Apple needs to focus on having server applications/OS that are useful in an enterprise environment before they worry about the hardware. 10.5 and 10.6 Server weren't terrible, but there's little they could do that AD and a Linux box couldn't do much better. 10.7 Server is absolute rubbish and isn't suitable for, well, anything.
I'm not saying they shouldn't come up with enterprise-ready hardware, just that they have bigger fish to fry.
> Opening an encrypted tunnel to circumvent packet inspection sounds like a wonderful way to bring in viruses, or send out classified materials.
The (perhaps incorrect) impression I got from the poster was that this isn't for a single computer, but would instead be available to multiple machines and would be used to circumvent a country's restrictions and/or packet sniffing. As there would be network equipment involved before the machines connected to whatever was handling their VPN traffic, the Navy official that was in charge of it could easily set up port mirroring in order to inspect the traffic.
I've had my run-in with this before. I'm just a generic every day sysadmin and have no real involvement with the security community, short of idling on IRC with a bunch of more active people. Here are my experiences:
In 1997 or '98 I was the sysadmin for a mom 'n pop local ISP. We got hit by a massive DOS attack - keep in mind this was in the pre-smurf/DDOS era, so it really did warrant the attention of the feds. The owner contacted them, and they talked to me about getting any logs we might have (which of course I was ready to provide). I asked them where they wanted me to send them, and... "No, why don't you meet us out somewhere? We'll buy you lunch.". Despite the offer of free food, the alarm bells were going off by this point. So, I met them at a local coffee shop, and out of the 30 or so minutes I was there, they spent maybe two minutes discussing the DDOS with me, and the rest of the time attempting to get me to inform on the local 2600 group. I declined repeatedly, and they continued to make more forceful and threatening requests. Every time I disagreed with them, they looked at each other - and this was the creepiest (and obviously rehearsed) behavior I've ever seen. They never did get those logs from me.
After that I didn't hear anything until around 2005 or so when one of my ex-coworkers from another company called to tell me two men came by looking for me, and that they had government plates on their car. They left a card, but since I'm not under any obligation to call them, I never did. As the years went by, I received more calls from different people with a similar story.
And my last run-in with them was only a year or two ago - someone called me from a cell phone claiming he was with the FBI, and he had my computer and I needed to come to the local field office to pick it up. I found that to be rather unlikely since I tend to hang onto them until they're dead, I certainly wasn't missing one, and then they (minus the drives - I still have those) go into the bin. After a week of ignoring his calls he stopped bothering me.
To this day I have no idea what they wanted, but the entire thing reeked of ill-spent tax dollars.
I really don't care anymore, so the hell with posting as AC...
It's on Hulu, so go watch it now and redeem yourself. Peter Sellers did such an awesome job in it.
Trivia: The set with the interior of the bomber in it was designed completely by guessing what it would look like; no one on the crew of the film had ever seen one before as it was classified when the film was made. The end result was so accurate they received a visit from the military wanting to know who had leaked information about it.
I just picked one up for that exact purpose - Newegg has a Rosewill wifi adapter (with external antenna connector) for $20. Works great in Linux and OSX, as it's a RTL8187 device.
Same here. When FileVault (VileFault, if you like) first came out I ran into the same problem as you. I was able to repair it, log in, and recover some of my data (most resulted in the spinning beachball of death). Trying to convert back to a non-encrypted FS resulted in the machine telling me I needed roughly 12 petabytes of free disk space.
Shame really, it was a good idea, but a very bad execution I think.
Same here, after years of owning PPC macs and never having a problem, I've had endless trouble from my MBPs.
The first one I had was a first generation one and I kinda expected the worst, but it lasted three years with two trips into Apple Service (logic board replaced twice). The new one (last of the previous body style MBPs) is garbage though, it's been non-stop odd behavior that I can't pin down to any one thing. Crashes consistently and runs slowly with Linux or OSX. Won't buy another one.
It's not really fine. Well, sort of. The health care system has major problems because no one can really afford it without insurance. In fact, if you try and purchase medical care, the hospital will charge you more than they would charge an insurance company.
Funny, that. Most of the Blackwater guys that were here after Katrina were wearing plain clothes and weren't (AFAIK) deputized. They were just out of town thugs with guns, not too different from the local thugs with guns. The only way you could tell them apart from the local thuggery was that they had better weaponry.
