Not yet, anyway. It's still spreading at a logarithmic rate, like a biological virus. I'm seeing hits from the worm increase by an order of magnitude every 4-5 hours, starting from last night. The graphs at http://www.incidents.org show the same kind of behavoir for their systems.
It'll start out small, but it doesn't take long to become a Real Big Problem at this rate.
SPIS - sprite is? makes sense since Doom's moving objects & static objects (like power-ups, exploding barrels, trees, etc) were all just 2D sprites
POPD - pop current directory (or object) off the stack in any number of OS's or languages
So the code means to pop the sprite off the collision-detection stack? Makes sense, that's what the code does -- walk through walls. I haven't looked at the Doom code, but this could just be Carmack being geeky and then other people putting an acronym on top of it.
After using apt for the first time, I've been a steadfast Debian whore. Nothing beats 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade' for saving a day's worth of effort poking around rpmfind.org for libraries or dependent packages.
Just the fact that I can do this out of the box in a Debian-based installation (you *could* set up autorpm & co. to do all this, with some effort) convinces me to use apt.
No crap, the people who REALLY know NT are hard-core VMS veterans and others who have been around the industry for a few decades. It can take that long to see behind Microsoft's smoke screen well enough to get useful things done.
Experience costs money, period. NT's main selling point is that you can use trained monkeys to get the job 50% done, which is a plus in organizations with a lot of turnover. Better to get something halfway done than not done at all...
At one of my previous employers, this was a stated reason to keep NT instead of switching to Sun boxes, because they couldn't hold on to any (clueful) support staff for more than a year. I left after 10 months.
Abrash is the guy John Carmack brought on to help code Quake.
Abrash is the guy who Carmack (and many others) learned their PC graphics programming from, via his articles in DDJ and the famous "Black Book".
He's since left iD, but he's a righteous dude. If he's working on X-Box, expect it to be worth something -- this isn't a person who you put on a throwaway job.
Interestingly enough, the afterword to the copy of the "Black Book" that's on my bookshelf mentions that Abrash left iD for Microsoft in '98. Gotta wonder how long he's been working on this...
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 13:42:56 -0400 (EDT) From: (sender deleted) To: (recipient deleted)
According to (recipient deleted): > > (sender), > > If you are on the phone with Invisible Worlds re: > (machine deleted), then disregard the page. Thanks.
actually with marshall rose, who owns the machine. he is rebooting to see if that clears up a large packet loss problem.
-(sender)
It's kinda fun when you figure out who your employer's clients are.:)
How did people (American Europeans) get into the American West?
Massive, huge grants of power and territory from governments and institutions that weren't justly empowered to do so, but did anyway.
The US government (and others) ought to give tax credits, property rights, state-sponsored monopoly-like status and so forth to anyone (person or corporation) who goes out into space. Want to mine Europa? Hey, it's all yours, just get there first. Like to set up shuttle service to the asteroid belt? We'll give you a fifty-year noncompetition clause if you get it up and running.
Economic incentive has always driven exploration and exploitation by Europeans. If the economic incentive existed, companies and investors would jump on the chance, and colonists would follow (give them property rights to a 100-square mile area and a pressure dome for anyone going to live on Mars).
Colonization only has to be effective, not efficient and just and proper.
In my personal odyssey to get DSL access, I ended up contacting about a dozen providers before finding a decent one -- Flashcom ain't it. Every story I've heard about them involves much pain and suffering.
I ended up going with service from CAIS (WashDC-area provider) through Covad's backbone, it's been very reliable and their tech support's not bad. Their salesdroids are something else, but the engineers there seem to have their heads on straight.
I'm not looking forward to the hassle of moving my service now that I've gotten a new apartment, though, it took me 6 months to get it where I am now...
Our organization uses Keystone as a helpdesk/trouble ticket solution. It's fairly easy to set up and get going (but not brain-dead out of the box, there's some tweaking needed to get everything working). It's worked out fairly well so far (maybe 20 active users and 300 tickets within a month and a half of use), but it is a bit clunky around the edges and takes some full-time maintenance to tweak it. ------------------
I administer a fair number of Sun boxen on a hetereogenous network every day. I spend a lot of time fixing crap that users or previous admins or the system itself broke.
