I work in an area that does DoD work and we are picking up support for linux. In our environment we like that linux allows us to use hardware from Sun, X86, Apple, etc. and not work at porting software between the different OS.
Most of the customer types I talk with don't care what the system is running, they just want to log into the operator workstation and have the software load and run 100% of the time. Most of the time a menu bar with a button for the different applicaitons is all they need to be happy.
I think I'll just wait for one of my neighbors to get one and then I can use his bandwidth... I would think in an apartment building or small office complex this could be a real problem. I didn't see any mention of how 2 or more of these devices in close proximity would keep from talking to each other. In any case I bet it won't like vhf/uhf ham gear at all.
This could actually help the quality of driver on the roads. I remember a Click and Clack on Car Talk once saying that airbags should be replaced with pungee sticks so that people whould drive safer since they knew that if they hit something they'd be dead. As for the people that didn't figure it out and kept driving like nuts Darwin would take over and the problem would eventually go away. This same principle applies to flying cars - the idiots will crash and eventualy get wiped out... we might loose a few innocent people along the way but oh well if it gets me home from work faster...
I took notice of the part that says they are eliminating the back door connections - that may be where the improovement is seen. From what I have read now there are some sites that have independent connections and varring levels of security on the connections. This seems to me like DISA is telling everyone to "close the back doors we'll make the front door bigger and add an extra rent-a-cop" I would also assume that the truly sensitive data would be on a stand alone network anyway. Use red wires for one network and green for the other and never connect anything red to anything green.
Also the certified professional engineer is considered an expert witness in many courts. I have known engineers who make a side job out of testifing for the whiplash willies about why this fender bender is worth $2,000,000 of pain and suffering damages.
Not every job would require the certification but for example mabee air traffic control software, or the software in the 2-way trunked radio that I trust will summon backup when I push the little red button should be overseen by someone certfied to design such systems.
In these cases I think the PE should be approving the design for major flaws and safe failure, not the gory details of code syntax - that's the job of the QA people on the code team, or better yet an open review of the code.
My personal take is that as long as the encryption raises the bar enough that the script kiddies can't get at it its as safe as the telephone. For instance some prisons contract the prisoners as phone oprators (reabilitation) - think about that the next time you give your card # to the operator on the end of that 800 number do you know who that realy is? or how about that kid making minimum wage at the mall?
I have been a sysadmin of a network that was sniffed. The program did a good job of getting passwords but the rest of the traffic required a lot of work to put back together. The ammount of traffic on internet backbones would make logging a big storage and sorting problem. If you tried to log all the traffic through a major e-commerce web site (assuming you get in and start the sniffer) you'd have to spend a lot of time sifting data out.
I think its more of a risk that one of these e-commerce places would have the customer/ordering database compromised - names, address, card #, etc. just waiting. It could be something a simple as throwing out that old computer and not destroying the data on the hard disk.
I fight that fight every day - we demo our products on various UNIX boxes all the time. The people with the stars on their collar keep asking about NT. I like to respond by talking about the US Navy's recent experience with the all NT ship - it had to be towed in to port, twice. I can't talk in specifics but I do know that we have pushed UNIX as a better choice on the programs I work on that are trying to get away from VMS.
Some good news here is that DII-COE,the Common Operator Environment (its not common and dosn't operate), is being developed for NT - if its anything like the UNIX version (bloated, unstable, leaky, and confusing) it will make NT's performance so bad you'd think it was running on an XT.
There are places out there to help - one of my coworkers is mentoring a teen and trying to help out - but be carefull I would strongly recommend working in pairs and NEVER being alone with a child in this type of setting because the same hysteria that blames doom will lable a person trying to help a "pervert" (and just that accusation can be devistating). I am a volunteer for the police and I have seen people trying to help get burned in this manner.
There needs to be more non-athletic ways to get to these kids so they have a place to belong - I found a place to belong in amateur radio and technical theater when I was in High-School. This never seems to cross people's minds when they cut the budget for music, theater, and other activities (but leave football alone).
I hope something can be done - I don't want to be responding to a school shooting...
