Damn it, how is it phones and tablets keep getting these awesome high-rez screens, yet it's impossible to buy a laptop with anything better than 1366 x 768 for less than 1K?
You get what you pay for, and when a laptop OEM goes cheap, the first thing to go is screen resolution. Bite the bullet and spend a the extra dosh for a good laptop. As a bonus, it'll last a lot longer - often long enough to give you a better ROI than the 2-3 cheaper laptops you'd be buying during the same time period.
Wait, wait, wait... first you assert that he's not able to carry around his "entire desktop" wherever he wants, then you go on to say:
I got the Surface 2 (not pro), and even that has allowed me to completely forget about my laptop and desktop unless I need to do some actual work
...and go on to talk about how you don't even need a computer if you didn't have that whole code-writing thing to bother with. So, well, which is it?
Meanwhile, the reason I originally wanted to say something: With VPN and RDP/SSH, I can carry around entire effing servers wherever I want when I'm traveling, and access them from my smartphone if I wanted to - so even that one argument of yours is rather moot.
(Now in my typical use case, I doodle in CG/3D artwork when I travel, and they ain't made a tablet yet that could render even a single frame w/o sucking the battery dry, so I carry around an MBP.)
Our super-sized egos aside, we are not separate from the rest of existence.
Now you've done it...
Me, I'm waiting for the ABE (Anthropogenic Beach Erosion) crowd to scream and belittle "deniers" who will question the assertion that those evil Spaniards were actually at fault, or if they just introduced better foods...
As a government employee who has had their salary reduced with forced furloughs every year, I'd tell you to go to hell...
As a private-sector employee who has seen outright layoffs (where you don't come back later or occasionally get refunded later by Uncle Sam for the time spent not working), outright salary reductions to help save a coworker's job, occasionally working insane hours (instead of, say, 9-4 M-F which most of the VA enjoys), and where you can be fired at any time for nearly any idiotic reason - oh, and where fat pensions are scarce-to-non-existent? Oh, and let's not forget that most private-sector employees have to make do with budgets that are not assumed to automatically grow each year.
Yeah - having a real hard time feeling sorry for you there, boyo.
PS: a "slash" in budget growth request is not a "slashed" budget. Come back when, say, the PHBs decide to whack your previously-approved CapEx by 50% because they're working an acquisition and the target company is balking at the offer. Then we'll talk about what a slashed budget really is.
Even worse - someone you don't know manages them, and they can get real unaccountable at times, especially once your PHB signs a contract w/o telling you.
Certainly there's SLAs that almost every cloud provider touts, but just try to get a typical provider to honor one (that is, without having to sic a lawyer onto 'em first.)
The other dirty little secret (and why I tend to keep the servers in-house for the most part) is the nickel-and-dime billing that adds up awful damned quickly. AWS for example is quite useful, but they charge per GB/hour, for every 1000 PUTs, every 10,000 GETs, and etc. Overall, if you're not careful you can rack upwards of $4k/mo just to host a handful of servers with hot backups and a fair amount of data and traffic on them (I've been able to get it down to $1200/mo for five small-but-fairly-busy servers, but it takes a lot of automation on the back-end to shake out your backups, work to keep the devs from getting stupid on the non-prod/staging boxes, optimize disk usage, etc.)
Cloud providers make for excellent temp hosting and for bare-bones startups, but be prepared to lay down some serious ducats if you want one to do anything permanent, enterprise-sized, and/or production-like.
And no, I ain't hugging the damned servers - I use Cloud providers where they make actual sense, but for no other purpose or cause. After all, I have cost and security concerns which cloud providers have not yet addressed to any competent admin's satisfaction.
Semi-agreed, for one reason: it may be because he has a turntable with a cheap or worn-out needle on it (that is, it's either way too dull overall, or way too sharp at the tip. The former will wear out the sides of the groove, while the latter will slowly gouge out the center of it). That or the armature itself is too damned heavy, the armature spring is bearing down too hard, etc etc etc.
Lots of variables to consider when you compare this stuff.:)
Mind you, I used to restore vintage record players and radios - as in 1920's-1950's - stuff that was old enough to use tubes. My biggest problem wasn't the electronics (even tubes aren't too tough to get if you know where to look.) My biggest problem was with needles that were worn way down, and finding a box of replacement needles that fit at a flea market was like finding pure gold. My next biggest problem was in restoring the armature (springs and hinges were usually shot, rusted, or worse). After that it was all the ancillary crap nobody thinks of (speakers, belts, motors, the battered wood finish and grilles, etc).
