Well, obviously IANAGD (I Am Not A Game Developer) and suffering a little from FAS (false authority syndrome).;) I study math mostly. This whole situation reminds me of the problem with trying to quantify worker "productivity". You can do it with machines because their associated variables are typically bounded. But, humans are completely different. Many execs do not understand this, so they propose these naive measurement schemes like [lines of code / hour] for programmers or [number of patients served / day ] for respiratory or physical therapists. Clearly, there are problems with the models based on these metrics.
Now, trying to measure game design is a similar problem. If there were a way to quantify game quality, a way to quantify game graphics quality, and a way to measure or estimate the amount of time required to produce a "good" game, then I think we would have enough to make a good model. Unfortunately, we have variables like game genre, machine architecture, controller ergonomics and button assignments, single- and group-playability, graphics, story and originality, length of objective, and re-playability. Then we have tradeoffs like if you were to base new games on popular old games, would this draw away from originality? Now, back to using junkfood as positive reinforcement for game development, this would depend on whether we can actually measure progress. But what if one programmer contributes a block of code that helps to prevent cheating, while another programmer sees it as impractical because of the obscurity of the vulnerability? Relative measurements, indeed. It seems like the best measurement (the only measurement?) we can use is popularity.
Anyway, this issue is far more complex than I had originally thought. Thanks for not totally flaming me.:)
I think most of the original games were made in the 1990-1996 era when there were more restrictions on graphics. I think this forced some developers to deal with the content of the game instead of spending all the time in making it look good. To see my point, pit yourself on the tv show trading spaces. Ignoring the "reality" aspect, there is a lot of pressure to be creative when there is a budget ($1000). But if you set that budget higher ($100,000), you relieve a lot of the pressure of having to think or be "creative", or "innovative".
My favorite game of all time was "The secret of Monkey Island." It was made with the
SCUMM engine. Sure, the graphics weren't "Enter the Matrix"- or DeusEx-style, but the humor was awesome. The puzzles weren't totally convoluted and not too easy either, while Elaine Marley was pretty hot in 16-color!;) Now if only we can pump out some more games like that. I mean, I haven't laughed that hard since MST3K went off the air years ago (ignoring reruns). How many games can do that? If you played these games, just consider how long it took to create all that humor, the storyline, the scenes, etc.
Your average game developer these days can probably code up a storm, but can he write a good story? I think thats whats missing in many games: a good story. Sure, anyone can create short term objective (ie. pong!), but what about all the other elements that people like? Do people really want to play a repititive task over and over again? I don't think so, not unless its some cheapo game meant to kill some time while waiting for a kernel to compile. Granted, some people do not want to get stuck into a long game, either, which is why many have started to include a save-game option. Furthermore, a good game should not lose its appeal after it has been conquered/beaten. Sort of like reading your favorite book or watching your favorite movie a second time and finding more details you hadn't noticed before, the game should allow the gamer to "explore" other parts of the game they hadn't noticed before. For example, most side-scrolling games get boring after you beat it. Contra was popular because you could play god-mode (u-u-d-d-b-a-b-a-start), but this wasn't in the design, it was a cheat. How many people actually played this game without using the cheat after beating it? Now look at how many more DOOM worlds were created after the majority of gamers beat DOOM. In this case, both games had a crappy storyline, but it was the game engine that helped retain DOOM gamers. By allowing more freedoms to the gamer, the game would not become dull after beating it. However, a game company does not care about game retention, just about consumer retention. So they do not assume the popularity of a game, but rather try to shorten deadlines in order to release as many games before christmas as possible. There is a tradeoff between developers producing excellent quality games and the company producing an excellent quantity of games. The decisions made by upper management on how to handle this tradeoff will effect the developers ability to focus on a good story, good long-term objective game, a good game engine, and good graphics.
I think that anyone can be creative if they put their mind to it, but they need time. Which leads me to believe that the root of all these bad game design problems are a side effect of the phb's rush to produce more quantity. And this isn't limited to game software, just look at the problems from Win95 which came close to NOT making the 1995 deadline. Oh yeah, and then there's my favorite quote from Bill: "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good." Hmm...
There are other factors too, probably related to the limited gaming experiences of the developers and the availability of game engines. If we trained game developers by having them play e
Google not only blocks the spam, but every result after it.
Sounds like an attack waiting to happen. Lets see, I really hate that blasted www.example.com site, ever since they totally ripped off my page! First, I'm going to mirror it here! Then I'm going to take that collection of spam I've been saving up all these years and attach it to my mirrored site. Then, if I can somehow push my site above in google page rank, they should not show up in any search and I have thwarted my opponent! YES!
