Yea, progress towards another watered down piece of shit that does more harm than good.
You don't seriously think the government is going to do something in our interests that might inconvenience corporations even slightly or impede their ability to invade our privacy do you? There is no financial motive for doing so.
Why don't we just not use these worthless, expensive, pieces of shit in our airports anymore? Seems like it might be a simpler solution to the problem.
I agree with the overall tone of the article, but at the same time I am pretty skeptical that this is going to lead to an overblown cyber warfare capability. I guess it could lead to massively over budgeted security theater and rights-trampling clusterfuck legislation, but at the same time the trend I see as an infosec professional is to massively under-invest in information security and underestimate the threats.
Just today we learned that there were Chinese hackers in Nortel's network for a decade. Can you imagine? How many organizations used the Contivity client? Uhm....like *every* organization? Add that to Symantec's dismal failure to deal with the theft of their source code. These are *security companies* and THEY have had mind blowing security lapses...what's going on with the rest of the corporate world? What's going on with government systems where there are government funded APTs going after them 100% of the time? Do we seriously think the US government is so good at cyber-security that there are no major problems there? Not likely. I would say "not possible" in fact.
I think where it gets overblown is the threat to infrastructure. Not that I think serious compromises there aren't possible, but its not the boogeyman they are starting to make it out as. The threats are becoming more sophisticated all the time, though.
What I definitely agree with the article about is that declassification is necessary so that the public can evaluate these issues on their own, rather than relying on people who have a.) something to gain and b.) absolutely no idea what information security is, should be, or how one goes about implementing it. I mean you hear things anecdotally from vendors about what the government is up to and you think, "gee...I wouldnt go with that solution for my network...so why would the government, which has a lot more to lose, go with it....?" The instinct is always to close off, to classify, to protect but that is absolutely the wrong way to go about security. Organizations do this to try and keep their flaws secret, but at the end of the day all they do is lose visibility and accountability which invites even worse compromises. I can think of nowhere this is more dangerous than with government systems.
I think there is a real lack of high level expertise in InfoSec. I am not the most technical person who has ever gotten into this field, and have been starting to steer my career accordingly. However, common sense and a decade or so in the trenches will give you some pretty good ideas about what the threats are, how to prevent them, and what direction you should be moving in. Unfortunately, InfoSec personnel are rarely listened to when architecting networks, designing implementations, etc.
Regardless on anyone's feelings on command line vs. GUI, one reason it is so popular is that it's easy to administrate for people who don't know how to use a CLI. I see it all the time now. Sure, it's definitely not ideal to be a sys admin who doesn't know how to use a CLI but...they're out there...and there are a lot of them. Without the GUI it's just one more reason not to run Microsoft on your servers.
Personally, I don't really like this either. I'm fine with CLI but I think a GUI is well suited to many server tasks. Microsoft could definitely have a stronger CLI (I haven't messed with powershell...Im in infosec and don't administrate that often anymore)...but the GUI was a good tool.
I dunno. I think this is a very bad idea for MS. For LINUX advocates? It's awesome.
What's so sad about all this is that anyone outside of the government and the (pardon the term) 1% have known this was coming for a long time now. Hell, I'm sure they knew it was coming too, they just didn't care because they are traitors out to corrupt capitalism and democracy to line their own pockets. I have no problem with capitalism, it's the only viable economic system, but you cannot allow people to corrupt the system of government to tilt the playing field in their favor. That's not capitalism.
I love how the Republicans whine about liberals being in favor of "wealth redistribution" when their own policies are clearly aimed at wealth redistribution in the other direction. Neither strategy is capitalistic and neither strategy is viable in the long term. How, exactly, is propping up the music industry, an industry with a completely outdated business model and declining content quality, capitalism? How is it helpful to the country to do so? The answer, of course, is that it isn't. It's just what happens when you let executives of the failing industry bribe politicians legally. Meanwhile, the copyright legislation they have pushed for is wreaking havoc on the innovation which made America competitive in the first place. They sell this to voters under the illusion that the US will be on top of the food chain forever, regardless of what we do, and we can just dictate new rules when we don't like the old ones. It's not going to work that way for long.
There have been articles on the decline of basic research in this country for years now. I remember posting links to USENET on the same ever so long ago. It's the same thing that has happened to manufacturing that people have been decrying for decades. The US is moving towards an economy based entirely on gambling in the stock market. We don't produce things anymore, hell we don't even INVEST in things anymore, we just let bankers find new ways to wring more money out of the middle class. High frequency trading? Seriously? No one sees a problem with an industry that produces absolutely no value and no product whatsoever? This is all well and good for them...until the rest of the world catches on that they are adding no value they can continue to exploit them as well. However, they'll be driving their Mercedes through endless ghetto with bullets whizzing by their windows.
