It's only normal to look at someone else's product and say "hey, that's a good idea, let's implement that too!".
I was leaning toward Apple being a bit too overzealous on their claims until I read the Ars article. It's difficult to ignore the abrupt physical design changes that came after the iPhone release. And the similarity of the interface. The interface was so similar there was an internal suggestion at Samsung to make the icons more different because they themselves thought it looked like a ripoff. That's pretty damning just by itself. Even if they didn't set out to infringe, they've clearly recognized they did end up with a confusingly similar design. In this game, intent isn't the only thing that will get you in trouble. There's no leeway for "honest mistakes" in patent violation, especially when you realize your mistake and continue to do it anyway.
I also had to think about the "obvious" / "optimal design" problem. There's just so many ways to efficiently design a toaster. Slot for bread, lever to pull down, dial to adjust time. If someone has a patent that covers those basics, you'd have a really hard time designing a competing product that didn't infringe. I get that. But samsung has been in the business for years before Apple, they've had plenty of time to bring various designs to market. Then Apple comes along with what we'll presume is a truckload of market research and engineering resources, and right-off-the-blocks has a design that's very different than 95% of the existing products available in the market. If at that point a competitor suddenly changes their designs on a direct collision course with yours, it's very hard to swallow that your new design wasn't at least a major influence on your recent design changes.
And if you pull designs out of your drafting cabinet that you've been working on for years that look like the new release, but you had never patented them or brought them to market.... you snooze you lose. The point here is improving the products available in the market, and it will not reward you for sitting on good designs. Get it to market or go home.
I think if a new player enters the market with a revolutionary design, you're not entitled to copy it just because it's turning out to be a much more optimal design. If it was "obvious" then you should have done it already. If you didn't, either you're slow, stupid, or it wasn't really that obvious then, even if now in retrospect it looks very obvious. In any event, you shouldn't be entitled to copy it just for the "optimal/obvious" reason. The one that was quick, clever and bold enough to bring the "optimal" design to market before you ought to get a reward for their effort, innovation, and providing the market with a superior product.
Some of what Apple is arguing is iffy, and a few things are downright silly. But now that they're in court they're going to play all their cards, whether they be strong or weak. May as well. Let the court uphold the strong ones, strike down the weak ones, and hash out who gets what out of the middleground. This is pretty standard practice in any big case like this. Bring all your cards to the table and turn over as many as you can mange to. So even though some of these things seem silly, I can see why they're doing it. You'll get better odds on review of your iffy things if they've already struck down some of the silly things and gotten the cutoff for "silly" more clearly defined. So it's necessary.
This almost sounds like astroturfing, but instead of using shills for public supporters, they're using shills for public reviewers. Not really much of a difference is there?
I was thinking more entertaining. Especially if the list is either (A) long, (B) contains some very high profile or normally impartial authorities, or BOTH.
They've always been a place for big ticket items but buying any kind of accessory there was an effort in being extremely stupid. They don't make any money on computers, tvs, appliances, etc. They make all of it on extended warranties and accessories.
That's typical of most local stores. They don't make much margin on big things, but make very good margin on little things. When something is small, a high percentage margin doesn't add many hard digits to the price. Look at a computer, maybe wholesale $1125, sells for $1199, 7% margin. A router wholesales for $26, sells for $35, 35% margin. An ethernet cable wholesales for $1.85, sells for $7.99, 330% margin.
That's how most local businesses work. People don't look at the margin as a percentage, they look at it as a dollar amount per item. The extra $75 tacked onto the computer really looks like a lot more money lost than an extra $9 on a router, or $6 on a cable. But the reality is that the cable is a massive ripoff by comparison. So they're just gaming human nature here.
But looked at a different way... the shelf space taken by a computer vs a router doesn't differ a whole lot. And that space is your resource to work with. So it's not so much that you have to get margin per item, but you have to make the retail space pay for itself. And that doesn't vary a lot between items. A $2500 computer may take up as much space as a $500 computer. The rent for the building isn't set based on which model of computer you have on the shelf. So both the $500 and the $2500 computer need to bring in the same amount to cover their way, regardless of margin. So naturally the smaller items require a higher markup. If you have a space in your store where a space is netting you $40/month, you may have another identical size space in your store that is raking in $100/month, and that probably means you need to adjust some margins or change your product selection.
That's not the way the DMCA works. After the posting party sends a properly-worded counterclaim, the next step of the party claiming the copyright violation is to file a lawsuit. They can't just file another DMCA claim.
I understand that's how it's supposed to work, but quite a few people have found it worked for them as I described. Within days (or sometimes hours) of getting their videos reinstated, they'd get another takedown on the same video from the same source. And when you get your 3rd, youtube will suspend your account. You'd expect they'd ignore repeat takedowns, and you'd expect they'd un-tick the three-strikes counter when a counterclaim was filed, but they don't and they don't. At least sometimes. Maybe it's improved recently.
I just reviewed some more recent information and it looks like that in at least some cases they temp suspend you now and send you a "copyright quiz" to fill out. If you pass, you get your account back. If not, you have to wait a few days to retake the quiz. They weren't specific about three strikes, but some accounts can be suspended immediately without even a second incident if they consider the violation bad enough. They also appear to ban other accounts with the same email address on them, so don't use a shared email account (such as family) or you may become collateral damage from the banhammer.
