By comparison, the Anonymous attacks just seem like a vindictive act of petty vandalism, by a bunch of kids who are angry because their parents have taken their toys away from them. It's not helping anything, if anything it's destructive.
On the contrary, I disagree.
All I've seen of the Anon attacks is that they make the Internet slow. Media sites don't/didn't work (eg. Netflix) all that well. In combination with Google and Wikipedia putting the blackout in effect, it had a powerful combined effect:
This is what the Internet is like with an information blackout brought upon us by restrictive legality.
Petty and childish? Maybe. How else is someone supposed to protest these things in the real world, these days, exactly? Stand outside in the rain and look foolish like a hippie while getting in the way of everyone? That just pisses people trying to work off.
If I own/operate a Taxi service and someone uses it for illegal activities, I am not responsible. If a murder or other crime occurs on public transit, the city is not responsible (this happens quite often). If I own a delivery service, and someone else ships illegal goods through said service, I am not legally culpable. If someone exploits my network and uses it for illegal activities, I am not going to be arrested (in all likelihood, at least - because I am not responsible for their actions). If someone is aware of a specific crime being committed, but is not party to said crime in action aside from actions they would otherwise take (eg. a bus driver ferrying someone back from a murder), they are not culpable. (They are a witness, presuming they're aware of it occurring at all.)
A hitman, or a conspirator in a murder, is something entirely different. That's an action (planning with or paying out to the perpetrator, specifically for said act).
If they ignore you, the sense of the law erodes. If they arrest you, you become a martyr. Either way you win.
If they ignore you, you lose: the sense of law, and that the law is fair and just, is eroded. Civility is decreased, and that is what we should be desiring: civility is the very basis of functional civilization, after all.
If they arrest you, you lose: you are now in jail. You are not Kevin Mitnick. Today, nobody cares about the hundreds who are arrested and sentenced for things like this. And they will arrest you, later: you won't be publicly beaten, you won't have a visible trial, and there won't be a news reel of you being oppressed. You'll just disappear with your closely knit friends and family knowing you were an idiot.
they did the absolute minimum they could to comply with the DMCA and other US legislation
And by driving 55 in a 55 mile per hour zone, I am doing the absolute minimum I can to comply with traffic laws. (Is this supposed to be a ding against them?)
Things such as having de-duplication in place, but only removing the one specific link to a file, not removing all the copies
Yet, there is a legitimate reason to do this, too. What if a claim is made, and I want to confirm before storage removal that it was, in fact, in violation? (Can shitty programming also be a valid reason to arrest someone or seize their property?)
The game changes if they really were encouraging illegal content. I don't care if they mention movies or songs: I can offer a legal, legitimate service doing the same with no intention of violating or encouraging the violation of copyright.
There really needs to be something substantial and flagrant in their violations to justify what was done. Unfortunately for everyone, I suspect this won't actually be proven, it'll be a kangaroo court, and the livelihood of many people will be destroyed.
I support the core idea of SOPA while opposing the bill, and I suspect many others do too. If you don't read the damned thing, SOPA sounds like "let's reduce the rampant unchecked piracy online." Sure, that's great. There are many reasons why people should have to really look if they want a pirated copy of The Hangover 2.
Online piracy has been about the same for the past 15-odd years in terms of availability, from what I can see. If anything, there's less of it now due to legitimate online channels for media: online 'app stores' (Apple's, Steam, Microsoft's), and the like. It is trivially easy to find electronic media of one sort of the other online to buy to download immediately, and people use them often.
This has been going on for well over the better part of a generation, with no sign of cultural shift on the horizon. (Meanwhile, the Prohibition lasted only 13 years, and look what good prohibiting access to a social vice which everyone wanted did! It ceased immediately, and nobody went to jail.)
All the while, *PAA has been pushing hard to completely eliminate (and making a mess of people's lives in the process) piracy. They've gotten quite a few laws on the books and have made the lives of common people utterly miserable for things they didn't necessarily know were "wrong" (or call it illegal).