It's not a sustainable model for a society, but it is exactly what we are heading for and it's exactly what we deserve. We've chosen to become fat and stupid and to allow ourselves to support people who offer nothing in return. Liberals are certainly NO better, but where I see it the most is in the Republican party. People are willing to go to the mat for people who make more in a year than they will in their lifetime, even though those people are demonstrably bad at their jobs. Executives are leaving companies worse off than when they started and yet somehow still receive massive bonuses...and the right leaning middle class supports this! Their ostensibly "capitalism friendly" political opinions lead them into arguments with leftists...and they forget that they're not just supposed to oppose leftists, but they're supposed to be capitalists themselves and support capitalistic policies. They shout down people who decry poor copyright legislation and invest in companies which are just garbage. Look at the tech bubble. All you had to do was get an IT kid fresh out of college, pay him 40 grand a year, and he could tell you that investing in a company that had no product and provided no service, but had a nifty website, was a bad idea.
I could rant all day about this stuff. Won't do any good though. The stupid have won and the system is beyond hope. Hopefully I can eek out a decent living and die before the inevitable crash.
The Leica is an overpriced piece of shit. Sorry Leica fans, but their pricing is way out of line for what you get. Fuji X100 is almost a better camera...the new one they're releasing will be a better camera. Yes, the glass...I know. But you're paying an exorbitant amount of money for an under performing body in order to mount very expensive but also VERY good glass. I think when the Fuji is released Leica may have to reconsider a bit.
It seems the movable mirror in the SLR design is an anachronistic piece of baggage left over from the days of film cameras. The mirror and pentaprism were necessary to get true "through the lens" viewing to accommodate different lenses, etc. The mirror introduces a lot of complexity, weight, and problems such as lag, mirror shake and problems doing video. I am surprised the the mirror persists in the digital camera age. In reading the comments, it seems that the DSLR cameras have nicer sensors, features, lenses, etc. but there is no reason these could not be fitted to the mirrorless designs. Is there any good reason to still have a mirror?
Night shooting? Action? Fashion? Precise composition?
I will be buying the new Fuji interchangeable lens camera when it comes out too...but if you think a mirror is outdated for all applications, it's because your definition of "photography" is severely limited.
Been lucky enough to be employed through the recession, but I haven't gotten a raise in the last TWO FUCKING YEARS and thats on top of my cheap ass company refusing to give me what would be considered an insulting raise at any for profit on a promotion to augment my piddly salary. Piddly salary isn't an exaggeration by the way...they've raised my pay 3 times now (well before the last two years) because they did a salary survey and figured out they weren't paying me enough. I could have told them that.
On top of it all the workload is getting insane and NOW they are talking layoffs, even as they bring on more affiliates. So...let me get this straight...you have money to buy hospitals, but the cost of supporting them is killing you leaving you with a budget shortfall which you have to make up by laying off the already overworked staff. Well that certainly sounds like a recipe for a successful IT organization.
IT is bullshit. Never work for a matrixed organization. If I get laid off Im getting out of this industry. Management uses the recession as an excuse to treat IT workers like dirt.
I started out with Sprint, then Nextel, neither of which was any good. Could never hold on to calls, mad dead spots, problems with reception at home, etc. Then I got verizon and loved it (but hated the phone). Verizon's service was rock solid, but their data plans were way too much. Then my iPod (which I live and die by) broke and I didn't have the cash for both a new phone and a new ipod, so I changed to ATT and got my 32 gb 3gs. The service in the boston area is on par with verizon. I can't speak to the data network, but there are no significant dead spots, I can talk on the phone and move around, etc. The internet is fast enough for what I need it for when Im out.
Even when I drove out to western ny on 88/86 we mostly had (edge) service. A few dead spots between towers, but good enough.
I think NYC has it much worse than I do anywhere I've been.
So I think it just depends on where you are, and also what your expectations are. If you're a wicked heavy internet user and you travel all over the country, yea, obviously verizon is going to beat the shit out of everybody. But if you mostly stay in a place where att has decent coverage and is not overloaded too bad then it will be fine.
The tone of your post implies that the world has some kind of right to the mineral deposits there and that the taliban was committing some kind of crime against humanity by failing to exploit them.
Let me make it clear that I am no fan of the taliban...apart from the obvious (terror, death, destruction, etc) I think the subjugation of women really IS a crime against humanity and 'backwards' in every sense of the word.
However, like it or not Afghanistan is (well, was) a sovreign nation and that nation has the right to choose whether they exploit their natural resources or not. Clearly the taliban is vested in keeping the world in an almost medieval state, so why would they exploit their resources to help us build laptop batteries?
This whole mineral find will likely spur the taliban on anyway. It will become another rallying cry that the imperialist US is here to steal our resources to promote their own corrupt, backwards way of life. Our only hope is that the jobs and money it brings to the country will keep people from becoming desperate enough to listen to them.
My point is that it's their right to live in the stone age, just as much as it is our right not to. The reasons that it was fundamentally wrong for them to attack us are the same reasons why it is fundamentally wrong to try and paint their failure to exploit this stuff as some kind of insanity that we have every right to stop.
...because destroying the US and offshoring our jobs to China and india wasn't enough. Corporate America has to prove that they have absolutely NO moral convictions whatsoever. Who is worse than North Korea? Does the Taliban have any programmers that will work cheap?
I disagree. The problems with rotaries come when people fail to be aggressive enough...they yield in the rotary rather than taking the right of way that is rightfully theirs. They think this is 'being nice' or 'being careful' when really all it's doing is disrupting the flow of traffic and fucking everything up for everyone.
