From the Charlie Miller interview mentioned elsewhere in this thread...
Another question from the Twittersphere: What OS/browser pairing to you use? Do you do anything special (beyond default settings) to secure yourself while browsing?
You're not trying to pwn me are you??? Have you ever heard the saying about the cobbler's kids not having shoes? That's me, I'm afraid. I use Safari on OSX with no special settings. This isn't the most secure combination, by any stretch of the imagination, but I like it. It's designed by Apple engineers to be easy to use and 'just work' and it does. The risk of malware is low, and hey, I'm a security expert right:) The risk of a targeted attack is real, except I don't think I'm important enough to be targeted! So I rely on security by obscurity, I guess
I use a similar method, but then apply an additional layer of obfuscation by putting my password that I've generated with my algorithm through something like an MD5 hash. If I can't remember the password, I can always recreate it, but the chances of anyone stumbling across it with anything other than brute force are miniscule. You could even write your passwords down and it wouldn't make a difference. All you're giving them is the seed. You can also apply simple encryption to them, such as having a deviation pattern from the password you've written down (i.e. first character is to the left of the one I've written down, second one two characters up on the keyboard, etc. I've also had success just keeping a list well hidden such as making a file called.nothing_interesting_in_here (for example) and hiding it down in/var or/etc somewhere. The chances of some miscellaneous laptop thief getting root and going ls-la through all of your config directories is relatively small. You just have to remember where you put the file.
We actually did this on a network that I ran for a while. Servers were birds of prey (kestrel, hawk, eagle), internal servers were flightless birds (kiwi, ostrich, etc.) Mac workstations were waterfowl (mallard, egret, swan, flamingo), laptops were rodents (rabbit, woodmouse, groundhog), fileservers were large herbivores (rhino, hippo, etc.) Linux workstations were types of deer and related species (ibex, impala, moose) and I reserved the entirety of aquatic invertebrates for naming Windows workstations (cuttlefish, octopus, squid, sponge, sea_cucumber) but that might just be personal prejudice. The other aspect of this that worked nicely, is that I reserved names for various floors in the building or remote locations for different geographical areas, so I knew that hippo was a fileserver on the 2nd floor of the main office (Africa) while bison was a fileserver on the 1st floor (North America). This requires a bit of pre-planning since you are allowed more linux workstations in Africa than in South America, but on the plus-side, almost all of those names are your spellchecker, and a lot of them, people have actually heard of which mean fewer errors and questions. It also gives you a simple way to physically identify the host -- I put little pictures on the cases.
I teach in a film program and am also the assistant artistic director for a film festival. Our preferred format for most tasks is VHS. Here's why. Of the thousand or so submissions we get to the festival each year, the prescreening copies that come in on DVD have a failure rate of approximately 20%. This is a combination of bad media, damaged media, or incorrectly authored media. Our VHS failure rate is 0%. We have never gotten a bad VHS tape. The only advantage to a DVD is that most computers will recognize NTSC, PAL and SECAM discs while multiformat VHS players are particularly expensive, as are multiformat monitors. On the other hand, getting your PAL or SECAM tape dubbed to NTSC VHS is generally pretty cheap. Since 80% of our submissions are from overseas, this is particularly critical for us.
In the classes that I teach, it is very common to show clips from movies to illustrate a concept or start a discussion. Students are given assignments to compile clips and present them. Having a student load a DVD, wait for the FBI warning, wait for the studio graphics to go by, wait for the menu to load, skip to the nearest chapter point, fast forward to the clip, have the DVD get stuck, etc. is a complete waste of time. Much better for them to take the DVDs to our lab, put it in one of the CSS-removal players and dub it to VHS -- this means we can spend our time in class just looking at the clip (and this academic use is exactly why fair use exemptions are in the law, lawyers). The same is true of cueing a VHS tape. You cue it, and when you take it to class, it's still cued. See above about cueing DVDs.
We are going to continue to use VHS for as long as we can, and don't even get me started about CSS and Macrovision, Feh.
The core issue here is the presence of a search warrant. IANAL, but my understanding is that if you have 20 kilos in the trunk of your car, and a service technician spots them, that falls under the "probable cause" clause under which the cops can search your car. If your plumber calls the cops and says, "I think my client has a meth lab in his basement," the cops would have to provide a judge with enough evidence to obtain a warrant to search your house.
The question here is: which category is your computer in? The EFF says it's on the house side of the equation. The entire reason cops can search your car is that you agree to it when you are issued a driver's license; driving is considered a voluntary practice, and as such you are required to give up some of your 4th ammendment rights in order to do it. Taking your computer to a repair shop in no way alters your relationship with law enforcement -- you have not agreed to the suspension of your rights. Thus, it requires a warrant. To whit, your terrorism example, the cops would still have to acquire a warrant to search your house and many judges would be hesitant to issue one since writing in the margins of a book is clearly a protected 1st ammendment right. On the other hand, the cops might bring you in and ask you some questions, and they are perfectly entitled to do so.
There's something else very fishy here. There are already a number of products on the market that do the same thing as both of these products: for example, as well as this.
IIRC, the condition of "prior art" will negate a patent, as will simply not defending a patent in court. Since the patent specifies "an MP3 player" and not "a 60 gig iPod Photo," products which do exactly the same thing for a shuffle or a mini should negate the patent strictly on the enforcemeent clause. By the way, I've bought one of each of these, and they both totally suck. The FM transmitters are basically useless. They do keep it charged, though.
In addition to other things, I also oversee a facility which checks out camera equipment to students in a university film program. I cannot imagine a situation in which cameras receive more abuse, and this is my recommendation. The http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O= productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=302346&is=REGSony PDX-10. It is the smallest and cheapest of Sony's "Prosumer" cameras, and is as durable as any of their professional models. We have one unit that has been in continuous use in the field for 4 years and has never had maintenance problems bigger than needing the heads cleaned. It is a 3 chip camera, has a large, good lens, and a durable body. These models also have an excellent shotgun mic and will record in DVCAM mode which shortens the recording length of the tape but improves error correction. (Contrary to popular belief, this does not require DVCAM tapes -- any DV tape will work in either mode.)
