But in any case, what can we say about a company that makes its living by finding security vulnerabilities and offering to sell their findings to interested parties?
1) If they sell their findings to people who want to exploit them (rather than fix them), they are scum.
2) If they do not do (1), these companies are useful, as they do make it easier for flaws to be fixed, even if they do charge money (and won't help if you don't pay them).
3) It's *mean*. It's not nice to solicit someone and say "I could fix your problems (and it wouldn't even take me any work!), but you have to pay me a lot."
Couldn't we just consider this a public service, let the software giants and consumers learn a lesson from all of this and move along?
Our society has become so focused on instant gratification that it's built itself into the production models of physical products and software packages alike. "Release it now! Damn the QA! Mush! Mush!" is the battle cry of the upper management and bean counters.
Well what if we delayed releases of products until they were right and let the people learn to wait? What if people became used to paying slightly more for a product that was of higher quality rather than wanting to shave every buck they can?
Bad enough that RealPlayer is pre-release quality bloatware rushed to market for its entire lifespan to compete with other media formats. Too bad it didn't become the ubiquitous media format they wanted it to be. {rolls eyes} So now I think it looks good on them to have to pay money to fix a vulnerability that affects their entire client base. Now the question becomes this - how concerned are they about the security of their clients? Are they willing to fork over the dough or are they going to stamp their feet in moral defiance and let their users twist in the wind?
Go ahead and advertise a "locksmith" service to open the doors on anybody's home, without the owner's consent, for a fee. Then have fun in jail.
FWIW, there are security firms that specialize in exactly that. House being one of a personal residence, a corporate office, a warehouse, or any secured facility that a company wants audited. What better way to audit one's security than to hire people with technical knowledge on how to enter establishments they shouldn't be in? It's one of those niche businesses that savvy reformed criminals tend to start up because they're the ones with the unique skill sets to do so.
Here's a better analogy for a legal activity: auto makers who sell SUVs to whomever wants them, then tell the rest of us we need one to keep our families safe in the event of being hit by one. It's a classic arms race, the only real winner is the arms dealer.
Ahh, a car analogy. Auto manufacturers sold products their customers asked for, and what their customers asked for was a bigger vehicle that was neither a pickup truck or a minivan, hence the SUV was born. How is being hit by an SUV different from being smucked by a minivan? Yaris and Fit don't work so well for families of 6 or 7.
As to your analogy, no, it's not comparable because RealNetworks aren't the ones selling the exploit code to people, they're the ones being "blackmailed". Hell-o?
Great, let's all dumb down to the lowest common denominator. There's no such thing as a "lowest common denominator". There's a "greatest common denominator" and a "least common multiple".
You'd be absolutely incorrect, both in the mathematical sense and the colloquial sense. Lowest common denominator is a perfectly valid mathematical term and in common usage the lowest common denominator is the most minimal subset of data available that's universally understood. For example, Slashdot's comments are composed primarily of ASCII characters, the lowest common denominator in electronic communications that even the lowly typewriter, screen reader, or teletype machine can understand. If you want a vehicle that anybody can drive you pick up a vehicle with an automatic transmission because it is the lowest common denominator and requires the least amount of specialized skills to drive. In purchase transactions cash in the national currency is the lowest common denominator because the individual or vendor in question may not accept the likes of debit cards, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club etc.
I could go on all day but you get the idea.
(Is being a math Nazi as bad as being a grammar Nazi?):-)
When you're incorrect, they're both devastatingly bad ways to be.
I can't give you a technical answer because I don't understand how it works myself. But I can give you an empircial answer. I'm 100% correct. I know this because I've tested it hundreds of times on dozens of different computer architectures. It was in fact driving me nuts that I could discover my network connections to nodes on my cluster that were "off" in the sense of the power switch being off or being in sleep mode. If you walk up to the machines themselves even when they are unplugged you can see the little ethernet LEDs blinking away when they are jacked in. I raised this issue with several different sysadmins. they all laughed and said yep, it that newer NIC actually don't need the computer powered up to respond to signals in minimal ways. You can even take the nic out of the computer and it can still work! Depending on the nic it can be very minimimal or as sophisticated as waiting for a wake on LAN (which I assume is because sleep mode draws some power).
Anyhow it's a fact. You can't always tell if a computer is off by pinging it.
Partial points for correctness, but you're right in that you're technically incorrect. ICMP echo request ("ping") requires a TCP stack to be present; that operates at a level higher than the NIC knows about so when you say "ping" you are incorrect. However the MAC address will still appear on the network provided the card is configured to do so (most cards come pre-configured this way).
As for taking the NIC out of the computer or having the ethernet LEDs blinking when the computer's power cord is disconnected it will only work if your switching equipment provides Power Over Ethernet. In 90% of small networks (less than 1000 nodes) you're going to encounter when you remove a NIC from a PC it's as good as a paperweight because it relies on the PCI bus within an ATX computer to provide the power required to listen for / react to WoL (Wake on LAN) requests (and turn on the LEDs on the back of the ethernet card).
The answer is simple. Tiny minority of the computers that are on could still be used by someone doing something important. You do not want to cut them off from the network.
Then implement a network policy that says if you're not going to be using your computer at night, shut it down. If you are going to be using your computer at nights, let somebody know. If you don't, your computer will be automatically shut down xx minutes after office hours end and started yy minutes before office hours begin the next work day.
Workplace policies generally aren't 100% cut and dry; there are almost always exceptions. When the doors are locked at your office building, does the person locking them check first to make sure nobody's in the washroom or do they just lock the doors and go on their merry way?