The whole point of this system is to decrease violence in a bar by rejecting supposedly violent people. But the list in the demo graphic also include: excessive drinking, missed payment, and other(?).
Well, I'd first like to know what qualifies as excessive drinking? Does getting sick qualify? how about stumbling? what level of breathalizer? and is it a fair level? This seems a bit subjective.
I'd also like to know what the other label means.
Finally, who is going to maintain this database? If the information is incorrect or if a bouncer, bartender, or server doesnt like you, how would you go about disputing your label? Who would you go to? How could you prove your case, since this seems like a guilty until proven innocent scenerio? Suppose you undertipped the server, does that mean you "missed payment"?
Seems like the problems with the airport
no-fly list are coming back in the form of a no-bar list.
This really depends on how well managed your LANs are but can work smoothly if the architectures and OS's are homogenous (per LAN). try this:
On each host in each LAN, make a list of programs you want to keep patched and store their names, MD5 hashes, revision numbers (or patch numbers), and revision dates in a file, say "patched.db". Ideally, you'll want to patch everything, but if your topology includes well-configured network firewalls in front of each LAN, then you can minimize and pinpoint an attack if a host gets comprimised, which gives the patch-admins in each LAN more time to patch.
One host should be designated in each LAN as the "patch-box". (got a spare 486 and linux distro?) You'll need to have MD5SUM and (GNU?)PGP on every box in the LAN and the patch-box should be running FTP, or even SSH if you want overkill (but as long as every host has cached copies of every public key of every host in the LAN, its own private key, and can sign or verify the integrity of the data, then the security of the channel won't matter). Now, every host should MD5SUM its patched.db file and sign the md5sum with their private key. It then packages patched.db and patched.db.md5 into patched-hostname-date.tar.gz and uploads this to the patch-box.
The patch-box then verifies the integrity of each patched.db from each host and then compares the revision numbers against the master list for that LAN, say patch-master.db. Now, at this point, you could just let the patch-boxes check sites for patches, but you specified only one host would be allowed to do this. Well, then that designated host connecting to the internet will be known as "fetch-box". Fetch-box will check for and download any patches if their revision number exceeds that of a file on in its harddrive (this will most likely need to be done manually since the integrity of the patches needs to be verified and the patches need to be tested by the network-admin, unless you can want to make use of up2date or win-auto-update). Every file/patch downloaded will be noted in a file similar to patched.db, which we'll name patch-control.db.
Meanwhile, each patch-box from each LAN will hash&sign the patch-master.db file and package these files into patch-master-LANname-date.tar.gz and upload this file to the fetch-box. Then fetch-box will verify the integrity of each patch-master.db file and compare it against patch-control.db to determine if more entries need to be added to patch-control.db (ie. suppose host-A in LAN-B just added program-c to its inventory (AFTER implementing your patch-scheme) and this program needs to stay patched). Later, each patch-box will download and verify the hashed&signed copy of patch-control.db from fetch-box to determine if it has downloaded (and is releasing) a new patch. If so, then patch-box will download the patch, make it available for download for any host on the LAN, and update the revision numbers for patch-master.db. In turn, each host will download and verify a hashed&signed copy of patch-master.db and compare it against patched.db. If there are any changes, then it will download these files from the patch-box.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Some issues: 0) You desire quick security patching, but system reaction is unpredictable, regardless of homogenity. You should rather focus on extending the time needed to patch. This can be accomplished through well-configured firewalls, proxies, and NDS's. With more time, you can test patches to make sure they are not corrupt and not rootkits. I also hope you have good backups of every system in case you need to disconnect and restore a comprimised one. 1) what happens when you need to downgrade software? 2) what happens when you run into race conditions? will a file-locking scheme need to be imposed as not to corrupt these databases? (ie. touch/var/run/lock-patchdb) 3) this can all be automated except for the part of acquiring, testing, and releasing the patches. At worst,
Why is SGI trying to comply with SCO if these supposed code segments are "trivial" and why is SCO trying not to cooperate with SGI?
Maybe SCO doesn't care about the code while SGI (knowing SCO would deny this good gesture ahead of time) is trying to add more evidence to a pump-n-dump case.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, no one comes out of SCO HQ to greet
Monninkhof.
