You realize you can alter ACLs with a GUI in XP and Win2k as well right?
Parent did specify XP Home. XP Home didn't have the same settings boxes as XP Pro or W2K. There was a hack available to allow the use of the file properties dialog from Professional on Home.
Without the hack you had to use CACLS at the CMD prompt, which I found to be a real PITA.
A machine I had came with XP Home, which I mulibooted with W2K and Knoppix. I bought XP Pro to add to the mix when I wanted to use direct X and the latest version wouldn't work with W2K.
The speed was pretty much the same on W2K, XP Home and XP Pro including the start up time. (XP let you log in sooner, but it was still about the same amount of time before you could do anything. All operating systems were heavily tweaked.) XP Home's only problems were the lack of settings available in the GUI, and the limit on the number of simultaneous connections.
2: You're proposing a reactive method of systems administration. This might be fine for a hobbyist who doesn't care about his system(s), but for a production environment this is playing with fire. You know that support for ReiserFS will disappear (unless you know for a fact that another person/group has stepped up to provide support); why wait until the last possible second, when you'll only have more work to do, to migrate your systems to a new filesystem? Don't put off to tomorrow that which can be done today.
How often is FAT32 updated? I'm pretty sure the kernal still supports FAT12 and FAT16. Considering the popularity of reiserfs there will be plenty of warning before it is dropped, and there isn't any particular need to upgrade to a new filesystem. Filesystem migration shouldn't be a nightmare in any case, unless you image drives to back them up instead of backing up files.
There really isn't enough info in the article. You need an itemized invoice to see what he paid for.
If the tech/clerk told him he had to buy a new drive, they weren't repairing his old drive, and warranty wasn't applied. If he was told he "had to buy a new drive", they had to provide a new drive if paid. (You can sell a refurbished drive, but selling it as new would be fraudulent. I know it's done, but they really don't want to go to court over it.) If told he had to buy "another drive" or a "replacement drive" they could probably get away with a refurbished one.
For a contract to be valid, there must be consideration, so the invoice should show the price of the drive, the credit for the old drive, labor and misc fees and taxes. If the invoice doesn't show the credit, couldn't you argue that the customer had not received consideration for their old disk, thus invalidating at least that clause?
IANAL, but I wouldn't want to try to convince a judge the contract was valid, let alone applicable if the customer's invoice didn't show a credit for the drive.
I was messing around with a Win2K install over the weekend, and wanted to view a pdf, spent a few minutes downloading the installer, and it aborted, explaining that I needed to update IE, couldn't find a hack to get around around it. I ended up downloading an older version of Acrobat Reader (Didn't know of Foxit and didn't have cygwin installed.) I couldn't figure out why I needed to update IE, the only thing I use it for is to download Firefox, well I guess this explains that:-(
If it's low traffic, blocking port 80 isn't a problem. Just set Apache (or IIS) to run on a different port. I use Verizon and run a web server on port 8080. Just change the URL to refer to the port. The majority of my traffic is various webcrawlers, particularly Google and MSN. If you want a commercial site, the cost isn't horrible, but if you're not interested in making money, and don't expect too much traffic...
I don't believe we're under martial law yet. If we were, someone at MIT would have alerted the students to confine their kits to the campus.
If you served, I imagine it was part of your training to be paranoid, and may have saved lives. But that is why we have a military, so the whole country doesn't need to be paranoid.
If you treat civilians in the US the same way as in a war zone, then we are both less free and less secure.
I haven't seen a quote as to how the clerk asked about her shirt yet, so assuming she heard and understood her, ignoring her might have been appropriate. Since she cooperated with security, never threated anyone, they should have let her go. At the time, she probably didn't have legal recourse against a temporary detainment due to a legitimate misunderstanding, I imagine I'd be looking into false charges and libel suits at this point. A judge will probably admonish her for her lack of common sense (and fashion sense), but it seems pretty clear that this was a matter of someone who was too embarrassed to apologize over an honest mistake.
