While it is interesting intellectually, there is no other benefit.
Well, it'd be nice to find the root cause so that you don't see the problem pop up again on your new server image...
But, yeah. If you can get it up and running with a re-image in a matter of minutes/hours instead of digging around for hours/days... Don't waste the time.
The real solution? Reimage the production server to just get it working, then you dig around on the dev server until you find out what's actually going on.
Exactly.
If the machine is in production it needs to be working. You don't have time to dig around and find the root cause. You need it to work. Now. If you've got a virtualized environment it is trivial to bring up a new VM, throw an image at it, and migrate the data.
Then you take your old, malfunctioning VM into a development environment and dig for the root cause, so that you don't see the same problem crop up on your new production machine.
Honestly, I think that for most people this just isn't a concern.
Most folks have been bitten by the lack of a backup at some point. You can't tell me they've never been working on a paper for a class and had the machine crap out on them - losing many pages of work. You can't tell me they've never been playing a game and had the machine crap out on them - losing a couple hours of progress. You can't tell me they've never sent an SD card through the laundry - losing some irreplaceable photos. You can't tell me they've never clicked "submit" on some forum comment or Facebook post and had the website malfunction - losing whatever witty thoughts they had at the time.
It happens all the freaking time.
But, for the most part, that information isn't all that valuable.
Folks will curse and mutter... And then re-type their paper, or re-play the game, or live without those pictures.
Folks won't feel like they need to back up their data until they're really burned by it. Just telling people that they need to make backups is not enough. Just teaching it in class isn't enough. Folks need to lose something that they care about.
In my experience, there's a real "glass ceiling" between those who have degrees and those who don't. It literally doesn't matter what the degree is in; I've worked with programmers who had degrees in fine arts and the like, and they still operated above the glass, whereas perfectly competent self-taught programmers didn't.
I tell people that the value of a degree isn't in the subject matter that you studied, but in the fact that you managed to pass classes for ~4 years.
It means you have the capacity to learn. It means you can be taught or trained.
But IT employers want it to be. The disconnect is decades old.
It isn't unique to IT. And it isn't just the employers who are mistaken about what a degree is.
I can go to a vocational school for a couple years and get a certificate that is tailored to a specific kind of employment - carpentry, electrical, plumbing, cosmetology, or even various flavors of IT. The classes involved in getting that certificated are supposed to train exactly the skills necessary to do that job. That's why it's canned vocational school.
A bachelor's degree is a much broader course of study. Lots more theoretical stuff. Lots of general education classes. You'll be taking a pile of classes that aren't even vaguely related to IT - things like art history. The whole point is to make you a generally well-rounded individual.
There are an awful lot of people out there - students as well as employers - who are under the mistaken impression that a bachelor's degree is going to teach them how to do a job. It isn't.
I have a BS in Computer Science. I learned how to program in Ada, and C, and Lisp, and assembly... But only a couple courses in each. Enough to learn what made each type of language unique, and why I might want to use a strongly-typed language instead of loosely-typed (or whatever). I learned all sorts of theoretical stuff about data transmission... Stuff that was equally applicable to modems, and ethernet, and wireless communication. But they never taught me how to crimp cable.
All this general education was basically useless in getting my first job. Everyone wanted experience. Everyone wanted somebody who knew how to do this in specific, and they didn't care about all the general stuff I knew...
But now that I'm actually out there working, all the general knowledge is coming in incredibly handy.
You're supposed to be working. Not doing political stuff. While it's a dick move, I rather doubt it's a first amendment violation or the end of the world (as is suggested by TFA).
Unions aren't really "political stuff". Granted, right now they are... But if we were talking about Wal-Mart employees being blocked from viewing a pro-union web page nobody would mention politics.
And unions most certainly are work-related. They're responsible for contract negotiations and all sorts of fun stuff. I certainly hope the folks in HR (at any organization) are able to get to the web pages of whatever unions they have to deal with.
And since censorship is, by definition, suppression of communication by the government... And these are state employees, who therefor work for the government... And their communication was suppressed... It probably does fall under the definition of censorship (unlike all the times that somebody screams about Comcast or AT&T or Apple filtering something).
But, ultimately, it isn't much of a story. There was absolutely no malicious intent. It appears that they simply use a whitelist to filter traffic, and that site was not in the whitelist. It appears to have been added to the whitelist shortly after the problem was reported.
