I am the IT Director for a smaller organization, about 300 total employees. Every little complaint you have there is something that I have seen a hundred times over regardless of the firm. Let me explain where you have started to go wrong here. First mistake, assuming incompetence, instead of researching the root cause of any service problems. It is easy to just say, "Well Bob over there is an idiot". When maybe Bob is following protocol that he didn't establish. Or that the IT resources are stretched to the breaking point.
Ignoring knowledgeable user input, ok that I have a huge problem with. Everyone in the IT community, programmers come to mind the most often, seem to think because they work in front of a pc all day that they know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to managing a network or a server farm. Sorry but that it the absolute truth. I have interviewed countless people for jobs in IT, well over 50% of them programmers trying to get Sysadmin positions. When asked specific questions about administrative tasks the answer is almost always the same. I know something about it but I have never implimented anything like that. Everyone wants to be an expert, trust me you aren't.
Unable to sell needed changes. Have you considered that management and accounting do not see the corporate finances in the same way that you do? Some changes are simply impossible to sell. Unless your corporate focus is in technology some of the upgrades needed to improve infrastructure will always be lacking. The exceptions tend to be when the powers that be are directly inconvenienced. But the IT Dept probably caters to them quicker than any other department so they do not see the need. They pick up the phone and Bob is right there, where as you submit a trouble ticket and you are lucky to see someone in 48 hours.
Starting a revolt? Wow you guys are arrogant. Plain and simple. What makes people think that they know another departments job better than they do? Much less "demanding" services. Just astounding. You efforts would be much better spent working with the IT department to figure out ways to get management to invest in more staff, more training and equipment upgrades. That benefits everyone, and doesn't just stroke your self-important little ego.
I'm sorry but this was my fault. I use Firefox and really do not pay attention to mozilla.org. Here I thought it was something shiney and new, then I installed it...
Lasted less than 5 minutes. If you like it great, but damn it is ugly by default.
I must have missed something in the article. All it refers to is a "cloaked" directory. Now this shouldn't surprise anyone here. This is no different than how XP works normally. By default XP hides or "cloaks" protected system directories too, namely the System Volume Information folder in the root of each partition. The only way you can find them is by selecting to show hidden files and folders and to uncheck the "hide protected operating system files" option.
Now what is interesting is that even if you have administrative privileges, you by default do not have access to that folder. You have to manually add yourself to the security on it just to open it. From the article this seems to be the exact deal with the Symantec product. They are worried that an intruder may use the location to stash files. Well guess what? That is exactly what attackers do with the System Volume Info folder. It happened to me on a system that I had an older version of the Backup Exec remote client installed on. A well known hole, thankfully it was on a test system with no access. I noticed a huge amount of outgoing connects from the box and used disk space that I could not account for. After some minor digging around I managed to find everything stashed in that hidden system folder.
So what I would really like to know, and the article doesn't specify, is Symantec actually hooking into the kernel to hide the folder from Windows, or is it just setting the permissions on the folder in a way that is similar to the System Volume Information folder? If it is the later this is not a rootkit, it's just being sneaky. If they are hooking in, well shame on them.
How you got modded as insightful I don't know. Here let me answer those questions for you.
1) Because shit happens in IT no matter how good you are. They were in all likelihood turned on during the testing phase, and someone forgot to turn it off when they took it live.
2) What gives you any impression that it wasn't tested fully before deployment? Nothing in the article or in real life every day IT work even suggests that.
3) God forbid a product with closed source, it must be the devil! I guess the world should take all of those CISCO routers offline that are all over the world you twit.
Bottom line, it's the damn web server, it's not like it is wired into the uber-secrete internal systems. Sheesh this is such a non-issue it's pathetic. All of you tinfoil hat wearing people should just practice safe web-surfing habits and have cookies disabled by default. Oh and as for your P.S. remark, well that is half right, that applies to analysts but not to the field agents, many of which are active duty military people on loan and many others with a background in Special Operations.
