I'm sure everyone's going to "fanboi" label me for this comment but here it is anyway. Apple tends to hang more on the bleeding edge, and is naturally going to run into more frequent hardware failures as a result. Things like mandatory cameras, backlit keyboards, ambient light sensors, 11N, drop-head-parking, DVI, etc. I suppose in that respect a lot of Apple buyers are comparable to other brands' "early adopters", and the tradeoffs that brings.
What's more important to most people is the support they get when they have a problem. (and then the tables turn, violently)
(I'd rather have my mobo go out twice and be covered both times, than for it to go out once and not be covered)
Seems like the best way to deal with an open plugin structure is to require mozilla to approve an app for wide-scale access to the internals, and for everyone else, restricted access that's more idiot-proofed. That way, anyone can write a plugin (unlike say, the apple store) albeit with limits, but at the same time the main app devs can allow power user plugins that are proven to be safe.
It's too bad Apple hasn't gone this route. (yet) Right now the only reason they are claiming for the app approval process is to "protect the users". While that certainly is one of their goals, eliminating competition with their own software, (the #1, #2, and #3 top reasons for app rejection at the store) doing what mozilla is doing would accomplish user protection without the lockdown/collateral damage of a must-be-signed-to-run system.
The idea is to have a weapon with LOW power requirements
Does not exist. Most (non-tactical) weapons are designed to do a maximum amount of disruption to the enemy, that means doing "work". Hence the majority of weapons deliver the most energy they practically can on target, in a way that's destructive.
When you say "power" I think you mean to say "energy". And there's a lot of kinetic energy in say, a bullet. In the case of the lasers, it's in the temps created by the photons. Either way you are sending energy ("power") downrange in such a way that the enemy can't handle it and it causes damage.
In the case of bullets, gunpowder holds a good deal of energy and is fairly efficiently converted to energy doing damage downrange. Lasers are just a different way of sending chaos-inducing energy downrange. They have different advantages and disadvantages over bullets.
Getting back to your original statement, there's a massive amount of "power" in an M16's magazine. The problem with lasers is their efficiency really really stinks, whereas gunpowder's good. So you have to carry a lot more energy with you for a laser weapon, and waste most of it. (not delivered downrange with consequences) Imagine how impractical an M16 would be if the bullets (bullet in cartridge) were the size of softballs? That's sort of what they're trying to fix with the lasers right now. The tech works, it's effective, it's just not convenient yet.
Does firing a laser bring recoil opposite the laser's direction with the energy equal to that in the laser, the way firing a bullet does?
Most of the energy of a laser is in the heat, and very little in the mass of the photons being fired. Bullets work the other way, their energy is almost all in the mass, and very little in their heat.
So lasers have almost zero recoil.
That being said, the kinetic (mass) energy of a bullet is basically converted to heat when it hits, and it can be considered to burn/melt through armor to some degree as well as punch a hole in it.
tho especially considering the criticality of weight, it's a lot easier to coat a missile with chrome than armor plating.
One would assume that all ICBMs around the world are either already chromed or can be retrofitted very easily should the laser tech become more mainstream.
It is intended to prevent brute force attacks on SSH servers by monitoring invalid login attempts in the authentication log and blocking the originating IP addresses. "
RTFA. From the looks of the logs he posted, it's deliberately only trying a couple times from any given IP, specifically to prevent this sort of detection.
I used to do this sort of thing with scripts on my server, after running into an occasional spurt of several hours of an IP address trying every username in the book, apparently hoping for a blank password or same-as-login password. I had it set to autoban the IP at 5 of any sort of failed attempts in a row. I had to do it this way unlike your above example because the guesses kept changing the username, and most traditional "delayed authentication failure" responses nowadays are only effective after multiple attempts on the same username, and they were running a username dictionary, not a password dictionary.
But your method is 100% worthless against this attack.
Nowadays, my servers listen on a nonstandard port, and rsa key login is manditory. End of problem.
