I must've seen 10 comments regarding how 'no one will talk about it'. Why is that? There are classified things that cannot be discussed, but much about military technology is open source and available in publically distributable trade magazines or on.mil public web sites, if you cared to look at them.
As for working for the military? Well, it's frustrating sometimes because of the circumstances. Let me give you a rough breakdown:
The people in green are great. They are savvy and motivated and want things to happen. Unfortunately, while they drive the train, they aren't the conductors. The lifer civilian employees are. Also they leave every couple years for new assignments. "Generals come and go, but the government employees stay forever!" is the mantra repeated by many. Initiatives often are left by the wayside as a result of this constant personnel reshuffle.
The lifer civilian employees are not so great. They are unmotivated and laxidasical in many cases. Let's say 85% fall into this category. They have poor IT skills and 30 years ago were driving a typewriter, and now are in charge of say, the e-mail system. They're waiting for a pension (60% are within 5 years of retirement, last I heard, DoD-wide) and couldn't care less about becoming more savvy. They are interested in making sure that their little power bases are not eroded, which they guard jealously. Things like access to rooms, decisionmaking authority about minor initiatives that fall in their bailiwick, their own departmental budget, and the ability to buy IT gear without going through any kind of central authority. They will frustrate the crap out of you. A very very few are excellent people. That's the other 15%. These people make the military work by circumventing the atrocious bureaucracy for the contractors (below).
The contractors are spotty. There are some excellent consulting companies, but many are not so good. Skills are lacking in many cases, and people are hired due to nepotism sometimes, which sucks. There are anti-nepotism rules regarding govt hires, but not for contractors. An arm gets twisted, and a contractor hires the spouse/son/daughter of a govt employee to 'facilitate' their contract. Still, the contractors do most of the real work.
Budget issues will plague you. At a bank, you have unlimited funds basically to accomplish whatever goal is required. They will spend the money to do stuff right if you tell them what the right thing to do is. In the military, this is not always the case. The budgeting and disbursement processes are baroque and byzantine, and I feel that is no exaggeration.
It's a lot like tech was back 15 years ago, to me. You have to cobble together systems sometimes out of scrap stuff. Sometimes you are made to do things you know are wrong, like putting Win2k server on an old Pentium Pro box that has seen better days so it can run something like Cold Fusion that is a cpu hog. This irritates me, personally. But you might be happy with some hacking in your daily life.
As for the tech? It's a little behind commercial stuff in the offices, but way ahead of anyone out in the field. Somehow everything gets done, even with the human and funding issues cited above. I think there are *just* enough people with a patriotic spirit toward their job to make everything that needs to happen, happens.
I've worked at some excellent banks and on Wall Street if you wonder about my context above. I hope this is helpful to you.
I'd just like the fools who criticized this post to eat some crow now. Sit down, and dig in. There's plenty to be had. I knew that this was a politically motivated exercise. Schneier and Russ Cooper - both either completely lacking in acumen or are scum bags. Making the innocent user pay for the failure of the IT professional, instead of stepping up and assuming our responsibility for this.
Where is this revenue going to go? To line the tax coffers, not to fix computer security. If you believe the latter, then I have a bridge to sell you.
This is the most disheartening news I have seen in months. It makes the SCO abortion look like a vacation.
I have worked for the Fed, commercial banks (HSBC/Republic, First Chicago nee Bank One) and the military. I had roughly the same job - running a small LAN group supporting a department, at each place.
Besides the usual piss tests and such, I had a very summary background check at the banks. They were basically pulling a credit report and searching public records for anything like a criminal conviction. It was very perfunctory and they only wanted my SSN and last few addresses, even the Fed. (FRBNY and the other Fed branches are private institutions whereas Greenspan is a government employee, very weird situation)
The government does a much better job of this. You have to fill out a huge form listing all your acquaintances, confess to your drug use and such, etc. Then they check back on you. If you lie, you don't get clearance.
In both cases, however, students are employed as interns at times. They go through far less scrutiny than a full time employee. The assumption is that they are just kids and don't have much history. I suppose.
The management must be made to pay for oversights like this.
Is there something wrong with just hanging up on telemarketers? I can detect the sales pitch within seconds of it beginning, and most of them use call machines that make the connection, then pass it to a telemarketer - takes a couple seconds, and if you hear the silence, then the click of the transfer, you just hang up because you know it's a bullshit telemarketer.
Done deal!
They won't be able to overcome that flaw. It'll hurt productivity...imagine having the telemarketer dialing the phone manually. Not happening.