There doesn't appear to be any clear spelled out hard rules anywhere. They're probably trying to keep their options open. If they put it in writing, then their enforcement/interpretation will be disputed.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a legal thing. This is more of a corporate thing, and when it's the coprs vs the people, it works the other way around, "guilty until proven innocent". (and then "guilty again after you prove your innocence, rinse and repeat")
It'd be quite entertaining if Scripps Local News did this entirely on purpose, to raise awareness of the abusability of these procedures. Heck, I'd like to see them do what the **RA like to do. NASA file a counterclaim and get it back, Scripps file another notice, repeat that a few times and watch Youtube auto-suspend NASA's youtube account for three abuse claims. (doesn't matter if they are reversed, three claims is all it takes) That would generate some AWESOME publicity!
I was so glad to see Sun, MACs and Linux systems fully represented.
"Right tool for the job." NASA can't afford to let PHBs, politics, or personal preferences and bias get in the way of doing their job. Bias can't be tolerated.
Since no one platform is best suited for everything and they need to do everything in their power to tilt the odds as far as possible in their favor, you're always going to see a good mashup at NASA.
If a manger prefers X but engineering finds a 3% improvement going with Y, they go with Y. They have to. When you have billions on the line, huge public exposure, and everyone looking for who to blame for failures, prejudice gets shaken out rapidly.
That's why people bring their own notebooks and watch porn with their phone's personal hotspot.
As a network admin, dealing with employees "wasting company time" isn't my job, so I really don't get too involved with it. So I really don't care if they jack up their personal computer. But I must admit I feel even less sorry for them when they wasted company time to do it in the first place. Serves them up a heaping fresh pile of "serves you right".
The people who need to be fired are the network administrators who aren't filtering external traffic properly in the first place.
That doesn't really fix the problem. It sounds like a good idea until you realize you're pitting the network admin against the users. His job isn't to get involved with a game of cat and mouse. Most admins grow tired of being expected to have an airtight physical defense when there's no complementary policy in place.
A better response is to have the network admins place reasonably good filtering in place. Not airtight. Not filters that interfere with legitimate traffic. Filters with a zero-false-positive. Then if someone is still watching porn, it's easy to demonstrate that they're taking steps to bypass the filtering. Make it clear to the staff that deliberately bypassing the filters is a fireable offense.
This solves most of the problem all at once. No collateral damage, no borderline unfair calls, reasonable expense, and accountability where it belongs.
It also makes the perps easier to catch, since they don't have to spend hours trying to different things before they finally find the inevitable crack in the armor. They'll try basic things like proxy or direct IP etc. Those are easy to prove as deliberate while at the same time being easy to detect. If you're placing the entire onus on the net admin, the users can dig at your defenses all day long without so much as a wrist-slap, and when they finally discover another way, they've' not only beat you, you may have a difficult time noticing you've been beat. And then you are the bad guy for having "allowed" them to violate policy.
I've been in charge of cat and mouse before. I'd set something up, they'd find a way around it. I'd add another net. They'd stop for a bit and then they'd find a way around it. Rinse and repeat. All the while the manager wouldn't bother to yank one of them into the office and discuss the perils of working hard to break company policy. The filters finally got tight enough that the manager started having problems with some of his downtime, and then things really got weird. You don't want to be here.
"against company policy" needs to mean "you don't do that here", not "we're going to try to stop you from doing that here".
as BES, the service that corporate Blackberry deployments use, _is_ end to end--the encryption key pairs are generated by the company that deploys a BES installation, and neither RIM nor anyone else has access to them, unlike SSL certificates etc.
Everyone in this thread seems to assume that all SSL keys are generated and provided by public CAs, who then could leak your private key. You can roll your own anytime you want. Then just tell the users and your servers to trust your public key. Works the same way for IMAP as it does for HTTPS.
(A) I thought they had rules saying they weren't allowed to agree on anything and (B) it's good to see a Republican pushing legislation for the Little People.
The barrier is not moving, hence, no work is being done to it,
To block something, you have to have an interaction with it. And then we have newton's first law. The barrier may not move, but somehow some way there is a change in energy in the barrier. Temperature, orientation, location, etc.
If I run my truck into a brick wall and the wall doesn't move, it doesn't mean I had no affect on the wall. At the very least, I created sound, heat, cracked some bricks, and broke some mortar free of bricks.
Although conservation of energy is the point we're hashing out, for the purpose of comparison it helps to remember that it ought to hold true, and when you keep that in mind, it helps you find the less obvious places energy has escaped to.
looking in one bag gives you free information about the other bag
I think his point there was you paid for information about the one bag, and that your ability to infer the other information as a result means you got it for "free". Which I agree, is wrong. You always knew that the bags contained different balls. So no new information was gained, just clarification of existing information.
It's like me giving you one more number for your Sudoku puzzle and your then being able to solve the entire puzzle, all 15 remaining numbers. You got the other 14 numbers "for free"? No, you didn't.
I get how two different entangled particles can share behavior, and how you can check one to test the other, but why don't things that affect one particle cause the entangled particle to also be affected?
And the other question I had on this is with the Brownian Motion. When you throw up a barrier to stop a particle from moving, and it hits the barrier, isn't that newton's 3rd law at work? Both deflecting the particle and providing equal but opposite energy to the barrier? How is this accounted for in this conservation of energy model? That would seem to be the missing input of energy?
Lets say that little invisible demon gets knocked back a little by the deflection of the particle. He eventually has to reposition himself back where he was, in front of the door. That requires energy. And I think there is where we are adding energy into the system that we think we're getting for "free".
The subtext here is that Zuck is setting up bots to drive his company revenues up.