So I started wondering, is this a matter of mistreating their business partner or not enough employees to come outside? I suspect that there's less than the 339 employees they claim. Laying off a dozen or so could probably pay off the legal fees and spins for the press since july. And who honestly keeps a counter of their employment on a web page? I'm having visions of those counters on the bottom of ebay auctions: "Free Employment counters and Services from Andale."
Looking at their site: "There are currently no job openings at SCO," and the history of SCO stops at 2002. Hmm...Their site also doesn't list any new beta software and no announcements that there will be, so are they even still developing? And on what?
But, there's still 25 days to the end of the "SCO year" and their "SCO IP license for Linux" offer ends in 9 days. I'm feeling pretty lucky, so I'm going to predict at least 12 SCO stories to hit slashdot headlines by Oct.31. Place your bets.
Well, the war is not over between open source and CCAGW. Here are some quotes from the CCAGW Minister of Information's response to your slashdot posts:
"We are not afraid of the slashdot. Tom Schatz
has condemned them. They are stupid. They are stupid" (dramatic pause) "and they are condemned."
"The open source community is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!"
"Let the open source infidels bask in their illusion"
"I triple guarantee you, there are no apache servers on our web site."
"They think we are retarded - they are retarded."
"Don't believe anything! We will chase the rascals back to Finland!"
"Be assured. Closed-source is safe, protected"
"Yes, the open source has advanced further. This will only make it easier for us to defeat them"
Great, just what I need, another person telling me "go back to college and pick
a different career".
If you don't like your current degree, then why did you choose it in the first place? If you based your decision on those average salary charts you got in highschool from taking the PRE-SATs, well then you were definitely misled and given too little information. My post wasn't suggesting that going to college is the answer either. There are plenty of resources on the net to self-train yourself as a code-monkey, kernel-developer, RHCE, mathematician, physicist, cryptologist, etc. Hell, go to MIT and check out their new FREE online materials (your public library has free internet if you need it). You can also start your own web hosting, email, ssh, ftp,
news, dns hosting company with a little startup costs (but prolly not if your loan overburden already, unless you can find 50-100 cheapo 486s and a dsl connection and $2 for a CD-R for a linux distro). Getting a degree should not dictate your career, nor should it dictate your happiness. You control that. Worst case scenerios: You join the military to recover your financial stability until you can move on to the career you want. OR, you could pick up chess and become a grandmaster living off of $1 games in central park or $80 prizes for tournaments in your state.
Why don't you take your high-and-mighty attitude and shove it?
Was that meant to be a question? Honestly, I'm just trying to help. You dont have to listen.
As for using my skills "outside the scope of their context", tell me what field
other than fast food is currently hiring inexperienced people with the "wrong" degree for the field?
There are plenty of examples of "geniuses" who started in the wrong career and then made brilliant discoveries, but I'll just name one: Einstein worked in the patent office and he had to work hard to build his math talents which didnt come naturally. Oh yeah, and then there was the time the NSA was hiring chess masters and crossword puzzle experts to try to break codes. And then there's "homeland security" who are looking for a few good crackers to help defend computer systems and track down black hats. My point being that all an employer cares about is what you CAN do, regardless of what your grades, degree, or field of specialty is in. If you work for Mcdonalds and publish a paper on the cryptanalysis of the [insert cipher name here] cryptosystem, then you've just increased your chances of getting hired by the NSA or any company looking to create enryption utilities (can you code up DES?) Or you could create a hypothetical example of a normal problem facing [insert industry here] and try to solve it on paper or make it faster using your skills from your original degree, then that would increase your chances of entering into that field which could be outside the context of the scope of your degree.
I could always go into sales, not that an introverted geek like me would make a
great salesperson. How about Best Buy? Curcuit City? Gateway? Dell?
Like I said, you have to do something anyway, so why not sit down tonight and think it out. Decide what will make you happy and do it. Nothing is impossible, so don't let the particulars intimidate you. Also consider what you want out of life.
What good is 15 years of Netware experience today? How about someone who knows that the original PC had odd size ISA slots, so that 286 and later cards wouldn't fit? Who cares that you spent a million hours with DOS and QEMM getting an extra 60K of base memory so somone's blasted Autocad machine would work correctly?
It's turning out that spending 20 years working with computers has been a really poor investment.
Sad. I always thought of learning as something that makes you human (as opposed to insects? viruses?), not rich or job-secure. A lot of people specialize in some industry and when that culture/economy/technology/employer changes and they lose a job (or are about to), they whine as if they've wasted their life or they go cry to the government to try save that dying industry so that they may (selfishly) preserve their outdated niche in society.