I do love rotaries, though, and think we need more of them.
You mean stopping at a red, then driving 100 yards straight down a main road before being forced to stop at another red isn't fuel efficient? "Signals timed to require frequent stops" on a major commuter artery wastes gas?? NO WAY!!!!
Seriously, though, yea...no kidding! A while ago, they timed the lights out in a certain section of Boston that is always a nightmare to get through. I had driven through there earlier in the day before reading the article about it and had actually noticed that the trip was a order of magnitude quicker than usual despite a relatively heavy volume of traffic.
There are so many poorly timed lights in this city, and I have been saying forever that we could save a ton of gas, a ton of money, and a ton of time if we just fixed this. I know it's not something we can snap our fingers and get done but, honestly, it seems like the state is actively working against doing this at times. Some of the situations with the lights around here are just absolutely beyond belief. There's one place I can think of where you sit at a red (on a major 3 lane road) then drive 50 feet before getting another red. Every time. 50 feet! No joke! Situations like this create congestion and gridlock and just make the city a huge mess. There are so many benefits to doing this, and absolutely no downsides whatsoever. Let's get this happening ASAP.
The description is almost too hilarious to believe..that they think it would be too much work to police their own networks. It's just so...its so far out there in hypocrisy land I can't even believe it.
It makes me want to develop a really awesome youtube channel that the networks would show clips of (under completely reasonable fair use provisions) and then sue their motherfucking balls off. I realize the insane hypocrisy of that, but hypocrisy is really all we have left. Anything that brings the collapse sooner is probably a good thing at this point.
I sort of had the same thought. I mean, obviously getting distracted could be bad too...but like imagine a 7 hour flight from Boston to LA in the middle of the night. Not really a lot going on. It almost seems like it might be good to have something to keep them awake and occupied...
I don't claim to really know the answer here...just a thought.
I think you can probably make a case for users needing to be competent to avoid phishing attacks...because the impact can be so damaging and there is no real way to prevent them...but in all other aspects maintaining a good security posture really is more the responsibility of the IT staff. In the end, something is going to test your defenses. Most of the viruses we see at my very large enterprise spread via the network. You get one user who makes a wrong click and BAM every single one of your small office's unpatched computers are infected. You're never going to get staff that is incapable of making those types of mistakes...even IT staff make them from time to time.
I don't disagree that users should be encouraged to be more computer literate and security aware...regardless of your budget and your staffing there are aspects of security which will come down to user decisions and there is nothing you can do about it. I have been an advocate for training and modifying the culture of my organization to try and instill at least SOME basic level of security awareness. Nurses who don't want to have a password on their computer because its too hard to remember...well...too bad. Start remembering a password or start touching up your resume is what I say. It's just part of the commitment a business needs to make when embracing IT as a part of it's business. However with things like viruses, spam, malware...it's always going to get through no matter what you do. The question is whether your infrastructure is ready for it.
If only we could find a way to make windows file sharing run over port 80 instead of 139/445!!! Then infosec wouldn't make us connect to the VPN to get our files and life would be perfect!!!!
It's called CSM and it's amazing! It does everything for you and never fucks up!!!:D
Seriously though, we're so far from this I couldn't even begin to tell you. Half the time the application vendor can't even tell you what ports are required and they wrote the software that's making the connections. It's pathetic. I get requests from clueless lusers who obviously don't even know what they're requesting, then the question ("No you can't have an IP any. No, ugh, never mind what that means...just ask the vendor what you need.") goes to the vendor and half the time they can't answer it.
Truthfully there is really no great way of doing this. Even if you can profile the software running on the machine, you're not going to know if it's making all the connections it needs to make during the time you profile it. You also need to have some kind of idea what you're doing so you don't wind up exposing 139/445 to the internet or something dumb like that. They pay us infosec people a salary to do this stuff for a reason: we can't always tell you what you want, but we can usually tell you what you don't want. Making these kinds of changes requires thought, risk analysis, and planning. It's not something that should be a drag and drop routine that any user can do...at least not at this point in history.
Maybe at smaller companies sys admins have the knowledge necessary to make these sort of decisions responsibly but I can tell you from experience that being a sys admin does not automatically confer on you the ability to make smart decisions about what firewall exceptions to request. We've had users escalate requests WAY up the chain after being denied by us, only to have them sending 911 pages to us literally 20 minutes after it's implemented to have it shut off. Just because your sshd is up to date and you use strong passwords doesn't mean you want the entire internet beating down your door 24/7/365...sometimes it really is better for you to have your users connect to the VPN first. That's the knowledge that infosec brings to the table, and that's why we don't want you making your own exceptions.
Don't just take any job? Do you realize how many college graduates who spent a lot of money on their degrees he's up against right now? And how few jobs there are? Now is not the time to be picky, my friend, the economic situation has shifted the balance of power solidly to the employers' side. This is the economic climate where you get fucked on salary, sorry to say.
You're leaving school and entering the real world. Being "able to program" in school and able to program in the real world are two completely different things. You don't know shit about shit right now. Colleget gives you a few basic tools and shows that you can get in-depth on a subject...in terms of what you can actually do for a company it's more or less meaningless.
