And was your "faraday cage" truely a functioning faraday cage ???
I once sat next to a guy who told me something similar as you tell it and he said to me the "cleaners" would use some crap walkie-talkie to communicate. Apparently the "faraday cage" was more a dog-and-pony cage to impress idiots and shaft the taxpayer.
Hello to John M.
Frank G.
Shrug. It could have been. Stuff like that definitely occurred.
And was your "faraday cage" truely a functioning faraday cage ???
I once sat next to a guy who told me something similar as you tell it and he said to me the "cleaners" would use some crap walkie-talkie to communicate. Apparently the "faraday cage" was more a dog-and-pony cage to impress idiots and shaft the taxpayer.
Hello to John M.
Frank G.
I don't know. We were told it was, and checking it wasn't my job. I observed that it was a metal door with a flexible metal seal all the way around. Other than that, I didn't think about it.
So... how does it feel, knowing you were Satan's Little Helper?
(the military-industrial complex is the closest thing to an actual Devil in existence. marketing is a close second. i assume your Dark Master rewarded you well?)
If you want a secure computing environment, don't connect your computer to anything! Also keep it in a faraday cage, and make sure the power supply lines are filtered so they can't carry signals out through the cage.
When I did military contracting, we did exactly this. (The room was also windowless.) The machines were used for code generation, so most often the data would *leave* the room rather than enter, (and there was an entire security protocol for that) so no LAN or portable storage was required. On the few times when data had to enter the room, it did so on disk packs (this was awhile ago) that had been vetted through a fairly complicated process.
Exactly once, the computers in the sealed room had to be connected to computers in the cage where we were setting up the customer's equipment. After some discussion, we carefully disconnected the cage from the company network, ran a network cable out the armored door and into the cage, ran the tests, then disconnected afterwards. Of course, that is technically not sufficient to avoid contamination, (viruses et al) but was the best we could do under the circumstances.
...at least to some people, are the homes that do not have guns. I note that you can zoom in close enough on the map to see the houses of families guaranteed not to be armed, and not next door to anyone likely to be armed. A valuable tool for home invasion.
I'm pretty sure the Japanese have prior art. I remember reading an article awhile back about virtual kissing devices. Both people had robot lip and tongue devices connected via the net. I'm sure that couldn't be as nasty as it sounds.
> The material in question depicts gruesome murders, torture, sexual abuse, assaults and necrophilia — all with young female victims.
I'm not a serious horror buff, but aren't most slasher films all of the above (save perhaps the necrophilia) directed mostly at young female victims? It's practically a definition of the genre.
I'm trying to imagine how it could be a crime for Couture to stage these scenes, and a multi-million-dollar enterprise for a studio in Los Angles to do exactly the same thing.
It's true they're not inert when unpowered, but modern drives park the heads, making them less fragile than in the old days. It's true they're more sensitive to physical abuse than are tapes, but one takes that into account.
It's important to keep track of how old they are and cycle them. I write on the face with a sharpie the date I started using them and what they're backing up. (Just as I track the start date for memory cards for the camera.) Once a year I replace the drive with my important data with a new, usually larger drive, (ghosting the data) and the old one becomes the level zero backup. Incremental backups are done to spare lower capacity drives which are used for five years or so then scrubbed and donated to the local freegeek.
I don't keep the backup drive online. I know that a lot of people use an external drive as a backup and leave it plugged in, but that does not protect you from data corruption and some types of viruses. A good backup is physically disconnected from the machine. A great backup is geologically distant from the machine.
At two companies I managed IP libraries (massive amounts of photographs and drawings used in catalogs and advertisements). The data changes only slowly, and (depending on usage) seasonally, so incremental backups are very much practical. But that's not really the issue.