This is not a myth I had heard before. In fact, none of the *nix sysadmins I know would dream of rebooting the box to clear a problem except as a last resort. Where has this come from?
The idea that you ought to just reboot to fix things comes from the Windows world.
I've got several Windows servers that absolutely have to be rebooted nightly to keep them running happily. This isn't because I'm some crappy admin or anything like that... Rather, the software running on them just isn't stable. It's actually the vendor's suggestion that these servers be rebooted nightly. Not that particular services need to be restarted - but that the entire box should be rebooted.
I'm not entirely sure what the problem is... Corrupt data in RAM? Memory leaks? Files not closing right? Whatever. They need to be rebooted, or they become cranky.
I'm OK with that. It's what the vendor recommends. It's what we do for those boxes. It generally works.
But we've also got a few Linux boxes... And we do not reboot those when things go wrong. We've got Linux boxes that've been up and running for years. If something goes wrong on one of our Linux boxes, it's probably because somebody screwed up a config, or an update went awry, or a bit of hardware is failing.
When something breaks on a Linux box, and we call support, the answer has never been "reboot it". They always want to see what is going on in the system as-is, and they've always been able to fix the issue.
I haven't personally been bit by rebooting a Linux box and making everything worse... But I've seen enough other people get bit, and I've read enough horror stories on-line.
Still sounds like a kill switch to me - whether Obama presses a physical red button under his desk or he makes a phone call to threaten corporate employees with jail or physical harm or else, still a kill switch to me. This is semantic bullshit.
Indeed.
If the law gets passed here in the US to allow a killswitch, they aren't actually going to install a big red button anywhere. It's simply going to make it legal to do exactly what they did in Egypt.
And when the decision is eventually made to hit that killswitch, nobody is going to reach for a big lever to pull. They're just going to place some phone calls to some ISPs. And those ISPs will do what they're told to, or law enforcement will show up to make them do what they're told to. Just like in Egypt.
I wouldn't be surprised if that 10% is more a theoretical number of "could" log in if necessary than "did" log in. I think it shows how trustworthy IT professionals are as a group.
In which case, I'm wondering why they think they can, if they didn't try it?
Are they just assuming that their replacement is incompetent? Did they intentionally leave a back door that they assume is still there?
I wasn't much impressed with my replacement at my previous job. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the admin accounts haven't been changed. I wouldn't be surprised if I was able get in to my old employer's network. But I don't know that I actually can. And I certainly wouldn't have answered in the affirmative on any kind of survey.
10+% of IT "Pros" aren't really that professional if they're going back to their old accounts to see if they can get in.
The computers of companies where I used to work are beyond the event horizon. I would never even try to log into them without some kind of written request for my former employer.
Yup.
I wasn't that impressed with my replacement at my previous employer. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he hadn't changed the domain credentials. I wouldn't be surprised to find out I could still log in to their network.
But I haven't tried. And I'm not going to. And I wouldn't even with a written request (screw them).
I'm more surprised that there are that many IT "Pros" out there who have actually tried to log in to a previous employer's systems. Not terribly professional, in my opinion...
People often leave on good terms and the accounts are kept so the ex-employees can help out later here and there if asked.
At my current job, I've replaced a guy who accomplished a hell of a lot in the two years that he was here. There's a good chunk of stuff here that my boss doesn't really feel comfortable with. So he disabled my predecessor's account, instead of straight-up deleting it, in case we had to call him in for help (at which point he would have been paid as an independent contractor).
But that account is disabled. Even though it's still got the same credentials on it, and could be re-activated and used in an emergency, it doesn't currently work. My predecessor could not log in right now if he wanted to.
You'd have to be crazy to intentionally leave an account active and functioning after someone leaves the company.
My last responsibility when I left my previous job was to disable my own account. I suppose I could have left it for the next guy to do... It isn't like they were going to fire me or anything... But I wasn't actually done being the administrator there until I walked out the door, and a good admin disables accounts that aren't in use. So, I shut down my access. Disabled the account, set an auto-reply on the mailbox and forwarded mail to the new guy. Moved some important documents from my account to his. Things like that.
Then I handed him the domain admin credentials and walked out the door.
