervasive compromises of our privacy.
The first is a rational position. The second is a philosophical position -- one that has nothing more to do with software than religion has to do with evolution.
I think it's easy to distance yourself from the comparison these days, especially with Sun and IBM and Novell throwing their hands in. With all these clean people helping the bearded wierdos with their (increasinly useful) hobby, it seems obvious that freedom need not be mutually exclusive with making an honest buck.
In other words: they're not Linux zealots, they're zealots who use Linux.
They do work greart for the home user...actually, they're great for any user who can work within the restriction that you can really only have 5 or so virtual servers before it starts to bog down. As for "corporate infrasctructures," this baby could have easily replaced the Big 5 unit we used at our corporate office in my last job.
It is, after all, little more than a front end to an embedded version of iptables. As such, it has all the great firewall features of a Linux box, without having to be a Linux admin. And when you don't have an IT department (we have an IT committee, which is me and three other guys who are already busy as hell), that's awesome.
Application protocols: there are about 70 or so set up by default, and you can write your own (set up based on internet protocol and port range). You can also group them, and treat the groups like an individual protocol, which speeds things up greatly. Rather than forward the 4 allowed "services" to my linux box on one screen and then set up policy information on another for each of the 4, i set up a single group called "Linux Box". Forward all connections hitting the ports set up in the "Linux Box" group on one external IP to my server, then set up a policy permitting "Linux Box" functions (and denying everything else) on that server. Adding a new outside accessible linux box to the network took me 2 minutes.
Logging: policy based, quite detailed, nicely printable, searchable over policies, policy groups, address groups, etc, savable to samba discs or emailable. A policy can be set up as granularly as per address per protocol...so if i wanted to permit AOL file transfers to just my machine, it'll let me do that, and log all the connections to it. It has built in support for email network intrusion attempt alerts and a statistics generator based off the same criteria as the logger.
Maybe the reason you wouldn't use one to protect the corporate infrastructure is that you assume a Linksys device repurposed with a Cisco label is inherently better than a device designed by linksys' primary competitor. It's not...in fact, they're about the same, except the DLink unit I got has support for a separate DMZ network (which allows you to set up a network in between your strictly intranet machines and machines that perform constant internet activities) as well as great support for service based mappings (which allow me to set up "virtual servers" which forward each port of an external IP address to a server, or bank of round robin load balanced servers on the intranet or DMZ networks). Performance on this stupid thing is better than it was with our old Novell machine. Yeah, maybe it is a top of the line Hyundai, but that Cisco device is some C-Class Benz. We get more leg room for the same pricetag.
In a world where Ford has lived to be a hundred years old, I think the lesson here is that if you don't mess up your finances, make a halfway decent product, devote equal time to listening to your customers, engineers and marketeers, you can survive even if you don't rule the market.
It's companies that consider success being number one, and anything less failure, that don't survive.
Actually, this machine does in fact have packet inspection (at least as far as the functions we'd care about, such as hacked and masqueraded addresses), DOS detection and pretty much anything else you can do with said machine. But, you know, keep making assumptions.
We needed a gateway, and not so much a NAT device as something which did port level filtering and port forwarding with NAT for the email machine, so we could put 35 machines behind 4 IP addresses and do everything we needed to. This box did that great and as complicated as it seems, we were able to do our whole network with around 20 rules, in total. The PIX-501 is CLOSE to what we needed, but was missing a number of essential features.
Last month, my company was looking for a replacement for the overly expensive, hard to manage firewall. Our favorite consultants (who seem think we are idiots and yet don't understand the words "packet filtering") tried to sell us on a Cisco firewall device that was something like $2000. I thought this was insane, seeing as all we needed was a nice interface to ipchains (nobody but me knows Linux here, so that wasn't an option). I look at LinkSys, but they didn't have anything which would do anything more advanced than direct NAT. This seemed strange to me, as at home I had a Linksys firewall router that allowed me to do pretty much whatever I liked when it came to mapping ports and setting up load balancing.
Dlink -- who used to be a direct competitor to Linksys in every segment of the market -- had an awesome device which rivalled the features of the Cisco router for only $300. I had a problem with the first one they sent out, got good support and they sent me a replacement. I had that one up and running in an afternoon without a problem (well, with one problem, but that was due to the Cisco cable router, not the Dlink). And we saved so much money, we could afford a nice spam filter and a new development server. And the new device has a nice, fairly unbuggy web interface that is way easier to use than plain ipchains/iptables with MOST of the functionality (it does bomb out after a certain number of NAT mappings, but since this thing is only 300 MHz I suppose that's for the best).
