University isn't about training coders. That's what college is for.
A Computer Science program at any (Canadian) University worth its salt has maybe 3 or 4 programming courses, and the other 30+ are algorithms, databases, networks, algebra, AI, operating systems, distributed systems, parallel systems, real-time systems, security, automata, digital logic, data structures, software engineering, graphics, instruction set architectures, compilers, professional ethics...
Note that any and all of the above are (relatively) language-independent. A CS student should be able to pick up a new language in a matter of days/weeks - but CS is not about syntax memorization.
I know this is intended to be funny, but I think people would be surprised at just how good this can look on a resume.
I did an internship with one of our government departments, involving 'security research'. Sure, an hour a day was occupied reviewing firewall/IDS logs, but the rest of the time was spent developing and testing exploits. It was a hell of a lot of fun, and I gotta tell you - I have a deeper understanding of the TCP/IP protocol suite than anyone in their right mind could want, I can code shellcode in my sleep, and writing a self-modifying virus that evades most signature-based scanners is something far from impossible now.
I gotta tell you, the right employer drools at this, because it's not something a person picks up in school, and the vast majority of people that know anything about it are really no more than glorified script kiddies. When it comes time to harden a system WELL, or set up an IDS so that it's actually useful, or write a virus scanner that will actually work 2 days after it's released onto the market... it helps to have a clue what you're doing.
Windows 9x actually has a bug in it that would lock the computer after 46 days of uptime, but it took years to catch it because no one ever got close to that mark.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. This urban legend deserved to die years ago.
I ran several Windows95 OSR2 systems with uptimes approaching 90+ days, and had no problems with them locking up. Sure, 9x wasn't HAPPY with this, and if you ran a lot of applications odds are you won't hit this, but I did it many times in my former employment.
When the '45 days' (as I heard it first) rumor started going around, I set up a bunch of idle 95 machines for fun, and on days 45-50 watched for anything going on. Not one crashed.
Hell, for all I know, Microsoft themselves are reporting this, just to cover their asses based on some average uptime limit they worked out, but I will swear on a stack of bibles that I've had Win95 machines go at least twice this supposed limit without locking up.
Every tax program in Canada will generate a.tax file which you can then upload to the government's site. The file is just a comma seperated file so any spreadsheet program should be able to read it.
And if you can give me a good reason why Revenue Canada (or whatever abomination they've given their name to this year) doesn't let me do this WITHOUT buying $30 worth of throw-away software, I'll agree, it's peachy keen.
Everyone harps about the US gov't bowing to corporations; where is the free online tax submission service in Canada? I can do it by phone for free, surely it isn't that much money to put this into html.
Yup, every game since Pong is basically a piece of crap.
I find it really funny to see so many people on Slashdot talking about "classic" systems, and how "new" stuff is all crap.... forgetting of course that the "classic" system they're talking about is generally 10-20 years newer than some of the first home video games.
And no, Gameboy was far from the first portable system. It was the first popular portable for the Nintendo generation.
A B&E record only lasts seven years (IIRC) so it seems that society has actually figured out that people CAN turn around. People CAN grow up. Amazing eh?
Yup, some people CAN change. Fact is, most crimes are commited by repeat offenders. Most people DON'T change, and have fun applying for the CIA job with your supposedly-erased-due-to-it-being-7-years-old criminal record.
The hacker who has never broken into a Real System cause mommy said she'd take away his computer privileges simply cannot know all the details.
How do you get good at knowing you're being tracked, if you've never been tracked? You don't. So how do you devise a tracking system which a hacker wouldn't detect? You can't.
Now come on, grow up. You want to break into a system? Set one up. Crack it. Next, get a friend to set one up, not tell you what he did, then crack it. And so on. You want to elude detection? Install Snort, and try to elude it. Etc.
You don't think Locksmiths are trained for their job by breaking into unsuspecting homeowners, do you? Or alarm companies enhance their products by comitting B&Es?
His reasoning is probably the same as why you need a criminal background check to do almost any real-world security work (ie: non-computer related).
Want to be a security guard? Nope, sorry, not if you have a B&E record. Want to be a police officer? Couple of murder convictions? I don't think so. And so on.
The rest of society has already figured this out. Ex-criminals can be useful for information, but it's not very often that they get put into positions of *trust*. I sure wouldn't want someone who's already proven their disregard for security controls designing them.
A dozen times what processors have increased!!!! WOW!!!! Holy crap are hard drives ever fast!!!
Oh wait, Moore's Law (which has nothing to do with hard drives, but I'll bite) says that things DOUBLE in a certain period of time. Hmm, a dozen times is less than 2^4. Even using the old standard of 18 months (for a while there it was 12), that's less than 4 doublings. 4x18 months = 6 years.
