Boy, Glen seems to like the sound of his name, from this feedback form to your post. It has a creepy Branch Davidian feel to it. Also, I once lived near Glen Gardner New Jersey, which wins the Google popcon in a big way. Maybe that's why it creeps me out.
Similar for the cable tv companies at least in the US. Cable companies typically reserve a few channels for displaying local information and a few times a year the system displaying the local info crashes. If you're bored you can watch as the tech troubleshoots the system and tries to get the program running again. If you're REALLY bored you can call them up on the phone and offer to help.
And if you're sneaky, you can watch and see if they ever run "winipcfg" (after all, they *are* in the same building as the head end for your cablemodem!);-)
Because business drives technology more than anything else. Just like all things tech, ATMs replaced humans because they can do a human's job 24x7x365 without taking coffee breaks or sick days. And if coded correctly, they can do it without errors. In the old days when you would sit down with a bank representative, they would ask you, "is there anything else I may help you with? Would you like to hear about our low mortgage rates? a new low-rate credit card?"
Once you replace the person with a machine, you lose the revenue stream generated by the "cold selling" tactics. So, as technology advances and the machines can handle more tasks, why not? If a company is paying to own or lease IT 24 hours a day, that IT should be earning you money 24 hours a day. Just spitting out greenbacks without advertising more products is just not taking full advantage of the technology. Business doesn't care that that's all YOU want out of the machine.
I'm just glad I'm not the only one who uses "monkey"!
There's a "box monkey" to open and unpack boxes for you when you're building servers. A "console monkey" who stares at tail -f/var/log/messages or even worse a CA TND console waiting for something highlighted yellow or red to scroll by. I used to say "desktop flunky" for one of the poor bastards who has to work the floor, but I changed it to monkey to bring it back into alignment with the others. Let's see, what else.. you mentioned "support monkey"..
Well, either way, "console monkey" and "box monkey" are my personal favorites.
Actually ALICEBot has been tweaked to serve as a salesperson with human-like conversation capabilities. When I was faced with one of the Rackspace employees, I suddenly felt like I was plunged into a Turing test.
You know, try to pick out the chatbot vs the human, using conversation kept to a well-defined list of topics (web hosting). It was fun poking at this guy to make sure he was human.
An interesting tidbit: SBC/Yahoo! DSL distributes DSL modems in Los Angeles that are secretly also access points with a minimal WEP firewall/NAT router and run a much lower power xmitter than normal. 2wire.com devices.
Saw two of them on a trip and both got sent back.. neither could get link on the provider side. Two different people, different sections of town, same excuses from SBC.. "the signal levels are really low in your part of town".
My point? The time has come where firewalls are automatically being shipped out to new broadband customers. Thank God, too. Even better, their service is so shitty the boxes are staying off the net! Can't get root if there's no path to the box, right?!:-D
Sorry, but I see doing frequent network installs from non-local mirrors as being just as detrimental to the performance of the Internet as spam. Its not sad to keep traffic off the net when its unnecessary and wasteful. On a much smaller scale, its like finding an enterprise that configures a couple thousand desktops to hit a stratum 1 NTP server out on the net vs either hosting a couple of stratum 3 servers in-house or splurging for the $300 roof-mount GPS-based stratum 1 hardware.
If you were called in as a small-time consultant to convert 100 desktops for a business over to Debian would you do 100 network installs from us.debian.org? God I hope not. You'd ask them for a machine they're no longer using (there's always a few) and rebuild it as a local mirror from CDs, and run cron-apt on the desktops, pointing to the new in-house mirror.
That's the problem with all these newcomers popping in with "they got it all wrong, and I can fix it." Their semester is almost over but they don't learn about dropping privileges until the next semester in Operating Systems Design. Its kind of sad seeing the future leaders wanting to take us away from drastically improved security practices.