When I get home, I tend to sit in front of my Windows box. Why? 'Cause I know I can get basic stuff done without going through another hour's worth of "oh wait, where's *that* in the documentation?". All of my network stuff (email, filesharing, firewall, etc) runs off of my linux & openbsd boxes because, by the same token, I don't have to spend an hour's worth of "oh crap, what else do I need to download or configure" to get those things to work properly.
I've done my fair share of system hacking and tweaking, but too often (even with Debian, which I love because it Does Things Right) linux needs help with this.
Speaking from an admin's, a former tech support dweeb and a user's perspective, STUFF NEEDS TO WORK PROPERLY. Where linux fails is user system integration. Systems should be consistent, straightforward and understandable to the point where picking up a manual is a last resort, not the first one.
UNIX does a good job of making networking services work properly. It should, it's spent a long time doing so. That's where the OS really shines.
But the UI can be done anywhere, by anyone; there's no technical barrier to porting over a good interface (a la WindowMaker, or Mac/Windows themes for various WM's). It just takes time and effort and conscious coordination & thought to do proper system integration.
Yeah, Kuhn has some interesting ideas, even if he can't *write* his way out of a paper bag (ye gods, try finding a single concise readable sentence in that book). If he lectures like he writes, I'd be comatose by the second chapter.
Ultimately, all he's saying is that science is a profession like any other, and you bang on theories until they make sense. They keep on making sense for a while, until people start to find little problems around the edges. Then all sorts of professional nastiness breaks out, and eventually the old theories get discarded for the new. Repeat ad infinitum. (This is the compressed version. Read the book if you want a couple hundred pages worth of explanation.)
Science (like religion) just has this problem where people become VERY attached to the theories and ideas, perhaps beyond the actual utility or worthfulness of the ideas.
I always thought "six times nine equals forty-two" was a way of pointing out that humans don't really know as much as they think they do, and other species don't either.
At a birthday party at work, someone blurted out that phrase, and was asked what it meant. One of my co-workers (a great bearded German character) simploy said: "The world is not run by beings with ten fingers."
And then I got it, ten years later.:) Do these sorts of things pop into your head and migrate into your storylines, or do they just *happen*?
...and nobody's come even close to developing a compelling or innovative free/open game...
Oh, bullcrap.
Play Nethack, or any of its relatives.
And then play Diablo, or Septerra Core, or Baldur's Gate, or Gauntlet... I could continue, but it'd be easier to name the CRPG's that *weren't* influenced and copied off of Rogue/Angband/Nethack/Moria/etc.
And then play the old ones again and see which you keep around longer...:)
That said, the free software/open source world doesn't lack for crappy tetris/asteroids/missile-command clones cluttering up sites.
Lord knows that Miss Rand would be all in favor of a self-actualized business tycoon doing whatever the hell he wants at the expense of any other lesser beings, those being his competition & his customers.
(Yes, I'm a biased flaming social liberal commie.)
At the same time, I'm all in favor of simply splitting up Microsoft into OS, Apps & Internet/media companies and letting them compete in the market. For God's sake, please don't let the government meddle around in how much they can charge, or force them to disclose APIs or source code. That can only lead to the *worst* kind of market intervention, and cripple the company way beyond any deserved punishment.
(Yes, I'm a biased unrepentant financial conservative fascist.)
Yes, it looks like crap, the website reads like crap, and the binaries run like... (take a wild guess).
Yeah, it's great that they're taking up bandwidth and getting slashdotted so that their ad links get hammered and they get some bennies for all the auto-popup crap off of their site.
I've seen way too many half-assed pieces of software, let alone half-assed games, let alone half-assed RPGs, let alone half-assed MMORPGs to give a crap.
Look at the Skunk Works arm of Lockheed Martin. Regardless of LM's corporate problems over the years, Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich managed to produce aerospace (the SR-71 Blackbird was as much a spacecraft as an airplane) products second to none in performance and reliability.
And it'll take another fifty years for all the documents on the US ballistic missile program to become unclassified, for the public to find out the tremendous engineering achievements that happened under the tightest security imaginable.