So, let's see. These numbers go back about 20 years, and the difference is less than 6. 6/20 = 30%. Wow, hard drives have increased in capacity 30% faster than CPUs have in speed. Whoopdee friggin do.
But I guess that sounds a lot less sensationalist than A DOZEN TIMES!!!
I'd love to see someone create a system that actually allowed true borrowing of other people's music/movies. Something that makes sure only one person at a time can play it.
I thought that's how physical CDs and DVDs worked, silly me. Unless you're advocating full-bore, put on your tinfoil hat, Microsoft wet dream style DRM....
Because this is Slashdot, where if you suggest migrating *anything* to Linux, you automatically get modded up. Even if it's an organization running on Commodore 64s, 'install Linux' is somehow insightful.
Considering the ease of use and effectiveness of the latest Samba exploit, anything thinking Linux machines are somehow magically more secure and cheaper than Windows machines is kidding themselves. It's all about how you configure/maintain them.
It's amazing how far out of their way people will go to support Microsoft's crap. More than half of your list is Microsoft specific.
How'd you come up with this? Only one thing even mentioned Microsoft, and also mentioned Apple in the same breath. Let's see:
1) Don't put DSL to each unit - pull CAT-5 and run Ethernet. Your residents will have a much easier time getting hardware than with DSL, and your costs will be less.
OS independant.
2) Pull the wire to a common router closet.
OS independant.
3) One port per unit
OS independant.
4) Lock down the ports that aren't being used.
OS independant.
5) Use DHCP to assign addresses.
OS independant.
6) Set up your own caching server. I would recommend using Squid.
OS independant.
7) Force all outbound port 25 (SMTP) through your mail server.
OS independant.
8) Run a virus scanner on your mail server. Scan all incoming AND outgoing mail.
Ok, *most* viruses are Windows-based. Most != all, however.
9) Don't route the Microsoft file sharing ports or Apple Rendezvous ports between units.
Again, mostly a Microsoft issue.
10) Insist customers keep their machines virus free. Disconnect any who don't IMMEDIATELY.
Remember, there are viruses for every platform out there.
11) Write into your rental contracts that you ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE for maintaining your customer's machines or security - if they are scared let them run their own firewall.
OS independant.
12) Offer your own space, accessible to your users, with virus scanner updates, MS patches, and so on. Encourage them to use that to save bandwidth.
There have been an order of magnitude more patches for my RedHat box this past month than for all versions of Windows combined. And most Windows patches have little to do with viruses, although many of these vulnerabilities do end up being exploited by worms at some point.
13) Routinely sniff around for WAPs. Handle them as you see fit - disconnect, or verify they are set up sanely. Don't ignore them.
Has nothing to do with what OS people run.
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the fact that the reason people spend so much time supporting Microsoft products is that Windows/Office/etc are 90%+ of their respective markets. Duh, you kind of have to. It's all fine and dandy to be an OSS zealot, but when you're trying to provide a service to people, it's rather impractical to just say 'run what I tell you to run'. That sort of thinking is why we hate Microsoft in the first place, remember?:)
Looks cool and all, but seeing as the music industry is already collecting hundreds of dollars a year from me in levies on blank data recording media, I think I'll keep doing what I'm legally allowed to do: copy any music from friends as much as I want.
Sorry folks, but this is far too late to stop this embittered consumer from ripping you off.
Oh, and at 99 cents US per song, that makes it over $15 Canadian for an average album - just about the same price I pay in stores if I wanted to buy a CD. Complete with media, case, and liner. Who's ripping whom off here?
Sorry for the harsh subject line, but I find it difficult to believe that a person can make it more than a few years in life without noticing that virtually every consumer product is priced this way.
$9.99, $99.99, $17,995 (for say, a car). We've had this as long as I've been alive, and from looking into older catalogues it's been standard practice in the retail industry since at least the 60's. EVERYONE rounds their price down slightly, so it appears cheaper when you quickly look at it. In fact, in the past decade many stores have successfully gone to a '95 cents' model, where $9.95 somehow looks more appealing to the shopper than $9.99. A whopping 4 cents less profit, but an amazing increase in sales.
Psychologists have known about this for eons, and marketing types do this routinely. 99 cents just looks cheaper than an even buck, to most people. In fact, it's so bad that if I'm in a store with someone, see something for say $395, I'll comment "wow, four hundred dollars for that?". Almost invariably, the person I'm with will say "no, it's only three ninety five". People are so used to this that rounding up prices just seems wrong, somehow.
