Yeah, you could do that, but I think that a possibility that rarely gets talked about is that of an EMP bomb. A few of these in strategic locations (I'm thinking Silicon Valley, DC, etc.) would not only thrash the Net by ruining colocation facilities, routers, etc., but the economic implications would be unbelievable. Anyone touting a "Digital Pearl Harbor" ought to be aware of just how fragile our technology really is.
I don't care the least bit about MSN. BUT...The other day I tried to run windows update on an over-the-hill machine here at work that is going back into service. I think that it had IE 3 loaded on it, and I couldn't view the windowsupdate.microsoft.com page with it. I put Mozilla on the machine, figuring that my problems would be solved, but I just got a blank page. I didn't think that it was a big deal at the time, but now I'm thinking that this was no accident. During the anti-trust trial they made a big deal out of showing how Windows could function perfectly well without IE. Perhaps, but how can I update my system (critical patches, etc.) without it? A big deal? Not really. A pain in the ass? I think so. So I installed IE. *sigh*
I agree completely that the political aspects of code red have gotten it a lot more media hype. But aside from just the "attack" on whitehouse.gov, what about that "Hacked by Chinese" defacement that was (is?) supposed to be popping up all over the place? The US media loves a good story about those darned Chinese. I think that this may have helped the hype along as well. BTW, has anyone actually seen one of these defacements?
Agreed, on all points. This scenario mirrors my experience nearly perfectly.
In my experience, the worst case of this occurred when I worked for a friend of mine to whom IT/IS was outsourced. The client was/is (I think that they still exist) a dot-com. The worst kind, too...San Francisco, South-of-Market, ALL (from top to bottom) Prima Donnas without the skills to back it up. (BTW, Can you/imagine/? A dot-com outsourcing tech support?!?) Anyway, Most of my billable hours were with this client. I got shafted when a few people there made complaints about my productivity, hours billed, and a few other ad hominem attacks. In short, I had no idea that this was coming. The (then) president of that particular company went to my friend/boss, the shit hit the fan, and even though my friend/boss stuck by me, the knife was already firmly planted in my back. So...without that twenty billable hours a week, I had to go. Without that money coming in, my friend/boss had to hire somebody else for that account, and I couldn't afford to live on half pay.
As it turns out, one of the knife wielders was a programmer that the client had hired to build them an e-commerce system. I found out a few months after my downfall that/none/ of the people who set me up with the crap there worked there anymore. They got their VC money, some people got fired, the president got forced out, and the programmer quit because his buddy got fired when they found out that he had been using their servers to store shit for other people that had nothing to do with the company. And the programmer? I always knew he was a prick, but it turned out that he really hadn't gotten very much done over the course of the last/many/ months. I can't imagine that I could have been much of a threat to him, but he was one of the people complaining about me. Anyway... Redemption for me? Perhaps a bit.;)
Anyway, I've learned a few more things since then, and now I'm doing pretty good. But, just as you described, the particular kind of Prima Donnas that worry/me/ the most are the one's who think that you'll make them look bad. When they are, in fact, BAD...well, they have the most to lose.
Sheesh, I ought to get more sleep. For a minute there I thought that you were talking about Ohm's Law... *grin*
But upon further reading, I think that this/can/ be a very valuable philosophy for workplace survival. I know that I've gotten burned in the past. Not because I was ascting the prima donna--but rather because I failed to consider what the prima donnas around me might be up to when I wasn't around to defend myself. After all, some people will sooner make everyone else look bad in order to "improve" their position.
The flipside of this, of course, is that there is nothing worse than fear and paranoia to make just about any job worse. I try to be careful (because everyone/is/ replaceable), but not get overly neurotic about it. Finding that middle ground has made me happier, more secure, and undoubtedly more productive in the workplace.
butthole
(thing) by edgarde ? Sat Nov 13 1999 at 10:07 utc
An informal but relatively inoffensive word for anus. You can more or less say "butthole" on american television if hardly anyone is watching. If the Butthole Surfers were named the Asshole Surfers they never would have gotten produced by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. Incidentally, tho I don't wanna dwell on this rock music too much, the Butthole Surfers were originally named The Inaliable Right To Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole. Not very commercial.
