look at the shooter in that luxury store in, where was it, Omaha(?) before christmas. What effect did that have on people shopping in the rest of the country? Probably about zero.
How about shopping in Omaha? How about shopping in that very store, after the cleanup and such?
A huge spike of sales business, some of which appears to have been "sympathy" shopping.
The optimist in me wants to see this as "The terrorists only win if we let them."
The realist in me notes, somewhat bitterly, that commerce trumps all in this nation.
YA RLY. El Al is fanatical about security, for fairly obvious reasons. They make the posers at TSA look like posers.
Even in Canada. Oh, sure, you have your own "independent" security. But El Al security is running the show inside their gate areas and on their planes, no fear.
Experience keeps a costly school, but Israel's national airline has definitely learned the lessons there.
A freely accessiblenetworkresource is begging to be driven, smoking and shattered, into the ground by the ill-mannered, ill-trained, or ill-intentioned hordes.
Personally, I blame the introduction of AOL in 1994 to the Usenet for this downward spiral. We were doing just fine before all you "me too"s started pouring in.
Tell it to street-level drug pushers. They mastered lock-in decades ago. It's only recently that tech marketing has risen to the level of "The first taste is free, baby!"
"It is hard for the users it's going to at least be that much harder for the hacker"?
Up to a point of diminished returns, at which point it's impossible* for the legitimate user, so they cheat and defeat the whole scheme. (Witness the archetypal "I can't remember this stupid password" sticky-note-under-the-keyboard situation.)
(*"Impossible" is dependent on the user's level of apathy, forgetfulness, or hostility to the security regime.)
But if you have strong armor around you, you look like a less appealing target as to try to find the one weak scale under your wing.
That presumes an equal level of interest and intent between the "soft" target and the hardened one. If the hard target contains the more valuable goodies, well, that's just "crunchy on the outside, tender and tasty on the inside."
Also, for some in the cracking community, an apparently-hard target is an personal challenge to their 1334 hax0r skills, and quite appealing.
People are more likely to jump on an open WAN then try to break into a hidden one with at least WEP.
Again, assuming the values of the targets behind the protection schemes are equal. If all you want is free wireless, then one WAP is as good as another. If you want that WAP for a particular reason, you'll target it no matter what its apparent hardness. Every security scheme is fallible; the real value is measured in terms of effectiveness versus the value of what's protected.
It sounds more like a lot of what we put in to place is useless once they're in, but that doesn't mean to weaken our defenses.
I suspect the author is arguing that we should strengthen our defenses by implementing effective measures (non-self-defeating, like the too-complicated password example above; or "security theater" measures that sound tough and look effective but can be easily defeated by ignoring their fundamental premise, like complete isolation from the outside except for trusted partners, but then trusting those partners unreservedly--if they get pwn'd so do you)
would sound like rants, yet, the only people I know using Fedora are using it "unwillingly:" because their companies run RHEL, because their partners are using RHEL, because they need need to be compatible to RHEL, etc. I know nobody who uses Fedora because s/he likes it.
So why aren't they running CentOS? It is RHEL without the trademarks and the promises-on-paper you don't get anyways if you're running Fedora, and as far as my experience goes it's production-grade. You're not RH's guinea pig like you'd be with Fedora.
People who are running Fedora because they want a solid server experience are mislead. The real reason to run Fedora is because you want to help out on the forefront, pioneering the good stuff that may eventually show up in RHEL (and CentOS).
On the other hand, pioneers tend to wind up face-down in the desert with arrows in their backs...
I'm not so sure about that. It was more optimistic, sure, but only by virtue of a creepy simplicism that smacks of final solutions and brave new worlds.
I'll take a messy wide-open future any day of the week, thank you.
[Gamasutra's A History of Gaming Platforms series continues with a look at the Apple II system. Perhaps best-remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms in the 1980s, the computer was also a popular gaming system. Need to catch up? Check out the first two articles in the series, covering the Commodore 64 and the Vectrex.]
And yes, the Apple II series was the first kick-ass game system. I'm old enough to remember first-hand. What was the Apple's competition? The TRS-80? I had one... the games were meh at best. Certainly, in any game that was released on both of those platforms, the Apple's version looked and sounded better.
Oh, yeah. What did Commodore have at this time? The PET? I heard rumors it had games.
Now, contemporaneous with the C64 in the Apple stable was the IIGS. Amazing, but still basically trailing edge. Like the absolute technological pinnacle in steam locomotives at the time that the diesel-electric was becoming the mainstream rail propulsion system. The C64 and the Amiga pwn'd the IIGS in almost every meaningful way. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about. I have all three.)
More to the point, as soon as there's no free taste capability, every domain they ninja on the basis of an availability query costs them money!.