Make no mistake, these cameras are not cheap, (circa $1800) but cameras are one of the few items where you truely get what you pay for. No consumer camcorder will ever have the lifespan, durability, or reliability of a professional camera, and when you look at TCO, $1800 pays for itself pretty quickly when you're buying another $600 camera every year. Another poster wished someone made a "toughbook" camera. They do, and these are they.
The problem is a little deeper than that. The implication here is that the data was on consumer banking customers, which for Citibank, constitutes only a small percentage of their gross revenue. The vast majority of the money large banks make is in their commercial divisions. Even if 100 percent of Citibank's consumer banking customers were to leave, it probably wouldn't affect their bottom line by more than about 10%. Their real bread and butter is in stuff like short term commercial loans where they might lend another mega-corp 100 million overnight, and net 3 million in interest. It takes a lot of mortgages to net the bank 3 million bucks, but the overhead (investment in personnel and facilities) is roughly equivalent for a 300K home loan and a 300 million overnight loan. Frankly, I think they just don't care that much about their consumer banking customers. Why would they? Lose low-margin high maintenance customers? Best Buy has a corporate strategy specifically designed to do just that (not that I'm saying that's a good thing, mind you...)
This is where I tend to part ways with most free market people. The consumer is essentially powerless in this relationship unless they utilize their perogative to legislate change.
The piece was Allegri's Miserere and it was deemed too beautiful to be performed anywhere outside of the Sistine Chapel. There are numerous stories surrounding incident which is quite possibly one of the earliest urban legends. Anyway, the whole story is recounted here. Mozart may have reproduced the piece from memory after a 1769 visit (when he was 12). Mozart died in 1791, so it was "loosely" "around 1800" as the parent suggests.
There are a number of firewire based swappable drive options, like this one available these days for a couple hundred bucks. Drives are so cheap it's entirely feasible to have multiple copies of your backups, one online and one in a safe deposit box, which end-runs the offsite backup (and rm -rf*) complaint problems that were in the previous RAID-5 post while maintaining the convenience of online backups. In my business, we've been backing up to CD since the mid 90's (yay 2x! This is so much faster!) and have discovered a number of discs that have disintigrated. None of it is mission critical, but when we're trying to put together a portfolio presentation, it's disappointing to find that a project you put blood sweat and tears into is gone. IMHO, hard drives are much more stable, and when it comes time to move them to solid-state storage, it'll be a lot easier to copy them in 250GB media units than 640MB media units.
There has also been a fair amount of talk about using dirigibles for heavy lifting and cargo carrying with a similar cost per pound to trains or ships. Also, the heavy lifting capacity could be used to combat fire more effectively than planes or helicopters.
It sounds to me like you have fewer problems with NAT as a concept than you do with NAT being configurable to your needs. There are a number of very, very good NATing firewalls available for Linux; I recommend monmotha (look for it on Freshmeat) which runs very nicely on a salvaged 300 Mhz P II with 64 MB of RAM.
I have about 8 machines currently behind my firewall using NAT, and have never had any problems with redirects to strange ports, etc. Even if you want to run some servers on the other side of the firewall, even if your ISP blocks port 80, just use:
foo 86400 IN A 216.219.239.186:2222;Cl=2
bar 86400 IN A 216.219.239.186: 2223;Cl=2
in bind (or whatever is appropriate for your DNS server) and you're set once you've redirected those ports on your firewall to 80 on your server (or not, depending on your Apache config).
The other advantage to using linux for your firewalling is that you can spoof your mac address if your ISP has the rather inconvienient policy of "securing" their network by authenticating by MAC address.
Call me a jackass, but something else they should consider resurrecting from the Apllo era is their naming schema. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo all awaken something in our psyche; they are all culturally loaded, powerful metaphors. Just as the rockets -- Saturn, Atlas, etc., they draw on the mythological significance of the names of the planets themselves and it gives the entire endeavour a weighty significance that STS-* will never manage to create.
Any marketing (or propaganda) person will tell you how quickly people come to accept something as important if it seems important. The mythological naming schema gives the program some of the weight that it needs to win the battle for mindshare in the contemporary political environment. I propose Prometheus as the name for the new capsule program; space exploration could use a bringer of enlightenment.
Actually, back in the day, they did. Orange computing used to make a PCI card with an entire pentium 100 computer on it that would share the hard drive on your 604 mac, you could access it through a window on your mac desktop. I think they discontinued them because they were useless; 500 mhz processors were showing up in the marketplace and the Orange card was more expensive than a complete PC.
The actual etymology of "boxen" as I recall it is in reference to women: a derogatory term for women being "box" as in "the box a dick comes in." Thus spawning turns of phrase such as "I'm gonna go out and get me some box tonight." And other redneckisms.
The extention of this is that a good looking woman is a "fox," and since pluralizing as "foxes boxes" makes absolutely no sense, the term "foxen boxen," naturally, was born. It was then a short migration to reusing the term in reference to computers since most/. posters have never seen a woman, nor would they have any idea what to do with one if they did.:)
I think that Katz is largely right, but he missed a critical issue that is really destroying what is left of integrity-driven American journalism: advertising dollars. It has generally been accepted that local newspapers don't run anything too controversial because it will piss off the local car dealerships, who will then pull their advertisements, and the paper will cease to exist. The same with local news broadcasts. National news, however, is different. Papers like the New York Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, and the LA times have national distribution, and have long been thought of as reliable, accurate and well considered news sources. People advertise in the NYT because it gives the advertiser an air of authority, so the NYT doesn't have to wonder where it's next advertising buck is coming from.
