Another possibility is that this crook is neither clever, nor smart, and is not the one who dreamed up the scheme but is just a lacky who doing the dirty work for somebody else. From the article:
Though £200,000 was spent on the cards, police said they believed that Parsons himself only earned £14,000 through it.
I have been told that the problem with using an external hard drive as a backup system is that it is difficult to verify whether a backup was completed successfully, and is recoverable. I have heard horror stories of backup systems that appear to be writing to the external hard drive but when the person attempts to recover data they find that something had gone wrong.
Can anybody confirm or deny this?
I have tried to verify these rumors by searching google but haven't found any info that appears reliable.
Do you know of any windows based software that can reliably back up to an external hard drive, keeps a log of the backups, and verifies the data? It doesn't have to be open source but should be affordable for my home computers.
What path should engineers pursue for maximum future employability?
seriously
High prices for crude oil are going to stick around for a while. Oil companies litterally can not hire enough people to work. I'm not just talking about push hands and drill pigs. They need engineers, welders, geologists, software developers. Every company out here is starving for employees. If you have a pulse you're hired. Don't have a resume? No problem. Completed a University or Technical program. . . great you're hired. No education? Companies out here will pay for courses.
The economy here in Alberta is so hot that the word "booming" doesn't seem to describe it well enough. Of course there are downsides. Line ups everywhere are huge. If you walk into a coffe shop expect a minimum of 15 minutes to get your latte. Labour shortages have affected every industry.Of course every boom will have a bust. But I don't see that happening in the next couple years and I would hire somebody with two years good experience over somebody with two years more general education.
It sounds like going overboard to solve the problem. Like designing a house to be hurricane proof when you are building in Oregon.
Linux has long had the ability to be installed on read only media. So your dream system already exists.
Even windows provides enough security to solve the problem. Running as a standard user I feel my windows computer is fairly safe from browsers, rootkits installing themselves from audio cds, and loads of other shady software.
It's a bit of a hassel sometimes. I moved from one timezone to another and can't change the time on my computer's clock. It's been about 8 months now and I still haven't bothered logging in as administrator to change the time.
First - "George Bush is a f..king
moron" is an opinion, not a fact.
And yes, as a matter of fact, when
you accept certain jobs, you DO loose your right to express your
opinion (but not to HAVE it).
The Official Secrets Act here in
Canada as an example. . . I may know something aobut what's going on in
the world because of my access to classified information. ..But you
can be sure that my ass will be thrown in jail if I give it.
Are you suggesting that the fact W. is a moron was supposed to be a
secret held by the Canadian Govenment?
Then the government did a poor job keeping this secret under wraps. Parish wasn't the only person who noticed
Yeah, god forbit I'd be allowed to move my settings between windows installs (including no longer bootign ones) in a simple manner.
You missed the point. Ini files are great.
The problem is that many applications fail to run without admin because a programmer reads and writes ini files to the system folder instead of user home.
If a programmer had stored your ini files in user home instead of the program files, or system folder there's a good chance your app would transfer to a new machine using the settings and transfer wizard.
The same reason most professional programmers use IDE's.
Because some aspects of code writing are easy to understand but are repetitive and time consuming. I'd rather a new student spend time understanding java.sql than typing get and set methods for classes.
Let's say that you have a project for writing a simple invoicing application. If a student had to type every get and set method for a Customer class, Order Class, InventoryItem, class etc the student could be typing for an hour just to build the basic data classes. Probably not time well spend for such an easy concept to understand. An IDE could do that for them in a few minutes which enables the student to spend more time on the useful programming of inserting/updating/retrieving and displaying these objects from the database.
However I totally agree with your point that the course should focus on the code, and not IDE tools. If a student completes a java course and can only read an xml file using an IDE's data wizard tool, and does not understand the underlying concepts then the teacher, and course curriculum have wasted the students' time.
This is why you should be able to club marketing reps to death.
After working as a programmer for 6 years I have heard a lot of marketing hype through brochures, white papers, and information seminars and I have come up with this principal: "Never promise that a task can be done based on what documentation or white papers say."
When a new API, IDE, framework or whatever is realeased I try building a small prototype, or test application, and only after first hand experience do I promise a project manager that it can be done. Otherwise I tell him that this new technology represents an unknown that could (is likely to) throw our timeline out of whack
I was half joking about the global warming, but on a serious level I have witnessed a change in climate.
Anecdotally:
I live in Vancouver. Being a coastal city it is warmer than the rest of Canada, and the temperature has never stayed below freezing for very long, but when I was a kid we used to have at least one good cold snap a year that would last long enough (a week or so) that we could go skating on the local ponds.