Its called evolution. Its a way of life. Only the fittest will survive! And you know who survives? The beings who change. Honestly, if you feel your life was wasted because you specialized in something and the only thing that made you important was that job-field, then maybe you aren't really special. Sorry, but being an intelligent human means being able to use your knowledge for something beyond a stupid job. If all you are is someone who picks up knowledge with no intent to use it beyond the scope of its context, then you are not intelligent, IMHO. But I do not believe any human in this world is NOT intelligent, just someone who has a tainted definition of life.
So here is my suggestion to all you unemployed or job-security conscious people out there: Make yourself special, use your intelligence, and learn things with the intent of using them beyond the scope of their context. Not only will your expertise grow (hence becoming more of an asset), but you may end up creating something innovative.
this so-called expert report is just Gates-bashing
Umm, if you actually read the article, you'd see that there were seven authors of this "gates-bashing" report. Two of which stand out: Dan Geer and Bruce Schneier. Dan Geer being the chief technology officer of @Stake, a security consulting firm. (Ever heard of L0phtCrack?) And Bruce Schneier is famous for his work with cryptography research (ever heard of twofish? blowfish, maybe?), but works for Counterpane Security Consulting firm.
These guys probably detest MS, but I'm sure they're not willing to sacrifice their credibility just to produce a stupid report just to bash gates.
According to this MSNBC Article: President Bush on Tuesday signed legislation creating a national "do-not-call" list intended to help consumers block unwanted telemarketing calls.
But according to this new article: The U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City said the Federal Trade Commission overstepped its authority when it set up the popular anti-telemarketing measure, according to a court decision filed late on Tuesday.
OK, now I'm confused....How did the FTC overstep its authority if it supposedly did exactly what the President wanted? Or was the DNC list supposed to implemented by some other government organization?
I really doubt that a company that current has more than 90% market share, and focuses it's products on 90% of the populace are going to worry about an obscure feature such as regular expressions that only 1% of the populace uses.
Actually, one could make the point that windows has "dumbed down" society. Just because only 1% (ignoring what you pulled that number out of) of the population uses the command line or tools like grep, find, ls, etc. doesn't mean they cant become "popular". I think if we made baby steps for society to follow in becoming more command-line literate, these tools could become popular because of their lack of *bloat*. THEN they could stop wasting time (and money) programming crap like integrating MSN and IE into system tools and start programming something "innovative", but nobody knows what that means anymore thanks to Microsloth except for that 1% you were talking about.
This is all assuming MS doesnt gain MSN, IE, and outlook/office customers from seeing all this integration. More likely, they are probably going to start losing customers since all this integration typically leads to more security vulnerabilities as we have seen in Outlook and IE.
Anyway, MS will never see this and will never give users ANY credit or chance to prove themselves. Personally, I think making a UI too transparent will yield these so-called dumb users. Instead, we should be focusing on making the UI less transparent (for example, log-files! As long as they are not cryptic but rather verbose and human readable, they can provide the answers most users call the help desk for). I believe most users just need more self-confidence, but you cant do this by trying to hide things from the user. (ie. that little checkbox in the control panels: "check here to hide file extensions")
This all sounds plausible. We were considering switching our cat-5 backbone to the electrical cabling, but the diagnostics would have been a whole new world. I mean, with the AC, the network model gets even more complex, because not only does your network have to handle new computers, new IPs, new MACs, etc. but you also have to deal with "users" plugging in their coffee grinders, custodians running their high powered vacuums and floor buffers, as well as the next door construction crew running their mitre saws, etc. If that extra "random" noise won't confuse the hell out of a network admin, then he deserves the credit of "ethernet god" without hesitation.
Seriously, Edison probably can handle all this with error correction and their own special network adapters. But what I'm curious about is the range of broadcasts. Will Edison implement switches for connecting these corporate users/networks, or will everyone in the same grid see each other's traffic like the cable broadband network model? Then we run into snarfing issues.
Another question is how will Edison handle subnets? If everyone is sharing the same AC loop (like the old coax network model) where would the bridge points be? Obviously Edisons router would be one. But what if a corporate lan wanted to also use the AC cable as its backbone? Then you have competition between the Edison router and the corporate lan router since there would no longer be a one-way-in-one-way-out traffic model. One would hope they don't share IP addresses between the lan and Edison. And even worse, what if there is more than one corporation on the same Edison AC network whom also wants to implement their own AC backbone?