For the most part, the laws necessary to reduce online piracy are already there and have been there for a long time. SOPA isn't needed. DMCA was already stepping over bounds by walking around presumption of innocence. What should be akin to a traffic or parking ticket if you're caught sharing has turned into something with the legal repercussions of organized drug trafficking. It isn't right, and it needs to be dialed back a hell of a lot before any steps 'forward' are taken.
So, no: having read SOPA, there is absolutely no justification for it. What it functionally should be able to provide has already been provided, legally (and then some). We really don't need even more of a Noble Experiment than what we've already got on our hands, thanks.
(Part of me suspects I'm replying to a shill, but what the hell...)
The same could be said for Google (search), Microsoft (search), Apple (you can pull songs off their i* products to another computer), and (I'm sure) a thousand other technology companies.
People like you simply don't get it: You can not penalize the provider of a service which can be and probably will be leveraged for illegal purposes when there is a legitimate use for said service or product - particularly when that legitimate use is easily conceived within the legal definitions of what is allowed.
* Selling condoms in a gas station? Check. They may be used for rape, but that's not what most of them are used for. * Providing a credit card service? Check. Even though credit cards are often used to steal and/or launder money, and are responsible for most sexploitation (indirectly), that isn't their principle purpose. * Selling firearms (even in a crime-ridden ghetto)? Check: recreational and hunting purposes, self defense (a function legally allowed by all police officers and all citizens, but only some subjects). Even if most firearms were used for crimes, there is still a significant justification (legitimate use) to not prohibit the common man from acquiring and using them. * Sharing large files with friends or publicly via an online for-profit service? Check. (Granted, this entails the possibility of piracy.)
I have to ask how things would be (or should be) different if MU had a profit plan which was, say, entirely based on ad revenue and selling personal information...
If this is going to be illegal, why don't we make all for-pay FTP clients illegal, too?
I'm not intimately familiar with their process, but (for instance) Android ROMs are popular, as linked by xda, as is other original/personally owned content. The model works quite well for legal content of paying contributors while (optionally) charging for popular files, I'd think.
Not to be redundant, but they've already killed the usefulness of the search. I've been using Google since their inception. I may be moving to Bing or Yahoo because Google's search results have regressed in quality substantially.
Google really needs to fix their shit. Consumer force only goes so far with technology: it's still very much the case that people look to their geek friends for technology recommendations.
I work in IT (systems). On one hand, you "need" a degree in many cases to get in the door (or work yourself up from tech support in a similar number of years) for a decent position. On the other hand, when you do get in that door, you really aren't going to be (necessarily) paid better than your peers who picked the 'work your way up' approach.
My experience is that I've been more experienced and more knowledgeable than most of my coworkers, who seemingly invariably are getting paid proportionately more than I am. I'm the one with the highest level of education. Maybe I'm a poor negotiator, or maybe it's because I don't have the requisite 'incremental pay increases' of 4+ years of working shit jobs to get me the higher wages. But for whatever the reason is, I can barely afford to pay back my student loans making roughly the same amount (or in some cases, less) as the people around me working the same "decent living" wages who do not have a degree. That 'decent living' doesn't allow for much month-month levity when you've got $500/month in student loans to pay. I should note that I have always been an "over achiever", though granted for the act of achievement and doing better than others, not for the teacher's star or the A+ (which is probably my downfall).
It's no wonder people wait until they're 40 to start living these days. You can hardly afford it otherwise.
Contrast: Option 1: get out of high school, work your way up from your minimum-wage job to be restaurant manager, shift manager, whatever. Work hard and be capable and you will get promoted. Go from being the paper guy/supply guy/whatever to being a welder or so on. Sure, you need to get training along the way, but it's relatively inexpensive and (importantly!) incremental - not all at once. The costs occur while you have income coming in from a steady job, and the training is (in all likelihood) integrated with your job. By the time you're 30, you've probably already started making house payments, you've got a reliable vehicle, and so on. Maybe you're married. If you've got steady employment, you probably at least got the option of a not-too-shitty health plan. If you want to have children, you can start considering it. If you weren't irresponsible with your money (flat screen TVs, etc.) you probably have very negligible debt.