This is important. Raid protects you from certain kinds of failures, usually limited to the mechanical or electrical failure of a single hard drive. (More protection can be had by nesting raid levels, but for most installations this is the case.) Raid does not protect you from a wide variety of failures including data corruption from a bad controller or application bug, systemic failure of the raid appliance (example: a catastrophic power supply failure taking out multiple drives) operator-induced data loss, either accidental or malicious, or environmental catastrophe. If your data is important, there is still no substitute for backing up your data and sending it to a remote site. Even geosynch won't necessarily help if you're synching bad data to the only remote copy. And, I'm not yet convinced that syncing to "the cloud" is a good idea.
Mind you, backups don't have to be to tape. I'm a photographer when I'm not a geek, and I typically keep tens of thousands of photographs online on my workstation. As backup to tape, DVD or even blu-ray isn't really practical, I back up to a series of hard drives using one of those plug-in hard drive toasters, then carefully store them elsewhere, disconnected from the computer. Disaster recovery is a set of drives in a safe at a friend's house.
There are examples where backups aren't necessary. I worked with one array that was essentially a huge cache for 1-800 calls, and a complete wipe would only mean that customers would see a delay on the next call as their particular part of the cache was rebuilt. But for the most part, depending on raid instead of a properly implemented backup solution is a really bad idea.
Yes, if it's a windows box, I run chkdsk/F/R a few times, and defragment the drive after deploy. (Not because it needs it, but for the exercise.) Similar with fsck on linux. If it fails, I want it to fail when the in-store return policy is still in effect, so I don't have to deal with the manufacturer.
But having a returned drive rejected because I repartitioned it or "ran linux"? Never heard of that.
I'm not sure how this changes the question, but either way the nuclear weapons complex is ultimately under civilian control. My understanding is that a nuclear device can not be deployed without an order from a civilian commander. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the order to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki solely under orders from a civilian?
Another thing to think about: Look at how other civilian government organizations are managed, and imagine a network of nuclear missiles under the same management. Don't world-destroying weapons need military-level discipline to keep in control?
The thing that makes me suspicious is that the same people -- James Hansen in particular -- were the major alarmists for an ice age back then, as they are for global warming now. What Hansen got out of it then, and what he's getting out of it now, is power. I think there may be a root cause that we haven't explored yet -- that people need for this to happen because they are elevated in money, stature, and power as a result.
Um, yeah, my Blackberry was dead nuts reliable when co-workers with these new-fangle iphone thingies were making calls that sounded like "Hello? Damn. (dial) Hello? Damn. (dial) Hello? DAMN." Before that, my Palm Treo (not the horrible Windows version but the one running PalmOS) did everything I needed, was absolutely reliable and took 30 seconds to bring to a full charge -- take the battery out, replace it with the one in the charger, put the exhausted battery in the charger, good to go. With an iphone that takes special tools.
So yeah, I remember, and I still wouldn't own an iphone.
So, there's two different ways to do things depending on whether you're using a mouse or a touch gesture. I'm sure there are reasons why they had to do it that way, but it strikes me as incoherent.
One of the biggest issues I had was that there's no visual cues as to what you're supposed to touch. Buttons and labels look exactly the same.
I massaged the screen for about ten minutes and couldn't get it to do anything useful. Oh, you can touch a tile and something happens, but it's easy to get into a mode where it's not at all obvious how to get out. GUIs, especially touch GUIs, should have visual cues on how to navigate, or at very least do things in consistent ways.
On a tablet, navigation-wise, Win8 works exactly the same as iOS. To get back to the previous screen in an app, you use the Back button, which is usually in the top right corner of the current page. To get out of the app to the Start screen, you press the hardware button with the Windows logo that's below the screen (on the tablets; your confusion might have to do with the fact that you were playing with it on a touch-enabled desktop).
There are some more arcane gestures, like swipe from left to switch between apps, but the above is sufficient to never get "lost" in the system.
You're right, it was not a tablet (no hardware buttons) but there was also no keyboard/mouse in evidence. Apparently you were supposed to see how well Windows 8 worked on a big touch surface. I wasn't impressed.
> To get back to the previous screen in an app, you use the Back button, which is usually in the top right corner of the current page.
There's inevitably going to be fans for any OS, even windows ME.