Whoa. You can offsite as much as you like. The government does. But the fact is, you can't beat a good filing system and hard copies for pure redundancy. What if the power goes out? What if your computers are compromised and you can't trust them to restore your data? What if there's a problem with your backup tape head sync, and all the tapes can only be read by the unit that made them -- which is slowly dying (I've had this happen to me).
I used to work in the hard copy repository for the NY criminal justice system...so many file folders in so many filing cabinets that the floor was caving in. All of the data was digitized, and yet there was enough work in maintaining the digitized database's accuracy and integrity to employ 20 file runners, plus summer help to purge unneeded records (duplicates, records of people that have been dead for three years or longer, etc).
A database is a beautiful thing, but it is not yet able to replace paper. They have only been around in government for about 10 or 15 years...hardly long enough to prove their reliability.
No, I'm suggesting that if a guy brings a printed document (say, a permit or tax document) into another government office, and you need a digitized version, it's far easier to OCR it than hunt down the original. The government employs a LOT of people, and the fewer people you have to tap to get a specific task done, the more efficient that task becomes. It is easier for citizens to get in and get out of offices if a particular clerk is empowered to do everything they need to do. Even if, occasionally, work is getting done twice.
Besides, what happens when a file gets corrupt or lost? The price you pay for the efficiency of digital representation is that bits are more delicate than letters. That's why we keep hard copies, after all.
Not really. If you can scan in a document sent from across the country in a minute and save a couple hours requesting and/or hunting down the original file, you've increased overall productivity.
After all, we don't want a universally accessible document store -- that's just begging to be hacked. And moving things on floppys or CDs is too uncertain for government work.
It's probably because TechTV is boring, inaccurate garbage. Watching that channel is really worthwhile if you want a marketting take on the amazing, top of the line electronics of three months ago. Oh, and commercials for things you couldn't possibly want. Oh, and animation that's so shitty even cartoon network won't take it.
G4's the same deal.
I suppose they might be worthwhile for people who don't actually care about the information enough to read slashdot, zdnet, Wired, and so forth. But you're not one of them, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Some German rap is very good. Remember, hip-hop is urban culture, and Germany has plenty of urban areas. So do France and Great Britain, both of which also have hot hip-hop scenes. And what's great is that each area is adding its own influence to the genre, not just reiterating Reverend Run rhymes in low German. Although, the band mentioned in this topic is just noise, some of it is really good.
It's the integration and unity of races that is growing in modern urban areas that increases the angular velocity of Herr Adolf. The fact that there's some modern clicks and whistles coming out of their Blaupunkt speakers would probably not increase this outrage.
I have the same printer. Works great in OSX. I installed no software. Canon's drivers have been included by default since 10.1 at least.
Have you tried plugging it into the wall and then into the computer?
You may also have to push the button the top, too.
(BTW, if it tells you you're using cups, there's a chance you fucked yourself by installing the open source system "designed" to get cups to work with samba. This system is very beta and breaks the HELL out of panther's printing system...but if you just remove your printer from the list, and plug it back in again, you should heal the damage you did.)
If you don't like the web browser, install a new one. If you don't like the "single desktop" mode, then you don't appreciate the design of the GUI maybe you shouldn't usign a mac in the first place. The Aqua way was intended to work well with one screen, one mouse button, one menu bar, and a dock. If you want more, customize it. Jesus christ, you have to do that in Linux too -- how is this an argument? "I hate that I want to customize the default. I'd rather use another system, where I HAVE to customize the default."
Actually, you're mistaking my point for a logical fallacy.
Yes, YOU can get your news from another source. You have that choice. But you choosing another source is not a force that can force them to stop, because YOU are one person out of the millions of people who rely on BBC for their news. Out of the millions who don't care about your silly point, and feel as I do that the benefits far outweigh your complaint.
Boycotts don't work unless they significantly cut into profits. And nowadays, they rarely do.
Uh, asshole? Check more than one fucking program before gloating. Many, many, many, many of them do not have the Landscape/Portrait button on the Page Setup menu, because as a developer you have to implement your own Page Setup screen. Internet Explorer has it, but textpad does not. MS Word has it (on the second tab), Visual Studio.NET does not. Outlook has two seperate print styles JUST for email, and features landscape and portrait on the second tab as part of a larger, much more complex print form that looks NOTHING like the one in Word.