Apparently (and I know almost nothing about CD-ROM formats, so I'm sure to be corrected in the following 10 posts), Sega accomplished this by basically removing some (all?) of the error correction that a normal CD-ROM has on it. Yes, there's that much.
Now, for a pressed CD-ROM, I don't mind as much, but considering how flaky most CD-R discs are (dye stabilization, anyone?), I'm not too keen on having less error correction than there is already.
People are insulting for no reason, rude becuase they can be, and moronic pretty much all of the time. The worst thing that ever happened to the net was when we let Joe User on to it.
Ironic that a post complaining about how rude people can be then goes on to insult basically 99% of the population, all based on a clever geek buzzword (Joe User - ooo look, he's playing off Joe SixPack or Joe PunchClock, but with a computer twist!).
Even more ironic that a moderation system designed to filter out obvious trolling and flamebait ends up giving this the highest score:)
Your best friend works for Panda Software (a fairly well known anti-virus vendor), and he doesn't know how spammers obtain email addresses, nor what spyware is? How the hell did he get that job in the first place?
You get a couple dozen a month across hundreds of accounts, with no filtering going on? Is this some recently registered domain with only 3 people actually using their email? You sure your email server is even working?
I have a less than a year old address, never posted on a web page, newsgroup, or on IRC, given out to maybe half a dozen friends, and I'm getting something like 20 pieces of spam EACH DAY. That's roughly 600 a month, from one account.
I won't even start on the amount we see at work (10,000 accounts, government domain). When you have to upgrade your mail servers due to spam, it's a sad day indeed.
Nice troll either way, but I really doubt Taco actually checks each (something)@slashdot.org as a personal account, and counts the spam from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind the fact that the floppy drives are probably fully functional. Copy source, bring home, compile, release over an open wireless connection.
Not that I've thought about this in any detail, mind you.
University isn't about training coders. That's what college is for.
A Computer Science program at any (Canadian) University worth its salt has maybe 3 or 4 programming courses, and the other 30+ are algorithms, databases, networks, algebra, AI, operating systems, distributed systems, parallel systems, real-time systems, security, automata, digital logic, data structures, software engineering, graphics, instruction set architectures, compilers, professional ethics...
Note that any and all of the above are (relatively) language-independent. A CS student should be able to pick up a new language in a matter of days/weeks - but CS is not about syntax memorization.
I know this is intended to be funny, but I think people would be surprised at just how good this can look on a resume.
I did an internship with one of our government departments, involving 'security research'. Sure, an hour a day was occupied reviewing firewall/IDS logs, but the rest of the time was spent developing and testing exploits. It was a hell of a lot of fun, and I gotta tell you - I have a deeper understanding of the TCP/IP protocol suite than anyone in their right mind could want, I can code shellcode in my sleep, and writing a self-modifying virus that evades most signature-based scanners is something far from impossible now.
I gotta tell you, the right employer drools at this, because it's not something a person picks up in school, and the vast majority of people that know anything about it are really no more than glorified script kiddies. When it comes time to harden a system WELL, or set up an IDS so that it's actually useful, or write a virus scanner that will actually work 2 days after it's released onto the market... it helps to have a clue what you're doing.
Windows 9x actually has a bug in it that would lock the computer after 46 days of uptime, but it took years to catch it because no one ever got close to that mark.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. This urban legend deserved to die years ago.
I ran several Windows95 OSR2 systems with uptimes approaching 90+ days, and had no problems with them locking up. Sure, 9x wasn't HAPPY with this, and if you ran a lot of applications odds are you won't hit this, but I did it many times in my former employment.
When the '45 days' (as I heard it first) rumor started going around, I set up a bunch of idle 95 machines for fun, and on days 45-50 watched for anything going on. Not one crashed.
Hell, for all I know, Microsoft themselves are reporting this, just to cover their asses based on some average uptime limit they worked out, but I will swear on a stack of bibles that I've had Win95 machines go at least twice this supposed limit without locking up.
Every tax program in Canada will generate a .tax file which you can then upload to the government's site. The file is just a comma seperated file so any spreadsheet program should be able to read it.
And if you can give me a good reason why Revenue Canada (or whatever abomination they've given their name to this year) doesn't let me do this WITHOUT buying $30 worth of throw-away software, I'll agree, it's peachy keen.
Everyone harps about the US gov't bowing to corporations; where is the free online tax submission service in Canada? I can do it by phone for free, surely it isn't that much money to put this into html.
Yup, every game since Pong is basically a piece of crap.
.. forgetting of course that the "classic" system they're talking about is generally 10-20 years newer than some of the first home video games.