Hope that helps, Bob. *grin*
Have you updated your BIND?
on
New Linux Worm
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· Score: 1
If I'm not mistaken, this worm exploits the same BIND vulnerability discussed here. So if you've upgraded BIND, you ought to be okay.
All those stupid business men who have invented web technologies, thinking they were going to get rich. They're ticked because we've taken all the new gadgets and they haven't got a penny back.
Actually, just my two cents worth, but I think that it could be argued that the "stupid business men" might have thought that they could get rich without inventing cool web technologies, but rather by exploiting them. Take the boom/bust of the dot-coms, for example. Did any of the companies actually offer anything new or innovative? It seems to me that many of them simply looked at the framework that had already been laid (with the help of projects like Apache, Sendmail, any number of open protocols, etc.) and just sold stuff that already existed, more or less. Of course, they can never make enough money, so the latest idea is to patent any technology that moves.
You're right, the internet has served the people well, and I don't see that changing. For a few years we have seen a massive inflation in people's expectations of what the web could do for them. ("Wow! Buying pet food online! I've been waiting my whole life for this!") Now that the wind is coming out of the dot-com sails, people are perhaps starting to realize that they had unrealistic expectations for the net. But those of us who aren't just in it for a quick buck know that the net is not a failure, and we will continue to find new and better uses for it (patent pending).
Sorry for ranting on an on...
For what it's worth, O'Reilly puts out some pretty informative Windows-related books. The "Annoyances" (as in "Windows 98 Annoyances") series has proven helpful to me on more than one occasion. My job, unfortunately, involves administering ~40 Win9x desktops and 5 NT4 servers. The job is made considerably more tolerable given good references (including O'Reilly books), and helpful tools (like the "Quick Solutions" CD included with the above mentioned book.
If they don't like the test results, they say the test was illegal and it doesn't count(They did this a while back with a few Linux vs. NT tests too).
You're right, but in all fairness, the NT vs. Linux benchmark war went both ways. Here is an old Slashdot article to show you what I mean. But it's all pretty silly when you get right down to it.
Wasn't it once said that there are kinds of falsehoods: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks? *grin* Just a thought...
I can't claim to be the best (or anything close to it), but back around 1990 I got one of those arcade-style flattop Pong machines for $50. It died after a year or so, and I can't remember the high-scores, but I had friends who would play for well over an hour per game. Pretty ridiculous what people will do with their time when they're bored!
The article used the example of a word processor being invoked when the user hits a key. I wonder how the word processor would know that anyone was typing at all without an OS of/some/ sort, even a minimal one. And once you've got your word processor running, how do you print your document? Where is the spooloer? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that there has to be an OS, though not necessarily a bulky or very "visible" one.
Actually, if you refer back to the Wired article, the link that was included with the quote I referenced led to a securityfocus.com article outlining the BIND holes that were recently uncovered. That's what gave me the impression that this was the subject being referenced. If not, then perhaps it's Wired who ought to get their act together. I was just commenting on the article which as it appeared.
"And the recent security problems with Linux... really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added.
So I guess that bind and linux are one and the same now? Is that what they're saying? This is almost laughable, but for the fact that it will be believed by too many nimrods who put too much faith in what Wired has to say.
classic computing is a Good Thing, IMHO
on
PDP-10 Revival
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· Score: 1
If anyone is interested, I happened across a pretty enjoyable site regarding old-school computers and computing. Perhaps there is no practical application for this stuff, but since when did that matter so much?
If we weren't just "scratching an itch", would open-source exist?
Oh, and does anyone have any links to interesting HP3000/MPE stuff? I used to work with one, and I want to know more... Cheers!
Perhaps this will be considered Off-Topic, but I don't think that it is:
"_Any_ additional player getting a larger share legitimises the very concept of 'additional player'."
I hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes a certain amount of sense. What it reminds me of is the argument (in the US) regarding elections and "third party candidates". I think that OS X has the potential to take just as much market share from MS as it does from Linux. Personally, if I had to name one thing that I have hated the most about MacOS, it is the inability to get a command line and/get things done/. This, and other problems (memory management?) are addressed in OS X, though to be fair I don't have a Mac and haven't used it much. But back to the point:
If Apple can open up the OS market a bit in the public opinion (and as a bonus, expose more people to *NIX), then it benefits Linux in the long run.
And back to my political analogy: even Pat Buchannan supported Ralph Nader's (along with his own) inclusion in the presidential debates. Cheers...
You nailed it. The Bay Area--already a crowded place--gets more crowded every time that some yuppie/dot-commer/whatever buys another god damned SUV. 15 MPG, and drive it everywhere. Don't build new power plants...we've got to live here! Buy the power from the Pacific Northwest, but don't dare raise my PG&E (electric co.) bill! I need that money to support my $10/day coffee habit! Dump the nuke waste in Nevada. California is important...Nevada is not, right? California is so god damned arrogant about this kind of stuff. If you want to live in a great place like that, you've got to pay the price. It's just part of the deal. I don't need to remind anyone from CA what they're paying in rent... Okay, enough scatter-brained ranting for one day:)
I din't know...I've always considered NC pretty "out there". I think that this would be a particularly creepy place to work, like a haunted house or something. What was going on in this place when Kennedy was shot?
I hadn't realized that this thing was still going on, but I tried to look at yahoo 30 minutes ago, and struck out. WTF? Like many people that I know/work with, I often use yahoo and a point to ping to determine internet connectivity...'cause it's ALWAYS up:). When I pinged yahoo, though, I got (DUP!)--duplicate packets...and I'm not sure what that means. I looked at the ping man page, and it more or less just said that it was A Bad Thing. Can anyone tell me more about what duplicate packets are indicative of? Thanks...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you could do that, but I think that a possibility that rarely gets talked about is that of an EMP bomb. A few of these in strategic locations (I'm thinking Silicon Valley, DC, etc.) would not only thrash the Net by ruining colocation facilities, routers, etc., but the economic implications would be unbelievable. Anyone touting a "Digital Pearl Harbor" ought to be aware of just how fragile our technology really is.
I don't care the least bit about MSN. BUT...The other day I tried to run windows update on an over-the-hill machine here at work that is going back into service. I think that it had IE 3 loaded on it, and I couldn't view the windowsupdate.microsoft.com page with it. I put Mozilla on the machine, figuring that my problems would be solved, but I just got a blank page. I didn't think that it was a big deal at the time, but now I'm thinking that this was no accident. During the anti-trust trial they made a big deal out of showing how Windows could function perfectly well without IE. Perhaps, but how can I update my system (critical patches, etc.) without it? A big deal? Not really. A pain in the ass? I think so. So I installed IE. *sigh*
I agree completely that the political aspects of code red have gotten it a lot more media hype. But aside from just the "attack" on whitehouse.gov, what about that "Hacked by Chinese" defacement that was (is?) supposed to be popping up all over the place? The US media loves a good story about those darned Chinese. I think that this may have helped the hype along as well. BTW, has anyone actually seen one of these defacements?
Agreed, on all points. This scenario mirrors my experience nearly perfectly.
In my experience, the worst case of this occurred when I worked for a friend of mine to whom IT/IS was outsourced. The client was/is (I think that they still exist) a dot-com. The worst kind, too...San Francisco, South-of-Market, ALL (from top to bottom) Prima Donnas without the skills to back it up. (BTW, Can you /imagine/? A dot-com outsourcing tech support?!?) Anyway, Most of my billable hours were with this client. I got shafted when a few people there made complaints about my productivity, hours billed, and a few other ad hominem attacks. In short, I had no idea that this was coming. The (then) president of that particular company went to my friend/boss, the shit hit the fan, and even though my friend/boss stuck by me, the knife was already firmly planted in my back. So...without that twenty billable hours a week, I had to go. Without that money coming in, my friend/boss had to hire somebody else for that account, and I couldn't afford to live on half pay.
