If physical media is to be replaced by downloads for 1080p HD content anytime in the near future, someone better tell the ISPs, especially in Canada. I'm a Rogers customers (which seems to be becoming the pariah of ISPs in terms of thottling and bandwidth limits), and I'm allowed 60Gb/month as a "mainstream", or average customer. I can get more, if i want to pay for it, but i'm already paying enough for my 60Gb.
If I want to download a single Blueray, that will use more than half of my monthly allowance.
Until the ISPs start handing out realistic speeds and bandwidth caps, at realistic prices, this will never happen.
The dude had a baseball bat, a chainsaw and a crossbow, plus a number of bottles of "unidentified" liquid. You don't test out police encryption with a crossbow!
Lok
I don't see what the big deal is. America has hired a contractor, with an option to renew if he meets his performance objectives and has a positive performance appraisal. When I got my last contract, I didn't get this kind of attention!
Many corporations are taking a serious look at PC virtualization, which eliminates the need to purchase PCs.
Instead, toss a bunch of blade racks together, virtualize your userbase, simplify your desktop management, address many of your network security issues, keep all your data "safe" in the data center, allow better user experience for remote users... lots and lots of benefits (if you can get it to work).
In my company (a large bank), we are due to refresh 10's of thousands of PCs, yet instead, we may refresh NONE of them, go with virtualization (and the saved costs of keeping older PCs will fund the new infrastructure). With PCs bought in the last 3-4 years, acting as thin-clients, we can keep them until they break, and replace them with some cheap thintops.
If many companies are going down this route, then it would be no surprise, coupled with the economy, that PC sales in the corporate world would be dropping!
I bought through steam. fun game. question is, if you buy through steam, does that replace the DRM? Can I now use Steams technology to install it wherever I want, however many times I want, as long as I only use it from wherever I'm logged into steam?
Up until a few months ago, I managed the email department for an enterprise of 35,000 seats. We implemented "Ironport" anti-spam appliances and have been very happy with them.
We're presently blocking between 750,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 spam messages per month, and allowing in about 1,500,000 "good" messages (which includes spam that defeats our defenses) in that same time period. 99% of all email that hits our perimeter is blocked, and our analysis of the "good" email indicates the actual success rate is about 99.9% of spam that targets us is blocked, which is a very high ratio.
Since we put in this solution, we get almost zero complaints from our user base. The typical user receives no spam, and we have a very small number of users who see up to 2-3 a day, which we find acceptable. We might see a false positive once or twice per month, which, across 35,000 users, is very acceptable. It's flexibility and rule processing has also llowed us to address a number of business requirements for message routing & processing. I highly recommend this product if you are looking at a commercial solution. They do have products for a medium sized business, as well as enterprise class environments.
I work at a large financial institution, where I manage the email team, including our mail hygiene systems. We saw spam numbers skyrocket in late august, to the point where 99% of everything hitting our perimeter is spam. For the last 3 weeks in a row, we blocked over 200,000,000 messages, which is more than triple the numbers we were seeing only 2 months ago.
One simple reason - centralized management - this phone doesn't have any (or at least nothing that I've seen announcements about).
If my CEO gets one and hooks it into our mail systems, and then it gets stolen (Remember when iPods were new and they were getting stolen all the time?), how am I going to remotely wipe all of the data from it?
How am I going to remotely enforce security on the device?
etc. etc. etc.
When apple provides a method for these to be centrally managed (whether using blackberry connect or mobile 5/6), come speak to I.T. about supporting them. Until then, go away.
What are the odds that, even given a great plan, that this has any hope of making it to daylight. IPv6 has been out for how long, yet how much real adoption have we seen in that space?
I run an enterprise level messaging department for a large financial institution.
The increase in November of 35% is pretty accurate - but where the real story is is when you look at the 6 month trend.
In July of 2006, my enterprise was blocking approximately 20 million spam messages per week. Last week, we blocked 86 million spam messages - over 400% increase in 6 months.