I've seen three popular explanations for "whose bots are they?" They're almost certainly a rented botnet composed mainly of compromised (usually windows) machines that are under remote mass control. I've read multiple expose where they show how you go to some.ru etc website and set up an account with them and rent out however many thousand machines you want to, and can do any of several offered services... ddos, backdoor installations, DNS redirects, proxy, and of course spam and click fraud.
Click fraud is run for one of three reasons:
1) drive up pay-for-click revenue for the site (facebook) - probably not a smart thing for them to do seeing as they're Suspect #1 because they have the most to gain, but already have a ton of cash
2) competitors trying to cost you money by driving up your advertising costs
3) competitors trying to cause you to hit your impression hit limit and stop displaying your ads
2 and 3 don't necessarily have to be your competitors, they could be random criminals trying to extort you, "pay us or we screw up your marketing".
I've seen several recent reports of (3) suspected due to finding a pattern of click fraud spikes at times when their competitors were doing a new product release. Renting botnets isn't free, and isn't without risk, and (2) probably doesn't have a very big net return. So (3) at the time of a new product release would appear to be a competitor's most prudent and effective time to buy some click-fraud.
And numerous posts above asking to post the IP addresses. really? Aren't you embarrassed to suggest that those would be helpful to anyone here?
- I like to get my work done quickly, I'm impatient. MOST internal IDE/sata attachments require a reboot. It's inconvenient to have to reboot one of my service machines every time I attach a drive to it. Which happens many times every day.
- I can replace a laptop drive with a new drive, boot off a USB stick, and plug the failing drive in and run the recovery directly. There have been days when I've been running four recoveries at once. Often more efficient than trying to get several things going on a service machine at once. And with having to reboot it would get that much worse. You can't attach an old hard drive internally to a laptop at the same time as the good drive. (most cases)
- failing drives have a habit of hanging their interface until power cycled or unplugged. Again, not something you want to be doing with your service machine or even target machine. If it hangs, I pull the fw cable which un-hangs my service machine, power cycle the sled, plug back in the cable and resume. Cranky drives can require a dozen sled reboots, or periodic trips to the freezer. Having a recovery hang a service machine while I was trying to use it for something else at the same time causes TWO of my jobs to have to be started over.
- When necessary, I can get more than one recovery going at the same time on a single service machine. Can't reboot a machine for one drive while you're doing another.
- Firewire isn't as fast as many sata and most ide, but a lot of the time I need to be attaching one drive or another over firewire anyway. If I have a laptop booted into target mode and attached to a service machine for recovery, attaching the bad drive internally doesn't save me any time since it will have to go TO the good drive over firewire anyway.
- When I have a lot of things going at once around here, speed becomes less important than the ability to multitask, and firewire offers me many more options and flexibility. Careful consideration of your options, how you do things, and in what order greatly reduces turnover time. This can be the difference between a process taking four hours of time and monopolizing a service machine, vs taking 90 minutes of time and using one sled and a usb stick off in the corner while I do other things. OR 30 minutes of my time focusing on a single job vs shuffling something like that off to a corner to run for a few hours on its own while I get other things done. Most things I do can arguably be done in many different ways, requiring very different amounts of clock time, hands-on time, and various resources. Prioritizing, availability of options, and planning my methods are very important to my job productivity.
I've been a repair tech for the last 10 yrs. (and I don't mean I'm a "I built my own PC, I'm a computer god! I fix my friend/family''s computers" I actually know what I'm doing and have electrical engineering experience) I'd estimate I've seen around a thousand bad hard drives in that time. Of those, I'd say 65% would tap repeatedly, 25% had some io errors but were still working, 8% would sound normal but would never post on the bus, and the other 2% were the other weird issues like chirping or no power at all.
The tappers were very rarely recoverable by me. Every now and then I'd see one that if you powered it up dozens of times, you might get lucky and it would post properly and you could get data from it. None of the other common methods were helpful.
Over 90% of the drives with io errors and slow blocks could be recovered from. Most of those simply required a file level copy from bad drive to good. Most would have a handful of unrecoverable files. Depending on what was lost, an OS reinstall was sometimes required on the new drive, but not usually. A small percentage of them would have a large number of errors and require days to recover, or would fail completely during the recovery. A few of them would look promising but then quickly becomes apparent that almost nothing will be recoverable.
Sometimes a drive would stop responding during recovery and require a break. Trips to the freezer helped on about 30% of the drives. Some drives required numerous trips to the freezer, using rsync to resume copying where it left off last time, a process which could take days but could result in a complete recovery. I pondered ways to cool a drive during the recovery such as using a peltier, but never got anything implemented. I also use ddrescue and another custom script I wrote that works in a similar way, doing block-level recovery while splitting problem areas for smaller recovery chunks. That's useful for windows or other foreign OS where you can't do a file copy. (mac shop here)
I've never dried "drop therapy" or "impact maintenance". I'm sure it could help under specific circumstances like a stuck spindle or loose connection but I've never witness it.
I've done a little bit of onboard controller card ("OBCC") swaps for identical drives where the bad one wouldn't power on at all. About 25% success there. For that reason I tend to keep old tapping drives because their cards can work in dead drives. I assume the tapping drives have head failures, which isn't related to the OBCC. I've talked with multiple data recovery places about this process, and to my surprise every single one of them has told me "that won't work". They usually explain the remaps are stored on the OBCC, which makes sense, but isn't a good excuse not to try when the remaps probably don't account for more than one in a hundred thousand blocks. I think they just want me to send the drive to them.