As it turns out, one of the knife wielders was a programmer that the client had hired to build them an e-commerce system. I found out a few months after my downfall that /none/ of the people who set me up with the crap there worked there anymore. They got their VC money, some people got fired, the president got forced out, and the programmer quit because his buddy got fired when they found out that he had been using their servers to store shit for other people that had nothing to do with the company. And the programmer? I always knew he was a prick, but it turned out that he really hadn't gotten very much done over the course of the last /many/ months. I can't imagine that I could have been much of a threat to him, but he was one of the people complaining about me. Anyway... Redemption for me? Perhaps a bit. ;)
Anyway, I've learned a few more things since then, and now I'm doing pretty good. But, just as you described, the particular kind of Prima Donnas that worry /me/ the most are the one's who think that you'll make them look bad. When they are, in fact, BAD...well, they have the most to lose.
Sheesh, I ought to get more sleep. For a minute there I thought that you were talking about Ohm's Law... *grin* But upon further reading, I think that this /can/ be a very valuable philosophy for workplace survival. I know that I've gotten burned in the past. Not because I was ascting the prima donna--but rather because I failed to consider what the prima donnas around me might be up to when I wasn't around to defend myself. After all, some people will sooner make everyone else look bad in order to "improve" their position.
The flipside of this, of course, is that there is nothing worse than fear and paranoia to make just about any job worse. I try to be careful (because everyone /is/ replaceable), but not get overly neurotic about it. Finding that middle ground has made me happier, more secure, and undoubtedly more productive in the workplace.
Yes, in a Slashback from a couple of days ago. Interesting case, though...
Or Kashmir.
butthole
(thing) by edgarde ? Sat Nov 13 1999 at 10:07 utc
An informal but relatively inoffensive word for anus. You can more or less say "butthole" on american television if hardly anyone is watching. If the Butthole Surfers were named the Asshole Surfers they never would have gotten produced by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. Incidentally, tho I don't wanna dwell on this rock music too much, the Butthole Surfers were originally named The Inaliable Right To Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole. Not very commercial.
Hope that helps, Bob. *grin*
If I'm not mistaken, this worm exploits the same BIND vulnerability discussed here. So if you've upgraded BIND, you ought to be okay.
Right?
For instance, what if Iraq started using Linux as part of it's guided missle software?
Well, maybe we would see Linux ported to Playstation 2. *grin*
At risk of being OT, I think the fed /did/ cut interest rates by .5 percent yesterday. Doesn't change much, though...
All those stupid business men who have invented web technologies, thinking they were going to get rich. They're ticked because we've taken all the new gadgets and they haven't got a penny back.
Actually, just my two cents worth, but I think that it could be argued that the "stupid business men" might have thought that they could get rich without inventing cool web technologies, but rather by exploiting them. Take the boom/bust of the dot-coms, for example. Did any of the companies actually offer anything new or innovative? It seems to me that many of them simply looked at the framework that had already been laid (with the help of projects like Apache, Sendmail, any number of open protocols, etc.) and just sold stuff that already existed, more or less. Of course, they can never make enough money, so the latest idea is to patent any technology that moves.
You're right, the internet has served the people well, and I don't see that changing. For a few years we have seen a massive inflation in people's expectations of what the web could do for them. ("Wow! Buying pet food online! I've been waiting my whole life for this!") Now that the wind is coming out of the dot-com sails, people are perhaps starting to realize that they had unrealistic expectations for the net. But those of us who aren't just in it for a quick buck know that the net is not a failure, and we will continue to find new and better uses for it (patent pending).
Sorry for ranting on an on...
For what it's worth, O'Reilly puts out some pretty informative Windows-related books. The "Annoyances" (as in "Windows 98 Annoyances") series has proven helpful to me on more than one occasion. My job, unfortunately, involves administering ~40 Win9x desktops and 5 NT4 servers. The job is made considerably more tolerable given good references (including O'Reilly books), and helpful tools (like the "Quick Solutions" CD included with the above mentioned book.