(For those of you who don't know, the cover price on a newspaper barely covers the printing costs, much less the distribution or paying all of those nice reporters and editors).
National TV news was much the same way for many years; people trusted 60 minutes and Walter Cronkite because those shows were not expected to pay for themselves. They were paid for by advertising revenue from other parts of the network, the idea was that if people trusted your news people, they would like your network and watch your other shows, too. Having a good evening news program was a public service designed to maintain viewer loyalty to the networks.
Enter the Cable News Network. How has this changed things? Well, how does CNN exist? On advertising dollars. How do you generate add revenue? You provide viewers for those ads. And how do you provide viewers? You repeat the same sensationalistic story over and over again, with a slight variation each time so that people are afraid to turn the channel.
"Oh my God! Anthrax is everywhere! I'd better stay home and watch CNN today instead of going to work and providing for my family and reassuring them that their chances of contracting anthrax are about one-tenth that of them winning the Florida lottery."
Any time the presentation of news is contingent on that news' ability to attract advertising dollars (whether explicitly or implicitly -- I'm not saying CNN only runs stories that it thinks will attract advertisers, but they sure as hell don't run things that will offend, or deal with issues that the majority of Americans aren't interested in) there is something dreadfully wrong. As a journalist, if money or politics (e.g. The Insider) is driving the content of your news, you should be cricified. But by and large, the public seems to accept news-as-entertainment without so much as a blink. Oh well.
And speaking of old-school journalism, Katz, how about a little proof reading. For a fun game, find the place where the word "the" shouldn't be, in the above article.
That's why I buy only trade paperbacks. And then only ones that are recommended by trusted friends or comic-shop employees that I really trust. I don't mind paying $15 for 8 issues of Transmet or something that is really worth reading (Cerebus, etc), but I do resent paying $2.95 for a single book that sucks.
I have bought all of the Transmet books to date, and Alan Moore's Top Ten (which was just cancelled, damnit) in TPB format, and feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of them. I'm not a collector, just a reader, so this arrangement suits me fine. Plus the trade paperbacks fit on a shelf better.:)
Warrin Ellis' comic Transmetropolotain (Transmet for the cool people out there) goes into great detail to describe a society in which nanotech has changed the way people live, including being able to make virii that are capable of broadcasting a video signal. Essentially, cameras are everywhere, which leads to Ellis' extrapolation of what happens when people are under constant observation? They stop caring what other people think.
Even more than the privacy issues, I think that the most frightening aspect of ubiquitous security cameras is the impact that they will have on us as a society. How do you think when you have no internal monologue? Do you dare go to the bathroom, knowing that your ass could wind up on a fetish site within minutes? Or, do you simply do as Ellis suggests and stop caring whether or not people see your ass?
I don't have any answers, I'm just positing the question. Personally, I blame the Chinese; these certainly are "interesting times."
Just don't nail me as flamebait right out of the gate, please.
The new apple iBooks are really, really nice pieces of hardware, particularly for the money, and they run Yellow Dog beautifully. See this slashdot article for more info.
I keep telling people about them and they say: "But this Toshiba goes to 11."
Yeah, and you can edit digital video on the road with this one, and it does everything that that Toshiba does.
"But this one goes to 11."
I administer a mixed office of macs, linux boxen and windows machines, and feel that all three machines have their place, it just seems sometimes that people don't give apple's hardware its due. Whatever else is wrong with them (and there's plenty, of which I'm sure I will be reminded in the posts that follow this one up) they do make really, really good hardware, and it's not as expensive as everybody thinks that it is. Go configure an iBook at the apple store, then configure a notebook from any other manufacturer to the same specs (if you can) and look at the price. I'd be surprised if there's $100 difference either way. And between OS X and Yellow Dog, there are plenty of configuration options.
Don't take me for a mac zealot, I just hate it when people either (a dismiss apple just 'cause their apple, or, (b make an uninformed or prejudicial decision for any reason. Apple certainly has their shortcomings, and I am not blind to them, they often seem to forget that good design is: "form plus function, followed by meaning." But don't let that discourage you from looking.
I have PPPoE at home and have never had any problems with it. I am running a masquerading firewall under RH 7.1, which is running roaring penguin PPPoE. ADSL connects on bootup, and has stayed connected for up to 60 days at a stretch. Every five minutes, a cron job runs and checks to see if the connection is up. If it is not, it reconnects, and if it receives a different IP, it notifies my DNS server, which updates the entry. It does help that I run my own DNS on a server that's on a DS3, but...
I run a small web server through this connection and have never had any problems with it, nor have I had any problems with any services including VPN and SWAN connections. It's been pretty painless once I got the scripts written. Contrary to what I've heard people saying here, my ping times are consistently around 10-18 ms. Sometimes slower at peak useage times, but generally less than 25ms, even then.
My present service is through a Bellsouth reseller called MPINet in central Florida, who in turn is part of Duro Communications. I also use their business DSL for one of our offices, which has a static IP and is running POATM, I think. The performance is pretty similar to my home DSL. The real deal, though is Directv's dsl service, static IP, free router and no installation charge for $49.95/month. I'm gonna switch to them as soon as my contract expires with MPINet.
Actually...
When looking at "Total Cost of Ownership," it breaks down something like this, for me. I administer about 20 linux machines, 30 macs and a handful of Windows PC's, mainly NT and 2K.
I do buy linux distros, mainly because I can purchase three or more of them for the cost of one Windows license, and I get those cool Red Hat stickers. I am also supporting a company that I believe in. Having CD installers around makes things easy, and you get some support with your CD purchase, and though I've never actually used it, it does make my bosses happy that I have that to fall back on. The real difference, though, is that I only have to buy one set of Red Hat CD's for 20 linux boxen. Cost per year, about $100. Upgrading from NT to 2000 cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $2000 (including staff time). Upgrading from Red Hat 6.2 to 7.1 cost about $500 including staff time.