The problem with the Challenger disaster is that NASA either was forced or chose to accept (depending on your viewpoint, I'd recommend Richard Feynman's myself:) shoddy work from a cheap contractor, and did nothing to rectify the situation. More money does not always solve problems, but when you add a tight budget, an urgency to perform or risk dissolving the program, and government bureaucracy together, you won't get good results.
Good aerospace engineering, like any other endeavor, takes time, money, and experience to do correctly. It can be done by either a private company or a government agency. When it's done right, it works wonders and accomplishes the impossible. When it's done wrong (unlike a personal computer losing a day's worth of work) people die, programs are cancelled, and billions of dollars are lost.
It's that strict need for quality that makes good engineering so incredible, and bad engineering so tragic.
It comes down to the driver, and not the equipment they're using...
Having put 500 to 800 miles a week on my '89 Nissan Sentra pulling commutes in rush hour and between one and five AM, I've used my cell phone to stay in touch with the 60-mile-diameter of locations that I drove to. I've had zero accidents after a year of 600-minute-per-month cell phone usage and 2500-miles-per-month driving, and one high-school parking lot fender-bender in five years.
If people were as careful on the roads as they should be (potentially lethal half-ton mile-per-minute vehicles piloted by unaware morons) half the folks on the road wouldn't be driving.
Sure, pass more legislation so troopers can waste their time pulling over cellphone-chatting drivers and filling out the paperwork to sit in court for a day every other week; people need to learn how to drive (mostly pay attention) better and use more public transit.
Myself, I've found different employment where I only have to drive fifteen minutes to work.:)
They've expanded since their beginnings, from working as mercenaries (generally on the side of the government, but hired guns & thugs nonetheless) in the West after the Civil War, to working as mercenaries and spies for the Feds and corporations during the periods of labor unrest in the 1890s through the 1930s, and providing intelligence and brute force in the various anti-Communist movements from the Bolshevik revolution until the 1950s.
Haven't heard much about their doings for the last fifty years, but given their track record, I'm not surprised to see them involved in this sort of knee-jerk security-paranoia stunt.
Microsoft cares about one thing: selling copies of their software.
If they can sell Windows, Office, and add-ons to people running these under VMware, it's no different than selling Windows, Office, and add-ons to people running these on actual x86 boxes.
The problem for Microsoft comes about when people move from a Windows-only box to running Windows under VMware to not running Windows at all. But historically, they've been better at creating good applications than creating good operating systems.
If they can reduce the operating system problem to an application level (more features) without having to worry about reliability (hey, just reboot or restart VMware), that's good for them.
'Course, you could argue they already do this...:)
First, worry about the service/carrier first. Talk to people, find some reviews for your geographic area on who has the best coverage and service, since this is FAR more important than the actual phone you use. (In NoVA/DC Metro area, I've always liked Bell Atlantic, but YMMV.)
I've used the Nokia 630-series (older, kinda clunky, didn't care for the NiMH batteries), the Motorola i1000's with Nextel service (kinda spotty coverage, though the two-way radio thingy is neat, if your employer is willing to eat the bill), and the newer Nokia 5180 (cute, indestructable so far as I've seen, good battery life, fun to play with).
Like the friend of mine from high school who not only got a free ride from VA Tech (go Hokies!) but also a matching free ride from No Such Agency and guaranteed employment after graduation.
Haven't heard from him in a while, but that's prob'ly more my fault than his. Brad Banks, if you're out there (at Fort Meade or elsewhere), hope you're enjoying yourself!:)
A lot of times companies will take potential man-hours multiplied by wages (or, as much as they can get away with) as the "cost" of doing an action so as to influence punitive damages in their favor. Depending on the outcome of the criminal case, they could then sue these folks for damages in civil court, and these numbers would become important.
(1) You can't or shouldn't be shutting the machine down. Hell, I get pissed off about rebooting for kernel revs. I'll be damned if I'm taking down a box when I know I can avoid it!
(2) The real problem with breakins is not losing confidential data, but that it gives an intruder more resources to launch further attacks. Every machine that gets owned makes more problems for everyone else out there. Your confidential info should be nowhere close to any unsecured network.
(3) If you have to do any useful work remotely, you need some decent encryption. I'll take exploitable (and fixable) encryption over cleartext seven days a week.