This is one of my bigest headaches at work - I have to remeber the location of everything and how startup scripts are written etc for each type of system that is around. I've gotten used to the way Solaris does things and Red-Hat is not to far off from that but move over to HPUX and its a whole different world. I would like to see everyone play nice together so that the poor sysadmin surrounded by the users with the pitch forks and torches dosn't have to flail around trying to find what got put where when a system is down (probably the fault of the people with the pitch forks and torches).
Suits want to se a company behind everything - they just don't understand "free" or "open source" or anything like that. They may complain bitterly about shelling out thousands of bucks for some OS but in the back of their little brain a voice is telling them "if it costs this much they must be good" (never said the pointy hairs were bright).
Some people are required to destroy their computers - at my place of employment we spend a lot of time developing appropriate methods. I actually enjoy the rare occasion when I get the pleasure of destroying some equipment (usualy security has all the fun).
Its not irrelevant when you have a department with systems from DEC, HP, & Sun on all the user desktops. These users are comfortable with the CDE and it gives them a very similar interface between systems and allows me as an admin to support fewer configurations. We don't prevent anyone from running something else but only a select few who do and they are cabable of getting along without too much help from us. I try to make the network as invisible as possible so as our linux machines begin to roll out I don't want to force the users to relearn the window manager - that would make it all the harder to get linux on more desktops.
Go ahead and let them install outlook and then ignore it and use whatever imap reader you want - I use netscape and what IS dosn't know won't hurt them.
The whole macro virus shows the bad things that can happen when one company is able to have its software running at all the levels - if you take the MS out of any part the whole things breaks. I believe the Cliff Stoll made a comment relating to this about not letting any one vendor dominate as a security flaw in that vendor's product could compromise everyone.
I hope companies (like mine) that now have their email turned off re-think how great exchange, word, and the whole MS package is. I wonder what this is costing in terms of lost work etc?
Her cdrom problem sounds remarkably like what happens every time I install windows on my system (I seem to get the thing corrupted every few months and need to start over which might indicate a tad bit of instability) the boot disk finds the cd but when it trys to run win for the first time it can't find the cd anymore.
Contrast this with the linux installation that I did 2 years ago that I just replaced with 2.2.3 a week ago. I didn't even bother to updrade linux when I got a new system - just copied from one disk to another and installed lilo and a prebuilt kernel.
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I work in an area that does DoD work and we are picking up support for linux. In our environment we like that linux allows us to use hardware from Sun, X86, Apple, etc. and not work at porting software between the different OS.
Most of the customer types I talk with don't care what the system is running, they just want to log into the operator workstation and have the software load and run 100% of the time. Most of the time a menu bar with a button for the different applicaitons is all they need to be happy.
I think I'll just wait for one of my neighbors to get one and then I can use his bandwidth... I would think in an apartment building or small office complex this could be a real problem. I didn't see any mention of how 2 or more of these devices in close proximity would keep from talking to each other. In any case I bet it won't like vhf/uhf ham gear at all.
This could actually help the quality of driver on the roads. I remember a Click and Clack on Car Talk once saying that airbags should be replaced with pungee sticks so that people whould drive safer since they knew that if they hit something they'd be dead. As for the people that didn't figure it out and kept driving like nuts Darwin would take over and the problem would eventually go away. This same principle applies to flying cars - the idiots will crash and eventualy get wiped out... we might loose a few innocent people along the way but oh well if it gets me home from work faster...
I took notice of the part that says they are eliminating the back door connections - that may be where the improovement is seen. From what I have read now there are some sites that have independent connections and varring levels of security on the connections. This seems to me like DISA is telling everyone to "close the back doors we'll make the front door bigger and add an extra rent-a-cop" I would also assume that the truly sensitive data would be on a stand alone network anyway. Use red wires for one network and green for the other and never connect anything red to anything green.
Also the certified professional engineer is considered an expert witness in many courts. I have known engineers who make a side job out of testifing for the whiplash willies about why this fender bender is worth $2,000,000 of pain and suffering damages.
Not every job would require the certification but for example mabee air traffic control software, or the software in the 2-way trunked radio that I trust will summon backup when I push the little red button should be overseen by someone certfied to design such systems.
In these cases I think the PE should be approving the design for major flaws and safe failure, not the gory details of code syntax - that's the job of the QA people on the code team, or better yet an open review of the code.