The sled you place the drive into makes a HUGE difference in recovery. Avoid usb. I don't care if you insist on windows, install a firewire card. Almost all USB bridge chips handle misbehaving drives very badly. Only use one of those little external adapters with the build-on 2ft usb cord on it as an absolute last resort. OWC's "mercury elite aluminum" series are the best (reasonably priced) recovery sled I have found, and I have tried many. USB (39MB/sec, not 36, 26, 16, 12, etc), FW400, FW800, AND esata interface. In the past I used a Granite Digital "fireview", those absolutely rocked for drive recovery (LCD panel with diag menu....) but they stopped making them and they were IDE only. Someone needs to make a modern sled like that for sata please.
As for paid recovery, results seem random. Techs tend to have a recovery place they swear BY, and others they swear AT. But my observation is simply that methods vary and different places handle different problems with varying success. I think many techs' impressions are based on their first few experiences - if good they like, if bad they don'
You can't avoid it, there's always work-related personal information around.
That's entirely up to you and your habit of using the company computer. No one forces you to browse personal web sites and enter your password on company gear. Don't go blaming others for your actions because you were "tempted."
With the size of flash drives, I can see no reason to store anything on a company computer. And with truecrypt, you can have some sense of security with the data stored there.
I use mac so I have constant access to the ability to encrypt disk images. I keep an encrypted dmg on my flash drive that's always in my belt pouch. This gets auto mirrored back and forth with a copy of it on my laptop when plugged in. So I always have access to all my keys, passwords, account info, etc, at or away from my computer. If I lose the flash drive, nothing was risked. My account keychain on my laptop has the password to that dmg so normally I never have to enter it in. Unless I have to get out my flash drive and plug it into another computer to view a password etc. But then I understand I am mounting an image on an untrusted platform, that may even have a keylogger, so I don't just do it without a care in the world.
There's a shortcut to the password text file in my home folder. I double click that, and the system automatically mounts the disk image and opens the document, so the protection is effectively transparent to me. Since os x's keychains unlock with your login password, if my laptop were ever stolen and my password reset, my keychain would not unlock and the dmg would be protected. So far it's looking like a good solution for me. The only way to break it is if I plug my flash drive into a severely compromised computer and try to open the dmg.
An alternate way to do this would be to store the dmg in the cloud like on dropbox. No less safe, perhaps a tad more convenient, but requires internet access..
First off I'll say for "next time", don't store personal information on company gear. Anything you've ever put on there is arguably company property. Any backups they've ever mare are also theirs. You shouldn't be in this situation to begin with. But that's not relevant to you now, you want a solution to the spot you're already in so I'll get to that next. Just try to avoid a reoccurrence next time huh?
Any company IT person with a clue will make sure your machine gets wiped and reimaged when you leave anyway. Even the remote possibility of an employee leaving a back door, logic bomb, or incriminating data (kiddy porn, descriptions of corporate illegal activity, made up stuff that could be bad, etc) being on your computer after you leave pretty much makes a nuke of your machine mandatory. So get the go-ahead from your IT person and then do it yourself. You may need to unlicense / deactivate some pro software on there first, make sure you have that taken care of first. Then do a secure wipe using whatever method you're comfortable with. Ask your IT person if you don't know how. It's a process that will take hours to run. If it finishes in under a few minutes, it didn't wipe anything, it merely reset the directory records, and your data is still on the drive.
The most basic mode of any secure wipe is good enough for anything short of DoD-class erasing. In reality, a simple one-pass zero of a drive will prevent anyone with a budget under $50k from getting anything off your drive. No need to go nuts with a seven pass random wipe, it'll just be a waste of your time with no added benefit.
After you've secure-erased it, let them do the reinstallation. That's how it should work, there's no point in wiping it only to give you another crack at installing a back door just before you walk out. If they say no that's ok you can do it, remember this... you are opening yourself to future suspicion because if something shady happens when your replacement has been using the machine, you are a suspect. ("hmmm that shouldn't have happened, how did that get out? I wonder if Jim didn't leave a back door?") Don't take that risk. Leave it blank. Nothing can be attributed to you after they do a fresh installation themselves. If they push you to do the reinstall yourself, push back with this point, you're not refusing to do it to be a dick, you're covering your ass. They should respect that. And explain how this also covers THEIR ass. That should be very difficult to say "no" to. If they still insist on your doing the reinstall before leaving, get it in writing. That will help you later if a wild criminal investigation appears later.
Considering the wide variety of responses you're getting, I'd suggest submitting this as a poll. There are a number of suggestions getting tossed out right now, and I'm seeing more posts offering different alternatives than subthreads splitting off to support already suggested options
Though this may simply be their way of saying "there really isn't any one answer that has a significant and obvious advantage over the others".:( But either way, I don't think you're getting the results you needed by posting this question, because people are simply providing you with a broad list of all the options you were already aware of without really helping you nail down just a few with useful comparisons to focus your decision on.
Take the top ~8 suggestions (though you are likely already aware of what they are going to be) and resubmit this as a poll. Then do your own research on the top 2 or 3 for a final decision on what will work best in your specific circumstances.
I found a load of these on the ground in a park. Never mind how they got there, how do you expect children to read the warning which isn't present with these things?
Never mind that nail, rock, and used condom over there on the ground. What if someone's kid picks that up and tries to swallow it? Lets ban all that stuff!
No. How about you teach your kid common sense and save the entire world the trouble of looking after them for you? I'm not going to run around the world slapping warning labels on stuff for your kid that may not even be old enough to read yet.
"Don't childproof the world - worldproof the child."
Interesting that they can write a whole article on redesigning body armor for women and there's not a single reference to tatas.
