I now have two offices. Both are in the same building about 30 feet from each other.
The larger office is my public office. It used to be a conference room but is now packed with book shelves, a several tables and desks, and a number of computers. Any more, I spend about three fourths of my workday in it.
The smaller, private office is very quiet. It is well insulated and has no telephone. It has a large comfortable easy chair pushed up to a desk with a couple of computers and a monitor. It also has a CD player and small speakers, but I hardly turn it on. Everyone knows to bother me there only if it is really important.
I can usually accomplish more software development work in two uninterrupted hours in the private office than I can in 8 hours in the public office.
All it takes is one or two interruptions in that two hours and my productivity drops to about the same as in the public office.
One of the lead computer people at one of the major oil companies told me once that all that their Visual Basic programmers do is to write meaningless little programs that noone ever uses.
He seemed to think that hiring Visual Basic programmers was a complete waste of money.
I think the ISC and the administration's reading of the assignment's intent was way off base. They both seem to be under the impression that simple port scans are illegal and forbidden, when in fact they occur regularly on the residential network and are a part of having an internet connection.
That depends where you are. In many locations, simple port scans are illegal and forbidden even though they occur regularly on the residential network.
For example, while my computer does not have a port 12345 open, under Texas law it is clearly illegal for you to scan my computer to see if it is open because you do not have my authorization to connect to the machine.
Only the owner of a machine or his authorized representative can authorize a security scan of that machine.
Frankly, if a machine is on the net, and it responds to a request to open a connection on a port with a valid handshake, then the ONLY REASONABLE ASSUMPTION is that this is INTENDED to be used by the public. If there are further locks keeping you out beyond that (logins with passwords, tokens etc) then... well thats that... but up to that point, you have to assume its ok to connect. This is a public network.
Suppose you connect to a computer with the BackOrifice trojan. What is not important is that it allowed you to connect to the computer. What makes it a crime is that you connected to it in the first place.
In many states,such a connection would clearly not be authorized by the owner of the system and it would be a criminal act. Furthermore, in many states, it wouldn't take much for it to be a felony and you could face years in prison in a cell with Bubba.
But, what I am waiting for is the next paradigm shift or revolution.
Then you need a Paradigm Shift Virtual Smoke Detector.
It will not only alert you to any and all paradigm shifts that may appear in your vicinity, but in between paradigm shifts, you can play solitaire on it.
This is the same way Art Bell kept mechanical kooks off his radio show.
That is, the supply of kooks is so great that he can use this as a criteria to filter out some of the kooks that would otherwise be ideal for his show?
Old-fashioned "core" memories could retain data for a hundred years plus, which made rebooting somewhat of a lengthy process. You would not, for example, build a CPU where the internal registers used "core" memory or any other form of non-volatile memory. At least, not unless you were very drunk.
At a DECUS in New Orleans a number of years ago (mid 80's or so, I think), I was talking to one of the DEC people and he gave me an interesting demonstration of RSTS/E on an old PDP-11 with core memory.
We walked over to where a real old PDP-11 was sitting with core memory. He did a directory command (in those days, you could actually read the directory as it passed by) and in the middle of the directory, he reached over and shut the power off.
When he turned the power back on, boot was real quick because it just continued from the point of where it was when he killed the power. The directory command continued from where it was and only missed outputting a single character.
Greylisting is doing pretty good for me at the moment.
Once the spammers adapt to it, and they will, I'll have to find something else.
One thing I'd like to do is to use SPF rules to identify the legitimate e-mail servers of some domains so that I can whitelist them to get around the greylist. The main reason for this is that if they are using RFC compliant servers, the e-mail is going to be delivered anyway. Except for Nigerian spams from hotmail.com, the big problem is zombie machines in people's homes. And some of our users don't understand why it can take an extra 20 or 30 minutes to deliver an e-mail through a server that hasn't sent us anything in a while.
For example, I might whitelist nasa.gov servers listed in their SPF records (if they had them), but not a provider that I don't know or that sends "targed advertisements to those who agreed to receive them".
One problem is not too many organizations create SPF records. I've read that ad mailing lists that border on spam are more likely to add them than regular companies and smaller service providers.
Another is that some providers don't try to list their e-mail servers, they list their entire address space. For example, look at panix.com:
panix.com text = "v=spf1 ip4:166.84.0.0/16 ip4:198.7.7.0/24 ?all"
I don't know if that is every address they have, but I doubt that have on the order of 66,000 mail servers.
But I'm thinking of writing a small program for my mailserver that checks the SPF records of a select list of domains each morning and creates a whitelist from the results. That way, if someone adds more e-mail servers to their SPF records, our whitelist will be updated within 24 hours and if someone of interest who has not published SPF records should do so, then we'll have them on the whitelist within 24 hours.
I went for about 10 years on about 2-3 hours of sleep most nights starting when I was about 39 or 40.
There were some exceptions, but not all that many.
At first, I'd get about 2-3 hours of sleep a night and then crash for a few hours about every 10 days. After doing that for few months, I got to the point where I didn't need to crash very often.