Most of the growth occured in September & October. We're projecting to hit 100 million per week by the end of January.
The only good news here is that the amount of valid email that we're letting into our enterprise is remaining flat, indicating that pretty much the entire increase is successfully blocked by our anti-spam. *whew*.
We block about 97%-98% of all incoming messages at our perimeter.
I have personally received 1 (one) spam message in the last 2 weeks
my executive, who used to receive a significant amount of spam under our old solution, hasn't received more than 1 per week in the last month.
We basically don't even notice spam issues anymore - except when we see our Ironport appliances CPU cycle up to almost 60% during high volume times. We're going to add a 5th appliance, and that should do us for a while.
I manage the email department for a large financial institution. We have seen our spam volumes quadruple in the last 3 months, to over 70,000,000 spam messages per week.
However, being a large financial institution, we have $$$ to spend, so we purchased Ironport Anti-spam this past spring. The amount of email (mostly legit) going through our filters in this same 3 month period has remained completely flat - even with the increase of spam on our perimeter, no more is getting through than 3 months ago.
For those of you struggling with the spam situation and have money to burn, you may want to look into Ironport.
-Lokatana
I disagree on one of your points. I do not have a degree. I started out as a data entry clerk, and then moved into a variety of support analyst roles. I'm now an IT manager, moving on to my second IT Management role, and will hopefully move up to the next level of management within the next 5 years (this is from the support side of the world).
In IT, results, soft-skills (communication) and service are what defines the top performers and those who move up. No one has even asked why I don't have a degree - and that's assuming people have even noticed that I don't have one. It's simply a non-issue for me, and while I've expected to be "capped" at some point, instead, I've found myself on the fast track.
Perhaps I'm a rare case, but from what I've seen, it's all about experience, ability and results.
For the last couple of years, there's been lots in the press about the dangers of driving while talking on a cellphone, and how that distraction is a major cause of car accidents.
I can see the headlines now:
Car accident fatality found with a smile on his face and his *censored* in his hand.
This may be the first time I've seen Microsoft do something smart in it's battle against Linux. Though you can scoff at their sources, at the sponsorship of the metrics used to calculate TCO's, Microsoft is finally making a concerted effort to use facts (or what they would like to see their readers assume are facts) to combat Linux. They're finally getting smart about how to deal with Linux. Remember when we laughed at their attempt to combat Netscape in the Internet browser market? Take a look now...
Most of the readers on/. are assuming that the information presented in these reports are bogus. But are the CFO's and CEO's who are responsable for finding corporate cost savings really going to think in the same way? Who is it who will make the choice between Linux and Windows, in large corporations? The IT geek peon who does the work, or the CFO who needs to reduce a budget, or at least ensure it does not inflate?
The only way that the Linux community can successfully ensure that this media campaign is false and does not spread incorrect information is to obtain metrics that can truly be seen as 3rd party, and have more industry respect than those provided by the Microsoft studies. And then ensure they are published widely and given strong media attention.
Ignoring this campaign, scoffing and laughing it off is a mistake. I'm sure the CFO's and CEOs who are going to make the decisions arn't/. readers who think the way that all these forum posts indicate we think.
-Lokatana
Linux was the biggest mistake of my life
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not for me, of course, but for setting up a firewall / app server on Linux for my brother.
I should have known that he wouldn't take the time to learn any of it, and would expect me to do even the simplest of support tasks. Myself, being a fairly busy IT professional, now finds myself spending an inordinate amount of time doing "enterprise support" for my brother's home network.
Of course, everything is an emergency because of the various online gaming services he is running, and once he has any problem that impacts his ability to access those servers, he's on the phone calling me.
Why didn't I tell him to pirate NT4 Server, and get him to set up his own firewall on there? Then I could legitamently say "Uh, can't help you. I don't touch MS products. It's against my religion."