It uses what he calls an "arc generator" in the video. (ironman reference?) It's a piezo electric (or other high voltage/low current generating) spark generator. You can see two curved wires coming up from the sides of the gas orifice and turning to face each other and ending. The spark jumps between them and ignites the gas. You can hear two sounds from the gadget in the video, one is a jit-jit-jit coming from what I assume is a small servo motor like used in model cars/planes, to adjust the gas opening in steps. The other is an occasional and sometimes rapid cracking sound, that's the sound of the spark being generated. A smart way to deal with the spark would be to have a temperature or IR sensor watching above your hand and arcing when there was gas applied but no heat present, but I don't know if that's how he does it.
I was expecting to see some gas cylinder somewhere when he gave a closeup of his "arc generator" but I didn't spot one. I assume he has a tube running around down his back, that's a lot of gas he's using so I don't think it's a little 20 gram acetylene cylinder like you'd find in a micro torch, not enough capacity.
I also notice he had to be careful with his control. Anytime he backed it down he had to close his fingers, which while he was pointing forward would have crispied his fingertips, so he always had to turn it to face palm upward first. Something of a limitation, especially since I doubt he has a safety (mercury sw etc) to slam the flow down to zero if he forgets and closes his fingers too much while too much gas is flowing while in a horizontal position.
And to all those commenting "no practical use!", you are completely missing the point. No, the point isn't practicality.
- lowers pollution and environmental damage by displacing formerly cheapest-power sources such as coal and oil - encourages recycling which can sometimes not be worth it due to energy requirements - raises quality of life pretty much across the board
Basically when power becomes cheaper, "the way things are done" changes in a lot of places because things that used to be more economical to do one way, become more economical to do another way. This almost always works to society's advantage. And as a result the prices on a lot of things gets cheaper because goods and services are cheaper to produce. When products (cost of living) goes down without average wage going down, quality of life goes up.
...which completely explains why we had to drop two of them before they surrendered. Surely they were in no hurry to lose another major city.
The bombs were dropped because it was completely clear to all that the japanese of that time were going to dig in as deep as possible and were all willing to fight to the death. If you run the math, the number killed by those two bombs is far less than the casualties would have been on just the Allies side had we had to actually invade Japan. Imagine the scale of damage to Japan (the country and the populace) if the rest of the world had been forced to invade to put an end to it?
At first glance it may seem like an absurd conclusion, but really, those bombs did Japan a favor. In the long run they saved a lot more Japanese lives than they took. The emperor had the entire populace wound up to fight to the death and that's about the only thing that was going to change his mind.
Although surely actually nuking someone beats sabor rattling any day, but that was a positive side-effect, not the deciding factor, by a long shot.
Turn radius was a big factor also, I have no numbers to post but a zero trying to follow a wildcat in a high speed turn had a very good chance of ripping off its wings. LOW speed turns on the other hand the zero could out-turn and get inside the wildcat. That low speed maneuverability was one of the very important discoveries made when a zero was captured, leading to training airmen to avoid situations advantageous to the zero.
but my policy on this is to not install pirated/mislicensed software. In three IT jobs, none of them have pushed me to "just do it anyway", but maybe I'm just fortunate that way.
That being said, about 50% of the time they just got one of my coworkers to do it instead, and quit asking me to pirate things for them. And about 20% of the time they actually bought the software, found a free alternative, or did without.
It'd take a pretty stupid manager to press such an issue to the point of firing you. That'd make for an entertainingly short discussion at your unemployment review, and would start a rather heavy boulder rolling.
The new windows tech here is having quite an annoying time trying to sort out all the pirated software that the previous tech was using. He too refuses to help with piracy, and I've simply advised him to tell the managers here we need to buy xxx. And if they say we already have it, just point out it's pirated and we can't use it. I don't think they'll have a problem with replacing the pirated software with legit. I'm glad I don't work somewhere where the CIO is a "pirate wherever you can to save a buck".
Even if you don't like, macs, get them a mac anyway. Regardless of how well windows or linux or whatnot works for you, you're not buying it for you so quit making the choice on what works for you and not for them. Recommend something that will be easy for them to use without frustrations, as unbreakable as possible, and require as little maintenance as possible. Never forget who will be using the computer, and that it either (1) needs to be maintenance free, (2) they need to be able to maintain it - really, or (3) YOU get to be 24/7 support until they throw it through a window.