So because I have a different workflow, I've got problems?
Yes. To start with it sounds as if you're in an IT-centric occupation and you can't figure out how to have your machine booted 30 minutes before you arrive at work (or, in your case, 6).
Lack of ability to problem solve is considered a big problem in most of the world.
Furthermore, I've also found that drives that are only run a few hours a day outlast drives that are run 24/7 anyway.
After thirty years in this business I've found the exact opposite.
Really? Most every personal hard drive I've ever had to replace has come as a total shock to me because for the longest time I left my workstations running 24x7 and, of course, my servers are the same way. Each connected to UPSs they're only power cycled for routine maintainance, the occasional dust clearing - things like that. It's when I power the machine back on that I find the drives making funny noises or having difficulty accessing the MBR or some such that causes me headaches. However when a workstation is frequently power cycled there are early warning signs of impending drive failure which give you time to back up the data before you find yourself with a brick and scads of lost data.
I won't tell you how many years' experience has taught me that; mostly because experience is about quality, not quantity, and that's a tad more difficult to compare.
I tend to go straight to my PC, check email and a a few other things before starting any coffee-machine banter, just to make sure I'm as informed as possible about any possible topics that might come up... So I would end up sitting there waiting for the machine, rather then logging in and starting on email immediately.
Then you have bigger problems than 5-10 minutes patch time. I normally walk into my office, tap my power button, take off my jacket and find out what's going on around me before I bury my nose in the illuminated phosphors of my monitor. You know - by talking to real people, things like that.
If your e-mail is that urgent, get a BlackBerry and have it sent to you automatically. Then you'll be informed BEFORE you arrive at the office.
"and technology and admin workstations that are excepted from the shutdown policy."
Shutdown everybody except yourself. Great attitude.
If the network administrators have enacted this policy why should they make it affect their machines? IT administrators, especially the clueful ones, tend to have a handle on their own workstations and will shut them down at night except when the machines are running a large job.
More to the OP's intended point - people like school administration will more often than not be excepted from these policies because they have discretion as to how to handle their machines.
What's with the ire towards IT administrators anyways? Did one of them catch you violating your AUP and lock out your account or something?
Do you honestly think everyone's going to dump their old PCs to the curb?
(As sad as it is, I know plenty of people do this, but not geeks.)
By the year 2038, your Pentium 2s will have long died and been replaced with "lowly Pentium 4s", which will then have been replaced by those "antique quad-core Xeons", etc. ad nauseum.
There just comes a time with commodity hardware where it reaches its EOL. When I upgrade my computer the internal hardware goes like this; Workstation --> home server --> parents --> younger brother --> curb. When I was still "hard core" I'd have a second machine in there because, well, let's face it - you just need two up-to-date workstations!
Neither my parents or my brother have had to buy a computer since the Compaq Presario with a Pentium 120 was considered "high end". As a matter of fact I've just given my brother my old 17" CRT monitor and taken the old Presario monitor for my server because the antique I was using went pop.
Point being, eventually everything dies. Eventually 64-bit processors will be the equivalent of the Celerons of yesteryear. Quad core will be passe. These will be the CPUs we use in our test boxes, or our "just has to pass packets" firewall machines, or the machines we give to computers for schools programs.
Heck, I don't even have any hardware in use today from the Pentium II era and the slowest processor in my family is about 800MHz and as of now it's a dog.
lol.. Did that really qualify as karma-whoring? I was trying to be as flip as possible and fully expected some flamebait mods.:)
I just tire of hearing people reminisce about how poor quality the music was in days of old where you could hear as many defects and fsck ups as you could music and tell young whippersnappers that they don't know no music with these digital cee-dees they all use. God forbid clarity and quality should be sought after goals when listening to music.
Seriously though, my karma's more than intact. Blacks are bad, the holocaust never happened, put women back in the kitchens and take their shoes, etc. etc.
Yep. If you're using XP Professional, run the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc).
Once in, use the left-hand pane to navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update.
Something hit me today whilst looking up things involving WiFi networking under Windows and learning that under Vista to disable automatic connection to AdHoc networks you have to open a command prompt and type;
I thought Linux was the OS that had complex commands and Windows was all GUI point and shoot style? So now under Windows XP to change basic, every day functionality you have to find and utilize some obscure policy editing applet? How does one even run "gpedit.msc"?
(I know, type start -> run -> gpedit.msc, I was being facetious.)
"Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations" - if you don't restart after doing an update, Windows will nag you incessantly every 10 minutes or so. If you're busily typing at the time, it's all too easy to inadvertently hit the "yes, please restart now and screw up my work" button when the nag window steals focus.
Major hassle, and indicative of a major fundamental interface flaw. Why should a context box ever be allowed to steal focus unless my computer is about to do something extremely harmful? When doing so, why is ANY option highlighted so that my next keystroke could cause damage?
And as someone noted, I too have a hard time listening to CD's that play all the way through, I'm used to hiss and scratches!
So what you're saying is growing up you got used to inferior quality and now you can't stand clear, properly reproduced sound so in defence of that you're decrying digital formats and defending inadequate, old technology.
Thanks for coming out, I won't be purchasing a phonograph any time soon. I enjoy music, not defects.
Smoking cannabis but not inhaling is ridiculous because by definition you must inhale in order to smoke cannabis. However it is quite possible for even a high-school student, many of whom don't actually drink at all, to hold a spirituous drink without drinking any of it. He could be holding it for someone else so that it isn't accidentally picked up while they use the restroom, which I've seen myself (and no, I was not drunk at the time). I submit that it is the idea that alcohol exerts some kind of force on high-schoolers to where they cannot hold a drink without drinking it that is patently ridiculous.
