On the other hand, y'all obviously aren't aging that fast... today's poll question ("Most recent car crash") only lists options going back to "last 5 years". My last one was 14 years ago...
For your reference: As an American living in Sweden, I get broadband from a company called "B2" for roughly $20/month. It's excellent: just a plain 'ol RJ45 ethernet jack in my wall (no special equipment), I get as many (real) IP addresses as I want from their DHCP server, and it's 10MBPS to the local switch, which is connected to a fiber loop (don't know how fast, but it's plenty fast).
Good luck!
Can someone just please explain to me why the picture of the CEO of the company that owns the interface looks like a cross between a dominatrix and The Terminator?
A better idea. Make this road tax, a tax on Gasoline.
Two positives: It taxes road use, and makes SUV's pay more per mile.
EXACTLY! Here in Sweden (I'm an American ex-pat), gas costs, like, ~$3.50-$4/gal., about 75% of which is taxes. You know why? Because they're charging you for the real cost of a gallon of gas, i.e. not just for the material costs, but for road upkeep, emergency response, environmental cleanup, etc. I'm so fscking sick of explaining to my American friends & family why I don't really mind paying a lot for gas here...
This goes to show that the real use of this GPS TAX is identification and location of vehicles.
I concur. And frankly, people in Oregon should be angry and concerned about this, because it's a very weasly way of getting mandatory tracking equipment installed in all vehicles.
Hang on a sec... this guy says he has a revolutionary new encryption algorithm that's as secure as a one-time pad?
Quite right. I think this guy had better think twice before dropping any capital on his "revolutionary" idea. Consider that rijndael *and* serpent -- algorithms developed by some of the best crypto folks in the world -- have recently both been partially compromised. Who knows, maybe the OP is a super-genius...
Moreover, I'm no expert, but since when is a true one-time pad vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks?! (Interested readers -- and the original poster -- are referred to the cryptography faq, esp. the section entitled "Why is a one-time pad secure?")
IMHO, the OP should use one of the above-mentioned cheap/free methods to establish his algorithm (the encrypted timestamp thing sounds pretty cool), and then open-source it for peer review. As "blibbleblobble" points out, especially in crypto, nobody's gonna take this seriously anyway without a lot of scrutiny. And that means it would be a long time before any of that $20,000 came back home...
...to Swedish academia, and I must say that there's an awful lot that I miss about being in industry. I actually had many of the same feelings, going in, as "EdinBear" voices, and I have, in fact, gotten the opportunity to participate in some fairly interesting research. The problem for me is that research moves at a different pace than industry, and has different goals. Here, a researcher picks a problem and works on it for years, and if they get good results that's nice, but if they get bad results it's still acceptable. That's as it should be in research, but personally I miss those moments of "damn, that didn't work and the customer needs this thing by tomorrow -- let's try something else, quick!" There's a dynamicism about corporate life that is absent from academic life. Also, the budgets in academia are a lot more fixed, so even if you wanted to suddenly change direction, you usually can't. I've enjoyed the experience, but I'm really thinking about moving back into industry.
I actually think many of the other comments, to the effect of "re-educate your users to only use their network drives", embody the best philosophy in this area. However, as this may be impractical for you, or if you have exceptions (e.g. paranoid managers who refuse to put "sensitive data" on a network share), you could add this to your mix:
- Share out the users' hard drives, using whatever security you think is appropriate - Write a simple script (batch file) that does a "net use" to each user drive in turn, and then does an "xcopy" of all files ending in the appropriate extensions (e.g..doc,.xls) to a local location on the server (use the/M switch to only get changed files, more or less) - Schedule the script to run at some appropriate time, like 7:00 at night - Put tape over the power buttons on the workstations to remind the users not to turn them off
Also, this article has some decent suggestions: http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Cont ent/638/14/1.h tml
Good luck to you.
(Note: I expect flames from certain loser boneheads to the effect of "that solution is stoopid/insecure/unreliable/karmically imbalanced". Said loser boneheads are, of course, entitled to their own loser bonehead opinions. However, this kind of solution works just fine for many small offices, in my experience.)
This is a good suggestion, I've found this function to be pretty stable and reliable. I will say, though, that it has limitations -- my boss has >2G in his home directory (never deletes anything) and it takes, like, 1/2 hour+ to synchronize. So I had to hack up a custom script with rsync, which works just great as long as he remembers to manually run it.