For the average computer noob, a mac is by far the easiest to work with, safest, and lowest maintenance. My mom (definite noob) bought a pc, had a horrible time with it, against my advice bought another pc, had an even worse time with it, and finally said I've had it I'm getting a mac. Hated it the first week because it was unfamiliar. Now she just raves about it and it's been 99% troublefree. On the couple occasions there was a minor problem, VNC remoted in and had it fixed in under 5 minutes. That's how family computer support should work.
If they refuse to buy what you recommend they get, (mac or otherwise) and keep coming to you for help, tell them flat out I can't support this, get what I told you to get and I will guarantee you a good experience and good help, and remind them of how easy the problem would be to fix (or that it would never have happened in the first place) if they'd have listened to you. Make sure they fully comprehend that you will NOT provide ANY support if they ignore your advice. Too many times I hear "but I thought you were the computer expert and would help me!". No. Not with that I won't, you are on your own.
That's what I did when she was shopping for her second pc, and that's why her third machine was a mac. With her windows machines she was spending several hundred dollars twice a year to have someone fix her computer (and twice losing everything) before it finally sunk in.
I was thinking more along the lines of "'inaccurate, uninformed, and embarrassingly honest"
But we've been through this before. Windows 3.1 was Mac OS 7. Windows 98 was Mac OS 9. Windows XP was Mac OS X 10.1. Nothing new here. You can't redact history. MS doesn't typically innovate, they "embrace, expand, and corrupt". They just typically have about a 2 year dwell time with whoever's coattails they're chasing.
7 does look a bit more modern on the outside, but from what we've seen so far, it's still a few years behind the times under the hood.
apple has never officially supported atom OR palms pretending to be ipods. But then I suppose you'll point out that MS has never officially supported modded xboxes, so touche'.
If there were another network you could use, sure fine, but they have a complete monopoly on it. You can't just go sign up with someone else to resume your network things like online play or downloading and demos with some other service, they're it. You paid for the box that has these features, and now the sole provider of the services that make it function cuts you off.
It's like ford finding out you installed an unapproved high performance carburetor so they remotely disable your third and fourth gears and there's not a mechanic in town that can undo it. That which you've paid for has substantially dropped in value due to the decision of the vendor, after they have taken your money for it.
Rubbing salt in the wound they offer solutions to your problem which involve your rebuying at least part of the product from them. That's like Ford graciously offering to sell you a new ECU ($2000) that will restore your gears. You'd love that wouldn't you?
I don't support the cheaters, and I'm not one of the modders, but I do support their right to mod without this treatment from the vendors. This whole concept of people having some unfair element of control over you after you have bought a product from them needs to stop. EULAs in general seem to only benefit the vendors while at the (sometimes extreme) disadvantage of the users.
I wonder how the recent front page article on the regulators questioning the BBCs new DRM, looks like the grounds were "Ofcom, asked them the same question that has been asked of many DRM systems: 'How does this benefit the consumer?' ". How do EULAs benefit the consumer? well of course, they don't, in any way. It's nice to see the basic principle starting to soak in, even if it's going to move like a glacier...
Not really. All it does is keep the bad cheaters off the games. The good cheaters don't get caught by these sweeps.
And that's just what xbox live needs, darwinism at work refining a better crowd of cheaters.
The checks done by live are less sophisticated than say, punkbuster on the PCs. And all that accomplished was to raise the stakes and make the cheaters go into business selling the "undetectable" cheats and taunting those like Activision.