If he's a good amin he then double-checked to make sure that my account was disabled and changed the domain admin credentials to make sure I couldn't abuse them. He would have taken a look at my user shares and made sure there wasn't anything he needed in there. He would have done a quick audit to make sure I hadn't do anything suspicious over the last week or two.
But, honestly, I doubt if he did. He didn't impress me at all. I bet I could still log in to their network with the domain admin password.
My previous employer had a crapload of generic admin logins on the network.
My last responsibility when I left was to disable my own account, so I'd assume that my personal username and password would no longer work.
But I'd be very surprised if they bothered to change all those generic admin logins... I met a ton of resistance when I tried doing it while I was there.
I'd say protecting their walled garden is just a side effect of Sony's war on piracy, not a primary goal, while the homebrew folks are just collateral damage.
The homebrew folks were certainly, originally, collateral damage in the war on piracy. That's why they took out the "other OS" thing in the first place. At that point the walled garden was well-protected, and the homebrew folks had their own sandbox to play in.
But now that "other OS" is gone, there isn't a separate sandbox for the homebrew folks. You either mod your system and do your homebrew on the same platform that your games run on, or you don't do homebrew.
And that threatens the walled garden in addition to allowing piracy.
Which is why they're now worried about "unauthorized" software, in addition to piracy.
Part of the appeal of something like PSN, or Xbox Live, is that it is a walled garden.
Yes, I know, here on Slashdot we're supposed to hate that stuff.
But it gets pretty annoying to go on-line and play some multiplayer game and get your ass handed to you by some guy running an aimbot or wallhack or whatever.
That's why so many games these days make an attempt to curtail cheating. That's why there's the whole Valve Anti-Cheat thing, and why WoW runs that malware/cheat scan before starting up.
On the console, it has traditionally been fairly hard to run a cheat, since you couldn't install your own software. You had to rely on bugs and glitches in the games themselves. But if you mod your system to run any old arbitrary software... Then you can run some kind of cheat in parallel with your game. And this degrades the gaming experience for anyone who plays against you. Which lowers the value of PSN and Xbox Live. Which hurts Sony's or Microsoft's profits.
Yes, I think it was damn stupid for Sony to remove the whole "other OS" thing. That was a colossally dumb thing to do. It used to allow people to tinker and load up their own homebrew stuff while keeping a big wall up between the homebrew and the games. It kept the games safe(er) from cheating and preserved the value of PSN.
But now that wall is gone. And, if you've modded your system to allow homebrew, you may very well be running cheats alongside your games. And Sony doesn't want to see that degrade the value of PSN. So they're protecting their walled garden.
1.) Amazon is handling the distribution. If their formula is unreasonable, that is something to kick around but they do need to cover those costs.
Of course they need to cover costs. I think the problem/complaint comes from a belief that it should be cheaper, since it's all digital.
2.) The publishers probably cannot "pop it in the mail" for less. The article's author is forgetting about or intentionally ignoring the printing costs.
I dunno... How much do you honestly think delivery costs on your average periodical? How much do you think printing actually costs?
Once you've considered the editorial staff, creative folks, journalists, assorted management... The cost of actually producing and distributing a periodical probably doesn't amount to much.
Which is what ruins the idea that it should be cheaper to distribute it digitally. If production/distribution isn't where your costs come from, then saving money on production/distribution isn't going to help you much. And if it actually costs more to produce/distribute digitally? You're screwed.
What I'd really like is some kind of standardized wireless communication, coupled with induction charging. Maybe a universal mat of some sort that does Bluetooth and induction at the same time.
Drop your phone on the mat and it charges and connects to whatever peripherals are attached to the mat.
Then you just connect your keyboard/mouse/giant TV/optical drives/printer/monitor/whatever to the mat. You get all the portability of a smart phone, along with all goodies that you get from a desktop or a big TV or whatever.
First sentence in the first section. "The average age for a video game player is 35".
Doesn't matter.
You say "video game" and the folks with money in Hollywood think "kids".
You pitch a movie with action and monsters and explosions, and the folks with money in Hollywood think "teenagers".
The target demographic for just about anything sci-fi or horror is teenagers. They really want to get that PG-13 rating.
That's why they watered down the first AvP movie so much. I mean... It's a combination of two different R-rated franchises. One of them involves aliens that skin you alive and take your skull for a trophy. The other one involves aliens that rape your face and kill you by violently exploding out of your chest. But if you can move enough of the gore off-screen you can nail that PG-13 rating, and sell a lot more tickets.
