A competent IT technician has just enough time on his hands to learn new technology and retain sanity.
So true, maybe this manager aught to get off his ass and out of the ivory tower and sit invisibly just 10 feet away from his people and follow them around for a day each.
He might learn management and internal users often are unreasonable in their requests wanting the best service, with crappy equipment, verbal abuse, lack of training (users, tech and management) and of course at no charge.
9 chances out of 10, the tech could do the managers job better than the manager could do the tech job.
Rational != Management in environments like these.
if [ `name -p` == "x386dell" ] ; then
echo "Too bad, you should have bought Sun, IBM or HP"
exit 222
fi
case `uname -s` in
SunOS)
# do it this way ;;
ubuntu)
# do it this way ;;
*)
# most do it this way ;;
esac
Nope. I worked on SCTP implementation in year 2000.... Nortel had it in 1999.
New as in it is just making it into some kernels. And it most of us have never seen an application use it. And it may be years before we do. However, as stated it exists in a niche telco market.
Nortel (used to work there) and the industry still has the "central office" mentality. Nortel had one thing right, VoIP is the future. What the telco business as a whole has wrong is how this will be done.
In the future there will no need for a central office, all calls will NOT route through central servers and thus negate a heavy need for sctp altogether! sctp is like a T1-T2-Txxx to sockets, allowing n channels of calls through one IP connection. If VoIP (not strictly defined) goes point to point direct there is no need for a central office. End user devices only need 1 to 4 channels. (Audio/Video/Control/MP3 Movies).
What will happen is someone like Linksys (or a Chinese company) will get enough momentum to produce a $99 device you hook to your internet, some LDAP server out there will be your directory and call routing will go direct device to device over TCP/IP. The MOBILE protocol has a better chance of surpasing SCTP as being in common use. You might even run call conferencing right off your own device.
Central office technology has seen it's peek hayday. SS7, BSSMAP, ISDN, SONET and others are far too complex, expensive, patented and cumbersome - and will be religated to legacy wireline only. SCTP might be used in this niche area to concentrator like a RLCM to wireline services. Hardly end user equipment.
The Internet is slowly eatting the telco business alive. As the traditional telco business market is evaporating.
Wireline needs to quite the bickering, quite tripping on DCLEC cables and get decent inexpensive DSL services or they can say good-bye to their business. DSL is the only hope for the wireline side of the telco business and most are screwing it up big time.
Cisco, if they keep innovation going high are going to put Nortel out of business. Central offices are being replaced with Network Access Point (NAP) and Cisco is king. Nortel might be best to spend their efforts on making the biggest, fastest, cheapest internet router possible. A DMS10000, 10000 as it can take 10000 IP based fibers.
BTW, I loved working for Nortel, but left as I was a grossly underpaid Canadian and could see Stern was going to wreck the company.
How long do you think it will be before this is adopted into the mainstream?
Probably never main stream. Maybe for some telco types in niche applications... but it is too easy for 99% of the world to just open 2 sockets if you want 2 streams, or rpc's and threads... both of which are well supported and seasoned. Sctp is new, new bugs, not supported everywhere and as a result will go not go far.
One might argue it is supposed to be more secure, I argue it is not. If it was it would be tied to kerberos and ipsec and use AES at the transport layer.
Sctp has only one advantage, and this too could be done using TCP or UDP with not too much effort. That is you can open one socket and have mutiple streams inside, reducing the socket count on servers, a problem if you are routing more than 48000 calls or so. But yor could also do this with "TCP connecting pooling", a common way around this issue.
But like ATM, it is the telco business push. ATM anyone?
Sctp to me looks like a problem looking for a home for 99% of us. But at least an informative post so when I see the compile option I will turn it off.
Steamboat Springs, CO may be having a great time moving to Linux, but it helps a lot that it's such a small community. The logistic problems are nowhere near the level they would be if a major metropolis tried to move all their systems to Linux. I think it's a great move, but there's a reason it's happening in a small town in Colorado rather than one of the cities with a high concentration of technology companies.
Actually, being a "low" tech town should they not have more problems than the "high tech" cities? It isn't like there are experts all ovr the place.
Might the problem really be "high tech" cities own too much M$ stock and making reliable OSes does not employ techs.