I found that surprising too. All that discussion about small differences in the shape of the female frame, but no consideration for breast size. Must be very uncomfortable going all day with an armor plate smashing your boobs flat.
I have no personal experience with being in the army, but I'd expect the low percentage of women there get an above-average share of grief if they complain ("quit your whining, woman!") so they're probably loathe to voice their concerns, and are for the most part just having to suffer silently through it. I was just taking it for granted that the military had already adjusted to the presence of women, but apparently they're only just starting now. Glad to see it's getting addressed, even if a bit tardy.
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I was leaning toward Apple being a bit too overzealous on their claims until I read the Ars article. It's difficult to ignore the abrupt physical design changes that came after the iPhone release. And the similarity of the interface. The interface was so similar there was an internal suggestion at Samsung to make the icons more different because they themselves thought it looked like a ripoff. That's pretty damning just by itself. Even if they didn't set out to infringe, they've clearly recognized they did end up with a confusingly similar design. In this game, intent isn't the only thing that will get you in trouble. There's no leeway for "honest mistakes" in patent violation, especially when you realize your mistake and continue to do it anyway.
I also had to think about the "obvious" / "optimal design" problem. There's just so many ways to efficiently design a toaster. Slot for bread, lever to pull down, dial to adjust time. If someone has a patent that covers those basics, you'd have a really hard time designing a competing product that didn't infringe. I get that. But samsung has been in the business for years before Apple, they've had plenty of time to bring various designs to market. Then Apple comes along with what we'll presume is a truckload of market research and engineering resources, and right-off-the-blocks has a design that's very different than 95% of the existing products available in the market. If at that point a competitor suddenly changes their designs on a direct collision course with yours, it's very hard to swallow that your new design wasn't at least a major influence on your recent design changes.
And if you pull designs out of your drafting cabinet that you've been working on for years that look like the new release, but you had never patented them or brought them to market.... you snooze you lose. The point here is improving the products available in the market, and it will not reward you for sitting on good designs. Get it to market or go home.
I think if a new player enters the market with a revolutionary design, you're not entitled to copy it just because it's turning out to be a much more optimal design. If it was "obvious" then you should have done it already. If you didn't, either you're slow, stupid, or it wasn't really that obvious then, even if now in retrospect it looks very obvious. In any event, you shouldn't be entitled to copy it just for the "optimal/obvious" reason. The one that was quick, clever and bold enough to bring the "optimal" design to market before you ought to get a reward for their effort, innovation, and providing the market with a superior product.
Some of what Apple is arguing is iffy, and a few things are downright silly. But now that they're in court they're going to play all their cards, whether they be strong or weak. May as well. Let the court uphold the strong ones, strike down the weak ones, and hash out who gets what out of the middleground. This is pretty standard practice in any big case like this. Bring all your cards to the table and turn over as many as you can mange to. So even though some of these things seem silly, I can see why they're doing it. You'll get better odds on review of your iffy things if they've already struck down some of the silly things and gotten the cutoff for "silly" more clearly defined. So it's necessary.
This almost sounds like astroturfing, but instead of using shills for public supporters, they're using shills for public reviewers. Not really much of a difference is there?
I was thinking more entertaining. Especially if the list is either (A) long, (B) contains some very high profile or normally impartial authorities, or BOTH.
Better go make some popcorn...
That's typical of most local stores. They don't make much margin on big things, but make very good margin on little things. When something is small, a high percentage margin doesn't add many hard digits to the price. Look at a computer, maybe wholesale $1125, sells for $1199, 7% margin. A router wholesales for $26, sells for $35, 35% margin. An ethernet cable wholesales for $1.85, sells for $7.99, 330% margin.
That's how most local businesses work. People don't look at the margin as a percentage, they look at it as a dollar amount per item. The extra $75 tacked onto the computer really looks like a lot more money lost than an extra $9 on a router, or $6 on a cable. But the reality is that the cable is a massive ripoff by comparison. So they're just gaming human nature here.
But looked at a different way... the shelf space taken by a computer vs a router doesn't differ a whole lot. And that space is your resource to work with. So it's not so much that you have to get margin per item, but you have to make the retail space pay for itself. And that doesn't vary a lot between items. A $2500 computer may take up as much space as a $500 computer. The rent for the building isn't set based on which model of computer you have on the shelf. So both the $500 and the $2500 computer need to bring in the same amount to cover their way, regardless of margin. So naturally the smaller items require a higher markup. If you have a space in your store where a space is netting you $40/month, you may have another identical size space in your store that is raking in $100/month, and that probably means you need to adjust some margins or change your product selection.
I understand that's how it's supposed to work, but quite a few people have found it worked for them as I described. Within days (or sometimes hours) of getting their videos reinstated, they'd get another takedown on the same video from the same source. And when you get your 3rd, youtube will suspend your account. You'd expect they'd ignore repeat takedowns, and you'd expect they'd un-tick the three-strikes counter when a counterclaim was filed, but they don't and they don't. At least sometimes. Maybe it's improved recently.
I just reviewed some more recent information and it looks like that in at least some cases they temp suspend you now and send you a "copyright quiz" to fill out. If you pass, you get your account back. If not, you have to wait a few days to retake the quiz. They weren't specific about three strikes, but some accounts can be suspended immediately without even a second incident if they consider the violation bad enough. They also appear to ban other accounts with the same email address on them, so don't use a shared email account (such as family) or you may become collateral damage from the banhammer.