Which means the automated query-NS-with-random-crap-domains that many folks suggested will actually hurt NS where they feel it: in the wallet.
I urge my fellow slashwarriors: keep up the automated random pointless availability queries. The moment NS can't abuse their position with impunity, they'll stop doing it or the slash-hordes zerging their WHOIS service will make them pay the price!
I had to google this. I worked with Univac (Sperry-Rand, Sperry-Univac, Unisys, whatever) gear in the early-to-mid-80s. And this was at a military site, so the gear was easily 5 years older than that by the time I got to it. I thought I was old-skool. But dang.
They were 90-column cards punched with round punch-holes. Again, no credit where no credit is due; this was ridiculously easy to Google.
Anyways, I never saw one of the "Univac-avoid-IBM's-patent" cards. Ever. By the time I got there, there was only one reader and one punch connected to the systems (switchable among test and production systems with a channel transfer switch setup). And an IBM 029 off in the corner for the programmers to fix their broken ECL. (JCL to you IBM types.)
So, anyways, I applaud your war-story superiority.
First, and more than sufficiently, of all: who the $curse is going to be taking coding language advice from CIO Magazine? If it's a real practicing software developer, they need to turn in their geek card and coder license immediately. And if it's a CIO or other PHB-level entity, for the love of $DIETY, don't let him start dictating software tool choices on the basis of stuff like TFA!
Second, the author of the article sounds like he has only ever dabbled with Perl, sysadmin-tool-like. He betrays a disturbing unawareness of the recent development in frameworks and methodologies in the Perl universe that track most of the major software development trends and tools available in other communities. His advice, positive and negative, seems stuck in basic out-of-the-box Perl 5.6 or something. Most of the time, that's plenty good enough for the ol' sysadmin "Swiss Army Scripting Language" approach, but certainly missed out on a lot of good work. (The reader comments after the article call him out on this pretty well, so I won't rehash.)
Third, a lot of the advice is universal, not Perl-specific. I mean, stuff like "Don't use Perl in an obfuscated fashion" is like "Don't drive a 1973 Dodge Ram pickup truck while drunk." Very true, very sage advice, but the problem is not Perl (or the truck), it's the obfuscation (or the drunkenness). Code readability is a timeless, domainless, endless problem. The only reason Perl gets picked on for readability is basically bad PR.
Frankly, a lot of TFA just sounds like an excuse to fill up a few column-inches the editor needed filled in.
This isn't a submarine patent. In that case, the patent holder sneaks into the marketplace with a hidden patent and then springs it full-fledged upon businesses using the patented technology.
This case is a bit different. The patent was licensed to the current users of the patented technology--the "bad guy" ship wasn't a submarine sneaking into the middle of a convoy, it was one of the ships already part of the convoy. But then the ship is taken over by another entity... say, a crew of pirates... and they took advantage of their position in the convoy and the fact their intended victims were already under their guns to try to extort more.
Yeah, this isn't a submarine patent, this is patent piracy.
Yaaar!
The only real problem with this analogy is that it doesn't involve cars....
Another Microsoft "We'll do it our way, and you'll do it our way too if you know what's good for you."
I wish Microsoft would at least learn to fake sincerity in actually following common standards. This isn't even lip service. This is "We follow standards (for certain Microsoft-centric values of 'standards')."
Of course, the market has rewarded them, so why should they change? All they need is smoke, some mirrors, and some moderately-skilled PR, et Voilà! "standards-compliant!"
Specious comparison to off-topic subjects != meaningful discussion
No one is pretending that popularity guarantees quality. Re-read TFGPP. On one hand, he states a few unsubstantiatable personal opinions about why he thinks WoW is quality. On the other hand, he argues that leaving (arguable) quality issues aside, it's popular.
Notice the distinct lack of "therefore" between the two discussions. There's no imputation of causality or even correlation; there's no assertion that it's good because it's popular or it's popular because it's good. He says "IMHO, it's good for these reasons. Also, it's popular and commercially successful."
So, thanks for pointing out a well-known but totally irrelevant fact. "Popularity != Quality"? This isn't the "Apple Fanboi" or "Microsoft-sponsored Gartner report" thread; save that argument for those discussions.
Slashdot Mirror
But the actual in-story thought crossing Dave Bowman's mind at the end was "Huh, HAL can read lips. Who knew?"
look at the shooter in that luxury store in, where was it, Omaha(?) before christmas. What effect did that have on people shopping in the rest of the country? Probably about zero.
How about shopping in Omaha? How about shopping in that very store, after the cleanup and such?
A huge spike of sales business, some of which appears to have been "sympathy" shopping.
The optimist in me wants to see this as "The terrorists only win if we let them."
The realist in me notes, somewhat bitterly, that commerce trumps all in this nation.