I've hacked boxes before from simple sniffer attacks, grabbing POP3 or telnet logins to gain access, and from there compromising the rest of the box. If you don't have packet-level hardware encryption on your network or WAN, for god's sake, use SSH or some other secure app anytime that you're passing logins & passwords around.
It doesn't matter how much you restrict the rest of the system, if a random box on your network (or any point along your communications route) can see your cleartext going by, you're going to get hit hard.
(I'm writing this from my NT4 box while I'm still setting up my new Debian box, so pardon the use of MS Outlook.)
After reading your "Et tu, Slashdot" article, I'm struck by the lack of solid facts you incorporate in your writing and prognosis of the future for Slashdot and Andover. What gives? VA Linux isn't even a *software* company, for crying out loud; they integrate hardware into systems, provide support and services, help out with a lot of free software efforts, and do a damn good job of it. (Think Dell, not Microsoft.) And the sale of Slashdot to VA Linux certainly isn't making the kinds of waves in the Linux/Open Source community that you might think it is. VA Linux are good people, it's hardly like Corel or IBM or another corporate "Hey, we discovered Linux last week" entity is buying them out.
I'd wager that most Slashdot readers (like myself) don't ultimately care which Linux/Open Source company pays the bills for Slashdot, so long as content isn't affected. And knowing the history of CmdrTaco and company, if anyone tried to put the big smack down on editorial freedom and fair posting, they'd get hit hard by their readers and move somewhere else. Even if someone else ended up owning the domain name for Slashdot, the content would live on in other places. The 'net will route around problems.
What this sounds like is a lazy attempt at getting a "relevant" article out before deadline. Writing like this is why I don't *pay* for Wired anymore, and rarely visit your sites. Outside of Webmonkey's excellent tutorials, there just ain't much good content left in the Wired name.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll start out small, but it doesn't take long to become a Real Big Problem at this rate.
idspispopd:
ID - ignore it, it'd their name
SPIS - sprite is? makes sense since Doom's moving objects & static objects (like power-ups, exploding barrels, trees, etc) were all just 2D sprites
POPD - pop current directory (or object) off the stack in any number of OS's or languages
So the code means to pop the sprite off the collision-detection stack? Makes sense, that's what the code does -- walk through walls. I haven't looked at the Doom code, but this could just be Carmack being geeky and then other people putting an acronym on top of it.
------------------
After using apt for the first time, I've been a steadfast Debian whore. Nothing beats 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade' for saving a day's worth of effort poking around rpmfind.org for libraries or dependent packages.
Just the fact that I can do this out of the box in a Debian-based installation (you *could* set up autorpm & co. to do all this, with some effort) convinces me to use apt.
-another debian user-
------------------
No crap, the people who REALLY know NT are hard-core VMS veterans and others who have been around the industry for a few decades. It can take that long to see behind Microsoft's smoke screen well enough to get useful things done.
Experience costs money, period. NT's main selling point is that you can use trained monkeys to get the job 50% done, which is a plus in organizations with a lot of turnover. Better to get something halfway done than not done at all...
At one of my previous employers, this was a stated reason to keep NT instead of switching to Sun boxes, because they couldn't hold on to any (clueful) support staff for more than a year. I left after 10 months.
------------------
Abrash is the guy John Carmack brought on to help code Quake.
Abrash is the guy who Carmack (and many others) learned their PC graphics programming from, via his articles in DDJ and the famous "Black Book".
He's since left iD, but he's a righteous dude. If he's working on X-Box, expect it to be worth something -- this isn't a person who you put on a throwaway job.
Interestingly enough, the afterword to the copy of the "Black Book" that's on my bookshelf mentions that Abrash left iD for Microsoft in '98. Gotta wonder how long he's been working on this...
------------------
Heh, saw this in an email less than an hour ago:
:)
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 13:42:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: (sender deleted)
To: (recipient deleted)
According to (recipient deleted):
>
> (sender),
>
> If you are on the phone with Invisible Worlds re:
> (machine deleted), then disregard the page. Thanks.
actually with marshall rose, who owns the machine. he is rebooting to see
if that clears up a large packet loss problem.
