Last week I felt like writing a little code with a simple game framework. The tutorial they had was a basic jet flying to the right shooting at and avoiding oncoming items. All the graphics and sounds were in the tutorial with copy and paste code so it was quick to throw together. My kids ages 3 and 6 were hanging out with me watching it come to life. I let them move the jet around when all I had was a moving jet. They saw it as we added targets, then bullets, then explosions, then sound.
What they really loved was me bending the rules of the game. I changed the rate of targets from 1 to 10 to 100 and showed them how it changed the game. They got a real kick out of me changing the bullet logic. I made the jet fire stationary bullets and let the targets run in to them. I also made the bullets fly backwards. I would point out how silly it was and they would laugh. I basically explained that we were in control of how everything acted and we could make it as serious or as silly as we wanted.
Make a simple game but comment out or turn off all the functionality. Then turn each piece on one at a time showing them the result. Have a few things that you can tweak that the kids can see make a difference in the game.
This works great for simple stuff. The commands in the -ScriptBlock are ran on the target computer. The -AsJob is not needed, but it basically multi threads the command. Running it on every computer at the same time instead of one at a time. You have to use get-job and related commands to check up on them, but its worth it when I want to run a command on hundreds of computers that may or may not be online.
I'm sure you may have figured out most of that but may be struggling with network access in remote shells or need different credentials other than your own. You need to enable CredSSP on your remote computers for passthrough authentication (for network access in remote shells). You can enable this in AD for Win7 computers but its a bit more work for WinXP. Using CredSSP requires you to pass credentials. Here is an example that pulls those together.
In this Get-Credential will prompt for the username password. I changed the ScriptBlock to run a program off a network share. This would have failed in the first example. One other thing about using CredSSP, it needs a FQDN of the computer. I am not sure if this is any simpler than psexec. I remember using it for automation years ago but have forgotten all about it. I do find all of this easy to remember though.
I find myself running commands like this all the time now. Combining this with Get-QADComputer from quest to get computer accounts and having wake on lan scriptable will give you tons of power. I just wanted to share with you and everyone else how cool the remoting features of PowerShell can be.
They need to just focus on smartphone integration. The people craving these features are the early adopters that already have a smartphone. You can get navigation and internet radio with that already.
Our privacy policy: You have no expectation of privacy. We will collect any and all information you or your computer is willing to give us and do whatever we want with that information. Use of this site is entirely optional. Use at your own risk.
Check the name on the cert. if it is self signed, then you just have to deal with it. But if it is root signed, look at the site name. If you can find a way to use that site address to access the device then you will not get prompted.
My home router has a valid cert, but I would use the ip address and get prompted every time. I ended up making an entry in my host file for "linksys" at that address. Now when I go to https://linksys/ everything is ok.
At the end of the day, remember the whole reason these devices use SSL is not so you can verify the connection. They use it to encrypt the connection. It is so much better to use SSL instead of plain text, even though the cert is not root signed.
If you make your microsoft certificate authority the domain authority, I think that it will automatically distribute the root cert to every domain joined computer at the next computer policy refresh.
Not only that, but there is a section of group policy just for certificates. It is very easy to work with (if you are using a Microsoft authority).
The cost is that of another server (or a few servers for a large organisation).
I have 100% replaced my cable TV. I watch a lot of TV. Well, I have the TV on a lot if I am watching it or not. I use it kind of like a radio.
The programming is also perfect for kids. They have just a few shows that they watch over and over again, the icons are big enough that they can tell what the show is.
I am watching a lot of old shows that I forgot about. Catching an old series from episode 1 forward is great.
I also have Hulu for the more current shows.
This is wonderful and cheap. I pay less than 10$ for all my TV entertainment now (on top of my internet connection). If you look at it that way, for people that drop Cable TV and Dish TV, if they had to pay an additional 10$-40$ for a better internet connection or more bandwidth, they would still be saving money each month. I am paying about 60$ a month less than I was with Dish TV.
I expect that at some point things will balance back out again. I don't want the fact that I am watching a lot of Netflix to impact my internet service, but I expect that it will at some point.
This is a packet sniffer. If you are on a switched network, the degree of difficulty to pull this off is much greater. it is not a solution because of other tricks like arp poisoning.
This is nothing new, but it is good publicity to remind people how important SSL is. This addon did not change anything except now more script kiddies have access to another tool.
