However the paper admits that the only way to be sure that you have killed a kernel rootkit is to completely erase an infected hard drive and reinstall the operating system from scratch. That sounds rather drastic.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft Windows! Install, use, b0rk, reinstall...this has been The Way since the beginning.
You're probably going to be modded troll or flamebait, but for what it's worth I agree and remember exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
There was a review of 'Warcraft 2', back when it was first released, in one of those 6" thick English PC mags. It was hyserically funny, and I bought the game on the strength of it, so I guess it did the job intended. But I had to wade through more than 100 pages of ads just to get to the contents page, letalone the review!
And then there was a story from a 'Byte' columnist (I think it was) about the time he and his college roomie built a poor-man's cleanroom in his mom's bathroom and salvaged junked HDDs for fun and profit.
I always got the impression that the English writers were a little bit out of their depth once the task at hand was anything more than, say, tweaking their autoexec.bat and congig.sys files to free up some extra memory for their games, whereas the American magazine writers were usually grizzled old greybeards, who cut their teeth designing ICs at Motorola, or laying out PCBs at TI.
Not a trolll, not a dig at British technical know-how! Just my own memories anyway.
My observatory is at 6,210' asl on a mountain in the middle of an island a long way from anywhere. The nearest towns are tiny, and not growing (in fact are declining in population) and the nearest cities are small and distant, with several decent mountain ranges between them and me.
My skies are about as dark as any you'll get outside of Antartica or the Arctic. Even allowing for some growth nearby (which isn't likely), light pollution is not something I'm losing sleep over.
However, most other ground-based astronomers are, and should be. I feel very bad for them.
We are in a first world country with a decent infrastructure and it is extremely unlikely that we will have mass powercuts.
That's all well-and-good for you, but this guy lives in the UK. He's worrying about when it gets so cold that the rubber-bands running everything turn brittle and snap. The backup clockwork-powered equipment will probably start (all its lubricating oil will have leaked out long before) so he needs a bit of advice from those of us in "first world countr[ies] with a decent infrastructure".
My observatory used to have its site hosted by a slick corporate-image-type company which runs Win2k/Win Server 2003. The downtime was terrible, and the management (all MCSEs, or working their way towards it...) were utterly hopeless.
So we transferred hosting to a personal friend's two-bit, barely-break-even-if-we're-lucky-but-who-gives-a-s hit, nerdtoy hosting outfit running Debian, and we've never seen an outage since.
This may sound like just another apocryphal *nix fanboy story, but it's true.
And I'm still trying to find the REAL reason several corp. systems I know of failed at rollover. I'm thinking sunspots, but I'm open to the possibility it was swamp gas.
Benmore Peak Observatory is entirely off the grid. As a not-for-profit it has to be, since the cost of getting AC-mains to our remote site is simply unaffordable. So we use solar cells and a wind turbine.
The key is storage: always have a power surplus adequate to cover you during those periods without sufficient sun or wind. Since you're generally drawing on the batteries, not the solar cells, that's critical. You don't really need all that many PV panels to keep a large battery array maintained.
Fortunately for us, when the weather is so bad that we get no sun during the day, it's usually pretty windy! And of course it's nice to know that there's a back-up genset if it ever comes to that.
I'm happy to accept that she is competent, but there does seem to be rather a lot of attention being paid to her soley on the basis of her gender. Is she the only woman in IT?
Regarding the moderation of her posts, and those of her fan club, I also suspect there is something not quite kosher going on. But then this IS slashdot, and it's all part of the fun!:-)
It's in his latest book, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'. But it still embarrasses me to know that I'm a distant relative of George W. Bush, even though everybody else is too.
Just because they aren't 10GHz Pentium IX's is pretty meaningless for many. The mini-itx thing is a Godsend to some of us.
I use the EPIA EDEN 533MHz system for the two weather stations on my mountaintop observatory site. They are plenty fast enough, considering all they do is run the weather app and Opera/Eudora/network-clock/antivirus/firewall.