And that's what it's all about - selling tickets. If you get an R rating you've just excluded an awful lot of people who aren't old enough to go see the movie on their own. You're automatically reducing the number of people that can possibly buy your tickets.
If it's some big, complex, thoughtful, dramatic movie... Well, the odds are good that you weren't going to get too many kids in there anyway, so that doesn't really matter.
If it's a movie with explosions and monsters and lasers and whatnot... There's a good chance there are plenty of kids who'd like to go see it. And if you get an R rating, they can't. So you've just shot yourself in the foot.
He's an entertainer, nothing more. He says stuff like this to get publicity like this.
And some people still take him seriously. And base their voting on what he says. Making him a serious problem for anyone living in the US - regardless of whether it's all just a stunt to sell books or not.
I think it's safe to say that/. has a left-leaning bias.
There are some well-established correlations between affluence and education, and liberal leanings. So any time you've got a gathering of educated, relatively well-off folks, a good number of them are going to be left-leaning.
Why give him the time of day? I wonder how many followers that loud-mouthed ignoramus would have if the "liberal" media didn't get all flustered every time he says something like this.
It's certainly true that/. is an international forum. So I'm sure there are plenty of folks overseas who really don't care about American politics. For them, this is nothing more than a diversion.
But/. is an US-centered forum. And for those of us here in the US, Glen Beck is serious business.
The guy has an audience. Folks listen to him. They buy gold when he tells them to, they avoid Google when he says they're in league with The Government... And they'll vote against candidates/bills that he condemns - and that will affect folks living in the US, regardless of which way they lean.
No, he's selling books and getting ratings and a lot of money. Folks who think Beck is crazy are just as bamboozled as any of his fans. It's really hilarious.
I don't know if he's clinically diagnosed or if he's just putting on an act to make money. And it really doesn't matter. Regardless of the cause of his actions, the guy is spewing flaming ignorance all over the place.
Yes, but by saying that, *you* have taken him seriously!
As opposed to what, ignoring the loony? Just letting him spew his ignorance without any kind of rebuttal?
The fact of the matter is that he's on national TV, publishing books, and presenting some truly deranged stuff as "truth".
If he was just some kind of comedian and everybody laughed and went on with their lives, that'd be one thing. But people believe him. Folks base their world view on what he says. They cast their votes based on his insane rantings.
You can't just ignore him, because he affects American politics whether you like it or not.
The attacks on him just make his supporters circle the wagons, and maybe even gain him followers from the stupid "Well, if he's pissing people off he must be doing something right!" crowd.
So, what... Plug your ears, hum real loud, and hope the crazy isn't there when you open your eyes?
I'm thinking of writing a crazy book, and shopping it to one of these neo-con publishers, all to get me some early retirement on the backs of the ideological loons. I'm not sure yet if I should invent a new angle, or tie together multiple existing memes in a new way.
There are a lot of crazy ideas out there. And most of them are just languishing in obscurity. I have absolutely no doubt that you could throw together some really insane horseshit and make money off of it. There are plenty of paranoid/gullible/curious folks out there who'd gobble it up.
But that isn't going to put you on par with Glen Beck.
There are tons of raving loonies out there that get absolutely no attention.
What differentiates Glen Beck from some homeless idiot claiming that the world is flat is that he has an audience. He has thousands (millions?) of viewers. They actually listen to him. If he claims that Google is in league with the devil, they'll believe it. They'll go use Bing instead.
And while it might not matter to me what search engine a bunch of paranoid neocons use... It does matter to me how they vote in elections, because I live in the same country that they do. And when he gets them all riled up to vote against some random bill that would actually be quite beneficial, I suffer for it.
Don't get me wrong... I'm not arrogant enough to think that my way is the only right way to do things. I have no problem being wrong or being out-voted or whatever. But I'd prefer to be out-voted based on reality. Not the ravings of some lunatic - regardless of whether it's a genuine clinical problem or simply an act to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is interesting intellectually, there is no other benefit.
Well, it'd be nice to find the root cause so that you don't see the problem pop up again on your new server image...
But, yeah. If you can get it up and running with a re-image in a matter of minutes/hours instead of digging around for hours/days... Don't waste the time.
The real solution? Reimage the production server to just get it working, then you dig around on the dev server until you find out what's actually going on.