You're also getting out of college and entering the job market during one of the worst economic downturns in recent history. Get used to applying for jobs and hearing nothing back. There are people with far more programming experience as well as just general work experience (the value of which you have probably not realized yet) who are getting the same replies...or lack of replies...from these companies. There are probably people with experience applying for the same entry level jobs you are because they are desperate. That's bad news for you.
Long story short: get used to getting nothing back. The problem isn't that the evil HR people are a barrier to you showing these companies how useful you could be to them, its that you have no experience at all and you're not worth hiring. Do anything you can to get noticed...apply online, send paper resumes, make sure you have a great cover letter, follow up with a phone call. If your communication skills are poor, you better get someone to help you with that. Your resume and cover letter should be ABSOLUTELY perfect...grammatically perfect, perfect formatting, and specifically targeted to each job you apply to. Persistence is your only weapon right now. If you have co-op/internship experience then that's great. If not, you're up against thousands of people who do have it. Remember, in times like this recruiters and HR people have a MASSIVE flood of resumes coming in. More than you can imagine. What makes yours so special? What makes you stand out from all those others? If the answer is nothing, better get used to flipping burgers until things get better.
If you're getting interviews with HR and then not getting callbacks, it might be time to brush up on your interviewing skills. In a job market like this NOTHING can be taken for granted. Remember that you are up against hundreds and hundreds of others for every single job. How well does that suit fit?
The winning strategy in the short term may be to take any damn job you can get...especially if its in the computer industry...no matter how shitty it may be.
Sorry to be so gloom and doom, but I'm just telling you the truth. I was out for a year when the tech bubble burst in 2001 so I have been there. I was a year out of school (i.e. I was cheap) with a year of experience that not many college grads would have, as well as co-op experience, and I couldn't get hired to save my life. My one final word of advice is not to believe ANYTHING a third party recruiter tells you. Confirm everything they say with the company directly before agreeing to anything. Those recruiters are sleazeballs of the worst kind and will lie to your face. Be very careful dealing with them.
Installed x64 on my 4gb machine and the performance was just ridiculously bad. I am a photographer and do a lot of image editing...couldn't even keep Cap One, Photoshop and iTunes open at the same time...especially if 7 was trying to thumbnail images in a folder (thumbnailing is broken and ridiculously resource intensive despite Microsoft's claims that its more robust in this OS). Noticed that it was swapping to the disk like crazy and ordered another 4gb. Definitely much better now, though I think 12gb would not be totally out of line for x64 with heavy applications. I haven't even TRIED to edit HD video yet...that is not a prospect I am looking forward to.
I pity people running the x86 version of the OS that are maxing out at 4gb. Definitely buy 64 bit (even though its more of a beta than a real OS) if you do anything memory intensive.
The one good thing about all this is that HOPEFULLY...FINALLY...maybe this will push Microsoft to push 64 bit more. They need to abandon 32 bit and force application writers and hardware manufacturers to start making 64 bit native applications. Working in a medical environment BELIEVE me I understand the need for backwards compatability, but the fact is that the resources are just not being put in to 64 bit to make it a really viable platform and even moderate power users are going to start bumping up against the 4gb limit.
Yea, I read that thing saying that the 4gb limit is a product-based limit rather than a technical limit but either way...it appears that x64 is where MS is choosing to support > 4gb so lets get serious about it.
You can expect the following...
1.) To begin to gain knowledge that will help you remain jaded and complacent throughout your miserable career in this terrible, terrible profession. Maybe if you are lucky you will even start to get a taste of the disrespect upper management (and finance) has for all IT workers.
2.) To find out why you should avoid staffing agencies. The job will likely be flipping burgers in the cafeteria at the company because the staffing agency is lying to you. I was incredulous too...how can you have your profession be staffing and yet actually, seriously, literally trick people in to accepting jobs which they have no interest in and may not even be qualified for? It's surprising, but true.
3.) It's lucky that the job will be in the cafeteria, because it sounds like that's about what they're going to be paying you for. $8 at a paid internship? Sounds like you're getting ready to learn about the reaming you'll take on salary in this industry...although even I did better than $8/hr and that was...jesus...10 years or more ago now?
IT is an absolutely miserable, horrible, terrible profession and I really urge anyone considering it as a career to strongly reevaluate their direction. I would say that a good 90% of IT workers are contributing, indirectly or directly, to making the world a much worse place for them and their progeny. This industry is a shithole of mismanagement and bullshit and bad technology and worthless wrongheaded regulations. I wish I could go back to the moment in college, when i was leaving CS and considering either IT or Photography, and tell myself to choose photography and avoid this life of drugery that I have accepted. Sure, I'd be broke as a photographer (even though I am really good), but there's certainly no way I could be any more miserable.
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Nor does he want to force them to do anything. All he's doing is posturing for the election with another meaningless piece of shit legislation.
Yea, progress towards another watered down piece of shit that does more harm than good.
You don't seriously think the government is going to do something in our interests that might inconvenience corporations even slightly or impede their ability to invade our privacy do you? There is no financial motive for doing so.
Why don't we just not use these worthless, expensive, pieces of shit in our airports anymore? Seems like it might be a simpler solution to the problem.