I suspect Edison will require that their network have exclusive usage of the traffic traveling over your AC if you want to be a customer. I also suspect that corporate users will be sharing their AC connection amongst other Edison corporate clients.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, obviously IANAGD (I Am Not A Game Developer) and suffering a little from FAS (false authority syndrome). ;) I study math mostly. This whole situation reminds me of the problem with trying to quantify worker "productivity". You can do it with machines because their associated variables are typically bounded. But, humans are completely different. Many execs do not understand this, so they propose these naive measurement schemes like [lines of code / hour] for programmers or [number of patients served / day ] for respiratory or physical therapists. Clearly, there are problems with the models based on these metrics.
:)
Now, trying to measure game design is a similar problem. If there were a way to quantify game quality, a way to quantify game graphics quality, and a way to measure or estimate the amount of time required to produce a "good" game, then I think we would have enough to make a good model. Unfortunately, we have variables like game genre, machine architecture, controller ergonomics and button assignments, single- and group-playability, graphics, story and originality, length of objective, and re-playability. Then we have tradeoffs like if you were to base new games on popular old games, would this draw away from originality? Now, back to using junkfood as positive reinforcement for game development, this would depend on whether we can actually measure progress. But what if one programmer contributes a block of code that helps to prevent cheating, while another programmer sees it as impractical because of the obscurity of the vulnerability? Relative measurements, indeed. It seems like the best measurement (the only measurement?) we can use is popularity.
Anyway, this issue is far more complex than I had originally thought. Thanks for not totally flaming me.
I think most of the original games were made in the 1990-1996 era when there were more restrictions on graphics. I think this forced some developers to deal with the content of the game instead of spending all the time in making it look good. To see my point, pit yourself on the tv show trading spaces. Ignoring the "reality" aspect, there is a lot of pressure to be creative when there is a budget ($1000). But if you set that budget higher ($100,000), you relieve a lot of the pressure of having to think or be "creative", or "innovative".
;) Now if only we can pump out some more games like that. I mean, I haven't laughed that hard since MST3K went off the air years ago (ignoring reruns). How many games can do that? If you played these games, just consider how long it took to create all that humor, the storyline, the scenes, etc.
My favorite game of all time was "The secret of Monkey Island." It was made with the SCUMM engine. Sure, the graphics weren't "Enter the Matrix"- or DeusEx-style, but the humor was awesome. The puzzles weren't totally convoluted and not too easy either, while Elaine Marley was pretty hot in 16-color!
Your average game developer these days can probably code up a storm, but can he write a good story? I think thats whats missing in many games: a good story. Sure, anyone can create short term objective (ie. pong!), but what about all the other elements that people like? Do people really want to play a repititive task over and over again? I don't think so, not unless its some cheapo game meant to kill some time while waiting for a kernel to compile. Granted, some people do not want to get stuck into a long game, either, which is why many have started to include a save-game option. Furthermore, a good game should not lose its appeal after it has been conquered/beaten. Sort of like reading your favorite book or watching your favorite movie a second time and finding more details you hadn't noticed before, the game should allow the gamer to "explore" other parts of the game they hadn't noticed before. For example, most side-scrolling games get boring after you beat it. Contra was popular because you could play god-mode (u-u-d-d-b-a-b-a-start), but this wasn't in the design, it was a cheat. How many people actually played this game without using the cheat after beating it? Now look at how many more DOOM worlds were created after the majority of gamers beat DOOM. In this case, both games had a crappy storyline, but it was the game engine that helped retain DOOM gamers. By allowing more freedoms to the gamer, the game would not become dull after beating it. However, a game company does not care about game retention, just about consumer retention. So they do not assume the popularity of a game, but rather try to shorten deadlines in order to release as many games before christmas as possible. There is a tradeoff between developers producing excellent quality games and the company producing an excellent quantity of games. The decisions made by upper management on how to handle this tradeoff will effect the developers ability to focus on a good story, good long-term objective game, a good game engine, and good graphics.
I think that anyone can be creative if they put their mind to it, but they need time. Which leads me to believe that the root of all these bad game design problems are a side effect of the phb's rush to produce more quantity. And this isn't limited to game software, just look at the problems from Win95 which came close to NOT making the 1995 deadline. Oh yeah, and then there's my favorite quote from Bill: "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good." Hmm...
There are other factors too, probably related to the limited gaming experiences of the developers and the availability of game engines. If we trained game developers by having them play e
Google not only blocks the spam, but every result after it.
Sounds like an attack waiting to happen. Lets see, I really hate that blasted www.example.com site, ever since they totally ripped off my page! First, I'm going to mirror it here! Then I'm going to take that collection of spam I've been saving up all these years and attach it to my mirrored site. Then, if I can somehow push my site above in google page rank, they should not show up in any search and I have thwarted my opponent! YES!