Hey, new kids. Learn about Mandatory Access Controls. Start with LIDS, grsecurity, openwall, SELinux and the LSM. Plus, if you think Apache runs as root any longer than it takes to bind to port 80, then don't worry, your professor will cover it come September.
Sorry to be so gritty, but some commentators are striking fear in me about the directions they think security should go.
My father-in-law recently told me a great story about this. His current customer wanted the onsite tech to swap out some 100 keyboards because they were in disgusting shape. Instead of putting the company through all the harassment of replacing the keyboards for free, he decided to try having the cafeteria steam clean the keyboards.
He tasked a couple of box monkeys with splitting the keyboards open and pulling the keyboard assemblies out, separating them from the electronics. The cafeteria ran them through the high pressure steam cleaning dishwasher system, and they came out looking and working like new! Strange but true.
You might be surprised but Nextel is becoming quite popular in the home market. I am very close friends with a family consisting of a father, mother, 3 kids, and an aunt and an uncle. Someone always needs to be picked up somewhere. Mother at the train station. Kids at various places. Grandparents all over the place. That family makes extensive use of the Nextel. My wife also pings me to come out and help bring in the groceries as she's pulling up to the house.
Finally, thanks to the free incoming calls and unlimited 2-way radio with my wife and best friend my chargeable minutes have dropped significantly. At worst, I used over 1,200 minutes. Then I added unlimited nights & weekends, and that dropped to about 500. Added free incoming calls, and that dropped to under 200! Now that my best friend has the 2-way, too, we ping each other all the time, and I'm thinking about dropping from the free incoming 400 to the free incoming 250.
It makes such a difference when you can get the point across without all the call setup hubub. Not the technical call setup stuff, the social stuff. "Hey, its me, got a minute?"
Now its, "[beep-beep] Can I reboot the server?" "[beep-beep] Sure."
Now that NASCAR's premiere racing series is Nextel Cup, you can expect a lot more subscribers to come online in the coming months and years. We are getting *bombarded* by Nextel ads these days.
There are some of us that are forced to sit beside a bloody loud computer at ear height, and we can't move it anywhere.
Dude, you, more than anyone need to get a new job. My Dad's cousin worked with a PC next to his head for just 10 years and he's completely deaf on that side of his head. It is extremely damaging to have that kind of noise right next to your head like that. Move. Now. Nothing is worth that.
OMFG it was the nastiest thing I had ever smelled. I opened the door and nearly puked on the floor (I have a weak stomach and have puked from cat shit in a litter box). I thought someone broke into my house while I was gone and died in there. It was in June in NJ. A hot June.
I opened a bunch of windows elsewhere in the house before making it into the kitchen. I leaned over the sink and opened the window over the sink. There were hundreds of flies and hundreds more maggots crawling ALL OVER it. It must've taken half an hour to get up the strength to reach in there and throw it away in a trash bag. Then I went to the supermarket and bought fly spray and a couple bottles of Clorox Cleanup. I went through all the Clorox, but god damn that kitchen was clean when I was done.
I also went to pour out the milk, and the quart emptied as two big chunks so there I went with the weak stomach all over again.
you're extremely naive to think that the military doesn't have precise topography maps of the entire world
My thoughts exactly. I'm also figuring that OP and others probably haven't seen the training that our fighter pilots go through when preparing for missions. Radar is used to build precise 3D models of the target area. The pilots are able to fly their exact missions in simulators dozens of times before actually heading out for the real thing. I've seen many pilots saying that they can't believe how lifelike the simulator is and that everything was exactly where they expected it to be.
I recently had the opportunity to work on my cousin's PC.. her husband had been running win2k unprotected on DSL for over a month. Total whorebox. I mean they were asking me, "what is mIRC and why is it running? we didn't install it." It reminded me of the time I forgot about the chicken I left to defrost in my sink before going out on vacation -- FOR TWO WEEKS!
I formatted and reinstalled, disabled as many services as possible and filtered TCP and UDP as much as I could prior to connecting to the net. I dove in and went straight to zonelabs. I stood with my finger on the cable while the download completed and soon as the dialog showed 100%, yoink!
