You're making a pretty big mistake by looking at this as an iPad competitor. I've seen the device here at Cisco Live, and it's pretty slick. The device docks into a desk phone-type system, so it basically serves as a desktop teleconferencing unit that can be decoupled from the base station and taken with you.
This device is only going to appeal to those organizations that already have an existing Cisco Unified Communications system in-place and already make heavy use of video communications, and want to be able to bring mobile individuals into Telepresense sessions and provide a cleaner solution for those who need to do desktop video teleconferencing. You can bet that Cisco will eventually release iPhone and iPad (once the iPad gets cameras or a camera addon) apps, along with apps for other cell phone OSes, that will provide tie-ins to the Telepresense systems (just like they already have apps for tie-ins to their VoIP products), but this solution fits a very particular niche in the voice and video ecosystem that no existing product on the market quite fills: a tightly integrated, function-specific mobile video telecommunications device designed from the ground up to work with Cisco's product line.
So the guy did you a favor and you're bitching? Only on Slashdot... The guy wasn't doing me a favor, that is TSA protocol. Prescription and over-the-counter drugs are exempt from their restrictions on liquids. Link: http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/9-25_updated_passenger_guidance.shtm
By the way, have you read how incredibly difficult chemists have stated that it is to actually mix explosives on a plane? Not just that, but, the chemicals that you mix are easily detectable and flammable materials anyway. The idea that you can take two inert, innocuous liquids on a plane undetected and combine them to form OMG SUPER EXPLOSIVE is just ridiculous.
But, lets say it wasn't. Lets say that the movies were right and you really could do such a thing. If that's the case, then anyone aiming to take down a plane could bypass the liquids restriction simply by placing them in medicine bottles. So what's the point in having the restriction in the first place?
There is none. It goes back to the original topic -- security theater.
Not having flown a commercial airliner recently, I'd completely forgotten about the liquid/aerosol rule and decided to carry my luggage onboard. After standing in line for awhile, I noticed the signs and remembered. Crap! I had my mouthwash, an aerosol can of deodorant, and my aerosol shaving cream with me. Given the length the line had grown to, I decided to just forgo those items than risk being late.
A bit about those three items. Both the shaving cream and deodorant were in aerosol cans, both larger than the size allowed, but obviously retail items. The mouthwash was too large as well, and was a generic amber bottle, about 14 or so ounces, with a prescription sticker (I have gingivitis).
I pull all three items out, and just tell the TSA guy that I know I need to toss them. He glances at all three and tells me I have to ditch the deodorant and the shaving cream, but I can keep the mouthwash.
Because it's prescription.
So, the two retail aerosol cans that are nearly impossible to inject anything into are verboten, but the amber bottle with the mystery liquid in it, that's okay, because it has a sticker with a Walgreens logo on it. Fan-fucking-tastic.
For anyone that's spent any amount of time in government contracting, you'd know this isn't uncommon.
Government acquisition contracts are supposed to go to the best product. Determining "best" is supposed to be based on an objective vendor selection process where certain aspects of each product are given a score, and the aggregate makes the decision. These vendor selection processes are sometimes not written well, often by people who don't really understand what it is they are comparing.
Let me give you an example from one vendor selection I worked on, for Ethernet switches. One of the criteria was "Supported VLANs." The product with the most supported VLANs was given a 1, and anyone less was given a fraction thereof equivilant to how many it supported. In this case, vendor A supported 4096 VLANs, while Vendor B supported 1024 VLANs. In this one criteria, vendor A was four times better than Vendor B, even though we only needed support for, at most, a dozen VLANs, which both devices could easily support.
In this instance, our complaints were heard and the problems were corrected.
However, often, this doesn't happen, and bogus criteria is used to make a decision.
On rare occasions, though, you'll even see vendor selection criteria written by people who've made a decision on which vendor they want to purchase, and the criteria is skewed to ensure that a certain product is purchased. This is rarely corruption, usually it's someone who already "knows" that a given product is better, and is simply trying to "make sure the right decision is made." For example, a Linux zealot writing vendor selction criteria for deciding on whether to go with Linux or Microsoft servers.
The exact vendor selection criteria, often being secret, leaves vendors that had reasonable belief that they should have won completely baffled as to why they lost. Unlike commercial transactions, where there is no recourse, they can bring the case to court to see if there was any improper behavior in the vendor selection process.
This actually benefits the taxpayer, as it gives oversight to procurment which is paid for by your tax dollars.
Just because in this case it's a company nobody likes, everyone is crying foul. But, in reality, it's a Good Thing.
The "Free Wi-Fi" stuff you see in airports aren't all, or even mostly, scams. Whenever someone sees one of these ad hoc networks and attempts to connect to it with a Windows machine, the Windows machine then broadcasts out that as a possible ad hoc network. It then carries that ad hoc network name with itself as you move.
That's how the SSID has spread so far and wide, and why it is so prevalent.
You should be *ALWAYS* careful when using ANY public wifi hotspot. Your traffic can be easily monitored or hijacked with very simple tools, none of which require setting up your own rogue AP or a fake ad hoc network.
Computerworld got had by a security firm looking for some free advertising. Way to go!
The problem is your interpretation of that statement. It is not the press that is being targeted here, it is the people who leaked the information in the first place. Leaking sensitive government information, except in very specific whistle-blower situations, is a CRIME. Someone committed a crime, and just because the crime was committed via leaking to the press doesn't automatically make the reporters not liable to be subpoenaed.
Using Watergate as an example is stupid. First off, Woodward and Bernstein took every precaution to keep the government from finding out who it was. Second, Deep Throat was leaking information about GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS COMMITTING A CRIME.