Iirc, with no service packs, in XP the network came up before the firewall. You had to make sure you weren't connected when you booted XP. I believe that was fixed after it became widely known. Not positive as I was natted to a Debian box running a firewall which had dialup access the only time I ran XP w/o updates. (I had restored the factory image after repartitioning the drive to dual boot with Knoppix.)
If management were capable of doing IT's job, they wouldn't need an IT dept. The decision to buy software is based on needs, availabilty, budget and approval. It doesn't make sense to hire a programmer to write software for a task, if the software exists and is established, the needs of the application won't change, IT is not your bread and butter, and the cost of recreating the wheel may be prohibative.
If you choose the only game in town, then risk assessment is meaningless, you had no choice. When you're updating things without testing first, you're not assessing the risk.
The business' need to be productive outweighs their need to be patched, up to date, and running the latest software/OS, especially when security can be maintained through alternative means. If you need to run an insecure service because the latest update will break it, then you make sure that that service isn't exposed to the net. At this time you go to management and tell them that running this software causes this risk, I did this to keep us up and running, but we should be looking at XYZ to replace this because..., or we need to hire someone to..., or we need to purchase the source so I can...
A system administrator's job is to keep the system up and running. The job generally entails preventative maintenance, keeping things secure, up to date, etc, but keeping things running is foremost on your list.
Why didn't you just upgrade all of your Windows machines to Vista?
In a corporate environment, there is some software you must be able to run, or at least replace. The software will likely vary from dept to dept, and MS will not test all possible software for you.
MS decides that they want to remove a depreciated API with a patch. This API has been depreciated for years and is merely a footnote in new documentation. Your screen printing software is 5 years old, the company that made it is defunct, and the cost of converting to a new application is prohibative. The screen printing software uses this API. You patch all of the machines, and suddenly production grinds to a halt.
Whose fault is the mess you're now in?
MS gave ample warning that the API was depreciated and could be removed at any time. The software company may or may not have known what they were doing at the time, but aren't in business anymore. You're the dummy that installed a patch in a production environment without checking to see if it would affect production. Do you really expect your boss to happy that they've lost several hundred man-hours of work, when it should have cost them two man-hours.
You shouldn't need to rely on MS, or even an antivirus to prevent exploits. You also can't count of MS testing all software and network combinations, or caring if a patch breaks your system. If you counted on MS to make sure your system worked then you were in over your head.
For a business (non-incorporated), you use a Schedule C to report gross income and expenses, the difference is your profit which gets transferred to your Form 1040. This increases your taxable income.
If your self-employment income is over $400 you must file a Schedule SE, for Self Employment Tax, which is Social Security and Medicare. You pay half and your employer pays half, since you are self-employed you get the whole bill. Half of the SE is taken as a deduction to taxable income (because it is a business expense.)
If you are married, and file jointly and both are in business (and each of you make more than $400), you should both file Schedule C and Schedule SE. If you're in the same business, split things down the middle. Do not just place both names on the Schedule SE. Someone might figure it out when processing, or they might screw it up, either way it will cause an additional delay.
My understanding is that if you are just selling off items that you have around the home, and not doing it as a business, you would then treat the sales as capital gains and losses and report them on a Schedule D. Which is not subject to Self-Employment tax.
If you wish to apply for EIC make sure that you keep your business records in case you are audited. Keep records for at least three years after the due date of the return, or three years after you filed, whichever is later.
Note: When you sign your return you are stating the information is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, your preparer is not responsible if they screw up, you are. Read your return before you sign it. Your return may not be considered filed until it is signed, and the IRS is not supposed to issue a refund on an unsigned return.
Well, $5000 (Earned Income) - $375 (1/2 of Self Employment) = $4625 which if $354 for EIC. This is off course assuming that he lived in the US for more than 6 months, and is 25-65 years old. You can't claim a parent for EIC, even if they are disabled.
>> You can't decrypt data by saying "THIS IS YOUR ADMINISTRATOR, OPEN UP!"
> Unless all decryption keys are registered on the domain controller.