This is in now way a perversion of the legal system? How you got that out of my story is simply beyond me. It is their "right" to inspect your purchases before you leave the store and protect thier property. I have never seen this at a Target store but this is in no way uncommon. There is a guy in a yellow shirt at the front of every Best Buy that is supposed to be doing the same thing, there is also a guy at the exit of every Sam's Club in America that is doing it as well. This is in no way what so ever a perversion. The security I described is in response to the number one cause of retail loss, namely employee theft. Since that time in the state of Minnesota almost every major retail store such as Target now requires you to get cold and sinus medicines from the Pharmacist. You have to show ID, and sign your name in a log book for each item you purchase. This is entirely vouluntary and designed to make it a little harder for people to steal and purchase large amounts of the materials to manufacture Meth. I appluad thier measures and their security.
Target and many other retailers really do have very nice security systems in place. But to what extent very few people outside of law enforcement and their loss prevention staff realize. I assist a Sheriff's Department with their computer and other technical needs as part of my job. When they need a hand I am more than happy to lend one. On one such case we were sent a CD with video on it showing a suspect attempting to purchase large amounts of Sudafed. Yes you guessed it to make everyones favorite trailor park candy...Meth. Not only that but they were making the purchase with a stolen check book. What we were sent from Target along with the video was an overhead high resolution picture that gets snapped at the time of purchase (yes smile everyone it happens every time you buy something there). This picture is digitaly stored along with an exact duplicate of the transaction recipt. It's pretty much a slam dunk when you walk into court with those. There is your nice smiling face, everything that was purchased along with complete payment information. At the end of the day if they do in fact conduct some form of audit how hard do you actually think it is to run a search for every transaction that included a specific item and what was paid for it? This time of year it is just very hard to do an on the floor count of items when people are all over the store with them in carts and often "orphan" items on other shelves. Sooner or later they will get caught.
I am a former sailor in the US Navy, my particular job was working with the Aegis weapon systems. Just because the system is installed on board doesn't imply that it gets used during a simulation or exercise. We have missiles and guns but very rarely ever fire a live round during training. We have electronic counter measures but those do not get set off either. Why waste the equipment and materials if they can be simulated via computer instead? But then how do you know the stuff works? Every bit of equipment has a planned maintenance schedule that is closely followed. This includes tests based daily, weekly, monthly, yearly etc. They are also very aware of the potential dangers, more so than you that is clear. The Navy is very careful about operating withing specific guidelines when it comes to the environment, they observe all of the whale habitats along the US costal waters and any other environmentaly sensative areas.
Maybe you should read the instructions, I perform builds all day long making minor changes here and there. The only recompiling that happens is if I add another package to get emerged in. Other than that I recompile my kernel by choice, but it is not a rule. Catalyst also easily supports distcc and it doesn't even need to be run under Gentoo. It runs just fine under Fedora or just about anything else for that matter. You just need to actually understand how it works. Also any of those "changes" you need to make, in Catalyst you just automate the process in your fsscript. It's frighteningly simple.
False information? Hardly! I use Catalyst every day. The release engineers at Gentoo use Catalyst. The Gentoo Power PC developers use Catalyst. Everyone that does production work for Gentoo uses Catalyst. People, it seriously takes all the hard work out of making a Live CD, how hard is that to understand. Try reading the instructions that come with the release. If you emerge it with the docs you get extremely up to date and step by step instructions for every switch in the spec files. If that isn't enough, there is an entire gentoo-catalyst mailing list for you to post your questions on, and they get answered usually in the same day by the guys who develop it.
The wiki articles on how to do this with Gentoo haven't been updated in well over a year. A large amount of the information is no longer valid. I actively work on development of a Forensic and Network Analysis Live CD based off of Gentoo. For the best advise on how to really get going with this, look into Catalyst and make sure you emerge it with the documentation. It will walk you through the basics. If anyone wants a link to my development page drop me an e-mail and I'll be happy to point the way. I'd simply post it but I doubt the server would take the beating very well.
"We have a zero-tolerance policy against the sale of World of Warcraft items on eBay and similar activities. We investigate such allegations very seriously and those accounts that are indeed guilty of exploits or selling of in-game items for real-world cash suffer disciplinary action within the game."
What a crock of crap! Zero tolerance my ass. If there were, then there wouldn't be people buying and selling gold, items or decked out characters on e-bay or these other sites.
On any given day and any given time on my server you can use the whois and see a collection of lvl 60 rogues farming the hell out of a particular area. I have ran into gold farmers plenty of times, and I just love when they run up and ask me for food. Once I actually gave a farmer a stack of food and he replied in broken engrish "no 20...200 food". Yeah ok...