In this case, some jackass in the police department tipped reporters off to a future raid, and the reporters irresponsibly used that information. Because of the freedom of the press, the reporters cannot be prosecuted for what they did, which is a good thing, big-picture wise, despite the fact that they deserve to have their teeth knocked in.
"Freedom of the Press" means exactly that. Not "Freedom to hide criminals"
Whoever leaked that information, though, is a security risk inside a government organization and needs to be punished or terminated for what they did. Not only did they interfere with law enforcement, but they put those law enforcement officers' lives at risk.
This was *not* an honest employee tipping off reporters to something the government doing something wrong -- those sorts of people are already protected under the whistleblower act. This was a (presumably) dishonest employee leaking information to the press for (presumably) dishonest reasons, probably a favor the reporter may owe them in the future or maybe even money.
Oh for shame! A helpdesk job with no upward mobility and he had to leave for greener pastures!
Give me a break. For those of us in IT, there are lots of jobs and lots of career paths -- but if you really want a new job, you have to motivate yourself, learn on your own, and (often times) leave the company to get a better job. If you're intelligent (as another user pointed out, just because you have a knack for computers doesn't make you smart) and are good with customers and juniors, you'll go far.
The key thing support guys (and I fall into this category) usually fail to realize is that they are not the cock-n-balls. They are the jock strap. It is their position to support the important parts of the business. Like the dispair.com poster says, just because you're essential, it doesn't mean you're important.
Me? I've got 8 1/2 years of IT experience. I went from being a lowly support guy (about as low as you can get...a data tech in the Marine Corps), today I'm a router guy who does senior-level enterprise network support for almost a half-million end users in our organization. Daily.
If you want it bad enough, you can get it. Just get rid of the "heh heh stoopid lusers" attitude and get with the program. IT support is little different than A/C repair, vehicle repair, medicine, or a myraid of other support/repair professions. Get the customer to trust you, don't make them feel stupid for not being able to do it themselves, and in the end, get them up and running, and happy that you're there for them, and will be next time.
You never hear EMTs giggling after work about stupid guys not being able to recognize heart attack symptoms. They get on the scene, and help the patient. Help the customer. Support them. That's what "IT support" is all about.
Decentralized IT is not the answer. While it tends to be more flexible in the short term, the payoff is lost in lower reliability, costs that spiral out of control, security nightmares, duplication of effort across an enterprise, and worse.
I've seen the result of decentralized IT, and its horrendous. Dozens of little fiefdoms, with each departmental/organizational IT guy a little Napoleon who decries that higher ups simply "don't get it." People who've explained to me that they "absolutely must have" three switches in each comm closet for the three different organizations, because "broadcasts might leak information." Despite the fact that each of those switches uplinks to the same distribution device. Or, that "troubleshooting a spanning tree storm is easy," that "it's just like ATM."
Where centralized IT fails is in being inflexible and attempting to apply cookie-cutter solutions to every problem. This is usually the result of a lack of a good project process. But, customers don't often help centralized IT either, usually when they want something, they operate under the (usually false) assumption that IT is a bunch of asshats who "just don't get it." So, you end up in a scenario where the customer stonewalls IT, and no one ends up happy.
The only fault with centralized IT is that, if its mismanaged, it fails for everyone. When properly managed, funded, and staffed, centralized IT can succeed, just like anything else.
Because of cell phones, 24/7 reachability has become the rule, rather than the exception. This has extended to the business world, where many employees are virtually on call 24/7. In some cases, this is minor, but in others, it can be critical. Emergency responders such as doctors and nurses, senior IT folks (such as myself, when I'm on call), and others keep their cells on them and can still have something of a life rather than stay at home and wait for the home.
Being denied the ability to do this would be suck. For me, not so much, my on-call is limited. For others, it'd be impossible.
What would be cool is if you could either give your cell phone to a greeter or usher, or forward your calls to a call center number. Then, they would either take your name and table (if a restaurant), or give you a tiny vibrating pager (if a theater) that you can be notified of a call.
The problem is tax revenue. Sales tax makes up a considerable percentage of revenue for many states, especially states like Texas that have no income tax.
Back in the day, most people bought almost everything they bought from local merchants, meaning that there was very little way to avoid sales tax. Catalog mail order and later, telephone orders, made up such a small percentage of commerce that the items remained untaxed. The smaller northeastern states, and even some municipalities (like in the Oklahoma City area) sometimes lower their tax rates to encourage people to come shop in their malls. Delaware makes a big stink about not having a sales tax, and there's a lot of outlet malls that advertise as such. Still, it wasn't much money.
Now, thanks to advances in shipping technology and Internet ordering, people are spending more and more money online, especially in the holiday season. This money isn't being taxed.
Some states have provisions to attempt to curb this. Virginia, for example, has a "use tax" where if you purchase any item and do not pay sales tax, you have you pay a "use tax" on it. Problem is, it's hard to track and almost no one reports anything, much less what they really spent.
The tax system is so convoluted and fucked up it should be changed, I agree, but this is totally legal. The sticky point comes in where states are trying to force e-merchants to collect their own sales taxes. Depending on how this is accomplished (i.e., not a federal law) if you've got a state that isn't part of this agreement you're going to see e-merchants move to those states to avoid having the additional burden of collecting those taxes.
A vast majority of actors are not full-time. Most of them pull other jobs in-between gigs, and they're also the ones most likely to aim for these reality show tryouts -- mainly because they've already got jobs that they can drop for a temporary period, and they're hungry for the fame and potential future jobs that a reality show appearance might rake in. Plus they have agents who's job it is to constantly search for these things.
Remember that stupid reality show they had where they got a supposed average guy and tricked a bunch of girls into thinking he was a millionaire? They claimed he was a "construction worker" -- which he was, but only when he wasn't doing acting jobs or underwear ads.
The core of the Internet is not run like you think it would be. While BGP is dynamic, when and where various prefixes (network address blocks) are advertised is tightly controlled.