Exactly.
If the machine is in production it needs to be working. You don't have time to dig around and find the root cause. You need it to work. Now. If you've got a virtualized environment it is trivial to bring up a new VM, throw an image at it, and migrate the data.
Then you take your old, malfunctioning VM into a development environment and dig for the root cause, so that you don't see the same problem crop up on your new production machine.
Honestly, I think that for most people this just isn't a concern.
Most folks have been bitten by the lack of a backup at some point. You can't tell me they've never been working on a paper for a class and had the machine crap out on them - losing many pages of work. You can't tell me they've never been playing a game and had the machine crap out on them - losing a couple hours of progress. You can't tell me they've never sent an SD card through the laundry - losing some irreplaceable photos. You can't tell me they've never clicked "submit" on some forum comment or Facebook post and had the website malfunction - losing whatever witty thoughts they had at the time.
It happens all the freaking time.
But, for the most part, that information isn't all that valuable.
Folks will curse and mutter... And then re-type their paper, or re-play the game, or live without those pictures.
Folks won't feel like they need to back up their data until they're really burned by it. Just telling people that they need to make backups is not enough. Just teaching it in class isn't enough. Folks need to lose something that they care about.
In my experience, there's a real "glass ceiling" between those who have degrees and those who don't. It literally doesn't matter what the degree is in; I've worked with programmers who had degrees in fine arts and the like, and they still operated above the glass, whereas perfectly competent self-taught programmers didn't.
I tell people that the value of a degree isn't in the subject matter that you studied, but in the fact that you managed to pass classes for ~4 years.
It means you have the capacity to learn. It means you can be taught or trained.
A degree is not a job training course.
End of.
But IT employers want it to be. The disconnect is decades old.
It isn't unique to IT. And it isn't just the employers who are mistaken about what a degree is.
I can go to a vocational school for a couple years and get a certificate that is tailored to a specific kind of employment - carpentry, electrical, plumbing, cosmetology, or even various flavors of IT. The classes involved in getting that certificated are supposed to train exactly the skills necessary to do that job. That's why it's canned vocational school.
A bachelor's degree is a much broader course of study. Lots more theoretical stuff. Lots of general education classes. You'll be taking a pile of classes that aren't even vaguely related to IT - things like art history. The whole point is to make you a generally well-rounded individual.
There are an awful lot of people out there - students as well as employers - who are under the mistaken impression that a bachelor's degree is going to teach them how to do a job. It isn't.
I have a BS in Computer Science. I learned how to program in Ada, and C, and Lisp, and assembly... But only a couple courses in each. Enough to learn what made each type of language unique, and why I might want to use a strongly-typed language instead of loosely-typed (or whatever). I learned all sorts of theoretical stuff about data transmission... Stuff that was equally applicable to modems, and ethernet, and wireless communication. But they never taught me how to crimp cable.
All this general education was basically useless in getting my first job. Everyone wanted experience. Everyone wanted somebody who knew how to do this in specific, and they didn't care about all the general stuff I knew...
But now that I'm actually out there working, all the general knowledge is coming in incredibly handy.
You're supposed to be working. Not doing political stuff. While it's a dick move, I rather doubt it's a first amendment violation or the end of the world (as is suggested by TFA).
Unions aren't really "political stuff". Granted, right now they are... But if we were talking about Wal-Mart employees being blocked from viewing a pro-union web page nobody would mention politics.
And unions most certainly are work-related. They're responsible for contract negotiations and all sorts of fun stuff. I certainly hope the folks in HR (at any organization) are able to get to the web pages of whatever unions they have to deal with.
And since censorship is, by definition, suppression of communication by the government... And these are state employees, who therefor work for the government... And their communication was suppressed... It probably does fall under the definition of censorship (unlike all the times that somebody screams about Comcast or AT&T or Apple filtering something).
But, ultimately, it isn't much of a story. There was absolutely no malicious intent. It appears that they simply use a whitelist to filter traffic, and that site was not in the whitelist. It appears to have been added to the whitelist shortly after the problem was reported.
This is not a myth I had heard before. In fact, none of the *nix sysadmins I know would dream of rebooting the box to clear a problem except as a last resort. Where has this come from?
The idea that you ought to just reboot to fix things comes from the Windows world.