Which in a corporate environment is probably the case. In a corporate environment this software could potentially allow a user to store information on a corporate server which couldn't be accessed by the administrator. Not a problem if you don't allow it to be installed. It could be useful to managers that wish to store information that the Administrators shouldn't be able to access.
It would be useful in a home environment where everyone uses the same profile and Dad and Mom have information that Junior shouldn't be privy to access, and big brother doesn't want Dad, Mom, or Junior to access his picture gallery.
This has impact in other areas than security as well; what happens if the client wants to adjust the audit parameters? You have to change the sourcecode and recompile?
XP Professional: 46 advisories in 2003-2004 48% remote attack (22.08) 46% granting system access (21.16)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8 had 48 advisories in the same period, 58% remote attack (27.84) 37% granting system access (17.76)
Red Hat's Advanced Server 3 had 50 advisories in the same period - despite the fact that counting only began in November of last year.
If counting began in November it's not the same period. 66% remote attack (33) 25% granting system access (12.5)
Mac OS X 36 advisories 61% remote attackers (21.96) 32% granting system access (11.52)
I actually read the article, and they pretty much tell you they're comparing apples to oranges. I noticed the numbers looked really close for remote exploits for XP and OS X, so I did the math.
I didn't bother to look up any of the exploits found, but the numbers still look best for OS X to me. Since it wasn't a fair comparison the numbers don't mean anything anyway.
Unfortunately, it is the government's responsibility to encourage new economic growth. Capitalism is great (at least I like it), but it requires that the government help it along every once in awhile.
The problem with Capitalism is that the government messes it up, if they stayed out eventually the market would be able to maintain itself. The free market is so warped and contorted because of the gov't trying to fix things, and then trying to fix what they messed up, etc.
Since space is not a "safe" investment, no company is going to invest in it.
It's a gamble, but the rewards are so great that many companies will invest resources for a cut.
Thus the government is going to have to develop the initial technology, prove it, then give it away to companies who wish to make a profit on it.
So we pay taxes, the goverment pays corps for the R & D (with taxes), the corps develop product X, and sell it to us (while we get to pay more taxes on it.)
Leave the government out, let the corporations fund their own R & D, and profit on that (the goverment still gets taxes on it.)
Like most tech support departments, Dell has customer that have a miserable time (my sister has had 8 service calls on a 1.5 year old system). The truth is that most tech support calls (80-90%) are FTF (First Time Fix).
Having 80-90% not call back sounds right, assuming that they're all fixed by support is something else entirely
Well reinstalling windows should work the majority of the time (at least temporarily.) Hopefully less than 10% are hardware problems.
I'm curious as to where those stats come from. My experience with support is, I try it, if it sounds like I know more than they do I look elsewhere for support.
If I'm paying for support, I'll call back and complain that I'm not paying for something that they didn't help me with. If I'm not then they usually don't know that what they suggested didn't work.
Why are they disabling a service when they could just as easily block the appropriate ports? There's a handful of programs that require the service, the problem is that the necessary ports shouldn't talk to the outside world.
JMTC.
Telemarketers have been able to download the list for some time now from donotcall.org. That means they not only have verified that your number is current but that they also have the potential to add to their call lists additional numbers they did not have before.
IANAL, but I'd think since they're liable if told not to call, that using the list in such a manner would be grounds for a class action suit against them, since we had to "sign" the list, if they use it, it should be grounds for a harrassment charge.
It might be dificult to prove that they didn't stumble upon your number instead of geting it off the list though. OTOH, why add a bunch of numbers to your lists that will probably return under 1% results, and increase turnover.
"I went through all the trouble of getting on that list..."
"Let me have your number so I can call you at home while you're eating your supper..."
"Do you know what time it is?..."
"Hold on while I get them."
(Still waiting 15 minutes later)
Unless you want to get nasty. Ask to talk to a supervisor, it takes time and money to train them, regular employees are a dime a dozen, it has the advantage of costing the TM money, scaring the employee (at least if they're new,) and aggravating the supervisor:)
Honestly, this isn't such a bad thing. I use Google as my main search engine as do most geeks, but even after preaching the virtues of Google for years, my 24 year-old sister *insists* on using MSN Search, as she "finds it easier to access and use MSN Search" for some God forsaken reason. I guess because it's just easier to hit the "Search" button on IE's toolbar than it is to go to Favorites and click on Google.