Since we have a Windows 7 slate that I really wanted to upgrade (read: make usable, as 7 is pants on a slate) daughter and I went to an Office Despot that had Win8 running on a big touch screen monitor, and I tried to get it to do stuff. Never touched Win8 before, but had worked on most previous Windows operating systems, (starting with 3.1, 3.51, 95, 98 SE, NT 4, 2000, ME (shudder), XP (still using it) and 7, plus experience with server 2000 and 2008) how hard could it be?
I massaged the screen for about ten minutes and couldn't get it to do anything useful. Oh, you can touch a tile and something happens, but it's easy to get into a mode where it's not at all obvious how to get out. GUIs, especially touch GUIs, should have visual cues on how to navigate, or at very least do things in consistent ways.
After awhile, daughter pushed me aside, as she has experience with Windows 7, Android and iOS on touchscreen, she wanted to take a crack at it. She figured out how to get out from where I had gotten stuck, but not much else after another ten minutes of pawing at the thing. Like 7, there seems to be little cabalistic gestures one has to learn to perform certain actions in 8, and they don't seem to be similar to what you had to do in 7. We finally gave up.
Mind you, I'm sure it's possible to learn Windows 8. The point is, it's not at all obvious how to use it.
Let's see...WiFi screws up airplane, 300 people dead, and your first question would be, "Why the hell didn't they use sacks of potatoes or something like that instead of people?"
There's just no pleasing you.
WiFi screws up airplane, 300 potato sacks lost, and your first question would be, "Why the hell didn't they use people who can't stop texting for a few minutes instead of sacks of potatoes?"
Wifi screws up airplane, 300 mad texters lost, and your first question would be, "Why the hell didn't they use celebutantes?"
Slashdot Mirror
And was your "faraday cage" truely a functioning faraday cage ???
I once sat next to a guy who told me something similar as you tell it and he said to me the "cleaners" would use some crap walkie-talkie to communicate. Apparently the "faraday cage" was more a dog-and-pony cage to impress idiots and shaft the taxpayer.
Hello to John M.
Frank G.
Shrug. It could have been. Stuff like that definitely occurred.
And was your "faraday cage" truely a functioning faraday cage ???
I once sat next to a guy who told me something similar as you tell it and he said to me the "cleaners" would use some crap walkie-talkie to communicate. Apparently the "faraday cage" was more a dog-and-pony cage to impress idiots and shaft the taxpayer.
Hello to John M.
Frank G.
I don't know. We were told it was, and checking it wasn't my job. I observed that it was a metal door with a flexible metal seal all the way around. Other than that, I didn't think about it.
When I did military contracting
So ... how does it feel, knowing you were Satan's Little Helper?
(the military-industrial complex is the closest thing to an actual Devil in existence. marketing is a close second. i assume your Dark Master rewarded you well?)
I did ok.
If you want a secure computing environment, don't connect your computer to anything! Also keep it in a faraday cage, and make sure the power supply lines are filtered so they can't carry signals out through the cage.
When I did military contracting, we did exactly this. (The room was also windowless.) The machines were used for code generation, so most often the data would *leave* the room rather than enter, (and there was an entire security protocol for that) so no LAN or portable storage was required. On the few times when data had to enter the room, it did so on disk packs (this was awhile ago) that had been vetted through a fairly complicated process.
Exactly once, the computers in the sealed room had to be connected to computers in the cage where we were setting up the customer's equipment. After some discussion, we carefully disconnected the cage from the company network, ran a network cable out the armored door and into the cage, ran the tests, then disconnected afterwards. Of course, that is technically not sufficient to avoid contamination, (viruses et al) but was the best we could do under the circumstances.
I'm pretty sure the Japanese have prior art. I remember reading an article awhile back about virtual kissing devices. Both people had robot lip and tongue devices connected via the net. I'm sure that couldn't be as nasty as it sounds.
But in any case, does this mean that Chuck Lorre owes Microsoft license fees? Or perhaps vice-versa?