-(sender)
It's kinda fun when you figure out who your employer's clients are.
------------------
How do you get people into space?
How did people (Europeans) get into the Americas?
How did people (American Europeans) get into the American West?
Massive, huge grants of power and territory from governments and institutions that weren't justly empowered to do so, but did anyway.
The US government (and others) ought to give tax credits, property rights, state-sponsored monopoly-like status and so forth to anyone (person or corporation) who goes out into space. Want to mine Europa? Hey, it's all yours, just get there first. Like to set up shuttle service to the asteroid belt? We'll give you a fifty-year noncompetition clause if you get it up and running.
Economic incentive has always driven exploration and exploitation by Europeans. If the economic incentive existed, companies and investors would jump on the chance, and colonists would follow (give them property rights to a 100-square mile area and a pressure dome for anyone going to live on Mars).
Colonization only has to be effective, not efficient and just and proper.
------------------
i wouldn't want to be on the beltway to begin with.
(that's why i'm moving from 50 minutes away to 15 minutes away from my job in Reston. no I-495 for me, thank you.)
------------------
In my personal odyssey to get DSL access, I ended up contacting about a dozen providers before finding a decent one -- Flashcom ain't it. Every story I've heard about them involves much pain and suffering.
I ended up going with service from CAIS (WashDC-area provider) through Covad's backbone, it's been very reliable and their tech support's not bad. Their salesdroids are something else, but the engineers there seem to have their heads on straight.
I'm not looking forward to the hassle of moving my service now that I've gotten a new apartment, though, it took me 6 months to get it where I am now...
------------------
Our organization uses Keystone as a helpdesk/trouble ticket solution. It's fairly easy to set up and get going (but not brain-dead out of the box, there's some tweaking needed to get everything working). It's worked out fairly well so far (maybe 20 active users and 300 tickets within a month and a half of use), but it is a bit clunky around the edges and takes some full-time maintenance to tweak it.
------------------
Yes, exactly!
I administer a fair number of Sun boxen on a hetereogenous network every day. I spend a lot of time fixing crap that users or previous admins or the system itself broke.
When I get home, I tend to sit in front of my Windows box. Why? 'Cause I know I can get basic stuff done without going through another hour's worth of "oh wait, where's *that* in the documentation?". All of my network stuff (email, filesharing, firewall, etc) runs off of my linux & openbsd boxes because, by the same token, I don't have to spend an hour's worth of "oh crap, what else do I need to download or configure" to get those things to work properly.
I've done my fair share of system hacking and tweaking, but too often (even with Debian, which I love because it Does Things Right) linux needs help with this.
Speaking from an admin's, a former tech support dweeb and a user's perspective, STUFF NEEDS TO WORK PROPERLY. Where linux fails is user system integration. Systems should be consistent, straightforward and understandable to the point where picking up a manual is a last resort, not the first one.
UNIX does a good job of making networking services work properly. It should, it's spent a long time doing so. That's where the OS really shines.
But the UI can be done anywhere, by anyone; there's no technical barrier to porting over a good interface (a la WindowMaker, or Mac/Windows themes for various WM's). It just takes time and effort and conscious coordination & thought to do proper system integration.
------------------
Yeah, Kuhn has some interesting ideas, even if he can't *write* his way out of a paper bag (ye gods, try finding a single concise readable sentence in that book). If he lectures like he writes, I'd be comatose by the second chapter.
Ultimately, all he's saying is that science is a profession like any other, and you bang on theories until they make sense. They keep on making sense for a while, until people start to find little problems around the edges. Then all sorts of professional nastiness breaks out, and eventually the old theories get discarded for the new. Repeat ad infinitum. (This is the compressed version. Read the book if you want a couple hundred pages worth of explanation.)
Science (like religion) just has this problem where people become VERY attached to the theories and ideas, perhaps beyond the actual utility or worthfulness of the ideas.
------------------
I always thought "six times nine equals forty-two" was a way of pointing out that humans don't really know as much as they think they do, and other species don't either.
:) Do these sorts of things pop into your head and migrate into your storylines, or do they just *happen*?
At a birthday party at work, someone blurted out that phrase, and was asked what it meant. One of my co-workers (a great bearded German character) simploy said: "The world is not run by beings with ten fingers."