I agree with the overall tone of the article, but at the same time I am pretty skeptical that this is going to lead to an overblown cyber warfare capability. I guess it could lead to massively over budgeted security theater and rights-trampling clusterfuck legislation, but at the same time the trend I see as an infosec professional is to massively under-invest in information security and underestimate the threats.
Just today we learned that there were Chinese hackers in Nortel's network for a decade. Can you imagine? How many organizations used the Contivity client? Uhm....like *every* organization? Add that to Symantec's dismal failure to deal with the theft of their source code. These are *security companies* and THEY have had mind blowing security lapses...what's going on with the rest of the corporate world? What's going on with government systems where there are government funded APTs going after them 100% of the time? Do we seriously think the US government is so good at cyber-security that there are no major problems there? Not likely. I would say "not possible" in fact.
I think where it gets overblown is the threat to infrastructure. Not that I think serious compromises there aren't possible, but its not the boogeyman they are starting to make it out as. The threats are becoming more sophisticated all the time, though.
What I definitely agree with the article about is that declassification is necessary so that the public can evaluate these issues on their own, rather than relying on people who have a.) something to gain and b.) absolutely no idea what information security is, should be, or how one goes about implementing it. I mean you hear things anecdotally from vendors about what the government is up to and you think, "gee...I wouldnt go with that solution for my network...so why would the government, which has a lot more to lose, go with it....?" The instinct is always to close off, to classify, to protect but that is absolutely the wrong way to go about security. Organizations do this to try and keep their flaws secret, but at the end of the day all they do is lose visibility and accountability which invites even worse compromises. I can think of nowhere this is more dangerous than with government systems.
I think there is a real lack of high level expertise in InfoSec. I am not the most technical person who has ever gotten into this field, and have been starting to steer my career accordingly. However, common sense and a decade or so in the trenches will give you some pretty good ideas about what the threats are, how to prevent them, and what direction you should be moving in. Unfortunately, InfoSec personnel are rarely listened to when architecting networks, designing implementations, etc.
Regardless on anyone's feelings on command line vs. GUI, one reason it is so popular is that it's easy to administrate for people who don't know how to use a CLI. I see it all the time now. Sure, it's definitely not ideal to be a sys admin who doesn't know how to use a CLI but...they're out there...and there are a lot of them. Without the GUI it's just one more reason not to run Microsoft on your servers.
Personally, I don't really like this either. I'm fine with CLI but I think a GUI is well suited to many server tasks. Microsoft could definitely have a stronger CLI (I haven't messed with powershell...Im in infosec and don't administrate that often anymore)...but the GUI was a good tool.
I dunno. I think this is a very bad idea for MS. For LINUX advocates? It's awesome.
What's so sad about all this is that anyone outside of the government and the (pardon the term) 1% have known this was coming for a long time now. Hell, I'm sure they knew it was coming too, they just didn't care because they are traitors out to corrupt capitalism and democracy to line their own pockets. I have no problem with capitalism, it's the only viable economic system, but you cannot allow people to corrupt the system of government to tilt the playing field in their favor. That's not capitalism.
I love how the Republicans whine about liberals being in favor of "wealth redistribution" when their own policies are clearly aimed at wealth redistribution in the other direction. Neither strategy is capitalistic and neither strategy is viable in the long term. How, exactly, is propping up the music industry, an industry with a completely outdated business model and declining content quality, capitalism? How is it helpful to the country to do so? The answer, of course, is that it isn't. It's just what happens when you let executives of the failing industry bribe politicians legally. Meanwhile, the copyright legislation they have pushed for is wreaking havoc on the innovation which made America competitive in the first place. They sell this to voters under the illusion that the US will be on top of the food chain forever, regardless of what we do, and we can just dictate new rules when we don't like the old ones. It's not going to work that way for long.
There have been articles on the decline of basic research in this country for years now. I remember posting links to USENET on the same ever so long ago. It's the same thing that has happened to manufacturing that people have been decrying for decades. The US is moving towards an economy based entirely on gambling in the stock market. We don't produce things anymore, hell we don't even INVEST in things anymore, we just let bankers find new ways to wring more money out of the middle class. High frequency trading? Seriously? No one sees a problem with an industry that produces absolutely no value and no product whatsoever? This is all well and good for them...until the rest of the world catches on that they are adding no value they can continue to exploit them as well. However, they'll be driving their Mercedes through endless ghetto with bullets whizzing by their windows.
It's not a sustainable model for a society, but it is exactly what we are heading for and it's exactly what we deserve. We've chosen to become fat and stupid and to allow ourselves to support people who offer nothing in return. Liberals are certainly NO better, but where I see it the most is in the Republican party. People are willing to go to the mat for people who make more in a year than they will in their lifetime, even though those people are demonstrably bad at their jobs. Executives are leaving companies worse off than when they started and yet somehow still receive massive bonuses...and the right leaning middle class supports this! Their ostensibly "capitalism friendly" political opinions lead them into arguments with leftists...and they forget that they're not just supposed to oppose leftists, but they're supposed to be capitalists themselves and support capitalistic policies. They shout down people who decry poor copyright legislation and invest in companies which are just garbage. Look at the tech bubble. All you had to do was get an IT kid fresh out of college, pay him 40 grand a year, and he could tell you that investing in a company that had no product and provided no service, but had a nifty website, was a bad idea.
