Very, very true. It's hard to quantify the value of bad things not happening.
If you keep your PCs patched with current security updates, and you have a decent software firewall or IDS/IPS system installed on the laptop, along with current antivirus definitions, then there should be relatively little risk of bringing something nasty back home. There's still the possibility of sniffing, but VPN software helps there, and that is still much less likely than picking up an infection.
Even so, infections can happen. A few months ago, some spam sneaked under our spam filter radar.
A bigwig, who was probably less alert than usual this morning, actually opened the attachment, which contained a worm using an exploit for a just-released Windows vulnerability, so recent that the patch wasn't rolled into our own patch server yet. The worm scrubbed the email address in the browser cache (of course, Bigwig uses IE) and started spamming and replicating. Replication attempts quickly died as antivirus and patches kicked in. And the bigwig was man enough to admit it was his fault. Morale of the story: even with cutting edge automation, you still have "Windows" of vulnerability. Me? I watched the hubbub with the amused smirk of a Linux user.
Oh, and our confidential Pentagon customers are now in a spammer's email database courtesy of that virus.
True, if your users are disciplined and you have a budget for automation. I guess it depends how much discipline your users are ready to abide to and how much automation you have. If you have an automatic system in place for detecting worms and unpatched PCs, as well as a network policy that disconnects unpatched or wormed up machines, then the admin-to-PC ratio comes closer to what you mention. But the author here sounds like he's in a much less comfy situation.
I've seen places where bigwigs routinely connected their laptops to random wireless links in airports, homes or hotel rooms, then brought back a dozen viruses and worms to their company's network. You can imagine how the bigwigs liked being told that they were the cause of the damage. If you don't have that kind of timesinks in your place, then you're in much better conditions than most small shop"s sysadmins out there.
You should point out that compliance with government regulation (especially for contractors) requires a good IS system. Otherwise, sooner or later, you'll have to supply records that you don't have. Talk with your accountants, see what they need.
I'm too overloaded. With 93 permanent users and 110 workstations (some are floaters), I can't do both systems work and admin work (my title is Systems Administrator, but I carry no management authority) on my own.
Your best friend is the schedule sheet. Such a sheet has the week's calendar detailed down to the half hour. If someone asks you to deworm a PC or deTrojan a Windows laptop, get your schedule sheet and book the next available 2 hours. Block time in advance for other sysadmin duties. Full schedule? Just tell the user his PC will be dewormed next month. When you have a few dissatisfied users, bring your ultra-full, scribbled schedule sheet to management and use it to prove you need help. DON'T DO UNCOMPENSATED OVERTIME. Take vacations, preferably on short notice. You don't have a backup? Well, ain't that too bad. Think you could hire one, boss?
As a rule of thumb, you need one full time person per 30 Windows PCs, plus one guy to cover for vacation and such. I don't know how you can keep up with a hundred Windows machines to maintain by yourself.
If your boss wants to save on sysadmin salaries, he can move his users to Linux PCs, with critical programs (e.g., macro-ridden Excel spreadsheets) running on Windows images under VMWare. Inside the image, have apps save to network drives (Samba is your friend), not to C:. Archive the images, they are just large files in Linux. When the Windows image catches a virus, just restore a fresh version from your storage server instead of spending hours fixing the Windows crap. You'd be amazed at how much time this little trick saves. Users have their Windows apps and you have manageable systems, everyone is happy.
The ESA got already burned once with a spacecraft of the same class as the Kliper project. The ill-fated
Hermès reuseable manned spacecraft
looks eerily similar to the Kliper. It was marred by cost overrun, political infights and technical difficulties.
The link doesn't mention it, but I remember reading an article about then-curring edeg FEM (finite element method) thermal simulations on the Hermes nose cone. Computations
showed that the nose cone would overheat during reentry and that the material of choice for the nose cone tile was unobtainium. Of course, it might just have been a technical excuse to scrap a project doomed by management failures, as is too often the case with state-run projects.
That's correct. Basically, anything looking like a media (prerecorded tape, CD, DVD, book) is a "cultural good" for the French regulators. So this law would make it illegal to read any media with a software that bypasses DRM, such as DeCSS.
The key point is that an open source software cannot integrate a DRM system because 1. their algorithms are generally not available except under NDA and paid license, and 2. Even if a DRM-infected OSS software was released, it would be trivial to extirpate the DRM part from the code and release a DRM-free forked version.