There doesn't appear to be any clear spelled out hard rules anywhere. They're probably trying to keep their options open. If they put it in writing, then their enforcement/interpretation will be disputed.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a legal thing. This is more of a corporate thing, and when it's the coprs vs the people, it works the other way around, "guilty until proven innocent". (and then "guilty again after you prove your innocence, rinse and repeat")
It'd be quite entertaining if Scripps Local News did this entirely on purpose, to raise awareness of the abusability of these procedures. Heck, I'd like to see them do what the **RA like to do. NASA file a counterclaim and get it back, Scripps file another notice, repeat that a few times and watch Youtube auto-suspend NASA's youtube account for three abuse claims. (doesn't matter if they are reversed, three claims is all it takes) That would generate some AWESOME publicity!
"Right tool for the job." NASA can't afford to let PHBs, politics, or personal preferences and bias get in the way of doing their job. Bias can't be tolerated.
Since no one platform is best suited for everything and they need to do everything in their power to tilt the odds as far as possible in their favor, you're always going to see a good mashup at NASA.
If a manger prefers X but engineering finds a 3% improvement going with Y, they go with Y. They have to. When you have billions on the line, huge public exposure, and everyone looking for who to blame for failures, prejudice gets shaken out rapidly.
As a network admin, dealing with employees "wasting company time" isn't my job, so I really don't get too involved with it. So I really don't care if they jack up their personal computer. But I must admit I feel even less sorry for them when they wasted company time to do it in the first place. Serves them up a heaping fresh pile of "serves you right".
That doesn't really fix the problem. It sounds like a good idea until you realize you're pitting the network admin against the users. His job isn't to get involved with a game of cat and mouse. Most admins grow tired of being expected to have an airtight physical defense when there's no complementary policy in place.
A better response is to have the network admins place reasonably good filtering in place. Not airtight. Not filters that interfere with legitimate traffic. Filters with a zero-false-positive. Then if someone is still watching porn, it's easy to demonstrate that they're taking steps to bypass the filtering. Make it clear to the staff that deliberately bypassing the filters is a fireable offense.
This solves most of the problem all at once. No collateral damage, no borderline unfair calls, reasonable expense, and accountability where it belongs.
It also makes the perps easier to catch, since they don't have to spend hours trying to different things before they finally find the inevitable crack in the armor. They'll try basic things like proxy or direct IP etc. Those are easy to prove as deliberate while at the same time being easy to detect. If you're placing the entire onus on the net admin, the users can dig at your defenses all day long without so much as a wrist-slap, and when they finally discover another way, they've' not only beat you, you may have a difficult time noticing you've been beat. And then you are the bad guy for having "allowed" them to violate policy.
I've been in charge of cat and mouse before. I'd set something up, they'd find a way around it. I'd add another net. They'd stop for a bit and then they'd find a way around it. Rinse and repeat. All the while the manager wouldn't bother to yank one of them into the office and discuss the perils of working hard to break company policy. The filters finally got tight enough that the manager started having problems with some of his downtime, and then things really got weird. You don't want to be here.
"against company policy" needs to mean "you don't do that here", not "we're going to try to stop you from doing that here".
wrong black hole...
Everyone in this thread seems to assume that all SSL keys are generated and provided by public CAs, who then could leak your private key. You can roll your own anytime you want. Then just tell the users and your servers to trust your public key. Works the same way for IMAP as it does for HTTPS.
(A) I thought they had rules saying they weren't allowed to agree on anything and (B) it's good to see a Republican pushing legislation for the Little People.
To block something, you have to have an interaction with it. And then we have newton's first law. The barrier may not move, but somehow some way there is a change in energy in the barrier. Temperature, orientation, location, etc.
If I run my truck into a brick wall and the wall doesn't move, it doesn't mean I had no affect on the wall. At the very least, I created sound, heat, cracked some bricks, and broke some mortar free of bricks.
Although conservation of energy is the point we're hashing out, for the purpose of comparison it helps to remember that it ought to hold true, and when you keep that in mind, it helps you find the less obvious places energy has escaped to.
I think his point there was you paid for information about the one bag, and that your ability to infer the other information as a result means you got it for "free". Which I agree, is wrong. You always knew that the bags contained different balls. So no new information was gained, just clarification of existing information.
It's like me giving you one more number for your Sudoku puzzle and your then being able to solve the entire puzzle, all 15 remaining numbers. You got the other 14 numbers "for free"? No, you didn't.
I get how two different entangled particles can share behavior, and how you can check one to test the other, but why don't things that affect one particle cause the entangled particle to also be affected?
And the other question I had on this is with the Brownian Motion. When you throw up a barrier to stop a particle from moving, and it hits the barrier, isn't that newton's 3rd law at work? Both deflecting the particle and providing equal but opposite energy to the barrier? How is this accounted for in this conservation of energy model? That would seem to be the missing input of energy?
Lets say that little invisible demon gets knocked back a little by the deflection of the particle. He eventually has to reposition himself back where he was, in front of the door. That requires energy. And I think there is where we are adding energy into the system that we think we're getting for "free".
(I'm no quantum mechanic, I only work on Fords)
I've seen three popular explanations for "whose bots are they?" They're almost certainly a rented botnet composed mainly of compromised (usually windows) machines that are under remote mass control. I've read multiple expose where they show how you go to some .ru etc website and set up an account with them and rent out however many thousand machines you want to, and can do any of several offered services... ddos, backdoor installations, DNS redirects, proxy, and of course spam and click fraud.
