Before my last job got hooked on frequent password changes, I had a set of passwords I couldn't forget and nobody else there could guess: I used the names of some of my DND characters. Not in any dictionary, not spelled phonetically, but the way I liked to spell them. Unforgettable and unguessable.
When I worked at an ISP, they decided to go with 30 day passwords for employees. This is for programs on the internal network, behind the firewall, that only employees have access to. It was also to log onto internal servers, similarly protected. The most anoying thing of it was that you would have to log into these programs or servers each time you needed them and it'd time out in less than five minutes of inactivity. If we'd been telecommuting, and logging in from home, this would have been A Good Thing, but we were all in their call centers, making most of this redundant. Naturally, the passwords were mixed case, alphanumeric, ten letters or more. Highly agravating, to say the least. My was of fighting back was to use passwords like m0therFucKer or fUcKing4ssh01e. OK, it did get embaressing once. I was having trouble with it and had to give it to my lead to check. She was rather amused by my way of making it easy to remember.
I have one generic password that I use for most places. It's simple to type, easy to remember and a pronouncable word. However, you'll never find it in any dictionary because it's not a standard word. I like it because it's easy for me to remember, but impossible for a stranger to guess. Of course, if there are real security issues involved, I use something else, and rotate as needed.
A little bit better solution is having a securid login with a pin code - still not quite there as I only have to get your login name, secuid key chain and guess what your 4 digit pin is.
You still have 10,000 possibilities, and if the pin's randomly assigned, that's fairly safe. My personal favorite for logging into specific programs/servers is s/key. Easy to set up, easy to use if you have a password generator on the client computer. The one I'm familiar with allows you to set up a password for up to 1,000 logins. Each time, the program is given the number of logins left, a key and your password. It runs your password through the hash that many times and you put that in as your password. That way, even if the password you enter is intercepted, whoever gets it can't tell what it would be if you ran it one time less, as they don't know the *original* key used to set things up.
I hope Peter Woodward does play Galen. He was good in the role, and it would jar to see somebody else in it. One of the best episodes of Crusade was the one his father was in.
I have a book published by "print on demand," because it's a book of tech support humor, and that's a small nitche market if ever I saw one. No mainstream publisher would be crazy enough to put it out, but I can make a small profit by print on demand. There's at least one such company specializing in putting old books back into print for the authors, and Piers Anthony has most of his old backlist books out that way at Xlibris just to get them back into print and help out the company because he believes in this type of thing.
Her reply was succinct: three simple words. "You're fired, smartass."
Wrong. First, she had no authority to do so, second, I was considerably senior to her in the company (I'd just never gone into maglement like she did.) and third, she never responded at all. Did I also mention that she wouldn't dare fire me because I could solve tech support problems nobody else on the team understood?
And the best part of the joke is that the Texan didn't end the sentence with a preposition. In that construction, "at" is a particle, and quite proper at the end of the sentence.
It is an offense against English, a sentence to end, a preposition with.
I remember once getting a flame from my supervisor once that was completely incoherent. From what I could tell, she was chewing me out for something I'd done that wasn't wrong at all. (She had about a third of my experience at the company, and a fifth of my skill.) Instead of addressing the issue, I quoted back the worst sentence and asked her to rephrase it in standard English so that I could understand what she was saying. She never replied.
Most business people are accustomed to paper files, where everything is in reverse-chronological order, so top posting makes sense to them. Of course, most of us don't work that way, and dislike it, but they either don't know this or don't care.
I agree that you should never need to use a router to protect your machines and in a perfect world, you wouldn't have to. But this isn't a perfect world, and what we'd do in one is irrelevant. As long as there are people out there trying to grab control of your box from you, it's your best bet. I have a DSL modem that does port blocking; behind that I have a router that does the same. Each of the machines on my network has its own software firewall.
I did tech support for an ISP for a number of years. We didn't support routers either, except for the one we sold. That didn't mean you couldn't use one. It meant that if we found the trouble was in the router (i.e., it went away when the router was out of the circuit) our job was finished. It was up to you to find out why your router wasn't working. By all means, take a router with you when you set up a new machine, and leave it there until you've got the patches installed.
Yes, it does make life easier for parents if what their children see on TV matches the values the parents are trying to instill. The right way to insure this is to restrict what your children watch, not by restricting what's available to watch.
The simplest way to handle this is to count all the identical complaints as just one complaint. Then, there'd only have been three complaints, not enough to bother with. Even when this becomes well known it won't matter, because these blue-noses don't have enough imagination to write their own complaints in their own words.