- data redundancy, offsite specifically - ability to cut over? ie what happens if there's an earthquake, are your services to the world down until everything is replaced and backups are restored? - what do you have on hand for hot spares in the event of equipment failure? - when you are in failover mode for whatever reason, how does it impact your performance? ie does webmail just crawl until the mirror finishes rebuilding? - how are your external resources? got a plan to truck in gas for the genny if a tornado levels the local substation? got a hotline or multiple points of expert contact available 24/7 for every critical piece of hardware that you can't fix yourself regardless of how it breaks? same for software. - do you have a forensics plan in place? ie if you get hacked, (and don't answer that with "that can't happen") do you have any idea what you will do and in what order, to preserve forensic information, stop additional damage, and orderly cleanup? What are your legal obligations for notification, who is your contact with the press? (and there better only be ONE) Do you have a specific partner waiting in the wing all picked out if needed? after the fact is not the time to be choosing one. - if you have a failure that affects multiple services or clients, what is your priority order? who gets their service back first? - do you have a set "fire schedule" that people know specific additional hours they will be required to work in the event of an emergency situation? Are you going to run short on manpower in a specific area because you're already overextended by day to day operations in some aspect? - are there any people that are single points of failure? What if Bob gets hit by a bus? what if Dave is the only one that knows the firewall and gets hospitalized when it explodes while he's working on it? crosstrain crosstrain crosstrain. - not sure if it was covered above but documentation, documentation, and more documentation. How consistent is it? Does every network map look like it was written with a different drafting app by a different person? Is all of your documentation collected together and well organized? multiple copies in various places? are some things much better documented than others? - server rebuild lists. do you have a step by step set of instructions for EVERY critical box that will take it from a freshly formatted HD to back in production, that any of a dozen of your monkeys can follow, with no "well wasn't that obvious?" missing steps? And how often do you test these? Walk in one morning and drop a new box on a desk and say "WEB15 just got STOLEN. Rebuild it. Fast. Starting NOW." and hit your stopwatch and see what you get. You do this from time to time, right? - do you have a structured command that avoids differing opinions in a crisis slowing things down? when it comes right down to it there needs to be one clear person or command structure that has final say in a crisis.
I'm sure I'm missing some things but that's a good start for ya.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure everyone's going to "fanboi" label me for this comment but here it is anyway. Apple tends to hang more on the bleeding edge, and is naturally going to run into more frequent hardware failures as a result. Things like mandatory cameras, backlit keyboards, ambient light sensors, 11N, drop-head-parking, DVI, etc. I suppose in that respect a lot of Apple buyers are comparable to other brands' "early adopters", and the tradeoffs that brings.
What's more important to most people is the support they get when they have a problem. (and then the tables turn, violently)
(I'd rather have my mobo go out twice and be covered both times, than for it to go out once and not be covered)
and $5 more in my pocket for shooting off an email or signing a paper is fine by me, even if someone else thinks maybe I'm entitled to $50.
Seems like the best way to deal with an open plugin structure is to require mozilla to approve an app for wide-scale access to the internals, and for everyone else, restricted access that's more idiot-proofed. That way, anyone can write a plugin (unlike say, the apple store) albeit with limits, but at the same time the main app devs can allow power user plugins that are proven to be safe.
It's too bad Apple hasn't gone this route. (yet) Right now the only reason they are claiming for the app approval process is to "protect the users". While that certainly is one of their goals, eliminating competition with their own software, (the #1, #2, and #3 top reasons for app rejection at the store) doing what mozilla is doing would accomplish user protection without the lockdown/collateral damage of a must-be-signed-to-run system.
The idea is to have a weapon with LOW power requirements
Does not exist. Most (non-tactical) weapons are designed to do a maximum amount of disruption to the enemy, that means doing "work". Hence the majority of weapons deliver the most energy they practically can on target, in a way that's destructive.
When you say "power" I think you mean to say "energy". And there's a lot of kinetic energy in say, a bullet. In the case of the lasers, it's in the temps created by the photons. Either way you are sending energy ("power") downrange in such a way that the enemy can't handle it and it causes damage.
In the case of bullets, gunpowder holds a good deal of energy and is fairly efficiently converted to energy doing damage downrange. Lasers are just a different way of sending chaos-inducing energy downrange. They have different advantages and disadvantages over bullets.
Getting back to your original statement, there's a massive amount of "power" in an M16's magazine. The problem with lasers is their efficiency really really stinks, whereas gunpowder's good. So you have to carry a lot more energy with you for a laser weapon, and waste most of it. (not delivered downrange with consequences) Imagine how impractical an M16 would be if the bullets (bullet in cartridge) were the size of softballs? That's sort of what they're trying to fix with the lasers right now. The tech works, it's effective, it's just not convenient yet.