And then I got it, ten years later.
------------------
Oh, bullcrap.
Play Nethack, or any of its relatives.
And then play Diablo, or Septerra Core, or Baldur's Gate, or Gauntlet... I could continue, but it'd be easier to name the CRPG's that *weren't* influenced and copied off of Rogue/Angband/Nethack/Moria/etc.
And then play the old ones again and see which you keep around longer... :)
That said, the free software/open source world doesn't lack for crappy tetris/asteroids/missile-command clones cluttering up sites.
------------------
Lord knows that Miss Rand would be all in favor of a self-actualized business tycoon doing whatever the hell he wants at the expense of any other lesser beings, those being his competition & his customers.
(Yes, I'm a biased flaming social liberal commie.)
At the same time, I'm all in favor of simply splitting up Microsoft into OS, Apps & Internet/media companies and letting them compete in the market. For God's sake, please don't let the government meddle around in how much they can charge, or force them to disclose APIs or source code. That can only lead to the *worst* kind of market intervention, and cripple the company way beyond any deserved punishment.
(Yes, I'm a biased unrepentant financial conservative fascist.)
------------------
Ummmmm.... okay.
:)
Yes, it looks like crap, the website reads like crap, and the binaries run like... (take a wild guess).
Yeah, it's great that they're taking up bandwidth and getting slashdotted so that their ad links get hammered and they get some bennies for all the auto-popup crap off of their site.
I've seen way too many half-assed pieces of software, let alone half-assed games, let alone half-assed RPGs, let alone half-assed MMORPGs to give a crap.
And now I feel better.
------------------
No, I'd have to disagree.
:) shoddy work from a cheap contractor, and did nothing to rectify the situation. More money does not always solve problems, but when you add a tight budget, an urgency to perform or risk dissolving the program, and government bureaucracy together, you won't get good results.
Look at the Skunk Works arm of Lockheed Martin. Regardless of LM's corporate problems over the years, Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich managed to produce aerospace (the SR-71 Blackbird was as much a spacecraft as an airplane) products second to none in performance and reliability.
And it'll take another fifty years for all the documents on the US ballistic missile program to become unclassified, for the public to find out the tremendous engineering achievements that happened under the tightest security imaginable.
The problem with the Challenger disaster is that NASA either was forced or chose to accept (depending on your viewpoint, I'd recommend Richard Feynman's myself
Good aerospace engineering, like any other endeavor, takes time, money, and experience to do correctly. It can be done by either a private company or a government agency. When it's done right, it works wonders and accomplishes the impossible. When it's done wrong (unlike a personal computer losing a day's worth of work) people die, programs are cancelled, and billions of dollars are lost.
It's that strict need for quality that makes good engineering so incredible, and bad engineering so tragic.
------------------
It comes down to the driver, and not the equipment they're using...
:)
Having put 500 to 800 miles a week on my '89 Nissan Sentra pulling commutes in rush hour and between one and five AM, I've used my cell phone to stay in touch with the 60-mile-diameter of locations that I drove to. I've had zero accidents after a year of 600-minute-per-month cell phone usage and 2500-miles-per-month driving, and one high-school parking lot fender-bender in five years.
If people were as careful on the roads as they should be (potentially lethal half-ton mile-per-minute vehicles piloted by unaware morons) half the folks on the road wouldn't be driving.
Sure, pass more legislation so troopers can waste their time pulling over cellphone-chatting drivers and filling out the paperwork to sit in court for a day every other week; people need to learn how to drive (mostly pay attention) better and use more public transit.
Myself, I've found different employment where I only have to drive fifteen minutes to work.
------------------
Yes.
They've expanded since their beginnings, from working as mercenaries (generally on the side of the government, but hired guns & thugs nonetheless) in the West after the Civil War, to working as mercenaries and spies for the Feds and corporations during the periods of labor unrest in the 1890s through the 1930s, and providing intelligence and brute force in the various anti-Communist movements from the Bolshevik revolution until the 1950s.
Haven't heard much about their doings for the last fifty years, but given their track record, I'm not surprised to see them involved in this sort of knee-jerk security-paranoia stunt.