Option 2: go to school out of college (while working or otherwise - the result isn't all that different). The money you make, short of working a 60-hour week or getting paid for a semi-professional position, goes towards living expenses: rent, student dorms, food, whatever. Four years later, you get out onto the work force and have to come up with experience on your resume in your field (hopefully you got that while working a 40-hour/week job to pay the bills) or start at the very, very bottom. Unfortunately, in doing so, you need to start at the bottom (or close to it). Your pay is going to be tight, and you're going to be competing against people who decided to go the 'quick route' who have experience. You will be paying large sums of money for your student loans for the better part of a decade or longer (if you face unemployment at any time) - hopefully you had grants to help. During that decade, you will either have to make significantly more than others without the degree (doesn't seem to happen in IT), or you will have to delay life.
But look at the flip side: education is fairly meaningless on its own without a way to make a living.
I am agitated by this mentality, because it's general societal perception of "degree = capable" is what pushed me to get my own degree. Education -should- greatly assist you in your general life, which is largely composed of your job (or career). I did learn things I still find useful that I did in my course work. Did I need the degree for what I do (or did it aid me in anything substantial aside from demonstrating that I can stick to something)? No, not really.
What irritates me more is that college is seen as necessarily better than no extended schooling, or a 2-year degree, for the bulk of jobs. This simply isn't the case. Yes, there are jobs out there which really should have a broad undergraduate exposure before job-specific training - for instance, education, engineering or medicine. They're going to be intensely studying a field and need to have a broad base to move forward on so their knowledge does not topple (so to speak).
Yet, college doesn't really provide that. A smathering of 100 and 200 level courses your first couple years in college which, in all likelihood, you should've learned in high school or picked up by osmosis by that point, really don't help a person all that much in a career. The bulk of what a "college degree" provides is fluff, because the courses are "required" and so professors are inclined to pass the students on them regardless, deferring to the students' 300 and 400+ level courses to determine whether they actually get the degree.
Cloud services aren't a "save money" proposition after you look at the actual monthly service charges. Using it as an inexpensive off-site backup/hot site, sure, but people who do things like you describe end up paying out the ass. $400+ for a single instance for development of a site isn't uncommon on ACS; twice that for production seems low. Now imagine actual files being transfered to/from those things, on a Windows platform, over VPN. I can only imagine...
This is a pretty damning account of why you should never, ever move things to "the cloud". (Likewise, this goes for datacenters outside your control in general, but moreso in something as ubiquitous/universal as Cloudy things).
The cloud is fast, easy, and (supposedly) inexpensive. But then you consider: it doesn't run itself. At the same time, you lose control. That's appealing in some regards, but the risks are equally large. It's outside your control, and the whims of others can fuck your world up inadvertently. Significantly: the whims of governments.
There are a surprising number of people and companies who are putting shit on Cloudy services who really should know better. (Shame on you, MSPs.) Your own cloud is awesome, but it's going to cost. There is a very real sliding value/cost scale association here, and the people who ignore it are doomed to repeat history.
You can pretty much be assured that his "private business" was actually state business - Chinese state business, to be exact. It's pretty damn well known that any Chinese national you've got on your network is likely to be trying to steal passwords and fish for holes in your network to report back to the homeland government...
My wife and I do this. I keep her passwords on a sheet of paper in the safe. She reads mine before going to bed every night (I believe she's on chapter 2, "Routers and Switches").
Does nobody see the irony of the people blasting Microsoft in preference for Android, which is (ultimately) a closed system, mostly installed on locked-down hardware and unrootable installs?
Tablets won't be able to be fully certified by MS if they don't have secure boot enabled with no way of disabling it.
So? When was the last time you heard anything even remotely interesting from Microsoft in the consumer market? And, in the consumer market, I mean "something which can validly appeal to Joe Sixpack".