I think you're a tad out of touch with today's high school students my friend. Students go to parties, they drink, they get drunk, they brag about it to their peers. The notion that even a slim minority of these people were holding drinks for their friends while they visited the facilities holds about as much water as the dog ate my homework, or my gun (vis: the murder weapon) was stolen but I neglected to report it to police, or the Presidential "I didn't inhale". It just doesn't pass the logic test.
Your last line suggests something a little closer to reality. High school students will do what their friends are doing because that's how they remain part of their peer group. They'll sneak out, stay out past their curfew, skip classes, smoke, drink, smoke marijuana, or generally do things they're not supposed to do because their peers are doing it. If they're at a party where a large component of their friends are drinking they will drink as well because they don't want to be the loser who doesn't participate.
If money is at all a question on anybody's mind it shouldn't be. Teenagers these days have sources of disposable income that I'd never dreamed of when I was younger. I remember how happy I was when I got a home phone with a basic, corded telephone but kids today have picture/MP3/video cell phones and money to go out and entertain themselves in the public going to movies, paintballing, eating at restaurants, you name it they're doing it. So the idea of modern day teenagers coming up with $10-20 to pick up some booze for a party is decidedly simple.
I find your standards of proof distressingly low. If you were a cashier and your manager stole money from your drawer, would you accept termination and criminal charges because the "realistic chances" were good that you took it?
That's not nearly a proper analogy. For that to take effect you're stretching far out on a precarious limb of coulda shoulda wouldas. You're assuming that even a small percentage of these photos could have been cases of people being "set up" by a fellow student.
Because photographs cannot be altered and because alcoholic beverages cannot be held without being drunk.
At a certain point you have to pass things through an internal probability meter. If somebody provides you with thousands of photos of various students engaged in illegal activities (possession and consumption of alcoholic beverages, illegal narcotics); photos which can be individually verified by visiting the originating sites, many of which have captions posted by the students themselves confirming their level of drunkenness on the occasions in question - chances are the photos are real.
What are the realistic chances that somebody went to such an effort to doctor hundreds or thousands of photos, uploaded them to dozens or hundreds of profiles, impersonated each of the individuals and posted damning comments? What are the realistic chances that many, if not most of the individuals in question were in fact engaged in the very activities presented in the photographs?
Furthermore, sorry, but the idea of a glass, cup, bottle, or can of alcohol being held by a student but not consumed is as patently ridiculous as smoking a marijuana joint but "not inhaling".
What you seem to have trouble distinguishing is the difference between a one-time fine or even a one-time jail/community service sentence, and the loss of a scholarship which might adversely affect the rest of someone's life.
Many employers and post secondary institutions, especially in cases where applicants exceed available positions, screen potentials using a criminal record check. That makes one just as damning as, if not more than the other, don't you think?
My employer screens potential employees with both a driving abstract and criminal record check. If I had DUI on one, or drunk and disorderly on the other I would not have been accepted for employment. Most employers in my field operate under the same guidelines so that would put me in the precarious position of having to choose another field of work facing the possibility of months if not years of training in another area. I'd much rather my school had nipped the problem in the bud before law enforcement became involved, wouldn't you agree?
One of those is a punishment that fits the "crime" (in quotes because there is no victim here), while the other is excessive and occurs with no charges, no judge, and no jury of one's peers. You can see that there is a difference here, can't you?
The suggested role of law enforcement officers, in theory, is to aim to protect the public by preventing crimes and by penalizing those who succeed in committing crimes. Attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder are also victimless crimes but they are severely punishable. There doesn't have to be a victim to be a crime.
MADD is a dangerous organization because they are truly a temperance society, as evidenced by their support of unreasonably low BAC limits under 0.10 that have not been scientifically proven to result in safer driving. They also support sobriety checkpoints, random searches, and other infringements of the fourth amendment.
Driving is a privilege, not a right, therefore the government and the law enforcement bodies have every right to stop you and test you for drunkenness especially around times where people are significantly more likely to drink and drive (new years, xmas, Halloween, etc.)
The R.I.D.E. program in Ontario Canada frequently catches hundreds of people who are over the legal limit, quite often by more than double or treble who should never have set out on the public roadways in the first place. These are the people who have the potential to KILL or severely INJURE otherwise law abiding citizens who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I have absolutely no objection to a 5-10 minute delay followed by a brief chat with a friendly officer and often times a free coupon book for my troubles if it means taking a killer off my streets.
As for BAC levels below 0.10? I've been clocked at levels around 0.10 and slightly above (not while driving, mind you) and I can tell you with 100% certainty that I was NOT in a capacity to drive safely. My reflexes and judgements were definitely impaired and I did have the potential to kill somebody or myself had I chosen to drive home on those occasions.
You have to ask yourself; whose civil liberties are more important - killers' or victims'?
I would agree that having a drink is not the same a being drunk, but a lot of people don't understand that you're impaired long before you're drunk.
So, when it comes to driving, alcohol does = abuse.
That's the very unhealthy attitude the GP was talking about. Not only am I a big guy (large frame, well equipped:P ) I've also got a fairly high tolerance of alcohol because I am a regular social drinker. As a result, I can safely consume an average of 1-1.5 drinks/hour and safely (and legally) drive home. If I'm at a social gathering and I have a glass of wine or a pint of beer with my meal or an Irish coffee with dessert I will assure you that I can still drive better than most of the other drivers on the roads of Ontario where I live.