I wasn't actually referring to Blackwater, even though it is of course applicable here. I was more referring to the NOPD guys that beat the schoolteacher up during Katrina, the ones that mug you, the ones that guard warehouses full of cocaine, the ones that in 2008 opened fire at an inspection sticker station because they didn't feel like waiting in line. People like Antoinette Franks and Len Davis (both NOPD officers and on death row).
As much as I'd love to work in the EU, it isn't that easy. I seriously looked into it a few years ago (and still do from time to time) only to come to the conclusion that many EU employers really don't want Americans working there. They'd much rather take care of their own and employee EU residents. Sucks for me, but I do see the truth of it.
While I think a reasonable punishment for a crime is great and all... what happens when an innocent person is convicted of a crime? What happens when you're walking home from the club/friends house/work and you get stopped by a police officer who's having a bad day? When he says you're stoned (even if he can't prove it), you're going to get caned, fined, beaten, imprisoned, and/or possibly executed (not in that particular order).
There's no such thing as an accurate and fair justice system; the least we can do is make sure that punishments aren't so horrible that they have a long term negative effect on your life when you're falsely convicted.
I'm just going to have to pass on the countries with harsh penalties like caning, even if other aspects of them are great.
Actually there are three Uceprotect RBLs - the first one (which is the one I use) only lists single IPs. It's pretty conservative and gets very few false positives.
It's the second and third ones that block entire ranges/ISPs/ASNs/etc. I couldn't really imagine anyone using these two in any kind of production environments.
> It is SORBS that I have an issue with. SORBS was created out of pure spite.
No, you're confusing "spite" with "greed". There's a difference. Spite is blacklisting a spammer's ISP in a fit of anti-spam zealotry. Greed is blacklisting a spammer's ISP hoping to extort a huge amount of money from them so their customers can send email again, and then blacklisting them again right after you un-blacklist them (yes, SORBS does this).
Good riddance to them. They've done nothing but tarnish the reputation of legitimate RBLs.
Spamcop, Spamhaus, and Uceprotect are plenty of RBL for me.
Out of the 68 open positions on Dice for New Orleans, a significant percentage of them aren't even IT at all (engineering). Add in the crime problem, government corruption, terrible streets, and high'ish cost of living, and I'd think it would come in at #1 on the list.
So a few years ago the PSU in my Mac G5 died, and it's under warranty. Unfortunately, the only Apple warranty shop around at the time (right after Katrina) was Circuit City. So I go to drop the box off...
Not an hour later I get a call from them telling me they need the passwords to both the admin account and my normal user account, and any other passwords (email, etc) present on the machine. The reason given? The power supply is actually a special piece of software and not a piece of hardware at all!
Obviously I didn't give them this; I wound up driving two hours away to take it to another shop.
I live in Louisiana as well, and I can tell you right now that not one damned cent of this new tax income is going to go to protecting children.
Assuming it pulls in one million annually, it's going to be spent something like this:
1) 50%: Given to contractors (aka good ol' boys) for work they'll never do (google for "NOLA crime cameras"). 2) 5%: Hookers for David Vitter. 3) 5%: Exorcisms performed by Bobby Jindal (google it). 4) 5%: Vacations for Ray Nagin. 5) Remainder: Kickbacks and bribes.
I wound up on the side of the road with a lump on my head after being hit with a flashlight. The car fared much worse, it was totalled after the cop destroyed the interior of it.
A lot of people say it's only a small minority of cops who make the rest look bad. I disagree - for every one nice cop I meet, I run into five times as many bullying assholes.
How would I have ended it differently... an excellent question, and one I hadn't put too much thought into other than, "Oh god not like this."
Ok, ask and I'll try to deliver. Well, not really, I just took an Ambien and started on a glass of wine. This may be terrible, but hopefully it won't be any worse than King's ending.
Roland and company are resting up near the tower, preparing for tomorrow morning: their long final walk into the unknown. Roland awakes before the others, and decides either one of two things: "If they follow me, they will die - so I will go on alone without them." Not a very Roland-like thought, so "They'll be in my way. This is MY quest, and I'll finish it on my own." The party is unaware of Flagg and Mordreds location and status.
Regardless of reason "why", Roland abandons his party and proceeds on alone. When morning comes, the party discovers he's gone and decides to chase after him. They leave, and soon Mordred and his new pet, a very confused/lobotomized Flagg, catch up.