When you peer with an ISP, that means you only exchange their prefixes for yours. Any other networks that may be reachable via that ISP are not advertised back to you, just like they don't send your prefixes to the rest of the Internet.
Access to other parts of the Internet via an ISP is called transit -- this is what we're all most familiar with. You give your prefixes to them and they take care of exchanging it with the rest of the Internet, and they give you the rest of the Internet's prefixes.
Lets say there are two ISPs. Lets say its Alpha (a Tier 1 ISP) and Beta (a non-Tier 1). Alpha and Beta have a settlement-free interconnect agreement -- meaning they peer with each other. Remember, that means that they can only access each other directly. To go to the rest of the Internet, it means that they have to go to other providers. Alpha uses its other SFI agreements with all other Tier 1 providers to do so, Beta may use other SFI agreements and paid-for peering or transit agreements with other providers. For so-called "tier 2" ISPs, it's often a complicated mess.
Then, lets say Alpha decides that its SFI agreement with Beta is no longer in its best interest. So, they tell Beta they're going to depeer if they don't start paying for the peering.
Beta has two options to ensure that their customer base will stay functioning. They can either come to an agreement with Alpha, or come up with a transit agreement with another ISP, either another Tier 1 ISP or Tier 2.
It gets more complicated than that, but, that's the basic jist of it.
You're missing the point. Cogent isn't a Tier 1 ISP. They're close, but not quite. To be a Tier 1, that means you don't pay for peering -- period. Cogent does.
This was a fairly straightforward business problem. Settlement-free peering only occurs when its in the best interests of both parties to do so. There are massive costs still incurred on each end, but they simply don't exchange money. The traffic in both directions is equal enough that neither side is incurring a loss. L3 determined that they were, and announced to Cogent that their settlement-free peering agreement was going to end.
Rather than doing what they should have done, and either ponied up the cash to L3, or reached a transit agreement with another ISP (say, a tier 2) to receive L3's prefixes and get its own prefixes onto L3's network, Cogent allowed the depeering to occur and used the resulting disruption to the Internet to their own advantage by calling L3 out.
They, in effect, allowed a major outage to occur in order to avoid paying for transit to L3. L3 gave them something like 90 days notice, plenty of time for Cogent to develop a contingency plan.
Yet, they didn't. Thier customers immediately became unreachable from L3's network, and their customers were unable to reach L3. They allowed this situation to continue, leveraging it for a public relations backlash against L3, and attempted to lure L3 customers to Cogent.
I'll be the first to admit my understanding of the issue is not 100% -- so if I'm missing a critical point, please let me know. But, from my understanding, let me be the first to say this is not a major problem with the Internet, nor is it something that regulation would do anything to fix. This is a bullshit back-room business decision by an ISP trying to save a buck and make a name for itself.
Problem is the Microsoft XML format is proprietary to Microsoft. While the standard is "open" -- as in published -- there are restrictions as to who can implement it.
Problem comes 5-10 years down the road, if/when an organization chooses to move away from Microsoft. Maybe they're going to OpenOffice.org 5.0, or maybe they're going to GoogleOffice. Or maybe a whole other developer has come along and revolutionized the office application suite.
But, you're stuck. You have 10 years of data that's locked into Microsoft products, what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed? Buy Office and the new product for everything? Create a "legacy application gateway" with a few copies of Office accessable via Citrix or VNC?
Also, there's interoperability with external organizations. Right now, to do business with the federal or most state governments, your business must use Office to be able to exchange data. No ifs ands or buts about it.
With OpenDocument, this isn't an issue. No matter what product you buy in the future, it can work with OpenDocument. Doesn't matter what product a client or customer uses -- if it's OD-compatible, you can exchange data.
Yet further proof that almost all "security professionals" have about as much intelligence as a gnat.
I'm really tired of mediocre systems guys passing a CISSP exam (thousand miles wide, quarter inch deep) and being declared experts on securing things they don't even understand to begin with.
For one, quantative analysis of the numbers of vulnerabilities doesn't equate to determining if a system is more or less secure than another. It's also meaningless if you don't compare how the systems are configured in what kinds of environments. Even simple things like Linksys routers greatly contribute to additional security on a personal computer (Windows or otherwise).
From the article: "Symantec chronicled 1,862 new vulnerabilities during 1H2005 - an average of 10 new flaws a day - 73 per cent of which it categorises as easily exploitable. The time between the disclosure of a vulnerability and the release of an associated exploit was just six days. Half (59 per cent) of vulnerabilities were associated with web application technologies."
Can anyone tell me where in that statement is a shred of useful, meaningful information? Of course not. Because there is none.
Insofar as Firefox and and OS X being "in for surprises." Sure, Firefox is an evolving application, bugs will be introduced and squashed, and later on more will be introduced. Some of those will be security vulnerabilities. Any application who's sole job is to pull data from untrusted sources and parse it will be vulnerable to security problems resulting from buggy code. Period. End of sentence.
OS X... please. The "it's not as popular" theory as to the lack of OS X viri and worms has been beaten to death over and over. Simple fact is the difficulty would make the first creator of an OS X virus or worm famous beyond anything another Windows worm would cause -- even if the spread wouldn't be nearly as bad. And yet, here we are, five years after the release, and not a single virus or worm that directly affects the operating system. Surprised?
Despite that incentive, it has yet to be done. A rootkit is being touted as "proof of OS X's insecurity." Give me a break. If you can trick a user to type in their admin password with an application, it doesn't matter if you're running Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, HP-UX, or Solaris -- you're going to get owned.
Jesus, I hate security people. I just want to choke them.
And you're right, this matches identically to the system in Eternal Darkness. The sanity system was one of the big advertising points of the game -- this was probably to protect it.