The page frame (window) was 64mb. However, I believe that, besides the 3.2 or 4.0 page frame, the Quarterdeck people did something funky with memory mapping (using EMS 4.0 features) which permitted them to swap out the entire main memory a program inhabited.
He seems to have provoked the speculation, which is irrational and wrong. The press will run with stuff like that, and some politician is going to read this and think it is a good idea.
For pete's sake, this has to be the most elitist article I have seen recently. Because Mr. Schneier knows what to do to keep his computer uninfected, let's blame the users and force them to be certified to be online.
Idiot.
How about blaming the actual target, the operating systems and flawed web standards that allow this. Look at certification authorities, browser, and OS vendors. I saw one of those hidden install ActiveX objects recently that has a Thawte signature. Why? Well, that CA's root cert is preloaded in IE so therefore, the signed ActiveX will install without any user intervention with default security settings.
What is wrong with this picture?
Why is Thawte issuing a certificate/signing code to/from a shady vendor like this?
Why does Microsoft let anyone with a signed ActiveX object install the thing without question, by default?
Why does the functionality to do so over the web exist in the first place? We know that scripting/file upload from untrusted Internet sources is the #1 security problem with end user systems. So why?
The problem was flawed assumptions at the outset. Microsoft assumed the Internet environment would remain benign, as it was in the early days of commercialization. Therefore, security was not a consideration. This has proven utterly false. The CAs figured they were in the business of printing up certificates for money. Check on the reliability of a vendor? Why, that would cost too much...so what are certificates and signing really worth? Not a whole hell of a lot. Yet we tell people to trust their money and credit card numbers to this intrinsically flawed system of 'trust'.
We, in IT in general, really need to reconsider all these flawed assumptions we have made and the bill of goods that has been sold to the general public. I have been doing end user support for 15 years now and I would be all too willing to blame this on the user. In this case we cannot. In the end, we have to realize it is not their fault. It is ours. We assumed things would stay the way they were, and they haven't.
Now let's fix it...invalidating the entire CA model and delegating that function to the government would probably be a good start. Have all certificates emanate from a government source or be considered invalid. That might actually work.
While we are at it, let's get the government involved in regulating operating system software in a formal fashion. Sure, I like the private sector and all, but it hasn't worked, has it? We have this huge security mess. Perhaps a greater degree of regulation is required to get us out of this mire, because market forces aren't going to fix the fact that Microsoft's operating system is woefully inadequate for today's Internet and most probably cannot be fixed while preserving backward compatibility for a meaningful number of applications.
The last two paragraphs were just ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure others could be arrived at, and better.
I would hush up if I were you. The unemployed reading slashdot might be inclined to kill you for voting for the guy that destroyed their jobs.
Not my fault that virtually skill-free people rode a bubble and thought it would last forever. Everyone got fat and lazy and now the real world intrudes on the fantasy built upon corporate malfeasance. Don't forget the winking Clinton administration that let it happen. Asleep at the switch, or just hoping the bubble would burst after they were out of office? You decide. Try kicking their ass instead, you might be close to the mark there.
I broke into the work force in a recession. It sucks. Deal. Learn to spell and to use grammar correctly. It helps.
You think you fuckers are the first people to have a hard time getting work? Think again. It'll get like this again in repeating cycles throughout your lifetime.
Every time someone bitches about the job market I think "how naive"...
Actually this is the reason why I decided today that I am voting Democrat next year.
I am a registered Republican, and have voted that way since 1993.
This administration is way out of control. It's too machiavellian for my tastes. If my freedoms are going to get eroded, I would prefer they do smarter stuff like close the borders or whatever. This administration is so milquetoast that I can't even see a marginal benefit to the crap they are doing.
I'll even vote for Dean if he is the Dem nominee. They lost my vote with this porn = file sharing shit, truth be told. But the stuff you cite above isn't helping.
Prove the US Government had any control over the Venezuelan coup, please.
Prove the Pakistani government supports Al Qaeda, please.
Show me the reference where the United States government said Iraq would be a cakewalk. Please.
Show me proof that the international press is any more accurate than the NYT, please.
Please prove all your allegations against Bush, particularly regarding the election, please.
Prove the CIA is full of criminals, please.
My point is basically that your post above is flamebait and has about zero fact in it. Insightful my ass. It's the wet dream of some leftist sociopath. Back down to mother Earth, please.
When are we going to start putting people against the wall?
Envision a situation where enough people would care about the shitty situation right now to overcome the power of the state.
Didn't think you could. That's your answer: never. Society in the US is constructed in such a way that, even when there is injustice, the general public is too apathetic to get too worked up about it. As long as beer is available, the football games go on, and the soap operas keep running, the body politic is fat and satiated.