By forbidding DRM bypassing, they outlaw brilliant hacks such as DeCSS.
So in France, the heinous crime of trying to watch a DVD on your Linux machine will land you in jail. I'd rather recommand Frenchmen to pursue
safer activities that obviously aren't
actively repressed.
Thank you, thank you, Mr. Stapleton! Now these damn kids will finally get off my lawn! And I can at last get even with these young idiots playing rap music at a windows-rattling volume.
Yup, cell phone services cost a fortune. And since there are now two main telecom companies in the US, it's going to stay that way. It's about time the stock holders get some of their money back, boys and girls. Let me remind you how it was.
Back in 1984 (how appropriate), evil Judge Greene
dismantled the AT&T monopoly. Instead of a benevolent Ma Bell guiding hapless consumers through an ever-more complex world, we entered an area of free-for-all market. Ma Bell was split into 6 entities. Suddenly, there were multiple telecom providers! Phones sold in stores instead of rented! Competition! Falling prices! Granted, the USA then experienced an unprecedented telecom boom. But telecom stock went into the crapper.
For almost two decades, this orgy of consumer felicity continued unabatted. Then, fortunately, the Clinton administration issued the 1996 Telecom Act, which watered down Greene's edict and allowed a wave of mergers to take place in the telecom industry.
Now, only two telecom companies remain, having absorbed all the baby Bells. We are finally seeing prices climb and customer service go back into the abysses where it belongs. But it was a long, hard road.
The ending of the original series was a big let down. Looked like the producers and writers got afraid to take a stand and settled for a "you have to imagine it" ending. I hope that this time they'll fix it and make it plain instead of cheating the audience.
And I sure hope they won't put together a half-baked end chapter where they blame the CIA or the Nazis or involve an alien conspiracy.
Precisely. The point is that they are saying the wall warts and other always-on transformers are equivalent to a 100 W load average. It translates into a 2.4 kWh extra consumption per day, or about extra 72 kWh on your monthly bill.
The "100 W average" info is enough to determine exactly the associated cost. In your fuel equivalence, a watt is similar to gallons per hour. If you have the info "1 gallon per hour average", you know exactly what your monthly costs will be.
But the writer thinks his audience is dumb. So he feels the need to add something to explain a number that doesn't need explanation. In essence, he says, "That average. Over a day. You know, 24 hours. Like, averaged." That's either patronizing or the mark of a lack of understanding.
Kilowatt-hours and Joules are equivalent units. 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ (million Joules). An average is an average, that's my point. You don't need to say "per day, it's like 24 hours. And oh, in a year, that would be like 365 days, dude". We get the idea.
The problem with the article is this: They are saying the wall warts and other always-on transformers are equivalent to a 100 W load average. OK, fine. It translates into 0.1*24= 2.4 kWh extra consumption per day, or about extra 72 kWh on your monthly bill.
The "100 W average" info is enough to determine exactly the associated cost. In your fuel equivalence, a watt is similar to gallons per hour. If you have the info "1 gallon per hour average.", you know exactly what your monthly costs will be.
But the writer thinks his audience is dumb. So he feels the need to add something to explain a number that doesn't need explanation. In essence, he says, "That average. Over a day. You know, 24 hours. Like, averaged." That's either patronizing or the mark of a lack of understanding.
Hmmm, you sure about that? Last time I checked, hardware virtualization had been implemented on Unix way before it was brought to Windows by VMWare and Virtual PC. Same for RAID. Sun's NFS and RPC were way ahead of anything MS had until years later.
Quoteth the NYTese: In the typical house that's enough to light a 100-watt light bulb 24/7
Translated in human language: In the typical house that's 100 W.
By definition, watts are independant of time. Joules are a quantity of energy, and 1 watt = 1 Joule per second.
It's sad to see that the tech section of one of the US's largest newspaper feels the need to dumb down its writing, or maybe just hires incompetent writers. Drool-proof paper cannot be far.
On the plus side, no units in the article were compared to a football field or a the Library of Congress, for once. That's progress, I suppose.
This is a good idea. It would be quite simple to do on Linux, provided you standardize on a few things (e.g., the download folder or the download manager, as well as always invoking a wrapper program when you start editing a file). On Windows, it might require more work.