This guy has it right, install Linux, go skiing is a whole lot better than nursing a cripled OS like windows.
It seems every once in a while, like when contracts with Microsoft expire, we hear Dell is selling Linux computers and then as soon as the stories appear the computers end up buried in some hard to find place on their website.
Very true. No one takes Dell systems with Linux seriously, your better off with Sun hardware that runs Linux, cheaper and faster too as Sun uses AMD X2 processors that blow away anything Dell has.
Somebody is probably making big bucks buying and selling every few days.
Maybe like a game of hot potato. One day someone is going to wake up and find it worth $0.00.
Why, IBM is laying down a trap for SCO. Plain as day the longer SCO goes on the more IBM can claim for expenses and damages. When SCO can't pay, IBM gets SCO licenses and SCO is history.
So, with a length of wire that has a resistance of 10 Ohm, with 120V at 1 amp (120W), you lose
I hate to spoil your day but your calculation assumes resistance as the only component in power consumption calculations. There is also capacitance and in this case inductance to consider. An idle transformer is inductive and not resistive, thus when a battery is fully charges it does not consume the resisitive load as you suggest. IR^2 also comes with phase angles... hit the books.
Me too, Windows Admins are a dime a dozen, like McDonalds. If he/she wants a great pay cheque it comes with getting skills to a level above commodity. That is, can they do more than click'n'call help! And do something better, faster and not so common and efficiently. Have they gone the extra distance?
Senior admin (ANY OS) almost always means my brain has gone from gray to green so you should pay me more. However a real senior admin knows at least 3 OSes, at least 3 programming languages including C/C++ and scripting, has a workable personality and people skills and knows BS when he/she hears it. It is likely a senior admin can do ANY job that anyone does on their systems, and often better...as they must lead. They can mentor off the top of their head anyone in their group without game playing, grand standing and BS politics.
Real good admins are rare birds. Hold on to them if you have them.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that: (1) source code distributions retain the above copyright notice and this paragraph in its entirety, (2) distributions including binary code include the above copyright notice and this paragraph in its entirety in the documentation or other materials provided with the distribution, and (3) all advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software display the following acknowledgement:..."
Funny, never seen a Microsoft OS acknowledge this. I mean it might, but must be well hidden. Where might I find the acknowledgement? Or is it like zlib in IE that was statically linked to hide it's presence.
Lets face it, Microsoft or FOSS is like inviting a wolf to a chicken coop with a promise of no harm. Microsoft is just looking for what it might "borrow" next.
Spam is a social problem, not primarily a technical one, and the solution is social.
This I equate with. Spam isn't so much different than having mobs on the street robbing people or too many DWI drivers on the road.
Here's a solution that would work if we had a real leader as president of the U.S., and not someone who is only interested in benefiting the rich.
Although the president of the USA is a very powerful person, free internet communications has a country like China, with guns, going amiss. The president however can afford a staff of 500 to filter the email before he gets it. This is his only real advantage.
Here is the solution. You, the end user or CEO, ask Microsoft, Dell, Intel, IBM, HP, Verisign, Sun or others that gain much in processing 95% of the spam on how they collectively plan to address it? Hey, if Joe user walks away from the unsecure PC and the Internet (not spending money) they, even Microsoft will come around. And any solution must be intelectually open and available to all without the next billion in mind. Another fact is even a child molester can get a domain name.
I will predict, governments will be involved. Just like when the first automobiles hit the dirt paths of America, there were no fines for careless driving (like careless computing) and speed limit signs (like QoS) and what happens if you harm people and need insurance (internet insurance) or perhaps use autos to rob banks interstate style (interstate internet fraud). Just a mater of time for the law to catch up and realise they can serve and collect on the internet.
Users will cut and paste a userlist from Exchange into a questionable site and with in days spam doubles for everyone and the user is innocent? I got hundreds of stories like this.
It is why I asked to be off of the "public" work Exchange system.
There are inexpensive solutions that work well and cause spammers grief but you need management support to do it as some user is going to whine that he can't get mail from a porn site when their business is diapers. But in the mean time the same company uses spammers on the false belief it will enhance their business. I wonder if they measure the customers they piss off? Hey Viagra, Cailis where are you?