So I'm conflicted.
Security was being run by an airline? Really?
YA RLY. El Al is fanatical about security, for fairly obvious reasons. They make the posers at TSA look like posers.
Even in Canada. Oh, sure, you have your own "independent" security. But El Al security is running the show inside their gate areas and on their planes, no fear.
Experience keeps a costly school, but Israel's national airline has definitely learned the lessons there.
That would mean my stereo, for example, could be made out of C4.
"This one goes to 11."
which is never ever learned...
A freely accessible network resource is begging to be driven, smoking and shattered, into the ground by the ill-mannered, ill-trained, or ill-intentioned hordes.
Personally, I blame the introduction of AOL in 1994 to the Usenet for this downward spiral. We were doing just fine before all you "me too"s started pouring in.
Get off my lawn, you clueless kids!
if m&ms had genetic traits and were bread
If M&Ms were bread, never mind their putative genetics, I'd never eat them. M&Ms must be chocolate. Preferable dark. With almonds.
<gets up and goes to the office snack shack>
Tell it to street-level drug pushers. They mastered lock-in decades ago. It's only recently that tech marketing has risen to the level of "The first taste is free, baby!"
"Lets see... Track Humanoids... Track Beasts... Ah, there it is, Track Terrorists." <click> <whoosh>
"Now for some serious work..."
"It is hard for the users it's going to at least be that much harder for the hacker"?
Up to a point of diminished returns, at which point it's impossible* for the legitimate user, so they cheat and defeat the whole scheme. (Witness the archetypal "I can't remember this stupid password" sticky-note-under-the-keyboard situation.)
(*"Impossible" is dependent on the user's level of apathy, forgetfulness, or hostility to the security regime.)
But if you have strong armor around you, you look like a less appealing target as to try to find the one weak scale under your wing.
That presumes an equal level of interest and intent between the "soft" target and the hardened one. If the hard target contains the more valuable goodies, well, that's just "crunchy on the outside, tender and tasty on the inside."
Also, for some in the cracking community, an apparently-hard target is an personal challenge to their 1334 hax0r skills, and quite appealing.
People are more likely to jump on an open WAN then try to break into a hidden one with at least WEP.
Again, assuming the values of the targets behind the protection schemes are equal. If all you want is free wireless, then one WAP is as good as another. If you want that WAP for a particular reason, you'll target it no matter what its apparent hardness. Every security scheme is fallible; the real value is measured in terms of effectiveness versus the value of what's protected.
It sounds more like a lot of what we put in to place is useless once they're in, but that doesn't mean to weaken our defenses.
I suspect the author is arguing that we should strengthen our defenses by implementing effective measures (non-self-defeating, like the too-complicated password example above; or "security theater" measures that sound tough and look effective but can be easily defeated by ignoring their fundamental premise, like complete isolation from the outside except for trusted partners, but then trusting those partners unreservedly--if they get pwn'd so do you)
would sound like rants, yet, the only people I know using Fedora are using it "unwillingly:" because their companies run RHEL, because their partners are using RHEL, because they need need to be compatible to RHEL, etc. I know nobody who uses Fedora because s/he likes it.
So why aren't they running CentOS? It is RHEL without the trademarks and the promises-on-paper you don't get anyways if you're running Fedora, and as far as my experience goes it's production-grade. You're not RH's guinea pig like you'd be with Fedora.
People who are running Fedora because they want a solid server experience are mislead. The real reason to run Fedora is because you want to help out on the forefront, pioneering the good stuff that may eventually show up in RHEL (and CentOS).
On the other hand, pioneers tend to wind up face-down in the desert with arrows in their backs...
Futurism was better in the past.
I'm not so sure about that. It was more optimistic, sure, but only by virtue of a creepy simplicism that smacks of final solutions and brave new worlds.
I'll take a messy wide-open future any day of the week, thank you.
I wonder if I can use that excuse to avoid deploying with my Guard unit to the sandbox next rotation?
Well, I think the huge pile of crutches and wheelchairs in the various big cat enclosures should have clued you in first. I'm just sayin'.
and redundant...
but still. Worst... Theme... Evar.
Bring back OMG Ponies!
Make everything babycrap brown like "IT". But make this horrible theme stop!
Damn. I have no mod points.
Well spoken.
TFA much?
And yes, the Apple II series was the first kick-ass game system. I'm old enough to remember first-hand. What was the Apple's competition? The TRS-80? I had one... the games were meh at best. Certainly, in any game that was released on both of those platforms, the Apple's version looked and sounded better.
Oh, yeah. What did Commodore have at this time? The PET? I heard rumors it had games.