I wouldn't exactly call Wichita a rural area, and you're insane if you think that you can find a $250k house in any large city.
20-year-old townhouses in suburban Washington (Prince William and Loudon Counties, Virginia) are running in the 320+ range, depending on distance from major throughfares.
And that still incurs a 1+ hour commute to Arlington or the District.
One-bedroom condos close to the Metro? $450k+
Townhouses in good areas inside the beltway? Try 600-800k.
Obviously written by someone with no knowledge of the housing market.
Most large metropolitan areas are, and have been the last 5 years or so, in the middle of bubble markets. Some are worse than others, but in almost all cases, those that make the median incomes cannot afford the median home.
Take where I live, Washington DC. We're in one of the worst bubbles in the history of the United States. People who make six-figure salaries cannot afford homes within 50 miles of the District. Even housing in far-flung communities like Fredericksburg VA, Waldorf MD, and even Martinsburg WV are skyrocketing.
The reason is speculation. People are willing to purchase homes they cannot afford out of the concept that they will make massive returns on it later on. They're right -- up to a point. Eventually (many are saying within the next couple years) the price point will level off because there simply aren't enough people who can afford those prices, then once it levels off, the speculation will end, and prices will plummet. Personally, I think it's all a scam engineered by real estate investors, which is why I'm renting.
Rural areas have been spared this. Making 100k a year, you can only afford to rent in and around DC. Making 50k in a rural area, you can afford a large home with acrage and still have enough left over for a very comfortable lifestyle. You won't be wearing the latest fashions and drinking at the finest clubs, but, you won't be expected, to, either.
There's always other friends, and besides, children would probably be better served growing up in a rural area vice a city, with all the problems that they come with.
I was referring to what is available for purchase, not what's currently deployed. I still work with production Cisco 2501's on occasion, so believe me, I know that the IPv6 transision is not going to be cheap, or easy.
Thing is it'll never be absolutely necessary here in the US, at least not for a long time to come. Enough kludges have been developed for NAT that it's "good enough" for the time being, espeically to IT managers facing the hard choice between sticking with NAT or dumping a metric ass-ton (roughly equivilant to an Imperial crapload) of money into an IPv6 infrastructure.
The "prime time" buzzword has been an excuse for the last few years, even though no one can really give a hard definition of what "prime time" is.
Looked up something interesting. Minimum MTU in IPv6 is 1280 bytes. So, now you're talking a difference of 1.5% versus 3.1% (rounded). Even less of a big deal.
Obviously you only read trade mags and know nothing about networking:
1) You're thinking older Cisco equipment. But, the same argument could be made for any number of enterprise/carrier routing vendors. If you have a router/multilayer switch designed for IPv4, you're going to have to either upgrade it with IPv6 ASICs, or replace it completely. That's part of the price of transisition, and there's no way around that.
2) No one with any level of education in the matter says "We're running out of addresses." We're running out of address SPACE. Big difference. The huge class A and B networks issued to large US corporations and the military means those countries who got online later on are losing out. Case in point...I was on the redesign team at a USAF base that had two class B networks -- for 30,000 customers.
And NAT is only a stopgap. You end up with a massive number of interoperability problems when you start NATing. With IPv6, there simply isn't the need for it, and you remove those problems.
3) Memory and CPU performance hasn't been a major issue with most routers in a long time, especially BGP routers. Massive OSPF networks, yeah, the Dykstra algorithm hits hard, but there are other, less CPU-intensive options like IS-IS, or just design your network right from the ground up and summarize properly.
Again, the problem we're going to run into here is the specialized memory used for wire-speed packet switching. But, if you're doing wire-speed, you're going to have to replace the ASICs anyway, so the TCAM gets replaced too.
4) You're right, minimum MTU size in IPv4 networks is 576 bytes. But that's a difference of 3.5% versus 7%. Not a major issue -- especially since most MTUs are in the range of 1250-1500, or even higher in pure GigE networks.
The road to IPv6 will be bumpy, but the only issue you mentioned with any real weight is the first, and that's an easy one. You just throw money at it.
Where the problem is going to lie is in long-haul data transport, IPv4 interoperability, and legacy application support. The network's the easy part.
This is a common problem for anyone in the IT industry. As you become more and more specialized, you run the risk of limiting where you are useful.
For example, I'm a network engineer, working on my CCIE. There aren't many places that need someone of a CCIE-level skillset to exclusively do networks.
Now, I also have considerable security, Windows, and Unix experience, which helps, a lot, but almost all of my experience in the last 4 years has been limited to routing and switching.
It really all depends on what you want out of your career. If you're like me, and want to stay in a specialized field, it's great. For someone that wants more breadth than depth, not so great.
Reality shows and basic dramas (think Desperate Housewives) are relatively cheap to make. You don't have the big up-front expense of maintaining large sets on large soundstages, nor do you have the continuing expense of effects work.
Firefly failed for a number of reasons. For one, it's premise made it seem hokey, reducing the number of people willing to give it a chance. Even those that did were turned off by the mediocre first episode that didn't match with the advertisments, or the two or three modiocre episodes that followed (along with the confusing plot due to the out-of-order airings). Plus, being on Fox, they demanded considerably higher ratings than they were ever going to get. Yeah, yeah, X-files started out with low ratings, but X-file was one of Fox's flagship shows when it became a network, back in the days where if you weren't ABC,NBC, or CBS, you were nothing.
The timeslot wasn't at fault, really. SFC airs their three main original series on Friday night, including BSG, but get very high ratings.
As a student who was allowed to use a calculator from the sixth grade forward, I found that my ability to do simple arithmetic in my head was very much diminished. While I could do derivations and other logical functions mentally quickly, when it came to adding two-digit numbers in my head, I still struggle and use my fingers.