Now what to do with our characters... We can play some deus ex machina and have an older Jacky Sawyer (and maybe a few wolves) show up and brutally dispose of Flagg and Mordred, and "save" the others, perhaps scattering them across the territories as sorta "knight errants" (keeping Jake and Oy together of course). Or, we can just kill them. No Jacky Sawyer crossover, but at least they get to die with their boots on. Not a little death either, a big long "this fight gets it's own chapter" type of battle. Alternatively, since our villains and heroes are all still more or less intact, spin off a separate book about just them and whatever their disposition turns out to be. If we let them die, they need to die honorable and valiant deaths.
Now we have Roland marching on to his tower, minus his horn.He gains entry and slaughters (not erases) the Crimson King in some fashion, with some great Client Eastwood style one-liners. He looks around, and his horn is there on a pedestal. He proceeds to the balcony, blows it, and cries out the names of all of those he left behind. Now, he marches on up to the top. At every room he learns some new truth, and usually a terrible one that he would rather not know. And when he reaches the pinnacle?
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
It's not so much the "contents" of the tower I disagreed with, it's the whole Mordred/Flagg/Eddie/Oy/etc etc thing. Of course they were going to die in the end, but I think he could have paid much more attention to such well established characters and sent them to the clearing at the end of their path in a more fitting manner.
The Stand always had the whole mysticism thing going on with Flagg and Mother Abby.
The only thing that was dragged in was King's typical shitty ending. I'm just hoping he doesn't do the same to the Gunslinger seri... oh wait a minute. He did. =(
The above is excellent advice - always record what's going on.
I've had the same extortion racket happen to me before as well: "If you don't stay on, we'll give you a bad recommendation to future employers. Oh, and by the way, we're out of money so you need to work for less, and those hot checks we wrote you? Yeah we're not going to pay you for those.".
Go to your local electronics shop and pick up a cheap digital audio recorder, and when they say something incriminating just record it. Get a copy of your reviews from HR as well. If a company is serious about hiring you and they tell you that the previous employer gave you a bad review, give them the evidence.
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Apple needs to focus on having server applications/OS that are useful in an enterprise environment before they worry about the hardware. 10.5 and 10.6 Server weren't terrible, but there's little they could do that AD and a Linux box couldn't do much better. 10.7 Server is absolute rubbish and isn't suitable for, well, anything.
I'm not saying they shouldn't come up with enterprise-ready hardware, just that they have bigger fish to fry.
> Opening an encrypted tunnel to circumvent packet inspection sounds like a wonderful way to bring in viruses, or send out classified materials.
The (perhaps incorrect) impression I got from the poster was that this isn't for a single computer, but would instead be available to multiple machines and would be used to circumvent a country's restrictions and/or packet sniffing. As there would be network equipment involved before the machines connected to whatever was handling their VPN traffic, the Navy official that was in charge of it could easily set up port mirroring in order to inspect the traffic.
I've had my run-in with this before. I'm just a generic every day sysadmin and have no real involvement with the security community, short of idling on IRC with a bunch of more active people. Here are my experiences:
In 1997 or '98 I was the sysadmin for a mom 'n pop local ISP. We got hit by a massive DOS attack - keep in mind this was in the pre-smurf/DDOS era, so it really did warrant the attention of the feds. The owner contacted them, and they talked to me about getting any logs we might have (which of course I was ready to provide). I asked them where they wanted me to send them, and... "No, why don't you meet us out somewhere? We'll buy you lunch.". Despite the offer of free food, the alarm bells were going off by this point. So, I met them at a local coffee shop, and out of the 30 or so minutes I was there, they spent maybe two minutes discussing the DDOS with me, and the rest of the time attempting to get me to inform on the local 2600 group. I declined repeatedly, and they continued to make more forceful and threatening requests. Every time I disagreed with them, they looked at each other - and this was the creepiest (and obviously rehearsed) behavior I've ever seen. They never did get those logs from me.
After that I didn't hear anything until around 2005 or so when one of my ex-coworkers from another company called to tell me two men came by looking for me, and that they had government plates on their car. They left a card, but since I'm not under any obligation to call them, I never did. As the years went by, I received more calls from different people with a similar story.
And my last run-in with them was only a year or two ago - someone called me from a cell phone claiming he was with the FBI, and he had my computer and I needed to come to the local field office to pick it up. I found that to be rather unlikely since I tend to hang onto them until they're dead, I certainly wasn't missing one, and then they (minus the drives - I still have those) go into the bin. After a week of ignoring his calls he stopped bothering me.