I installed Zone Alarm, locked it down, and went back online to start the patching party. Zone Alarm blocked the first connect (port 135, which virus was that again? there are so many..) in 43 seconds. I checked. I left the Zone Alarm control panel up to show my cousin's husband when he came home from work since it continuously updates the number of blocked access attempts. Within six hours, ZA had blocked 983 attempts. And now, three weeks later, their system is still running fine. Not that they would notice if it wasn't, but still..
I'm sorry but I've been singing "Trust Your Mechanic" from The Dead Kennedys in my head since reading these comments, and I knew it would be a matter of time before someone approached it as closely as you did..
[snip] Trust your mechanic to mend your car Bring it in to his garage He tightens and loosens a few spare parts One thing's fixed, another falls apart And the rich eat you
[snip]
Trust your mechanic To make you well You're seeing an awful lot of him now The quicker he makes your life fall apart The more money you put in his pockets
Trust your mechanic To plug your holes Trust him to make more Somewhere else Trust your mechanic He'll always come through And rip you off
I don't think I've ever wanted to rewind radio. The need just doesn't seem to be that overwhelming.
I would guess you don't commute in your car in the NYC metro area. If you only hear parts of a report about a road closing you'd want to hit the 8-second rewind a few times, too. Not to mention how many times have I (and others) just missed the latest traffic report "on the 8's" while listening to a CD.. i'd love to cache radio while playing cd's.
I have a (now) old-fashioned Motorola i95cl for Nextel. I like having the flip b/c in the closed position, the screen and keypad are protected and still look new unlike any non-flip I've ever seen. Also I can unholster it and open it with one hand by pushing a finger or two between the two halves -- it just snaps open. Also, being a Nextel, I can just push one button on the outside to answer it as a speakerphone without opening it -- which is great when I'm driving. Reach down, push one button and get right back to two-handed driving while talking on the speakerphone. Its illegal to hold a phone while driving in NJ and NY now, so its easy to comply.
I, too, was bugged by this, but I am soon about to meet with the board of directors of a community development organization and do an IT assessment for them. Apparently, they just received an $800k grant and have had 50 computers donated, but don't know what to do with any of it. My contact asked, "do we need to order a, uh, uh, a rrrrrrrrouterrrrrrr? is that what its called?" As an IT Architect at IBM, I obviously have the tools to do an IT assessment for them and set an IT direction. But as an IBM employee, I am extremely lucky to have the backing of a very responsible corporate community member, in the form of guidance for dealing with non-profit organizations up to and including being able to offer special discounts to the organization I'm working with. I even get to register the organization with the community partnership group at IBM, and track my hours and have my work fully recognized by corporate.
if you don't have a compiler on your computer, it can't compile viruses distributed as source code. Firewalls shouldn't have compilers. Compile everything on another box and ship the binaries. Even the kernel.
I wouldn't necessarily say "Shame on Dell" unless they completely gave up. They, like IBM, realize that Linux helps them move hardware, and they are making efforts to cover more corners of the market -- including the "no pre-installed OS" market.
I say kudos for continuing to slink around and not piss off the hand that feeds them 90% of their revenue, all while recognizing that not everyone wants to run Windows. They know that most everyone who wants to buy a PC just to run Linux probably knows they can get it for free or in the back of a book on the clearance table at Barnes & Noble. I applaud their flexibility and perseverence to keep providing cheap, commodity, Microsoft-free hardware for us. They could easily give up that fight, but choose not to.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any idea how much it would cost? Are you offering to pay for it?
No, but Bill could. And he's been defrauded by the system, too.
Boy, Glen seems to like the sound of his name, from this feedback form to your post. It has a creepy Branch Davidian feel to it. Also, I once lived near Glen Gardner New Jersey, which wins the Google popcon in a big way. Maybe that's why it creeps me out.
