Accountability will not happen until Data Security becomes easy enough to understand by the people who run things. Many companies think they are doing things the right way because the decision makers are not properly schooled in best practices or vulnberabilities. Do you really want the government to get involved in this? Does anyone think there is a government agency capable of the oversight necessary to decide when the hackers were just too smart? If you punish companies for data loss, that is akin to fining people for getting their house burgled. Hackers will always be one step ahead, especially with no good method of securing data assets for a cost that will allow businesses that are struggling already with a lousy economy to be protected. Ultimately there needs to be a task force of actual IT professionals who set standards for securing data and pursue cyber-criminals and malicious hackers. Keep it out of the hands of any existing agency because there is not one that has this sort of proficiency. Creation of a new agency would create a small boost to the IT sector as people would regulated into complying with some sort of standard. Just dumping fines on someone for gettting hacked is not a good business decision. It would be like giving billions to companies that had already shown they were not capable of sustaining a profit...
Hosted Exchange costs $10 per month per mailbox or so and you get all the features of an Exchange server plus the virus loading.....err features of Outlook. It is pretty cheap and I was wondering why I do not hear about more people using this type of service?
That seems to be the motto here where I work. Supposedly, we are audited by a partner but I amazed that we have not had a major breach of security yet. Default admin password on all the windows images used for desktops, no complex password requirement, passwords changed on a phone call with no challenge to the person's identity, and the list goes on. I have reported each thing I have found but no one responds, so I am officially just waiting to watch the train wreck at this point.
First, let me be up front and say that I think t sucks that we have become a two party government. This has eliminated competition in the place where it is most needed. I doubt our government will ever bring itself up on antitrust charges so I guess we have to make do. I found it amusing to read that the Republicans are socialist because most of the Republicans I know swear that Democrats are socialists. Socialist has become a dirty word that the two parties use to try and stir up hate to hide the fact that both just look for ways to make money off of the people. I do not understand why socialism is viewed so negatively, the worst thing about it in the USA is tha tnothing good is ever socialized.
I am currently employed in a medium sized business' IT department and I have started to look for a way out. I have wanted to get out of IT for a while and this place has been the final nail. I make less per hour than a factory worker and I only get paid for 40 hours even though I have not worked that few hours in a week since the middle of last year. Currently I am on my ninth straight day without a day off, and I have 5 days more before the possibility of having a day off.
Recently, I started looking into contracting again and it is tempting with the higher pay and getting paid for the actual hours worked but I am pretty scared of what the economy might do in the next 18 months. I would love to go back to school but the cost vs. the change in my salary would not make sense for my field of choice (advanced degree in biology). I am old enough now that I missed my chance to pick a career that I love so I am stuck in the IT pit. As someone else pointed out though, it is generally good work compared to what I could be doing. I have relatives that work in coal mines, and IT certainly is nice compared to that.
The bigger issue for me is the god awful support they offer if anything goes wrong with your console. I did not get the red ring of death so there was no way they were going to help me, essentially. They claimed that my console (registered the night I bought it) was sold 3 months before I bought it. It quit reading discs but they would not agree that my warranty was still good 10 months after I bought it. Thankfully Office Depot replaced the thing after 10 months since they never sold the only other one they got in stock.
When I think of games and torture I almost always think of WoW. Sheer torture to sit through that snore fest of a game. Yeah, that is grade A prime troll bait.
Asheron's Call, Ever Quest, Dark Age of Camelot...
on
How Gamers View Their MMOs
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I have played almost all the MMO's that have existed up to Burning Crusade. I cannot honestly fathom what posessed me to play those games. I took up guitar (not guitar hero, the real thing with strings) and spend more time playing with my kids. I tried to play WoW again a month or two ago and before that temporarily reactivated my LOTRO account, and I honestly do not see what is supposed to be fun about those games. WHen I get the bug to do some gaming I fire up the Xbox 360. No need to wait for a group to form and no worry about leaving early if the mood strikes to go play the guitar or the kids get bored with what they are into. Even better I save about $45 per month on no game subscriptions (used to play three or so of them at a time, or at least pay so I could). EVE online sounded really cool, then I logged in and it was just so ridiculously boring. Last log in for WoW I walked across a piece of Shattrath City and cancelled the account before I could even make up my mind where to go. The old school games seemed to have a lot more challenge, or maybe it was just that they were new. Anyone else find that they were once hardcore MMO fans and now totally do not play them?