Lets face it, business of all types like spam or in fact they would take rational and earnest steps to change it. Things like user awareness, some firings, rational choices should replace spending on mail filtering, use of spammers to do business and plain apathy of management.
And maybe worse, there are enough lonely users out there that like spam so their mail box is not empty when they get home from work... send a friend an email today!
Your post should have been ranked informative +10 and is underrated. Those that think they are "professional" programmers aught to read this and memorize it. This thread has so much BS about what is right for making code stable it just shows how many poorly qualified people there are out there. But for other readers---
I have been in both kind of shops, dime a dozen out of control cowboy mentality workshops, and a few others with high standards in planing, process, controls and testing procedures. The later produces better software that is not only less flawed and runs better, but costs less in the long term as you don't need an army to program it or to support it's quirks.
Lets dispell some myths:
At minimum, one hour of rational planning and engineering with save 100 hours of programming and 10000 hours of support.
Bad code is bad code, it does not mater if it is C, C++, Java, Python, C#, J# or whatever. Adding another langauge will add complexity but solve nothing. If you want to fix it you need a real software engineer and not a programmer.
9 of 10 programmers are incompetant, at best. If they were compared to brick layers, 9 of 10 could not make a straight or vertical wall. Same goes for software managers. This is the real reason of outsourcing.
Those that do know how to code either work alone or in qualified shops with diciplined processses. The later being the best.
Most I/T shops have the incorrect attitude, "we are not going to kill people by rushing this, so quicly do it". The truth is they don't know how and are incapable of doing it right the first time and have come to accept the high maintenance costs associated with sloppy computing practices. As their user perception deteriorates, another reason to outsource.
Ever notice how I/T vendors bypass techs? Don't trust those who do. If you have a wizard on staff that is socialble, use them but don't abuse them or they will leave. If they are anti-social, loos them.
Management is shallow in their vision, look at the long term in team development and raising the bar of the quality of software products. There will be less to worry about when you sleep.
The act of making the programming changes should be mechanical, repeatable and quick if planning and engineering are functioning correctly. If your programmers need spend more than 8 hours overtime per month your engineering and planning needs development. Also, if you have more programmers than engineers your resource base is out of whack.
Want to manage your project for success? Work the process not the technology.
Their new push for quality engineering over marketing fluff will surely give them the lead again!
I am still ticked at my PERL mobo w. P4 HT 2.4GHz that died just out of warrenty.
If Intel want's back, cheaper, faster, cooler and more reliable come to mind. AMD has this over Intel at the moment and I have a 1.2GHz AMD that keeps on ticking.... so naturally one of those dual core AMD 64 X2 systems is on my list.
I know this, I'm the guy doing Sarbanes Oxley in the IT department here and I let the overly paranoid management know that there is no way to guarentee that information can not get stolen without impacting cash flow significantly.
By the same token you cannot guaranty to management that fraud will not occur in accounting short of not cutting off all payments. Accounting does not make money for any company, they are a cost center. But this does not mean you loose accounting and it's controls because it does not make money. Someone has to watch the farm and the need is legislated for public companies as it is recognized as needed.
Security is like accounting in many ways but less mature in it's operations and legislation. After all the accountants might feel a little better if someone was auditing and watching the finacial and payroll database platform. At least then the probabilities of abuse/fraud are reduced.
As anyone knows the level of security should be guided by risk management. Just like accounting, the controls become more rigid as the risk goes up. And a realistic assessment is required, not wishful business cheapness or stupidity.
Take for example a real company. A graphics arts house servicing advertising. They had millions of photo's and thought who would want to hack us so they saw no need for security. Along comes a virus that infects and destroys almost their entire inventory of graphics works... and no one backed it up or checked the works into a managed revision control system. They are needless to say out of business.
One I was involved with was a small company of about 50 people involved in marketing a product to interested prospective customers so the customer database was a critical part of their business. They didn't have the role of security nor a professional administrator. We recovered their system to operational status and suggested to backup and upgrade immediately as the hardware was old and unstable. They ignored this and 2 weeks later it died permanently without backups. That office closed with 50 people unemployed.
Information Security is more than denying access. It is about keeping the business going in adverse conditions where the customer rarely appreciates it... until it is too late.