This even makes my current career a pain in the ass as i have to subnet every single day.
Students should be forced to use slide rules and pen and paper. There is no educational advantage to allowing them to use calculators.
Slashdot Mirror
You're making a pretty big mistake by looking at this as an iPad competitor. I've seen the device here at Cisco Live, and it's pretty slick. The device docks into a desk phone-type system, so it basically serves as a desktop teleconferencing unit that can be decoupled from the base station and taken with you.
This device is only going to appeal to those organizations that already have an existing Cisco Unified Communications system in-place and already make heavy use of video communications, and want to be able to bring mobile individuals into Telepresense sessions and provide a cleaner solution for those who need to do desktop video teleconferencing. You can bet that Cisco will eventually release iPhone and iPad (once the iPad gets cameras or a camera addon) apps, along with apps for other cell phone OSes, that will provide tie-ins to the Telepresense systems (just like they already have apps for tie-ins to their VoIP products), but this solution fits a very particular niche in the voice and video ecosystem that no existing product on the market quite fills: a tightly integrated, function-specific mobile video telecommunications device designed from the ground up to work with Cisco's product line.
But, lets say it wasn't. Lets say that the movies were right and you really could do such a thing. If that's the case, then anyone aiming to take down a plane could bypass the liquids restriction simply by placing them in medicine bottles. So what's the point in having the restriction in the first place?
There is none. It goes back to the original topic -- security theater.
Not having flown a commercial airliner recently, I'd completely forgotten about the liquid/aerosol rule and decided to carry my luggage onboard. After standing in line for awhile, I noticed the signs and remembered. Crap! I had my mouthwash, an aerosol can of deodorant, and my aerosol shaving cream with me. Given the length the line had grown to, I decided to just forgo those items than risk being late.
A bit about those three items. Both the shaving cream and deodorant were in aerosol cans, both larger than the size allowed, but obviously retail items. The mouthwash was too large as well, and was a generic amber bottle, about 14 or so ounces, with a prescription sticker (I have gingivitis).
I pull all three items out, and just tell the TSA guy that I know I need to toss them. He glances at all three and tells me I have to ditch the deodorant and the shaving cream, but I can keep the mouthwash.
Because it's prescription.
So, the two retail aerosol cans that are nearly impossible to inject anything into are verboten, but the amber bottle with the mystery liquid in it, that's okay, because it has a sticker with a Walgreens logo on it. Fan-fucking-tastic.
For anyone that's spent any amount of time in government contracting, you'd know this isn't uncommon.
Government acquisition contracts are supposed to go to the best product. Determining "best" is supposed to be based on an objective vendor selection process where certain aspects of each product are given a score, and the aggregate makes the decision. These vendor selection processes are sometimes not written well, often by people who don't really understand what it is they are comparing.
Let me give you an example from one vendor selection I worked on, for Ethernet switches. One of the criteria was "Supported VLANs." The product with the most supported VLANs was given a 1, and anyone less was given a fraction thereof equivilant to how many it supported. In this case, vendor A supported 4096 VLANs, while Vendor B supported 1024 VLANs. In this one criteria, vendor A was four times better than Vendor B, even though we only needed support for, at most, a dozen VLANs, which both devices could easily support.
In this instance, our complaints were heard and the problems were corrected.
However, often, this doesn't happen, and bogus criteria is used to make a decision.
On rare occasions, though, you'll even see vendor selection criteria written by people who've made a decision on which vendor they want to purchase, and the criteria is skewed to ensure that a certain product is purchased. This is rarely corruption, usually it's someone who already "knows" that a given product is better, and is simply trying to "make sure the right decision is made." For example, a Linux zealot writing vendor selction criteria for deciding on whether to go with Linux or Microsoft servers.
The exact vendor selection criteria, often being secret, leaves vendors that had reasonable belief that they should have won completely baffled as to why they lost. Unlike commercial transactions, where there is no recourse, they can bring the case to court to see if there was any improper behavior in the vendor selection process.
This actually benefits the taxpayer, as it gives oversight to procurment which is paid for by your tax dollars.
Just because in this case it's a company nobody likes, everyone is crying foul. But, in reality, it's a Good Thing.
Wow. What a bunch of alarmist crap.
The "Free Wi-Fi" stuff you see in airports aren't all, or even mostly, scams. Whenever someone sees one of these ad hoc networks and attempts to connect to it with a Windows machine, the Windows machine then broadcasts out that as a possible ad hoc network. It then carries that ad hoc network name with itself as you move.
That's how the SSID has spread so far and wide, and why it is so prevalent.
You should be *ALWAYS* careful when using ANY public wifi hotspot. Your traffic can be easily monitored or hijacked with very simple tools, none of which require setting up your own rogue AP or a fake ad hoc network.
Computerworld got had by a security firm looking for some free advertising. Way to go!
The problem is your interpretation of that statement. It is not the press that is being targeted here, it is the people who leaked the information in the first place. Leaking sensitive government information, except in very specific whistle-blower situations, is a CRIME. Someone committed a crime, and just because the crime was committed via leaking to the press doesn't automatically make the reporters not liable to be subpoenaed.
Using Watergate as an example is stupid. First off, Woodward and Bernstein took every precaution to keep the government from finding out who it was. Second, Deep Throat was leaking information about GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS COMMITTING A CRIME.
In this case, some jackass in the police department tipped reporters off to a future raid, and the reporters irresponsibly used that information. Because of the freedom of the press, the reporters cannot be prosecuted for what they did, which is a good thing, big-picture wise, despite the fact that they deserve to have their teeth knocked in.
"Freedom of the Press" means exactly that. Not "Freedom to hide criminals"
Whoever leaked that information, though, is a security risk inside a government organization and needs to be punished or terminated for what they did. Not only did they interfere with law enforcement, but they put those law enforcement officers' lives at risk.