Actually you pay out less for a death than you do for a chronic incurable condition like brain trauma, or a lengthy battle with cancer. Therefore, IBM would in fact be well advised to delay things as much as possible. In any event, it is standard procedure when settling large, intractable claims.
People have a fixed value from a claims perspective - I might be worth $2 million because I have children and they will take into account my future earnings and the impact on the kids' lives if I die. If you are single and unmarried, you might be worth as little as $50k because no one is dependent on your income besides you. This is all, of course, based on your value to your surviving family.
It is a very cold measure of human worth, but it is a very real one.
Bad news dude, you're full of it. The DoD is riddled with Microsoft products. Not only desktop - a lot of military sites I have seen are running on IIS. SQL Server 2k is used also.
I don't think anyone in an IT capacity in the DoD could possibly say that there are 'no microsoft products here' - that's just ludicrous. At least the boss's laptop has Win2k on it or something.
I always thought Byrne took a lot from Kirby's style and didn't make it awful. I mean this is purely based on my enjoyment of said art, not anything artistic or whatever.
I always liked Jim Starlin's work, on the other extreme - Starlin was obsessed with anatomy, at least to my untrained eye.
I remember reading some potshots the two were taking at each other back in the mid-80s. It was stupid then and it's stupid now. It was a collaborative creation -Lee readily admits he just wrote outlines of the comics, let Kirby draw them and then added dialogue afterward. Lee will be dead soon and Kirby is already gone, so how about leaving it be?
I'm too young to remember the public's preception of him,
To most he appeared like a crank, to some he appeared to have some insight. Pretty much like he is viewed today.
There could never be anyone else like him again - the country has changed too much and someone like Nader could not come to prominence just by writing a book, however true.
Slashdot Mirror
Esoteric should be altruistic.
At least how I read your intent.
I must've seen 10 comments regarding how 'no one will talk about it'. Why is that? There are classified things that cannot be discussed, but much about military technology is open source and available in publically distributable trade magazines or on .mil public web sites, if you cared to look at them.
As for working for the military? Well, it's frustrating sometimes because of the circumstances. Let me give you a rough breakdown:
The people in green are great. They are savvy and motivated and want things to happen. Unfortunately, while they drive the train, they aren't the conductors. The lifer civilian employees are. Also they leave every couple years for new assignments. "Generals come and go, but the government employees stay forever!" is the mantra repeated by many. Initiatives often are left by the wayside as a result of this constant personnel reshuffle.
The lifer civilian employees are not so great. They are unmotivated and laxidasical in many cases. Let's say 85% fall into this category. They have poor IT skills and 30 years ago were driving a typewriter, and now are in charge of say, the e-mail system. They're waiting for a pension (60% are within 5 years of retirement, last I heard, DoD-wide) and couldn't care less about becoming more savvy. They are interested in making sure that their little power bases are not eroded, which they guard jealously. Things like access to rooms, decisionmaking authority about minor initiatives that fall in their bailiwick, their own departmental budget, and the ability to buy IT gear without going through any kind of central authority. They will frustrate the crap out of you. A very very few are excellent people. That's the other 15%. These people make the military work by circumventing the atrocious bureaucracy for the contractors (below).
The contractors are spotty. There are some excellent consulting companies, but many are not so good. Skills are lacking in many cases, and people are hired due to nepotism sometimes, which sucks. There are anti-nepotism rules regarding govt hires, but not for contractors. An arm gets twisted, and a contractor hires the spouse/son/daughter of a govt employee to 'facilitate' their contract. Still, the contractors do most of the real work.
Budget issues will plague you. At a bank, you have unlimited funds basically to accomplish whatever goal is required. They will spend the money to do stuff right if you tell them what the right thing to do is. In the military, this is not always the case. The budgeting and disbursement processes are baroque and byzantine, and I feel that is no exaggeration.
It's a lot like tech was back 15 years ago, to me. You have to cobble together systems sometimes out of scrap stuff. Sometimes you are made to do things you know are wrong, like putting Win2k server on an old Pentium Pro box that has seen better days so it can run something like Cold Fusion that is a cpu hog. This irritates me, personally. But you might be happy with some hacking in your daily life.
As for the tech? It's a little behind commercial stuff in the offices, but way ahead of anyone out in the field. Somehow everything gets done, even with the human and funding issues cited above. I think there are *just* enough people with a patriotic spirit toward their job to make everything that needs to happen, happens.
I've worked at some excellent banks and on Wall Street if you wonder about my context above. I hope this is helpful to you.