I could rant all day about this stuff. Won't do any good though. The stupid have won and the system is beyond hope. Hopefully I can eek out a decent living and die before the inevitable crash.
Night shooting - sensors can show things brighter than a mirror
No they can't. I'm talking about pitch black here. > 30s exposure. I have a 5dMKII...I know what I am talking about.
Action - a display can keep up as well as a mirror viewfinder (plus you don't have the delay for the mirror moving out of the way)
Again, no they can't. There is lag. As far as the mirror moving out of the way...try it with a 5dmkii and see how the results are.
Fashion - I presume you are talking about precise focus... again, no reason a display can't show this.
Actually, no. Live view is much better for precise focus...thats the time I use it the most on my camera.
Precise composition - The display can be as precise as a viewfinder.
LOL. You need to get a camera that has both. It won't take you long to see the difference.
The Leica is an overpriced piece of shit. Sorry Leica fans, but their pricing is way out of line for what you get. Fuji X100 is almost a better camera...the new one they're releasing will be a better camera. Yes, the glass...I know. But you're paying an exorbitant amount of money for an under performing body in order to mount very expensive but also VERY good glass. I think when the Fuji is released Leica may have to reconsider a bit.
It seems the movable mirror in the SLR design is an anachronistic piece of baggage left over from the days of film cameras. The mirror and pentaprism were necessary to get true "through the lens" viewing to accommodate different lenses, etc. The mirror introduces a lot of complexity, weight, and problems such as lag, mirror shake and problems doing video.
I am surprised the the mirror persists in the digital camera age. In reading the comments, it seems that the DSLR cameras have nicer sensors, features, lenses, etc. but there is no reason these could not be fitted to the mirrorless designs.
Is there any good reason to still have a mirror?
Night shooting? Action? Fashion? Precise composition?
I will be buying the new Fuji interchangeable lens camera when it comes out too...but if you think a mirror is outdated for all applications, it's because your definition of "photography" is severely limited.
You can bet that someone in congress is getting money from someone who manufactures backup cameras. Simple as that.
Been lucky enough to be employed through the recession, but I haven't gotten a raise in the last TWO FUCKING YEARS and thats on top of my cheap ass company refusing to give me what would be considered an insulting raise at any for profit on a promotion to augment my piddly salary. Piddly salary isn't an exaggeration by the way...they've raised my pay 3 times now (well before the last two years) because they did a salary survey and figured out they weren't paying me enough. I could have told them that.
On top of it all the workload is getting insane and NOW they are talking layoffs, even as they bring on more affiliates. So...let me get this straight...you have money to buy hospitals, but the cost of supporting them is killing you leaving you with a budget shortfall which you have to make up by laying off the already overworked staff. Well that certainly sounds like a recipe for a successful IT organization.
IT is bullshit. Never work for a matrixed organization. If I get laid off Im getting out of this industry. Management uses the recession as an excuse to treat IT workers like dirt.
I started out with Sprint, then Nextel, neither of which was any good. Could never hold on to calls, mad dead spots, problems with reception at home, etc. Then I got verizon and loved it (but hated the phone). Verizon's service was rock solid, but their data plans were way too much. Then my iPod (which I live and die by) broke and I didn't have the cash for both a new phone and a new ipod, so I changed to ATT and got my 32 gb 3gs. The service in the boston area is on par with verizon. I can't speak to the data network, but there are no significant dead spots, I can talk on the phone and move around, etc. The internet is fast enough for what I need it for when Im out.
Even when I drove out to western ny on 88/86 we mostly had (edge) service. A few dead spots between towers, but good enough.
I think NYC has it much worse than I do anywhere I've been.
So I think it just depends on where you are, and also what your expectations are. If you're a wicked heavy internet user and you travel all over the country, yea, obviously verizon is going to beat the shit out of everybody. But if you mostly stay in a place where att has decent coverage and is not overloaded too bad then it will be fine.
The tone of your post implies that the world has some kind of right to the mineral deposits there and that the taliban was committing some kind of crime against humanity by failing to exploit them.
Let me make it clear that I am no fan of the taliban...apart from the obvious (terror, death, destruction, etc) I think the subjugation of women really IS a crime against humanity and 'backwards' in every sense of the word.
However, like it or not Afghanistan is (well, was) a sovreign nation and that nation has the right to choose whether they exploit their natural resources or not. Clearly the taliban is vested in keeping the world in an almost medieval state, so why would they exploit their resources to help us build laptop batteries?
This whole mineral find will likely spur the taliban on anyway. It will become another rallying cry that the imperialist US is here to steal our resources to promote their own corrupt, backwards way of life. Our only hope is that the jobs and money it brings to the country will keep people from becoming desperate enough to listen to them.
My point is that it's their right to live in the stone age, just as much as it is our right not to. The reasons that it was fundamentally wrong for them to attack us are the same reasons why it is fundamentally wrong to try and paint their failure to exploit this stuff as some kind of insanity that we have every right to stop.