Xbox 360? Before that, what? The Xbox?
This isn't Microsoft's market anymore. People buy Windows because it runs on the computers they buy, or because they need it for games or Office.
On the other hand, people actively seek out Android and IOS (Apple) products. They've been hot sellers at Christmas for years.
Microsoft isn't going to sell Windows 8 tablets or phones without a very significant incentive. "Office compatibility" isn't the must-have feature that it used to be, especially on a portable. For starters, people aren't going to jump for that shark unless there is something out there to rival App Store and Android Market. Microsoft will have to do something on par with what they did for the Xbox: bring something to the platform (console games) which had never been done well before (multiplayer FPS).
Asus has them thoroughly beat on the "works as well as a laptop for most things" department. Streaming and playing media, games, and communication are thick as thieves. Mail is meh, and other communication tools are fairly well fleshed out, too. Nobody seems to care about "works like Office, but in my hand". Their only ace here is probably some sort of Skynet-style navigation system, and it would have to work flawlessly. (Meanwhile, I don't see Google sitting down and letting geolocational superiority slipping out of their hands... Latitude/Navigation/Maps/etc. aren't great, but they're good tools.)
Basically: why would I, or anyone else, want a phone or tablet from Microsoft at this point? There is not only no incentive, but very little conceivable incentive: the only thing I can think of would be a single device to "bind them all": my phone would dock to my tablet, or my TV, or my computer. It could be my media center. I could use it for all of those things. Personally, that's only mildly appealing, because I'd still have to buy all the 'docks', and I've got devices that do that all already, anyway.
He's dyslexic. I suppose that might have something to do with it, yes? We read every night and several times a day. We've been encouraging his reading and actively instructing him since he was 5.
He's able to do long division without a problem. Did I mention he's able to understand and use 'advanced' concepts like UNIX pipes?
(You do realize that girls typically mature quicker intellectually than boys, right?)
My son is 8. He's not a very proficient reader yet, though his math skills are very good. He's been mostly home schooled (nothing all too vigorous, which probably attributes to his lack of reading proficiency) but wanted to go to public school this past year.
However, he has a better grasp of some key IT concepts which my MCSE and college IT/CS/etc. coworkers do not, simply through osmosis. If this girl's parents were both in IT and she had an overt interest in it, I can see how it might be more the case. My son understands things like basic troubleshooting (my primary role, it seems), connectivity, hierarchy, the interaction of components inside the system, and can navigate around in a shell OK.
That's an "old" educational system? What's a "new" educational system? What you describe seems fairly common to me (regardless of the size of the school or its age, as I've seen both in hundred+ year institutions with under 2,000 students as well as in modern for-profit educational organizations with tens of thousands (and everything in between). I know that many, many universities still do this.
Virtualization may do that. Someone virtualizes an old machine with malware, and voila, there you go. You've just perpetuated the problem indefinitely.
If they're using, say, Symantec products, it's really not difficult to see this problem being perpetuated, is it? Something from 1999 may not have had AV on it originally, but they realized later down the line it was necessary but thought it too old to be problematic... voila, instant perpetual malware vector.
I recently found a machine which had malware on it for almost 2 years, and nobody had noticed. It had been used by a member of the IT staff. How didn't they notice? It's hard to say. It had AV on it. Modern tools couldn't detect the malware, but network logs very clearly indicated it was the machine at fault.
I'd hire someone who put that on their resume, in a heartbeat. At least for an initial interview.
Honesty is somewhat lacking out there. This at least demonstrates the person knows when people are retards. How many problems could be averted because hyuck-hyuck good-natured people who are otherwise competent just go along with some idiot's ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
By comparison, the Anonymous attacks just seem like a vindictive act of petty vandalism, by a bunch of kids who are angry because their parents have taken their toys away from them. It's not helping anything, if anything it's destructive.
On the contrary, I disagree.