I'd just like the fools who criticized this post to eat some crow now. Sit down, and dig in. There's plenty to be had. I knew that this was a politically motivated exercise. Schneier and Russ Cooper - both either completely lacking in acumen or are scum bags. Making the innocent user pay for the failure of the IT professional, instead of stepping up and assuming our responsibility for this.
Where is this revenue going to go? To line the tax coffers, not to fix computer security. If you believe the latter, then I have a bridge to sell you.
This is the most disheartening news I have seen in months. It makes the SCO abortion look like a vacation.
I have worked for the Fed, commercial banks (HSBC/Republic, First Chicago nee Bank One) and the military. I had roughly the same job - running a small LAN group supporting a department, at each place.
Besides the usual piss tests and such, I had a very summary background check at the banks. They were basically pulling a credit report and searching public records for anything like a criminal conviction. It was very perfunctory and they only wanted my SSN and last few addresses, even the Fed. (FRBNY and the other Fed branches are private institutions whereas Greenspan is a government employee, very weird situation)
The government does a much better job of this. You have to fill out a huge form listing all your acquaintances, confess to your drug use and such, etc. Then they check back on you. If you lie, you don't get clearance.
In both cases, however, students are employed as interns at times. They go through far less scrutiny than a full time employee. The assumption is that they are just kids and don't have much history. I suppose.
The management must be made to pay for oversights like this.
Is there something wrong with just hanging up on telemarketers? I can detect the sales pitch within seconds of it beginning, and most of them use call machines that make the connection, then pass it to a telemarketer - takes a couple seconds, and if you hear the silence, then the click of the transfer, you just hang up because you know it's a bullshit telemarketer.
Done deal!
They won't be able to overcome that flaw. It'll hurt productivity...imagine having the telemarketer dialing the phone manually. Not happening.
The pages were only 16k in size :b
The page frame (window) was 64mb. However, I believe that, besides the 3.2 or 4.0 page frame, the Quarterdeck people did something funky with memory mapping (using EMS 4.0 features) which permitted them to swap out the entire main memory a program inhabited.
Hence the reason why Desqview worked.
So you're saying he's a bad person for not speaking in atomic, unambiguous sound bites which have no room for interpretation?
That's depressing. What a society we live in.
No, i'm saying he's unworthy of being taken seriously for not doing so.
Hence the 'no respect'. I am sure he's very personable. That's not the issue here.
Microsoft is only C2 certified when you turn off the networking. What use is that? Let's get that myth out of the way please.
Take your motherboard-shipped version of Trend's virus product from 4 years ago and tell me how effective it is today.
Try again please.
He seems to have provoked the speculation, which is irrational and wrong. The press will run with stuff like that, and some politician is going to read this and think it is a good idea.
For pete's sake, this has to be the most elitist article I have seen recently. Because Mr. Schneier knows what to do to keep his computer uninfected, let's blame the users and force them to be certified to be online.
Idiot.
How about blaming the actual target, the operating systems and flawed web standards that allow this. Look at certification authorities, browser, and OS vendors. I saw one of those hidden install ActiveX objects recently that has a Thawte signature. Why? Well, that CA's root cert is preloaded in IE so therefore, the signed ActiveX will install without any user intervention with default security settings.
What is wrong with this picture?
The problem was flawed assumptions at the outset. Microsoft assumed the Internet environment would remain benign, as it was in the early days of commercialization. Therefore, security was not a consideration. This has proven utterly false. The CAs figured they were in the business of printing up certificates for money. Check on the reliability of a vendor? Why, that would cost too much...so what are certificates and signing really worth? Not a whole hell of a lot. Yet we tell people to trust their money and credit card numbers to this intrinsically flawed system of 'trust'.
We, in IT in general, really need to reconsider all these flawed assumptions we have made and the bill of goods that has been sold to the general public. I have been doing end user support for 15 years now and I would be all too willing to blame this on the user. In this case we cannot. In the end, we have to realize it is not their fault. It is ours. We assumed things would stay the way they were, and they haven't.
Now let's fix it...invalidating the entire CA model and delegating that function to the government would probably be a good start. Have all certificates emanate from a government source or be considered invalid. That might actually work.
While we are at it, let's get the government involved in regulating operating system software in a formal fashion. Sure, I like the private sector and all, but it hasn't worked, has it? We have this huge security mess. Perhaps a greater degree of regulation is required to get us out of this mire, because market forces aren't going to fix the fact that Microsoft's operating system is woefully inadequate for today's Internet and most probably cannot be fixed while preserving backward compatibility for a meaningful number of applications.