Give her a short list of things to look up on a computer using dial up with a poor connection. I bet you'd find a shortcut to google on her desktop after eight or ten items.
Actually it sounds like MS trying to get Lindow's users to give Windows another shot. If I bought a computer and it works adequately for my needs I'd be much more inclined to shell out $50 for something that I don't really need, than $200. The only company MS is trying to help out is their own.
MS would have to give away their product to make selling it as profitable as selling Lindows, Bill could do it for a short time, but he'd be reaching deep in his pockets to do it, and it'd probably be a good time to invest in Lindows:)
Thus, if you have an IBM system, it will be diffcult to switch to Sun, or from Microsoft to something else. Most state IT departments are tied in to specific product lines, and it's like pulling teth to get them to change.
Actually,
(4) avoid the acquisition of products that do not
comply with open standards for interoperability or data storage;
argues against the use of propriety formats. This prevents them from being locked into one vendor. If you want to save a document in a propriety format, say an MS Office XP Word document, then MS would have to make the format available to the public, so that a competitor could read/write that format as well.
It could conceivably force MS to release the formats they use if MS doesn't want lose their business, or the gov't could simply save their files as text/rich text.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize you can alter ACLs with a GUI in XP and Win2k as well right?
Parent did specify XP Home. XP Home didn't have the same settings boxes as XP Pro or W2K. There was a hack available to allow the use of the file properties dialog from Professional on Home.
Without the hack you had to use CACLS at the CMD prompt, which I found to be a real PITA.
A machine I had came with XP Home, which I mulibooted with W2K and Knoppix. I bought XP Pro to add to the mix when I wanted to use direct X and the latest version wouldn't work with W2K.
The speed was pretty much the same on W2K, XP Home and XP Pro including the start up time. (XP let you log in sooner, but it was still about the same amount of time before you could do anything. All operating systems were heavily tweaked.) XP Home's only problems were the lack of settings available in the GUI, and the limit on the number of simultaneous connections.
How often is FAT32 updated? I'm pretty sure the kernal still supports FAT12 and FAT16. Considering the popularity of reiserfs there will be plenty of warning before it is dropped, and there isn't any particular need to upgrade to a new filesystem. Filesystem migration shouldn't be a nightmare in any case, unless you image drives to back them up instead of backing up files.
There really isn't enough info in the article. You need an itemized invoice to see what he paid for.
If the tech/clerk told him he had to buy a new drive, they weren't repairing his old drive, and warranty wasn't applied. If he was told he "had to buy a new drive", they had to provide a new drive if paid. (You can sell a refurbished drive, but selling it as new would be fraudulent. I know it's done, but they really don't want to go to court over it.) If told he had to buy "another drive" or a "replacement drive" they could probably get away with a refurbished one.
For a contract to be valid, there must be consideration, so the invoice should show the price of the drive, the credit for the old drive, labor and misc fees and taxes. If the invoice doesn't show the credit, couldn't you argue that the customer had not received consideration for their old disk, thus invalidating at least that clause?
IANAL, but I wouldn't want to try to convince a judge the contract was valid, let alone applicable if the customer's invoice didn't show a credit for the drive.
I was messing around with a Win2K install over the weekend, and wanted to view a pdf, spent a few minutes downloading the installer, and it aborted, explaining that I needed to update IE, couldn't find a hack to get around around it. I ended up downloading an older version of Acrobat Reader (Didn't know of Foxit and didn't have cygwin installed.) I couldn't figure out why I needed to update IE, the only thing I use it for is to download Firefox, well I guess this explains that:-(
BtVS was never on the CW, it ran 5 seasons on the WB, and 2 on UPN.
I'm glad to see JW decided to return to TV. But who names his shows?!