I don't have AC up here yet, so low power consumption is way more important than beating somebody in a pissing competition over UT2k fps or Photoshop rendering speeds!:-)
Mod me -1 Troll, Flamebait, or, yes, Off-Topic, but I can't help but comment on this. I just spent the last hour reading about things I'd never heard of before, including the whole Censorware project (a worthy cause if ever there was one, and a source of shame to me in the fact that I knew nothing of it previously). I read everybody's statements, including those of the Michael Sims of Censorware.org. I see truth solidly being on the side of everybody other than he in this matter.
All that reading has lead me to conclude that the Michael Sims involved in that whole sorry saga should not be permitted to practice journalism, anywhere, anytime, until he does a full public Mea Culpa. For anybody, Slashdot or other, to employ him in any capacity, indicates either ignorance (of these preceding events) or wilful contempt for the victims of the shenanigans perpetrated by the Michael Sims involved: victims including anybody interested in the efforts to fight censorware.
I find it difficult to believe that the Michael Sims of Slashdot and the Michael Sims of Censorware.org infamy can be one-and-the-same. Why would Slashdot employ such a person?
Sorry to vent, but man, just how shitty can one embarrassed webmaster get?
As If They'd Own-Up To 9/11 Anytime Either.
on
Roswell Declassified
·
· Score: 1
Not that I'm saying they were behind it or anything (just because it was the most amazingly convenient gift from the Gods for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice/Ashcroft co-Presidency...), but, just for the sake of argument, if they *were* behind it, they'd never admit it, and neither would any other administration in the near-or-distant future. It'd be like admitting that, say, the Brits grew tired ofthe Americas and giving them up was all their idea; something historically image-tarnishing like that.
The Bush Clan and Dicky, Donnie, Johnnie and Connie would have sent the Marines to '...Liberate the People of Mars from the brutal and tyrannical Martian Dictatorship'.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everybody gets that right: http://www.unmuseum.org/hindenburg.htm/
However the paper admits that the only way to be sure that you have killed a kernel rootkit is to completely erase an infected hard drive and reinstall the operating system from scratch. That sounds rather drastic. Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft Windows! Install, use, b0rk, reinstall...this has been The Way since the beginning.
You're probably going to be modded troll or flamebait, but for what it's worth I agree and remember exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
There was a review of 'Warcraft 2', back when it was first released, in one of those 6" thick English PC mags. It was hyserically funny, and I bought the game on the strength of it, so I guess it did the job intended. But I had to wade through more than 100 pages of ads just to get to the contents page, letalone the review!
And then there was a story from a 'Byte' columnist (I think it was) about the time he and his college roomie built a poor-man's cleanroom in his mom's bathroom and salvaged junked HDDs for fun and profit.
I always got the impression that the English writers were a little bit out of their depth once the task at hand was anything more than, say, tweaking their autoexec.bat and congig.sys files to free up some extra memory for their games, whereas the American magazine writers were usually grizzled old greybeards, who cut their teeth designing ICs at Motorola, or laying out PCBs at TI.
Not a trolll, not a dig at British technical know-how! Just my own memories anyway.
My observatory is at 6,210' asl on a mountain in the middle of an island a long way from anywhere. The nearest towns are tiny, and not growing (in fact are declining in population) and the nearest cities are small and distant, with several decent mountain ranges between them and me.
My skies are about as dark as any you'll get outside of Antartica or the Arctic. Even allowing for some growth nearby (which isn't likely), light pollution is not something I'm losing sleep over.
However, most other ground-based astronomers are, and should be. I feel very bad for them.
Surprising that Michael Sims posted this "story". Oh no, wait, it's not surprising at all...
It explains so much. ;-)
We are in a first world country with a decent infrastructure and it is extremely unlikely that we will have mass powercuts.
That's all well-and-good for you, but this guy lives in the UK. He's worrying about when it gets so cold that the rubber-bands running everything turn brittle and snap. The backup clockwork-powered equipment will probably start (all its lubricating oil will have leaked out long before) so he needs a bit of advice from those of us in "first world countr[ies] with a decent infrastructure".
C'mon, give the guy a break.