I find it really funny to see so many people on Slashdot talking about "classic" systems, and how "new" stuff is all crap..
And no, Gameboy was far from the first portable system. It was the first popular portable for the Nintendo generation.
Gamecube dvd discs DO NOT spin backwards. Run a game and open the cover when it's loading something if you don't believe me.
A B&E record only lasts seven years (IIRC) so it seems that society has actually figured out that people CAN turn around. People CAN grow up. Amazing eh?
Yup, some people CAN change. Fact is, most crimes are commited by repeat offenders. Most people DON'T change, and have fun applying for the CIA job with your supposedly-erased-due-to-it-being-7-years-old criminal record.
The hacker who has never broken into a Real System cause mommy said she'd take away his computer privileges simply cannot know all the details.
How do you get good at knowing you're being tracked, if you've never been tracked? You don't. So how do you devise a tracking system which a hacker wouldn't detect? You can't.
Now come on, grow up. You want to break into a system? Set one up. Crack it. Next, get a friend to set one up, not tell you what he did, then crack it. And so on. You want to elude detection? Install Snort, and try to elude it. Etc.
You don't think Locksmiths are trained for their job by breaking into unsuspecting homeowners, do you? Or alarm companies enhance their products by comitting B&Es?
His reasoning is probably the same as why you need a criminal background check to do almost any real-world security work (ie: non-computer related).
Want to be a security guard? Nope, sorry, not if you have a B&E record. Want to be a police officer? Couple of murder convictions? I don't think so. And so on.
The rest of society has already figured this out. Ex-criminals can be useful for information, but it's not very often that they get put into positions of *trust*. I sure wouldn't want someone who's already proven their disregard for security controls designing them.
A dozen times what processors have increased!!!! WOW!!!! Holy crap are hard drives ever fast!!!
Oh wait, Moore's Law (which has nothing to do with hard drives, but I'll bite) says that things DOUBLE in a certain period of time. Hmm, a dozen times is less than 2^4. Even using the old standard of 18 months (for a while there it was 12), that's less than 4 doublings. 4x18 months = 6 years.
So, let's see. These numbers go back about 20 years, and the difference is less than 6. 6/20 = 30%. Wow, hard drives have increased in capacity 30% faster than CPUs have in speed. Whoopdee friggin do.
But I guess that sounds a lot less sensationalist than A DOZEN TIMES!!!
I'd love to see someone create a system that actually allowed true borrowing of other people's music/movies. Something that makes sure only one person at a time can play it.
I thought that's how physical CDs and DVDs worked, silly me. Unless you're advocating full-bore, put on your tinfoil hat, Microsoft wet dream style DRM....
(One of the recent MS patches was found to cause some machines to stop booting)
:)
So just don't re-boot your machines.
Oh wait.....
That seems like an important statement coming from a company who's patches are possibly responsible for 45% of traffic on some networks.
(emphasis mine)
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the term 'some'.
Also, if you could provide a link where Rob claims spam is 60% of traffic on every network in existence, please, enlighten us.
I do agree with the rest of your comments, however - the number of RedHat advisories in my inbox this month outnumbers Windows by at least 20:1.
Because this is Slashdot, where if you suggest migrating *anything* to Linux, you automatically get modded up. Even if it's an organization running on Commodore 64s, 'install Linux' is somehow insightful.
Considering the ease of use and effectiveness of the latest Samba exploit, anything thinking Linux machines are somehow magically more secure and cheaper than Windows machines is kidding themselves. It's all about how you configure/maintain them.
It's amazing how far out of their way people will go to support Microsoft's crap. More than half of your list is Microsoft specific.
:)
How'd you come up with this? Only one thing even mentioned Microsoft, and also mentioned Apple in the same breath. Let's see:
1) Don't put DSL to each unit - pull CAT-5 and run Ethernet. Your residents will have a much easier time getting hardware than with DSL, and your costs will be less.
OS independant.
2) Pull the wire to a common router closet.
OS independant.
3) One port per unit
OS independant.
4) Lock down the ports that aren't being used.
OS independant.
5) Use DHCP to assign addresses.
OS independant.
6) Set up your own caching server. I would recommend using Squid.
OS independant.
7) Force all outbound port 25 (SMTP) through your mail server.
OS independant.
8) Run a virus scanner on your mail server. Scan all incoming AND outgoing mail.
Ok, *most* viruses are Windows-based. Most != all, however.
9) Don't route the Microsoft file sharing ports or Apple Rendezvous ports between units.
Again, mostly a Microsoft issue.
10) Insist customers keep their machines virus free. Disconnect any who don't IMMEDIATELY.
Remember, there are viruses for every platform out there.