The last two paragraphs were just ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure others could be arrived at, and better.
I'd like to point out the clear bias evidenced by the above tree of posts.
/. mods.
current -1 is flamebait
current -3 is 5 insightful
There is not much more to be said. Read them both, and they express congruent points of view but one is acceptable to the left, and one isn't.
Typical of
I would hush up if I were you. The unemployed reading slashdot might be inclined to kill you for voting for the guy that destroyed their jobs.
Not my fault that virtually skill-free people rode a bubble and thought it would last forever. Everyone got fat and lazy and now the real world intrudes on the fantasy built upon corporate malfeasance. Don't forget the winking Clinton administration that let it happen. Asleep at the switch, or just hoping the bubble would burst after they were out of office? You decide. Try kicking their ass instead, you might be close to the mark there.
I broke into the work force in a recession. It sucks. Deal. Learn to spell and to use grammar correctly. It helps.
You think you fuckers are the first people to have a hard time getting work? Think again. It'll get like this again in repeating cycles throughout your lifetime.
Every time someone bitches about the job market I think "how naive"...
Actually this is the reason why I decided today that I am voting Democrat next year.
I am a registered Republican, and have voted that way since 1993.
This administration is way out of control. It's too machiavellian for my tastes. If my freedoms are going to get eroded, I would prefer they do smarter stuff like close the borders or whatever. This administration is so milquetoast that I can't even see a marginal benefit to the crap they are doing.
I'll even vote for Dean if he is the Dem nominee. They lost my vote with this porn = file sharing shit, truth be told. But the stuff you cite above isn't helping.
Fucking losers.
Lest you wonder why the GDP in the Euro zone lags behind the US, Japan, etc - here is one of your big reasons.
My point is basically that your post above is flamebait and has about zero fact in it. Insightful my ass. It's the wet dream of some leftist sociopath. Back down to mother Earth, please.
Can always trust you to remember the good Roman quotes. ;-)
When are we going to start putting people against the wall?
Envision a situation where enough people would care about the shitty situation right now to overcome the power of the state.
Didn't think you could. That's your answer: never. Society in the US is constructed in such a way that, even when there is injustice, the general public is too apathetic to get too worked up about it. As long as beer is available, the football games go on, and the soap operas keep running, the body politic is fat and satiated.
Actually you pay out less for a death than you do for a chronic incurable condition like brain trauma, or a lengthy battle with cancer. Therefore, IBM would in fact be well advised to delay things as much as possible. In any event, it is standard procedure when settling large, intractable claims.
People have a fixed value from a claims perspective - I might be worth $2 million because I have children and they will take into account my future earnings and the impact on the kids' lives if I die. If you are single and unmarried, you might be worth as little as $50k because no one is dependent on your income besides you. This is all, of course, based on your value to your surviving family.
It is a very cold measure of human worth, but it is a very real one.
It depends on what your definition is of important. There are many systems that I personally wouldn't run on Microsoft, that do.
Obviously I can't/won't go into detail. Suffice to say that the DHS situation with Microsoft is probably relatively similar to DoD.
Bad news dude, you're full of it. The DoD is riddled with Microsoft products. Not only desktop - a lot of military sites I have seen are running on IIS. SQL Server 2k is used also.
I don't think anyone in an IT capacity in the DoD could possibly say that there are 'no microsoft products here' - that's just ludicrous. At least the boss's laptop has Win2k on it or something.
My point is that they will not upgrade themselves.
Inserting the CD just gets you started. Getting you finished and running again often require quite a bit more effort.
Actually Win32 lets you get your system in trouble much faster than Linux ever could. Selling point?
Seriously, users couldn't give two shits about upgrade functionality. They aren't going to do it. No matter how easy you make it.
I always thought Byrne took a lot from Kirby's style and didn't make it awful. I mean this is purely based on my enjoyment of said art, not anything artistic or whatever.
I always liked Jim Starlin's work, on the other extreme - Starlin was obsessed with anatomy, at least to my untrained eye.
I remember reading some potshots the two were taking at each other back in the mid-80s. It was stupid then and it's stupid now. It was a collaborative creation -Lee readily admits he just wrote outlines of the comics, let Kirby draw them and then added dialogue afterward. Lee will be dead soon and Kirby is already gone, so how about leaving it be?
Talk about your tempest in a teapot.
I'm too young to remember the public's preception of him,
To most he appeared like a crank, to some he appeared to have some insight. Pretty much like he is viewed today.
There could never be anyone else like him again - the country has changed too much and someone like Nader could not come to prominence just by writing a book, however true.