All I've seen of the Anon attacks is that they make the Internet slow. Media sites don't/didn't work (eg. Netflix) all that well. In combination with Google and Wikipedia putting the blackout in effect, it had a powerful combined effect:
This is what the Internet is like with an information blackout brought upon us by restrictive legality.
Petty and childish? Maybe. How else is someone supposed to protest these things in the real world, these days, exactly? Stand outside in the rain and look foolish like a hippie while getting in the way of everyone? That just pisses people trying to work off.
Vote Democratic? You get what you have now: ACTA, SOPA/PIPA, etc. Vote Republican? Who knows what you would have gotten. Left or right, you lose.
Since at least 2000, you get the same thing:
FUCKYA
If I own/operate a Taxi service and someone uses it for illegal activities, I am not responsible.
If a murder or other crime occurs on public transit, the city is not responsible (this happens quite often).
If I own a delivery service, and someone else ships illegal goods through said service, I am not legally culpable.
If someone exploits my network and uses it for illegal activities, I am not going to be arrested (in all likelihood, at least - because I am not responsible for their actions).
If someone is aware of a specific crime being committed, but is not party to said crime in action aside from actions they would otherwise take (eg. a bus driver ferrying someone back from a murder), they are not culpable. (They are a witness, presuming they're aware of it occurring at all.)
A hitman, or a conspirator in a murder, is something entirely different. That's an action (planning with or paying out to the perpetrator, specifically for said act).
If they ignore you, the sense of the law erodes. If they arrest you, you become a martyr. Either way you win.
If they ignore you, you lose: the sense of law, and that the law is fair and just, is eroded. Civility is decreased, and that is what we should be desiring: civility is the very basis of functional civilization, after all.
If they arrest you, you lose: you are now in jail. You are not Kevin Mitnick. Today, nobody cares about the hundreds who are arrested and sentenced for things like this. And they will arrest you, later: you won't be publicly beaten, you won't have a visible trial, and there won't be a news reel of you being oppressed. You'll just disappear with your closely knit friends and family knowing you were an idiot.
Civil disobedience is civil war without teeth.
they did the absolute minimum they could to comply with the DMCA and other US legislation
And by driving 55 in a 55 mile per hour zone, I am doing the absolute minimum I can to comply with traffic laws. (Is this supposed to be a ding against them?)
Things such as having de-duplication in place, but only removing the one specific link to a file, not removing all the copies
Yet, there is a legitimate reason to do this, too. What if a claim is made, and I want to confirm before storage removal that it was, in fact, in violation? (Can shitty programming also be a valid reason to arrest someone or seize their property?)
The game changes if they really were encouraging illegal content. I don't care if they mention movies or songs: I can offer a legal, legitimate service doing the same with no intention of violating or encouraging the violation of copyright.
There really needs to be something substantial and flagrant in their violations to justify what was done. Unfortunately for everyone, I suspect this won't actually be proven, it'll be a kangaroo court, and the livelihood of many people will be destroyed.
I support the core idea of SOPA while opposing the bill, and I suspect many others do too. If you don't read the damned thing, SOPA sounds like "let's reduce the rampant unchecked piracy online." Sure, that's great. There are many reasons why people should have to really look if they want a pirated copy of The Hangover 2.
Online piracy has been about the same for the past 15-odd years in terms of availability, from what I can see. If anything, there's less of it now due to legitimate online channels for media: online 'app stores' (Apple's, Steam, Microsoft's), and the like. It is trivially easy to find electronic media of one sort of the other online to buy to download immediately, and people use them often.
This has been going on for well over the better part of a generation, with no sign of cultural shift on the horizon. (Meanwhile, the Prohibition lasted only 13 years, and look what good prohibiting access to a social vice which everyone wanted did! It ceased immediately, and nobody went to jail.)
All the while, *PAA has been pushing hard to completely eliminate (and making a mess of people's lives in the process) piracy. They've gotten quite a few laws on the books and have made the lives of common people utterly miserable for things they didn't necessarily know were "wrong" (or call it illegal).