I will of course agree that drinking to excess, drinking to a dizzying state or consuming more than one's tolerance level (as dictated by how often they drink, their body mass and how their metabolism processes alcohol as well as how much food and/or water was consumed in the process) that they should not be considered fit to drive and that's why services like taxi's and "Keys To Us" and the like exist (where they send two drivers out to drive you and your car home).
But to declare unilaterally that having a drink of alcohol == abuse is absurd.
I think you may be correct, when I was at school we used to drink in the local pub from around age 15 onwards. Since it was the local pub many of our teachers would also drink in the same pub and I suspect they would not have dreamed of taking any action against us in school for what went on in the pub. As to drinking being viewed as highly illegal activity they obviously didn't see it that way as they'd also occasionally buy us drinks.
In the great United States of America the legal drinking ages vary from 18 to 21 years of age. If one is below the requisite age and is found to be purchasing, consuming and/or distributing alcohol to same it is an illegal activity.
Here in Canada the drinking age is pretty unilaterally 19 years of age across the board with the exception of 2-3 provinces where it's 18.
Yes, there are tens of thousands of students ranging in age anywhere from 20 down to, man, probably 12-13 years of age posting party pictures of themselves consuming alcohol, drugs, smoking, etc. and quite often these baby Einsteins will post comments saying conspicuous things like "$&#@! I was SOOOO wasted that night!" pretty much confirming the pictorial evidence. My younger brother and his friends are in the same boat.
It's a pretty amazing thing just how much these kids don't comprehend the damage they could be doing to themselves later on in life. Used to be if you did illegal activities you'd keep them between you and your friends, but nowadays there's pictures of kids breaking up rails of cocaine, rolling joints with containers of half-drunk booze all over the place! They're going to have to wake up to the fact that not only is doing this damaging to themselves but posting copious amounts of evidence in a centralized, globally accessible, massively indexed and cross-referenced manner is going to cause them serious harm when seeking post secondary education and employment, or just respect in general when they reach adulthood.
Much as it's a massive privacy slam and for that I object, I also think these students in a way have forgone their right to privacy when they made these pictures publically available and in a very large way deserve the treatment they're getting; especially the athletes who've signed moral pledges.
Sorry to say but when you post evidence of yourself breaking the law and violating your schools' moral codes you deserve to be disciplined for it. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, etc.
Not to have to download and install new firmware to a DVD player, not to find that their player doesn't support all the features on a newer disc, to be able to play a DVD purchased from anywhere without worrying about region locking. Sounds like he had a pretty good grasp of what mainstream consumers want, actually.
Agreeing with his ridiculous strawman makes you just as wrong as he does, FWIW.
No, I don't think I said any of that. And you're overstating a number of factors.
I didn't state any factors, letalone overstate. You're the one who's claimed that there's no cost burden to maintain two disparate formats.
Indeed, insofar as you're right, Warner Brothers is still better off producing some discs in HD DVD format rather than producing both formats, because HD DVD is slightly cheaper per disc.
Obviously in the long run they've determined Bluray to be more profitable so the cost per disc in production is meaningless.
Your opinions don't matter to me any more than mine does to yours.
Funny, because I'm not stating opinions. I wasn't trying to hurt your feelings, really, I was trying to enlighten you as to just how far your Slashdot keyboard slapping is going towards media conglomerates' views on their next HD format.
I don't actually like Blu-ray, and I will not be buying it. I don't want to constantly downloading firmware updates because the "latest release" of something I'm interested in has a BD+ (or whatever) hack on it that screws up playback on my player.
Interesting. You're telling me I don't understand the issue and you put up a strawman that large?
Blu-ray has to offer me advantages over DVD in order for me to want it. It doesn't. In that respect, I believe my views are very, very, mainstream.
And that's why we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. You have no idea what mainstream consumers actually want.
Not in practice. Both formats have similar capacities in their most common forms (dual layer HD-DVD vs single layer Blu-ray),
Are you in marketing? "similar capacities"? "most common forms"? I said different. They are not the same, therefore they are different.
Nope. The only way you're going to save in physical production, storage, shipping, and handling is if you reduce the number of units you sell, which of course results in a predictable reduction in revenues, so what are you gaining by doing this? You're treating this as if 100,000 Blu-ray discs take half as much storage as 50,000 Blu-ray discs and 50,000 HD-DVD discs. That's clearly not the case.
Are you saying that the market is split evenly at 50/50 and they will produce and sell an identical number of each units? There won't be any overhead, overruns, surplus production of either format? Or, to be less pedantic, are you saying that a given production house can nearly accurately forecast the number of sales of either given format for any given title over a period of time? Further, the fact that the production equipment is physically different and that there are licensing fees involved, etc. doesn't factor into your equation. Business 101.
Up to a point. I don't think this would have been an issue if studios had all supported both formats and had shown no signs of deciding that one was going to get better treatment than the other in future unless one did spectacularly badly.
Time to take the naive cap off my friend. There's billions of dollars at stake here and everybody's got their hand out with golden eggs in it. The content providers, hardware and console makers have had to decide which egg looks the most appealing. Money talks. Welcome to capitalism.
Here's something worth bearing in mind: I'm not doing Blu-ray. I looked at the three formats a month or two ago, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray, and decided that I felt HD-DVD was a clear step up from DVD, whereas Blu-ray was a step down. (For my logic, see here.) The studios "making the choice for me" doesn't mean I'm breathing a sigh of relief and rushing out to buy a Blu-ray drive, it means they'll be seeing less of my money, especially if they decide to drop DVD as well.