OTOH, even with brand-new turntables, there's a lot of things that have to happen correctly in both design and execution before you get a solid turntable that will play good vinyl over the long term without tearing the crap out of it.
Problem is, none of your suppliers or employees want them for payment on their goods and services. So unless you have a large amount of cash on hand to cover expenses you will soon be out of business for non-payment of bills.
Depends on the bill - the important business/vendor purchases are paid on terms of net+n, where n can be 30, 60, or 90 days. Plenty of wiggle-room there.
"Oh sorry you'll have to send me more money, the value of this cryptocurrency dropped 20% in the 5 seconds it took to process the transaction."
I disagree for one reason: existing foreign currencies. I can buy stuff online in Swiss Francs (CHF) even though my bank account, card, and etc are all in USD... and they don't jack around the exchange rate dynamically. Most banks set their rates only once every 24 hours for such things - I don't see why they cannot do the same with Bitcoin. Sure, the merchant may get taken for a bath if the rates go radical within that 24 hours, but that's no mechanical or theoretical difference than what's faced by a merchant who accepts payment in JPY (Yen), a currency where a fair amount of volatility can be seen over a given 24-hour period.
The other thing is the amounts involved. An item that costs > 5 BTC (at current rates) isn't going to kill a merchant if the exchange rate goes nuts, and we're not exactly talking about folks trying to buy a brand new Tesla or a multi-million-dollar piece of specialized equipment with BTC, yanno (and to be honest, large purchases like that where fluctuation means large monetary changes are usually fixed and agreed-upon at a certain exchange rate before the deal is sealed.)
give them a system that doesnt function how they want.
When they complain, give them what they want profit!
Bonus points: make the mis-function a small matter of changing the configuration files; that way you can spend a week or two "fixing" the problem.
...on the other hand, I once fired someone for doing that - repeatedly. You can fool the non-techies that way, but if your IT Director or internal customers are gearheads, or you service a development team of any size, you can screw yourself over very quickly.
"We have successfully prevented Al Qaeda from taking down our infrastructure in April"
"This month, we are proud to announce that our infrastructure is now gender-neutral and completely embraces the LGBT community!"
"The IT datacenter is now fully secure against velociraptor attacks."
"We are happy to inform you that as of this month, our IT infrastructure is 100% Animal Cruelty Free!"
"For the month of April, we have completed our (self) certification, and as a result we now feature only Free Range servers in our infrastructure."
... I used to insert bits like this a few employers ago, just to see who actually read the reports. But then, I live in Portland, so even then half of those got glossed over.:(
None of which has any bearing on my original point, which is that we need a better and more secure way of applying security to web servers that isn't reliant on the good graces of a third party (either through their schedule of fees or through their procedures and policies).
I agree on the concept as posted, well sorta. Right now it's a choice between a SSL cert saying "trust me" (self-signed certs), or "trust him" (CA-generated certs.) A better way would be nice, but on a practical level that better way would be damned hard to implement, and I don't even want to know what kind of overhead it would add to the typical user session. I mean, do you really want your local bank handing out RSA keyfobs to each customer just so that you can bank online with a better feeling of security? From an Ops and Support standpoint, it would be the stuff of nightmares.
GP does have a point though - on a *practical* level, if you have a great enough need for security, you spend for it. If you think $25 is costly, try getting a cert from Thawte or VeriSign - those bastards are downright confiscatory on their pricing, and many institutional customers demand you only use those vendors or similar when you build something for them.
...but did they confirm that most of Apache's lead was eaten away by nginx?
Also, there's this:
"Nearly seven million of this month's new websites are using Microsoft IIS. Around 11 thousand of these new sites are hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform (including a few phishing sites)"
Also, what are the odds that the majority of the new sites are on parked domains?
...because we're waiting for vendors to issue patches.
1) who is the "we" you refer to? 9 times out of 10, there are workarounds, ranging from shutting off the heartbeat feature in OpenSSL to parking an SSL proxy host or load-balancer (depending on application) in-between your affected box and the rest of the planet. And yes, it's that fucking important.
2) The "new, latest security hole" in this instance can turn your company's reputation and sales into rancid mush should you get compromised, and in this case, there's no easy way to catch it before they get in. Oh, and don't ask about the potential for lawsuits that a data breach can generate from pissed-off customers.