For the most part, the laws necessary to reduce online piracy are already there and have been there for a long time. SOPA isn't needed. DMCA was already stepping over bounds by walking around presumption of innocence. What should be akin to a traffic or parking ticket if you're caught sharing has turned into something with the legal repercussions of organized drug trafficking. It isn't right, and it needs to be dialed back a hell of a lot before any steps 'forward' are taken.
So, no: having read SOPA, there is absolutely no justification for it. What it functionally should be able to provide has already been provided, legally (and then some). We really don't need even more of a Noble Experiment than what we've already got on our hands, thanks.
(Part of me suspects I'm replying to a shill, but what the hell...)
The same could be said for Google (search), Microsoft (search), Apple (you can pull songs off their i* products to another computer), and (I'm sure) a thousand other technology companies.
People like you simply don't get it: You can not penalize the provider of a service which can be and probably will be leveraged for illegal purposes when there is a legitimate use for said service or product - particularly when that legitimate use is easily conceived within the legal definitions of what is allowed.
* Selling condoms in a gas station? Check. They may be used for rape, but that's not what most of them are used for.
* Providing a credit card service? Check. Even though credit cards are often used to steal and/or launder money, and are responsible for most sexploitation (indirectly), that isn't their principle purpose.
* Selling firearms (even in a crime-ridden ghetto)? Check: recreational and hunting purposes, self defense (a function legally allowed by all police officers and all citizens, but only some subjects). Even if most firearms were used for crimes, there is still a significant justification (legitimate use) to not prohibit the common man from acquiring and using them.
* Sharing large files with friends or publicly via an online for-profit service? Check. (Granted, this entails the possibility of piracy.)
I have to ask how things would be (or should be) different if MU had a profit plan which was, say, entirely based on ad revenue and selling personal information...
If this is going to be illegal, why don't we make all for-pay FTP clients illegal, too?
I'm not intimately familiar with their process, but (for instance) Android ROMs are popular, as linked by xda, as is other original/personally owned content. The model works quite well for legal content of paying contributors while (optionally) charging for popular files, I'd think.
You assume a couple things, probably:
* I'm single (I am not)
* I don't have kids (I have 3)
Try that on for size with $60k in California.
Not to be redundant, but they've already killed the usefulness of the search. I've been using Google since their inception. I may be moving to Bing or Yahoo because Google's search results have regressed in quality substantially.
Google really needs to fix their shit. Consumer force only goes so far with technology: it's still very much the case that people look to their geek friends for technology recommendations.
This is sadly true.
I work in IT (systems). On one hand, you "need" a degree in many cases to get in the door (or work yourself up from tech support in a similar number of years) for a decent position. On the other hand, when you do get in that door, you really aren't going to be (necessarily) paid better than your peers who picked the 'work your way up' approach.
My experience is that I've been more experienced and more knowledgeable than most of my coworkers, who seemingly invariably are getting paid proportionately more than I am. I'm the one with the highest level of education. Maybe I'm a poor negotiator, or maybe it's because I don't have the requisite 'incremental pay increases' of 4+ years of working shit jobs to get me the higher wages. But for whatever the reason is, I can barely afford to pay back my student loans making roughly the same amount (or in some cases, less) as the people around me working the same "decent living" wages who do not have a degree. That 'decent living' doesn't allow for much month-month levity when you've got $500/month in student loans to pay. I should note that I have always been an "over achiever", though granted for the act of achievement and doing better than others, not for the teacher's star or the A+ (which is probably my downfall).
It's no wonder people wait until they're 40 to start living these days. You can hardly afford it otherwise.
Contrast:
Option 1: get out of high school, work your way up from your minimum-wage job to be restaurant manager, shift manager, whatever. Work hard and be capable and you will get promoted. Go from being the paper guy/supply guy/whatever to being a welder or so on. Sure, you need to get training along the way, but it's relatively inexpensive and (importantly!) incremental - not all at once. The costs occur while you have income coming in from a steady job, and the training is (in all likelihood) integrated with your job. By the time you're 30, you've probably already started making house payments, you've got a reliable vehicle, and so on. Maybe you're married. If you've got steady employment, you probably at least got the option of a not-too-shitty health plan. If you want to have children, you can start considering it. If you weren't irresponsible with your money (flat screen TVs, etc.) you probably have very negligible debt.