My observatory used to have its site hosted by a slick corporate-image-type company which runs Win2k/Win Server 2003. The downtime was terrible, and the management (all MCSEs, or working their way towards it...) were utterly hopeless.
s hit, nerdtoy hosting outfit running Debian, and we've never seen an outage since.
So we transferred hosting to a personal friend's two-bit, barely-break-even-if-we're-lucky-but-who-gives-a-
This may sound like just another apocryphal *nix fanboy story, but it's true.
OpenBSD = Blowfish with a leaash on another fish with a spiked collar = spiky, poisonous, and into S&M.
And that's the way we like it baby...oh yeah...OH YEAH...!
And I'm still trying to find the REAL reason several corp. systems I know of failed at rollover. I'm thinking sunspots, but I'm open to the possibility it was swamp gas.
It sure looks that way.
The key is storage: always have a power surplus adequate to cover you during those periods without sufficient sun or wind. Since you're generally drawing on the batteries, not the solar cells, that's critical. You don't really need all that many PV panels to keep a large battery array maintained.
Fortunately for us, when the weather is so bad that we get no sun during the day, it's usually pretty windy! And of course it's nice to know that there's a back-up genset if it ever comes to that.
Can't wait to do it again.
:-)
2. Ask if it runs Linux
3. OpenBSD is officially dead on this media
4. Where's the SMP support?
5. Pour hot grits down front of gnaa member's pants
6. Natalie Portman looks really hot with this
7. ???
8. Profit!!!
You're a Brit, right?
I'm happy to accept that she is competent, but there does seem to be rather a lot of attention being paid to her soley on the basis of her gender. Is she the only woman in IT? Regarding the moderation of her posts, and those of her fan club, I also suspect there is something not quite kosher going on. But then this IS slashdot, and it's all part of the fun! :-)
It's in his latest book, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'. But it still embarrasses me to know that I'm a distant relative of George W. Bush, even though everybody else is too.
Kudos sir -- you have raised the bar once again!
Just because they aren't 10GHz Pentium IX's is pretty meaningless for many. The mini-itx thing is a Godsend to some of us.
:-)
I use the EPIA EDEN 533MHz system for the two weather stations on my mountaintop observatory site. They are plenty fast enough, considering all they do is run the weather app and Opera/Eudora/network-clock/antivirus/firewall.
I don't have AC up here yet, so low power consumption is way more important than beating somebody in a pissing competition over UT2k fps or Photoshop rendering speeds!
And there was me thinking that spam was all bullshit...
Mod me -1 Troll, Flamebait, or, yes, Off-Topic, but I can't help but comment on this. I just spent the last hour reading about things I'd never heard of before, including the whole Censorware project (a worthy cause if ever there was one, and a source of shame to me in the fact that I knew nothing of it previously). I read everybody's statements, including those of the Michael Sims of Censorware.org. I see truth solidly being on the side of everybody other than he in this matter. All that reading has lead me to conclude that the Michael Sims involved in that whole sorry saga should not be permitted to practice journalism, anywhere, anytime, until he does a full public Mea Culpa. For anybody, Slashdot or other, to employ him in any capacity, indicates either ignorance (of these preceding events) or wilful contempt for the victims of the shenanigans perpetrated by the Michael Sims involved: victims including anybody interested in the efforts to fight censorware. I find it difficult to believe that the Michael Sims of Slashdot and the Michael Sims of Censorware.org infamy can be one-and-the-same. Why would Slashdot employ such a person? Sorry to vent, but man, just how shitty can one embarrassed webmaster get?
Not that I'm saying they were behind it or anything (just because it was the most amazingly convenient gift from the Gods for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice/Ashcroft co-Presidency...), but, just for the sake of argument, if they *were* behind it, they'd never admit it, and neither would any other administration in the near-or-distant future. It'd be like admitting that, say, the Brits grew tired ofthe Americas and giving them up was all their idea; something historically image-tarnishing like that.
The Bush Clan and Dicky, Donnie, Johnnie and Connie would have sent the Marines to '...Liberate the People of Mars from the brutal and tyrannical Martian Dictatorship'.
BWARHARHARHARHAR...! Nice one dude. I guess it's right there on the shelf next to Keanu's Best Actor Oscars. BWARHARHAR...!