Does firing a laser bring recoil opposite the laser's direction with the energy equal to that in the laser, the way firing a bullet does?
Most of the energy of a laser is in the heat, and very little in the mass of the photons being fired. Bullets work the other way, their energy is almost all in the mass, and very little in their heat.
So lasers have almost zero recoil.
That being said, the kinetic (mass) energy of a bullet is basically converted to heat when it hits, and it can be considered to burn/melt through armor to some degree as well as punch a hole in it.
tho especially considering the criticality of weight, it's a lot easier to coat a missile with chrome than armor plating.
One would assume that all ICBMs around the world are either already chromed or can be retrofitted very easily should the laser tech become more mainstream.
right now the second thing we can use is space, in the prime and hospitable places. and other natural resources like forests.
It is intended to prevent brute force attacks on SSH servers by monitoring invalid login attempts in the authentication log and blocking the originating IP addresses. "
RTFA. From the looks of the logs he posted, it's deliberately only trying a couple times from any given IP, specifically to prevent this sort of detection.
I used to do this sort of thing with scripts on my server, after running into an occasional spurt of several hours of an IP address trying every username in the book, apparently hoping for a blank password or same-as-login password. I had it set to autoban the IP at 5 of any sort of failed attempts in a row. I had to do it this way unlike your above example because the guesses kept changing the username, and most traditional "delayed authentication failure" responses nowadays are only effective after multiple attempts on the same username, and they were running a username dictionary, not a password dictionary.
But your method is 100% worthless against this attack.
Nowadays, my servers listen on a nonstandard port, and rsa key login is manditory. End of problem.
I also like how it auto-ignites
It uses what he calls an "arc generator" in the video. (ironman reference?) It's a piezo electric (or other high voltage/low current generating) spark generator. You can see two curved wires coming up from the sides of the gas orifice and turning to face each other and ending. The spark jumps between them and ignites the gas. You can hear two sounds from the gadget in the video, one is a jit-jit-jit coming from what I assume is a small servo motor like used in model cars/planes, to adjust the gas opening in steps. The other is an occasional and sometimes rapid cracking sound, that's the sound of the spark being generated. A smart way to deal with the spark would be to have a temperature or IR sensor watching above your hand and arcing when there was gas applied but no heat present, but I don't know if that's how he does it.
I was expecting to see some gas cylinder somewhere when he gave a closeup of his "arc generator" but I didn't spot one. I assume he has a tube running around down his back, that's a lot of gas he's using so I don't think it's a little 20 gram acetylene cylinder like you'd find in a micro torch, not enough capacity.
I also notice he had to be careful with his control. Anytime he backed it down he had to close his fingers, which while he was pointing forward would have crispied his fingertips, so he always had to turn it to face palm upward first. Something of a limitation, especially since I doubt he has a safety (mercury sw etc) to slam the flow down to zero if he forgets and closes his fingers too much while too much gas is flowing while in a horizontal position.
And to all those commenting "no practical use!", you are completely missing the point. No, the point isn't practicality.
cheaper power has several positive side effects
- lowers pollution and environmental damage by displacing formerly cheapest-power sources such as coal and oil
- encourages recycling which can sometimes not be worth it due to energy requirements
- raises quality of life pretty much across the board
Basically when power becomes cheaper, "the way things are done" changes in a lot of places because things that used to be more economical to do one way, become more economical to do another way. This almost always works to society's advantage. And as a result the prices on a lot of things gets cheaper because goods and services are cheaper to produce. When products (cost of living) goes down without average wage going down, quality of life goes up.
...which completely explains why we had to drop two of them before they surrendered. Surely they were in no hurry to lose another major city.
The bombs were dropped because it was completely clear to all that the japanese of that time were going to dig in as deep as possible and were all willing to fight to the death. If you run the math, the number killed by those two bombs is far less than the casualties would have been on just the Allies side had we had to actually invade Japan. Imagine the scale of damage to Japan (the country and the populace) if the rest of the world had been forced to invade to put an end to it?
At first glance it may seem like an absurd conclusion, but really, those bombs did Japan a favor. In the long run they saved a lot more Japanese lives than they took. The emperor had the entire populace wound up to fight to the death and that's about the only thing that was going to change his mind.