To a prude, if it's not acceptable for you to watch, then it's not acceptable for anybody else to watch either. They're not saying, "I watched this and found it objectionable," they're saying, "I find it objectionable that other people are able to watch this." They're main goal is to stop other people from doing things they wouldn't do themselves.
I wonder how many of those people have any children to be exposed to TV, and how many are trying to protect other people's children even though they have none of their own?
By the time the technology is ready for that, the price will have come down to the point that the average FPS addict can pretend to afford one.
Re:Done in by the people who would buy this stuff
on
Buy a Piece of Acclaim
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· Score: 1
It's hard for a company to make money selling games, when perfect duplication is possible and people are willing to break the law to circumvent copy protection systems.
And that's where the fallacy in your subject line is. It wasn't done in by the people who would buy this stuff, it was done in by the people who pirated their software. I'm no fan of copy protection, although I don't mind having to have the CD in the drive when you play, but if too many people use stolen, cracked copies, there's no profit for the company, and without that, you have no company and no more games.
I wonder how many of the people who mouned the bankrupcy paid for every copy of a game they have...
We're a registered non-profit corporation. We have to be careful. We don't allow any pirated software on our systems. If a CD is required, we have an original CD. If we only have one, then only one computer can use it at any time, and that's not a problem for us. I notice, however, that you ignore all the other cases I mentioned of people being screwed by this. I guess you don't care about them either.
I belong to a Science Fiction club. We have over half a dozen computers in a gaming room at out club house. For very good reasons, we have no Internet connection for them. (Think of kids downloading warez, porn and trojans for a start.) They love HL, but we'll never have HL2 because of this. How about people who want to run it on laptops away from a network connection? How about people with poor connections, or who want to pass the time waiting for their DSL to be fixed? Clearly the company doesn't give a damn about them and doesn't care about all the potential sales they're pissing away by forcing you to be on-line to play a single-player game.
Maybe if enough of us who are getting screwed started a letter writing campaign and made it clear to Valve how much money they're throwing down the toilet by being so restrictive, they'll bow down, kiss the holy bottom line and change their policy.
Don't mean to be rude, but why does little stuff like corporate patent law even matter when we now live in a society where the House Majority Leader can remain in his position even when indicted?
You do know the difference between an indictment and a conviction, don't you? Just because he's been indicted doesn't mean he's guilty, just that he's going to have to stand trial. Now, if he retained his position after a conviction, then you'd have a complaint.
I metamod at least once a day. I regularly see posts like that modded Troll, Flamebait or Redundant as people try to stifle dissent. Naturally, I metamod them Unfair. With any luck, the ones doing that will soon lose their mod privileges.
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Before my last job got hooked on frequent password changes, I had a set of passwords I couldn't forget and nobody else there could guess: I used the names of some of my DND characters. Not in any dictionary, not spelled phonetically, but the way I liked to spell them. Unforgettable and unguessable.
And you're surprised? I bet they have all sorts of certifications, like A+ and MCSE, but no Real World experience.
When I worked at an ISP, they decided to go with 30 day passwords for employees. This is for programs on the internal network, behind the firewall, that only employees have access to. It was also to log onto internal servers, similarly protected. The most anoying thing of it was that you would have to log into these programs or servers each time you needed them and it'd time out in less than five minutes of inactivity. If we'd been telecommuting, and logging in from home, this would have been A Good Thing, but we were all in their call centers, making most of this redundant. Naturally, the passwords were mixed case, alphanumeric, ten letters or more. Highly agravating, to say the least. My was of fighting back was to use passwords like m0therFucKer or fUcKing4ssh01e. OK, it did get embaressing once. I was having trouble with it and had to give it to my lead to check. She was rather amused by my way of making it easy to remember.
I have one generic password that I use for most places. It's simple to type, easy to remember and a pronouncable word. However, you'll never find it in any dictionary because it's not a standard word. I like it because it's easy for me to remember, but impossible for a stranger to guess. Of course, if there are real security issues involved, I use something else, and rotate as needed.
You still have 10,000 possibilities, and if the pin's randomly assigned, that's fairly safe. My personal favorite for logging into specific programs/servers is s/key. Easy to set up, easy to use if you have a password generator on the client computer. The one I'm familiar with allows you to set up a password for up to 1,000 logins. Each time, the program is given the number of logins left, a key and your password. It runs your password through the hash that many times and you put that in as your password. That way, even if the password you enter is intercepted, whoever gets it can't tell what it would be if you ran it one time less, as they don't know the *original* key used to set things up.