Click fraud is run for one of three reasons:
1) drive up pay-for-click revenue for the site (facebook) - probably not a smart thing for them to do seeing as they're Suspect #1 because they have the most to gain, but already have a ton of cash
2) competitors trying to cost you money by driving up your advertising costs
3) competitors trying to cause you to hit your impression hit limit and stop displaying your ads
2 and 3 don't necessarily have to be your competitors, they could be random criminals trying to extort you, "pay us or we screw up your marketing".
I've seen several recent reports of (3) suspected due to finding a pattern of click fraud spikes at times when their competitors were doing a new product release. Renting botnets isn't free, and isn't without risk, and (2) probably doesn't have a very big net return. So (3) at the time of a new product release would appear to be a competitor's most prudent and effective time to buy some click-fraud.
And numerous posts above asking to post the IP addresses. really? Aren't you embarrassed to suggest that those would be helpful to anyone here?
I'm out. I'll just wait for another one to come up for sale.
Quite a few reasons really.
- I like to get my work done quickly, I'm impatient. MOST internal IDE/sata attachments require a reboot. It's inconvenient to have to reboot one of my service machines every time I attach a drive to it. Which happens many times every day.
- I can replace a laptop drive with a new drive, boot off a USB stick, and plug the failing drive in and run the recovery directly. There have been days when I've been running four recoveries at once. Often more efficient than trying to get several things going on a service machine at once. And with having to reboot it would get that much worse. You can't attach an old hard drive internally to a laptop at the same time as the good drive. (most cases)
- failing drives have a habit of hanging their interface until power cycled or unplugged. Again, not something you want to be doing with your service machine or even target machine. If it hangs, I pull the fw cable which un-hangs my service machine, power cycle the sled, plug back in the cable and resume. Cranky drives can require a dozen sled reboots, or periodic trips to the freezer. Having a recovery hang a service machine while I was trying to use it for something else at the same time causes TWO of my jobs to have to be started over.
- When necessary, I can get more than one recovery going at the same time on a single service machine. Can't reboot a machine for one drive while you're doing another.
- Firewire isn't as fast as many sata and most ide, but a lot of the time I need to be attaching one drive or another over firewire anyway. If I have a laptop booted into target mode and attached to a service machine for recovery, attaching the bad drive internally doesn't save me any time since it will have to go TO the good drive over firewire anyway.
- When I have a lot of things going at once around here, speed becomes less important than the ability to multitask, and firewire offers me many more options and flexibility. Careful consideration of your options, how you do things, and in what order greatly reduces turnover time. This can be the difference between a process taking four hours of time and monopolizing a service machine, vs taking 90 minutes of time and using one sled and a usb stick off in the corner while I do other things. OR 30 minutes of my time focusing on a single job vs shuffling something like that off to a corner to run for a few hours on its own while I get other things done. Most things I do can arguably be done in many different ways, requiring very different amounts of clock time, hands-on time, and various resources. Prioritizing, availability of options, and planning my methods are very important to my job productivity.
I've been a repair tech for the last 10 yrs. (and I don't mean I'm a "I built my own PC, I'm a computer god! I fix my friend/family''s computers" I actually know what I'm doing and have electrical engineering experience) I'd estimate I've seen around a thousand bad hard drives in that time. Of those, I'd say 65% would tap repeatedly, 25% had some io errors but were still working, 8% would sound normal but would never post on the bus, and the other 2% were the other weird issues like chirping or no power at all.
The tappers were very rarely recoverable by me. Every now and then I'd see one that if you powered it up dozens of times, you might get lucky and it would post properly and you could get data from it. None of the other common methods were helpful.
Over 90% of the drives with io errors and slow blocks could be recovered from. Most of those simply required a file level copy from bad drive to good. Most would have a handful of unrecoverable files. Depending on what was lost, an OS reinstall was sometimes required on the new drive, but not usually. A small percentage of them would have a large number of errors and require days to recover, or would fail completely during the recovery. A few of them would look promising but then quickly becomes apparent that almost nothing will be recoverable.
Sometimes a drive would stop responding during recovery and require a break. Trips to the freezer helped on about 30% of the drives. Some drives required numerous trips to the freezer, using rsync to resume copying where it left off last time, a process which could take days but could result in a complete recovery. I pondered ways to cool a drive during the recovery such as using a peltier, but never got anything implemented. I also use ddrescue and another custom script I wrote that works in a similar way, doing block-level recovery while splitting problem areas for smaller recovery chunks. That's useful for windows or other foreign OS where you can't do a file copy. (mac shop here)
I've never dried "drop therapy" or "impact maintenance". I'm sure it could help under specific circumstances like a stuck spindle or loose connection but I've never witness it.
I've done a little bit of onboard controller card ("OBCC") swaps for identical drives where the bad one wouldn't power on at all. About 25% success there. For that reason I tend to keep old tapping drives because their cards can work in dead drives. I assume the tapping drives have head failures, which isn't related to the OBCC. I've talked with multiple data recovery places about this process, and to my surprise every single one of them has told me "that won't work". They usually explain the remaps are stored on the OBCC, which makes sense, but isn't a good excuse not to try when the remaps probably don't account for more than one in a hundred thousand blocks. I think they just want me to send the drive to them.
The sled you place the drive into makes a HUGE difference in recovery. Avoid usb. I don't care if you insist on windows, install a firewire card. Almost all USB bridge chips handle misbehaving drives very badly. Only use one of those little external adapters with the build-on 2ft usb cord on it as an absolute last resort. OWC's "mercury elite aluminum" series are the best (reasonably priced) recovery sled I have found, and I have tried many. USB (39MB/sec, not 36, 26, 16, 12, etc), FW400, FW800, AND esata interface. In the past I used a Granite Digital "fireview", those absolutely rocked for drive recovery (LCD panel with diag menu....) but they stopped making them and they were IDE only. Someone needs to make a modern sled like that for sata please.