The whole point of this system is to decrease violence in a bar by rejecting supposedly violent people. But the list in the demo graphic also include: excessive drinking, missed payment, and other(?).
Well, I'd first like to know what qualifies as excessive drinking? Does getting sick qualify? how about stumbling? what level of breathalizer? and is it a fair level? This seems a bit subjective. I'd also like to know what the other label means.
Finally, who is going to maintain this database? If the information is incorrect or if a bouncer, bartender, or server doesnt like you, how would you go about disputing your label? Who would you go to? How could you prove your case, since this seems like a guilty until proven innocent scenerio? Suppose you undertipped the server, does that mean you "missed payment"?
Seems like the problems with the airport no-fly list are coming back in the form of a no-bar list.
This really depends on how well managed your LANs are but can work smoothly if the architectures and OS's are homogenous (per LAN). try this:
/var/run/lock-patchdb)
On each host in each LAN, make a list of programs you want to keep patched and store their names, MD5 hashes, revision numbers (or patch numbers), and revision dates in a file, say "patched.db". Ideally, you'll want to patch everything, but if your topology includes well-configured network firewalls in front of each LAN, then you can minimize and pinpoint an attack if a host gets comprimised, which gives the patch-admins in each LAN more time to patch.
One host should be designated in each LAN as the "patch-box". (got a spare 486 and linux distro?) You'll need to have MD5SUM and (GNU?)PGP on every box in the LAN and the patch-box should be running FTP, or even SSH if you want overkill (but as long as every host has cached copies of every public key of every host in the LAN, its own private key, and can sign or verify the integrity of the data, then the security of the channel won't matter). Now, every host should MD5SUM its patched.db file and sign the md5sum with their private key. It then packages patched.db and patched.db.md5 into patched-hostname-date.tar.gz and uploads this to the patch-box.
The patch-box then verifies the integrity of each patched.db from each host and then compares the revision numbers against the master list for that LAN, say patch-master.db. Now, at this point, you could just let the patch-boxes check sites for patches, but you specified only one host would be allowed to do this. Well, then that designated host connecting to the internet will be known as "fetch-box". Fetch-box will check for and download any patches if their revision number exceeds that of a file on in its harddrive (this will most likely need to be done manually since the integrity of the patches needs to be verified and the patches need to be tested by the network-admin, unless you can want to make use of up2date or win-auto-update). Every file/patch downloaded will be noted in a file similar to patched.db, which we'll name patch-control.db.
Meanwhile, each patch-box from each LAN will hash&sign the patch-master.db file and package these files into patch-master-LANname-date.tar.gz and upload this file to the fetch-box. Then fetch-box will verify the integrity of each patch-master.db file and compare it against patch-control.db to determine if more entries need to be added to patch-control.db (ie. suppose host-A in LAN-B just added program-c to its inventory (AFTER implementing your patch-scheme) and this program needs to stay patched). Later, each patch-box will download and verify the hashed&signed copy of patch-control.db from fetch-box to determine if it has downloaded (and is releasing) a new patch. If so, then patch-box will download the patch, make it available for download for any host on the LAN, and update the revision numbers for patch-master.db. In turn, each host will download and verify a hashed&signed copy of patch-master.db and compare it against patched.db. If there are any changes, then it will download these files from the patch-box.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Some issues:
0) You desire quick security patching, but system reaction is unpredictable, regardless of homogenity. You should rather focus on extending the time needed to patch. This can be accomplished through well-configured firewalls, proxies, and NDS's. With more time, you can test patches to make sure they are not corrupt and not rootkits. I also hope you have good backups of every system in case you need to disconnect and restore a comprimised one.
1) what happens when you need to downgrade software?
2) what happens when you run into race conditions? will a file-locking scheme need to be imposed as not to corrupt these databases? (ie. touch
3) this can all be automated except for the part of acquiring, testing, and releasing the patches. At worst,
Why is SGI trying to comply with SCO if these supposed code segments are "trivial" and why is SCO trying not to cooperate with SGI? Maybe SCO doesn't care about the code while SGI (knowing SCO would deny this good gesture ahead of time) is trying to add more evidence to a pump-n-dump case.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, no one comes out of SCO HQ to greet Monninkhof. So I started wondering, is this a matter of mistreating their business partner or not enough employees to come outside? I suspect that there's less than the 339 employees they claim. Laying off a dozen or so could probably pay off the legal fees and spins for the press since july. And who honestly keeps a counter of their employment on a web page? I'm having visions of those counters on the bottom of ebay auctions: "Free Employment counters and Services from Andale." Looking at their site: "There are currently no job openings at SCO," and the history of SCO stops at 2002. Hmm...Their site also doesn't list any new beta software and no announcements that there will be, so are they even still developing? And on what?