So how hard would it actually be to write a script to parse the logs. Flag any account that is staying connected 24/7.... Answer not very...
I didn't miss anything. I have been purchasing from Newegg regularly for ages and they are hands down the best parts site out there. All I did was list off what you could put this same rig together for yourself. If you need you hand held for pre-sales support, and somebody to wipe your nose for you too, feel free to send me that extra grand, you can call me all you want.
Just out of sheer morbid curiousity I priced this out on Newegg, grand total minus shipping and any applicable tax was $3,702.95 not a bad mark-up they have going there. But if you put it together yourself you won't get the swanky paintjob. But then again you won't get the retarded disk configuration either.
Thermaltake Shark Tower Black - $169.00 Enermax Noisetaker EG701AX-VE-SFMA ATX 2.0 - $149.99 Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI - $175.00 AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939) - $1,011 Zalman CNPS7000-CU Copper CPU Fan - $42.99 4 x Corsair w/LED Display (TWINX1024-3200XLPRO) - $430 1 x Western Digital 74 GB SATA 10K Raptor (WD740GD) - $183.00 2 x Western Digital Caviar SE 250 GB SATAII 16MB Cache 7200 RPM (WD2500KS) - $237.98 Plextor PX-716SA DVD±RW 16x8x16x DVD+RW 48x24x48x CD-RW SATA - $116.99 Mitsumi Floppy 7-in-1 USB Card Reader/Smart Media Drive (Black) - $21.00 2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3, VIVO/, Dual-DVI - $928.00 Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum INT Drive Sound - $176.00 D-Link DWL-AG530 Tri-Mode Dualband (2.4/5GHz) Wireless 108Mbps PCI Adapter - $62.00
You DO NOT want a water tray at the bottom. What makes you think a little bit of water will stop thermite? You need a tray full of sand. The thermite is hot enough to seperate the hydrogen out of water, not a great move.
My god go wrap your heads in tinfoil you bunch of nutballs. How in the world is this a problem for anyone is simply beyond me? Seriously. I work in technology for the government at the local level. That means at your local county courthouse if you haven't figured that out. Here we handle issuing passports and drivers licenses among all the other county type activities.
I have also lived in several different states and have had to get several diffent drivers licenses, obviously one in each state. Several of these states take six weeks or more to get you your new license. Others are generated on the spot. I for one would welcome a unified standard or Federal ID that would take care of this problem. One ID no matter where I need to move for my job. One less thing I need to worry about. I know this doesn't accomplish that, but it is a step in the right direction.
But what about Big Brother, he's tracking you ya know! Grow the hell up. A bunch of over educated cry babies with nothing better to do than to bitch about politics.
Here is a novel idea a standardized system of identification that will help out everyone in some way or another.
Picture yourself in the shoes of that Satte Trooper standing on the side of the road at midnight with somebody from out of state pulled over. Don't you think a little consistancy in identification would help him out and get you on your way faster? Simple answer is yes.
Put yourself in the shoes of the store clerk that asks to see an ID with a large credit card purchase. Only they hand the person an out of state license that they aren't familiar with. Instead of looking at it closely they shrug and hand it back, sale completed, woops that was your credit card they used.
Stop seeing evil in every idea that rolls down the pipe and look at the simplicity behind it, and how it can benifit different people in many different ways. If you can't wrap your brain around the concept of it, think of it as a standardized API then./rant
There are loads of people that have built gentoo live CDs. You can use the Catalyst tool, which the developers use to whip together builds, or you can do it from scratch. The problem is that you loose a lot of the small tweaking options that you might wish to try out. I prefer the from scratch approach it suits my needs better and really is no trouble. There are amazingly detailed threads in the Gentoo forum on how to do this step by step in a chrooted env. I reccomend it if you need to make a tools cd, and don't want all the bloat of Knoppix. The one I made is a security/forensics build and it works fantastic. It's a lot of fun to accomplish something like this yourself.
The default installation adds the Acrobat Toolbar to Word. REconfiguring it's position, or unselecting it in the toolbar settins is only good for the current session. If you close Word and open it back up, BAM! There is is, right back where it started. It's just plain annoying.