As for paid recovery, results seem random. Techs tend to have a recovery place they swear BY, and others they swear AT. But my observation is simply that methods vary and different places handle different problems with varying success. I think many techs' impressions are based on their first few experiences - if good they like, if bad they don'
I try to check out all the comments before posting a reaction to a summary, to make sure someone else hasn't already raised the point. And you have.
"This is horrible, everyone hates it!"
Who hates it? why?
"Because it's horrible and I hate it!"
Oh. I see. (clicks "ignore")
That's entirely up to you and your habit of using the company computer. No one forces you to browse personal web sites and enter your password on company gear. Don't go blaming others for your actions because you were "tempted."
I use mac so I have constant access to the ability to encrypt disk images. I keep an encrypted dmg on my flash drive that's always in my belt pouch. This gets auto mirrored back and forth with a copy of it on my laptop when plugged in. So I always have access to all my keys, passwords, account info, etc, at or away from my computer. If I lose the flash drive, nothing was risked. My account keychain on my laptop has the password to that dmg so normally I never have to enter it in. Unless I have to get out my flash drive and plug it into another computer to view a password etc. But then I understand I am mounting an image on an untrusted platform, that may even have a keylogger, so I don't just do it without a care in the world.
There's a shortcut to the password text file in my home folder. I double click that, and the system automatically mounts the disk image and opens the document, so the protection is effectively transparent to me. Since os x's keychains unlock with your login password, if my laptop were ever stolen and my password reset, my keychain would not unlock and the dmg would be protected. So far it's looking like a good solution for me. The only way to break it is if I plug my flash drive into a severely compromised computer and try to open the dmg.
An alternate way to do this would be to store the dmg in the cloud like on dropbox. No less safe, perhaps a tad more convenient, but requires internet access..
First off I'll say for "next time", don't store personal information on company gear. Anything you've ever put on there is arguably company property. Any backups they've ever mare are also theirs. You shouldn't be in this situation to begin with. But that's not relevant to you now, you want a solution to the spot you're already in so I'll get to that next. Just try to avoid a reoccurrence next time huh?
Any company IT person with a clue will make sure your machine gets wiped and reimaged when you leave anyway. Even the remote possibility of an employee leaving a back door, logic bomb, or incriminating data (kiddy porn, descriptions of corporate illegal activity, made up stuff that could be bad, etc) being on your computer after you leave pretty much makes a nuke of your machine mandatory. So get the go-ahead from your IT person and then do it yourself. You may need to unlicense / deactivate some pro software on there first, make sure you have that taken care of first. Then do a secure wipe using whatever method you're comfortable with. Ask your IT person if you don't know how. It's a process that will take hours to run. If it finishes in under a few minutes, it didn't wipe anything, it merely reset the directory records, and your data is still on the drive.
The most basic mode of any secure wipe is good enough for anything short of DoD-class erasing. In reality, a simple one-pass zero of a drive will prevent anyone with a budget under $50k from getting anything off your drive. No need to go nuts with a seven pass random wipe, it'll just be a waste of your time with no added benefit.
After you've secure-erased it, let them do the reinstallation. That's how it should work, there's no point in wiping it only to give you another crack at installing a back door just before you walk out. If they say no that's ok you can do it, remember this... you are opening yourself to future suspicion because if something shady happens when your replacement has been using the machine, you are a suspect. ("hmmm that shouldn't have happened, how did that get out? I wonder if Jim didn't leave a back door?") Don't take that risk. Leave it blank. Nothing can be attributed to you after they do a fresh installation themselves. If they push you to do the reinstall yourself, push back with this point, you're not refusing to do it to be a dick, you're covering your ass. They should respect that. And explain how this also covers THEIR ass. That should be very difficult to say "no" to. If they still insist on your doing the reinstall before leaving, get it in writing. That will help you later if a wild criminal investigation appears later.
Considering the wide variety of responses you're getting, I'd suggest submitting this as a poll. There are a number of suggestions getting tossed out right now, and I'm seeing more posts offering different alternatives than subthreads splitting off to support already suggested options
Though this may simply be their way of saying "there really isn't any one answer that has a significant and obvious advantage over the others". :( But either way, I don't think you're getting the results you needed by posting this question, because people are simply providing you with a broad list of all the options you were already aware of without really helping you nail down just a few with useful comparisons to focus your decision on.
Take the top ~8 suggestions (though you are likely already aware of what they are going to be) and resubmit this as a poll. Then do your own research on the top 2 or 3 for a final decision on what will work best in your specific circumstances.
Never mind that nail, rock, and used condom over there on the ground. What if someone's kid picks that up and tries to swallow it? Lets ban all that stuff!
No. How about you teach your kid common sense and save the entire world the trouble of looking after them for you? I'm not going to run around the world slapping warning labels on stuff for your kid that may not even be old enough to read yet.
"Don't childproof the world - worldproof the child."
I found that surprising too. All that discussion about small differences in the shape of the female frame, but no consideration for breast size. Must be very uncomfortable going all day with an armor plate smashing your boobs flat.
I have no personal experience with being in the army, but I'd expect the low percentage of women there get an above-average share of grief if they complain ("quit your whining, woman!") so they're probably loathe to voice their concerns, and are for the most part just having to suffer silently through it. I was just taking it for granted that the military had already adjusted to the presence of women, but apparently they're only just starting now. Glad to see it's getting addressed, even if a bit tardy.