The one missing piece, however, is an automated program to silently convert.DOC and other input formats to ODT. This could be done with an OOo macro. An example is given here: http://www.ooomacros.org/user.php#95532. The macro simply opens the specified files and saves then as PDF. If you alter the macro to save as ODT and remove or archive the original, you have the functionality you need.
The wikipedia article is bunk. Methamphetamines were not mass-manufactured in Europe at the time. And the only non-med pills on regulation list were the caffeine pills that submariners popped on long watches. Even that was rather exceptional because the reported after-effects were that the caffeinated watchmen started getting useless, effectively awake but not able to identify and report threats.
There are extensive military archives and memoirs, and then there is Wikipedia. Guess which is more accurate?
I must confess we haven't upgraded our machines to the latest OOo, so we still use.sxw. But you're right, of course: If you are a new installation and thus have the newest OOo, use the ODT format rather than the old one.
The key is to realize that complex MS Word documents are unstable: even when edited only with Word, they tend to accumulate cruft, that is, subtle changes of layout and format in parts nobody touched. When you open them with OOo, these unpredictable changes can really screw you up.
So the trick is this: when you edit a.DOC file with OOo, convert it to the OOo format (.sxw) as soon as you start. Make sure the format is OK. Keep the file in.sxw format inside the company.
When you need to interface with the outside world, publish the.DOC by saving in this format if needed. If you don't need outside people to actually edit the document, export it from OOo as a PDF, which is read-only, and publish the PDF instead of the DOC.
What I don't understand is this: XCP has been around for about a year. It's a rootkit. Its modifications in the Win32 vector table are glaringly obvious and thus detectable if you know what to look for. So why didn't the MS antivirus detect it previously? Or doesn't MS tool check for rootkits?
Ungrounded conductive layers do not properly shield you from radio waves. However, if you ground your aluminium foil hat, the electric field associated with a radio signal is attenuated dramatically.
Which is why the real paranoid can easily be identified from the chain or copper wire attached to his foil hat that trails behind him.
Synthetic fabric carpets prevent the grounding effect of the wire, and you'll notice these carpets are standard issue in government building. Coincidence? I think not.
The Wired article perpetuates the same old tiresome mistake, that is, that the term "bug" originated from a moth found in a 1947 computer.
That is wrong. This is a myth that has been disproved several times. See for example the "IEEE Annals of Computer History" where Adm. Grace Hopper said that that the term "bug" was used at least since the 30s, and maybe earlier, to describe an electrical problem in a system. See also here.
In interview, Hopper confirmed that the notebook moth's caption, "First actual case of bug being found", clearly shows that it was a joke referring to a term that was already in use at the time.
Any idiot researching this anecdote for five minutes could have found about it. I guess Wired couldn't be bothered. At this level of laziness and incompetence, one wonders why they just don't start publishing printouts of slashdot laced with ads. At least, this place contains occasional nudgets of truth.
Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons):
Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 357,491 tons
Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons
At least, with nuclear power, plant operators watch radioactive releases very closely, and we avoid the huge amount of weakly radioactive dust that coal burning plant release routinely.
Re nuclear waste: yes, there are problems. But even coal-burning power plant create nuclear waste of their own, namely,
thorium and uranium rejects. These don't cause any kind of alarm because of sheer ignorance, and the coal lobbies aren't going to raise this issue.
The French and the Dutch reprocess their nuclear waste and convert the waste's plutonium into short-life radionucleides. The technology exists. It's there, it's working, it's available for licensing.
I'd much prefer working at a waste reprocessing plant than breathing the air downwind from a coal burning plant: I'd wok in reducing the amount of deadly plutonium on Earth rather than being content with misspelling words starting with a "c" on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
If you keep your PCs patched with current security updates, and you have a decent software firewall or IDS/IPS system installed on the laptop, along with current antivirus definitions, then there should be relatively little risk of bringing something nasty back home. There's still the possibility of sniffing, but VPN software helps there, and that is still much less likely than picking up an infection.
Even so, infections can happen. A few months ago, some spam sneaked under our spam filter radar. A bigwig, who was probably less alert than usual this morning, actually opened the attachment, which contained a worm using an exploit for a just-released Windows vulnerability, so recent that the patch wasn't rolled into our own patch server yet. The worm scrubbed the email address in the browser cache (of course, Bigwig uses IE) and started spamming and replicating. Replication attempts quickly died as antivirus and patches kicked in. And the bigwig was man enough to admit it was his fault. Morale of the story: even with cutting edge automation, you still have "Windows" of vulnerability. Me? I watched the hubbub with the amused smirk of a Linux user.
