Well, it's a teaser. It always amazes me at how advanced the Germans and Japanese were in some things, and just how arrogant and stupid the Americans were. (Of course the same could be said for all participants, but as victors, the Americans wrote the history after the war.)
American Generals refused to believe the early reports of the speed and agility of the Zero. British Generals refused to fund the development of the jet engine until the Germans fielded theirs.
Now I learn that the Japanese were playing with submarine stealth technology.
Lots of good stuff for geeks; just gotta do your homework and not wait to be spoonfed.
You missed the last part; I pick phrases that are easy to remember even if I don't speak the language. Google mnemonics and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I use the same password for everything, true. Except that I run the phrase through babelfish, so all I need to remember is "phrase"+"language". I could post my passwords and still be somewhat secure; unless you can figure out which language I used and what capitalization schema I used you're out of luck.
And with a bit of menmonics, you can come up with a language phrase that's easy to remember, but utterly unguessable to a stranger.
We in the Western culture have developed this High Noon attitude towards health. Putz through our lives, and then in the last closing minutes, lose weight and become fit in a blaze of glory.
Doesn't work that way. I've counselled people on weight loss, and I lay it on the line:
Losing weight is a change of life. You will have to give up your life as you know it; you will eat different things, you will do different things.
You will find that your old friends, the ones who are still overweight, are no longer your friends. You will find that you need to get new hobbies and new activities.
I don't understand this simpleton fixation on one small aspect of proper health as though it's the be-all and end-all.
Since the people in the program were allowed to continue eating unhealthy food in excessive amounts, is it any wonder they failed to lose weight?
Yet it hasn't happened here or Western Europe or most modern Asian countries. Why?
Well, at least where I work, we no longer allow modems to be attached to any equipment. This is a huge cost item; that means we have to fly in a tech with a laptop for several thousand dollars when something goes down instead of allowing the factory to dial in on their modem.
We choose to do this as we are a "major" target - a medium sized public utility. I would guess many of the smaller utilities don't have the resources to do this. So it's a question of targets; if someone was to study the network, they could identify a weak small utility that could bring down a larger utility that would then cascade to a major failure down the line. I'd guess it hasn't happened because the outcome is uncertain and not guaranteed; our operators are pretty damn good at taking care of upstream failures.
Hehe... Back when I was in the Air Force, we had a squirrel shut down the entire base for 8 hours. S/he crawled into the main power station, and committed suicide across the breakers, blowing up a good chunk of the station and about 100' of main feeder line.
Today no doubt the press would have whipped up frenzy about a "possible terrorist attack" with artistic renderings of the squirrel in mufti....
Most of the systems are controlled by PLCs. Most PLCs to this day have no access control whatsoever. Some of the attempts at "security" I've heard for PLCs are salesguy technobabble. (The password is stored on the PC being used to access the PLC; the PLC retrieves the password FROM THE PC in order to verify the validity of the user. No shit, this is what a major vendor told me.)
A kid with a laptop with the right software, a modem, and knowledge of a few phone numbers could take out significant infrastructure.
Last time I visited one of "those" sites, (in the interest of pure research of course) it was full of ads. Even if they get a few fractions of a penny per ad, if you infect enough computers to start banging on your sites you can drive up the ad revenue.
It's a plot! Redmond is secretly paying off Acer to do this, so that they can give Android a bad rap and save Windows CE. I have proof but I can't take my tinfoil hat off right now....
I've flown an F15 simulator (the real one, not FlightGear) and the joy stick is pretty cool once you figure it out.
The plane is fly-by-wire. You set the stick to what you want and the computers take care of it. So you set the stick to fly straight and the computers fly it straight.
The one disconcerting thing is that the stick doesn't center; you put the plane in a right hand turn and it stays there until you apply reverse pressure to make it fly straight.
So I can see something like this. You set it to go straight and it does. You set it to turn left, and it will center like a steering wheel does.
You push forward to accelerate and pull back to slow down. You pull back it slows down and stops and stays stopped. You release the pressure and pull back and the car shifts into reverse.
Very different from a 1960s type system; we have lots better technology now.
Last I heard, the State of Georgia was paying full tuition at State Universities for anyone who maintained a C or better average, curtesy of the lottery. They had so much money that they didn't know what to do with it. While the secondary education system sucks in most of GA, some of the universities are really good.