What we were talking about, though, is total cost of ownership. Windows machines, mainly running After Effects and Maya. Expensive workstations to begin with. The cost of the software that runs them and on them pushes the purchase price per system up to about $20,000. This is for, for example, dual processor, gig of ram, ultra160 SCSI or RAID, Fire GL4 3D card, 21" trinitron, sometimes two of the above, plus the software. They are windows machines, so I spend about an hour a week on each machine doing routine maintenance, software updates, figuring out why they are crashing, dealing with hardware failures, etc.
Macs: purchase price: $4,000-$5,000 plus $3000 for software (Photoshop, Quark, After Effects, Premiere, etc). This gets you dual processors, gig of ram, we can normally live with ATA hard drives in those machines. I set them up correctly, and then annually, I burn a disc with all of the software updates, reformat the hard drive and make everything current. 3 days of my time per year. In 6 years, I have never had a hardware failure on a Mac, with the exception of a keyboard that somebody dropped a cup of coffee on. I always get angry when people say that Macs are more expensive than PC's. That's probably true on the low end of the spectrum, but when you are talking about workstations, and not desktop PC's the mac is a real bargain. I've got two machines on my desk: a G-4 450 with ATA and a Dell dual P3-700 with Ultra 160. Both have.5GB of ram. The mac is as fast in virtually every measureable or practical comparison. and cost less than half of what the Dell cost. Not that I do that many comparisons now that the Dell is running Red Hat instead of NT.
The linux machines. Mostly servers, a lot of them from Penguin Computing. I have had one hardware failure, an IBM deskstar 75 GB hard drive, which Penguin replaced in the most painless warranty experience I have ever had. They tend to cost less than $5000, I set them up, and basically never think about them again, with the exception of our firewalls and web servers, which require constant tending.
The biggest hassle with the Windows machines and the Macs is that most of the software, you have to pay for as well. While the hardware-cost to performance comparison is about dead even between a Linux workstation and a Windows workstation, the total cost is much higher on the Windows machine because of the enormous software investment. Even Office is insanely expensive unless you're buying an upgrade. At one point, when discussing the liability associated with software piracy, my boss suggested: "wouldn't it be cheaper to pirate the software, then just drop the cpu's out the window into the lake if anyone from the Business Software Alliance ever shows up?" Do the math. He's right.
The linux workstations and servers are pretty much fire-and-forget, but in the event of a mishap, the repair time is huge.
Bottom Line:
Windows: high initial cost, highest maintenance cost, highest software cost.
Linux: low initial cost, low maintenance cost, lowest software cost, longest down-time in the event of a failure.
The answer to the question is: Linux is cheaper than Windows, particularly when you realize some economy of scale by installing it on numerous machines. And at the end of the day, all my boss cares about is how much it costs.
This is a little off topic, but I've seen some other similar things, so, my $.02:
I just had an amazing experience with tech support at Penguin Computing. I have a server that was in immediate danger of losing its IBM deskstar 75 GB drive. The following is an excerpt from the letter that I wrote to them thanking them; the new drive (under warranty) was in my hand less than 24 hours after my phone call. 22 hours later the server is back on line with all of the data restored my total cost? nada :
Much to my surprise, my call was answered by a human. They asked how they could help -- I told them, and I was immediately connected to
another human. No hold time, no muzak, no "press 9 if your laptop is on fire" messages. The fellow that I talked to -- I regret to say that I'm not sure of his name; I though it was *******, but your customer service rep, *********, says it was ********... at any rate, he sounded British, if that helps -- was courteous, and, much to my surprise, he... listened. No script, no checklist, no lets spend three hours going over all of the stuff that I had figured out before I called tech
support in the first place. He let me talk, asked two very specific questions about the contents of the log file, then simply agreed with my assessment that the hard drive was in immenent danger of failing, and that a new one would be shipped to me right away. Despite the fact that it was about 4 o'clock on the east coast when I called, **** informs me the new drive will arrive this morning.
I was stunned. I can honestly say that even when I was working in an environment where we payed over $100K/year for support to Sun, I have never been treated with the courtesy, respect, promptness and knowledgeable professionalism that I was when I called Penguin Computing yesterday. I felt that my problems were of genuine concern and that
everything possible was being done to correct them. I promise you that from this point on, as long as you keep doing what you're doing, I will never buy a server or Linux workstation from anyone else.
but, since a supreme court ruling 1920's or so (in the US) corporations have been entitled to essentially the same rights as people under the law, and officers of corporations are protected even further -- this gave rise to the term "corporate citizen" which has no legal meaning, but does have some significance in proving a point. Thus: if corporations have the same rights as people doesn't it stand to reason that they should be bound by the same ethical and moral considerations as humans?
Actually what would happen is that the call volume would drop, so the company would lay off a corresponding number of tech support people and the hold times would stay the same.
But I think that the attitude that people should only call tech support for "'real' problems" is exactly the kind of arrogance that Katz was talking about. Let's face it. When my grandmother gets an error message, to her, that's a very "real" problem. She doesn't know what it means, she doesn't know why it's there, she doesn't know if it is seriously threatening the usefulness of this very expensive piece of hardware that she's purchased (if she knows the difference between hardware and software, which she probably doesn't) and she doesn't have the slightest idea how to find out what the error message means without calling tech support, much less have any idea how to fix it.
Now, the general response to this is likely going to be "well, then she's too dumb/uneducated/needs to take a class/whatever to own a computer." No. You did hit the nail right on the head that a computer is a complex piece of equipment that requires a least a bit of knowledge to operate. But as a computer vendor or software vendor, you have a responsability to acurately portray the level of knowledge that is necessary in order to operate your product.