I once worked for a company who had a client who was months behind in payments. Facing serious cashflow issues, they understood that something drastic had to be done in order to keep our own company alive.
Luckily, they didn't need anything as complex as a coded back door. We were also hosting their applications internally. I was instructed to go into the data center, hold my finger over their server's power buttons, and management told them to pay by 4pm, or their boxes would be powered off.
Needless to say, we got paid.
Unfortunately, the end result was they build their own data center, moved everything into their own environment, and cut all ties with us. A short while after I left the company, they went under. And this was before the dot-com bubble burst. (yeah, they didn't know how to manage an internet company).
Single Player Graphical MU* ?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever played on a MU* ? Specifically, a MUSH or MUX?
This concept sounds very much like what you have been able to get for the last 15-20 years in a mutiplayer MU* evironment. The main difference (besides a MU* being text-only), is you wouldn't need multiple players anymore.
I'm still waiting to see a good implementation of a graphical, multiplayer MU*. The MMORPs are the closest so far, but when will we see a massive, multiplayer, 1st person world, where there is no specific storyline, but rather just an environment for role playing and personal interaction with the qualities of the Unreal2 or DOOM3 engine?
George Martin is probably the best "new" author for anyone looking for reading in the Fantasy genre. His "Song of Ice and Fire" series, currently at 3 books with a 4th on it's way (April 1st?) will completely change the way you rate books in this genre.
Martin has done the usual things expected of a fantasy epic: He's built a new world complete with maps, built interacting societies each complete with their own racial traits, histories, legends and prophecies. He's then taken them and made them interact according to his storyline. But that's where things begin to change vastly from the norm.
With a few exceptions, you begin to have a hard time telling who is the "good guy" and who is the "bad guy".
Those who are the "bad guy" side have some people who might actually be good guys, and vice versa. But not all the time. But you're not quite sure?
Martin does not hesitate to kill off main characters if it advances the plot, or suprises the hell out of the reader
You cannot predict what is going to happen next
The "politics" in his story are deep, brutal, and surprising. They go farther than any other fantasy story I've read.
I could continue with this list for a while, but you get the idea. Probably the most amazing thing about this series is that each book gets better and better, almost exponentially.
If you have not read George Martin's work, I strongly encourage you to try out just the first book. If you're a true fantasy fan, you will be hooked immediately.
Do not read Redemption of Althalus. It's a great example of a great writer gone horribly wrong. It's an unoriginal, obviously predictable, unexciting ramble of crap. At no time is any of the characters in anything remotely resembling danger, and overall it's a horrible way to introduce yourself to someone who was once a great writer.
If you were a big fan of Eddings (as I am/was) his original works (The Belgariad and Elenium) were masterpieces, his subsequent works (The Mallorean & The Tamuli) were very good, and even his prequels (Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress) were fun with interesting insights. I'll even say that The Riven Codex was good for those who are very dedicated fans, though it was mostly a good way to make a buck.
But "Redemption" was a huge dissapointment. If you insist in reading it anyways, borrow it from a library or a friend.
-Lokatana
The person who assigned this project might get in a bit of trouble, but,
From the project page:
December 16, 2002 Final Assignment
Assignment:
Your final project is going to be making a fully functional hoax. The work must:
- exist in the public realm
- be advertised, exposed or introduced to strangers
- be fully documented, strategies include images, movies, sound recording, and interviews
- employ the element of craft (they will be judged on both ambition & effort)
- be fully functional. For example, if the project is a website, you must register the domain name. There should be no connection to this class or to Parsons.
Think hard about why people make hoaxes. I want you not to just have "fun" tricking people, but think about a message or idea you want to convey. What are the strategies for bringing people in? What is your overall message?
Your aim should be to create work which is subtle and effective.
In addition to creating the work, you will be asked to write 3 or more pages documenting your strategy in creating the work. Keep this in mind as you work.
It's interesting to notice that the author of this article claims to barely know Linux or other competing products to Microsoft. I'm not sure how much I agree with his thoughts regarding a "split" within Microsoft, but...