An entire generation or more has been raised to believe in its own innate and unearned importance, and bolstered with a solid and unshakable faith in its responsibility-less intrinsic rights. They truly believe that they are entitled to do whatsoever they please, whenever they please to, and that they are educated and savvy enough to inject their opinions in any arena they see fit, and how dare anyone presume to tell them otherwise. Their rights are absolute at all times, without qualification of any kind.
You know, I'm getting a bit tired of this. It's the same crap that's been heaped on the younger generation for ages. I remember it when I was a kid.
Kids today by and large are more responsible, if anything, than the kids in my generation were. They are under more pressure, in a more dangerous environment, than we were and they're dealing with it pretty well.
There seems to be this bizarre "whack a mole" approach to dealing with kids... Let them do what they want, but once in a while take a kid out back and shoot him/her for being a kid as an example.
No wonder the kids today are confused.
They've been taught really good social skills, conflict resolution, sharing in school, and then they get hammered when they do something wrong.
Some of the grownups need to attend those social skills classes instead of their kids.
This incompetence is something far beyond serious for MS. T-mobile is a much bigger customer than almost anyone short of vodafone can ever hope to be. MS have been moving strategically into hosting servers such as exchange for many customers. If you're a CEO you should be calling your CIO in and asking him when he plans to be free of MS services. If you are a CIO you want to be able to answer "there's nothing business critical relying on MS services" by the time that meeting comes.
Hehe. I raised this issue when this broke. We have a huge amount of critical data outsourced to a hosting company. I sent this fiasco up the food chain asking what is our backup strategy should this happen to our host.
I got back some pablum about "well, they have 2 geographically separate datacenters, blah blah blah" from the guy who administers the contract.
Maybe they did at one point but I know the folks we use fired most of their devs, including the lead developer, back in March as a cost cutting measure. and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the "two data centers" disappeared along with the developers. Regardless, no one on our end seems to be concerned and no one is taking any precautions (like local backups.)
But... It's got a powerful CPU and a gob of ram. The only other thing they could have done was to bring out some GPIO.
Then you'd have a pretty cool general purpose computer. Heck, I repurpose Asus APs (or used to, until they changed) as samba clients for backup and vpn gateways. This thing could make a killer vpn box.
So yes, for an AP it's pricey. For a general purpose computer that probably runs on 1A @ 5VDC, not so bad.
But everyone who's interested will have already read him.....
I'd start with the Jules Verne type of stories; early hard science fantasy.
Then, in perhaps in response to the economic and political situation of the 30s and the 40s the pulps. The "Aliens came and abducted my daughter" stories. The monster bodice rippers.
And then tie it back to the post was tech boom, the cold reasoned (and boring) authors like Arthur C. Clarke. Then the heady 70s with its "do anything" culture that spawned the likes of Niven.
The womens lib movement that brought in lots of women. The subsequent change from male-centric fiction to female protagonists. Books from Janet Kagan or other female authors.
And now to the current flock of writers (none of whom I find particularly exciting).
Anyway, tie the development of the whoel genre to the real world.
No it won't. It will be some bandaid solution thought of at the last minute that will patch things together until the current crop of CEOs get their golden parachutes.
Sorry, but I'm very cynical on this. Few businesses are "forward looking"; most look back to the heyday when life was good and want nothing to do with any new invention if they can help it. Look at the entertainment industry, the paper press industry, the telecom industry... They've all been fighting new tech for years.
Heck, if it was up to AT&T we'd all be dialing on our Princess Phones.
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Well, it's a teaser. It always amazes me at how advanced the Germans and Japanese were in some things, and just how arrogant and stupid the Americans were. (Of course the same could be said for all participants, but as victors, the Americans wrote the history after the war.)
American Generals refused to believe the early reports of the speed and agility of the Zero. British Generals refused to fund the development of the jet engine until the Germans fielded theirs.
Now I learn that the Japanese were playing with submarine stealth technology.
Lots of good stuff for geeks; just gotta do your homework and not wait to be spoonfed.
You missed the last part; I pick phrases that are easy to remember even if I don't speak the language. Google mnemonics and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Yabbuttt....
I use the same password for everything, true. Except that I run the phrase through babelfish, so all I need to remember is "phrase"+"language". I could post my passwords and still be somewhat secure; unless you can figure out which language I used and what capitalization schema I used you're out of luck.