Sorry, but your arguments are a tad misguided. DRM is a component of media conglomerates, not media storage formats. It will exist as long as the "War On Piracy" continues to rage on.
As for the studios seeing more or less of your money, well, if BluRay does become the clear victor and HD-DVD goes the way of BetaMax that's your choice. Do you participate in purchasing new entertainment media, do you pirate, or do you opt out of current entertainment media all together?
But in the long run, I don't think you get it. You are not a typical consumer. You are nothing remotely resembling a typical consumer and the people responsible for producing these formats, I'm sorry to say, don't shive a git what your opinion is or where your wallet goes one way or another. Your arguments mean as much to a movie studio as the subtle nuances of rocket science mean to me. But this is Slashdot, so please don't hesitate to respond and tell me how one DRM format/requirement is subtly different than another or some other pedantry.
Do you perhaps think that the "Slow HD uptake" referred to in the article might be as a consequence of the overwhelming cost of, and over-restrictive DRM associated with HD video?
Unequivocally no. Hint: The general public couldn't care less.
Have you thought perhaps that for the vast majority of spice-girl-loving, Shrek-3 adoring consumers, DVD is more than "Good enough"?
Again, no. High Definition, fully digital content is the wave of the future. 1080p is king!
So now that the successfully marketed plebes have been addressed, those of us who've taken enough time to read into the formats and screens and capabilities and what-not do realize that high def does look significantly better on a large screen (40+ inches) and you get better audio support on the high def discs.
Not only that, but your sentiment is the same one we heard ages ago when people said that VHS was simply "good enough". Back then too most of the DVD content was essentially the VHS movie transferred to a shiny round disc and sold at a higher price. When DVDs became ubiquitous the quality got better, cables and televisions improved to handle the higher quality output and VHS has been dying a slow death ever since.
Slashdot Mirror
1) If they sell their findings to people who want to exploit them (rather than fix them), they are scum.
2) If they do not do (1), these companies are useful, as they do make it easier for flaws to be fixed, even if they do charge money (and won't help if you don't pay them).
3) It's *mean*. It's not nice to solicit someone and say "I could fix your problems (and it wouldn't even take me any work!), but you have to pay me a lot."
Couldn't we just consider this a public service, let the software giants and consumers learn a lesson from all of this and move along?
Our society has become so focused on instant gratification that it's built itself into the production models of physical products and software packages alike. "Release it now! Damn the QA! Mush! Mush!" is the battle cry of the upper management and bean counters.
Well what if we delayed releases of products until they were right and let the people learn to wait? What if people became used to paying slightly more for a product that was of higher quality rather than wanting to shave every buck they can?
Bad enough that RealPlayer is pre-release quality bloatware rushed to market for its entire lifespan to compete with other media formats. Too bad it didn't become the ubiquitous media format they wanted it to be. {rolls eyes} So now I think it looks good on them to have to pay money to fix a vulnerability that affects their entire client base. Now the question becomes this - how concerned are they about the security of their clients? Are they willing to fork over the dough or are they going to stamp their feet in moral defiance and let their users twist in the wind?
FWIW, there are security firms that specialize in exactly that. House being one of a personal residence, a corporate office, a warehouse, or any secured facility that a company wants audited. What better way to audit one's security than to hire people with technical knowledge on how to enter establishments they shouldn't be in? It's one of those niche businesses that savvy reformed criminals tend to start up because they're the ones with the unique skill sets to do so.
Here's a better analogy for a legal activity: auto makers who sell SUVs to whomever wants them, then tell the rest of us we need one to keep our families safe in the event of being hit by one. It's a classic arms race, the only real winner is the arms dealer.Ahh, a car analogy. Auto manufacturers sold products their customers asked for, and what their customers asked for was a bigger vehicle that was neither a pickup truck or a minivan, hence the SUV was born. How is being hit by an SUV different from being smucked by a minivan? Yaris and Fit don't work so well for families of 6 or 7.
As to your analogy, no, it's not comparable because RealNetworks aren't the ones selling the exploit code to people, they're the ones being "blackmailed". Hell-o?
You'd be absolutely incorrect, both in the mathematical sense and the colloquial sense. Lowest common denominator is a perfectly valid mathematical term and in common usage the lowest common denominator is the most minimal subset of data available that's universally understood. For example, Slashdot's comments are composed primarily of ASCII characters, the lowest common denominator in electronic communications that even the lowly typewriter, screen reader, or teletype machine can understand. If you want a vehicle that anybody can drive you pick up a vehicle with an automatic transmission because it is the lowest common denominator and requires the least amount of specialized skills to drive. In purchase transactions cash in the national currency is the lowest common denominator because the individual or vendor in question may not accept the likes of debit cards, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club etc.
I could go on all day but you get the idea.
(Is being a math Nazi as bad as being a grammar Nazi?)When you're incorrect, they're both devastatingly bad ways to be.
Anyhow it's a fact. You can't always tell if a computer is off by pinging it.
Partial points for correctness, but you're right in that you're technically incorrect. ICMP echo request ("ping") requires a TCP stack to be present; that operates at a level higher than the NIC knows about so when you say "ping" you are incorrect. However the MAC address will still appear on the network provided the card is configured to do so (most cards come pre-configured this way).
As for taking the NIC out of the computer or having the ethernet LEDs blinking when the computer's power cord is disconnected it will only work if your switching equipment provides Power Over Ethernet. In 90% of small networks (less than 1000 nodes) you're going to encounter when you remove a NIC from a PC it's as good as a paperweight because it relies on the PCI bus within an ATX computer to provide the power required to listen for / react to WoL (Wake on LAN) requests (and turn on the LEDs on the back of the ethernet card).