I see a lot of talk about people who are refused treatment and such, but I have seen no mention of the people who refuse to get treated or to stop spreading the disease. My wife worked as a case management RN and set up an AIDS/HIV clinic intended to supply free treatment to those who could not afford it. The issue they had was that a lot of these people do not want to be bothered by treatment. They seem to either not give a shit because their lives are already hell or they assume that because they have it they are going to die so they do not want to be bothered. To me the biggest problem with HIV/AIDS are the people who still go out there sharing needles and engaging in unsafe sex. I think that needs to be prosecuted a lot more vigorously. I have seen spouses who were dying because their significant other was going out on the DL and brought home a nice case of HIV/AIDS (I used to be a MLT/phlebot). The guy that did that should be prosecuted for murder.
I know it was nto a thread about MUSHes, but did anyone play Elendor? I played a fairly well known fat bad guy from Rohan and was granted a role as a troll later on. That game was probably only second to Ultima I-V in sucking up time I should have spent doing other things.
As a former resident, I can say that this is no surprise. Kentucky is probably one of the most corrupt states in the union. The entire state is governed by old money and the horse racing industry. Every governor in my life time has had a major scandal of some sort. Kentucky is the best argument against States' rights that I can think of. The bridges on Interstate 65 have been being painted for about 8 years now because of the corrupt transportation cabinet forcing various contractors to pay bribes that drove them off from finishing the job.
I will not lay out the specifics on how it was done, since I am not sure that the guy who designed the process wants it shared. However, the US Census in 2000 processed every piece of paper from that Census using OCR with some back up QA by humans. The process essentially used a server farm to run each block that contained handwriting through a series of OCR checks, depending on the OCR confidence level the box would be either passed as read or put in fron of a keyer who would type what they saw in the box. The process then decided if the human matched what it had guessed if it did it passed on through if not then it went to another keyer and looked at the match between the two keyers and the OCR guess. It took about 90 days to process every piece of paper sent in. I cannot recall how many pieces there were but obviously it was millions. It surprises me tha tno one has improved on that in the last 8 years. I am going to have to see what they plan to do this time around, it was a pretty cool project to be a part of. We had a huge (for the year 2000 anyhow)SAN from EMC which is now pretty common but was rather rare at that time. I hope they keep it on the cutting edge this time around. I do know they adopted LINUX at the processing center I worked at after the Census was complete. I am pretty sure the project will be done without any Windows machines this time.
I am in the beta, but admittedly have not spent much time on it. The thing about the game that struck me instantly was this: What is different in this game from Earth&Beyond (which I also beta tested)? To me it seems like a pretty (a very very pretty one granted) remake. Stunning visually, but it is all the same, watch your ship zip through space to mine some rocks. Maybe it is better than that, but htey need something in the game to show you what makes it special or it will not go off any better than Earth & Beyond did.
Actually you are sort of wrong. Bacteria, which is what I assume you mean by microbes, reproduce in many different ways. They also can exchange genetic material via plasmids. One species can literally get new genes from an entirely different species. This is actually one of the main reasons antibiotic resistance is so scary. If some really nasty enterobacter got resistance from some not so bad bug that you failed to take the full course of antibiotics for, we would have big trouble brewing. IIRC, there are 5 methods at least that bacteria can reproduce by. Perhaps they are not male/female sexual repduction as we think of it (no humping bacteria), but it is more than just splitting. Species are not defined by sexual reproduction. Producing fertile offspring is a part of it, but sexual reproduction is not a requirement in any form. There is a fish which requires no male to reproduce, but males do exist. It is certainly a species (Rivulus marmoratum or some such). Speciation is not something that is well defined. I can easily name a dozen cases where an animal is riding the fence between being a species or not.
Actually according to the guy who runs the company (on some Food Network show). They are stale on purpose as he claims that most people prefer them that way. Or something.
The people who do not understand why this system is so expensive have not had experience selling to people with lots of money. That sounds a little strange so let me give you an example (a strange one but it works). A few years back I used to raise and show rabbits (pedigreed fancy rabbits, look up the American Netherland Dwarf Rabbit Club or American Rabbit Breeders Association for more info). We would occasionally sell stock at some of the shows. One of the places we sold lots of rabbits was the State Fair. While watching the crowd go buy and talking to people interested in buying, I ran across some horse people (there was a very large Quarter Horse show at this fair). I had some pet quality stock there that I would have sold at a flea market for $10 to $20. For the fair the price was slightly higher, say $20 to $30. The horse people remarked that my rabbits were a lot cheaper than the guy whom they had just spoken to. I explained that we do not try to make money off of stock just to cover feed costs, I also pointed out that the stock I had was from more prestigious blood lines. They bought the most expensive and lower quality animals. Their reason? They said they didn't want a cheap rabbit, they wanted and expensive one. The price tag is a prestige item more than what they are buying. That is why this company will make money. People with money don't really care $6k to someone willing to pay $6k for a computer is peanuts.