Verifying that every client received the same message is fairly easy. You can just collect the logs and compare. A good damage meter does more than that.
With that said, if they would have built a damage meter then the logs would be more accurate and the resulting damage meter would be more accurate.
The early damage mods parsed the combat log as text. So every mob that had the same name was the same mob. single pulls were fine, but double pulls of the same mob was confusing. Then pets were an issue. If 2 people had a wolf named wolf or god help you if someone named the pet after someone else in the raid. Blizzard saw this issue and revamped the logs so there were ID numbers for mobs.
I wrote a damage meter once for another game (when people told me it was impossible to do in AOC). Text parsing natural language combat logs is not fun but it is doable.
Even though no information has been released yet, I would expect to see something in the next 2 years. That would put Windows 7 at 3 years old. If we don't see a release, we should be seeing some betas by then. They will not wait 5 years again like they did from XP to Vista and the Vista to Win 7 timeline was 3 years.
I just used that example because AOC was released just ahead of Warhammer. It was another game that slipped release dates and shipped an unfinished product. They had good solid release numbers and a very sharp decline in subscribers because it was unfinished. It sounds like AoC has made progress in the months after. But in the window of time where Warhammer was released, AoC looked like it was going to die an early death.
Warhammer didn't do it self any favors by releasing so close to a WoW expansion either. I tried AoC for 2 months and skipped over Warhammer partly because of the pending WoW expansion.
And if you are traveling internationally, they will charge you international rates to receive that message.
Although that is a small price to pay. Knowing that you racked up $1,000 in charges the first day instead of $7,000 after you get back. But you know someone will complain about that $0.20 message.
When I was in high school we had a pre-windows PC lab of 15-20 computers and a Mac lab of 12-14 computers. One day I returned to the PC lab at the end of the day for something and I saw the PC teacher and the Mac teacher sitting at a computer. They called me over to them asking if I knew anything about this.
They told me this computer had a virus and it had my name on it. As soon as they said that, I remembered what I did. I did a net send to all the computers in the PC lab with the message "This is a virus" earlier in the day. They were not happy with me at the time and it took a bit of work for me to explain that it was not a virus, just a message saying it was a virus.
We fight with this type of stuff all the time. The market price for things and the amount IT "charges" for the same thing can be way out of line. What I usually see is some large infrastructure investment by IT gets broken up and tacked onto other services charged to the departments that depend on them. Your TB drive may cost $100 but it may be in a high end raid on a server with some fault tolerance attached to a UPS ran by a full team of support. The company can either cover the cost of IT or hand it back to you based on the services you use.
You may be able to get away with getting you own 1TB drive and not paying the IT tax. But if the IT expenses are not being met, they will find other ways to charge you.
I would kind of like to start charging our departments something for network space. It goes unchecked at the moment. I have 16 out of 500 users that use 1/2 of our home folder storage.
Well, it is still not legal to keep using the software after the contract is up if it required to keep your software license. It is just not a DMCA violation to do so.
If they properly test the device, the everything should be covered.
I think the FDA does need to realize there is a software component. For no other reason then to require a full recertification of the devise every time the firmware changes. The risk I see is that an item gets certified and then bugs get introduced later if future firmware updates.
The FDA should also be notified of any bugs uncovered in existing firmware. Put the responsibility of deciding if an item needs recalled our of the hands of the company. I think there are other measures that can be put in place without requiring manufacturers to open source the code.
With that said, if the FDA did start looking at the source code, that would not be a bad thing.
A pass phrase is not that bad of an idea. It does not have to be 200 chars long, but a few words that mean something to you stringed together. If nobody can see you type it, then they will have no clue its a pass phrase. If they see you tap space every 4-7 chars they will figure it out.
For a while, I used the phrase "I am the administrator!" for my workstation admin password. 23 very easy characters to remember. It is such a simple password to remember and hard to guess.
Slashdot Mirror
if anything, I bing google and then google what I want. Because clicking in the address bar is too much work.
*on other computers of course, where google is not the homepage.
Exactly, It would be nice if all of my users were rocket scientists.
Last week I felt like writing a little code with a simple game framework. The tutorial they had was a basic jet flying to the right shooting at and avoiding oncoming items. All the graphics and sounds were in the tutorial with copy and paste code so it was quick to throw together. My kids ages 3 and 6 were hanging out with me watching it come to life. I let them move the jet around when all I had was a moving jet. They saw it as we added targets, then bullets, then explosions, then sound.