Oh, and our confidential Pentagon customers are now in a spammer's email database courtesy of that virus.
I've seen places where bigwigs routinely connected their laptops to random wireless links in airports, homes or hotel rooms, then brought back a dozen viruses and worms to their company's network. You can imagine how the bigwigs liked being told that they were the cause of the damage. If you don't have that kind of timesinks in your place, then you're in much better conditions than most small shop"s sysadmins out there.
I'm too overloaded. With 93 permanent users and 110 workstations (some are floaters), I can't do both systems work and admin work (my title is Systems Administrator, but I carry no management authority) on my own.
Your best friend is the schedule sheet. Such a sheet has the week's calendar detailed down to the half hour. If someone asks you to deworm a PC or deTrojan a Windows laptop, get your schedule sheet and book the next available 2 hours. Block time in advance for other sysadmin duties. Full schedule? Just tell the user his PC will be dewormed next month. When you have a few dissatisfied users, bring your ultra-full, scribbled schedule sheet to management and use it to prove you need help. DON'T DO UNCOMPENSATED OVERTIME. Take vacations, preferably on short notice. You don't have a backup? Well, ain't that too bad. Think you could hire one, boss?
As a rule of thumb, you need one full time person per 30 Windows PCs, plus one guy to cover for vacation and such. I don't know how you can keep up with a hundred Windows machines to maintain by yourself.
If your boss wants to save on sysadmin salaries, he can move his users to Linux PCs, with critical programs (e.g., macro-ridden Excel spreadsheets) running on Windows images under VMWare. Inside the image, have apps save to network drives (Samba is your friend), not to C:. Archive the images, they are just large files in Linux. When the Windows image catches a virus, just restore a fresh version from your storage server instead of spending hours fixing the Windows crap. You'd be amazed at how much time this little trick saves. Users have their Windows apps and you have manageable systems, everyone is happy.
The link doesn't mention it, but I remember reading an article about then-curring edeg FEM (finite element method) thermal simulations on the Hermes nose cone. Computations showed that the nose cone would overheat during reentry and that the material of choice for the nose cone tile was unobtainium. Of course, it might just have been a technical excuse to scrap a project doomed by management failures, as is too often the case with state-run projects.
The key point is that an open source software cannot integrate a DRM system because 1. their algorithms are generally not available except under NDA and paid license, and 2. Even if a DRM-infected OSS software was released, it would be trivial to extirpate the DRM part from the code and release a DRM-free forked version.
By forbidding DRM bypassing, they outlaw brilliant hacks such as DeCSS.
So in France, the heinous crime of trying to watch a DVD on your Linux machine will land you in jail. I'd rather recommand Frenchmen to pursue safer activities that obviously aren't actively repressed.
Thank you, thank you, Mr. Stapleton! Now these damn kids will finally get off my lawn! And I can at last get even with these young idiots playing rap music at a windows-rattling volume.
Forget mad science, Stapleton perfected crusty science!
I have a new hero.
Back in 1984 (how appropriate), evil Judge Greene dismantled the AT&T monopoly. Instead of a benevolent Ma Bell guiding hapless consumers through an ever-more complex world, we entered an area of free-for-all market. Ma Bell was split into 6 entities. Suddenly, there were multiple telecom providers! Phones sold in stores instead of rented! Competition! Falling prices! Granted, the USA then experienced an unprecedented telecom boom. But telecom stock went into the crapper.
For almost two decades, this orgy of consumer felicity continued unabatted. Then, fortunately, the Clinton administration issued the 1996 Telecom Act, which watered down Greene's edict and allowed a wave of mergers to take place in the telecom industry.
Now, only two telecom companies remain, having absorbed all the baby Bells. We are finally seeing prices climb and customer service go back into the abysses where it belongs. But it was a long, hard road.
(Yes, it was sarcasm. Thanks for noticing).
And I sure hope they won't put together a half-baked end chapter where they blame the CIA or the Nazis or involve an alien conspiracy.
C'mon, guys, grow a spine.
The "100 W average" info is enough to determine exactly the associated cost. In your fuel equivalence, a watt is similar to gallons per hour. If you have the info "1 gallon per hour average", you know exactly what your monthly costs will be.