But, there's still 25 days to the end of the "SCO year" and their "SCO IP license for Linux" offer ends in 9 days. I'm feeling pretty lucky, so I'm going to predict at least 12 SCO stories to hit slashdot headlines by Oct.31. Place your bets.
Well, the war is not over between open source and CCAGW. Here are some quotes from the CCAGW Minister of Information's response to your slashdot posts:
"We are not afraid of the slashdot. Tom Schatz has condemned them. They are stupid. They are stupid" (dramatic pause) "and they are condemned."
"The open source community is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!"
"Let the open source infidels bask in their illusion"
"I triple guarantee you, there are no apache servers on our web site."
"They think we are retarded - they are retarded."
"Don't believe anything! We will chase the rascals back to Finland!"
"Be assured. Closed-source is safe, protected"
"Yes, the open source has advanced further. This will only make it easier for us to defeat them"
Great, just what I need, another person telling me "go back to college and pick a different career".
If you don't like your current degree, then why did you choose it in the first place? If you based your decision on those average salary charts you got in highschool from taking the PRE-SATs, well then you were definitely misled and given too little information. My post wasn't suggesting that going to college is the answer either. There are plenty of resources on the net to self-train yourself as a code-monkey, kernel-developer, RHCE, mathematician, physicist, cryptologist, etc. Hell, go to MIT and check out their new FREE online materials (your public library has free internet if you need it). You can also start your own web hosting, email, ssh, ftp, news, dns hosting company with a little startup costs (but prolly not if your loan overburden already, unless you can find 50-100 cheapo 486s and a dsl connection and $2 for a CD-R for a linux distro). Getting a degree should not dictate your career, nor should it dictate your happiness. You control that. Worst case scenerios: You join the military to recover your financial stability until you can move on to the career you want. OR, you could pick up chess and become a grandmaster living off of $1 games in central park or $80 prizes for tournaments in your state.
Why don't you take your high-and-mighty attitude and shove it?
Was that meant to be a question? Honestly, I'm just trying to help. You dont have to listen.
As for using my skills "outside the scope of their context", tell me what field other than fast food is currently hiring inexperienced people with the "wrong" degree for the field?
There are plenty of examples of "geniuses" who started in the wrong career and then made brilliant discoveries, but I'll just name one: Einstein worked in the patent office and he had to work hard to build his math talents which didnt come naturally. Oh yeah, and then there was the time the NSA was hiring chess masters and crossword puzzle experts to try to break codes. And then there's "homeland security" who are looking for a few good crackers to help defend computer systems and track down black hats. My point being that all an employer cares about is what you CAN do, regardless of what your grades, degree, or field of specialty is in. If you work for Mcdonalds and publish a paper on the cryptanalysis of the [insert cipher name here] cryptosystem, then you've just increased your chances of getting hired by the NSA or any company looking to create enryption utilities (can you code up DES?) Or you could create a hypothetical example of a normal problem facing [insert industry here] and try to solve it on paper or make it faster using your skills from your original degree, then that would increase your chances of entering into that field which could be outside the context of the scope of your degree.
I could always go into sales, not that an introverted geek like me would make a great salesperson.
How about Best Buy? Curcuit City? Gateway? Dell?
Like I said, you have to do something anyway, so why not sit down tonight and think it out. Decide what will make you happy and do it. Nothing is impossible, so don't let the particulars intimidate you. Also consider what you want out of life.
What good is 15 years of Netware experience today?
How about someone who knows that the original PC had odd size ISA slots, so that 286 and later cards wouldn't fit?
Who cares that you spent a million hours with DOS and QEMM getting an extra 60K of base memory so somone's blasted Autocad machine would work correctly?
It's turning out that spending 20 years working with computers has been a really poor investment.
Sad. I always thought of learning as something that makes you human (as opposed to insects? viruses?), not rich or job-secure. A lot of people specialize in some industry and when that culture/economy/technology/employer changes and they lose a job (or are about to), they whine as if they've wasted their life or they go cry to the government to try save that dying industry so that they may (selfishly) preserve their outdated niche in society.