During the ten years that I was in High School, and college we seemed to have a cold snap about every three years.
And during the last 6 years the local ponds have only frozen once. Every winter I tell the guys at the office that if the ponds freeze over I'm skipping out of work to play hockey. For five years I have been waiting and it finally came this winter.
Here on the Canadian West Coast global warming has been great. Winters are getting milder and milder and we've have had some great summers in the last few years.
The only downsides have been a few pesky forest fires, and annual water restrictions.
Many business people think building software is like building a house. When the framing is done, it's done. You usually don't spend weeks testing how the wall interacts with the drywall and foundations.
Non IT people just don't understand why code isn't written correctly the first time.
Useable? Yes. Acceptable for generic web browsing and word processing? Maybe. An excellent-performing midrange desktop replacement? No way.
The benchmark you linked said the single processor handled dvd playback flawlessly, and played divx movies "perfectly with no slowdowns or stutters"
Their conclusion:
"VIA has definitely listened to the users of the EPIA on this one. They've fixed up all of the major problems that stopped the EPIA becoming a perfect TV-Run machine. Anyone who is looking to set up a dedicated TV-Run machine should look no further than the VIA EPIA-M - its high quality DVD and DivX playback make it a perfect choice!"
That sounds fast enough to replace many home desktops
Some people might argue that 20 minutes is too far to walk when I can drive it in 5 and parking is free at my office.
But the way I see it is that programming does not provide my body with the excercise it needs. Fresh air and a brisk walk in the morning helps wake me up.
I also walk to pick up small things like milk, bread, or a bottle of wine.
Anecdotal evidence: A friend sometimes calls my cell from Korea using a long distance calling card and the number displayed on my Caller Id is very similar to the one you posted.
Just a guessing: Strange caller id numbers also originate from a poorly configured (or intentionally screwed up) Voice Over IP phone.
I agree to a certain extent. Windows is a good workstation/network client.
In our offices people use Windows, Mac, and (one)Linux workstations but everybody must save their files to the company file server, which has RAID drives, and backed up nightly to a remote location.
So if Bob the programmer with admin access FUBARs his workstation then we have to reinstall windows and some apps but the data is safe.
In the article Mikko Hyppönen, complained that, "although the worm may seem beneficial, in fact it is likely to cause problems for administrators who will have to handle the increase in traffic."
But the way I see it your site only gets infected by this worm if you are running an old version of php (less than php-4.3.10). The best way for an admin to deal with the traffic is just patch your system in the first place.
No vulnerability. No worm. No increased traffic.
The time to patch your servers was two weeks ago, but better late than never.
Re:If this were Trek...
on
Bayesian Tail
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
True. But if the Star Trek error log resembled real life then it might look more like: 01:37 [error] Overheat in plasma injector #1. 01:37 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open. 01:38 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open. 01:38 [warning] Oxegen sensor on deck 2 not responding. 01:39 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open. 01:40 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open. 01:41 [warning] Oxegen sensor on deck 2 not responding. 01:56 [error] Plasma injector #1 offline, switching to #2 backup.
In other words real interesting errors in the logs can get hidden by a bunch of trivial log entries.
I use tail all the time when developing php applications. PHP logs errors to the apache log file so I type: tail -f/var/log/apache/mysite.com-error.log To track changes to the apache logs as I test the php pages.
But the truth of the matter is that I am only interested in php errors, and not broken links, and missing images. So if I can train btail to pay attention to php errors like: [Wed Dec 29 10:58:04 2004] [error] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function: badFunction() in/home/aoteoroa/www/pages/info.php on line 1
and ignore file not found errors like: [Wed Dec 29 11:16:22 2004] [error] [client 192.168.0.2] File does not exist:/home/aoteoroa/www/pages/info-over.gif it would make my job just a little bit easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Another possibility is that this crook is neither clever, nor smart, and is not the one who dreamed up the scheme but is just a lacky who doing the dirty work for somebody else. From the article:
Though £200,000 was spent on the cards, police said they believed that Parsons himself only earned £14,000 through it.
This implies that there are more people involved.I have been told that the problem with using an external hard drive as a backup system is that it is difficult to verify whether a backup was completed successfully, and is recoverable. I have heard horror stories of backup systems that appear to be writing to the external hard drive but when the person attempts to recover data they find that something had gone wrong.
Can anybody confirm or deny this?
I have tried to verify these rumors by searching google but haven't found any info that appears reliable.