Option 2: go to school out of college (while working or otherwise - the result isn't all that different). The money you make, short of working a 60-hour week or getting paid for a semi-professional position, goes towards living expenses: rent, student dorms, food, whatever. Four years later, you get out onto the work force and have to come up with experience on your resume in your field (hopefully you got that while working a 40-hour/week job to pay the bills) or start at the very, very bottom. Unfortunately, in doing so, you need to start at the bottom (or close to it). Your pay is going to be tight, and you're going to be competing against people who decided to go the 'quick route' who have experience. You will be paying large sums of money for your student loans for the better part of a decade or longer (if you face unemployment at any time) - hopefully you had grants to help. During that decade, you will either have to make significantly more than others without the degree (doesn't seem to happen in IT), or you will have to delay life.
But look at the flip side: education is fairly meaningless on its own without a way to make a living.
I am agitated by this mentality, because it's general societal perception of "degree = capable" is what pushed me to get my own degree. Education -should- greatly assist you in your general life, which is largely composed of your job (or career). I did learn things I still find useful that I did in my course work. Did I need the degree for what I do (or did it aid me in anything substantial aside from demonstrating that I can stick to something)? No, not really.
What irritates me more is that college is seen as necessarily better than no extended schooling, or a 2-year degree, for the bulk of jobs. This simply isn't the case. Yes, there are jobs out there which really should have a broad undergraduate exposure before job-specific training - for instance, education, engineering or medicine. They're going to be intensely studying a field and need to have a broad base to move forward on so their knowledge does not topple (so to speak).
Yet, college doesn't really provide that. A smathering of 100 and 200 level courses your first couple years in college which, in all likelihood, you should've learned in high school or picked up by osmosis by that point, really don't help a person all that much in a career. The bulk of what a "college degree" provides is fluff, because the courses are "required" and so professors are inclined to pass the students on them regardless, deferring to the students' 300 and 400+ level courses to determine whether they actually get the degree.
Cloud services aren't a "save money" proposition after you look at the actual monthly service charges. Using it as an inexpensive off-site backup/hot site, sure, but people who do things like you describe end up paying out the ass. $400+ for a single instance for development of a site isn't uncommon on ACS; twice that for production seems low. Now imagine actual files being transfered to/from those things, on a Windows platform, over VPN. I can only imagine...
This is a pretty damning account of why you should never, ever move things to "the cloud". (Likewise, this goes for datacenters outside your control in general, but moreso in something as ubiquitous/universal as Cloudy things).
The cloud is fast, easy, and (supposedly) inexpensive. But then you consider: it doesn't run itself. At the same time, you lose control. That's appealing in some regards, but the risks are equally large. It's outside your control, and the whims of others can fuck your world up inadvertently. Significantly: the whims of governments.
There are a surprising number of people and companies who are putting shit on Cloudy services who really should know better. (Shame on you, MSPs.) Your own cloud is awesome, but it's going to cost. There is a very real sliding value/cost scale association here, and the people who ignore it are doomed to repeat history.
You can pretty much be assured that his "private business" was actually state business - Chinese state business, to be exact. It's pretty damn well known that any Chinese national you've got on your network is likely to be trying to steal passwords and fish for holes in your network to report back to the homeland government...
or intentional deception of anyone is involved.
Which pretty much covers any use of social networking. "John Smith is Online".
My wife and I do this. I keep her passwords on a sheet of paper in the safe. She reads mine before going to bed every night (I believe she's on chapter 2, "Routers and Switches").
Does nobody see the irony of the people blasting Microsoft in preference for Android, which is (ultimately) a closed system, mostly installed on locked-down hardware and unrootable installs?
Tablets won't be able to be fully certified by MS if they don't have secure boot enabled with no way of disabling it.