But the writer thinks his audience is dumb. So he feels the need to add something to explain a number that doesn't need explanation. In essence, he says, "That average. Over a day. You know, 24 hours. Like, averaged." That's either patronizing or the mark of a lack of understanding.
Kilowatt-hours and Joules are equivalent units. 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ (million Joules). An average is an average, that's my point. You don't need to say "per day, it's like 24 hours. And oh, in a year, that would be like 365 days, dude". We get the idea.
The "100 W average" info is enough to determine exactly the associated cost. In your fuel equivalence, a watt is similar to gallons per hour. If you have the info "1 gallon per hour average.", you know exactly what your monthly costs will be.
But the writer thinks his audience is dumb. So he feels the need to add something to explain a number that doesn't need explanation. In essence, he says, "That average. Over a day. You know, 24 hours. Like, averaged." That's either patronizing or the mark of a lack of understanding.
My metric-formatted brain hurst now. Ouch.
Hmmm, you sure about that? Last time I checked, hardware virtualization had been implemented on Unix way before it was brought to Windows by VMWare and Virtual PC. Same for RAID. Sun's NFS and RPC were way ahead of anything MS had until years later.
Translated in human language: In the typical house that's 100 W.
By definition, watts are independant of time. Joules are a quantity of energy, and 1 watt = 1 Joule per second.
It's sad to see that the tech section of one of the US's largest newspaper feels the need to dumb down its writing, or maybe just hires incompetent writers. Drool-proof paper cannot be far.
On the plus side, no units in the article were compared to a football field or a the Library of Congress, for once. That's progress, I suppose.
Why would you hate PDF? It's a documented format with open-source readers and producers.
The one missing piece, however, is an automated program to silently convert .DOC and other input formats to ODT. This could be done with an OOo macro. An example is given here: http://www.ooomacros.org/user.php#95532. The macro simply opens the specified files and saves then as PDF. If you alter the macro to save as ODT and remove or archive the original, you have the functionality you need.
Hope it helps.
There are extensive military archives and memoirs, and then there is Wikipedia. Guess which is more accurate?
I must confess we haven't upgraded our machines to the latest OOo, so we still use .sxw. But you're right, of course: If you are a new installation and thus have the newest OOo, use the ODT format rather than the old one.
So the trick is this: when you edit a .DOC file with OOo, convert it to the OOo format (.sxw) as soon as you start. Make sure the format is OK. Keep the file in .sxw format inside the company.
When you need to interface with the outside world, publish the .DOC by saving in this format if needed. If you don't need outside people to actually edit the document, export it from OOo as a PDF, which is read-only, and publish the PDF instead of the DOC.
And remember to edit only the .sxw file.
What I don't understand is this: XCP has been around for about a year. It's a rootkit. Its modifications in the Win32 vector table are glaringly obvious and thus detectable if you know what to look for. So why didn't the MS antivirus detect it previously? Or doesn't MS tool check for rootkits?
Which is why the real paranoid can easily be identified from the chain or copper wire attached to his foil hat that trails behind him.
Synthetic fabric carpets prevent the grounding effect of the wire, and you'll notice these carpets are standard issue in government building. Coincidence? I think not.
That is wrong. This is a myth that has been disproved several times. See for example the "IEEE Annals of Computer History" where Adm. Grace Hopper said that that the term "bug" was used at least since the 30s, and maybe earlier, to describe an electrical problem in a system. See also here.
In interview, Hopper confirmed that the notebook moth's caption, "First actual case of bug being found", clearly shows that it was a joke referring to a term that was already in use at the time.
Any idiot researching this anecdote for five minutes could have found about it. I guess Wired couldn't be bothered. At this level of laziness and incompetence, one wonders why they just don't start publishing printouts of slashdot laced with ads. At least, this place contains occasional nudgets of truth.
Once again, Wired blew it. Nice jobs, guys.
Well said, John. Thanks for the reply.
Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons):
At least, with nuclear power, plant operators watch radioactive releases very closely, and we avoid the huge amount of weakly radioactive dust that coal burning plant release routinely.
The French and the Dutch reprocess their nuclear waste and convert the waste's plutonium into short-life radionucleides. The technology exists. It's there, it's working, it's available for licensing.
I'd much prefer working at a waste reprocessing plant than breathing the air downwind from a coal burning plant: I'd wok in reducing the amount of deadly plutonium on Earth rather than being content with misspelling words starting with a "c" on slashdot.