About two years ago, I had some kind of infection that seemed to be more of a nuiscance than anything else. A couple of weeks later, I had a relapse that lasted a couple of weeks. During that time, I spent more time asleep. Since then, I haven't been able to get by on so little sleep.
You have much luck getting data back from a tape five years later?
Yes.
First you have to find the tape. You can't have misplaced it and you can't have reused it due to the damn high cost of magnetic tape.
That is no problem at all. I keep detailed listing of what backup set is stored on what backup media.
As far as the "damn high cost of magnetic tape", you must be talking about those cheap tape drives that use expensive tapes. We have a couple of those around here, but we don't use them much at all.
Interestingly enough, individual tapes don't really vary all that much whether they carry 4 GB or 400 GB. But IMHO the tape drives that use 4 GB tapes are not trustworthy enough to use for backups and I would never suggest using such.
Then you have to find a drive that can read the tape. The one you wrote it with died two years ago, its no longer manufactured and oh darn none of the three you picked up off ebay use the same compression format.
If it is no longer manufacturered in two years, then you made a very poor choice of choosing a backup system.
Go to LTO Ultrium. It will still be around in 5 years.
Next you need the old backup software. You've been using Acme Archiver for the past three years; It doesn't understand the old SuperBackup format and unfortunately SuperBackup only ran in DOS with an 8-bit ISA SCSI card.
Why would anyone use something like that for a backup? The first critera should be that whatever you write to the tape should be readable using any device that can read and write to that tape.
Finally you have to pray that the tape is still good. They're like floppy disks; they go bad just sitting on the shelf.
I've had very little problem with bad tapes. But just in case, having just one copy of the file on a backup tape is an amateur error.
Buddy, I've been there. It ain't pretty. So for the last 7 years I've stored my backups on hard disks. No pain! No pain!
I've used tapes, disks, CDs, DVDs, and even in a few cases printouts of really important data. And tapes are still my favorite.
You are absolutely correct.
In addition, with a tape, you can much more easily take copies off-site for storage. I frequently suggest that people get a safety deposit box in a bank at least 20 miles away from their facilities and store a copy of their backups there.
ATA and SATA drives are a great choice for online backup. Its pretty easy to put several terabytes worth in a box these days, software raid-5 them with Linux and then use tar and gzip. The price is not exceptionally higher than tapes either and the reliability (i.e. your success rate restoring data) is superior.
That depends on how long you need to store the data.
If you need it for a short time, you might be correct.
But if you may need the data 5 years or more from now, tape is clearly far superior.
Slashdot Mirror
I now have two offices. Both are in the same building about 30 feet from each other.
The larger office is my public office. It used to be a conference room but is now packed with book shelves, a several tables and desks, and a number of computers. Any more, I spend about three fourths of my workday in it.
The smaller, private office is very quiet. It is well insulated and has no telephone. It has a large comfortable easy chair pushed up to a desk with a couple of computers and a monitor. It also has a CD player and small speakers, but I hardly turn it on. Everyone knows to bother me there only if it is really important.
I can usually accomplish more software development work in two uninterrupted hours in the private office than I can in 8 hours in the public office.
All it takes is one or two interruptions in that two hours and my productivity drops to about the same as in the public office.
One of the lead computer people at one of the major oil companies told me once that all that their Visual Basic programmers do is to write meaningless little programs that noone ever uses.
He seemed to think that hiring Visual Basic programmers was a complete waste of money.
That depends where you are. In many locations, simple port scans are illegal and forbidden even though they occur regularly on the residential network.
For example, while my computer does not have a port 12345 open, under Texas law it is clearly illegal for you to scan my computer to see if it is open because you do not have my authorization to connect to the machine.
Only the owner of a machine or his authorized representative can authorize a security scan of that machine.
I don't know if they still do it, but in a graduate course at Texas A&M a few years ago, the class would divide into two halves.
One half was assigned the task of setting up a computer so that it could not be penetrated. The other half had the job of penetrating that computer.
And that was all done on a network isolated from the rest of the Internet.
In at least some states, port scanning is illegal.
In Texas, for example, any unauthorized connection or attempt to connect to a computer is illegal.
Suppose you connect to a computer with the BackOrifice trojan. What is not important is that it allowed you to connect to the computer. What makes it a crime is that you connected to it in the first place.
In many states,such a connection would clearly not be authorized by the owner of the system and it would be a criminal act. Furthermore, in many states, it wouldn't take much for it to be a felony and you could face years in prison in a cell with Bubba.
Then you need a Paradigm Shift Virtual Smoke Detector.
It will not only alert you to any and all paradigm shifts that may appear in your vicinity, but in between paradigm shifts, you can play solitaire on it.
Which version is this?
I already have the 3rd edition that I bought a few years ago.
That is, the supply of kooks is so great that he can use this as a criteria to filter out some of the kooks that would otherwise be ideal for his show?
At a DECUS in New Orleans a number of years ago (mid 80's or so, I think), I was talking to one of the DEC people and he gave me an interesting demonstration of RSTS/E on an old PDP-11 with core memory.