Although surely actually nuking someone beats sabor rattling any day, but that was a positive side-effect, not the deciding factor, by a long shot.
Turn radius was a big factor also, I have no numbers to post but a zero trying to follow a wildcat in a high speed turn had a very good chance of ripping off its wings. LOW speed turns on the other hand the zero could out-turn and get inside the wildcat. That low speed maneuverability was one of the very important discoveries made when a zero was captured, leading to training airmen to avoid situations advantageous to the zero.
The Germans and the Japanese had a penchant for attempting to produce super weapons as opposed to incremental improvements in existing stuff.
Then again from time to time a technological leap in weaponry does make a hit. Like oh, the Atomic Bomb that ended said war.
but my policy on this is to not install pirated/mislicensed software. In three IT jobs, none of them have pushed me to "just do it anyway", but maybe I'm just fortunate that way.
That being said, about 50% of the time they just got one of my coworkers to do it instead, and quit asking me to pirate things for them. And about 20% of the time they actually bought the software, found a free alternative, or did without.
It'd take a pretty stupid manager to press such an issue to the point of firing you. That'd make for an entertainingly short discussion at your unemployment review, and would start a rather heavy boulder rolling.
The new windows tech here is having quite an annoying time trying to sort out all the pirated software that the previous tech was using. He too refuses to help with piracy, and I've simply advised him to tell the managers here we need to buy xxx. And if they say we already have it, just point out it's pirated and we can't use it. I don't think they'll have a problem with replacing the pirated software with legit. I'm glad I don't work somewhere where the CIO is a "pirate wherever you can to save a buck".
I'll have to find the right web site to browse to in order to handle the carry
sure beats OnStar
Even if you don't like, macs, get them a mac anyway. Regardless of how well windows or linux or whatnot works for you, you're not buying it for you so quit making the choice on what works for you and not for them. Recommend something that will be easy for them to use without frustrations, as unbreakable as possible, and require as little maintenance as possible. Never forget who will be using the computer, and that it either (1) needs to be maintenance free, (2) they need to be able to maintain it - really, or (3) YOU get to be 24/7 support until they throw it through a window.
For the average computer noob, a mac is by far the easiest to work with, safest, and lowest maintenance. My mom (definite noob) bought a pc, had a horrible time with it, against my advice bought another pc, had an even worse time with it, and finally said I've had it I'm getting a mac. Hated it the first week because it was unfamiliar. Now she just raves about it and it's been 99% troublefree. On the couple occasions there was a minor problem, VNC remoted in and had it fixed in under 5 minutes. That's how family computer support should work.
If they refuse to buy what you recommend they get, (mac or otherwise) and keep coming to you for help, tell them flat out I can't support this, get what I told you to get and I will guarantee you a good experience and good help, and remind them of how easy the problem would be to fix (or that it would never have happened in the first place) if they'd have listened to you. Make sure they fully comprehend that you will NOT provide ANY support if they ignore your advice. Too many times I hear "but I thought you were the computer expert and would help me!". No. Not with that I won't, you are on your own.
That's what I did when she was shopping for her second pc, and that's why her third machine was a mac. With her windows machines she was spending several hundred dollars twice a year to have someone fix her computer (and twice losing everything) before it finally sunk in.
I was thinking more along the lines of "'inaccurate, uninformed, and embarrassingly honest "
But we've been through this before. Windows 3.1 was Mac OS 7. Windows 98 was Mac OS 9. Windows XP was Mac OS X 10.1. Nothing new here. You can't redact history. MS doesn't typically innovate, they "embrace, expand, and corrupt". They just typically have about a 2 year dwell time with whoever's coattails they're chasing.
7 does look a bit more modern on the outside, but from what we've seen so far, it's still a few years behind the times under the hood.
apple has never officially supported atom OR palms pretending to be ipods. But then I suppose you'll point out that MS has never officially supported modded xboxes, so touche'.
3% is a pretty small percentage.
until that 3% is standing in the street in front of your house with baseball bats. o_O Then tell me that 3% is insignificant.