Its called evolution. Its a way of life. Only the fittest will survive! And you know who survives? The beings who change. Honestly, if you feel your life was wasted because you specialized in something and the only thing that made you important was that job-field, then maybe you aren't really special. Sorry, but being an intelligent human means being able to use your knowledge for something beyond a stupid job. If all you are is someone who picks up knowledge with no intent to use it beyond the scope of its context, then you are not intelligent, IMHO. But I do not believe any human in this world is NOT intelligent, just someone who has a tainted definition of life.
So here is my suggestion to all you unemployed or job-security conscious people out there: Make yourself special, use your intelligence, and learn things with the intent of using them beyond the scope of their context. Not only will your expertise grow (hence becoming more of an asset), but you may end up creating something innovative.
this so-called expert report is just Gates-bashing
Umm, if you actually read the article, you'd see that there were seven authors of this "gates-bashing" report. Two of which stand out: Dan Geer and Bruce Schneier. Dan Geer being the chief technology officer of @Stake, a security consulting firm. (Ever heard of L0phtCrack?) And Bruce Schneier is famous for his work with cryptography research (ever heard of twofish? blowfish, maybe?), but works for Counterpane Security Consulting firm.
These guys probably detest MS, but I'm sure they're not willing to sacrifice their credibility just to produce a stupid report just to bash gates.
According to this MSNBC Article: President Bush on Tuesday signed legislation creating a national "do-not-call" list intended to help consumers block unwanted telemarketing calls.
But according to this new article: The U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City said the Federal Trade Commission overstepped its authority when it set up the popular anti-telemarketing measure, according to a court decision filed late on Tuesday.
OK, now I'm confused....How did the FTC overstep its authority if it supposedly did exactly what the President wanted? Or was the DNC list supposed to implemented by some other government organization?
I really doubt that a company that current has more than 90% market share, and focuses it's products on 90% of the populace are going to worry about an obscure feature such as regular expressions that only 1% of the populace uses.
Actually, one could make the point that windows has "dumbed down" society. Just because only 1% (ignoring what you pulled that number out of) of the population uses the command line or tools like grep, find, ls, etc. doesn't mean they cant become "popular". I think if we made baby steps for society to follow in becoming more command-line literate, these tools could become popular because of their lack of *bloat*. THEN they could stop wasting time (and money) programming crap like integrating MSN and IE into system tools and start programming something "innovative", but nobody knows what that means anymore thanks to Microsloth except for that 1% you were talking about.
This is all assuming MS doesnt gain MSN, IE, and outlook/office customers from seeing all this integration. More likely, they are probably going to start losing customers since all this integration typically leads to more security vulnerabilities as we have seen in Outlook and IE.
Anyway, MS will never see this and will never give users ANY credit or chance to prove themselves. Personally, I think making a UI too transparent will yield these so-called dumb users. Instead, we should be focusing on making the UI less transparent (for example, log-files! As long as they are not cryptic but rather verbose and human readable, they can provide the answers most users call the help desk for). I believe most users just need more self-confidence, but you cant do this by trying to hide things from the user. (ie. that little checkbox in the control panels: "check here to hide file extensions")
This all sounds plausible. We were considering switching our cat-5 backbone to the electrical cabling, but the diagnostics would have been a whole new world. I mean, with the AC, the network model gets even more complex, because not only does your network have to handle new computers, new IPs, new MACs, etc. but you also have to deal with "users" plugging in their coffee grinders, custodians running their high powered vacuums and floor buffers, as well as the next door construction crew running their mitre saws, etc. If that extra "random" noise won't confuse the hell out of a network admin, then he deserves the credit of "ethernet god" without hesitation.
Seriously, Edison probably can handle all this with error correction and their own special network adapters. But what I'm curious about is the range of broadcasts. Will Edison implement switches for connecting these corporate users/networks, or will everyone in the same grid see each other's traffic like the cable broadband network model? Then we run into snarfing issues.
Another question is how will Edison handle subnets? If everyone is sharing the same AC loop (like the old coax network model) where would the bridge points be? Obviously Edisons router would be one. But what if a corporate lan wanted to also use the AC cable as its backbone? Then you have competition between the Edison router and the corporate lan router since there would no longer be a one-way-in-one-way-out traffic model. One would hope they don't share IP addresses between the lan and Edison. And even worse, what if there is more than one corporation on the same Edison AC network whom also wants to implement their own AC backbone?
I suspect Edison will require that their network have exclusive usage of the traffic traveling over your AC if you want to be a customer. I also suspect that corporate users will be sharing their AC connection amongst other Edison corporate clients.