Since the automobile analogy is a popular one, I'll use that as a counter example. You will never see a car commercial (well, not in the next 20 years) that has Jeff Goldblum standing there in all black saying "The new Ford Golden Delicious is so easy to operate, you don't even need to know how to drive." But every computer maker in America is screaming "you don't need to know a thing! it's as easy to operate as your stereo! just buy our digital camera, computer, mp3 player, palm pilot combo and we'll throw in this free bag of hype!" at my grandmother at the top of their lungs.
People simply need to have reasonable expectations about what they are getting. If you tell people they don't need to know anything, then don't expect them to, and provide tech support accordingly. Otherwise, say: "We have no tech support. Don't buy this unless you're ready to fix it yourself, and here's the manual."
Stop the marketing tilt-a-whirl, I need to throw up.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Charlie Miller interview mentioned elsewhere in this thread...
Another question from the Twittersphere: What OS/browser pairing to you use? Do you do anything special (beyond default settings) to secure yourself while browsing?
You're not trying to pwn me are you??? Have you ever heard the saying about the cobbler's kids not having shoes? That's me, I'm afraid. I use Safari on OSX with no special settings. This isn't the most secure combination, by any stretch of the imagination, but I like it. It's designed by Apple engineers to be easy to use and 'just work' and it does. The risk of malware is low, and hey, I'm a security expert right :) The risk of a targeted attack is real, except I don't think I'm important enough to be targeted! So I rely on security by obscurity, I guess
I use a similar method, but then apply an additional layer of obfuscation by putting my password that I've generated with my algorithm through something like an MD5 hash. If I can't remember the password, I can always recreate it, but the chances of anyone stumbling across it with anything other than brute force are miniscule. You could even write your passwords down and it wouldn't make a difference. All you're giving them is the seed. You can also apply simple encryption to them, such as having a deviation pattern from the password you've written down (i.e. first character is to the left of the one I've written down, second one two characters up on the keyboard, etc. I've also had success just keeping a list well hidden such as making a file called .nothing_interesting_in_here (for example) and hiding it down in /var or /etc somewhere. The chances of some miscellaneous laptop thief getting root and going ls-la through all of your config directories is relatively small. You just have to remember where you put the file.
We actually did this on a network that I ran for a while. Servers were birds of prey (kestrel, hawk, eagle), internal servers were flightless birds (kiwi, ostrich, etc.) Mac workstations were waterfowl (mallard, egret, swan, flamingo), laptops were rodents (rabbit, woodmouse, groundhog), fileservers were large herbivores (rhino, hippo, etc.) Linux workstations were types of deer and related species (ibex, impala, moose) and I reserved the entirety of aquatic invertebrates for naming Windows workstations (cuttlefish, octopus, squid, sponge, sea_cucumber) but that might just be personal prejudice. The other aspect of this that worked nicely, is that I reserved names for various floors in the building or remote locations for different geographical areas, so I knew that hippo was a fileserver on the 2nd floor of the main office (Africa) while bison was a fileserver on the 1st floor (North America). This requires a bit of pre-planning since you are allowed more linux workstations in Africa than in South America, but on the plus-side, almost all of those names are your spellchecker, and a lot of them, people have actually heard of which mean fewer errors and questions. It also gives you a simple way to physically identify the host -- I put little pictures on the cases.
I teach in a film program and am also the assistant artistic director for a film festival. Our preferred format for most tasks is VHS. Here's why. Of the thousand or so submissions we get to the festival each year, the prescreening copies that come in on DVD have a failure rate of approximately 20%. This is a combination of bad media, damaged media, or incorrectly authored media. Our VHS failure rate is 0%. We have never gotten a bad VHS tape. The only advantage to a DVD is that most computers will recognize NTSC, PAL and SECAM discs while multiformat VHS players are particularly expensive, as are multiformat monitors. On the other hand, getting your PAL or SECAM tape dubbed to NTSC VHS is generally pretty cheap. Since 80% of our submissions are from overseas, this is particularly critical for us.
In the classes that I teach, it is very common to show clips from movies to illustrate a concept or start a discussion. Students are given assignments to compile clips and present them. Having a student load a DVD, wait for the FBI warning, wait for the studio graphics to go by, wait for the menu to load, skip to the nearest chapter point, fast forward to the clip, have the DVD get stuck, etc. is a complete waste of time. Much better for them to take the DVDs to our lab, put it in one of the CSS-removal players and dub it to VHS -- this means we can spend our time in class just looking at the clip (and this academic use is exactly why fair use exemptions are in the law, lawyers). The same is true of cueing a VHS tape. You cue it, and when you take it to class, it's still cued. See above about cueing DVDs.
We are going to continue to use VHS for as long as we can, and don't even get me started about CSS and Macrovision, Feh.
The core issue here is the presence of a search warrant. IANAL, but my understanding is that if you have 20 kilos in the trunk of your car, and a service technician spots them, that falls under the "probable cause" clause under which the cops can search your car. If your plumber calls the cops and says, "I think my client has a meth lab in his basement," the cops would have to provide a judge with enough evidence to obtain a warrant to search your house.
The question here is: which category is your computer in? The EFF says it's on the house side of the equation. The entire reason cops can search your car is that you agree to it when you are issued a driver's license; driving is considered a voluntary practice, and as such you are required to give up some of your 4th ammendment rights in order to do it. Taking your computer to a repair shop in no way alters your relationship with law enforcement -- you have not agreed to the suspension of your rights. Thus, it requires a warrant. To whit, your terrorism example, the cops would still have to acquire a warrant to search your house and many judges would be hesitant to issue one since writing in the margins of a book is clearly a protected 1st ammendment right. On the other hand, the cops might bring you in and ask you some questions, and they are perfectly entitled to do so.
There's something else very fishy here. There are already a number of products on the market that do the same thing as both of these products: for example, as well as this.