If they don't like the test results, they say the test was illegal and it doesn't count(They did this a while back with a few Linux vs. NT tests too).
You're right, but in all fairness, the NT vs. Linux benchmark war went both ways. Here is an old Slashdot article to show you what I mean. But it's all pretty silly when you get right down to it.
Wasn't it once said that there are kinds of falsehoods: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks? *grin* Just a thought...
I can't claim to be the best (or anything close to it), but back around 1990 I got one of those arcade-style flattop Pong machines for $50. It died after a year or so, and I can't remember the high-scores, but I had friends who would play for well over an hour per game. Pretty ridiculous what people will do with their time when they're bored!
The article used the example of a word processor being invoked when the user hits a key. I wonder how the word processor would know that anyone was typing at all without an OS of /some/ sort, even a minimal one. And once you've got your word processor running, how do you print your document? Where is the spooloer? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that there has to be an OS, though not necessarily a bulky or very "visible" one.
Actually, if you refer back to the Wired article, the link that was included with the quote I referenced led to a securityfocus.com article outlining the BIND holes that were recently uncovered. That's what gave me the impression that this was the subject being referenced. If not, then perhaps it's Wired who ought to get their act together. I was just commenting on the article which as it appeared.
"And the recent security problems with Linux... really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added.
So I guess that bind and linux are one and the same now? Is that what they're saying? This is almost laughable, but for the fact that it will be believed by too many nimrods who put too much faith in what Wired has to say.
If anyone is interested, I happened across a pretty enjoyable site regarding old-school computers and computing. Perhaps there is no practical application for this stuff, but since when did that matter so much?
If we weren't just "scratching an itch", would open-source exist?
Oh, and does anyone have any links to interesting HP3000/MPE stuff? I used to work with one, and I want to know more... Cheers!
...the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Perhaps this will be considered Off-Topic, but I don't think that it is:
/get things done/. This, and other problems (memory management?) are addressed in OS X, though to be fair I don't have a Mac and haven't used it much. But back to the point:
"_Any_ additional player getting a larger share legitimises the very concept of 'additional player'."
I hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes a certain amount of sense. What it reminds me of is the argument (in the US) regarding elections and "third party candidates". I think that OS X has the potential to take just as much market share from MS as it does from Linux. Personally, if I had to name one thing that I have hated the most about MacOS, it is the inability to get a command line and
If Apple can open up the OS market a bit in the public opinion (and as a bonus, expose more people to *NIX), then it benefits Linux in the long run.
And back to my political analogy: even Pat Buchannan supported Ralph Nader's (along with his own) inclusion in the presidential debates. Cheers...
You nailed it. The Bay Area--already a crowded place--gets more crowded every time that some yuppie/dot-commer/whatever buys another god damned SUV. 15 MPG, and drive it everywhere. Don't build new power plants...we've got to live here! Buy the power from the Pacific Northwest, but don't dare raise my PG&E (electric co.) bill! I need that money to support my $10/day coffee habit! Dump the nuke waste in Nevada. California is important...Nevada is not, right? California is so god damned arrogant about this kind of stuff. If you want to live in a great place like that, you've got to pay the price. It's just part of the deal. I don't need to remind anyone from CA what they're paying in rent... Okay, enough scatter-brained ranting for one day:)
I din't know...I've always considered NC pretty "out there". I think that this would be a particularly creepy place to work, like a haunted house or something. What was going on in this place when Kennedy was shot?
I just wonder when it was that people began to care about what Wired has to say about /anything/
I hadn't realized that this thing was still going on, but I tried to look at yahoo 30 minutes ago, and struck out. WTF? Like many people that I know/work with, I often use yahoo and a point to ping to determine internet connectivity...'cause it's ALWAYS up :). When I pinged yahoo, though, I got (DUP!)--duplicate packets...and I'm not sure what that means. I looked at the ping man page, and it more or less just said that it was A Bad Thing. Can anyone tell me more about what duplicate packets are indicative of? Thanks...