This is just in the programs I use every day. Every print preview offers different options, each has them in different locations, some are barely useful.
On my mac, the page setup screen is pretty much identical for each of my applications. So's the printing screen.
I did tech support for three and a half years in college. Never burnt out (though I had a few moments of brief, subvocal insanity). My trick was learning what people wanted. If they wanted to learn how to do something, I showed them how. If they wanted me to do it for them, I did that (after all, if a person really wants to be ignorant, teaching them is an exercise in well meant futility). Sometimes, all people wanted was to vent, so I let them do that. As long as they weren't angry at me (and letting them know you're on their "side" is crucial at preventing this), I didn't care.
I looked at it like this: I go to a doctor when my appendix is hurting, because I don't know shit about physiology. This doesn't make me an idiot...it takes YEARS of training to be a doctor. They come to me because they don't know shit about computers, something I've invested years (something like 17 of them) in learning.
Don't knock the responsibility of the software industry here, either.
Consider the printer issue. In the Microsoft world, the Printer is controlled by the printer companies. The printer companies, in an effort to get rich in a low margin market segment, generate TERRIBLE software that is different for each manufacturer and uses completely different terminology. We, the geeks, are used to solving the puzzle of "what does this user interface do." Somebody who is scared that they might break a $200 printer and not know how to fix it will probably do much worse.
In the Mac world, Apple doesn't want printer manufacturers to have the ultimate say. Drivers are bit more basic (based, as they are, on UN*X printing functions). The trade off is, if Apple doesn't support your printer, you probably can't use it.
For this reason, I like printing on the mac better. I like the choices that Windows printing clients give me, but come on...when even simple options, like printing in landscape vs. printing in portrait, are hidden in six pages of "user friendly" options, something's wrong. You can't solve the problem of a complicated interface by adding more TEXT.
A quick aside, remember when printers had BUTTONS? Or a form feed wheel for when they got clogged up? Our laser printer has no buttons at all, and when it runs out of paper, there's no way to tell it to keep going short of restarting it...and you lose a half page, ugh.
But I have no clue what goes on in today's modern multi-processor-controlled engine
God, I see this argument everywhere, and it enrages me to no end. Know what goes on in today's chip controlled engine? The same things that used to go on with ANALOG controls in older engines. Monitoring and control of the mixture of gasoline. Monitoring of heat and vibration. You know, stuff that people used to screw up all the time, stuff that would screw up on its own and the car would need to get tuned up -- carburetor cleaned and tweaked, ignition timing adjusted, etc.
The stuff that the computer controls on your car is unlikely to break. So it doesn't matter that you "don't know what's going on" -- the parts that are causing the problem are still accessible. Car sluggish? Check your gas line, your emissions system, your injectors, you'll find one of them is clogged. If anything, the computer controls HELP you diagnose the problem. For example, they'll tell you if your engine is knocking and they're compensating by adjusting the mix (either more air or more gas). You can still fix the problem...you just know it's not the carburetor's fault. I wish I had assurance that on my '73 Superbug!
I guess what I'm saying is, I don't see where spending a day tweaking your operating system is more valuable than a day spent figuring out how your damn car works, when the car is more expensive to own (and often, to repair).
Not really. There are 1.2 billion Indians longing for a chance to prove they understand what you do.
Wow, that's a pretty crass estimate of what he said. To me, it looks more like he's implying to his friends and family, "I used to have the problems you had. I got tired of figuring out how to solve them, so I switched platforms to something that works better for me. Obviously, if I'm not willing to figure out something for myself, I'm quite reluctant to figure it out for somebody else. You want my advice, you're asking for trouble, sticking with a machine that confounds you."
You know, some people don't have time to learn the complex intricacies of three seperate computer systems just in case somebody has a problem with one of them. Some people instead try to get things done, like giving lecture tours or making films or composing slashdot posts or playing a musical instrument or having sex with women.
Personally, I would never be so cruel as to tell encourage any of my friends to use BSD or Linux. If a person is too busy (or too lazy) to read how to clean a virus on one of one of the thousands of internet sites that explain how to do so, telling them to use an operating system which prides itself on customization, choice and actualization seems foolish. You can't counter a deficit of information by forcing a person to abandon what little knowledge they've gained for a system that asks them more questions.
"Humility is human?"
What humans do you know? Admitting wrongdoing is so hard, even our goddamn vice president can't do it.