I've got several Windows servers that absolutely have to be rebooted nightly to keep them running happily. This isn't because I'm some crappy admin or anything like that... Rather, the software running on them just isn't stable. It's actually the vendor's suggestion that these servers be rebooted nightly. Not that particular services need to be restarted - but that the entire box should be rebooted.
I'm not entirely sure what the problem is... Corrupt data in RAM? Memory leaks? Files not closing right? Whatever. They need to be rebooted, or they become cranky.
I'm OK with that. It's what the vendor recommends. It's what we do for those boxes. It generally works.
But we've also got a few Linux boxes... And we do not reboot those when things go wrong. We've got Linux boxes that've been up and running for years. If something goes wrong on one of our Linux boxes, it's probably because somebody screwed up a config, or an update went awry, or a bit of hardware is failing.
When something breaks on a Linux box, and we call support, the answer has never been "reboot it". They always want to see what is going on in the system as-is, and they've always been able to fix the issue.
I haven't personally been bit by rebooting a Linux box and making everything worse... But I've seen enough other people get bit, and I've read enough horror stories on-line.
Still sounds like a kill switch to me - whether Obama presses a physical red button under his desk or he makes a phone call to threaten corporate employees with jail or physical harm or else, still a kill switch to me. This is semantic bullshit.
Indeed.
If the law gets passed here in the US to allow a killswitch, they aren't actually going to install a big red button anywhere. It's simply going to make it legal to do exactly what they did in Egypt.
And when the decision is eventually made to hit that killswitch, nobody is going to reach for a big lever to pull. They're just going to place some phone calls to some ISPs. And those ISPs will do what they're told to, or law enforcement will show up to make them do what they're told to. Just like in Egypt.
I wouldn't say there's nothing to see here...
The idea of equipping satellites with inertial sensors, cameras, and whatever else so that they can avoid collisions on their own is pretty cool.
But, no, there's no thinking going on. Just a different kind of programming.
x^-2
AAA? What on earth does that mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_protocol
Kind of surprised you're asking that here on Slashdot...
I wouldn't be surprised if that 10% is more a theoretical number of "could" log in if necessary than "did" log in. I think it shows how trustworthy IT professionals are as a group.
In which case, I'm wondering why they think they can, if they didn't try it?
Are they just assuming that their replacement is incompetent? Did they intentionally leave a back door that they assume is still there?
I wasn't much impressed with my replacement at my previous job. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the admin accounts haven't been changed. I wouldn't be surprised if I was able get in to my old employer's network. But I don't know that I actually can. And I certainly wouldn't have answered in the affirmative on any kind of survey.
10+% of IT "Pros" aren't really that professional if they're going back to their old accounts to see if they can get in.
The computers of companies where I used to work are beyond the event horizon. I would never even try to log into them without some kind of written request for my former employer.
Yup.
I wasn't that impressed with my replacement at my previous employer. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he hadn't changed the domain credentials. I wouldn't be surprised to find out I could still log in to their network.
But I haven't tried. And I'm not going to. And I wouldn't even with a written request (screw them).
I'm more surprised that there are that many IT "Pros" out there who have actually tried to log in to a previous employer's systems. Not terribly professional, in my opinion...
People often leave on good terms and the accounts are kept so the ex-employees can help out later here and there if asked.
At my current job, I've replaced a guy who accomplished a hell of a lot in the two years that he was here. There's a good chunk of stuff here that my boss doesn't really feel comfortable with. So he disabled my predecessor's account, instead of straight-up deleting it, in case we had to call him in for help (at which point he would have been paid as an independent contractor).
But that account is disabled. Even though it's still got the same credentials on it, and could be re-activated and used in an emergency, it doesn't currently work. My predecessor could not log in right now if he wanted to.
You'd have to be crazy to intentionally leave an account active and functioning after someone leaves the company.
My last responsibility when I left my previous job was to disable my own account. I suppose I could have left it for the next guy to do... It isn't like they were going to fire me or anything... But I wasn't actually done being the administrator there until I walked out the door, and a good admin disables accounts that aren't in use. So, I shut down my access. Disabled the account, set an auto-reply on the mailbox and forwarded mail to the new guy. Moved some important documents from my account to his. Things like that.
Then I handed him the domain admin credentials and walked out the door.