IIRC, the condition of "prior art" will negate a patent, as will simply not defending a patent in court. Since the patent specifies "an MP3 player" and not "a 60 gig iPod Photo," products which do exactly the same thing for a shuffle or a mini should negate the patent strictly on the enforcemeent clause. By the way, I've bought one of each of these, and they both totally suck. The FM transmitters are basically useless. They do keep it charged, though.
In addition to other things, I also oversee a facility which checks out camera equipment to students in a university film program. I cannot imagine a situation in which cameras receive more abuse, and this is my recommendation. The http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O= productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=302346&is=REGSony PDX-10. It is the smallest and cheapest of Sony's "Prosumer" cameras, and is as durable as any of their professional models. We have one unit that has been in continuous use in the field for 4 years and has never had maintenance problems bigger than needing the heads cleaned. It is a 3 chip camera, has a large, good lens, and a durable body. These models also have an excellent shotgun mic and will record in DVCAM mode which shortens the recording length of the tape but improves error correction. (Contrary to popular belief, this does not require DVCAM tapes -- any DV tape will work in either mode.)
Make no mistake, these cameras are not cheap, (circa $1800) but cameras are one of the few items where you truely get what you pay for. No consumer camcorder will ever have the lifespan, durability, or reliability of a professional camera, and when you look at TCO, $1800 pays for itself pretty quickly when you're buying another $600 camera every year. Another poster wished someone made a "toughbook" camera. They do, and these are they.
The problem is a little deeper than that. The implication here is that the data was on consumer banking customers, which for Citibank, constitutes only a small percentage of their gross revenue. The vast majority of the money large banks make is in their commercial divisions. Even if 100 percent of Citibank's consumer banking customers were to leave, it probably wouldn't affect their bottom line by more than about 10%. Their real bread and butter is in stuff like short term commercial loans where they might lend another mega-corp 100 million overnight, and net 3 million in interest. It takes a lot of mortgages to net the bank 3 million bucks, but the overhead (investment in personnel and facilities) is roughly equivalent for a 300K home loan and a 300 million overnight loan. Frankly, I think they just don't care that much about their consumer banking customers. Why would they? Lose low-margin high maintenance customers? Best Buy has a corporate strategy specifically designed to do just that (not that I'm saying that's a good thing, mind you...)
This is where I tend to part ways with most free market people. The consumer is essentially powerless in this relationship unless they utilize their perogative to legislate change.
The piece was Allegri's Miserere and it was deemed too beautiful to be performed anywhere outside of the Sistine Chapel. There are numerous stories surrounding incident which is quite possibly one of the earliest urban legends. Anyway, the whole story is recounted here. Mozart may have reproduced the piece from memory after a 1769 visit (when he was 12). Mozart died in 1791, so it was "loosely" "around 1800" as the parent suggests.
There are a number of firewire based swappable drive options, like this one available these days for a couple hundred bucks. Drives are so cheap it's entirely feasible to have multiple copies of your backups, one online and one in a safe deposit box, which end-runs the offsite backup (and rm -rf*) complaint problems that were in the previous RAID-5 post while maintaining the convenience of online backups. In my business, we've been backing up to CD since the mid 90's (yay 2x! This is so much faster!) and have discovered a number of discs that have disintigrated. None of it is mission critical, but when we're trying to put together a portfolio presentation, it's disappointing to find that a project you put blood sweat and tears into is gone. IMHO, hard drives are much more stable, and when it comes time to move them to solid-state storage, it'll be a lot easier to copy them in 250GB media units than 640MB media units.
There has also been a fair amount of talk about using dirigibles for heavy lifting and cargo carrying with a similar cost per pound to trains or ships. Also, the heavy lifting capacity could be used to combat fire more effectively than planes or helicopters.
Look here
and
here
It sounds to me like you have fewer problems with NAT as a concept than you do with NAT being configurable to your needs. There are a number of very, very good NATing firewalls available for Linux; I recommend monmotha (look for it on Freshmeat) which runs very nicely on a salvaged 300 Mhz P II with 64 MB of RAM.
I have about 8 machines currently behind my firewall using NAT, and have never had any problems with redirects to strange ports, etc. Even if you want to run some servers on the other side of the firewall, even if your ISP blocks port 80, just use:
foo 86400 IN A 216.219.239.186:2222 ;Cl=2
bar 86400 IN A 216.219.239.186: 2223 ;Cl=2
in bind (or whatever is appropriate for your DNS server) and you're set once you've redirected those ports on your firewall to 80 on your server (or not, depending on your Apache config).
The other advantage to using linux for your firewalling is that you can spoof your mac address if your ISP has the rather inconvienient policy of "securing" their network by authenticating by MAC address.
Call me a jackass, but something else they should consider resurrecting from the Apllo era is their naming schema. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo all awaken something in our psyche; they are all culturally loaded, powerful metaphors. Just as the rockets -- Saturn, Atlas, etc., they draw on the mythological significance of the names of the planets themselves and it gives the entire endeavour a weighty significance that STS-* will never manage to create.
Any marketing (or propaganda) person will tell you how quickly people come to accept something as important if it seems important. The mythological naming schema gives the program some of the weight that it needs to win the battle for mindshare in the contemporary political environment. I propose Prometheus as the name for the new capsule program; space exploration could use a bringer of enlightenment.
Isn't BSD a non SysV OS, and thus not derivative of SCO's IP? Is not mac OSX based on BSD? So how is OSX derivative of SCO's IP?
Actually, back in the day, they did. Orange computing used to make a PCI card with an entire pentium 100 computer on it that would share the hard drive on your 604 mac, you could access it through a window on your mac desktop. I think they discontinued them because they were useless; 500 mhz processors were showing up in the marketplace and the Orange card was more expensive than a complete PC.