Then implement a network policy that says if you're not going to be using your computer at night, shut it down. If you are going to be using your computer at nights, let somebody know. If you don't, your computer will be automatically shut down xx minutes after office hours end and started yy minutes before office hours begin the next work day.
Workplace policies generally aren't 100% cut and dry; there are almost always exceptions. When the doors are locked at your office building, does the person locking them check first to make sure nobody's in the washroom or do they just lock the doors and go on their merry way?
Yes. To start with it sounds as if you're in an IT-centric occupation and you can't figure out how to have your machine booted 30 minutes before you arrive at work (or, in your case, 6).
Lack of ability to problem solve is considered a big problem in most of the world.
After thirty years in this business I've found the exact opposite.
Really? Most every personal hard drive I've ever had to replace has come as a total shock to me because for the longest time I left my workstations running 24x7 and, of course, my servers are the same way. Each connected to UPSs they're only power cycled for routine maintainance, the occasional dust clearing - things like that. It's when I power the machine back on that I find the drives making funny noises or having difficulty accessing the MBR or some such that causes me headaches. However when a workstation is frequently power cycled there are early warning signs of impending drive failure which give you time to back up the data before you find yourself with a brick and scads of lost data.
I won't tell you how many years' experience has taught me that; mostly because experience is about quality, not quantity, and that's a tad more difficult to compare.
Then you have bigger problems than 5-10 minutes patch time. I normally walk into my office, tap my power button, take off my jacket and find out what's going on around me before I bury my nose in the illuminated phosphors of my monitor. You know - by talking to real people, things like that.
If your e-mail is that urgent, get a BlackBerry and have it sent to you automatically. Then you'll be informed BEFORE you arrive at the office.
Really? How many NICs have an onboard TCP stack and maintain an IP address and routing information when their host PC is powered off?
Shutdown everybody except yourself. Great attitude.
If the network administrators have enacted this policy why should they make it affect their machines? IT administrators, especially the clueful ones, tend to have a handle on their own workstations and will shut them down at night except when the machines are running a large job.
More to the OP's intended point - people like school administration will more often than not be excepted from these policies because they have discretion as to how to handle their machines.
What's with the ire towards IT administrators anyways? Did one of them catch you violating your AUP and lock out your account or something?
"I know they're there! See? This is the invoice from when I sold them to him!"
Do you honestly think everyone's going to dump their old PCs to the curb?
(As sad as it is, I know plenty of people do this, but not geeks.)
By the year 2038, your Pentium 2s will have long died and been replaced with "lowly Pentium 4s", which will then have been replaced by those "antique quad-core Xeons", etc. ad nauseum.
There just comes a time with commodity hardware where it reaches its EOL. When I upgrade my computer the internal hardware goes like this; Workstation --> home server --> parents --> younger brother --> curb. When I was still "hard core" I'd have a second machine in there because, well, let's face it - you just need two up-to-date workstations!
Neither my parents or my brother have had to buy a computer since the Compaq Presario with a Pentium 120 was considered "high end". As a matter of fact I've just given my brother my old 17" CRT monitor and taken the old Presario monitor for my server because the antique I was using went pop.
Point being, eventually everything dies. Eventually 64-bit processors will be the equivalent of the Celerons of yesteryear. Quad core will be passe. These will be the CPUs we use in our test boxes, or our "just has to pass packets" firewall machines, or the machines we give to computers for schools programs.
Heck, I don't even have any hardware in use today from the Pentium II era and the slowest processor in my family is about 800MHz and as of now it's a dog.
lol.. Did that really qualify as karma-whoring? I was trying to be as flip as possible and fully expected some flamebait mods. :)
I just tire of hearing people reminisce about how poor quality the music was in days of old where you could hear as many defects and fsck ups as you could music and tell young whippersnappers that they don't know no music with these digital cee-dees they all use. God forbid clarity and quality should be sought after goals when listening to music.
Seriously though, my karma's more than intact. Blacks are bad, the holocaust never happened, put women back in the kitchens and take their shoes, etc. etc.
Once in, use the left-hand pane to navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update.
Something hit me today whilst looking up things involving WiFi networking under Windows and learning that under Vista to disable automatic connection to AdHoc networks you have to open a command prompt and type;
I thought Linux was the OS that had complex commands and Windows was all GUI point and shoot style? So now under Windows XP to change basic, every day functionality you have to find and utilize some obscure policy editing applet? How does one even run "gpedit.msc"?
(I know, type start -> run -> gpedit.msc, I was being facetious.)
"Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations" - if you don't restart after doing an update, Windows will nag you incessantly every 10 minutes or so. If you're busily typing at the time, it's all too easy to inadvertently hit the "yes, please restart now and screw up my work" button when the nag window steals focus.Major hassle, and indicative of a major fundamental interface flaw. Why should a context box ever be allowed to steal focus unless my computer is about to do something extremely harmful? When doing so, why is ANY option highlighted so that my next keystroke could cause damage?
So what you're saying is growing up you got used to inferior quality and now you can't stand clear, properly reproduced sound so in defence of that you're decrying digital formats and defending inadequate, old technology.
Thanks for coming out, I won't be purchasing a phonograph any time soon. I enjoy music, not defects.