If he's a good amin he then double-checked to make sure that my account was disabled and changed the domain admin credentials to make sure I couldn't abuse them. He would have taken a look at my user shares and made sure there wasn't anything he needed in there. He would have done a quick audit to make sure I hadn't do anything suspicious over the last week or two.
But, honestly, I doubt if he did. He didn't impress me at all. I bet I could still log in to their network with the domain admin password.
My previous employer had a crapload of generic admin logins on the network.
My last responsibility when I left was to disable my own account, so I'd assume that my personal username and password would no longer work.
But I'd be very surprised if they bothered to change all those generic admin logins... I met a ton of resistance when I tried doing it while I was there.
I'd say protecting their walled garden is just a side effect of Sony's war on piracy, not a primary goal, while the homebrew folks are just collateral damage.
The homebrew folks were certainly, originally, collateral damage in the war on piracy. That's why they took out the "other OS" thing in the first place. At that point the walled garden was well-protected, and the homebrew folks had their own sandbox to play in.
But now that "other OS" is gone, there isn't a separate sandbox for the homebrew folks. You either mod your system and do your homebrew on the same platform that your games run on, or you don't do homebrew.
And that threatens the walled garden in addition to allowing piracy.
Which is why they're now worried about "unauthorized" software, in addition to piracy.
Part of the appeal of something like PSN, or Xbox Live, is that it is a walled garden.
Yes, I know, here on Slashdot we're supposed to hate that stuff.
But it gets pretty annoying to go on-line and play some multiplayer game and get your ass handed to you by some guy running an aimbot or wallhack or whatever.
That's why so many games these days make an attempt to curtail cheating. That's why there's the whole Valve Anti-Cheat thing, and why WoW runs that malware/cheat scan before starting up.
On the console, it has traditionally been fairly hard to run a cheat, since you couldn't install your own software. You had to rely on bugs and glitches in the games themselves. But if you mod your system to run any old arbitrary software... Then you can run some kind of cheat in parallel with your game. And this degrades the gaming experience for anyone who plays against you. Which lowers the value of PSN and Xbox Live. Which hurts Sony's or Microsoft's profits.
Yes, I think it was damn stupid for Sony to remove the whole "other OS" thing. That was a colossally dumb thing to do. It used to allow people to tinker and load up their own homebrew stuff while keeping a big wall up between the homebrew and the games. It kept the games safe(er) from cheating and preserved the value of PSN.
But now that wall is gone. And, if you've modded your system to allow homebrew, you may very well be running cheats alongside your games. And Sony doesn't want to see that degrade the value of PSN. So they're protecting their walled garden.
1.) Amazon is handling the distribution. If their formula is unreasonable, that is something to kick around but they do need to cover those costs.
Of course they need to cover costs. I think the problem/complaint comes from a belief that it should be cheaper, since it's all digital.
2.) The publishers probably cannot "pop it in the mail" for less. The article's author is forgetting about or intentionally ignoring the printing costs.
I dunno... How much do you honestly think delivery costs on your average periodical? How much do you think printing actually costs?
Once you've considered the editorial staff, creative folks, journalists, assorted management... The cost of actually producing and distributing a periodical probably doesn't amount to much.
Which is what ruins the idea that it should be cheaper to distribute it digitally. If production/distribution isn't where your costs come from, then saving money on production/distribution isn't going to help you much. And if it actually costs more to produce/distribute digitally? You're screwed.
What I'd really like is some kind of standardized wireless communication, coupled with induction charging. Maybe a universal mat of some sort that does Bluetooth and induction at the same time.
Drop your phone on the mat and it charges and connects to whatever peripherals are attached to the mat.
Then you just connect your keyboard/mouse/giant TV/optical drives/printer/monitor/whatever to the mat. You get all the portability of a smart phone, along with all goodies that you get from a desktop or a big TV or whatever.
First sentence in the first section. "The average age for a video game player is 35".
Doesn't matter.
You say "video game" and the folks with money in Hollywood think "kids".
You pitch a movie with action and monsters and explosions, and the folks with money in Hollywood think "teenagers".
The target demographic for just about anything sci-fi or horror is teenagers. They really want to get that PG-13 rating.
That's why they watered down the first AvP movie so much. I mean... It's a combination of two different R-rated franchises. One of them involves aliens that skin you alive and take your skull for a trophy. The other one involves aliens that rape your face and kill you by violently exploding out of your chest. But if you can move enough of the gore off-screen you can nail that PG-13 rating, and sell a lot more tickets.