If there were another network you could use, sure fine, but they have a complete monopoly on it. You can't just go sign up with someone else to resume your network things like online play or downloading and demos with some other service, they're it. You paid for the box that has these features, and now the sole provider of the services that make it function cuts you off.
It's like ford finding out you installed an unapproved high performance carburetor so they remotely disable your third and fourth gears and there's not a mechanic in town that can undo it. That which you've paid for has substantially dropped in value due to the decision of the vendor, after they have taken your money for it.
Rubbing salt in the wound they offer solutions to your problem which involve your rebuying at least part of the product from them. That's like Ford graciously offering to sell you a new ECU ($2000) that will restore your gears. You'd love that wouldn't you?
I don't support the cheaters, and I'm not one of the modders, but I do support their right to mod without this treatment from the vendors. This whole concept of people having some unfair element of control over you after you have bought a product from them needs to stop. EULAs in general seem to only benefit the vendors while at the (sometimes extreme) disadvantage of the users.
I wonder how the recent front page article on the regulators questioning the BBCs new DRM, looks like the grounds were "Ofcom, asked them the same question that has been asked of many DRM systems: 'How does this benefit the consumer?' ". How do EULAs benefit the consumer? well of course, they don't, in any way. It's nice to see the basic principle starting to soak in, even if it's going to move like a glacier...
every time I watch that it cracks me up
And at least it keeps the cheaters off games.
Not really. All it does is keep the bad cheaters off the games. The good cheaters don't get caught by these sweeps.
And that's just what xbox live needs, darwinism at work refining a better crowd of cheaters.
The checks done by live are less sophisticated than say, punkbuster on the PCs. And all that accomplished was to raise the stakes and make the cheaters go into business selling the "undetectable" cheats and taunting those like Activision.
was just going to say... aaaaaaand that's what you get for hooking the kernel to your web browser ... idiots.
"windows security" isn't just an oxymoron, it's the oxymoron. They just... never... learn.
- data redundancy, offsite specifically
- ability to cut over? ie what happens if there's an earthquake, are your services to the world down until everything is replaced and backups are restored?
- what do you have on hand for hot spares in the event of equipment failure?
- when you are in failover mode for whatever reason, how does it impact your performance? ie does webmail just crawl until the mirror finishes rebuilding?
- how are your external resources? got a plan to truck in gas for the genny if a tornado levels the local substation? got a hotline or multiple points of expert contact available 24/7 for every critical piece of hardware that you can't fix yourself regardless of how it breaks? same for software.
- do you have a forensics plan in place? ie if you get hacked, (and don't answer that with "that can't happen") do you have any idea what you will do and in what order, to preserve forensic information, stop additional damage, and orderly cleanup? What are your legal obligations for notification, who is your contact with the press? (and there better only be ONE) Do you have a specific partner waiting in the wing all picked out if needed? after the fact is not the time to be choosing one.
- if you have a failure that affects multiple services or clients, what is your priority order? who gets their service back first?
- do you have a set "fire schedule" that people know specific additional hours they will be required to work in the event of an emergency situation? Are you going to run short on manpower in a specific area because you're already overextended by day to day operations in some aspect?
- are there any people that are single points of failure? What if Bob gets hit by a bus? what if Dave is the only one that knows the firewall and gets hospitalized when it explodes while he's working on it? crosstrain crosstrain crosstrain.
- not sure if it was covered above but documentation, documentation, and more documentation. How consistent is it? Does every network map look like it was written with a different drafting app by a different person? Is all of your documentation collected together and well organized? multiple copies in various places? are some things much better documented than others?
- server rebuild lists. do you have a step by step set of instructions for EVERY critical box that will take it from a freshly formatted HD to back in production, that any of a dozen of your monkeys can follow, with no "well wasn't that obvious?" missing steps? And how often do you test these? Walk in one morning and drop a new box on a desk and say "WEB15 just got STOLEN. Rebuild it. Fast. Starting NOW." and hit your stopwatch and see what you get. You do this from time to time, right?
- do you have a structured command that avoids differing opinions in a crisis slowing things down? when it comes right down to it there needs to be one clear person or command structure that has final say in a crisis.
I'm sure I'm missing some things but that's a good start for ya.