11) Write into your rental contracts that you ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE for maintaining your customer's machines or security - if they are scared let them run their own firewall.
OS independant.
12) Offer your own space, accessible to your users, with virus scanner updates, MS patches, and so on. Encourage them to use that to save bandwidth.
There have been an order of magnitude more patches for my RedHat box this past month than for all versions of Windows combined. And most Windows patches have little to do with viruses, although many of these vulnerabilities do end up being exploited by worms at some point.
13) Routinely sniff around for WAPs. Handle them as you see fit - disconnect, or verify they are set up sanely. Don't ignore them.
Has nothing to do with what OS people run.
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the fact that the reason people spend so much time supporting Microsoft products is that Windows/Office/etc are 90%+ of their respective markets. Duh, you kind of have to. It's all fine and dandy to be an OSS zealot, but when you're trying to provide a service to people, it's rather impractical to just say 'run what I tell you to run'. That sort of thinking is why we hate Microsoft in the first place, remember?
Looks cool and all, but seeing as the music industry is already collecting hundreds of dollars a year from me in levies on blank data recording media, I think I'll keep doing what I'm legally allowed to do: copy any music from friends as much as I want.
Sorry folks, but this is far too late to stop this embittered consumer from ripping you off.
Oh, and at 99 cents US per song, that makes it over $15 Canadian for an average album - just about the same price I pay in stores if I wanted to buy a CD. Complete with media, case, and liner. Who's ripping whom off here?
Sorry for the harsh subject line, but I find it difficult to believe that a person can make it more than a few years in life without noticing that virtually every consumer product is priced this way.
$9.99, $99.99, $17,995 (for say, a car). We've had this as long as I've been alive, and from looking into older catalogues it's been standard practice in the retail industry since at least the 60's. EVERYONE rounds their price down slightly, so it appears cheaper when you quickly look at it. In fact, in the past decade many stores have successfully gone to a '95 cents' model, where $9.95 somehow looks more appealing to the shopper than $9.99. A whopping 4 cents less profit, but an amazing increase in sales.
Psychologists have known about this for eons, and marketing types do this routinely. 99 cents just looks cheaper than an even buck, to most people. In fact, it's so bad that if I'm in a store with someone, see something for say $395, I'll comment "wow, four hundred dollars for that?". Almost invariably, the person I'm with will say "no, it's only three ninety five". People are so used to this that rounding up prices just seems wrong, somehow.
The president?
Apparently (and I know almost nothing about CD-ROM formats, so I'm sure to be corrected in the following 10 posts), Sega accomplished this by basically removing some (all?) of the error correction that a normal CD-ROM has on it. Yes, there's that much.
Now, for a pressed CD-ROM, I don't mind as much, but considering how flaky most CD-R discs are (dye stabilization, anyone?), I'm not too keen on having less error correction than there is already.
Besides, the practice of flooding peoples' inboxes doesn't really happen that way very much anymore.
:)
bughunter@earthlink.net
Let's test that theory
People are insulting for no reason, rude becuase they can be, and moronic pretty much all of the time. The worst thing that ever happened to the net was when we let Joe User on to it.
:)
Ironic that a post complaining about how rude people can be then goes on to insult basically 99% of the population, all based on a clever geek buzzword (Joe User - ooo look, he's playing off Joe SixPack or Joe PunchClock, but with a computer twist!).
Even more ironic that a moderation system designed to filter out obvious trolling and flamebait ends up giving this the highest score
Your best friend works for Panda Software (a fairly well known anti-virus vendor), and he doesn't know how spammers obtain email addresses, nor what spyware is? How the hell did he get that job in the first place?
;)
Oh wait, you said marketing...
According to this artical on PCWorld 1/3 of the email on the internet is spam and the rest is mostly person-to-person communications.
;)
If it isn't a person sending it to me, it's still spam in my book, so I guess that makes sense
Although others are pegging that ratio closer to 40 or even 50%.
(stupid new keyboard)
You get a couple dozen a month across hundreds of accounts, with no filtering going on? Is this some recently registered domain with only 3 people actually using their email? You sure your email server is even working?
I have a less than a year old address, never posted on a web page, newsgroup, or on IRC, given out to maybe half a dozen friends, and I'm getting something like 20 pieces of spam EACH DAY. That's roughly 600 a month, from one account.
I won't even start on the amount we see at work (10,000 accounts, government domain). When you have to upgrade your mail servers due to spam, it's a sad day indeed.
Nice troll either way, but I really doubt Taco actually checks each (something)@slashdot.org as a personal account, and counts the spam from it.
You get a couple dozen a month across hundreds of accounts? Is