And that's what it's all about - selling tickets. If you get an R rating you've just excluded an awful lot of people who aren't old enough to go see the movie on their own. You're automatically reducing the number of people that can possibly buy your tickets.
If it's some big, complex, thoughtful, dramatic movie... Well, the odds are good that you weren't going to get too many kids in there anyway, so that doesn't really matter.
If it's a movie with explosions and monsters and lasers and whatnot... There's a good chance there are plenty of kids who'd like to go see it. And if you get an R rating, they can't. So you've just shot yourself in the foot.
Why is the Republican party imploding into insanity?
I can not believe you people allow idiots like Beck and Palin even open their mouths. They make all republicans look insane just by association.
Somewhere along the line, the Republican party stopped being the Republican party.
It used to be all about small government and fiscal responsibility.
Now it's all about fundamentalism.
He's an entertainer, nothing more. He says stuff like this to get publicity like this.
And some people still take him seriously. And base their voting on what he says. Making him a serious problem for anyone living in the US - regardless of whether it's all just a stunt to sell books or not.
I think it's safe to say that /. has a left-leaning bias.
There are some well-established correlations between affluence and education, and liberal leanings. So any time you've got a gathering of educated, relatively well-off folks, a good number of them are going to be left-leaning.
Why give him the time of day? I wonder how many followers that loud-mouthed ignoramus would have if the "liberal" media didn't get all flustered every time he says something like this.
It's certainly true that /. is an international forum. So I'm sure there are plenty of folks overseas who really don't care about American politics. For them, this is nothing more than a diversion.
But /. is an US-centered forum. And for those of us here in the US, Glen Beck is serious business.
The guy has an audience. Folks listen to him. They buy gold when he tells them to, they avoid Google when he says they're in league with The Government... And they'll vote against candidates/bills that he condemns - and that will affect folks living in the US, regardless of which way they lean.
No, he's selling books and getting ratings and a lot of money. Folks who think Beck is crazy are just as bamboozled as any of his fans. It's really hilarious.
I don't know if he's clinically diagnosed or if he's just putting on an act to make money. And it really doesn't matter. Regardless of the cause of his actions, the guy is spewing flaming ignorance all over the place.
Yes, but by saying that, *you* have taken him seriously!
As opposed to what, ignoring the loony? Just letting him spew his ignorance without any kind of rebuttal?
The fact of the matter is that he's on national TV, publishing books, and presenting some truly deranged stuff as "truth".
If he was just some kind of comedian and everybody laughed and went on with their lives, that'd be one thing. But people believe him. Folks base their world view on what he says. They cast their votes based on his insane rantings.
You can't just ignore him, because he affects American politics whether you like it or not.
The attacks on him just make his supporters circle the wagons, and maybe even gain him followers from the stupid "Well, if he's pissing people off he must be doing something right!" crowd.
So, what... Plug your ears, hum real loud, and hope the crazy isn't there when you open your eyes?
I'm thinking of writing a crazy book, and shopping it to one of these neo-con publishers, all to get me some early retirement on the backs of the ideological loons. I'm not sure yet if I should invent a new angle, or tie together multiple existing memes in a new way.
There are a lot of crazy ideas out there. And most of them are just languishing in obscurity. I have absolutely no doubt that you could throw together some really insane horseshit and make money off of it. There are plenty of paranoid/gullible/curious folks out there who'd gobble it up.
But that isn't going to put you on par with Glen Beck.
There are tons of raving loonies out there that get absolutely no attention.
What differentiates Glen Beck from some homeless idiot claiming that the world is flat is that he has an audience. He has thousands (millions?) of viewers. They actually listen to him. If he claims that Google is in league with the devil, they'll believe it. They'll go use Bing instead.
And while it might not matter to me what search engine a bunch of paranoid neocons use... It does matter to me how they vote in elections, because I live in the same country that they do. And when he gets them all riled up to vote against some random bill that would actually be quite beneficial, I suffer for it.
Don't get me wrong... I'm not arrogant enough to think that my way is the only right way to do things. I have no problem being wrong or being out-voted or whatever. But I'd prefer to be out-voted based on reality. Not the ravings of some lunatic - regardless of whether it's a genuine clinical problem or simply an act to make money.