> The material in question depicts gruesome murders, torture, sexual abuse, assaults and necrophilia — all with young female victims.
I'm not a serious horror buff, but aren't most slasher films all of the above (save perhaps the necrophilia) directed mostly at young female victims? It's practically a definition of the genre.
I'm trying to imagine how it could be a crime for Couture to stage these scenes, and a multi-million-dollar enterprise for a studio in Los Angles to do exactly the same thing.
I think I saw that movie. Or was it grasshoppers? I don't remember now.
It's true they're not inert when unpowered, but modern drives park the heads, making them less fragile than in the old days. It's true they're more sensitive to physical abuse than are tapes, but one takes that into account.
It's important to keep track of how old they are and cycle them. I write on the face with a sharpie the date I started using them and what they're backing up. (Just as I track the start date for memory cards for the camera.) Once a year I replace the drive with my important data with a new, usually larger drive, (ghosting the data) and the old one becomes the level zero backup. Incremental backups are done to spare lower capacity drives which are used for five years or so then scrubbed and donated to the local freegeek.
I don't keep the backup drive online. I know that a lot of people use an external drive as a backup and leave it plugged in, but that does not protect you from data corruption and some types of viruses. A good backup is physically disconnected from the machine. A great backup is geologically distant from the machine.
Everything will be gone, given enough time.
Not to mention, too slow to be useful.
At two companies I managed IP libraries (massive amounts of photographs and drawings used in catalogs and advertisements). The data changes only slowly, and (depending on usage) seasonally, so incremental backups are very much practical. But that's not really the issue.
This is important. Raid protects you from certain kinds of failures, usually limited to the mechanical or electrical failure of a single hard drive. (More protection can be had by nesting raid levels, but for most installations this is the case.) Raid does not protect you from a wide variety of failures including data corruption from a bad controller or application bug, systemic failure of the raid appliance (example: a catastrophic power supply failure taking out multiple drives) operator-induced data loss, either accidental or malicious, or environmental catastrophe. If your data is important, there is still no substitute for backing up your data and sending it to a remote site. Even geosynch won't necessarily help if you're synching bad data to the only remote copy. And, I'm not yet convinced that syncing to "the cloud" is a good idea.
Mind you, backups don't have to be to tape. I'm a photographer when I'm not a geek, and I typically keep tens of thousands of photographs online on my workstation. As backup to tape, DVD or even blu-ray isn't really practical, I back up to a series of hard drives using one of those plug-in hard drive toasters, then carefully store them elsewhere, disconnected from the computer. Disaster recovery is a set of drives in a safe at a friend's house.
There are examples where backups aren't necessary. I worked with one array that was essentially a huge cache for 1-800 calls, and a complete wipe would only mean that customers would see a delay on the next call as their particular part of the cache was rebuilt. But for the most part, depending on raid instead of a properly implemented backup solution is a really bad idea.
Yes, if it's a windows box, I run chkdsk /F /R a few times, and defragment the drive after deploy. (Not because it needs it, but for the exercise.) Similar with fsck on linux. If it fails, I want it to fail when the in-store return policy is still in effect, so I don't have to deal with the manufacturer.
But having a returned drive rejected because I repartitioned it or "ran linux"? Never heard of that.
> Who cares about HDDs anymore these days?
Anyone with a need for a massive amount of storage space.
You do realize that something as simple as soap flakes in your powdered laundry soap can be used to make explosives.
If you arrested everyone that had explosive chemicals in the house, then you would have to arrest everyone that cleans anything.
I'm safe, then.
That's really what you're going with? Google "james hansen" "global cooling" and 1971. This is hardly a secret.
I'm not sure how this changes the question, but either way the nuclear weapons complex is ultimately under civilian control. My understanding is that a nuclear device can not be deployed without an order from a civilian commander. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the order to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki solely under orders from a civilian?
Another thing to think about: Look at how other civilian government organizations are managed, and imagine a network of nuclear missiles under the same management. Don't world-destroying weapons need military-level discipline to keep in control?