------------------
Microsoft cares about one thing: selling copies of their software.
:)
If they can sell Windows, Office, and add-ons to people running these under VMware, it's no different than selling Windows, Office, and add-ons to people running these on actual x86 boxes.
The problem for Microsoft comes about when people move from a Windows-only box to running Windows under VMware to not running Windows at all. But historically, they've been better at creating good applications than creating good operating systems.
If they can reduce the operating system problem to an application level (more features) without having to worry about reliability (hey, just reboot or restart VMware), that's good for them.
'Course, you could argue they already do this...
------------------
First, worry about the service/carrier first. Talk to people, find some reviews for your geographic area on who has the best coverage and service, since this is FAR more important than the actual phone you use. (In NoVA/DC Metro area, I've always liked Bell Atlantic, but YMMV.)
I've used the Nokia 630-series (older, kinda clunky, didn't care for the NiMH batteries), the Motorola i1000's with Nextel service (kinda spotty coverage, though the two-way radio thingy is neat, if your employer is willing to eat the bill), and the newer Nokia 5180 (cute, indestructable so far as I've seen, good battery life, fun to play with).
------------------
Like the friend of mine from high school who not only got a free ride from VA Tech (go Hokies!) but also a matching free ride from No Such Agency and guaranteed employment after graduation.
:)
Haven't heard from him in a while, but that's prob'ly more my fault than his. Brad Banks, if you're out there (at Fort Meade or elsewhere), hope you're enjoying yourself!
------------------
A lot of times companies will take potential man-hours multiplied by wages (or, as much as they can get away with) as the "cost" of doing an action so as to influence punitive damages in their favor. Depending on the outcome of the criminal case, they could then sue these folks for damages in civil court, and these numbers would become important.
:)
Weasel lawyers, but I repeat myself.
------------------
Problems with this:
(1) You can't or shouldn't be shutting the machine down. Hell, I get pissed off about rebooting for kernel revs. I'll be damned if I'm taking down a box when I know I can avoid it!
(2) The real problem with breakins is not losing confidential data, but that it gives an intruder more resources to launch further attacks. Every machine that gets owned makes more problems for everyone else out there. Your confidential info should be nowhere close to any unsecured network.
(3) If you have to do any useful work remotely, you need some decent encryption. I'll take exploitable (and fixable) encryption over cleartext seven days a week.
I've hacked boxes before from simple sniffer attacks, grabbing POP3 or telnet logins to gain access, and from there compromising the rest of the box. If you don't have packet-level hardware encryption on your network or WAN, for god's sake, use SSH or some other secure app anytime that you're passing logins & passwords around.
It doesn't matter how much you restrict the rest of the system, if a random box on your network (or any point along your communications route) can see your cleartext going by, you're going to get hit hard.
------------------
To: 'jay@wired.com'; 'webmonkey@wired.com'
(I'm writing this from my NT4 box while I'm still setting up my new Debian box, so pardon the use of MS Outlook.)
After reading your "Et tu, Slashdot" article, I'm struck by the lack of solid facts you incorporate in your writing and prognosis of the future for Slashdot and Andover. What gives? VA Linux isn't even a *software* company, for crying out loud; they integrate hardware into systems, provide support and services, help out with a lot of free software efforts, and do a damn good job of it. (Think Dell, not Microsoft.) And the sale of Slashdot to VA Linux certainly isn't making the kinds of waves in the Linux/Open Source community that you might think it is. VA Linux are good people, it's hardly like Corel or IBM or another corporate "Hey, we discovered Linux last week" entity is buying them out.
I'd wager that most Slashdot readers (like myself) don't ultimately care which Linux/Open Source company pays the bills for Slashdot, so long as content isn't affected. And knowing the history of CmdrTaco and company, if anyone tried to put the big smack down on editorial freedom and fair posting, they'd get hit hard by their readers and move somewhere else. Even if someone else ended up owning the domain name for Slashdot, the content would live on in other places. The 'net will route around problems.
What this sounds like is a lazy attempt at getting a "relevant" article out before deadline. Writing like this is why I don't *pay* for Wired anymore, and rarely visit your sites. Outside of Webmonkey's excellent tutorials, there just ain't much good content left in the Wired name.