My personal take is that as long as the encryption raises the bar enough that the script kiddies can't get at it its as safe as the telephone. For instance some prisons contract the prisoners as phone oprators (reabilitation) - think about that the next time you give your card # to the operator on the end of that 800 number do you know who that realy is? or how about that kid making minimum wage at the mall?
I have been a sysadmin of a network that was sniffed. The program did a good job of getting passwords but the rest of the traffic required a lot of work to put back together. The ammount of traffic on internet backbones would make logging a big storage and sorting problem. If you tried to log all the traffic through a major e-commerce web site (assuming you get in and start the sniffer) you'd have to spend a lot of time sifting data out.
I think its more of a risk that one of these e-commerce places would have the customer/ordering database compromised - names, address, card #, etc. just waiting. It could be something a simple as throwing out that old computer and not destroying the data on the hard disk.
I fight that fight every day - we demo our products on various UNIX boxes all the time. The people with the stars on their collar keep asking about NT. I like to respond by talking about the US Navy's recent experience with the all NT ship - it had to be towed in to port, twice. I can't talk in specifics but I do know that we have pushed UNIX as a better choice on the programs I work on that are trying to get away from VMS.
Some good news here is that DII-COE,the Common Operator Environment (its not common and dosn't operate), is being developed for NT - if its anything like the UNIX version (bloated, unstable, leaky, and confusing) it will make NT's performance so bad you'd think it was running on an XT.
There are places out there to help - one of my coworkers is mentoring a teen and trying to help out - but be carefull I would strongly recommend working in pairs and NEVER being alone with a child in this type of setting because the same hysteria that blames doom will lable a person trying to help a "pervert" (and just that accusation can be devistating). I am a volunteer for the police and I have seen people trying to help get burned in this manner.
There needs to be more non-athletic ways to get to these kids so they have a place to belong - I found a place to belong in amateur radio and technical theater when I was in High-School. This never seems to cross people's minds when they cut the budget for music, theater, and other activities (but leave football alone).
I hope something can be done - I don't want to be responding to a school shooting...
This is one of my bigest headaches at work - I have to remeber the location of everything and how startup scripts are written etc for each type of system that is around. I've gotten used to the way Solaris does things and Red-Hat is not to far off from that but move over to HPUX and its a whole different world. I would like to see everyone play nice together so that the poor sysadmin surrounded by the users with the pitch forks and torches dosn't have to flail around trying to find what got put where when a system is down (probably the fault of the people with the pitch forks and torches).
Suits want to se a company behind everything - they just don't understand "free" or "open source" or anything like that. They may complain bitterly about shelling out thousands of bucks for some OS but in the back of their little brain a voice is telling them "if it costs this much they must be good" (never said the pointy hairs were bright).
Some people are required to destroy their computers - at my place of employment we spend a lot of time developing appropriate methods. I actually enjoy the rare occasion when I get the pleasure of destroying some equipment (usualy security has all the fun).
Its not irrelevant when you have a department with systems from DEC, HP, & Sun on all the user desktops. These users are comfortable with the CDE and it gives them a very similar interface between systems and allows me as an admin to support fewer configurations. We don't prevent anyone from running something else but only a select few who do and they are cabable of getting along without too much help from us. I try to make the network as invisible as possible so as our linux machines begin to roll out I don't want to force the users to relearn the window manager - that would make it all the harder to get linux on more desktops.
Go ahead and let them install outlook and then ignore it and use whatever imap reader you want - I use netscape and what IS dosn't know won't hurt them.
The whole macro virus shows the bad things that can happen when one company is able to have its software running at all the levels - if you take the MS out of any part the whole things breaks. I believe the Cliff Stoll made a comment relating to this about not letting any one vendor dominate as a security flaw in that vendor's product could compromise everyone.
I hope companies (like mine) that now have their email turned off re-think how great exchange, word, and the whole MS package is. I wonder what this is costing in terms of lost work etc?
Her cdrom problem sounds remarkably like what happens every time I install windows on my system (I seem to get the thing corrupted every few months and need to start over which might indicate a tad bit of instability) the boot disk finds the cd but when it trys to run win for the first time it can't find the cd anymore.
Contrast this with the linux installation that I did 2 years ago that I just replaced with 2.2.3 a week ago. I didn't even bother to updrade linux when I got a new system - just copied from one disk to another and installed lilo and a prebuilt kernel.