3) If a vendor hasn't coughed up a fix by now? Stop using the product, and/or learn enough about it to wedge in your own fix until you can replace the product with something whose vendor is more responsive.
4) Sibling isn't entirely flamebait... a competent sysadmin is more than just a keyboard button actuator - he/she should have enough technical mojo to cook up a means to help protect his career and his company in cases like this. If one of my admins told me what you just wrote without providing solid proof that no workaround exists, I'd sit him down and ask him if he really wants to continue his career as a sysadmin.
The difference is that when opening the trunk, the defendant is either present, or (if the car is impounded) there is an official chain of custody where witnesses are present. Also, physical items found during that search will most likely have forensic evidence attached (fingerprints, etc) that can tie the item to the defendant.
Snatching a logon and going onto the website while impersonating that user is a whole different bucket of fish, and is way too vague to prove to a jury that you were just looking versus planting evidence.
How about google, hotmail, facebook etc passwords from Safari's settings? Thats what law enforcement always look for. That is cop gold right there.
No, that is prosecutor cyanide. Cops do not generally log in with the user's credentials, because it poisons the evidence gained from that site. Any competent defense attorney could get the subsequent evidence found that way thrown out almost immediately ("So, officer, you logged in as the user and acted on his behalf in the website? How do we know that you and your cohorts didn't plant the evidence yourself? Tainted evidence, yerhonor!")
Easier to get a warrant, have the provider give you the data. That way you can have a valid chain of custody, proof that there was no impersonation by cops or prosecutor, and absolutely no chance of any claims being valid that questions the veracity and integrity of the evidence found. Hell, even in those few cases where a user/pass is used, both prosecution and defense attorneys are present during its use (and depending on locate, a clerk of the court) - the defense (and clerk) are there to keep 'em honest.
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That said, i think the biggest bugbear is going to be Windows 8. It doesn't work very well with touch either.
True, but according to the commercials it'll turn you into one very badassed break-dancer/parkour/contortionist with awesome jazz hands...
Damn it, how is it phones and tablets keep getting these awesome high-rez screens, yet it's impossible to buy a laptop with anything better than 1366 x 768 for less than 1K?
You get what you pay for, and when a laptop OEM goes cheap, the first thing to go is screen resolution. Bite the bullet and spend a the extra dosh for a good laptop. As a bonus, it'll last a lot longer - often long enough to give you a better ROI than the 2-3 cheaper laptops you'd be buying during the same time period.
Wait, wait, wait... first you assert that he's not able to carry around his "entire desktop" wherever he wants, then you go on to say:
I got the Surface 2 (not pro), and even that has allowed me to completely forget about my laptop and desktop unless I need to do some actual work
...and go on to talk about how you don't even need a computer if you didn't have that whole code-writing thing to bother with. So, well, which is it?
Meanwhile, the reason I originally wanted to say something: With VPN and RDP/SSH, I can carry around entire effing servers wherever I want when I'm traveling, and access them from my smartphone if I wanted to - so even that one argument of yours is rather moot.
(Now in my typical use case, I doodle in CG/3D artwork when I travel, and they ain't made a tablet yet that could render even a single frame w/o sucking the battery dry, so I carry around an MBP.)
Our super-sized egos aside, we are not separate from the rest of existence.
Now you've done it...
Me, I'm waiting for the ABE (Anthropogenic Beach Erosion) crowd to scream and belittle "deniers" who will question the assertion that those evil Spaniards were actually at fault, or if they just introduced better foods...
As a government employee who has had their salary reduced with forced furloughs every year, I'd tell you to go to hell...
As a private-sector employee who has seen outright layoffs (where you don't come back later or occasionally get refunded later by Uncle Sam for the time spent not working), outright salary reductions to help save a coworker's job, occasionally working insane hours (instead of, say, 9-4 M-F which most of the VA enjoys), and where you can be fired at any time for nearly any idiotic reason - oh, and where fat pensions are scarce-to-non-existent? Oh, and let's not forget that most private-sector employees have to make do with budgets that are not assumed to automatically grow each year.
Yeah - having a real hard time feeling sorry for you there, boyo.
PS: a "slash" in budget growth request is not a "slashed" budget. Come back when, say, the PHBs decide to whack your previously-approved CapEx by 50% because they're working an acquisition and the target company is balking at the offer. Then we'll talk about what a slashed budget really is.
My uptime has more nines than Amazon's.
I've got an HPUX box sitting around with more uptime than some of my junior admins' career spans.