The extention of this is that a good looking woman is a "fox," and since pluralizing as "foxes boxes" makes absolutely no sense, the term "foxen boxen," naturally, was born. It was then a short migration to reusing the term in reference to computers since most
National TV news was much the same way for many years; people trusted 60 minutes and Walter Cronkite because those shows were not expected to pay for themselves. They were paid for by advertising revenue from other parts of the network, the idea was that if people trusted your news people, they would like your network and watch your other shows, too. Having a good evening news program was a public service designed to maintain viewer loyalty to the networks.
Enter the Cable News Network. How has this changed things? Well, how does CNN exist? On advertising dollars. How do you generate add revenue? You provide viewers for those ads. And how do you provide viewers? You repeat the same sensationalistic story over and over again, with a slight variation each time so that people are afraid to turn the channel.
"Oh my God! Anthrax is everywhere! I'd better stay home and watch CNN today instead of going to work and providing for my family and reassuring them that their chances of contracting anthrax are about one-tenth that of them winning the Florida lottery."
Any time the presentation of news is contingent on that news' ability to attract advertising dollars (whether explicitly or implicitly -- I'm not saying CNN only runs stories that it thinks will attract advertisers, but they sure as hell don't run things that will offend, or deal with issues that the majority of Americans aren't interested in) there is something dreadfully wrong. As a journalist, if money or politics (e.g. The Insider) is driving the content of your news, you should be cricified. But by and large, the public seems to accept news-as-entertainment without so much as a blink. Oh well.
And speaking of old-school journalism, Katz, how about a little proof reading. For a fun game, find the place where the word "the" shouldn't be, in the above article.
I have bought all of the Transmet books to date, and Alan Moore's Top Ten (which was just cancelled, damnit) in TPB format, and feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of them. I'm not a collector, just a reader, so this arrangement suits me fine. Plus the trade paperbacks fit on a shelf better. :)
Even more than the privacy issues, I think that the most frightening aspect of ubiquitous security cameras is the impact that they will have on us as a society. How do you think when you have no internal monologue? Do you dare go to the bathroom, knowing that your ass could wind up on a fetish site within minutes? Or, do you simply do as Ellis suggests and stop caring whether or not people see your ass?
I don't have any answers, I'm just positing the question. Personally, I blame the Chinese; these certainly are "interesting times."
The new apple iBooks are really, really nice pieces of hardware, particularly for the money, and they run Yellow Dog beautifully. See this slashdot article for more info.
I keep telling people about them and they say: "But this Toshiba goes to 11."
Yeah, and you can edit digital video on the road with this one, and it does everything that that Toshiba does.
"But this one goes to 11."
I administer a mixed office of macs, linux boxen and windows machines, and feel that all three machines have their place, it just seems sometimes that people don't give apple's hardware its due. Whatever else is wrong with them (and there's plenty, of which I'm sure I will be reminded in the posts that follow this one up) they do make really, really good hardware, and it's not as expensive as everybody thinks that it is. Go configure an iBook at the apple store, then configure a notebook from any other manufacturer to the same specs (if you can) and look at the price. I'd be surprised if there's $100 difference either way. And between OS X and Yellow Dog, there are plenty of configuration options.
Don't take me for a mac zealot, I just hate it when people either (a dismiss apple just 'cause their apple, or, (b make an uninformed or prejudicial decision for any reason. Apple certainly has their shortcomings, and I am not blind to them, they often seem to forget that good design is: "form plus function, followed by meaning." But don't let that discourage you from looking.
Not that anyone will ever read this, but...
I have PPPoE at home and have never had any problems with it. I am running a masquerading firewall under RH 7.1, which is running roaring penguin PPPoE. ADSL connects on bootup, and has stayed connected for up to 60 days at a stretch. Every five minutes, a cron job runs and checks to see if the connection is up. If it is not, it reconnects, and if it receives a different IP, it notifies my DNS server, which updates the entry. It does help that I run my own DNS on a server that's on a DS3, but...
I run a small web server through this connection and have never had any problems with it, nor have I had any problems with any services including VPN and SWAN connections. It's been pretty painless once I got the scripts written. Contrary to what I've heard people saying here, my ping times are consistently around 10-18 ms. Sometimes slower at peak useage times, but generally less than 25ms, even then.
My present service is through a Bellsouth reseller called MPINet in central Florida, who in turn is part of Duro Communications. I also use their business DSL for one of our offices, which has a static IP and is running POATM, I think. The performance is pretty similar to my home DSL. The real deal, though is Directv's dsl service, static IP, free router and no installation charge for $49.95/month. I'm gonna switch to them as soon as my contract expires with MPINet.
I do buy linux distros, mainly because I can purchase three or more of them for the cost of one Windows license, and I get those cool Red Hat stickers. I am also supporting a company that I believe in. Having CD installers around makes things easy, and you get some support with your CD purchase, and though I've never actually used it, it does make my bosses happy that I have that to fall back on. The real difference, though, is that I only have to buy one set of Red Hat CD's for 20 linux boxen. Cost per year, about $100. Upgrading from NT to 2000 cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $2000 (including staff time). Upgrading from Red Hat 6.2 to 7.1 cost about $500 including staff time.
What we were talking about, though, is total cost of ownership. Windows machines, mainly running After Effects and Maya. Expensive workstations to begin with. The cost of the software that runs them and on them pushes the purchase price per system up to about $20,000. This is for, for example, dual processor, gig of ram, ultra160 SCSI or RAID, Fire GL4 3D card, 21" trinitron, sometimes two of the above, plus the software. They are windows machines, so I spend about an hour a week on each machine doing routine maintenance, software updates, figuring out why they are crashing, dealing with hardware failures, etc.