The thing that makes me suspicious is that the same people -- James Hansen in particular -- were the major alarmists for an ice age back then, as they are for global warming now. What Hansen got out of it then, and what he's getting out of it now, is power. I think there may be a root cause that we haven't explored yet -- that people need for this to happen because they are elevated in money, stature, and power as a result.
Maybe that *was* the apocalypse.
Um, yeah, my Blackberry was dead nuts reliable when co-workers with these new-fangle iphone thingies were making calls that sounded like "Hello? Damn. (dial) Hello? Damn. (dial) Hello? DAMN." Before that, my Palm Treo (not the horrible Windows version but the one running PalmOS) did everything I needed, was absolutely reliable and took 30 seconds to bring to a full charge -- take the battery out, replace it with the one in the charger, put the exhausted battery in the charger, good to go. With an iphone that takes special tools.
So yeah, I remember, and I still wouldn't own an iphone.
So, there's two different ways to do things depending on whether you're using a mouse or a touch gesture. I'm sure there are reasons why they had to do it that way, but it strikes me as incoherent.
One of the biggest issues I had was that there's no visual cues as to what you're supposed to touch. Buttons and labels look exactly the same.
I massaged the screen for about ten minutes and couldn't get it to do anything useful. Oh, you can touch a tile and something happens, but it's easy to get into a mode where it's not at all obvious how to get out. GUIs, especially touch GUIs, should have visual cues on how to navigate, or at very least do things in consistent ways.
On a tablet, navigation-wise, Win8 works exactly the same as iOS. To get back to the previous screen in an app, you use the Back button, which is usually in the top right corner of the current page. To get out of the app to the Start screen, you press the hardware button with the Windows logo that's below the screen (on the tablets; your confusion might have to do with the fact that you were playing with it on a touch-enabled desktop).
There are some more arcane gestures, like swipe from left to switch between apps, but the above is sufficient to never get "lost" in the system.
You're right, it was not a tablet (no hardware buttons) but there was also no keyboard/mouse in evidence. Apparently you were supposed to see how well Windows 8 worked on a big touch surface. I wasn't impressed.
> To get back to the previous screen in an app, you use the Back button, which is usually in the top right corner of the current page.
"usually"? That worries me.
There's inevitably going to be fans for any OS, even windows ME.
Since we have a Windows 7 slate that I really wanted to upgrade (read: make usable, as 7 is pants on a slate) daughter and I went to an Office Despot that had Win8 running on a big touch screen monitor, and I tried to get it to do stuff. Never touched Win8 before, but had worked on most previous Windows operating systems, (starting with 3.1, 3.51, 95, 98 SE, NT 4, 2000, ME (shudder), XP (still using it) and 7, plus experience with server 2000 and 2008) how hard could it be?
I massaged the screen for about ten minutes and couldn't get it to do anything useful. Oh, you can touch a tile and something happens, but it's easy to get into a mode where it's not at all obvious how to get out. GUIs, especially touch GUIs, should have visual cues on how to navigate, or at very least do things in consistent ways.
After awhile, daughter pushed me aside, as she has experience with Windows 7, Android and iOS on touchscreen, she wanted to take a crack at it. She figured out how to get out from where I had gotten stuck, but not much else after another ten minutes of pawing at the thing. Like 7, there seems to be little cabalistic gestures one has to learn to perform certain actions in 8, and they don't seem to be similar to what you had to do in 7. We finally gave up.
Mind you, I'm sure it's possible to learn Windows 8. The point is, it's not at all obvious how to use it.
Let's see...WiFi screws up airplane, 300 people dead, and your first question would be, "Why the hell didn't they use sacks of potatoes or something like that instead of people?"
There's just no pleasing you.
WiFi screws up airplane, 300 potato sacks lost, and your first question would be, "Why the hell didn't they use people who can't stop texting for a few minutes instead of sacks of potatoes?"
Wifi screws up airplane, 300 mad texters lost, and your first question would be, "Why the hell didn't they use celebutantes?"
You kidding? I'd have one in my basement if I could.