This was *not* an honest employee tipping off reporters to something the government doing something wrong -- those sorts of people are already protected under the whistleblower act. This was a (presumably) dishonest employee leaking information to the press for (presumably) dishonest reasons, probably a favor the reporter may owe them in the future or maybe even money.
You mean that posting intimate details of my life on the web may be an affront to my privacy?
Say it ain't so!!!
Oh for shame! A helpdesk job with no upward mobility and he had to leave for greener pastures!
Give me a break. For those of us in IT, there are lots of jobs and lots of career paths -- but if you really want a new job, you have to motivate yourself, learn on your own, and (often times) leave the company to get a better job. If you're intelligent (as another user pointed out, just because you have a knack for computers doesn't make you smart) and are good with customers and juniors, you'll go far.
The key thing support guys (and I fall into this category) usually fail to realize is that they are not the cock-n-balls. They are the jock strap. It is their position to support the important parts of the business. Like the dispair.com poster says, just because you're essential, it doesn't mean you're important.
Me? I've got 8 1/2 years of IT experience. I went from being a lowly support guy (about as low as you can get...a data tech in the Marine Corps), today I'm a router guy who does senior-level enterprise network support for almost a half-million end users in our organization. Daily.
If you want it bad enough, you can get it. Just get rid of the "heh heh stoopid lusers" attitude and get with the program. IT support is little different than A/C repair, vehicle repair, medicine, or a myraid of other support/repair professions. Get the customer to trust you, don't make them feel stupid for not being able to do it themselves, and in the end, get them up and running, and happy that you're there for them, and will be next time.
You never hear EMTs giggling after work about stupid guys not being able to recognize heart attack symptoms. They get on the scene, and help the patient. Help the customer. Support them. That's what "IT support" is all about.
Decentralized IT is not the answer. While it tends to be more flexible in the short term, the payoff is lost in lower reliability, costs that spiral out of control, security nightmares, duplication of effort across an enterprise, and worse.
I've seen the result of decentralized IT, and its horrendous. Dozens of little fiefdoms, with each departmental/organizational IT guy a little Napoleon who decries that higher ups simply "don't get it." People who've explained to me that they "absolutely must have" three switches in each comm closet for the three different organizations, because "broadcasts might leak information." Despite the fact that each of those switches uplinks to the same distribution device. Or, that "troubleshooting a spanning tree storm is easy," that "it's just like ATM."
Where centralized IT fails is in being inflexible and attempting to apply cookie-cutter solutions to every problem. This is usually the result of a lack of a good project process. But, customers don't often help centralized IT either, usually when they want something, they operate under the (usually false) assumption that IT is a bunch of asshats who "just don't get it." So, you end up in a scenario where the customer stonewalls IT, and no one ends up happy.
The only fault with centralized IT is that, if its mismanaged, it fails for everyone. When properly managed, funded, and staffed, centralized IT can succeed, just like anything else.
Because of cell phones, 24/7 reachability has become the rule, rather than the exception. This has extended to the business world, where many employees are virtually on call 24/7. In some cases, this is minor, but in others, it can be critical. Emergency responders such as doctors and nurses, senior IT folks (such as myself, when I'm on call), and others keep their cells on them and can still have something of a life rather than stay at home and wait for the home.
Being denied the ability to do this would be suck. For me, not so much, my on-call is limited. For others, it'd be impossible.
What would be cool is if you could either give your cell phone to a greeter or usher, or forward your calls to a call center number. Then, they would either take your name and table (if a restaurant), or give you a tiny vibrating pager (if a theater) that you can be notified of a call.
The problem is tax revenue. Sales tax makes up a considerable percentage of revenue for many states, especially states like Texas that have no income tax.
Back in the day, most people bought almost everything they bought from local merchants, meaning that there was very little way to avoid sales tax. Catalog mail order and later, telephone orders, made up such a small percentage of commerce that the items remained untaxed. The smaller northeastern states, and even some municipalities (like in the Oklahoma City area) sometimes lower their tax rates to encourage people to come shop in their malls. Delaware makes a big stink about not having a sales tax, and there's a lot of outlet malls that advertise as such. Still, it wasn't much money.
Now, thanks to advances in shipping technology and Internet ordering, people are spending more and more money online, especially in the holiday season. This money isn't being taxed.
Some states have provisions to attempt to curb this. Virginia, for example, has a "use tax" where if you purchase any item and do not pay sales tax, you have you pay a "use tax" on it. Problem is, it's hard to track and almost no one reports anything, much less what they really spent.
The tax system is so convoluted and fucked up it should be changed, I agree, but this is totally legal. The sticky point comes in where states are trying to force e-merchants to collect their own sales taxes. Depending on how this is accomplished (i.e., not a federal law) if you've got a state that isn't part of this agreement you're going to see e-merchants move to those states to avoid having the additional burden of collecting those taxes.
A vast majority of actors are not full-time. Most of them pull other jobs in-between gigs, and they're also the ones most likely to aim for these reality show tryouts -- mainly because they've already got jobs that they can drop for a temporary period, and they're hungry for the fame and potential future jobs that a reality show appearance might rake in. Plus they have agents who's job it is to constantly search for these things.
Remember that stupid reality show they had where they got a supposed average guy and tricked a bunch of girls into thinking he was a millionaire? They claimed he was a "construction worker" -- which he was, but only when he wasn't doing acting jobs or underwear ads.
The core of the Internet is not run like you think it would be. While BGP is dynamic, when and where various prefixes (network address blocks) are advertised is tightly controlled.
When you peer with an ISP, that means you only exchange their prefixes for yours. Any other networks that may be reachable via that ISP are not advertised back to you, just like they don't send your prefixes to the rest of the Internet.