We live in a world where some people are telling you only what they want to tell you, while others are just making it up. Getting all upset because somebody CORRECTS a mistake seems like the last thing we should be doing.
If the BBC doesn't want to list their corrections, there's no force that will make them. So it's not going to happen. If you don't like it, you can get your news from another source, but in my experience all the other sources are a lot worse.
I guess we disagree here, then. I believe that information from a public entity should be as accurate as possible...I mean, I get annoyed that libraries have books with factual errors in them, or that they host fictional works on the paranormal next to non-fiction works on computing theory (stupid Dewey and his muddled Decimal system, Library of Congress, so much better). Therefore, if a news agency reports that a house is on fire and it actually isn't, I'd rather they pull the article than post something like "House on fire! (update) Not really." On the digest, the former method is much quicker.
Your "hiding things when they screw up" argument is kind of silly, since we caught them. To err is human. To expect them to be proud of it and display it publically is insane.
However, this is an editorial piece. And in an editorial piece, there is no right or wrong...merely popular or unpopular. To change an editorial piece's factual basis is OK, but to change verbage based on popularity is a very sleazy, CBS sort of thing to do.
Uh, if they say something that's wrong on an immutable medium like the internet, why shouldn't they change it? The reason you have to write a retraction of a false story in a newspaper is you can't just go back and fix it -- even if you wish you could.
Do you expect them to just LEAVE the false statement where people might believe it? They're a respectable news entity, they're not SLASHDOT, for christ's sake.
As long as they aren't denying that the story was different in the past -- I've got no problem with this. I can change the text on my website when I change my mind...why can't they?
Here, here. I like open source software, but there's a big difference between thinking that it is a good idea for a bunch of smart people to work together in their free time to make an operating system that can't be handled unfairly for economic reasons, and thinking that Open Source is the One True Path to Freedom and all commercial software vendors are necessarily spiteful jackals looking to lock us all down in patent fees, inferior products and pervasive compromises of our privacy.
The first is a rational position. The second is a philosophical position -- one that has nothing more to do with software than religion has to do with evolution.
I think it's easy to distance yourself from the comparison these days, especially with Sun and IBM and Novell throwing their hands in. With all these clean people helping the bearded wierdos with their (increasinly useful) hobby, it seems obvious that freedom need not be mutually exclusive with making an honest buck.
In other words: they're not Linux zealots, they're zealots who use Linux.
They do work greart for the home user...actually, they're great for any user who can work within the restriction that you can really only have 5 or so virtual servers before it starts to bog down. As for "corporate infrasctructures," this baby could have easily replaced the Big 5 unit we used at our corporate office in my last job.
It is, after all, little more than a front end to an embedded version of iptables. As such, it has all the great firewall features of a Linux box, without having to be a Linux admin. And when you don't have an IT department (we have an IT committee, which is me and three other guys who are already busy as hell), that's awesome.
Application protocols: there are about 70 or so set up by default, and you can write your own (set up based on internet protocol and port range). You can also group them, and treat the groups like an individual protocol, which speeds things up greatly. Rather than forward the 4 allowed "services" to my linux box on one screen and then set up policy information on another for each of the 4, i set up a single group called "Linux Box". Forward all connections hitting the ports set up in the "Linux Box" group on one external IP to my server, then set up a policy permitting "Linux Box" functions (and denying everything else) on that server. Adding a new outside accessible linux box to the network took me 2 minutes.
Logging: policy based, quite detailed, nicely printable, searchable over policies, policy groups, address groups, etc, savable to samba discs or emailable. A policy can be set up as granularly as per address per protocol...so if i wanted to permit AOL file transfers to just my machine, it'll let me do that, and log all the connections to it. It has built in support for email network intrusion attempt alerts and a statistics generator based off the same criteria as the logger.
Maybe the reason you wouldn't use one to protect the corporate infrastructure is that you assume a Linksys device repurposed with a Cisco label is inherently better than a device designed by linksys' primary competitor. It's not...in fact, they're about the same, except the DLink unit I got has support for a separate DMZ network (which allows you to set up a network in between your strictly intranet machines and machines that perform constant internet activities) as well as great support for service based mappings (which allow me to set up "virtual servers" which forward each port of an external IP address to a server, or bank of round robin load balanced servers on the intranet or DMZ networks). Performance on this stupid thing is better than it was with our old Novell machine. Yeah, maybe it is a top of the line Hyundai, but that Cisco device is some C-Class Benz. We get more leg room for the same pricetag.