Now, contemporaneous with the C64 in the Apple stable was the IIGS. Amazing, but still basically trailing edge. Like the absolute technological pinnacle in steam locomotives at the time that the diesel-electric was becoming the mainstream rail propulsion system. The C64 and the Amiga pwn'd the IIGS in almost every meaningful way. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about. I have all three.)
MOD PARENT UP!
More to the point, as soon as there's no free taste capability, every domain they ninja on the basis of an availability query costs them money!.
Which means the automated query-NS-with-random-crap-domains that many folks suggested will actually hurt NS where they feel it: in the wallet.
I urge my fellow slashwarriors: keep up the automated random pointless availability queries. The moment NS can't abuse their position with impunity, they'll stop doing it or the slash-hordes zerging their WHOIS service will make them pay the price!
I am impressed.
I had to google this. I worked with Univac (Sperry-Rand, Sperry-Univac, Unisys, whatever) gear in the early-to-mid-80s. And this was at a military site, so the gear was easily 5 years older than that by the time I got to it. I thought I was old-skool. But dang.
They were 90-column cards punched with round punch-holes. Again, no credit where no credit is due; this was ridiculously easy to Google.
Anyways, I never saw one of the "Univac-avoid-IBM's-patent" cards. Ever. By the time I got there, there was only one reader and one punch connected to the systems (switchable among test and production systems with a channel transfer switch setup). And an IBM 029 off in the corner for the programmers to fix their broken ECL. (JCL to you IBM types.)
So, anyways, I applaud your war-story superiority.
First, and more than sufficiently, of all: who the $curse is going to be taking coding language advice from CIO Magazine? If it's a real practicing software developer, they need to turn in their geek card and coder license immediately. And if it's a CIO or other PHB-level entity, for the love of $DIETY, don't let him start dictating software tool choices on the basis of stuff like TFA!
Second, the author of the article sounds like he has only ever dabbled with Perl, sysadmin-tool-like. He betrays a disturbing unawareness of the recent development in frameworks and methodologies in the Perl universe that track most of the major software development trends and tools available in other communities. His advice, positive and negative, seems stuck in basic out-of-the-box Perl 5.6 or something. Most of the time, that's plenty good enough for the ol' sysadmin "Swiss Army Scripting Language" approach, but certainly missed out on a lot of good work. (The reader comments after the article call him out on this pretty well, so I won't rehash.)
Third, a lot of the advice is universal, not Perl-specific. I mean, stuff like "Don't use Perl in an obfuscated fashion" is like "Don't drive a 1973 Dodge Ram pickup truck while drunk." Very true, very sage advice, but the problem is not Perl (or the truck), it's the obfuscation (or the drunkenness). Code readability is a timeless, domainless, endless problem. The only reason Perl gets picked on for readability is basically bad PR.
Frankly, a lot of TFA just sounds like an excuse to fill up a few column-inches the editor needed filled in.
Your shipment of rootkit has arrived!
In Soviet Russia, kremvax bang paths you!
This isn't a submarine patent. In that case, the patent holder sneaks into the marketplace with a hidden patent and then springs it full-fledged upon businesses using the patented technology.
This case is a bit different. The patent was licensed to the current users of the patented technology--the "bad guy" ship wasn't a submarine sneaking into the middle of a convoy, it was one of the ships already part of the convoy. But then the ship is taken over by another entity... say, a crew of pirates... and they took advantage of their position in the convoy and the fact their intended victims were already under their guns to try to extort more.
Yeah, this isn't a submarine patent, this is patent piracy.
Yaaar!
The only real problem with this analogy is that it doesn't involve cars....
The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain
"stanch", not "staunch". See http://www.cjr.org/resources/lc/stanch.php
Another Microsoft "We'll do it our way, and you'll do it our way too if you know what's good for you."
I wish Microsoft would at least learn to fake sincerity in actually following common standards. This isn't even lip service. This is "We follow standards (for certain Microsoft-centric values of 'standards')."
Of course, the market has rewarded them, so why should they change? All they need is smoke, some mirrors, and some moderately-skilled PR, et Voilà! "standards-compliant!"
Specious comparison to off-topic subjects != meaningful discussion
No one is pretending that popularity guarantees quality. Re-read TFGPP. On one hand, he states a few unsubstantiatable personal opinions about why he thinks WoW is quality. On the other hand, he argues that leaving (arguable) quality issues aside, it's popular.
Notice the distinct lack of "therefore" between the two discussions. There's no imputation of causality or even correlation; there's no assertion that it's good because it's popular or it's popular because it's good. He says "IMHO, it's good for these reasons. Also, it's popular and commercially successful."
So, thanks for pointing out a well-known but totally irrelevant fact. "Popularity != Quality"? This isn't the "Apple Fanboi" or "Microsoft-sponsored Gartner report" thread; save that argument for those discussions.