I have been using Beyond Tv for some time now, and it allows you the simple option of padding a recording by X amount of minutes before or after a program start time. I can't imagine it would take much for Tivo to implement something like that.
Funny that the History Channel ran a show last night on disasters in the Soviet space program. What was very interesting was some seriously devistating disasters that the world at large never knew about until years after the wall came down. One was really impressive, the rocket exploded on the pad killing over 150 people and burning for hours. In another the rocket began to launch, but flipped sideways and dropped. The damage to the launch facility was so bad it took two years to get in back into usable shape. All the while Khrushchev was mocking the US efforts as backwards and offering assistance to a "backwards" nation. Meanwhile covering up their mega-disasters. So it makes you wonder what "really" happened to this thing.
I think CSI is good, it gives people a chance to see another side to crime solving. In the course of my work I have been called in by local law enforcement agencies to perform forensic work with computers. This is an area the show completely misrepresents. They show the investigators just sitting down and start digging through the target system. Not so much! There is a lot of work that must be done to prevent damaging any evidence. I wish they would go into more detail with this angle like they do with blood work on the show. I will be lecturing at a nearby university in December on computer forensics, and they are developing a course on the subject for next fall. I am also working on a Gentoo based foresic toolkit if anyone is interested.
That is why any good investigator keeps more than one tool in his kit. Personally I have a bootable windows environment that I custom build for doing work with Windows. And for a system like yours I pop out my handy bootable Linux CD. It is based off of Gentoo and has more than enough bells and whistles to handle reiser or xfs and pretty much anything else you care. If I need something more I tweak the packages and kernel and recompile. Once you have that bit for bit copy you have all the time you need to work on it. And FYI there are many many packages that "hold water" in a court of law. I will also be giving a lecture in December at a nearby university on computer forensics. Funny how arrogant attitudes like that in most cases get you busted when you think you are smarter than those doing the looking.
Slashdot Mirror
I am the IT Director for a smaller organization, about 300 total employees. Every little complaint you have there is something that I have seen a hundred times over regardless of the firm. Let me explain where you have started to go wrong here. First mistake, assuming incompetence, instead of researching the root cause of any service problems. It is easy to just say, "Well Bob over there is an idiot". When maybe Bob is following protocol that he didn't establish. Or that the IT resources are stretched to the breaking point.
Ignoring knowledgeable user input, ok that I have a huge problem with. Everyone in the IT community, programmers come to mind the most often, seem to think because they work in front of a pc all day that they know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to managing a network or a server farm. Sorry but that it the absolute truth. I have interviewed countless people for jobs in IT, well over 50% of them programmers trying to get Sysadmin positions. When asked specific questions about administrative tasks the answer is almost always the same. I know something about it but I have never implimented anything like that. Everyone wants to be an expert, trust me you aren't.
Unable to sell needed changes. Have you considered that management and accounting do not see the corporate finances in the same way that you do? Some changes are simply impossible to sell. Unless your corporate focus is in technology some of the upgrades needed to improve infrastructure will always be lacking. The exceptions tend to be when the powers that be are directly inconvenienced. But the IT Dept probably caters to them quicker than any other department so they do not see the need. They pick up the phone and Bob is right there, where as you submit a trouble ticket and you are lucky to see someone in 48 hours.
Starting a revolt? Wow you guys are arrogant. Plain and simple. What makes people think that they know another departments job better than they do? Much less "demanding" services. Just astounding. You efforts would be much better spent working with the IT department to figure out ways to get management to invest in more staff, more training and equipment upgrades. That benefits everyone, and doesn't just stroke your self-important little ego.
I'm sorry but this was my fault. I use Firefox and really do not pay attention to mozilla.org. Here I thought it was something shiney and new, then I installed it...
Lasted less than 5 minutes. If you like it great, but damn it is ugly by default.
This is what I would like to know. But the article doesn't say this at all. It simply reffers to a "cloaked" folder.
I must have missed something in the article. All it refers to is a "cloaked" directory. Now this shouldn't surprise anyone here. This is no different than how XP works normally. By default XP hides or "cloaks" protected system directories too, namely the System Volume Information folder in the root of each partition. The only way you can find them is by selecting to show hidden files and folders and to uncheck the "hide protected operating system files" option.