The only real problem is overzealous proxy servers,...
Not really, often it best to deny, evaluate and permit with business cause. Provided the response is usually positive where the business need is legitimate then their is not an issue. Any security system will need to be tuned to work correctly. And often users fall into the trap of buying products that abuse protocols to circumvent security without regard to company policy.
The enemy within is in my experience a 50/50 split with the enemy outside. These tools are needed to prosecute criminal and negligent employee behaviors. Some examples I have freequently seen:
Insider trading of company secrets
Posting of internal information on Yahoo and other board and mails services
Had a manager watching video porn consuming the network bandwidth while he was bitching at I/T because the lines were slow and the clerks could not do order input.
Much like the last point, the clerks will call while they are all listening to the radio and complain because the servers are slow... they don't understand nor give a damm that 100 people in an office listening to radio designed for 1 cable modem drives costs up -- they don't know how dumb they come off to I/T. And their managers didn't have the spine to say no.
Had one more advanced user who bypassed the proxy with a VPN type software using SSL. He thought he would not be noticed so we watched his terminal. He was using file shares relayed from his home system and watching, you got it - porn.
Caught one person posting personal comments about the CEO on a message board.
Figured out which user posted the companies address book right onto a known spammers web board as it would be "more convenient".
Had one one user who used their internal priveleges to load seti on 12 shared UNIX systems. The company thought their CPUs were slow and were preparing to buy more.
Had one internal developer who back doored some applications for stuff I can't say, but cost the company a million to clean up.
Had one case where every Windows server bar none was compromised and controlled from the outside. The real kicker is that the systems were compromised from the inside and then controlled from the outside to serve Warez. Got my first copy of W2000 before it was released!
Had one user who would run a "spam" program while working on his PC. He was caught because the companies domain was blacklisted.
and many more...
So remember this when you bitch about security. The behavior above was detected by security tools. And this type of behavior in corporate America costs companies lots and reduces the security of your job. Security is to enable you to do your job AND is there to prevent the 1/100 bad asses from getting inside to do your company harm. And the opposite is true, to prevent the 1/100 bad asses you have hired from compromising your company.
And if you don't think your threat exists from the inside, your either a very small trustworthy group or your just not looking.
What is the right balance between security and productivity, in the corporate IT environment?
Simple, more security. As more secure systems tend to run more reliably (less bugs) and with lower maintenance (removing root kits)than do less secure systems. Knowing most corporate environments, security tends to be lax.
Looking back at my company, 10 years ago, our machines were connected directly to the Internet, no proxy, no firewall, no antivirus software.
Yes, it was better more than ten years ago. If your computer was connected to the internet and caused someone problems you got kicked off for a week or two to think about it. Some were even blacklisted. And few if any ran Microsoft products as their gateways or terminals.
But the fact is with many hundreds of millions of Internet users today practicing self administration of an inherently insecure OS and trusting everything they click on -- without regard to others or their companies costs, security has had to evolve. And believe it or not, firewalls existed 10 years ago.
Then along comes the modern cowboy on an unmonitored cable connection hacking people for sport and profit. People hack computers just to send spam, and the system/ISP do nothing. They have long since abandoned kicking them off. The result is the problem is mow rampant.
have we become so secure that we're stifling our own ability to get things done?
Not at all, I have always kept important stuff on UNIX and Linux, and professionally manage them like I do at work. They haven't been hacked or wormed. I also tend to use "safe" tools as they also fail less as well are more secure.
But the optimum answer to be secure is to use securable tools and secure practices in what you do with your computer, something like safe sex.
For the same money you can buy 4 (or even more) 19 inch screens.
No arguement there, Dell has overpriced this at $2,199 (I presume USD).
Me, I went to the local Canadian Costco and picked up a Viewsonic 27" widescreen N2750W that has DVI, VGA, TV tuner, speakers, PIP etc. all inside. Sure, the resultion is 1280x720 but I don't need to see 10 pt fonts at 1/32". My stock NVIDIA AGP DVI card drives it nicely. The kicker is it is $899 Canadian, but I paid $999 a year earlier. Thinking of buying another one as my wife wants it as a TV. And no dead pixels that I can find.
What is really cool about this is watching TV in PIP, no ATI blunder software to crash.