Do you know of any windows based software that can reliably back up to an external hard drive, keeps a log of the backups, and verifies the data? It doesn't have to be open source but should be affordable for my home computers.
seriously
High prices for crude oil are going to stick around for a while. Oil companies litterally can not hire enough people to work. I'm not just talking about push hands and drill pigs. They need engineers, welders, geologists, software developers. Every company out here is starving for employees. If you have a pulse you're hired. Don't have a resume? No problem. Completed a University or Technical program. . . great you're hired. No education? Companies out here will pay for courses.
The economy here in Alberta is so hot that the word "booming" doesn't seem to describe it well enough. Of course there are downsides. Line ups everywhere are huge. If you walk into a coffe shop expect a minimum of 15 minutes to get your latte. Labour shortages have affected every industry.Of course every boom will have a bust. But I don't see that happening in the next couple years and I would hire somebody with two years good experience over somebody with two years more general education.
Wish I had mod points right now because I couldn't agree with you more. . . LIE!
As far as the webforms are concerned my mom's maiden name is Evans, and my favorite pet is Aragog.
It sounds like going overboard to solve the problem. Like designing a house to be hurricane proof when you are building in Oregon.
Linux has long had the ability to be installed on read only media. So your dream system already exists.
Even windows provides enough security to solve the problem. Running as a standard user I feel my windows computer is fairly safe from browsers, rootkits installing themselves from audio cds, and loads of other shady software.
It's a bit of a hassel sometimes. I moved from one timezone to another and can't change the time on my computer's clock. It's been about 8 months now and I still haven't bothered logging in as administrator to change the time.
That might be the most depressing thing I have heard today, and hope you were aiming for sarcasm, not insight.
Shedding your inhibitions is quite enjoyable once in a while.
Of course we don't need alcohol to relax but there is nothing wrong with occasional consumption if it leads to a few more laughs in life.
Are you suggesting that the fact W. is a moron was supposed to be a secret held by the Canadian Govenment?
Then the government did a poor job keeping this secret under wraps. Parish wasn't the only person who noticed
You missed the point. Ini files are great.
The problem is that many applications fail to run without admin because a programmer reads and writes ini files to the system folder instead of user home.
If a programmer had stored your ini files in user home instead of the program files, or system folder there's a good chance your app would transfer to a new machine using the settings and transfer wizard.
The same reason most professional programmers use IDE's.
Because some aspects of code writing are easy to understand but are repetitive and time consuming. I'd rather a new student spend time understanding java.sql than typing get and set methods for classes.
Let's say that you have a project for writing a simple invoicing application. If a student had to type every get and set method for a Customer class, Order Class, InventoryItem, class etc the student could be typing for an hour just to build the basic data classes. Probably not time well spend for such an easy concept to understand. An IDE could do that for them in a few minutes which enables the student to spend more time on the useful programming of inserting/updating/retrieving and displaying these objects from the database.
However I totally agree with your point that the course should focus on the code, and not IDE tools. If a student completes a java course and can only read an xml file using an IDE's data wizard tool, and does not understand the underlying concepts then the teacher, and course curriculum have wasted the students' time.
You said more questions *then* answers.
So where are the answers, now that you've asked the questions?
Right after the questions (or did you mean than?).
A barbaric attack has just occurred in London and you guys are blabbing on about OSS Web-based File Management? GET SOME PRIORITIES!
This is a forum for discussing technical issues. If you want to talk about current issues, or popular news items go to
K5 or
Fark
This is why you should be able to club marketing reps to death.
After working as a programmer for 6 years I have heard a lot of marketing hype through brochures, white papers, and information seminars and I have come up with this principal: "Never promise that a task can be done based on what documentation or white papers say."
When a new API, IDE, framework or whatever is realeased I try building a small prototype, or test application, and only after first hand experience do I promise a project manager that it can be done. Otherwise I tell him that this new technology represents an unknown that could (is likely to) throw our timeline out of whack
but it still looks like a good source of information.
I also use http://www.sans.org/newsletters/ to keep up to date.
What other resources do people here use to make sure that your server applications are up to date?
I was half joking about the global warming, but on a serious level I have witnessed a change in climate.
Anecdotally:
I live in Vancouver. Being a coastal city it is warmer than the rest of Canada, and the temperature has never stayed below freezing for very long, but when I was a kid we used to have at least one good cold snap a year that would last long enough (a week or so) that we could go skating on the local ponds.
During the ten years that I was in High School, and college we seemed to have a cold snap about every three years.