If it's low traffic, blocking port 80 isn't a problem. Just set Apache (or IIS) to run on a different port. I use Verizon and run a web server on port 8080. Just change the URL to refer to the port. The majority of my traffic is various webcrawlers, particularly Google and MSN. If you want a commercial site, the cost isn't horrible, but if you're not interested in making money, and don't expect too much traffic ...
I don't believe we're under martial law yet. If we were, someone at MIT would have alerted the students to confine their kits to the campus.
If you served, I imagine it was part of your training to be paranoid, and may have saved lives. But that is why we have a military, so the whole country doesn't need to be paranoid.
If you treat civilians in the US the same way as in a war zone, then we are both less free and less secure.
I haven't seen a quote as to how the clerk asked about her shirt yet, so assuming she heard and understood her, ignoring her might have been appropriate. Since she cooperated with security, never threated anyone, they should have let her go. At the time, she probably didn't have legal recourse against a temporary detainment due to a legitimate misunderstanding, I imagine I'd be looking into false charges and libel suits at this point. A judge will probably admonish her for her lack of common sense (and fashion sense), but it seems pretty clear that this was a matter of someone who was too embarrassed to apologize over an honest mistake.
Iirc, with no service packs, in XP the network came up before the firewall. You had to make sure you weren't connected when you booted XP. I believe that was fixed after it became widely known. Not positive as I was natted to a Debian box running a firewall which had dialup access the only time I ran XP w/o updates. (I had restored the factory image after repartitioning the drive to dual boot with Knoppix.)
And people complain about the GPL!
If you choose the only game in town, then risk assessment is meaningless, you had no choice. When you're updating things without testing first, you're not assessing the risk.
The business' need to be productive outweighs their need to be patched, up to date, and running the latest software/OS, especially when security can be maintained through alternative means. If you need to run an insecure service because the latest update will break it, then you make sure that that service isn't exposed to the net. At this time you go to management and tell them that running this software causes this risk, I did this to keep us up and running, but we should be looking at XYZ to replace this because ..., or we need to hire someone to ..., or we need to purchase the source so I can ...
A system administrator's job is to keep the system up and running. The job generally entails preventative maintenance, keeping things secure, up to date, etc, but keeping things running is foremost on your list.
JMTC
Why didn't you just upgrade all of your Windows machines to Vista?
In a corporate environment, there is some software you must be able to run, or at least replace. The software will likely vary from dept to dept, and MS will not test all possible software for you.
MS decides that they want to remove a depreciated API with a patch. This API has been depreciated for years and is merely a footnote in new documentation. Your screen printing software is 5 years old, the company that made it is defunct, and the cost of converting to a new application is prohibative. The screen printing software uses this API. You patch all of the machines, and suddenly production grinds to a halt.
Whose fault is the mess you're now in?
MS gave ample warning that the API was depreciated and could be removed at any time. The software company may or may not have known what they were doing at the time, but aren't in business anymore. You're the dummy that installed a patch in a production environment without checking to see if it would affect production. Do you really expect your boss to happy that they've lost several hundred man-hours of work, when it should have cost them two man-hours.
You shouldn't need to rely on MS, or even an antivirus to prevent exploits. You also can't count of MS testing all software and network combinations, or caring if a patch breaks your system. If you counted on MS to make sure your system worked then you were in over your head.
JMTC
For a business (non-incorporated), you use a Schedule C to report gross income and expenses, the difference is your profit which gets transferred to your Form 1040. This increases your taxable income.
If your self-employment income is over $400 you must file a Schedule SE, for Self Employment Tax, which is Social Security and Medicare. You pay half and your employer pays half, since you are self-employed you get the whole bill. Half of the SE is taken as a deduction to taxable income (because it is a business expense.)
If you are married, and file jointly and both are in business (and each of you make more than $400), you should both file Schedule C and Schedule SE. If you're in the same business, split things down the middle. Do not just place both names on the Schedule SE. Someone might figure it out when processing, or they might screw it up, either way it will cause an additional delay.
My understanding is that if you are just selling off items that you have around the home, and not doing it as a business, you would then treat the sales as capital gains and losses and report them on a Schedule D. Which is not subject to Self-Employment tax.