Now what is interesting is that even if you have administrative privileges, you by default do not have access to that folder. You have to manually add yourself to the security on it just to open it. From the article this seems to be the exact deal with the Symantec product. They are worried that an intruder may use the location to stash files. Well guess what? That is exactly what attackers do with the System Volume Info folder. It happened to me on a system that I had an older version of the Backup Exec remote client installed on. A well known hole, thankfully it was on a test system with no access. I noticed a huge amount of outgoing connects from the box and used disk space that I could not account for. After some minor digging around I managed to find everything stashed in that hidden system folder.
So what I would really like to know, and the article doesn't specify, is Symantec actually hooking into the kernel to hide the folder from Windows, or is it just setting the permissions on the folder in a way that is similar to the System Volume Information folder? If it is the later this is not a rootkit, it's just being sneaky. If they are hooking in, well shame on them.
How you got modded as insightful I don't know. Here let me answer those questions for you.
1) Because shit happens in IT no matter how good you are. They were in all likelihood turned on during the testing phase, and someone forgot to turn it off when they took it live.
2) What gives you any impression that it wasn't tested fully before deployment? Nothing in the article or in real life every day IT work even suggests that.
3) God forbid a product with closed source, it must be the devil! I guess the world should take all of those CISCO routers offline that are all over the world you twit.
Bottom line, it's the damn web server, it's not like it is wired into the uber-secrete internal systems. Sheesh this is such a non-issue it's pathetic. All of you tinfoil hat wearing people should just practice safe web-surfing habits and have cookies disabled by default. Oh and as for your P.S. remark, well that is half right, that applies to analysts but not to the field agents, many of which are active duty military people on loan and many others with a background in Special Operations.
This is in now way a perversion of the legal system? How you got that out of my story is simply beyond me. It is their "right" to inspect your purchases before you leave the store and protect thier property. I have never seen this at a Target store but this is in no way uncommon. There is a guy in a yellow shirt at the front of every Best Buy that is supposed to be doing the same thing, there is also a guy at the exit of every Sam's Club in America that is doing it as well. This is in no way what so ever a perversion. The security I described is in response to the number one cause of retail loss, namely employee theft. Since that time in the state of Minnesota almost every major retail store such as Target now requires you to get cold and sinus medicines from the Pharmacist. You have to show ID, and sign your name in a log book for each item you purchase. This is entirely vouluntary and designed to make it a little harder for people to steal and purchase large amounts of the materials to manufacture Meth. I appluad thier measures and their security.
Target and many other retailers really do have very nice security systems in place. But to what extent very few people outside of law enforcement and their loss prevention staff realize. I assist a Sheriff's Department with their computer and other technical needs as part of my job. When they need a hand I am more than happy to lend one. On one such case we were sent a CD with video on it showing a suspect attempting to purchase large amounts of Sudafed. Yes you guessed it to make everyones favorite trailor park candy...Meth. Not only that but they were making the purchase with a stolen check book. What we were sent from Target along with the video was an overhead high resolution picture that gets snapped at the time of purchase (yes smile everyone it happens every time you buy something there). This picture is digitaly stored along with an exact duplicate of the transaction recipt. It's pretty much a slam dunk when you walk into court with those. There is your nice smiling face, everything that was purchased along with complete payment information. At the end of the day if they do in fact conduct some form of audit how hard do you actually think it is to run a search for every transaction that included a specific item and what was paid for it? This time of year it is just very hard to do an on the floor count of items when people are all over the store with them in carts and often "orphan" items on other shelves. Sooner or later they will get caught.
I am a former sailor in the US Navy, my particular job was working with the Aegis weapon systems. Just because the system is installed on board doesn't imply that it gets used during a simulation or exercise. We have missiles and guns but very rarely ever fire a live round during training. We have electronic counter measures but those do not get set off either. Why waste the equipment and materials if they can be simulated via computer instead? But then how do you know the stuff works? Every bit of equipment has a planned maintenance schedule that is closely followed. This includes tests based daily, weekly, monthly, yearly etc. They are also very aware of the potential dangers, more so than you that is clear. The Navy is very careful about operating withing specific guidelines when it comes to the environment, they observe all of the whale habitats along the US costal waters and any other environmentaly sensative areas.