I like my data to not be in the hands of someone else. I don't want it examined, copied or accidently Googled.
That's what LUKS is for (among other things), as sibling mentioned. I don't put jack shit out there w/o it being encrypted.
Fuck this Curtis Peterson
...with a red-hot iron poker.
Even worse - someone you don't know manages them, and they can get real unaccountable at times, especially once your PHB signs a contract w/o telling you.
Certainly there's SLAs that almost every cloud provider touts, but just try to get a typical provider to honor one (that is, without having to sic a lawyer onto 'em first.)
The other dirty little secret (and why I tend to keep the servers in-house for the most part) is the nickel-and-dime billing that adds up awful damned quickly. AWS for example is quite useful, but they charge per GB/hour, for every 1000 PUTs, every 10,000 GETs, and etc. Overall, if you're not careful you can rack upwards of $4k/mo just to host a handful of servers with hot backups and a fair amount of data and traffic on them (I've been able to get it down to $1200/mo for five small-but-fairly-busy servers, but it takes a lot of automation on the back-end to shake out your backups, work to keep the devs from getting stupid on the non-prod/staging boxes, optimize disk usage, etc.)
Cloud providers make for excellent temp hosting and for bare-bones startups, but be prepared to lay down some serious ducats if you want one to do anything permanent, enterprise-sized, and/or production-like.
And no, I ain't hugging the damned servers - I use Cloud providers where they make actual sense, but for no other purpose or cause. After all, I have cost and security concerns which cloud providers have not yet addressed to any competent admin's satisfaction.
Not wax, but any variety of materials depending on its age, who pressed it, etc.
Semi-agreed, for one reason: it may be because he has a turntable with a cheap or worn-out needle on it (that is, it's either way too dull overall, or way too sharp at the tip. The former will wear out the sides of the groove, while the latter will slowly gouge out the center of it). That or the armature itself is too damned heavy, the armature spring is bearing down too hard, etc etc etc.
Lots of variables to consider when you compare this stuff. :)
Mind you, I used to restore vintage record players and radios - as in 1920's-1950's - stuff that was old enough to use tubes. My biggest problem wasn't the electronics (even tubes aren't too tough to get if you know where to look.) My biggest problem was with needles that were worn way down, and finding a box of replacement needles that fit at a flea market was like finding pure gold. My next biggest problem was in restoring the armature (springs and hinges were usually shot, rusted, or worse). After that it was all the ancillary crap nobody thinks of (speakers, belts, motors, the battered wood finish and grilles, etc).
OTOH, even with brand-new turntables, there's a lot of things that have to happen correctly in both design and execution before you get a solid turntable that will play good vinyl over the long term without tearing the crap out of it.
Problem is, none of your suppliers or employees want them for payment on their goods and services. So unless you have a large amount of cash on hand to cover expenses you will soon be out of business for non-payment of bills.
Depends on the bill - the important business/vendor purchases are paid on terms of net+n, where n can be 30, 60, or 90 days. Plenty of wiggle-room there.
"Oh sorry you'll have to send me more money, the value of this cryptocurrency dropped 20% in the 5 seconds it took to process the transaction."
I disagree for one reason: existing foreign currencies. I can buy stuff online in Swiss Francs (CHF) even though my bank account, card, and etc are all in USD... and they don't jack around the exchange rate dynamically. Most banks set their rates only once every 24 hours for such things - I don't see why they cannot do the same with Bitcoin. Sure, the merchant may get taken for a bath if the rates go radical within that 24 hours, but that's no mechanical or theoretical difference than what's faced by a merchant who accepts payment in JPY (Yen), a currency where a fair amount of volatility can be seen over a given 24-hour period.
The other thing is the amounts involved. An item that costs > 5 BTC (at current rates) isn't going to kill a merchant if the exchange rate goes nuts, and we're not exactly talking about folks trying to buy a brand new Tesla or a multi-million-dollar piece of specialized equipment with BTC, yanno (and to be honest, large purchases like that where fluctuation means large monetary changes are usually fixed and agreed-upon at a certain exchange rate before the deal is sealed.)
...maybe they can field a football team?
give them a system that doesnt function how they want.
When they complain, give them what they want
profit!
Bonus points: make the mis-function a small matter of changing the configuration files; that way you can spend a week or two "fixing" the problem.
I have a better idea, courtesy of politics:
"We have successfully prevented Al Qaeda from taking down our infrastructure in April"
"This month, we are proud to announce that our infrastructure is now gender-neutral and completely embraces the LGBT community!"