Access to other parts of the Internet via an ISP is called transit -- this is what we're all most familiar with. You give your prefixes to them and they take care of exchanging it with the rest of the Internet, and they give you the rest of the Internet's prefixes.
Lets say there are two ISPs. Lets say its Alpha (a Tier 1 ISP) and Beta (a non-Tier 1). Alpha and Beta have a settlement-free interconnect agreement -- meaning they peer with each other. Remember, that means that they can only access each other directly. To go to the rest of the Internet, it means that they have to go to other providers. Alpha uses its other SFI agreements with all other Tier 1 providers to do so, Beta may use other SFI agreements and paid-for peering or transit agreements with other providers. For so-called "tier 2" ISPs, it's often a complicated mess.
Then, lets say Alpha decides that its SFI agreement with Beta is no longer in its best interest. So, they tell Beta they're going to depeer if they don't start paying for the peering.
Beta has two options to ensure that their customer base will stay functioning. They can either come to an agreement with Alpha, or come up with a transit agreement with another ISP, either another Tier 1 ISP or Tier 2.
It gets more complicated than that, but, that's the basic jist of it.
You're missing the point. Cogent isn't a Tier 1 ISP. They're close, but not quite. To be a Tier 1, that means you don't pay for peering -- period. Cogent does.
This was a fairly straightforward business problem. Settlement-free peering only occurs when its in the best interests of both parties to do so. There are massive costs still incurred on each end, but they simply don't exchange money. The traffic in both directions is equal enough that neither side is incurring a loss. L3 determined that they were, and announced to Cogent that their settlement-free peering agreement was going to end.
Rather than doing what they should have done, and either ponied up the cash to L3, or reached a transit agreement with another ISP (say, a tier 2) to receive L3's prefixes and get its own prefixes onto L3's network, Cogent allowed the depeering to occur and used the resulting disruption to the Internet to their own advantage by calling L3 out.
They, in effect, allowed a major outage to occur in order to avoid paying for transit to L3. L3 gave them something like 90 days notice, plenty of time for Cogent to develop a contingency plan.
Yet, they didn't. Thier customers immediately became unreachable from L3's network, and their customers were unable to reach L3. They allowed this situation to continue, leveraging it for a public relations backlash against L3, and attempted to lure L3 customers to Cogent.
I'll be the first to admit my understanding of the issue is not 100% -- so if I'm missing a critical point, please let me know. But, from my understanding, let me be the first to say this is not a major problem with the Internet, nor is it something that regulation would do anything to fix. This is a bullshit back-room business decision by an ISP trying to save a buck and make a name for itself.
Problem is the Microsoft XML format is proprietary to Microsoft. While the standard is "open" -- as in published -- there are restrictions as to who can implement it.
Problem comes 5-10 years down the road, if/when an organization chooses to move away from Microsoft. Maybe they're going to OpenOffice.org 5.0, or maybe they're going to GoogleOffice. Or maybe a whole other developer has come along and revolutionized the office application suite.
But, you're stuck. You have 10 years of data that's locked into Microsoft products, what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed? Buy Office and the new product for everything? Create a "legacy application gateway" with a few copies of Office accessable via Citrix or VNC?
Also, there's interoperability with external organizations. Right now, to do business with the federal or most state governments, your business must use Office to be able to exchange data. No ifs ands or buts about it.
With OpenDocument, this isn't an issue. No matter what product you buy in the future, it can work with OpenDocument. Doesn't matter what product a client or customer uses -- if it's OD-compatible, you can exchange data.
Yet further proof that almost all "security professionals" have about as much intelligence as a gnat.
... please. The "it's not as popular" theory as to the lack of OS X viri and worms has been beaten to death over and over. Simple fact is the difficulty would make the first creator of an OS X virus or worm famous beyond anything another Windows worm would cause -- even if the spread wouldn't be nearly as bad. And yet, here we are, five years after the release, and not a single virus or worm that directly affects the operating system. Surprised?
I'm really tired of mediocre systems guys passing a CISSP exam (thousand miles wide, quarter inch deep) and being declared experts on securing things they don't even understand to begin with.
For one, quantative analysis of the numbers of vulnerabilities doesn't equate to determining if a system is more or less secure than another. It's also meaningless if you don't compare how the systems are configured in what kinds of environments. Even simple things like Linksys routers greatly contribute to additional security on a personal computer (Windows or otherwise).
From the article: "Symantec chronicled 1,862 new vulnerabilities during 1H2005 - an average of 10 new flaws a day - 73 per cent of which it categorises as easily exploitable. The time between the disclosure of a vulnerability and the release of an associated exploit was just six days. Half (59 per cent) of vulnerabilities were associated with web application technologies."
Can anyone tell me where in that statement is a shred of useful, meaningful information? Of course not. Because there is none.
Insofar as Firefox and and OS X being "in for surprises." Sure, Firefox is an evolving application, bugs will be introduced and squashed, and later on more will be introduced. Some of those will be security vulnerabilities. Any application who's sole job is to pull data from untrusted sources and parse it will be vulnerable to security problems resulting from buggy code. Period. End of sentence.
OS X
Despite that incentive, it has yet to be done. A rootkit is being touted as "proof of OS X's insecurity." Give me a break. If you can trick a user to type in their admin password with an application, it doesn't matter if you're running Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, HP-UX, or Solaris -- you're going to get owned.
Jesus, I hate security people. I just want to choke them.
The patent was filed December 14, 2000.
And you're right, this matches identically to the system in Eternal Darkness. The sanity system was one of the big advertising points of the game -- this was probably to protect it.
I wouldn't exactly call Wichita a rural area, and you're insane if you think that you can find a $250k house in any large city.
20-year-old townhouses in suburban Washington (Prince William and Loudon Counties, Virginia) are running in the 320+ range, depending on distance from major throughfares.