Maybe you should read the instructions, I perform builds all day long making minor changes here and there. The only recompiling that happens is if I add another package to get emerged in. Other than that I recompile my kernel by choice, but it is not a rule. Catalyst also easily supports distcc and it doesn't even need to be run under Gentoo. It runs just fine under Fedora or just about anything else for that matter. You just need to actually understand how it works. Also any of those "changes" you need to make, in Catalyst you just automate the process in your fsscript. It's frighteningly simple.
False information? Hardly! I use Catalyst every day. The release engineers at Gentoo use Catalyst. The Gentoo Power PC developers use Catalyst. Everyone that does production work for Gentoo uses Catalyst. People, it seriously takes all the hard work out of making a Live CD, how hard is that to understand. Try reading the instructions that come with the release. If you emerge it with the docs you get extremely up to date and step by step instructions for every switch in the spec files. If that isn't enough, there is an entire gentoo-catalyst mailing list for you to post your questions on, and they get answered usually in the same day by the guys who develop it.
The wiki articles on how to do this with Gentoo haven't been updated in well over a year. A large amount of the information is no longer valid. I actively work on development of a Forensic and Network Analysis Live CD based off of Gentoo. For the best advise on how to really get going with this, look into Catalyst and make sure you emerge it with the documentation. It will walk you through the basics. If anyone wants a link to my development page drop me an e-mail and I'll be happy to point the way. I'd simply post it but I doubt the server would take the beating very well.
e-mail: paul.kessler@gmail.com
"We have a zero-tolerance policy against the sale of World of Warcraft items on eBay and similar activities. We investigate such allegations very seriously and those accounts that are indeed guilty of exploits or selling of in-game items for real-world cash suffer disciplinary action within the game."
What a crock of crap! Zero tolerance my ass. If there were, then there wouldn't be people buying and selling gold, items or decked out characters on e-bay or these other sites.
On any given day and any given time on my server you can use the whois and see a collection of lvl 60 rogues farming the hell out of a particular area. I have ran into gold farmers plenty of times, and I just love when they run up and ask me for food. Once I actually gave a farmer a stack of food and he replied in broken engrish "no 20...200 food". Yeah ok...
So how hard would it actually be to write a script to parse the logs. Flag any account that is staying connected 24/7.... Answer not very...
I didn't miss anything. I have been purchasing from Newegg regularly for ages and they are hands down the best parts site out there. All I did was list off what you could put this same rig together for yourself. If you need you hand held for pre-sales support, and somebody to wipe your nose for you too, feel free to send me that extra grand, you can call me all you want.
Just out of sheer morbid curiousity I priced this out on Newegg, grand total minus shipping and any applicable tax was $3,702.95 not a bad mark-up they have going there. But if you put it together yourself you won't get the swanky paintjob. But then again you won't get the retarded disk configuration either.
Thermaltake Shark Tower Black - $169.00
Enermax Noisetaker EG701AX-VE-SFMA ATX 2.0 - $149.99
Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI - $175.00
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (939) - $1,011
Zalman CNPS7000-CU Copper CPU Fan - $42.99
4 x Corsair w/LED Display (TWINX1024-3200XLPRO) - $430
1 x Western Digital 74 GB SATA 10K Raptor (WD740GD) - $183.00
2 x Western Digital Caviar SE 250 GB SATAII 16MB Cache 7200 RPM (WD2500KS) - $237.98
Plextor PX-716SA DVD±RW 16x8x16x DVD+RW 48x24x48x CD-RW SATA - $116.99
Mitsumi Floppy 7-in-1 USB Card Reader/Smart Media Drive (Black) - $21.00
2 x NVIDIA Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3, VIVO/, Dual-DVI - $928.00
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum INT Drive Sound - $176.00
D-Link DWL-AG530 Tri-Mode Dualband (2.4/5GHz) Wireless 108Mbps PCI Adapter - $62.00
You DO NOT want a water tray at the bottom. What makes you think a little bit of water will stop thermite? You need a tray full of sand. The thermite is hot enough to seperate the hydrogen out of water, not a great move.
My god go wrap your heads in tinfoil you bunch of nutballs. How in the world is this a problem for anyone is simply beyond me? Seriously. I work in technology for the government at the local level. That means at your local county courthouse if you haven't figured that out. Here we handle issuing passports and drivers licenses among all the other county type activities.