In a world where Ford has lived to be a hundred years old, I think the lesson here is that if you don't mess up your finances, make a halfway decent product, devote equal time to listening to your customers, engineers and marketeers, you can survive even if you don't rule the market.
It's companies that consider success being number one, and anything less failure, that don't survive.
Actually, this machine does in fact have packet inspection (at least as far as the functions we'd care about, such as hacked and masqueraded addresses), DOS detection and pretty much anything else you can do with said machine. But, you know, keep making assumptions.
We needed a gateway, and not so much a NAT device as something which did port level filtering and port forwarding with NAT for the email machine, so we could put 35 machines behind 4 IP addresses and do everything we needed to. This box did that great and as complicated as it seems, we were able to do our whole network with around 20 rules, in total. The PIX-501 is CLOSE to what we needed, but was missing a number of essential features.
There is a LOT of truth to this.
Last month, my company was looking for a replacement for the overly expensive, hard to manage firewall. Our favorite consultants (who seem think we are idiots and yet don't understand the words "packet filtering") tried to sell us on a Cisco firewall device that was something like $2000. I thought this was insane, seeing as all we needed was a nice interface to ipchains (nobody but me knows Linux here, so that wasn't an option). I look at LinkSys, but they didn't have anything which would do anything more advanced than direct NAT. This seemed strange to me, as at home I had a Linksys firewall router that allowed me to do pretty much whatever I liked when it came to mapping ports and setting up load balancing.
Dlink -- who used to be a direct competitor to Linksys in every segment of the market -- had an awesome device which rivalled the features of the Cisco router for only $300. I had a problem with the first one they sent out, got good support and they sent me a replacement. I had that one up and running in an afternoon without a problem (well, with one problem, but that was due to the Cisco cable router, not the Dlink). And we saved so much money, we could afford a nice spam filter and a new development server. And the new device has a nice, fairly unbuggy web interface that is way easier to use than plain ipchains/iptables with MOST of the functionality (it does bomb out after a certain number of NAT mappings, but since this thing is only 300 MHz I suppose that's for the best).
ah thanks. it's nice to know somebody's listening.
"Sideshow" Bob Terwilliger. Assshirt.
That was Silent Bob's brother, Cyril, ass.
Whoa. You can offsite as much as you like. The government does. But the fact is, you can't beat a good filing system and hard copies for pure redundancy. What if the power goes out? What if your computers are compromised and you can't trust them to restore your data? What if there's a problem with your backup tape head sync, and all the tapes can only be read by the unit that made them -- which is slowly dying (I've had this happen to me).
I used to work in the hard copy repository for the NY criminal justice system...so many file folders in so many filing cabinets that the floor was caving in. All of the data was digitized, and yet there was enough work in maintaining the digitized database's accuracy and integrity to employ 20 file runners, plus summer help to purge unneeded records (duplicates, records of people that have been dead for three years or longer, etc).
A database is a beautiful thing, but it is not yet able to replace paper. They have only been around in government for about 10 or 15 years...hardly long enough to prove their reliability.
No, I'm suggesting that if a guy brings a printed document (say, a permit or tax document) into another government office, and you need a digitized version, it's far easier to OCR it than hunt down the original. The government employs a LOT of people, and the fewer people you have to tap to get a specific task done, the more efficient that task becomes. It is easier for citizens to get in and get out of offices if a particular clerk is empowered to do everything they need to do. Even if, occasionally, work is getting done twice.
Besides, what happens when a file gets corrupt or lost? The price you pay for the efficiency of digital representation is that bits are more delicate than letters. That's why we keep hard copies, after all.
And all documents from the Department of Homeland Security should be formatted in 16 point "Spooky" font. Preferrably in red.
Not really. If you can scan in a document sent from across the country in a minute and save a couple hours requesting and/or hunting down the original file, you've increased overall productivity.
After all, we don't want a universally accessible document store -- that's just begging to be hacked. And moving things on floppys or CDs is too uncertain for government work.
It's probably because TechTV is boring, inaccurate garbage. Watching that channel is really worthwhile if you want a marketting take on the amazing, top of the line electronics of three months ago. Oh, and commercials for things you couldn't possibly want. Oh, and animation that's so shitty even cartoon network won't take it.
G4's the same deal.
I suppose they might be worthwhile for people who don't actually care about the information enough to read slashdot, zdnet, Wired, and so forth. But you're not one of them, eh?