Let's set aside price. Does anyone know what the power consumption for say 100GB of this vs a 100GB hard drive is? If price weren't a consideration, I might be willing to consider a slight drop in speed, if it meant that my batter would last say 5x as long.
Space would be your next issue, for 100GB flash disk would have to be smaller too. Power would not be much different. Neither would heat.
There are alot of hurtles for this prediction to come true. I figure in 15-50 years this may become main stream in desktops and full functioning portables. Although I can see it for hand held devices right now. Some of those hurtles will be catching up with hard drive density and supassing it, heat, power, write speed (although read is fast), write/rewrite lifetime and cost.
IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
I wonder if they should re-examine this. Perhaps the universe is overall static in size. Much like the conservation of energy...
Perhaps it is our world and solar system that is becoming smaller and thus the universe "appears" to be getting larger. As space dust deposits minute amounts of dust on earth, it increases our gravity and thus affects time. We do know time and gravity have a relationship, and thus maybe we are missing the obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
A competent IT technician has just enough time on his hands to learn new technology and retain sanity.
So true, maybe this manager aught to get off his ass and out of the ivory tower and sit invisibly just 10 feet away from his people and follow them around for a day each.
He might learn management and internal users often are unreasonable in their requests wanting the best service, with crappy equipment, verbal abuse, lack of training (users, tech and management) and of course at no charge.
9 chances out of 10, the tech could do the managers job better than the manager could do the tech job.
Rational != Management in environments like these.
If we are going to run 1000W, EPS 12V etc.
Why not use a quad socket mobo that can have dual procs for 8 cores? Sun and Tyan both have them. Supermicro is on the catchup.
if [ `name -p` == "x386dell" ] ; then
;;
;;
;;
echo "Too bad, you should have bought Sun, IBM or HP"
exit 222
fi
case `uname -s` in
SunOS)
# do it this way
ubuntu)
# do it this way
*)
# most do it this way
esac
Nope. I worked on SCTP implementation in year 2000.... Nortel had it in 1999.
New as in it is just making it into some kernels. And it most of us have never seen an application use it. And it may be years before we do. However, as stated it exists in a niche telco market.
Nortel (used to work there) and the industry still has the "central office" mentality. Nortel had one thing right, VoIP is the future. What the telco business as a whole has wrong is how this will be done.
In the future there will no need for a central office, all calls will NOT route through central servers and thus negate a heavy need for sctp altogether! sctp is like a T1-T2-Txxx to sockets, allowing n channels of calls through one IP connection. If VoIP (not strictly defined) goes point to point direct there is no need for a central office. End user devices only need 1 to 4 channels. (Audio/Video/Control/MP3 Movies).
What will happen is someone like Linksys (or a Chinese company) will get enough momentum to produce a $99 device you hook to your internet, some LDAP server out there will be your directory and call routing will go direct device to device over TCP/IP. The MOBILE protocol has a better chance of surpasing SCTP as being in common use. You might even run call conferencing right off your own device.
Central office technology has seen it's peek hayday. SS7, BSSMAP, ISDN, SONET and others are far too complex, expensive, patented and cumbersome - and will be religated to legacy wireline only. SCTP might be used in this niche area to concentrator like a RLCM to wireline services. Hardly end user equipment.
The Internet is slowly eatting the telco business alive. As the traditional telco business market is evaporating.
Wireline needs to quite the bickering, quite tripping on DCLEC cables and get decent inexpensive DSL services or they can say good-bye to their business. DSL is the only hope for the wireline side of the telco business and most are screwing it up big time.
Cisco, if they keep innovation going high are going to put Nortel out of business. Central offices are being replaced with Network Access Point (NAP) and Cisco is king. Nortel might be best to spend their efforts on making the biggest, fastest, cheapest internet router possible. A DMS10000, 10000 as it can take 10000 IP based fibers.
BTW, I loved working for Nortel, but left as I was a grossly underpaid Canadian and could see Stern was going to wreck the company.
not susceptible to SYN floods like TCP
Init and cookie floods instead, the basic problem still exists.
How long do you think it will be before this is adopted into the mainstream?