I think "SquadBoy's" advice is some of the best I've seen in this topic: certs are by no means useless, but they are entirely specific to the market you're targeting. That said: 1.) I used to work as a consultant, and in that case it was useful to have (*shudder*) Microsoft certs, because it helped the sales weasels sell me to the customers. Mind you, the certs are not what got me the job, but they did go in the "plus" column and probably added a few dollars to the salary offer. 2.) A couple weeks ago I spoke with a sales rep from a training company to ask her what kind of trainers they need the most. She said Cold Fusion. Apparently a lot of companies are trying to get their people trained on Cold Fusion, and there aren't that many trainers that have the certs. Mostly what this implies to me is that if you walked into a company that uses CF and told them you *didn't* need training, it could only help you. Good luck!
A lot of people have given a nod to this point already, but I think this is worth the attention.
The most important "negative" you listed, IMHO, is
I don't get a proven, prepackaged system that works right out of the box.
After working for years as a consultant and systems manager, I've found that it's almost always more cost-effective to leave each job in the hands of the "specialists". I don't doubt that you're entirely capable of building every one of those PC's yourself, but it's still likely that some things will go wrong, e.g. bad memory module here, inexplicable OS problems there, etc. Even one or two glitches might cost you in additional hardware, but more importantly, it will cost you in time. It's so much nicer, when a power supply explodes or a NIC goes funny, to just call the manufacturer, get the on-site service, and bang -- you're up and running a day later.
The point is, take a look at the true impact on your bottom line, not only of the time investment associated with building these systems, but of maintaining them indefinitely. Good luck to you.
TOAST?! PATHETIC?!
I'm outraged. Well... OK... they have a good point -- actually the point about enterprise management is a good one too, since I'd guess most admins just use scripting to do their management and nobody's ever taken the time to do it in a uniform way.
But, yes, open source does work. (It'd better, otherwise I'm out of a job...)
Point 1: iPaul, I wanted to comment that I was truly (no kidding) impressed by the class with which you conducted yourself in this exchange. It's so common in this community for things to immediately degenerate to "I know you are, but what am I?!" A pity your detractor couldn't muster a bit of class himself -- it's bad enough that he's dead wrong...
Point 2: To expand a bit upon the subject of IPv6/IPv4 compatibility, I quote here from the 2nd edition of "Computer Networks: A systems approach", (Peterson & Davie, 2000, Academic Press), on the subject of the IPv6 address space:
Within the reserved address space (addresses beginning with a byte of 0's) are some important special types of addresses. A node may be assigned an "IPv4-comaptible IPv6 address" by zero-extending a 32-bit IPv4 address to 128 bits. A node that is only capable of understanding IPv4 can be assigned an "IPv4-mapped IPv6 address" by prefixing the 32-bit IPv4 address with 2 bytes of all 1s and then zero-extending the result to 128 bits.
Which is to say, while of course no IPv4 device is going to natively understand IPv6, there are easy mechanisms for incorporating IPv4 devices into an IPv6 network, as iPaul has observed.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, y'all obviously aren't aging that fast... today's poll question ("Most recent car crash") only lists options going back to "last 5 years". My last one was 14 years ago...
Off to take my Metamucil now...
For your reference: As an American living in Sweden, I get broadband from a company called "B2" for roughly $20/month. It's excellent: just a plain 'ol RJ45 ethernet jack in my wall (no special equipment), I get as many (real) IP addresses as I want from their DHCP server, and it's 10MBPS to the local switch, which is connected to a fiber loop (don't know how fast, but it's plenty fast). Good luck!
Can someone just please explain to me why the picture of the CEO of the company that owns the interface looks like a cross between a dominatrix and The Terminator?
Maybe it's just me...
...for "Carbon Copy"... no wonder the thing is thinner thatn it's "sibling"... it's got identity issues and they've triggered an eating disorder.
Is that legal in Australia?! Ohh... wait... maybe they mean Coca-*Cola*... Nevermind.
"...for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain?!"
And here I was worrying that the world was in trouble. Now I can sleep at night.
EXACTLY! Here in Sweden (I'm an American ex-pat), gas costs, like, ~$3.50-$4/gal., about 75% of which is taxes. You know why? Because they're charging you for the real cost of a gallon of gas, i.e. not just for the material costs, but for road upkeep, emergency response, environmental cleanup, etc. I'm so fscking sick of explaining to my American friends & family why I don't really mind paying a lot for gas here...
I concur. And frankly, people in Oregon should be angry and concerned about this, because it's a very weasly way of getting mandatory tracking equipment installed in all vehicles.
HUZZAH! (And many, many congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple.)
Quite right. I think this guy had better think twice before dropping any capital on his "revolutionary" idea. Consider that rijndael *and* serpent -- algorithms developed by some of the best crypto folks in the world -- have recently both been partially compromised. Who knows, maybe the OP is a super-genius...