So? When was the last time you heard anything even remotely interesting from Microsoft in the consumer market? And, in the consumer market, I mean "something which can validly appeal to Joe Sixpack".
Xbox 360? Before that, what? The Xbox?
This isn't Microsoft's market anymore. People buy Windows because it runs on the computers they buy, or because they need it for games or Office.
On the other hand, people actively seek out Android and IOS (Apple) products. They've been hot sellers at Christmas for years.
Microsoft isn't going to sell Windows 8 tablets or phones without a very significant incentive. "Office compatibility" isn't the must-have feature that it used to be, especially on a portable. For starters, people aren't going to jump for that shark unless there is something out there to rival App Store and Android Market. Microsoft will have to do something on par with what they did for the Xbox: bring something to the platform (console games) which had never been done well before (multiplayer FPS).
Asus has them thoroughly beat on the "works as well as a laptop for most things" department. Streaming and playing media, games, and communication are thick as thieves. Mail is meh, and other communication tools are fairly well fleshed out, too. Nobody seems to care about "works like Office, but in my hand". Their only ace here is probably some sort of Skynet-style navigation system, and it would have to work flawlessly. (Meanwhile, I don't see Google sitting down and letting geolocational superiority slipping out of their hands... Latitude/Navigation/Maps/etc. aren't great, but they're good tools.)
Basically: why would I, or anyone else, want a phone or tablet from Microsoft at this point? There is not only no incentive, but very little conceivable incentive: the only thing I can think of would be a single device to "bind them all": my phone would dock to my tablet, or my TV, or my computer. It could be my media center. I could use it for all of those things. Personally, that's only mildly appealing, because I'd still have to buy all the 'docks', and I've got devices that do that all already, anyway.
He's dyslexic. I suppose that might have something to do with it, yes? We read every night and several times a day. We've been encouraging his reading and actively instructing him since he was 5.
He's able to do long division without a problem. Did I mention he's able to understand and use 'advanced' concepts like UNIX pipes?
(You do realize that girls typically mature quicker intellectually than boys, right?)
Why is that really all that surprising?
My son is 8. He's not a very proficient reader yet, though his math skills are very good. He's been mostly home schooled (nothing all too vigorous, which probably attributes to his lack of reading proficiency) but wanted to go to public school this past year.
However, he has a better grasp of some key IT concepts which my MCSE and college IT/CS/etc. coworkers do not, simply through osmosis. If this girl's parents were both in IT and she had an overt interest in it, I can see how it might be more the case. My son understands things like basic troubleshooting (my primary role, it seems), connectivity, hierarchy, the interaction of components inside the system, and can navigate around in a shell OK.
Judging by the intellectual capacity and knowledge of their CS/IT graduates, not fucking likely. I'm surprised they're able to remain accredited.
That's an "old" educational system? What's a "new" educational system? What you describe seems fairly common to me (regardless of the size of the school or its age, as I've seen both in hundred+ year institutions with under 2,000 students as well as in modern for-profit educational organizations with tens of thousands (and everything in between). I know that many, many universities still do this.
Virtualization may do that. Someone virtualizes an old machine with malware, and voila, there you go. You've just perpetuated the problem indefinitely.
If they're using, say, Symantec products, it's really not difficult to see this problem being perpetuated, is it? Something from 1999 may not have had AV on it originally, but they realized later down the line it was necessary but thought it too old to be problematic... voila, instant perpetual malware vector.
I recently found a machine which had malware on it for almost 2 years, and nobody had noticed. It had been used by a member of the IT staff. How didn't they notice? It's hard to say. It had AV on it. Modern tools couldn't detect the malware, but network logs very clearly indicated it was the machine at fault.
I'd hire someone who put that on their resume, in a heartbeat. At least for an initial interview.
Honesty is somewhat lacking out there. This at least demonstrates the person knows when people are retards. How many problems could be averted because hyuck-hyuck good-natured people who are otherwise competent just go along with some idiot's ideas?