If you wish to apply for EIC make sure that you keep your business records in case you are audited. Keep records for at least three years after the due date of the return, or three years after you filed, whichever is later.
Note: When you sign your return you are stating the information is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, your preparer is not responsible if they screw up, you are. Read your return before you sign it. Your return may not be considered filed until it is signed, and the IRS is not supposed to issue a refund on an unsigned return.
Dislaimer: I am a tax examiner.
Well, $5000 (Earned Income) - $375 (1/2 of Self Employment) = $4625 which if $354 for EIC. This is off course assuming that he lived in the US for more than 6 months, and is 25-65 years old. You can't claim a parent for EIC, even if they are disabled.
>> You can't decrypt data by saying "THIS IS YOUR ADMINISTRATOR, OPEN UP!" > Unless all decryption keys are registered on the domain controller. Which in a corporate environment is probably the case. In a corporate environment this software could potentially allow a user to store information on a corporate server which couldn't be accessed by the administrator. Not a problem if you don't allow it to be installed. It could be useful to managers that wish to store information that the Administrators shouldn't be able to access. It would be useful in a home environment where everyone uses the same profile and Dad and Mom have information that Junior shouldn't be privy to access, and big brother doesn't want Dad, Mom, or Junior to access his picture gallery.
He gets paid again.
I tried that, and caved and ordered a copy after they updated the image when I was in the middle of downloading:)
48% remote attack (22.08)
46% granting system access (21.16)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8 had 48 advisories in the same period,
58% remote attack (27.84)
37% granting system access (17.76)
Red Hat's Advanced Server 3 had 50 advisories in the same period - despite the fact that counting only began in November of last year.
If counting began in November it's not the same period.
66% remote attack (33)
25% granting system access (12.5)
Mac OS X 36 advisories
61% remote attackers (21.96)
32% granting system access (11.52)
I actually read the article, and they pretty much tell you they're comparing apples to oranges. I noticed the numbers looked really close for remote exploits for XP and OS X, so I did the math.
I didn't bother to look up any of the exploits found, but the numbers still look best for OS X to me. Since it wasn't a fair comparison the numbers don't mean anything anyway.
The problem with Capitalism is that the government messes it up, if they stayed out eventually the market would be able to maintain itself. The free market is so warped and contorted because of the gov't trying to fix things, and then trying to fix what they messed up, etc.
Since space is not a "safe" investment, no company is going to invest in it.
It's a gamble, but the rewards are so great that many companies will invest resources for a cut.
Thus the government is going to have to develop the initial technology, prove it, then give it away to companies who wish to make a profit on it.
So we pay taxes, the goverment pays corps for the R & D (with taxes), the corps develop product X, and sell it to us (while we get to pay more taxes on it.)
Leave the government out, let the corporations fund their own R & D, and profit on that (the goverment still gets taxes on it.)
Why are they disabling a service when they could just as easily block the appropriate ports? There's a handful of programs that require the service, the problem is that the necessary ports shouldn't talk to the outside world. JMTC.
IANAL, but I'd think since they're liable if told not to call, that using the list in such a manner would be grounds for a class action suit against them, since we had to "sign" the list, if they use it, it should be grounds for a harrassment charge.
It might be dificult to prove that they didn't stumble upon your number instead of geting it off the list though. OTOH, why add a bunch of numbers to your lists that will probably return under 1% results, and increase turnover.
Unless you want to get nasty. Ask to talk to a supervisor, it takes time and money to train them, regular employees are a dime a dozen, it has the advantage of costing the TM money, scaring the employee (at least if they're new,) and aggravating the supervisor:)
Actually it sounds like MS trying to get Lindow's users to give Windows another shot. If I bought a computer and it works adequately for my needs I'd be much more inclined to shell out $50 for something that I don't really need, than $200. The only company MS is trying to help out is their own.
MS would have to give away their product to make selling it as profitable as selling Lindows, Bill
could do it for a short time, but he'd be reaching deep in his pockets to do it, and it'd probably be a good time to invest in Lindows:)