Probably never main stream. Maybe for some telco types in niche applications... but it is too easy for 99% of the world to just open 2 sockets if you want 2 streams, or rpc's and threads... both of which are well supported and seasoned. Sctp is new, new bugs, not supported everywhere and as a result will go not go far.
One might argue it is supposed to be more secure, I argue it is not. If it was it would be tied to kerberos and ipsec and use AES at the transport layer.
Sctp has only one advantage, and this too could be done using TCP or UDP with not too much effort. That is you can open one socket and have mutiple streams inside, reducing the socket count on servers, a problem if you are routing more than 48000 calls or so. But yor could also do this with "TCP connecting pooling", a common way around this issue.
But like ATM, it is the telco business push. ATM anyone?
Sctp to me looks like a problem looking for a home for 99% of us. But at least an informative post so when I see the compile option I will turn it off.
Steamboat Springs, CO may be having a great time moving to Linux, but it helps a lot that it's such a small community. The logistic problems are nowhere near the level they would be if a major metropolis tried to move all their systems to Linux. I think it's a great move, but there's a reason it's happening in a small town in Colorado rather than one of the cities with a high concentration of technology companies.
Actually, being a "low" tech town should they not have more problems than the "high tech" cities? It isn't like there are experts all ovr the place.
Might the problem really be "high tech" cities own too much M$ stock and making reliable OSes does not employ techs.
This guy has it right, install Linux, go skiing is a whole lot better than nursing a cripled OS like windows.
It seems every once in a while, like when contracts with Microsoft expire, we hear Dell is selling Linux computers and then as soon as the stories appear the computers end up buried in some hard to find place on their website.
Very true. No one takes Dell systems with Linux seriously, your better off with Sun hardware that runs Linux, cheaper and faster too as Sun uses AMD X2 processors that blow away anything Dell has.
Somebody is probably making big bucks buying and selling every few days.
Maybe like a game of hot potato. One day someone is going to wake up and find it worth $0.00.
Why, IBM is laying down a trap for SCO. Plain as day the longer SCO goes on the more IBM can claim for expenses and damages. When SCO can't pay, IBM gets SCO licenses and SCO is history.
So, with a length of wire that has a resistance of 10 Ohm, with 120V at 1 amp (120W), you lose
I hate to spoil your day but your calculation assumes resistance as the only component in power consumption calculations. There is also capacitance and in this case inductance to consider. An idle transformer is inductive and not resistive, thus when a battery is fully charges it does not consume the resisitive load as you suggest. IR^2 also comes with phase angles... hit the books.
Don't let insightful go to your head, it is BS.
I am so very sorry for you...
Me too, Windows Admins are a dime a dozen, like McDonalds. If he/she wants a great pay cheque it comes with getting skills to a level above commodity. That is, can they do more than click'n'call help! And do something better, faster and not so common and efficiently. Have they gone the extra distance?
Senior admin (ANY OS) almost always means my brain has gone from gray to green so you should pay me more. However a real senior admin knows at least 3 OSes, at least 3 programming languages including C/C++ and scripting, has a workable personality and people skills and knows BS when he/she hears it. It is likely a senior admin can do ANY job that anyone does on their systems, and often better...as they must lead. They can mentor off the top of their head anyone in their group without game playing, grand standing and BS politics.
Real good admins are rare birds. Hold on to them if you have them.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that: (1) source code distributions retain the above copyright notice and this paragraph in its entirety, (2) distributions including binary code include the above copyright notice and this paragraph in its entirety in the documentation or other materials provided with the distribution, and (3) all advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software display the following acknowledgement:..."
Funny, never seen a Microsoft OS acknowledge this. I mean it might, but must be well hidden. Where might I find the acknowledgement? Or is it like zlib in IE that was statically linked to hide it's presence.
Lets face it, Microsoft or FOSS is like inviting a wolf to a chicken coop with a promise of no harm. Microsoft is just looking for what it might "borrow" next.
The real answer here is to run a real BSD or Linux. New Hampshire has it right, live free or die.
In the end, the free shall prevail.
Spam is a social problem, not primarily a technical one, and the solution is social.
This I equate with. Spam isn't so much different than having mobs on the street robbing people or too many DWI drivers on the road.
Here's a solution that would work if we had a real leader as president of the U.S., and not someone who is only interested in benefiting the rich.