And with a bit of menmonics, you can come up with a language phrase that's easy to remember, but utterly unguessable to a stranger.
be brief, be gone.
That's about the best I can give you.
Your whole summary should fit on 1 sheet of paper, with bullet points.
The whole presentation should take less than 3 minutes.
Ask yourself, if you were flying at 30,000' over your operation, "What would I see?"
That's what the execs want.
We in the Western culture have developed this High Noon attitude towards health. Putz through our lives, and then in the last closing minutes, lose weight and become fit in a blaze of glory.
Doesn't work that way. I've counselled people on weight loss, and I lay it on the line:
Losing weight is a change of life. You will have to give up your life as you know it; you will eat different things, you will do different things.
You will find that your old friends, the ones who are still overweight, are no longer your friends. You will find that you need to get new hobbies and new activities.
I don't understand this simpleton fixation on one small aspect of proper health as though it's the be-all and end-all.
Since the people in the program were allowed to continue eating unhealthy food in excessive amounts, is it any wonder they failed to lose weight?
>
Yet it hasn't happened here or Western Europe or most modern Asian countries. Why?
Well, at least where I work, we no longer allow modems to be attached to any equipment. This is a huge cost item; that means we have to fly in a tech with a laptop for several thousand dollars when something goes down instead of allowing the factory to dial in on their modem.
We choose to do this as we are a "major" target - a medium sized public utility. I would guess many of the smaller utilities don't have the resources to do this. So it's a question of targets; if someone was to study the network, they could identify a weak small utility that could bring down a larger utility that would then cascade to a major failure down the line. I'd guess it hasn't happened because the outcome is uncertain and not guaranteed; our operators are pretty damn good at taking care of upstream failures.
broken link! The name sounds enticing.... SquirrelJihad!
Hehe... Back when I was in the Air Force, we had a squirrel shut down the entire base for 8 hours. S/he crawled into the main power station, and committed suicide across the breakers, blowing up a good chunk of the station and about 100' of main feeder line.
Today no doubt the press would have whipped up frenzy about a "possible terrorist attack" with artistic renderings of the squirrel in mufti....
Most of the systems are controlled by PLCs. Most PLCs to this day have no access control whatsoever. Some of the attempts at "security" I've heard for PLCs are salesguy technobabble. (The password is stored on the PC being used to access the PLC; the PLC retrieves the password FROM THE PC in order to verify the validity of the user. No shit, this is what a major vendor told me.)
A kid with a laptop with the right software, a modem, and knowledge of a few phone numbers could take out significant infrastructure.
Last time I visited one of "those" sites, (in the interest of pure research of course) it was full of ads. Even if they get a few fractions of a penny per ad, if you infect enough computers to start banging on your sites you can drive up the ad revenue.
I can't find it now, but several years ago someone floated this idea. Etching ads on fruit with a laser.
While technically possible, it was roundly rejected by the "consumer test group".
I guess an apple just doesn't taste the same when an add for Preparation H is tattooed on it.....
It's in trunk now. I built qt3/embedded and konqueror for it 4 years ago. OpenWRT is a build system; you can build whatever you want.
DUH! Mea Culpa! Yes, it's a 486 DX/4. I wish it was 486 MHz.
It's a plot! Redmond is secretly paying off Acer to do this, so that they can give Android a bad rap and save Windows CE. I have proof but I can't take my tinfoil hat off right now....
Sorry, brain fart..... F/A-18.
I've flown an F15 simulator (the real one, not FlightGear) and the joy stick is pretty cool once you figure it out.
The plane is fly-by-wire. You set the stick to what you want and the computers take care of it. So you set the stick to fly straight and the computers fly it straight.
The one disconcerting thing is that the stick doesn't center; you put the plane in a right hand turn and it stays there until you apply reverse pressure to make it fly straight.
So I can see something like this. You set it to go straight and it does. You set it to turn left, and it will center like a steering wheel does.
You push forward to accelerate and pull back to slow down. You pull back it slows down and stops and stays stopped. You release the pressure and pull back and the car shifts into reverse.
Very different from a 1960s type system; we have lots better technology now.
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything."
— Joseph Stalin
This should be followed by something from Ecclesiastes...