...because destroying the US and offshoring our jobs to China and india wasn't enough. Corporate America has to prove that they have absolutely NO moral convictions whatsoever. Who is worse than North Korea? Does the Taliban have any programmers that will work cheap?
I disagree. The problems with rotaries come when people fail to be aggressive enough...they yield in the rotary rather than taking the right of way that is rightfully theirs. They think this is 'being nice' or 'being careful' when really all it's doing is disrupting the flow of traffic and fucking everything up for everyone.
I do love rotaries, though, and think we need more of them.
You mean stopping at a red, then driving 100 yards straight down a main road before being forced to stop at another red isn't fuel efficient? "Signals timed to require frequent stops" on a major commuter artery wastes gas?? NO WAY!!!!
Seriously, though, yea...no kidding! A while ago, they timed the lights out in a certain section of Boston that is always a nightmare to get through. I had driven through there earlier in the day before reading the article about it and had actually noticed that the trip was a order of magnitude quicker than usual despite a relatively heavy volume of traffic.
There are so many poorly timed lights in this city, and I have been saying forever that we could save a ton of gas, a ton of money, and a ton of time if we just fixed this. I know it's not something we can snap our fingers and get done but, honestly, it seems like the state is actively working against doing this at times. Some of the situations with the lights around here are just absolutely beyond belief. There's one place I can think of where you sit at a red (on a major 3 lane road) then drive 50 feet before getting another red. Every time. 50 feet! No joke! Situations like this create congestion and gridlock and just make the city a huge mess. There are so many benefits to doing this, and absolutely no downsides whatsoever. Let's get this happening ASAP.
The description is almost too hilarious to believe..that they think it would be too much work to police their own networks. It's just so...its so far out there in hypocrisy land I can't even believe it.
It makes me want to develop a really awesome youtube channel that the networks would show clips of (under completely reasonable fair use provisions) and then sue their motherfucking balls off. I realize the insane hypocrisy of that, but hypocrisy is really all we have left. Anything that brings the collapse sooner is probably a good thing at this point.
I sort of had the same thought. I mean, obviously getting distracted could be bad too...but like imagine a 7 hour flight from Boston to LA in the middle of the night. Not really a lot going on. It almost seems like it might be good to have something to keep them awake and occupied...
I don't claim to really know the answer here...just a thought.
Excellent point.
I think you can probably make a case for users needing to be competent to avoid phishing attacks...because the impact can be so damaging and there is no real way to prevent them...but in all other aspects maintaining a good security posture really is more the responsibility of the IT staff. In the end, something is going to test your defenses. Most of the viruses we see at my very large enterprise spread via the network. You get one user who makes a wrong click and BAM every single one of your small office's unpatched computers are infected. You're never going to get staff that is incapable of making those types of mistakes...even IT staff make them from time to time.
I don't disagree that users should be encouraged to be more computer literate and security aware...regardless of your budget and your staffing there are aspects of security which will come down to user decisions and there is nothing you can do about it. I have been an advocate for training and modifying the culture of my organization to try and instill at least SOME basic level of security awareness. Nurses who don't want to have a password on their computer because its too hard to remember...well...too bad. Start remembering a password or start touching up your resume is what I say. It's just part of the commitment a business needs to make when embracing IT as a part of it's business. However with things like viruses, spam, malware...it's always going to get through no matter what you do. The question is whether your infrastructure is ready for it.
If only we could find a way to make windows file sharing run over port 80 instead of 139/445!!! Then infosec wouldn't make us connect to the VPN to get our files and life would be perfect!!!!
It's called CSM and it's amazing! It does everything for you and never fucks up!!! :D
Seriously though, we're so far from this I couldn't even begin to tell you. Half the time the application vendor can't even tell you what ports are required and they wrote the software that's making the connections. It's pathetic. I get requests from clueless lusers who obviously don't even know what they're requesting, then the question ("No you can't have an IP any. No, ugh, never mind what that means...just ask the vendor what you need.") goes to the vendor and half the time they can't answer it.
Truthfully there is really no great way of doing this. Even if you can profile the software running on the machine, you're not going to know if it's making all the connections it needs to make during the time you profile it. You also need to have some kind of idea what you're doing so you don't wind up exposing 139/445 to the internet or something dumb like that. They pay us infosec people a salary to do this stuff for a reason: we can't always tell you what you want, but we can usually tell you what you don't want. Making these kinds of changes requires thought, risk analysis, and planning. It's not something that should be a drag and drop routine that any user can do...at least not at this point in history.
Maybe at smaller companies sys admins have the knowledge necessary to make these sort of decisions responsibly but I can tell you from experience that being a sys admin does not automatically confer on you the ability to make smart decisions about what firewall exceptions to request. We've had users escalate requests WAY up the chain after being denied by us, only to have them sending 911 pages to us literally 20 minutes after it's implemented to have it shut off. Just because your sshd is up to date and you use strong passwords doesn't mean you want the entire internet beating down your door 24/7/365...sometimes it really is better for you to have your users connect to the VPN first. That's the knowledge that infosec brings to the table, and that's why we don't want you making your own exceptions.