Although the president of the USA is a very powerful person, free internet communications has a country like China, with guns, going amiss. The president however can afford a staff of 500 to filter the email before he gets it. This is his only real advantage.
Here is the solution. You, the end user or CEO, ask Microsoft, Dell, Intel, IBM, HP, Verisign, Sun or others that gain much in processing 95% of the spam on how they collectively plan to address it? Hey, if Joe user walks away from the unsecure PC and the Internet (not spending money) they, even Microsoft will come around. And any solution must be intelectually open and available to all without the next billion in mind. Another fact is even a child molester can get a domain name.
I will predict, governments will be involved. Just like when the first automobiles hit the dirt paths of America, there were no fines for careless driving (like careless computing) and speed limit signs (like QoS) and what happens if you harm people and need insurance (internet insurance) or perhaps use autos to rob banks interstate style (interstate internet fraud). Just a mater of time for the law to catch up and realise they can serve and collect on the internet.
I think sometimes we underestimate our users.
I am not sure how you meant that, in sarcasm?
Users will cut and paste a userlist from Exchange into a questionable site and with in days spam doubles for everyone and the user is innocent? I got hundreds of stories like this.
It is why I asked to be off of the "public" work Exchange system.
There are inexpensive solutions that work well and cause spammers grief but you need management support to do it as some user is going to whine that he can't get mail from a porn site when their business is diapers. But in the mean time the same company uses spammers on the false belief it will enhance their business. I wonder if they measure the customers they piss off? Hey Viagra, Cailis where are you?
Lets face it, business of all types like spam or in fact they would take rational and earnest steps to change it. Things like user awareness, some firings, rational choices should replace spending on mail filtering, use of spammers to do business and plain apathy of management.
And maybe worse, there are enough lonely users out there that like spam so their mail box is not empty when they get home from work... send a friend an email today!
Follow NASA's advice... http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml [fastcompany.com]
Your post should have been ranked informative +10 and is underrated. Those that think they are "professional" programmers aught to read this and memorize it. This thread has so much BS about what is right for making code stable it just shows how many poorly qualified people there are out there. But for other readers---
I have been in both kind of shops, dime a dozen out of control cowboy mentality workshops, and a few others with high standards in planing, process, controls and testing procedures. The later produces better software that is not only less flawed and runs better, but costs less in the long term as you don't need an army to program it or to support it's quirks.
Lets dispell some myths:
The best is still a chopper with night vision, so when the perp leaves the car they can be followed. After all, the value is in getting the criminal.
Yawn... Why would someone in this day and age pay this much for a video card?
Their new push for quality engineering over marketing fluff will surely give them the lead again!
I am still ticked at my PERL mobo w. P4 HT 2.4GHz that died just out of warrenty.
If Intel want's back, cheaper, faster, cooler and more reliable come to mind. AMD has this over Intel at the moment and I have a 1.2GHz AMD that keeps on ticking.... so naturally one of those dual core AMD 64 X2 systems is on my list.
I know this, I'm the guy doing Sarbanes Oxley in the IT department here and I let the overly paranoid management know that there is no way to guarentee that information can not get stolen without impacting cash flow significantly.
By the same token you cannot guaranty to management that fraud will not occur in accounting short of not cutting off all payments. Accounting does not make money for any company, they are a cost center. But this does not mean you loose accounting and it's controls because it does not make money. Someone has to watch the farm and the need is legislated for public companies as it is recognized as needed.
Security is like accounting in many ways but less mature in it's operations and legislation. After all the accountants might feel a little better if someone was auditing and watching the finacial and payroll database platform. At least then the probabilities of abuse/fraud are reduced.
As anyone knows the level of security should be guided by risk management. Just like accounting, the controls become more rigid as the risk goes up. And a realistic assessment is required, not wishful business cheapness or stupidity.
Take for example a real company. A graphics arts house servicing advertising. They had millions of photo's and thought who would want to hack us so they saw no need for security. Along comes a virus that infects and destroys almost their entire inventory of graphics works... and no one backed it up or checked the works into a managed revision control system. They are needless to say out of business.