Similar for the cable tv companies at least in the US. Cable companies typically reserve a few channels for displaying local information and a few times a year the system displaying the local info crashes. If you're bored you can watch as the tech troubleshoots the system and tries to get the program running again. If you're REALLY bored you can call them up on the phone and offer to help.
;-)
And if you're sneaky, you can watch and see if they ever run "winipcfg" (after all, they *are* in the same building as the head end for your cablemodem!)
Because business drives technology more than anything else. Just like all things tech, ATMs replaced humans because they can do a human's job 24x7x365 without taking coffee breaks or sick days. And if coded correctly, they can do it without errors. In the old days when you would sit down with a bank representative, they would ask you, "is there anything else I may help you with? Would you like to hear about our low mortgage rates? a new low-rate credit card?"
Once you replace the person with a machine, you lose the revenue stream generated by the "cold selling" tactics. So, as technology advances and the machines can handle more tasks, why not? If a company is paying to own or lease IT 24 hours a day, that IT should be earning you money 24 hours a day. Just spitting out greenbacks without advertising more products is just not taking full advantage of the technology. Business doesn't care that that's all YOU want out of the machine.
I'm just glad I'm not the only one who uses "monkey"!
/var/log/messages or even worse a CA TND console waiting for something highlighted yellow or red to scroll by.
There's a "box monkey" to open and unpack boxes for you when you're building servers.
A "console monkey" who stares at tail -f
I used to say "desktop flunky" for one of the poor bastards who has to work the floor, but I changed it to monkey to bring it back into alignment with the others.
Let's see, what else.. you mentioned "support monkey"..
Well, either way, "console monkey" and "box monkey" are my personal favorites.
Actually ALICEBot has been tweaked to serve as a salesperson with human-like conversation capabilities. When I was faced with one of the Rackspace employees, I suddenly felt like I was plunged into a Turing test.
You know, try to pick out the chatbot vs the human, using conversation kept to a well-defined list of topics (web hosting). It was fun poking at this guy to make sure he was human.
An interesting tidbit: SBC/Yahoo! DSL distributes DSL modems in Los Angeles that are secretly also access points with a minimal WEP firewall/NAT router and run a much lower power xmitter than normal. 2wire.com devices.
:-D
Saw two of them on a trip and both got sent back.. neither could get link on the provider side. Two different people, different sections of town, same excuses from SBC.. "the signal levels are really low in your part of town".
My point? The time has come where firewalls are automatically being shipped out to new broadband customers. Thank God, too. Even better, their service is so shitty the boxes are staying off the net! Can't get root if there's no path to the box, right?!
Sorry, but I see doing frequent network installs from non-local mirrors as being just as detrimental to the performance of the Internet as spam. Its not sad to keep traffic off the net when its unnecessary and wasteful. On a much smaller scale, its like finding an enterprise that configures a couple thousand desktops to hit a stratum 1 NTP server out on the net vs either hosting a couple of stratum 3 servers in-house or splurging for the $300 roof-mount GPS-based stratum 1 hardware.
If you were called in as a small-time consultant to convert 100 desktops for a business over to Debian would you do 100 network installs from us.debian.org? God I hope not. You'd ask them for a machine they're no longer using (there's always a few) and rebuild it as a local mirror from CDs, and run cron-apt on the desktops, pointing to the new in-house mirror.
That's the problem with all these newcomers popping in with "they got it all wrong, and I can fix it." Their semester is almost over but they don't learn about dropping privileges until the next semester in Operating Systems Design. Its kind of sad seeing the future leaders wanting to take us away from drastically improved security practices.
Hey, new kids. Learn about Mandatory Access Controls. Start with LIDS, grsecurity, openwall, SELinux and the LSM. Plus, if you think Apache runs as root any longer than it takes to bind to port 80, then don't worry, your professor will cover it come September.
Sorry to be so gritty, but some commentators are striking fear in me about the directions they think security should go.