/rant
I have also lived in several different states and have had to get several diffent drivers licenses, obviously one in each state. Several of these states take six weeks or more to get you your new license. Others are generated on the spot. I for one would welcome a unified standard or Federal ID that would take care of this problem. One ID no matter where I need to move for my job. One less thing I need to worry about. I know this doesn't accomplish that, but it is a step in the right direction.
But what about Big Brother, he's tracking you ya know! Grow the hell up. A bunch of over educated cry babies with nothing better to do than to bitch about politics.
Here is a novel idea a standardized system of identification that will help out everyone in some way or another.
Picture yourself in the shoes of that Satte Trooper standing on the side of the road at midnight with somebody from out of state pulled over. Don't you think a little consistancy in identification would help him out and get you on your way faster? Simple answer is yes.
Put yourself in the shoes of the store clerk that asks to see an ID with a large credit card purchase. Only they hand the person an out of state license that they aren't familiar with. Instead of looking at it closely they shrug and hand it back, sale completed, woops that was your credit card they used.
Stop seeing evil in every idea that rolls down the pipe and look at the simplicity behind it, and how it can benifit different people in many different ways. If you can't wrap your brain around the concept of it, think of it as a standardized API then.
Funny, but I emerged Gnome 2.10 the same day it was announced here on /. maybe you should learn to unmask a package sometime.
There are loads of people that have built gentoo live CDs. You can use the Catalyst tool, which the developers use to whip together builds, or you can do it from scratch. The problem is that you loose a lot of the small tweaking options that you might wish to try out. I prefer the from scratch approach it suits my needs better and really is no trouble. There are amazingly detailed threads in the Gentoo forum on how to do this step by step in a chrooted env. I reccomend it if you need to make a tools cd, and don't want all the bloat of Knoppix. The one I made is a security/forensics build and it works fantastic. It's a lot of fun to accomplish something like this yourself.
The default installation adds the Acrobat Toolbar to Word. REconfiguring it's position, or unselecting it in the toolbar settins is only good for the current session. If you close Word and open it back up, BAM! There is is, right back where it started. It's just plain annoying.
I was playing with light pipe back in my highschool days, 16 years ago.
Must be bad karma I have been running the Nvidia driver, not "nv", under Gentoo for many months. Hasn't locked on me once.
I have been using Beyond Tv for some time now, and it allows you the simple option of padding a recording by X amount of minutes before or after a program start time. I can't imagine it would take much for Tivo to implement something like that.
Funny that the History Channel ran a show last night on disasters in the Soviet space program. What was very interesting was some seriously devistating disasters that the world at large never knew about until years after the wall came down. One was really impressive, the rocket exploded on the pad killing over 150 people and burning for hours. In another the rocket began to launch, but flipped sideways and dropped. The damage to the launch facility was so bad it took two years to get in back into usable shape. All the while Khrushchev was mocking the US efforts as backwards and offering assistance to a "backwards" nation. Meanwhile covering up their mega-disasters. So it makes you wonder what "really" happened to this thing.
I think CSI is good, it gives people a chance to see another side to crime solving. In the course of my work I have been called in by local law enforcement agencies to perform forensic work with computers. This is an area the show completely misrepresents. They show the investigators just sitting down and start digging through the target system. Not so much! There is a lot of work that must be done to prevent damaging any evidence. I wish they would go into more detail with this angle like they do with blood work on the show. I will be lecturing at a nearby university in December on computer forensics, and they are developing a course on the subject for next fall. I am also working on a Gentoo based foresic toolkit if anyone is interested.
That is why any good investigator keeps more than one tool in his kit. Personally I have a bootable windows environment that I custom build for doing work with Windows. And for a system like yours I pop out my handy bootable Linux CD. It is based off of Gentoo and has more than enough bells and whistles to handle reiser or xfs and pretty much anything else you care. If I need something more I tweak the packages and kernel and recompile. Once you have that bit for bit copy you have all the time you need to work on it. And FYI there are many many packages that "hold water" in a court of law. I will also be giving a lecture in December at a nearby university on computer forensics. Funny how arrogant attitudes like that in most cases get you busted when you think you are smarter than those doing the looking.