Don't just take any job? Do you realize how many college graduates who spent a lot of money on their degrees he's up against right now? And how few jobs there are? Now is not the time to be picky, my friend, the economic situation has shifted the balance of power solidly to the employers' side. This is the economic climate where you get fucked on salary, sorry to say.
You're leaving school and entering the real world. Being "able to program" in school and able to program in the real world are two completely different things. You don't know shit about shit right now. Colleget gives you a few basic tools and shows that you can get in-depth on a subject...in terms of what you can actually do for a company it's more or less meaningless.
You're also getting out of college and entering the job market during one of the worst economic downturns in recent history. Get used to applying for jobs and hearing nothing back. There are people with far more programming experience as well as just general work experience (the value of which you have probably not realized yet) who are getting the same replies...or lack of replies...from these companies. There are probably people with experience applying for the same entry level jobs you are because they are desperate. That's bad news for you.
Long story short: get used to getting nothing back. The problem isn't that the evil HR people are a barrier to you showing these companies how useful you could be to them, its that you have no experience at all and you're not worth hiring. Do anything you can to get noticed...apply online, send paper resumes, make sure you have a great cover letter, follow up with a phone call. If your communication skills are poor, you better get someone to help you with that. Your resume and cover letter should be ABSOLUTELY perfect...grammatically perfect, perfect formatting, and specifically targeted to each job you apply to. Persistence is your only weapon right now. If you have co-op/internship experience then that's great. If not, you're up against thousands of people who do have it. Remember, in times like this recruiters and HR people have a MASSIVE flood of resumes coming in. More than you can imagine. What makes yours so special? What makes you stand out from all those others? If the answer is nothing, better get used to flipping burgers until things get better.
If you're getting interviews with HR and then not getting callbacks, it might be time to brush up on your interviewing skills. In a job market like this NOTHING can be taken for granted. Remember that you are up against hundreds and hundreds of others for every single job. How well does that suit fit?
The winning strategy in the short term may be to take any damn job you can get...especially if its in the computer industry...no matter how shitty it may be.
Sorry to be so gloom and doom, but I'm just telling you the truth. I was out for a year when the tech bubble burst in 2001 so I have been there. I was a year out of school (i.e. I was cheap) with a year of experience that not many college grads would have, as well as co-op experience, and I couldn't get hired to save my life. My one final word of advice is not to believe ANYTHING a third party recruiter tells you. Confirm everything they say with the company directly before agreeing to anything. Those recruiters are sleazeballs of the worst kind and will lie to your face. Be very careful dealing with them.
Installed x64 on my 4gb machine and the performance was just ridiculously bad. I am a photographer and do a lot of image editing...couldn't even keep Cap One, Photoshop and iTunes open at the same time...especially if 7 was trying to thumbnail images in a folder (thumbnailing is broken and ridiculously resource intensive despite Microsoft's claims that its more robust in this OS). Noticed that it was swapping to the disk like crazy and ordered another 4gb. Definitely much better now, though I think 12gb would not be totally out of line for x64 with heavy applications. I haven't even TRIED to edit HD video yet...that is not a prospect I am looking forward to.
I pity people running the x86 version of the OS that are maxing out at 4gb. Definitely buy 64 bit (even though its more of a beta than a real OS) if you do anything memory intensive.
The one good thing about all this is that HOPEFULLY...FINALLY...maybe this will push Microsoft to push 64 bit more. They need to abandon 32 bit and force application writers and hardware manufacturers to start making 64 bit native applications. Working in a medical environment BELIEVE me I understand the need for backwards compatability, but the fact is that the resources are just not being put in to 64 bit to make it a really viable platform and even moderate power users are going to start bumping up against the 4gb limit.
Yea, I read that thing saying that the 4gb limit is a product-based limit rather than a technical limit but either way...it appears that x64 is where MS is choosing to support > 4gb so lets get serious about it.
You can expect the following... 1.) To begin to gain knowledge that will help you remain jaded and complacent throughout your miserable career in this terrible, terrible profession. Maybe if you are lucky you will even start to get a taste of the disrespect upper management (and finance) has for all IT workers. 2.) To find out why you should avoid staffing agencies. The job will likely be flipping burgers in the cafeteria at the company because the staffing agency is lying to you. I was incredulous too...how can you have your profession be staffing and yet actually, seriously, literally trick people in to accepting jobs which they have no interest in and may not even be qualified for? It's surprising, but true. 3.) It's lucky that the job will be in the cafeteria, because it sounds like that's about what they're going to be paying you for. $8 at a paid internship? Sounds like you're getting ready to learn about the reaming you'll take on salary in this industry...although even I did better than $8/hr and that was...jesus...10 years or more ago now? IT is an absolutely miserable, horrible, terrible profession and I really urge anyone considering it as a career to strongly reevaluate their direction. I would say that a good 90% of IT workers are contributing, indirectly or directly, to making the world a much worse place for them and their progeny. This industry is a shithole of mismanagement and bullshit and bad technology and worthless wrongheaded regulations. I wish I could go back to the moment in college, when i was leaving CS and considering either IT or Photography, and tell myself to choose photography and avoid this life of drugery that I have accepted. Sure, I'd be broke as a photographer (even though I am really good), but there's certainly no way I could be any more miserable.