Re:LA Times (no registration or pop-ups!)
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Well, I have not yet had a chance to see the movies but I already can tellthat the person who wrote this review doesn't know much about LoTR. The complaints the person has about Rohan are way off the mark. If what he/she says is true and Rohan has a dull middle ages feel, then the director was a smashing success. Rohan was very much an Anglo/Saxon based kingdom. Even many of the names and language conventions of that area are taken directly from middle english (if memory serves). As for it having a feeling that is quite different than the first (which was interpreted as uninspiring by the crtic), so did the book. The second book is where the bad guys start to show their power and where the good start to look like they are in for a beating, but like all good fairy tales it just serves to build up to the climax of good prevailing. As for what the critic and others say about too much emphasis on Helm's Deep I can understand why Jackson did this. I certainly feel that it is one of the most memorable parts of the book. On a nitpicking note, the reviewer claims Gandlaf charges Frodo with the quest to destory the ring, but it certainly did not happen that way in the movie or the book.
Rude....well I was working in a restaruant once were Mr. Shatner was having dinner. I won't go into details but the story ends with his server crying and wanting to quit and her ex-Marine husband the Chef (6'7" around 260 or so and not real tolerant of BS) being restrained in the kitchen to prevent harm to Mr. Shatner. The server was a sensitive person, but we had lots of real a-holes in the place (I can think of another very well known figure whom I lost respect for after working there) and none ever caused her to cry and offer a resignation. Maybe he was having a bad night but I am not a fan of his personal self. Professionally I think he is great a great actor for sure, a great man I am not so sure. This is of course my own experience obviously others do not find him abrasive (that is not speleed correctly maybe), I just thought he was kind of a jerk.
The other poster is correct about liver and kidney wounds, the blood is gonna be really red as there are lots of arteries in both organs. But more importantly (ok not more) there is no such thing as brown food coloring;-). You have to use chocolate or cocoa powder.
quote EXPERT unquote
Well since no one else said it, you might want to search your keyboard. There is a key that resembles this ". It works really well to replace the phrase "quote unquote"
Slashdot Mirror
I have a bust of Darwin tattoo on my upper arm surrounded by animals from the Galapagos. Darwin is a personal favorite and we share a birthday.
FIRST
Happy birthday Thursday Big D. I hope I am still pissing people off as much as you do over a hundred years after I am gone.
Accountability will not happen until Data Security becomes easy enough to understand by the people who run things. Many companies think they are doing things the right way because the decision makers are not properly schooled in best practices or vulnberabilities. Do you really want the government to get involved in this? Does anyone think there is a government agency capable of the oversight necessary to decide when the hackers were just too smart? If you punish companies for data loss, that is akin to fining people for getting their house burgled. Hackers will always be one step ahead, especially with no good method of securing data assets for a cost that will allow businesses that are struggling already with a lousy economy to be protected. Ultimately there needs to be a task force of actual IT professionals who set standards for securing data and pursue cyber-criminals and malicious hackers. Keep it out of the hands of any existing agency because there is not one that has this sort of proficiency. Creation of a new agency would create a small boost to the IT sector as people would regulated into complying with some sort of standard. Just dumping fines on someone for gettting hacked is not a good business decision. It would be like giving billions to companies that had already shown they were not capable of sustaining a profit...
Hosted Exchange costs $10 per month per mailbox or so and you get all the features of an Exchange server plus the virus loading.....err features of Outlook. It is pretty cheap and I was wondering why I do not hear about more people using this type of service?
That seems to be the motto here where I work. Supposedly, we are audited by a partner but I amazed that we have not had a major breach of security yet. Default admin password on all the windows images used for desktops, no complex password requirement, passwords changed on a phone call with no challenge to the person's identity, and the list goes on. I have reported each thing I have found but no one responds, so I am officially just waiting to watch the train wreck at this point.
First, let me be up front and say that I think t sucks that we have become a two party government. This has eliminated competition in the place where it is most needed. I doubt our government will ever bring itself up on antitrust charges so I guess we have to make do. I found it amusing to read that the Republicans are socialist because most of the Republicans I know swear that Democrats are socialists. Socialist has become a dirty word that the two parties use to try and stir up hate to hide the fact that both just look for ways to make money off of the people. I do not understand why socialism is viewed so negatively, the worst thing about it in the USA is tha tnothing good is ever socialized.