"The IT datacenter is now fully secure against velociraptor attacks."
"We are happy to inform you that as of this month, our IT infrastructure is 100% Animal Cruelty Free!"
"For the month of April, we have completed our (self) certification, and as a result we now feature only Free Range servers in our infrastructure."
None of which has any bearing on my original point, which is that we need a better and more secure way of applying security to web servers that isn't reliant on the good graces of a third party (either through their schedule of fees or through their procedures and policies).
I agree on the concept as posted, well sorta. Right now it's a choice between a SSL cert saying "trust me" (self-signed certs), or "trust him" (CA-generated certs.) A better way would be nice, but on a practical level that better way would be damned hard to implement, and I don't even want to know what kind of overhead it would add to the typical user session. I mean, do you really want your local bank handing out RSA keyfobs to each customer just so that you can bank online with a better feeling of security? From an Ops and Support standpoint, it would be the stuff of nightmares.
GP does have a point though - on a *practical* level, if you have a great enough need for security, you spend for it. If you think $25 is costly, try getting a cert from Thawte or VeriSign - those bastards are downright confiscatory on their pricing, and many institutional customers demand you only use those vendors or similar when you build something for them.
Can't you just get one CA signed certificate and use that to sign all the other certificates in your organization yourself?
Well, until that 'master cert' gets compromised, in which case whoever stole it can immediately turn it into a certificate printing machine...
You sure you want that headache?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... oh, forget it.
Agreed.
You can still get Apache for HPUX, fercryinoutloud.
...but did they confirm that most of Apache's lead was eaten away by nginx?
Also, there's this:
"Nearly seven million of this month's new websites are using Microsoft IIS. Around 11 thousand of these new sites are hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform (including a few phishing sites)"
Also, what are the odds that the majority of the new sites are on parked domains?
...because we're waiting for vendors to issue patches.
1) who is the "we" you refer to? 9 times out of 10, there are workarounds, ranging from shutting off the heartbeat feature in OpenSSL to parking an SSL proxy host or load-balancer (depending on application) in-between your affected box and the rest of the planet. And yes, it's that fucking important.
2) The "new, latest security hole" in this instance can turn your company's reputation and sales into rancid mush should you get compromised, and in this case, there's no easy way to catch it before they get in. Oh, and don't ask about the potential for lawsuits that a data breach can generate from pissed-off customers.
3) If a vendor hasn't coughed up a fix by now? Stop using the product, and/or learn enough about it to wedge in your own fix until you can replace the product with something whose vendor is more responsive.
4) Sibling isn't entirely flamebait... a competent sysadmin is more than just a keyboard button actuator - he/she should have enough technical mojo to cook up a means to help protect his career and his company in cases like this. If one of my admins told me what you just wrote without providing solid proof that no workaround exists, I'd sit him down and ask him if he really wants to continue his career as a sysadmin.
And then I said, " ...
That's what most recipients will likely say - nothing.
So what happens after that?
The difference is that when opening the trunk, the defendant is either present, or (if the car is impounded) there is an official chain of custody where witnesses are present. Also, physical items found during that search will most likely have forensic evidence attached (fingerprints, etc) that can tie the item to the defendant.
Snatching a logon and going onto the website while impersonating that user is a whole different bucket of fish, and is way too vague to prove to a jury that you were just looking versus planting evidence.
How about google, hotmail, facebook etc passwords from Safari's settings? Thats what law enforcement always look for. That is cop gold right there.
No, that is prosecutor cyanide. Cops do not generally log in with the user's credentials, because it poisons the evidence gained from that site. Any competent defense attorney could get the subsequent evidence found that way thrown out almost immediately ("So, officer, you logged in as the user and acted on his behalf in the website? How do we know that you and your cohorts didn't plant the evidence yourself? Tainted evidence, yerhonor!")
Easier to get a warrant, have the provider give you the data. That way you can have a valid chain of custody, proof that there was no impersonation by cops or prosecutor, and absolutely no chance of any claims being valid that questions the veracity and integrity of the evidence found. Hell, even in those few cases where a user/pass is used, both prosecution and defense attorneys are present during its use (and depending on locate, a clerk of the court) - the defense (and clerk) are there to keep 'em honest.
Fair enough - I liked the so-called 'spot-welding', as it gave continuity and a good story arc that bound the two series.
But okay, let's do it your way, and stop at Robots and Empire, where Olivaw and Giskard literally alter the course of human history.