What they really loved was me bending the rules of the game. I changed the rate of targets from 1 to 10 to 100 and showed them how it changed the game. They got a real kick out of me changing the bullet logic. I made the jet fire stationary bullets and let the targets run in to them. I also made the bullets fly backwards. I would point out how silly it was and they would laugh. I basically explained that we were in control of how everything acted and we could make it as serious or as silly as we wanted.
Make a simple game but comment out or turn off all the functionality. Then turn each piece on one at a time showing them the result. Have a few things that you can tweak that the kids can see make a difference in the game.
Powershell does a great job of bringing WMI to the shell.
Get-WMIObject WIN32_BIOS
Not only can you query with wmi, but get access to the objects to call various WMI functions.
There is a lot of power in PowerShell remoting now and its easier than ever to use now.
Get-Content .\computers.txt | %{ Invoke-Command -ComputerName $_ -AsJob -ScriptBlock { gpupdate /force } }
This works great for simple stuff. The commands in the -ScriptBlock are ran on the target computer. The -AsJob is not needed, but it basically multi threads the command. Running it on every computer at the same time instead of one at a time. You have to use get-job and related commands to check up on them, but its worth it when I want to run a command on hundreds of computers that may or may not be online.
I'm sure you may have figured out most of that but may be struggling with network access in remote shells or need different credentials other than your own. You need to enable CredSSP on your remote computers for passthrough authentication (for network access in remote shells). You can enable this in AD for Win7 computers but its a bit more work for WinXP. Using CredSSP requires you to pass credentials. Here is an example that pulls those together.
$Cred = Get-Credential .\computers.txt | %{ Invoke-Command -ComputerName "$_.doman" -AsJob -Credential $Cred -Authentication CredSSP -ScriptBlock { //server/share/program.exe } }
Get-Content
In this Get-Credential will prompt for the username password. I changed the ScriptBlock to run a program off a network share. This would have failed in the first example. One other thing about using CredSSP, it needs a FQDN of the computer. I am not sure if this is any simpler than psexec. I remember using it for automation years ago but have forgotten all about it. I do find all of this easy to remember though.
I find myself running commands like this all the time now. Combining this with Get-QADComputer from quest to get computer accounts and having wake on lan scriptable will give you tons of power. I just wanted to share with you and everyone else how cool the remoting features of PowerShell can be.
They need to just focus on smartphone integration. The people craving these features are the early adopters that already have a smartphone. You can get navigation and internet radio with that already.
Our privacy policy:
You have no expectation of privacy. We will collect any and all information you or your computer is willing to give us and do whatever we want with that information. Use of this site is entirely optional. Use at your own risk.
it was only a matter of time.
Check the name on the cert. if it is self signed, then you just have to deal with it. But if it is root signed, look at the site name. If you can find a way to use that site address to access the device then you will not get prompted.
My home router has a valid cert, but I would use the ip address and get prompted every time. I ended up making an entry in my host file for "linksys" at that address. Now when I go to https://linksys/ everything is ok.
At the end of the day, remember the whole reason these devices use SSL is not so you can verify the connection. They use it to encrypt the connection. It is so much better to use SSL instead of plain text, even though the cert is not root signed.
If you make your microsoft certificate authority the domain authority, I think that it will automatically distribute the root cert to every domain joined computer at the next computer policy refresh.
Not only that, but there is a section of group policy just for certificates. It is very easy to work with (if you are using a Microsoft authority).
The cost is that of another server (or a few servers for a large organisation).
I have 100% replaced my cable TV. I watch a lot of TV. Well, I have the TV on a lot if I am watching it or not. I use it kind of like a radio.
The programming is also perfect for kids. They have just a few shows that they watch over and over again, the icons are big enough that they can tell what the show is.
I am watching a lot of old shows that I forgot about. Catching an old series from episode 1 forward is great.
I also have Hulu for the more current shows.
This is wonderful and cheap. I pay less than 10$ for all my TV entertainment now (on top of my internet connection). If you look at it that way, for people that drop Cable TV and Dish TV, if they had to pay an additional 10$-40$ for a better internet connection or more bandwidth, they would still be saving money each month. I am paying about 60$ a month less than I was with Dish TV.
I expect that at some point things will balance back out again. I don't want the fact that I am watching a lot of Netflix to impact my internet service, but I expect that it will at some point.
Use a switched network ....