I am currently employed in a medium sized business' IT department and I have started to look for a way out. I have wanted to get out of IT for a while and this place has been the final nail. I make less per hour than a factory worker and I only get paid for 40 hours even though I have not worked that few hours in a week since the middle of last year. Currently I am on my ninth straight day without a day off, and I have 5 days more before the possibility of having a day off. Recently, I started looking into contracting again and it is tempting with the higher pay and getting paid for the actual hours worked but I am pretty scared of what the economy might do in the next 18 months. I would love to go back to school but the cost vs. the change in my salary would not make sense for my field of choice (advanced degree in biology). I am old enough now that I missed my chance to pick a career that I love so I am stuck in the IT pit. As someone else pointed out though, it is generally good work compared to what I could be doing. I have relatives that work in coal mines, and IT certainly is nice compared to that.
The bigger issue for me is the god awful support they offer if anything goes wrong with your console. I did not get the red ring of death so there was no way they were going to help me, essentially. They claimed that my console (registered the night I bought it) was sold 3 months before I bought it. It quit reading discs but they would not agree that my warranty was still good 10 months after I bought it. Thankfully Office Depot replaced the thing after 10 months since they never sold the only other one they got in stock.
When I think of games and torture I almost always think of WoW. Sheer torture to sit through that snore fest of a game. Yeah, that is grade A prime troll bait.
I have played almost all the MMO's that have existed up to Burning Crusade. I cannot honestly fathom what posessed me to play those games. I took up guitar (not guitar hero, the real thing with strings) and spend more time playing with my kids. I tried to play WoW again a month or two ago and before that temporarily reactivated my LOTRO account, and I honestly do not see what is supposed to be fun about those games. WHen I get the bug to do some gaming I fire up the Xbox 360. No need to wait for a group to form and no worry about leaving early if the mood strikes to go play the guitar or the kids get bored with what they are into. Even better I save about $45 per month on no game subscriptions (used to play three or so of them at a time, or at least pay so I could). EVE online sounded really cool, then I logged in and it was just so ridiculously boring. Last log in for WoW I walked across a piece of Shattrath City and cancelled the account before I could even make up my mind where to go. The old school games seemed to have a lot more challenge, or maybe it was just that they were new. Anyone else find that they were once hardcore MMO fans and now totally do not play them?
I see a lot of talk about people who are refused treatment and such, but I have seen no mention of the people who refuse to get treated or to stop spreading the disease. My wife worked as a case management RN and set up an AIDS/HIV clinic intended to supply free treatment to those who could not afford it. The issue they had was that a lot of these people do not want to be bothered by treatment. They seem to either not give a shit because their lives are already hell or they assume that because they have it they are going to die so they do not want to be bothered. To me the biggest problem with HIV/AIDS are the people who still go out there sharing needles and engaging in unsafe sex. I think that needs to be prosecuted a lot more vigorously. I have seen spouses who were dying because their significant other was going out on the DL and brought home a nice case of HIV/AIDS (I used to be a MLT/phlebot). The guy that did that should be prosecuted for murder.
I know it was nto a thread about MUSHes, but did anyone play Elendor? I played a fairly well known fat bad guy from Rohan and was granted a role as a troll later on. That game was probably only second to Ultima I-V in sucking up time I should have spent doing other things.
As a former resident, I can say that this is no surprise. Kentucky is probably one of the most corrupt states in the union. The entire state is governed by old money and the horse racing industry. Every governor in my life time has had a major scandal of some sort. Kentucky is the best argument against States' rights that I can think of. The bridges on Interstate 65 have been being painted for about 8 years now because of the corrupt transportation cabinet forcing various contractors to pay bribes that drove them off from finishing the job.
Long live the Dead Milkmen! Or would that make them Undead Milkmen?
I will not lay out the specifics on how it was done, since I am not sure that the guy who designed the process wants it shared. However, the US Census in 2000 processed every piece of paper from that Census using OCR with some back up QA by humans. The process essentially used a server farm to run each block that contained handwriting through a series of OCR checks, depending on the OCR confidence level the box would be either passed as read or put in fron of a keyer who would type what they saw in the box. The process then decided if the human matched what it had guessed if it did it passed on through if not then it went to another keyer and looked at the match between the two keyers and the OCR guess. It took about 90 days to process every piece of paper sent in. I cannot recall how many pieces there were but obviously it was millions. It surprises me tha tno one has improved on that in the last 8 years. I am going to have to see what they plan to do this time around, it was a pretty cool project to be a part of. We had a huge (for the year 2000 anyhow)SAN from EMC which is now pretty common but was rather rare at that time. I hope they keep it on the cutting edge this time around. I do know they adopted LINUX at the processing center I worked at after the Census was complete. I am pretty sure the project will be done without any Windows machines this time.