Last I heard, the State of Georgia was paying full tuition at State Universities for anyone who maintained a C or better average, curtesy of the lottery. They had so much money that they didn't know what to do with it. While the secondary education system sucks in most of GA, some of the universities are really good.
An entire generation or more has been raised to believe in its own innate and unearned importance, and bolstered with a solid and unshakable faith in its responsibility-less intrinsic rights. They truly believe that they are entitled to do whatsoever they please, whenever they please to, and that they are educated and savvy enough to inject their opinions in any arena they see fit, and how dare anyone presume to tell them otherwise. Their rights are absolute at all times, without qualification of any kind.
You know, I'm getting a bit tired of this. It's the same crap that's been heaped on the younger generation for ages. I remember it when I was a kid.
Kids today by and large are more responsible, if anything, than the kids in my generation were. They are under more pressure, in a more dangerous environment, than we were and they're dealing with it pretty well.
There seems to be this bizarre "whack a mole" approach to dealing with kids... Let them do what they want, but once in a while take a kid out back and shoot him/her for being a kid as an example.
No wonder the kids today are confused.
They've been taught really good social skills, conflict resolution, sharing in school, and then they get hammered when they do something wrong.
Some of the grownups need to attend those social skills classes instead of their kids.
This incompetence is something far beyond serious for MS. T-mobile is a much bigger customer than almost anyone short of vodafone can ever hope to be. MS have been moving strategically into hosting servers such as exchange for many customers. If you're a CEO you should be calling your CIO in and asking him when he plans to be free of MS services. If you are a CIO you want to be able to answer "there's nothing business critical relying on MS services" by the time that meeting comes.
Hehe. I raised this issue when this broke. We have a huge amount of critical data outsourced to a hosting company. I sent this fiasco up the food chain asking what is our backup strategy should this happen to our host.
I got back some pablum about "well, they have 2 geographically separate datacenters, blah blah blah" from the guy who administers the contract.
Maybe they did at one point but I know the folks we use fired most of their devs, including the lead developer, back in March as a cost cutting measure. and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the "two data centers" disappeared along with the developers. Regardless, no one on our end seems to be concerned and no one is taking any precautions (like local backups.)
Maybe one day I'll get to say, "I Told You So."
Hey wait a minute, maybe the T-Mobile and Danger/MS guys tried to port their stuff to Macs....
I think MS showed us how to lose user data in a big way...
(Ducking and running for cover) :-)
I have to have a tetanus shot and have First Aid, CPR, AED certs. Those are a condition of my employment. No shots, no certs, no paycheck.
I also have to wear steel toe boots, a hardhat, and a dayglo safety vest if I'm on a job site.
Let's face it, if you work in a high-risk area, your employer would be negligent in *not* requiring you to take reasonable and practical precautions.
If you don't like, the door swings both ways.
But... It's got a powerful CPU and a gob of ram. The only other thing they could have done was to bring out some GPIO.
Then you'd have a pretty cool general purpose computer. Heck, I repurpose Asus APs (or used to, until they changed) as samba clients for backup and vpn gateways. This thing could make a killer vpn box.
So yes, for an AP it's pricey. For a general purpose computer that probably runs on 1A @ 5VDC, not so bad.
But everyone who's interested will have already read him.....
I'd start with the Jules Verne type of stories; early hard science fantasy.
Then, in perhaps in response to the economic and political situation of the 30s and the 40s the pulps. The "Aliens came and abducted my daughter" stories. The monster bodice rippers.
And then tie it back to the post was tech boom, the cold reasoned (and boring) authors like Arthur C. Clarke. Then the heady 70s with its "do anything" culture that spawned the likes of Niven.
The womens lib movement that brought in lots of women. The subsequent change from male-centric fiction to female protagonists. Books from Janet Kagan or other female authors.
And now to the current flock of writers (none of whom I find particularly exciting).
Anyway, tie the development of the whoel genre to the real world.
No it won't. It will be some bandaid solution thought of at the last minute that will patch things together until the current crop of CEOs get their golden parachutes.
Sorry, but I'm very cynical on this. Few businesses are "forward looking"; most look back to the heyday when life was good and want nothing to do with any new invention if they can help it. Look at the entertainment industry, the paper press industry, the telecom industry... They've all been fighting new tech for years.
Heck, if it was up to AT&T we'd all be dialing on our Princess Phones.