Macs: purchase price: $4,000-$5,000 plus $3000 for software (Photoshop, Quark, After Effects, Premiere, etc). This gets you dual processors, gig of ram, we can normally live with ATA hard drives in those machines. I set them up correctly, and then annually, I burn a disc with all of the software updates, reformat the hard drive and make everything current. 3 days of my time per year. In 6 years, I have never had a hardware failure on a Mac, with the exception of a keyboard that somebody dropped a cup of coffee on. I always get angry when people say that Macs are more expensive than PC's. That's probably true on the low end of the spectrum, but when you are talking about workstations, and not desktop PC's the mac is a real bargain. I've got two machines on my desk: a G-4 450 with ATA and a Dell dual P3-700 with Ultra 160. Both have .5GB of ram. The mac is as fast in virtually every measureable or practical comparison. and cost less than half of what the Dell cost. Not that I do that many comparisons now that the Dell is running Red Hat instead of NT.
The linux machines. Mostly servers, a lot of them from Penguin Computing. I have had one hardware failure, an IBM deskstar 75 GB hard drive, which Penguin replaced in the most painless warranty experience I have ever had. They tend to cost less than $5000, I set them up, and basically never think about them again, with the exception of our firewalls and web servers, which require constant tending.
The biggest hassle with the Windows machines and the Macs is that most of the software, you have to pay for as well. While the hardware-cost to performance comparison is about dead even between a Linux workstation and a Windows workstation, the total cost is much higher on the Windows machine because of the enormous software investment. Even Office is insanely expensive unless you're buying an upgrade. At one point, when discussing the liability associated with software piracy, my boss suggested: "wouldn't it be cheaper to pirate the software, then just drop the cpu's out the window into the lake if anyone from the Business Software Alliance ever shows up?" Do the math. He's right.
The linux workstations and servers are pretty much fire-and-forget, but in the event of a mishap, the repair time is huge.
Bottom Line:
Windows: high initial cost, highest maintenance cost, highest software cost.
Mac: mid-range initial cost, low maintenance cost, highest software cost.
Linux: low initial cost, low maintenance cost, lowest software cost, longest down-time in the event of a failure.
The answer to the question is: Linux is cheaper than Windows, particularly when you realize some economy of scale by installing it on numerous machines. And at the end of the day, all my boss cares about is how much it costs.
my $.05
This is a little off topic, but I've seen some other similar things, so, my $.02: I just had an amazing experience with tech support at Penguin Computing. I have a server that was in immediate danger of losing its IBM deskstar 75 GB drive. The following is an excerpt from the letter that I wrote to them thanking them; the new drive (under warranty) was in my hand less than 24 hours after my phone call. 22 hours later the server is back on line with all of the data restored my total cost? nada : Much to my surprise, my call was answered by a human. They asked how they could help -- I told them, and I was immediately connected to another human. No hold time, no muzak, no "press 9 if your laptop is on fire" messages. The fellow that I talked to -- I regret to say that I'm not sure of his name; I though it was *******, but your customer service rep, *********, says it was ********... at any rate, he sounded British, if that helps -- was courteous, and, much to my surprise, he ... listened. No script, no checklist, no lets spend three hours going over all of the stuff that I had figured out before I called tech
support in the first place. He let me talk, asked two very specific questions about the contents of the log file, then simply agreed with my assessment that the hard drive was in immenent danger of failing, and that a new one would be shipped to me right away. Despite the fact that it was about 4 o'clock on the east coast when I called, **** informs me the new drive will arrive this morning.
I was stunned. I can honestly say that even when I was working in an environment where we payed over $100K/year for support to Sun, I have never been treated with the courtesy, respect, promptness and knowledgeable professionalism that I was when I called Penguin Computing yesterday. I felt that my problems were of genuine concern and that
everything possible was being done to correct them. I promise you that from this point on, as long as you keep doing what you're doing, I will never buy a server or Linux workstation from anyone else.
IANAL
:)
but, since a supreme court ruling 1920's or so (in the US) corporations have been entitled to essentially the same rights as people under the law, and officers of corporations are protected even further -- this gave rise to the term "corporate citizen" which has no legal meaning, but does have some significance in proving a point. Thus: if corporations have the same rights as people doesn't it stand to reason that they should be bound by the same ethical and moral considerations as humans?
Just a question, really
Actually what would happen is that the call volume would drop, so the company would lay off a corresponding number of tech support people and the hold times would stay the same.
But I think that the attitude that people should only call tech support for "'real' problems" is exactly the kind of arrogance that Katz was talking about. Let's face it. When my grandmother gets an error message, to her, that's a very "real" problem. She doesn't know what it means, she doesn't know why it's there, she doesn't know if it is seriously threatening the usefulness of this very expensive piece of hardware that she's purchased (if she knows the difference between hardware and software, which she probably doesn't) and she doesn't have the slightest idea how to find out what the error message means without calling tech support, much less have any idea how to fix it.
Now, the general response to this is likely going to be "well, then she's too dumb/uneducated/needs to take a class/whatever to own a computer." No. You did hit the nail right on the head that a computer is a complex piece of equipment that requires a least a bit of knowledge to operate. But as a computer vendor or software vendor, you have a responsability to acurately portray the level of knowledge that is necessary in order to operate your product.
Since the automobile analogy is a popular one, I'll use that as a counter example. You will never see a car commercial (well, not in the next 20 years) that has Jeff Goldblum standing there in all black saying "The new Ford Golden Delicious is so easy to operate, you don't even need to know how to drive." But every computer maker in America is screaming "you don't need to know a thing! it's as easy to operate as your stereo! just buy our digital camera, computer, mp3 player, palm pilot combo and we'll throw in this free bag of hype!" at my grandmother at the top of their lungs.
People simply need to have reasonable expectations about what they are getting. If you tell people they don't need to know anything, then don't expect them to, and provide tech support accordingly. Otherwise, say: "We have no tech support. Don't buy this unless you're ready to fix it yourself, and here's the manual."
Stop the marketing tilt-a-whirl, I need to throw up.
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