And during the last 6 years the local ponds have only frozen once. Every winter I tell the guys at the office that if the ponds freeze over I'm skipping out of work to play hockey. For five years I have been waiting and it finally came this winter.
Some facts:
An interesting web site on climate change in BC is here: Ministry of Water, Land, and Air protection, Gov of BC
Here on the Canadian West Coast global warming has been great. Winters are getting milder and milder and we've have had some great summers in the last few years.
The only downsides have been a few pesky forest fires, and annual water restrictions.
Many business people think building software is like building a house. When the framing is done, it's done. You usually don't spend weeks testing how the wall interacts with the drywall and foundations.
Non IT people just don't understand why code isn't written correctly the first time.
There are some neat tricks here including storing the cart ID as a cookie on the client.
I sure hope that people who read that chapter also take time to read how cookies can be abused.
Like The Twelve Most Common Application-level Hack Attacks(102 KB pdf)
Note The linked article is good reading for new web programmers but probably old news for many programmers here.
Useable? Yes. Acceptable for generic web browsing and word processing? Maybe. An excellent-performing midrange desktop replacement? No way.
The benchmark you linked said the single processor handled dvd playback flawlessly, and played divx movies "perfectly with no slowdowns or stutters"
Their conclusion:
"VIA has definitely listened to the users of the EPIA on this one. They've fixed up all of the major problems that stopped the EPIA becoming a perfect TV-Run machine. Anyone who is looking to set up a dedicated TV-Run machine should look no further than the VIA EPIA-M - its high quality DVD and DivX playback make it a perfect choice!"
That sounds fast enough to replace many home desktops
Some people might argue that 20 minutes is too far to walk when I can drive it in 5 and parking is free at my office.
But the way I see it is that programming does not provide my body with the excercise it needs. Fresh air and a brisk walk in the morning helps wake me up.
I also walk to pick up small things like milk, bread, or a bottle of wine.
Anecdotal evidence:
A friend sometimes calls my cell from Korea using a long distance calling card and the number displayed on my Caller Id is very similar to the one you posted.
Just a guessing:
Strange caller id numbers also originate from a poorly configured (or intentionally screwed up) Voice Over IP phone.
No - they have a lot of assests. And "investments". In cash they are about equal with Apple. Have a look at their quarterly earnings.
Huh? How do you figure?
Apple Balance Sheet 25-Sep-04
$2,969,000,000 Cash
$2,495,000,000 Short Term Investments
=
$5.5 billion cash equivalents
Microsoft Balance Sheet 30-Jun-04
$15,982,000,000 Cash
$44,610,000,000 Short Term Investments
=
$60.5 billion cash equivalents
I agree to a certain extent. Windows is a good workstation/network client.
In our offices people use Windows, Mac, and (one)Linux workstations but everybody must save their files to the company file server, which has RAID drives, and backed up nightly to a remote location.
So if Bob the programmer with admin access FUBARs his workstation then we have to reinstall windows and some apps but the data is safe.
In the article Mikko Hyppönen, complained that, "although the worm may seem beneficial, in fact it is likely to cause problems for administrators who will have to handle the increase in traffic."
But the way I see it your site only gets infected by this worm if you are running an old version of php (less than php-4.3.10). The best way for an admin to deal with the traffic is just patch your system in the first place.
No vulnerability.
No worm.
No increased traffic.
The time to patch your servers was two weeks ago, but better late than never.
True. But if the Star Trek error log resembled real life then it might look more like:
/var/log/apache/mysite.com-error.log
/home/aoteoroa/www/pages/info.php on line 1
/home/aoteoroa/www/pages/info-over.gif
01:37 [error] Overheat in plasma injector #1.
01:37 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
01:38 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
01:38 [warning] Oxegen sensor on deck 2 not responding.
01:39 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
01:40 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
01:41 [warning] Oxegen sensor on deck 2 not responding.
01:56 [error] Plasma injector #1 offline, switching to #2 backup.
In other words real interesting errors in the logs can get hidden by a bunch of trivial log entries.
I use tail all the time when developing php applications. PHP logs errors to the apache log file so I type:
tail -f
To track changes to the apache logs as I test the php pages.
But the truth of the matter is that I am only interested in php errors, and not broken links, and missing images. So if I can train btail to pay attention to php errors like:
[Wed Dec 29 10:58:04 2004] [error] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function: badFunction() in
and ignore file not found errors like:
[Wed Dec 29 11:16:22 2004] [error] [client 192.168.0.2] File does not exist:
it would make my job just a little bit easier.