My father-in-law recently told me a great story about this. His current customer wanted the onsite tech to swap out some 100 keyboards because they were in disgusting shape. Instead of putting the company through all the harassment of replacing the keyboards for free, he decided to try having the cafeteria steam clean the keyboards.
He tasked a couple of box monkeys with splitting the keyboards open and pulling the keyboard assemblies out, separating them from the electronics. The cafeteria ran them through the high pressure steam cleaning dishwasher system, and they came out looking and working like new! Strange but true.
Mod parent up. This is a critical link, people, it should not be sitting at 1.
:)
God bless Phil Karn
You might be surprised but Nextel is becoming quite popular in the home market. I am very close friends with a family consisting of a father, mother, 3 kids, and an aunt and an uncle. Someone always needs to be picked up somewhere. Mother at the train station. Kids at various places. Grandparents all over the place. That family makes extensive use of the Nextel. My wife also pings me to come out and help bring in the groceries as she's pulling up to the house.
Finally, thanks to the free incoming calls and unlimited 2-way radio with my wife and best friend my chargeable minutes have dropped significantly. At worst, I used over 1,200 minutes. Then I added unlimited nights & weekends, and that dropped to about 500. Added free incoming calls, and that dropped to under 200! Now that my best friend has the 2-way, too, we ping each other all the time, and I'm thinking about dropping from the free incoming 400 to the free incoming 250.
It makes such a difference when you can get the point across without all the call setup hubub. Not the technical call setup stuff, the social stuff. "Hey, its me, got a minute?"
Now its, "[beep-beep] Can I reboot the server?" "[beep-beep] Sure."
Now that NASCAR's premiere racing series is Nextel Cup, you can expect a lot more subscribers to come online in the coming months and years. We are getting *bombarded* by Nextel ads these days.
There are some of us that are forced to sit beside a bloody loud computer at ear height, and we can't move it anywhere.
Dude, you, more than anyone need to get a new job. My Dad's cousin worked with a PC next to his head for just 10 years and he's completely deaf on that side of his head. It is extremely damaging to have that kind of noise right next to your head like that. Move. Now. Nothing is worth that.
I was skimming for this kind of post, because I wanted to see if anyone posted this. And yours is as good as any post to tag along with.
Obligatory Simpsons reference
"Hmmmmmm.. monoculture."
OMFG it was the nastiest thing I had ever smelled. I opened the door and nearly puked on the floor (I have a weak stomach and have puked from cat shit in a litter box). I thought someone broke into my house while I was gone and died in there. It was in June in NJ. A hot June.
I opened a bunch of windows elsewhere in the house before making it into the kitchen. I leaned over the sink and opened the window over the sink. There were hundreds of flies and hundreds more maggots crawling ALL OVER it. It must've taken half an hour to get up the strength to reach in there and throw it away in a trash bag. Then I went to the supermarket and bought fly spray and a couple bottles of Clorox Cleanup. I went through all the Clorox, but god damn that kitchen was clean when I was done.
I also went to pour out the milk, and the quart emptied as two big chunks so there I went with the weak stomach all over again.
Ahhhhhh, bachelor livin'
you're extremely naive to think that the military doesn't have precise topography maps of the entire world
My thoughts exactly. I'm also figuring that OP and others probably haven't seen the training that our fighter pilots go through when preparing for missions. Radar is used to build precise 3D models of the target area. The pilots are able to fly their exact missions in simulators dozens of times before actually heading out for the real thing. I've seen many pilots saying that they can't believe how lifelike the simulator is and that everything was exactly where they expected it to be.
Those 3D models are extremely detailed.
I recently had the opportunity to work on my cousin's PC.. her husband had been running win2k unprotected on DSL for over a month. Total whorebox. I mean they were asking me, "what is mIRC and why is it running? we didn't install it." It reminded me of the time I forgot about the chicken I left to defrost in my sink before going out on vacation -- FOR TWO WEEKS!