One I was involved with was a small company of about 50 people involved in marketing a product to interested prospective customers so the customer database was a critical part of their business. They didn't have the role of security nor a professional administrator. We recovered their system to operational status and suggested to backup and upgrade immediately as the hardware was old and unstable. They ignored this and 2 weeks later it died permanently without backups. That office closed with 50 people unemployed.
Information Security is more than denying access. It is about keeping the business going in adverse conditions where the customer rarely appreciates it... until it is too late.
The only real problem is overzealous proxy servers, ...
Not really, often it best to deny, evaluate and permit with business cause. Provided the response is usually positive where the business need is legitimate then their is not an issue. Any security system will need to be tuned to work correctly. And often users fall into the trap of buying products that abuse protocols to circumvent security without regard to company policy.
The enemy within is in my experience a 50/50 split with the enemy outside. These tools are needed to prosecute criminal and negligent employee behaviors. Some examples I have freequently seen:
So remember this when you bitch about security. The behavior above was detected by security tools. And this type of behavior in corporate America costs companies lots and reduces the security of your job. Security is to enable you to do your job AND is there to prevent the 1/100 bad asses from getting inside to do your company harm. And the opposite is true, to prevent the 1/100 bad asses you have hired from compromising your company.
And if you don't think your threat exists from the inside, your either a very small trustworthy group or your just not looking.
What is the right balance between security and productivity, in the corporate IT environment?
Simple, more security. As more secure systems tend to run more reliably (less bugs) and with lower maintenance (removing root kits)than do less secure systems. Knowing most corporate environments, security tends to be lax.
Looking back at my company, 10 years ago, our machines were connected directly to the Internet, no proxy, no firewall, no antivirus software.
Yes, it was better more than ten years ago. If your computer was connected to the internet and caused someone problems you got kicked off for a week or two to think about it. Some were even blacklisted. And few if any ran Microsoft products as their gateways or terminals.
But the fact is with many hundreds of millions of Internet users today practicing self administration of an inherently insecure OS and trusting everything they click on -- without regard to others or their companies costs, security has had to evolve. And believe it or not, firewalls existed 10 years ago.
Then along comes the modern cowboy on an unmonitored cable connection hacking people for sport and profit. People hack computers just to send spam, and the system/ISP do nothing. They have long since abandoned kicking them off. The result is the problem is mow rampant.
have we become so secure that we're stifling our own ability to get things done?
Not at all, I have always kept important stuff on UNIX and Linux, and professionally manage them like I do at work. They haven't been hacked or wormed. I also tend to use "safe" tools as they also fail less as well are more secure.
But the optimum answer to be secure is to use securable tools and secure practices in what you do with your computer, something like safe sex.
For the same money you can buy 4 (or even more) 19 inch screens.
No arguement there, Dell has overpriced this at $2,199 (I presume USD).
Me, I went to the local Canadian Costco and picked up a Viewsonic 27" widescreen N2750W that has DVI, VGA, TV tuner, speakers, PIP etc. all inside. Sure, the resultion is 1280x720 but I don't need to see 10 pt fonts at 1/32". My stock NVIDIA AGP DVI card drives it nicely. The kicker is it is $899 Canadian, but I paid $999 a year earlier. Thinking of buying another one as my wife wants it as a TV. And no dead pixels that I can find.
What is really cool about this is watching TV in PIP, no ATI blunder software to crash.
Let's set aside price. Does anyone know what the power consumption for say 100GB of this vs a 100GB hard drive is? If price weren't a consideration, I might be willing to consider a slight drop in speed, if it meant that my batter would last say 5x as long.
Space would be your next issue, for 100GB flash disk would have to be smaller too. Power would not be much different. Neither would heat.
There are alot of hurtles for this prediction to come true. I figure in 15-50 years this may become main stream in desktops and full functioning portables. Although I can see it for hand held devices right now. Some of those hurtles will be catching up with hard drive density and supassing it, heat, power, write speed (although read is fast), write/rewrite lifetime and cost.
9 Dark energy
IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
I wonder if they should re-examine this. Perhaps the universe is overall static in size. Much like the conservation of energy...
Perhaps it is our world and solar system that is becoming smaller and thus the universe "appears" to be getting larger. As space dust deposits minute amounts of dust on earth, it increases our gravity and thus affects time. We do know time and gravity have a relationship, and thus maybe we are missing the obvious.