What if this type of thinking begins to really penetrate MS's customer base? If Joe User (think of all of your friends and family who use you as their technical support hotline) starts to believe that Microsoft is taking them to the cleaners - not just believe it, but become convinced of the fact - and is willing to make the jump to an alternative OS, what then? What if the tools to make the switch are easy enough for anyone's grandparents to freely obtain and use? (Today, most of these kinds of users don't even know how to locate an ISO, let alone download & burn it! I'm also assuming they don't want to pay for the software from a vendor or store)
What would MS do if their customer base starts to erode noticeably? Will we see more "Satanic" actions to lock in their customers, or will MS respond in a way that will benefit the overall user community?
Perhaps this would be a good followup "Ask Slashdot", but I'd love to see people's thoughts on this.
Slashdot Mirror
If physical media is to be replaced by downloads for 1080p HD content anytime in the near future, someone better tell the ISPs, especially in Canada. I'm a Rogers customers (which seems to be becoming the pariah of ISPs in terms of thottling and bandwidth limits), and I'm allowed 60Gb/month as a "mainstream", or average customer. I can get more, if i want to pay for it, but i'm already paying enough for my 60Gb.
If I want to download a single Blueray, that will use more than half of my monthly allowance.
Until the ISPs start handing out realistic speeds and bandwidth caps, at realistic prices, this will never happen.
Lokatana
The dude had a baseball bat, a chainsaw and a crossbow, plus a number of bottles of "unidentified" liquid. You don't test out police encryption with a crossbow! Lok
-Lok
The sun moves in an 11 year cycle. Right now we're at the bottom part of the cycle, within 3 years we will be back at the top of the cycle. -Lok
I don't see what the big deal is. America has hired a contractor, with an option to renew if he meets his performance objectives and has a positive performance appraisal. When I got my last contract, I didn't get this kind of attention!
:)
-Lok
Instead, toss a bunch of blade racks together, virtualize your userbase, simplify your desktop management, address many of your network security issues, keep all your data "safe" in the data center, allow better user experience for remote users... lots and lots of benefits (if you can get it to work).
In my company (a large bank), we are due to refresh 10's of thousands of PCs, yet instead, we may refresh NONE of them, go with virtualization (and the saved costs of keeping older PCs will fund the new infrastructure). With PCs bought in the last 3-4 years, acting as thin-clients, we can keep them until they break, and replace them with some cheap thintops.
If many companies are going down this route, then it would be no surprise, coupled with the economy, that PC sales in the corporate world would be dropping!
Lokatana
I bought through steam. fun game. question is, if you buy through steam, does that replace the DRM? Can I now use Steams technology to install it wherever I want, however many times I want, as long as I only use it from wherever I'm logged into steam?
We're presently blocking between 750,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 spam messages per month, and allowing in about 1,500,000 "good" messages (which includes spam that defeats our defenses) in that same time period. 99% of all email that hits our perimeter is blocked, and our analysis of the "good" email indicates the actual success rate is about 99.9% of spam that targets us is blocked, which is a very high ratio.
Since we put in this solution, we get almost zero complaints from our user base. The typical user receives no spam, and we have a very small number of users who see up to 2-3 a day, which we find acceptable. We might see a false positive once or twice per month, which, across 35,000 users, is very acceptable. It's flexibility and rule processing has also llowed us to address a number of business requirements for message routing & processing. I highly recommend this product if you are looking at a commercial solution. They do have products for a medium sized business, as well as enterprise class environments.
-Lokatana
-Lok
If my CEO gets one and hooks it into our mail systems, and then it gets stolen (Remember when iPods were new and they were getting stolen all the time?), how am I going to remotely wipe all of the data from it?
How am I going to remotely enforce security on the device?
etc. etc. etc.
When apple provides a method for these to be centrally managed (whether using blackberry connect or mobile 5/6), come speak to I.T. about supporting them. Until then, go away.