We walked over to where a real old PDP-11 was sitting with core memory. He did a directory command (in those days, you could actually read the directory as it passed by) and in the middle of the directory, he reached over and shut the power off.
When he turned the power back on, boot was real quick because it just continued from the point of where it was when he killed the power. The directory command continued from where it was and only missed outputting a single character.
How about QNX?
I have no idea what the prices are, but it is reportedly the most superstable embedded platform available.
If I were building embedded devices for critical medical applications, I suspect QNX would be my only choice.
For less critical applications, I'd still keep it in mind.
My bank sends out notices of their yearly hot dog luncheon in the parking lot by e-mail. I don't think they send any other mailings by e-mail.
Greylisting is doing pretty good for me at the moment.
Once the spammers adapt to it, and they will, I'll have to find something else.
One thing I'd like to do is to use SPF rules to identify the legitimate e-mail servers of some domains so that I can whitelist them to get around the greylist. The main reason for this is that if they are using RFC compliant servers, the e-mail is going to be delivered anyway. Except for Nigerian spams from hotmail.com, the big problem is zombie machines in people's homes. And some of our users don't understand why it can take an extra 20 or 30 minutes to deliver an e-mail through a server that hasn't sent us anything in a while.
For example, I might whitelist nasa.gov servers listed in their SPF records (if they had them), but not a provider that I don't know or that sends "targed advertisements to those who agreed to receive them".
One problem is not too many organizations create SPF records. I've read that ad mailing lists that border on spam are more likely to add them than regular companies and smaller service providers.
Another is that some providers don't try to list their e-mail servers, they list their entire address space. For example, look at panix.com:
I don't know if that is every address they have, but I doubt that have on the order of 66,000 mail servers.
But I'm thinking of writing a small program for my mailserver that checks the SPF records of a select list of domains each morning and creates a whitelist from the results. That way, if someone adds more e-mail servers to their SPF records, our whitelist will be updated within 24 hours and if someone of interest who has not published SPF records should do so, then we'll have them on the whitelist within 24 hours.
My office used to be a conference room.
We never had much in the way of conferences so I moved into it.
I'm just the opposite.
I'd rather write in assembler than anything else. Unfortunately, that is a luxury I don't have.
From what I can see, there are far more people who don't download music than those who do.
It could be quite a bit of money if that $4-5 a month was from everyone with an ISP account.
The original posting doesn't say whether the $4-5 a month is for every user or just those wanting to share music.
I went for about 10 years on about 2-3 hours of sleep most nights starting when I was about 39 or 40.
There were some exceptions, but not all that many.
At first, I'd get about 2-3 hours of sleep a night and then crash for a few hours about every 10 days. After doing that for few months, I got to the point where I didn't need to crash very often.
About two years ago, I had some kind of infection that seemed to be more of a nuiscance than anything else. A couple of weeks later, I had a relapse that lasted a couple of weeks. During that time, I spent more time asleep. Since then, I haven't been able to get by on so little sleep.
Now I'm back up to 6-8 hours a night.
I miss all that extra time I had.
If it is generational, it might be the other way around.
I still have some old 9 track tapes and a 9 track tape drive. Maybe I ought to verify those tapes.
For what it's worth, I never would have thought about appending my birth year to that. 76 is actually my class year of my undergraduate degree.
Eric, Texas A&M University - Class of '76.
Yes.
That is no problem at all. I keep detailed listing of what backup set is stored on what backup media.
As far as the "damn high cost of magnetic tape", you must be talking about those cheap tape drives that use expensive tapes. We have a couple of those around here, but we don't use them much at all.
Interestingly enough, individual tapes don't really vary all that much whether they carry 4 GB or 400 GB. But IMHO the tape drives that use 4 GB tapes are not trustworthy enough to use for backups and I would never suggest using such.
If it is no longer manufacturered in two years, then you made a very poor choice of choosing a backup system.
Go to LTO Ultrium. It will still be around in 5 years.
Why would anyone use something like that for a backup? The first critera should be that whatever you write to the tape should be readable using any device that can read and write to that tape.
I've had very little problem with bad tapes. But just in case, having just one copy of the file on a backup tape is an amateur error.
I've used tapes, disks, CDs, DVDs, and even in a few cases printouts of really important data. And tapes are still my favorite.
You are absolutely correct. In addition, with a tape, you can much more easily take copies off-site for storage. I frequently suggest that people get a safety deposit box in a bank at least 20 miles away from their facilities and store a copy of their backups there.
That depends on how long you need to store the data.
If you need it for a short time, you might be correct.
But if you may need the data 5 years or more from now, tape is clearly far superior.
Use SATA and SCSI.
There are devices available that appear to the comuter to be a SCSI drive when it is really a RAID array of SATA drives.
Something like the the Maxtronic Arena Sivy SA-4830/SA-4831 could give you a 2 TB SCSI drive.
But instead, you just type in 'g' and a space followed by the search terms.
The main reason I am considering putting a RAID 5 set on the same computer as the tape drive is just to make it more efficient for backups.
I look at the RAID 5 sets as a method of minimizing or eliminating downtime for simple problems, not as a form of backup.