I formatted and reinstalled, disabled as many services as possible and filtered TCP and UDP as much as I could prior to connecting to the net. I dove in and went straight to zonelabs. I stood with my finger on the cable while the download completed and soon as the dialog showed 100%, yoink!
I installed Zone Alarm, locked it down, and went back online to start the patching party. Zone Alarm blocked the first connect (port 135, which virus was that again? there are so many..) in 43 seconds. I checked. I left the Zone Alarm control panel up to show my cousin's husband when he came home from work since it continuously updates the number of blocked access attempts. Within six hours, ZA had blocked 983 attempts. And now, three weeks later, their system is still running fine. Not that they would notice if it wasn't, but still..
I'm sorry but I've been singing "Trust Your Mechanic" from The Dead Kennedys in my head since reading these comments, and I knew it would be a matter of time before someone approached it as closely as you did..
From the lyrics:
[snip]
Trust your mechanic to mend your car
Bring it in to his garage
He tightens and loosens a few spare parts
One thing's fixed, another falls apart
And the rich eat you
[snip]
Trust your mechanic
To make you well
You're seeing an awful lot of him now
The quicker he makes your life fall apart
The more money you put in his pockets
Trust your mechanic
To plug your holes
Trust him to make more
Somewhere else
Trust your mechanic
He'll always come through
And rip you off
I don't think I've ever wanted to rewind radio. The need just doesn't seem to be that overwhelming.
I would guess you don't commute in your car in the NYC metro area. If you only hear parts of a report about a road closing you'd want to hit the 8-second rewind a few times, too. Not to mention how many times have I (and others) just missed the latest traffic report "on the 8's" while listening to a CD.. i'd love to cache radio while playing cd's.
I have a (now) old-fashioned Motorola i95cl for Nextel. I like having the flip b/c in the closed position, the screen and keypad are protected and still look new unlike any non-flip I've ever seen. Also I can unholster it and open it with one hand by pushing a finger or two between the two halves -- it just snaps open. Also, being a Nextel, I can just push one button on the outside to answer it as a speakerphone without opening it -- which is great when I'm driving. Reach down, push one button and get right back to two-handed driving while talking on the speakerphone. Its illegal to hold a phone while driving in NJ and NY now, so its easy to comply.
Its really not that bad.
I, too, was bugged by this, but I am soon about to meet with the board of directors of a community development organization and do an IT assessment for them. Apparently, they just received an $800k grant and have had 50 computers donated, but don't know what to do with any of it. My contact asked, "do we need to order a, uh, uh, a rrrrrrrrouterrrrrrr? is that what its called?" As an IT Architect at IBM, I obviously have the tools to do an IT assessment for them and set an IT direction. But as an IBM employee, I am extremely lucky to have the backing of a very responsible corporate community member, in the form of guidance for dealing with non-profit organizations up to and including being able to offer special discounts to the organization I'm working with. I even get to register the organization with the community partnership group at IBM, and track my hours and have my work fully recognized by corporate.
*ahem* "On her good side"
:)
I know you're new here, so I'll tell you now..
that will *NEVER* get you on her "good side"!! See this for reference. It is a bible.
if you don't have a compiler on your computer, it can't compile viruses distributed as source code. Firewalls shouldn't have compilers. Compile everything on another box and ship the binaries. Even the kernel.
I wouldn't necessarily say "Shame on Dell" unless they completely gave up. They, like IBM, realize that Linux helps them move hardware, and they are making efforts to cover more corners of the market -- including the "no pre-installed OS" market.
I say kudos for continuing to slink around and not piss off the hand that feeds them 90% of their revenue, all while recognizing that not everyone wants to run Windows. They know that most everyone who wants to buy a PC just to run Linux probably knows they can get it for free or in the back of a book on the clearance table at Barnes & Noble. I applaud their flexibility and perseverence to keep providing cheap, commodity, Microsoft-free hardware for us. They could easily give up that fight, but choose not to.