-Lokatana
What are the odds that, even given a great plan, that this has any hope of making it to daylight. IPv6 has been out for how long, yet how much real adoption have we seen in that space?
The increase in November of 35% is pretty accurate - but where the real story is is when you look at the 6 month trend.
In July of 2006, my enterprise was blocking approximately 20 million spam messages per week. Last week, we blocked 86 million spam messages - over 400% increase in 6 months.
Most of the growth occured in September & October. We're projecting to hit 100 million per week by the end of January.
The only good news here is that the amount of valid email that we're letting into our enterprise is remaining flat, indicating that pretty much the entire increase is successfully blocked by our anti-spam. *whew*.
-Lokatana
- We block about 97%-98% of all incoming messages at our perimeter.
- I have personally received 1 (one) spam message in the last 2 weeks
- my executive, who used to receive a significant amount of spam under our old solution, hasn't received more than 1 per week in the last month.
- We basically don't even notice spam issues anymore - except when we see our Ironport appliances CPU cycle up to almost 60% during high volume times. We're going to add a 5th appliance, and that should do us for a while.
-LokatanaI manage the email department for a large financial institution. We have seen our spam volumes quadruple in the last 3 months, to over 70,000,000 spam messages per week. However, being a large financial institution, we have $$$ to spend, so we purchased Ironport Anti-spam this past spring. The amount of email (mostly legit) going through our filters in this same 3 month period has remained completely flat - even with the increase of spam on our perimeter, no more is getting through than 3 months ago. For those of you struggling with the spam situation and have money to burn, you may want to look into Ironport. -Lokatana
5 years from now, we'll be reading up on how these things produce F.L.K.'s (Funny Looking Kids).
-Lokatana
In IT, results, soft-skills (communication) and service are what defines the top performers and those who move up. No one has even asked why I don't have a degree - and that's assuming people have even noticed that I don't have one. It's simply a non-issue for me, and while I've expected to be "capped" at some point, instead, I've found myself on the fast track.
Perhaps I'm a rare case, but from what I've seen, it's all about experience, ability and results.
For the last couple of years, there's been lots in the press about the dangers of driving while talking on a cellphone, and how that distraction is a major cause of car accidents.
I can see the headlines now:
Car accident fatality found with a smile on his face and his *censored* in his hand.
Most of the readers on /. are assuming that the information presented in these reports are bogus. But are the CFO's and CEO's who are responsable for finding corporate cost savings really going to think in the same way? Who is it who will make the choice between Linux and Windows, in large corporations? The IT geek peon who does the work, or the CFO who needs to reduce a budget, or at least ensure it does not inflate?
The only way that the Linux community can successfully ensure that this media campaign is false and does not spread incorrect information is to obtain metrics that can truly be seen as 3rd party, and have more industry respect than those provided by the Microsoft studies. And then ensure they are published widely and given strong media attention.
Ignoring this campaign, scoffing and laughing it off is a mistake. I'm sure the CFO's and CEOs who are going to make the decisions arn't /. readers who think the way that all these forum posts indicate we think.
-Lokatana
I should have known that he wouldn't take the time to learn any of it, and would expect me to do even the simplest of support tasks. Myself, being a fairly busy IT professional, now finds myself spending an inordinate amount of time doing "enterprise support" for my brother's home network.
Of course, everything is an emergency because of the various online gaming services he is running, and once he has any problem that impacts his ability to access those servers, he's on the phone calling me.
Why didn't I tell him to pirate NT4 Server, and get him to set up his own firewall on there? Then I could legitamently say "Uh, can't help you. I don't touch MS products. It's against my religion."
-Lokatana
Luckily, they didn't need anything as complex as a coded back door. We were also hosting their applications internally. I was instructed to go into the data center, hold my finger over their server's power buttons, and management told them to pay by 4pm, or their boxes would be powered off.
Needless to say, we got paid.