To this day I have no idea what they wanted, but the entire thing reeked of ill-spent tax dollars.
I really don't care anymore, so the hell with posting as AC...
It's on Hulu, so go watch it now and redeem yourself. Peter Sellers did such an awesome job in it.
Trivia: The set with the interior of the bomber in it was designed completely by guessing what it would look like; no one on the crew of the film had ever seen one before as it was classified when the film was made. The end result was so accurate they received a visit from the military wanting to know who had leaked information about it.
They came in below the bar in the police state contest the US and UK seem to be competing in. I guess they decided they didn't want to be the losers.
Hooray for the underdog! Oh, wait...
I just picked one up for that exact purpose - Newegg has a Rosewill wifi adapter (with external antenna connector) for $20. Works great in Linux and OSX, as it's a RTL8187 device.
Same here. When FileVault (VileFault, if you like) first came out I ran into the same problem as you. I was able to repair it, log in, and recover some of my data (most resulted in the spinning beachball of death). Trying to convert back to a non-encrypted FS resulted in the machine telling me I needed roughly 12 petabytes of free disk space.
Shame really, it was a good idea, but a very bad execution I think.
Same here, after years of owning PPC macs and never having a problem, I've had endless trouble from my MBPs.
The first one I had was a first generation one and I kinda expected the worst, but it lasted three years with two trips into Apple Service (logic board replaced twice). The new one (last of the previous body style MBPs) is garbage though, it's been non-stop odd behavior that I can't pin down to any one thing. Crashes consistently and runs slowly with Linux or OSX. Won't buy another one.
It's not really fine. Well, sort of. The health care system has major problems because no one can really afford it without insurance. In fact, if you try and purchase medical care, the hospital will charge you more than they would charge an insurance company.
Funny, that. Most of the Blackwater guys that were here after Katrina were wearing plain clothes and weren't (AFAIK) deputized. They were just out of town thugs with guns, not too different from the local thugs with guns. The only way you could tell them apart from the local thuggery was that they had better weaponry.
I wasn't actually referring to Blackwater, even though it is of course applicable here. I was more referring to the NOPD guys that beat the schoolteacher up during Katrina, the ones that mug you, the ones that guard warehouses full of cocaine, the ones that in 2008 opened fire at an inspection sticker station because they didn't feel like waiting in line. People like Antoinette Franks and Len Davis (both NOPD officers and on death row).
Come to New Orleans. The only difference between the criminals and the police is a uniform.
Try Movable Type. It's maybe not what I'd really call "lightweight", but it isn't huge either.
As much as I'd love to work in the EU, it isn't that easy. I seriously looked into it a few years ago (and still do from time to time) only to come to the conclusion that many EU employers really don't want Americans working there. They'd much rather take care of their own and employee EU residents. Sucks for me, but I do see the truth of it.
While I think a reasonable punishment for a crime is great and all... what happens when an innocent person is convicted of a crime? What happens when you're walking home from the club/friends house/work and you get stopped by a police officer who's having a bad day? When he says you're stoned (even if he can't prove it), you're going to get caned, fined, beaten, imprisoned, and/or possibly executed (not in that particular order).
There's no such thing as an accurate and fair justice system; the least we can do is make sure that punishments aren't so horrible that they have a long term negative effect on your life when you're falsely convicted.
I'm just going to have to pass on the countries with harsh penalties like caning, even if other aspects of them are great.
Actually there are three Uceprotect RBLs - the first one (which is the one I use) only lists single IPs. It's pretty conservative and gets very few false positives.
It's the second and third ones that block entire ranges/ISPs/ASNs/etc. I couldn't really imagine anyone using these two in any kind of production environments.
> It is SORBS that I have an issue with. SORBS was created out of pure spite.
No, you're confusing "spite" with "greed". There's a difference. Spite is blacklisting a spammer's ISP in a fit of anti-spam zealotry. Greed is blacklisting a spammer's ISP hoping to extort a huge amount of money from them so their customers can send email again, and then blacklisting them again right after you un-blacklist them (yes, SORBS does this).
Good riddance to them. They've done nothing but tarnish the reputation of legitimate RBLs.
Spamcop, Spamhaus, and Uceprotect are plenty of RBL for me.
Out of the 68 open positions on Dice for New Orleans, a significant percentage of them aren't even IT at all (engineering). Add in the crime problem, government corruption, terrible streets, and high'ish cost of living, and I'd think it would come in at #1 on the list.