Moreover, I'm no expert, but since when is a true one-time pad vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks?! (Interested readers -- and the original poster -- are referred to the cryptography faq, esp. the section entitled "Why is a one-time pad secure?")
IMHO, the OP should use one of the above-mentioned cheap/free methods to establish his algorithm (the encrypted timestamp thing sounds pretty cool), and then open-source it for peer review. As "blibbleblobble" points out, especially in crypto, nobody's gonna take this seriously anyway without a lot of scrutiny. And that means it would be a long time before any of that $20,000 came back home...
...to Swedish academia, and I must say that there's an awful lot that I miss about being in industry. I actually had many of the same feelings, going in, as "EdinBear" voices, and I have, in fact, gotten the opportunity to participate in some fairly interesting research. The problem for me is that research moves at a different pace than industry, and has different goals. Here, a researcher picks a problem and works on it for years, and if they get good results that's nice, but if they get bad results it's still acceptable. That's as it should be in research, but personally I miss those moments of "damn, that didn't work and the customer needs this thing by tomorrow -- let's try something else, quick!" There's a dynamicism about corporate life that is absent from academic life. Also, the budgets in academia are a lot more fixed, so even if you wanted to suddenly change direction, you usually can't. I've enjoyed the experience, but I'm really thinking about moving back into industry.
Good luck to you.
I actually think many of the other comments, to the effect of "re-educate your users to only use their network drives", embody the best philosophy in this area. However, as this may be impractical for you, or if you have exceptions (e.g. paranoid managers who refuse to put "sensitive data" on a network share), you could add this to your mix:
.doc, .xls) to a local location on the server (use the /M switch to only get changed files, more or less)
t ent/638/14/1.h tml
- Share out the users' hard drives, using whatever security you think is appropriate
- Write a simple script (batch file) that does a "net use" to each user drive in turn, and then does an "xcopy" of all files ending in the appropriate extensions (e.g.
- Schedule the script to run at some appropriate time, like 7:00 at night
- Put tape over the power buttons on the workstations to remind the users not to turn them off
Also, this article has some decent suggestions:
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Con
Good luck to you.
(Note: I expect flames from certain loser boneheads to the effect of "that solution is stoopid/insecure/unreliable/karmically imbalanced". Said loser boneheads are, of course, entitled to their own loser bonehead opinions. However, this kind of solution works just fine for many small offices, in my experience.)
I think "SquadBoy's" advice is some of the best I've seen in this topic: certs are by no means useless, but they are entirely specific to the market you're targeting. That said:
1.) I used to work as a consultant, and in that case it was useful to have (*shudder*) Microsoft certs, because it helped the sales weasels sell me to the customers. Mind you, the certs are not what got me the job, but they did go in the "plus" column and probably added a few dollars to the salary offer.
2.) A couple weeks ago I spoke with a sales rep from a training company to ask her what kind of trainers they need the most. She said Cold Fusion. Apparently a lot of companies are trying to get their people trained on Cold Fusion, and there aren't that many trainers that have the certs. Mostly what this implies to me is that if you walked into a company that uses CF and told them you *didn't* need training, it could only help you.
Good luck!
A lot of people have given a nod to this point already, but I think this is worth the attention. The most important "negative" you listed, IMHO, is I don't get a proven, prepackaged system that works right out of the box. After working for years as a consultant and systems manager, I've found that it's almost always more cost-effective to leave each job in the hands of the "specialists". I don't doubt that you're entirely capable of building every one of those PC's yourself, but it's still likely that some things will go wrong, e.g. bad memory module here, inexplicable OS problems there, etc. Even one or two glitches might cost you in additional hardware, but more importantly, it will cost you in time. It's so much nicer, when a power supply explodes or a NIC goes funny, to just call the manufacturer, get the on-site service, and bang -- you're up and running a day later. The point is, take a look at the true impact on your bottom line, not only of the time investment associated with building these systems, but of maintaining them indefinitely. Good luck to you.
TOAST?! PATHETIC?! I'm outraged. Well... OK... they have a good point -- actually the point about enterprise management is a good one too, since I'd guess most admins just use scripting to do their management and nobody's ever taken the time to do it in a uniform way. But, yes, open source does work. (It'd better, otherwise I'm out of a job...)
Point 2: To expand a bit upon the subject of IPv6/IPv4 compatibility, I quote here from the 2nd edition of "Computer Networks: A systems approach", (Peterson & Davie, 2000, Academic Press), on the subject of the IPv6 address space: Which is to say, while of course no IPv4 device is going to natively understand IPv6, there are easy mechanisms for incorporating IPv4 devices into an IPv6 network, as iPaul has observed.