And that still incurs a 1+ hour commute to Arlington or the District.
One-bedroom condos close to the Metro? $450k+
Townhouses in good areas inside the beltway? Try 600-800k.
Obviously written by someone with no knowledge of the housing market.
Most large metropolitan areas are, and have been the last 5 years or so, in the middle of bubble markets. Some are worse than others, but in almost all cases, those that make the median incomes cannot afford the median home.
Take where I live, Washington DC. We're in one of the worst bubbles in the history of the United States. People who make six-figure salaries cannot afford homes within 50 miles of the District. Even housing in far-flung communities like Fredericksburg VA, Waldorf MD, and even Martinsburg WV are skyrocketing.
The reason is speculation. People are willing to purchase homes they cannot afford out of the concept that they will make massive returns on it later on. They're right -- up to a point. Eventually (many are saying within the next couple years) the price point will level off because there simply aren't enough people who can afford those prices, then once it levels off, the speculation will end, and prices will plummet. Personally, I think it's all a scam engineered by real estate investors, which is why I'm renting.
Rural areas have been spared this. Making 100k a year, you can only afford to rent in and around DC. Making 50k in a rural area, you can afford a large home with acrage and still have enough left over for a very comfortable lifestyle. You won't be wearing the latest fashions and drinking at the finest clubs, but, you won't be expected, to, either.
There's always other friends, and besides, children would probably be better served growing up in a rural area vice a city, with all the problems that they come with.
It's all contingent on what's important to you.
I was referring to what is available for purchase, not what's currently deployed. I still work with production Cisco 2501's on occasion, so believe me, I know that the IPv6 transision is not going to be cheap, or easy.
Thing is it'll never be absolutely necessary here in the US, at least not for a long time to come. Enough kludges have been developed for NAT that it's "good enough" for the time being, espeically to IT managers facing the hard choice between sticking with NAT or dumping a metric ass-ton (roughly equivilant to an Imperial crapload) of money into an IPv6 infrastructure.
The "prime time" buzzword has been an excuse for the last few years, even though no one can really give a hard definition of what "prime time" is.
Looked up something interesting. Minimum MTU in IPv6 is 1280 bytes. So, now you're talking a difference of 1.5% versus 3.1% (rounded). Even less of a big deal.
Obviously you only read trade mags and know nothing about networking:
1) You're thinking older Cisco equipment. But, the same argument could be made for any number of enterprise/carrier routing vendors. If you have a router/multilayer switch designed for IPv4, you're going to have to either upgrade it with IPv6 ASICs, or replace it completely. That's part of the price of transisition, and there's no way around that.
2) No one with any level of education in the matter says "We're running out of addresses." We're running out of address SPACE. Big difference. The huge class A and B networks issued to large US corporations and the military means those countries who got online later on are losing out. Case in point...I was on the redesign team at a USAF base that had two class B networks -- for 30,000 customers.
And NAT is only a stopgap. You end up with a massive number of interoperability problems when you start NATing. With IPv6, there simply isn't the need for it, and you remove those problems.
3) Memory and CPU performance hasn't been a major issue with most routers in a long time, especially BGP routers. Massive OSPF networks, yeah, the Dykstra algorithm hits hard, but there are other, less CPU-intensive options like IS-IS, or just design your network right from the ground up and summarize properly.
Again, the problem we're going to run into here is the specialized memory used for wire-speed packet switching. But, if you're doing wire-speed, you're going to have to replace the ASICs anyway, so the TCAM gets replaced too.
4) You're right, minimum MTU size in IPv4 networks is 576 bytes. But that's a difference of 3.5% versus 7%. Not a major issue -- especially since most MTUs are in the range of 1250-1500, or even higher in pure GigE networks.
The road to IPv6 will be bumpy, but the only issue you mentioned with any real weight is the first, and that's an easy one. You just throw money at it.
Where the problem is going to lie is in long-haul data transport, IPv4 interoperability, and legacy application support. The network's the easy part.
This is a common problem for anyone in the IT industry. As you become more and more specialized, you run the risk of limiting where you are useful.
For example, I'm a network engineer, working on my CCIE. There aren't many places that need someone of a CCIE-level skillset to exclusively do networks.
Now, I also have considerable security, Windows, and Unix experience, which helps, a lot, but almost all of my experience in the last 4 years has been limited to routing and switching.
It really all depends on what you want out of your career. If you're like me, and want to stay in a specialized field, it's great. For someone that wants more breadth than depth, not so great.
There's a few problems with that.
Reality shows and basic dramas (think Desperate Housewives) are relatively cheap to make. You don't have the big up-front expense of maintaining large sets on large soundstages, nor do you have the continuing expense of effects work.
Firefly failed for a number of reasons. For one, it's premise made it seem hokey, reducing the number of people willing to give it a chance. Even those that did were turned off by the mediocre first episode that didn't match with the advertisments, or the two or three modiocre episodes that followed (along with the confusing plot due to the out-of-order airings). Plus, being on Fox, they demanded considerably higher ratings than they were ever going to get. Yeah, yeah, X-files started out with low ratings, but X-file was one of Fox's flagship shows when it became a network, back in the days where if you weren't ABC,NBC, or CBS, you were nothing.
The timeslot wasn't at fault, really. SFC airs their three main original series on Friday night, including BSG, but get very high ratings.
As a student who was allowed to use a calculator from the sixth grade forward, I found that my ability to do simple arithmetic in my head was very much diminished. While I could do derivations and other logical functions mentally quickly, when it came to adding two-digit numbers in my head, I still struggle and use my fingers.
This even makes my current career a pain in the ass as i have to subnet every single day.
Students should be forced to use slide rules and pen and paper. There is no educational advantage to allowing them to use calculators.