So a few years ago the PSU in my Mac G5 died, and it's under warranty. Unfortunately, the only Apple warranty shop around at the time (right after Katrina) was Circuit City. So I go to drop the box off...
Not an hour later I get a call from them telling me they need the passwords to both the admin account and my normal user account, and any other passwords (email, etc) present on the machine. The reason given? The power supply is actually a special piece of software and not a piece of hardware at all!
Obviously I didn't give them this; I wound up driving two hours away to take it to another shop.
I'm so glad that company is dead and gone.
I live in Louisiana as well, and I can tell you right now that not one damned cent of this new tax income is going to go to protecting children.
Assuming it pulls in one million annually, it's going to be spent something like this:
1) 50%: Given to contractors (aka good ol' boys) for work they'll never do (google for "NOLA crime cameras").
2) 5%: Hookers for David Vitter.
3) 5%: Exorcisms performed by Bobby Jindal (google it).
4) 5%: Vacations for Ray Nagin.
5) Remainder: Kickbacks and bribes.
I tried driving while being the wrong color once.
I wound up on the side of the road with a lump on my head after being hit with a flashlight. The car fared much worse, it was totalled after the cop destroyed the interior of it.
A lot of people say it's only a small minority of cops who make the rest look bad. I disagree - for every one nice cop I meet, I run into five times as many bullying assholes.
How would I have ended it differently... an excellent question, and one I hadn't put too much thought into other than, "Oh god not like this."
Ok, ask and I'll try to deliver. Well, not really, I just took an Ambien and started on a glass of wine. This may be terrible, but hopefully it won't be any worse than King's ending.
Roland and company are resting up near the tower, preparing for tomorrow morning: their long final walk into the unknown. Roland awakes before the others, and decides either one of two things: "If they follow me, they will die - so I will go on alone without them." Not a very Roland-like thought, so "They'll be in my way. This is MY quest, and I'll finish it on my own." The party is unaware of Flagg and Mordreds location and status.
Regardless of reason "why", Roland abandons his party and proceeds on alone. When morning comes, the party discovers he's gone and decides to chase after him. They leave, and soon Mordred and his new pet, a very confused/lobotomized Flagg, catch up.
Now what to do with our characters... We can play some deus ex machina and have an older Jacky Sawyer (and maybe a few wolves) show up and brutally dispose of Flagg and Mordred, and "save" the others, perhaps scattering them across the territories as sorta "knight errants" (keeping Jake and Oy together of course). Or, we can just kill them. No Jacky Sawyer crossover, but at least they get to die with their boots on. Not a little death either, a big long "this fight gets it's own chapter" type of battle. Alternatively, since our villains and heroes are all still more or less intact, spin off a separate book about just them and whatever their disposition turns out to be. If we let them die, they need to die honorable and valiant deaths.
Now we have Roland marching on to his tower, minus his horn.He gains entry and slaughters (not erases) the Crimson King in some fashion, with some great Client Eastwood style one-liners. He looks around, and his horn is there on a pedestal. He proceeds to the balcony, blows it, and cries out the names of all of those he left behind. Now, he marches on up to the top. At every room he learns some new truth, and usually a terrible one that he would rather not know. And when he reaches the pinnacle?
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
It's not so much the "contents" of the tower I disagreed with, it's the whole Mordred/Flagg/Eddie/Oy/etc etc thing. Of course they were going to die in the end, but I think he could have paid much more attention to such well established characters and sent them to the clearing at the end of their path in a more fitting manner.
Goddamnit, Madagascar has already shut it's borders.
The Stand always had the whole mysticism thing going on with Flagg and Mother Abby.
The only thing that was dragged in was King's typical shitty ending. I'm just hoping he doesn't do the same to the Gunslinger seri... oh wait a minute. He did. =(
The above is excellent advice - always record what's going on.
I've had the same extortion racket happen to me before as well: "If you don't stay on, we'll give you a bad recommendation to future employers. Oh, and by the way, we're out of money so you need to work for less, and those hot checks we wrote you? Yeah we're not going to pay you for those.".
Go to your local electronics shop and pick up a cheap digital audio recorder, and when they say something incriminating just record it. Get a copy of your reviews from HR as well. If a company is serious about hiring you and they tell you that the previous employer gave you a bad review, give them the evidence.
You really should ask a lawyer though.