This is a packet sniffer. If you are on a switched network, the degree of difficulty to pull this off is much greater. it is not a solution because of other tricks like arp poisoning.
This is nothing new, but it is good publicity to remind people how important SSL is. This addon did not change anything except now more script kiddies have access to another tool.
Verifying that every client received the same message is fairly easy. You can just collect the logs and compare. A good damage meter does more than that.
With that said, if they would have built a damage meter then the logs would be more accurate and the resulting damage meter would be more accurate.
The early damage mods parsed the combat log as text. So every mob that had the same name was the same mob. single pulls were fine, but double pulls of the same mob was confusing. Then pets were an issue. If 2 people had a wolf named wolf or god help you if someone named the pet after someone else in the raid. Blizzard saw this issue and revamped the logs so there were ID numbers for mobs.
I wrote a damage meter once for another game (when people told me it was impossible to do in AOC). Text parsing natural language combat logs is not fun but it is doable.
Even though no information has been released yet, I would expect to see something in the next 2 years. That would put Windows 7 at 3 years old. If we don't see a release, we should be seeing some betas by then. They will not wait 5 years again like they did from XP to Vista and the Vista to Win 7 timeline was 3 years.
Good point.
I just used that example because AOC was released just ahead of Warhammer. It was another game that slipped release dates and shipped an unfinished product. They had good solid release numbers and a very sharp decline in subscribers because it was unfinished. It sounds like AoC has made progress in the months after. But in the window of time where Warhammer was released, AoC looked like it was going to die an early death.
Warhammer didn't do it self any favors by releasing so close to a WoW expansion either. I tried AoC for 2 months and skipped over Warhammer partly because of the pending WoW expansion.
I guess they did not learn anything from Age of Conan.
And if you are traveling internationally, they will charge you international rates to receive that message.
Although that is a small price to pay. Knowing that you racked up $1,000 in charges the first day instead of $7,000 after you get back. But you know someone will complain about that $0.20 message.
It was nice to see the users take a stand and for the ISP to notice.
When I was in high school we had a pre-windows PC lab of 15-20 computers and a Mac lab of 12-14 computers. One day I returned to the PC lab at the end of the day for something and I saw the PC teacher and the Mac teacher sitting at a computer. They called me over to them asking if I knew anything about this.
They told me this computer had a virus and it had my name on it. As soon as they said that, I remembered what I did. I did a net send to all the computers in the PC lab with the message "This is a virus" earlier in the day. They were not happy with me at the time and it took a bit of work for me to explain that it was not a virus, just a message saying it was a virus.
I am having a hard time installing windows to this new expensive secure drive. It gives me an operating system not found error after the first reboot.
We fight with this type of stuff all the time. The market price for things and the amount IT "charges" for the same thing can be way out of line. What I usually see is some large infrastructure investment by IT gets broken up and tacked onto other services charged to the departments that depend on them. Your TB drive may cost $100 but it may be in a high end raid on a server with some fault tolerance attached to a UPS ran by a full team of support. The company can either cover the cost of IT or hand it back to you based on the services you use.
You may be able to get away with getting you own 1TB drive and not paying the IT tax. But if the IT expenses are not being met, they will find other ways to charge you.
I would kind of like to start charging our departments something for network space. It goes unchecked at the moment. I have 16 out of 500 users that use 1/2 of our home folder storage.
Well, it is still not legal to keep using the software after the contract is up if it required to keep your software license. It is just not a DMCA violation to do so.
If they properly test the device, the everything should be covered.
I think the FDA does need to realize there is a software component. For no other reason then to require a full recertification of the devise every time the firmware changes. The risk I see is that an item gets certified and then bugs get introduced later if future firmware updates.
The FDA should also be notified of any bugs uncovered in existing firmware. Put the responsibility of deciding if an item needs recalled our of the hands of the company. I think there are other measures that can be put in place without requiring manufacturers to open source the code.
With that said, if the FDA did start looking at the source code, that would not be a bad thing.
Somebody set up us the script bomb
A pass phrase is not that bad of an idea. It does not have to be 200 chars long, but a few words that mean something to you stringed together. If nobody can see you type it, then they will have no clue its a pass phrase. If they see you tap space every 4-7 chars they will figure it out.
For a while, I used the phrase "I am the administrator!" for my workstation admin password. 23 very easy characters to remember. It is such a simple password to remember and hard to guess.