I think you're a tad out of touch with today's high school students my friend. Students go to parties, they drink, they get drunk, they brag about it to their peers. The notion that even a slim minority of these people were holding drinks for their friends while they visited the facilities holds about as much water as the dog ate my homework, or my gun (vis: the murder weapon) was stolen but I neglected to report it to police, or the Presidential "I didn't inhale". It just doesn't pass the logic test.
Your last line suggests something a little closer to reality. High school students will do what their friends are doing because that's how they remain part of their peer group. They'll sneak out, stay out past their curfew, skip classes, smoke, drink, smoke marijuana, or generally do things they're not supposed to do because their peers are doing it. If they're at a party where a large component of their friends are drinking they will drink as well because they don't want to be the loser who doesn't participate.
If money is at all a question on anybody's mind it shouldn't be. Teenagers these days have sources of disposable income that I'd never dreamed of when I was younger. I remember how happy I was when I got a home phone with a basic, corded telephone but kids today have picture/MP3/video cell phones and money to go out and entertain themselves in the public going to movies, paintballing, eating at restaurants, you name it they're doing it. So the idea of modern day teenagers coming up with $10-20 to pick up some booze for a party is decidedly simple.
I find your standards of proof distressingly low. If you were a cashier and your manager stole money from your drawer, would you accept termination and criminal charges because the "realistic chances" were good that you took it?That's not nearly a proper analogy. For that to take effect you're stretching far out on a precarious limb of coulda shoulda wouldas. You're assuming that even a small percentage of these photos could have been cases of people being "set up" by a fellow student.
At a certain point you have to pass things through an internal probability meter. If somebody provides you with thousands of photos of various students engaged in illegal activities (possession and consumption of alcoholic beverages, illegal narcotics); photos which can be individually verified by visiting the originating sites, many of which have captions posted by the students themselves confirming their level of drunkenness on the occasions in question - chances are the photos are real.
What are the realistic chances that somebody went to such an effort to doctor hundreds or thousands of photos, uploaded them to dozens or hundreds of profiles, impersonated each of the individuals and posted damning comments? What are the realistic chances that many, if not most of the individuals in question were in fact engaged in the very activities presented in the photographs?
Furthermore, sorry, but the idea of a glass, cup, bottle, or can of alcohol being held by a student but not consumed is as patently ridiculous as smoking a marijuana joint but "not inhaling".
Many employers and post secondary institutions, especially in cases where applicants exceed available positions, screen potentials using a criminal record check. That makes one just as damning as, if not more than the other, don't you think?
My employer screens potential employees with both a driving abstract and criminal record check. If I had DUI on one, or drunk and disorderly on the other I would not have been accepted for employment. Most employers in my field operate under the same guidelines so that would put me in the precarious position of having to choose another field of work facing the possibility of months if not years of training in another area. I'd much rather my school had nipped the problem in the bud before law enforcement became involved, wouldn't you agree?
One of those is a punishment that fits the "crime" (in quotes because there is no victim here), while the other is excessive and occurs with no charges, no judge, and no jury of one's peers. You can see that there is a difference here, can't you?The suggested role of law enforcement officers, in theory, is to aim to protect the public by preventing crimes and by penalizing those who succeed in committing crimes. Attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder are also victimless crimes but they are severely punishable. There doesn't have to be a victim to be a crime.
Driving is a privilege, not a right, therefore the government and the law enforcement bodies have every right to stop you and test you for drunkenness especially around times where people are significantly more likely to drink and drive (new years, xmas, Halloween, etc.)
The R.I.D.E. program in Ontario Canada frequently catches hundreds of people who are over the legal limit, quite often by more than double or treble who should never have set out on the public roadways in the first place. These are the people who have the potential to KILL or severely INJURE otherwise law abiding citizens who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I have absolutely no objection to a 5-10 minute delay followed by a brief chat with a friendly officer and often times a free coupon book for my troubles if it means taking a killer off my streets.
As for BAC levels below 0.10? I've been clocked at levels around 0.10 and slightly above (not while driving, mind you) and I can tell you with 100% certainty that I was NOT in a capacity to drive safely. My reflexes and judgements were definitely impaired and I did have the potential to kill somebody or myself had I chosen to drive home on those occasions.
You have to ask yourself; whose civil liberties are more important - killers' or victims'?
So, when it comes to driving, alcohol does = abuse.
That's the very unhealthy attitude the GP was talking about. Not only am I a big guy (large frame, well equipped :P ) I've also got a fairly high tolerance of alcohol because I am a regular social drinker. As a result, I can safely consume an average of 1-1.5 drinks/hour and safely (and legally) drive home. If I'm at a social gathering and I have a glass of wine or a pint of beer with my meal or an Irish coffee with dessert I will assure you that I can still drive better than most of the other drivers on the roads of Ontario where I live.
I will of course agree that drinking to excess, drinking to a dizzying state or consuming more than one's tolerance level (as dictated by how often they drink, their body mass and how their metabolism processes alcohol as well as how much food and/or water was consumed in the process) that they should not be considered fit to drive and that's why services like taxi's and "Keys To Us" and the like exist (where they send two drivers out to drive you and your car home).
But to declare unilaterally that having a drink of alcohol == abuse is absurd.
In the great United States of America the legal drinking ages vary from 18 to 21 years of age. If one is below the requisite age and is found to be purchasing, consuming and/or distributing alcohol to same it is an illegal activity.
Here in Canada the drinking age is pretty unilaterally 19 years of age across the board with the exception of 2-3 provinces where it's 18.