I am in the beta, but admittedly have not spent much time on it. The thing about the game that struck me instantly was this: What is different in this game from Earth&Beyond (which I also beta tested)? To me it seems like a pretty (a very very pretty one granted) remake. Stunning visually, but it is all the same, watch your ship zip through space to mine some rocks. Maybe it is better than that, but htey need something in the game to show you what makes it special or it will not go off any better than Earth & Beyond did.
Actually you are sort of wrong. Bacteria, which is what I assume you mean by microbes, reproduce in many different ways. They also can exchange genetic material via plasmids. One species can literally get new genes from an entirely different species. This is actually one of the main reasons antibiotic resistance is so scary. If some really nasty enterobacter got resistance from some not so bad bug that you failed to take the full course of antibiotics for, we would have big trouble brewing. IIRC, there are 5 methods at least that bacteria can reproduce by. Perhaps they are not male/female sexual repduction as we think of it (no humping bacteria), but it is more than just splitting. Species are not defined by sexual reproduction. Producing fertile offspring is a part of it, but sexual reproduction is not a requirement in any form. There is a fish which requires no male to reproduce, but males do exist. It is certainly a species (Rivulus marmoratum or some such). Speciation is not something that is well defined. I can easily name a dozen cases where an animal is riding the fence between being a species or not.
Actually according to the guy who runs the company (on some Food Network show). They are stale on purpose as he claims that most people prefer them that way. Or something.
The people who do not understand why this system is so expensive have not had experience selling to people with lots of money. That sounds a little strange so let me give you an example (a strange one but it works). A few years back I used to raise and show rabbits (pedigreed fancy rabbits, look up the American Netherland Dwarf Rabbit Club or American Rabbit Breeders Association for more info). We would occasionally sell stock at some of the shows. One of the places we sold lots of rabbits was the State Fair. While watching the crowd go buy and talking to people interested in buying, I ran across some horse people (there was a very large Quarter Horse show at this fair). I had some pet quality stock there that I would have sold at a flea market for $10 to $20. For the fair the price was slightly higher, say $20 to $30. The horse people remarked that my rabbits were a lot cheaper than the guy whom they had just spoken to. I explained that we do not try to make money off of stock just to cover feed costs, I also pointed out that the stock I had was from more prestigious blood lines. They bought the most expensive and lower quality animals. Their reason? They said they didn't want a cheap rabbit, they wanted and expensive one. The price tag is a prestige item more than what they are buying. That is why this company will make money. People with money don't really care $6k to someone willing to pay $6k for a computer is peanuts.
Well, I have not yet had a chance to see the movies but I already can tellthat the person who wrote this review doesn't know much about LoTR. The complaints the person has about Rohan are way off the mark. If what he/she says is true and Rohan has a dull middle ages feel, then the director was a smashing success. Rohan was very much an Anglo/Saxon based kingdom. Even many of the names and language conventions of that area are taken directly from middle english (if memory serves). As for it having a feeling that is quite different than the first (which was interpreted as uninspiring by the crtic), so did the book. The second book is where the bad guys start to show their power and where the good start to look like they are in for a beating, but like all good fairy tales it just serves to build up to the climax of good prevailing. As for what the critic and others say about too much emphasis on Helm's Deep I can understand why Jackson did this. I certainly feel that it is one of the most memorable parts of the book. On a nitpicking note, the reviewer claims Gandlaf charges Frodo with the quest to destory the ring, but it certainly did not happen that way in the movie or the book.
Rude....well I was working in a restaruant once were Mr. Shatner was having dinner. I won't go into details but the story ends with his server crying and wanting to quit and her ex-Marine husband the Chef (6'7" around 260 or so and not real tolerant of BS) being restrained in the kitchen to prevent harm to Mr. Shatner. The server was a sensitive person, but we had lots of real a-holes in the place (I can think of another very well known figure whom I lost respect for after working there) and none ever caused her to cry and offer a resignation. Maybe he was having a bad night but I am not a fan of his personal self. Professionally I think he is great a great actor for sure, a great man I am not so sure. This is of course my own experience obviously others do not find him abrasive (that is not speleed correctly maybe), I just thought he was kind of a jerk.
The other poster is correct about liver and kidney wounds, the blood is gonna be really red as there are lots of arteries in both organs. But more importantly (ok not more) there is no such thing as brown food coloring ;-). You have to use chocolate or cocoa powder.
quote EXPERT unquote Well since no one else said it, you might want to search your keyboard. There is a key that resembles this ". It works really well to replace the phrase "quote unquote"
[] Just put that space under the appropriate microscope to see for yourself.