I hope Peter Woodward does play Galen. He was good in the role, and it would jar to see somebody else in it. One of the best episodes of Crusade was the one his father was in.
I have a book published by "print on demand," because it's a book of tech support humor, and that's a small nitche market if ever I saw one. No mainstream publisher would be crazy enough to put it out, but I can make a small profit by print on demand. There's at least one such company specializing in putting old books back into print for the authors, and Piers Anthony has most of his old backlist books out that way at Xlibris just to get them back into print and help out the company because he believes in this type of thing.
It was an excellent review. It told me exactly why I'd never want to read the book and you can't ask for anything better than that in a review.
Wrong. First, she had no authority to do so, second, I was considerably senior to her in the company (I'd just never gone into maglement like she did.) and third, she never responded at all. Did I also mention that she wouldn't dare fire me because I could solve tech support problems nobody else on the team understood?
Yes, it will become a dialect of English; a non-standard one and using it will display a lack of a proper education.
It is an offense against English, a sentence to end, a preposition with.
I remember once getting a flame from my supervisor once that was completely incoherent. From what I could tell, she was chewing me out for something I'd done that wasn't wrong at all. (She had about a third of my experience at the company, and a fifth of my skill.) Instead of addressing the issue, I quoted back the worst sentence and asked her to rephrase it in standard English so that I could understand what she was saying. She never replied.
Most business people are accustomed to paper files, where everything is in reverse-chronological order, so top posting makes sense to them. Of course, most of us don't work that way, and dislike it, but they either don't know this or don't care.
I agree that you should never need to use a router to protect your machines and in a perfect world, you wouldn't have to. But this isn't a perfect world, and what we'd do in one is irrelevant. As long as there are people out there trying to grab control of your box from you, it's your best bet. I have a DSL modem that does port blocking; behind that I have a router that does the same. Each of the machines on my network has its own software firewall.
I did tech support for an ISP for a number of years. We didn't support routers either, except for the one we sold. That didn't mean you couldn't use one. It meant that if we found the trouble was in the router (i.e., it went away when the router was out of the circuit) our job was finished. It was up to you to find out why your router wasn't working. By all means, take a router with you when you set up a new machine, and leave it there until you've got the patches installed.
Yes, it does make life easier for parents if what their children see on TV matches the values the parents are trying to instill. The right way to insure this is to restrict what your children watch, not by restricting what's available to watch.
The simplest way to handle this is to count all the identical complaints as just one complaint. Then, there'd only have been three complaints, not enough to bother with. Even when this becomes well known it won't matter, because these blue-noses don't have enough imagination to write their own complaints in their own words.
To a prude, if it's not acceptable for you to watch, then it's not acceptable for anybody else to watch either. They're not saying, "I watched this and found it objectionable," they're saying, "I find it objectionable that other people are able to watch this." They're main goal is to stop other people from doing things they wouldn't do themselves.
I wonder how many of those people have any children to be exposed to TV, and how many are trying to protect other people's children even though they have none of their own?
By the time the technology is ready for that, the price will have come down to the point that the average FPS addict can pretend to afford one.
And that's where the fallacy in your subject line is. It wasn't done in by the people who would buy this stuff, it was done in by the people who pirated their software. I'm no fan of copy protection, although I don't mind having to have the CD in the drive when you play, but if too many people use stolen, cracked copies, there's no profit for the company, and without that, you have no company and no more games.
I wonder how many of the people who mouned the bankrupcy paid for every copy of a game they have...
We're a registered non-profit corporation. We have to be careful. We don't allow any pirated software on our systems. If a CD is required, we have an original CD. If we only have one, then only one computer can use it at any time, and that's not a problem for us. I notice, however, that you ignore all the other cases I mentioned of people being screwed by this. I guess you don't care about them either.
Maybe if enough of us who are getting screwed started a letter writing campaign and made it clear to Valve how much money they're throwing down the toilet by being so restrictive, they'll bow down, kiss the holy bottom line and change their policy.
You do know the difference between an indictment and a conviction, don't you? Just because he's been indicted doesn't mean he's guilty, just that he's going to have to stand trial. Now, if he retained his position after a conviction, then you'd have a complaint.
I metamod at least once a day. I regularly see posts like that modded Troll, Flamebait or Redundant as people try to stifle dissent. Naturally, I metamod them Unfair. With any luck, the ones doing that will soon lose their mod privileges.