Yes, there are tens of thousands of students ranging in age anywhere from 20 down to, man, probably 12-13 years of age posting party pictures of themselves consuming alcohol, drugs, smoking, etc. and quite often these baby Einsteins will post comments saying conspicuous things like "$&#@! I was SOOOO wasted that night!" pretty much confirming the pictorial evidence. My younger brother and his friends are in the same boat.
It's a pretty amazing thing just how much these kids don't comprehend the damage they could be doing to themselves later on in life. Used to be if you did illegal activities you'd keep them between you and your friends, but nowadays there's pictures of kids breaking up rails of cocaine, rolling joints with containers of half-drunk booze all over the place! They're going to have to wake up to the fact that not only is doing this damaging to themselves but posting copious amounts of evidence in a centralized, globally accessible, massively indexed and cross-referenced manner is going to cause them serious harm when seeking post secondary education and employment, or just respect in general when they reach adulthood.
Much as it's a massive privacy slam and for that I object, I also think these students in a way have forgone their right to privacy when they made these pictures publically available and in a very large way deserve the treatment they're getting; especially the athletes who've signed moral pledges.
Sorry to say but when you post evidence of yourself breaking the law and violating your schools' moral codes you deserve to be disciplined for it. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, etc.
Agreeing with his ridiculous strawman makes you just as wrong as he does, FWIW.
I didn't state any factors, letalone overstate. You're the one who's claimed that there's no cost burden to maintain two disparate formats.
Indeed, insofar as you're right, Warner Brothers is still better off producing some discs in HD DVD format rather than producing both formats, because HD DVD is slightly cheaper per disc.Obviously in the long run they've determined Bluray to be more profitable so the cost per disc in production is meaningless.
Your opinions don't matter to me any more than mine does to yours.Funny, because I'm not stating opinions. I wasn't trying to hurt your feelings, really, I was trying to enlighten you as to just how far your Slashdot keyboard slapping is going towards media conglomerates' views on their next HD format.
I don't actually like Blu-ray, and I will not be buying it. I don't want to constantly downloading firmware updates because the "latest release" of something I'm interested in has a BD+ (or whatever) hack on it that screws up playback on my player.Interesting. You're telling me I don't understand the issue and you put up a strawman that large?
Blu-ray has to offer me advantages over DVD in order for me to want it. It doesn't. In that respect, I believe my views are very, very, mainstream.And that's why we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. You have no idea what mainstream consumers actually want.
Are you in marketing? "similar capacities"? "most common forms"? I said different. They are not the same, therefore they are different.
Nope. The only way you're going to save in physical production, storage, shipping, and handling is if you reduce the number of units you sell, which of course results in a predictable reduction in revenues, so what are you gaining by doing this? You're treating this as if 100,000 Blu-ray discs take half as much storage as 50,000 Blu-ray discs and 50,000 HD-DVD discs. That's clearly not the case.Are you saying that the market is split evenly at 50/50 and they will produce and sell an identical number of each units? There won't be any overhead, overruns, surplus production of either format? Or, to be less pedantic, are you saying that a given production house can nearly accurately forecast the number of sales of either given format for any given title over a period of time? Further, the fact that the production equipment is physically different and that there are licensing fees involved, etc. doesn't factor into your equation. Business 101.
Up to a point. I don't think this would have been an issue if studios had all supported both formats and had shown no signs of deciding that one was going to get better treatment than the other in future unless one did spectacularly badly.Time to take the naive cap off my friend. There's billions of dollars at stake here and everybody's got their hand out with golden eggs in it. The content providers, hardware and console makers have had to decide which egg looks the most appealing. Money talks. Welcome to capitalism.
Here's something worth bearing in mind: I'm not doing Blu-ray. I looked at the three formats a month or two ago, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray, and decided that I felt HD-DVD was a clear step up from DVD, whereas Blu-ray was a step down. (For my logic, see here.) The studios "making the choice for me" doesn't mean I'm breathing a sigh of relief and rushing out to buy a Blu-ray drive, it means they'll be seeing less of my money, especially if they decide to drop DVD as well.Sorry, but your arguments are a tad misguided. DRM is a component of media conglomerates, not media storage formats. It will exist as long as the "War On Piracy" continues to rage on.
As for the studios seeing more or less of your money, well, if BluRay does become the clear victor and HD-DVD goes the way of BetaMax that's your choice. Do you participate in purchasing new entertainment media, do you pirate, or do you opt out of current entertainment media all together?
But in the long run, I don't think you get it. You are not a typical consumer. You are nothing remotely resembling a typical consumer and the people responsible for producing these formats, I'm sorry to say, don't shive a git what your opinion is or where your wallet goes one way or another. Your arguments mean as much to a movie studio as the subtle nuances of rocket science mean to me. But this is Slashdot, so please don't hesitate to respond and tell me how one DRM format/requirement is subtly different than another or some other pedantry.
Unequivocally no. Hint: The general public couldn't care less.
Have you thought perhaps that for the vast majority of spice-girl-loving, Shrek-3 adoring consumers, DVD is more than "Good enough"?Again, no. High Definition, fully digital content is the wave of the future. 1080p is king!
So now that the successfully marketed plebes have been addressed, those of us who've taken enough time to read into the formats and screens and capabilities and what-not do realize that high def does look significantly better on a large screen (40+ inches) and you get better audio support on the high def discs.
Not only that, but your sentiment is the same one we heard ages ago when people said that VHS was simply "good enough". Back then too most of the DVD content was essentially the VHS movie transferred to a shiny round disc and sold at a higher price. When DVDs became ubiquitous the quality got better, cables and televisions improved to handle the higher quality output and VHS has been dying a slow death ever since.