Unfortunately, the end result was they build their own data center, moved everything into their own environment, and cut all ties with us. A short while after I left the company, they went under. And this was before the dot-com bubble burst. (yeah, they didn't know how to manage an internet company).
This concept sounds very much like what you have been able to get for the last 15-20 years in a mutiplayer MU* evironment. The main difference (besides a MU* being text-only), is you wouldn't need multiple players anymore.
I'm still waiting to see a good implementation of a graphical, multiplayer MU*. The MMORPs are the closest so far, but when will we see a massive, multiplayer, 1st person world, where there is no specific storyline, but rather just an environment for role playing and personal interaction with the qualities of the Unreal2 or DOOM3 engine?
-Lokatana
Martin has done the usual things expected of a fantasy epic: He's built a new world complete with maps, built interacting societies each complete with their own racial traits, histories, legends and prophecies. He's then taken them and made them interact according to his storyline. But that's where things begin to change vastly from the norm.
- With a few exceptions, you begin to have a hard time telling who is the "good guy" and who is the "bad guy".
- Those who are the "bad guy" side have some people who might actually be good guys, and vice versa. But not all the time. But you're not quite sure?
- Martin does not hesitate to kill off main characters if it advances the plot, or suprises the hell out of the reader
- You cannot predict what is going to happen next
- The "politics" in his story are deep, brutal, and surprising. They go farther than any other fantasy story I've read.
I could continue with this list for a while, but you get the idea. Probably the most amazing thing about this series is that each book gets better and better, almost exponentially.If you have not read George Martin's work, I strongly encourage you to try out just the first book. If you're a true fantasy fan, you will be hooked immediately.
-Lokatana
Do not read Redemption of Althalus. It's a great example of a great writer gone horribly wrong. It's an unoriginal, obviously predictable, unexciting ramble of crap. At no time is any of the characters in anything remotely resembling danger, and overall it's a horrible way to introduce yourself to someone who was once a great writer. If you were a big fan of Eddings (as I am/was) his original works (The Belgariad and Elenium) were masterpieces, his subsequent works (The Mallorean & The Tamuli) were very good, and even his prequels (Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress) were fun with interesting insights. I'll even say that The Riven Codex was good for those who are very dedicated fans, though it was mostly a good way to make a buck. But "Redemption" was a huge dissapointment. If you insist in reading it anyways, borrow it from a library or a friend. -Lokatana
December 16, 2002 Final Assignment
Assignment:
Your final project is going to be making a fully functional hoax. The work must:
- exist in the public realm
- be advertised, exposed or introduced to strangers
- be fully documented, strategies include images, movies, sound recording, and interviews
- employ the element of craft (they will be judged on both ambition & effort)
- be fully functional. For example, if the project is a website, you must register the domain name. There should be no connection to this class or to Parsons.
Think hard about why people make hoaxes. I want you not to just have "fun" tricking people, but think about a message or idea you want to convey. What are the strategies for bringing people in? What is your overall message?
Your aim should be to create work which is subtle and effective.
In addition to creating the work, you will be asked to write 3 or more pages documenting your strategy in creating the work. Keep this in mind as you work.
What if this type of thinking begins to really penetrate MS's customer base? If Joe User (think of all of your friends and family who use you as their technical support hotline) starts to believe that Microsoft is taking them to the cleaners - not just believe it, but become convinced of the fact - and is willing to make the jump to an alternative OS, what then? What if the tools to make the switch are easy enough for anyone's grandparents to freely obtain and use? (Today, most of these kinds of users don't even know how to locate an ISO, let alone download & burn it! I'm also assuming they don't want to pay for the software from a vendor or store)
What would MS do if their customer base starts to erode noticeably? Will we see more "Satanic" actions to lock in their customers, or will MS respond in a way that will benefit the overall user community?
Perhaps this would be a good followup "Ask Slashdot", but I'd love to see people's thoughts on this.
-Lokatana