That's not correct. You pay income taxes based on the state you are a resident of. In other words, lets say you work in DC, but live in Virginia, you pay Virginia taxes.
The only exception is for consecutive days. The usual rule is that if you spend an entire calendar month in a particular state, you become a resident of that state for income tax purposes. This is, of course, a general rule, state law varies from place to place, but usually, when you follow these guidelines, you're pretty much left alone.
I worked for two years on the road. I flew home once a month to avoid this very thing (Texas resident, ergo, no income tax).
While colloquially classified as "contractors," these individuals were not contract employees. They were full-time employees (W-2) of the contracting company, who in turn had a contract with the customer to provide a staffing service. The contract was with their employer -- not the employee directly.
The contractor vs. employee argument only comes into play when you're talking about true-blue contractors who work for a flat rate under a 1099, not W2 employees.
This was the situation in the famous Microsoft contractor vs. employee case. Contrary to common belief, the contractors were not the instigators in that case. It was the IRS who audited Microsoft and determined that they had incorrectly classified people as independant contractors as opposed to employees, and was therefore liable for back employment taxes (which, by the way, are paid if you're a W2 employee of a contracting company). The contractors then picked it up from there and demanded that, since the IRS classified them as employees, they were due the benefits give to full-time employees.
In my humble, and non-lawyerish opinion, this case is entirely without merit. They were employees of the contracting company, and were given a benefit package that they agreed upon by becoming employees.
The biggest problem, in my mind, lies with the fact that usually science fiction and quality are two mutually exclusive quantities. A vast majority of science fiction films that are made are of very poor quality (case in point: SFC's recent advertising blitz for Mansquito). Even where there is solid story and drama, people had to look past the cheesy sets and cheesy effects to see the meat of it. Those of us who are/were science fiction fans were those that could suspend the disbelief, look past the genre's shortcomings, and appreciate the meat of it.
The last ten years or so, that's begun to change. Science fiction has become an acceptable medium to tell serious stories. Effects are inexpensive and ubiquitous enough so as not to overshadow the story being told. Quality actors and writers are enticed into the genre. This, coupled with the television industry's wider acceptence of serial dramas as opposed to more episodic adventure series (mainly thanks to shows like 90210 and ER, although Babylon 5 did a lot for that in the science fiction sphere), has let science fiction come into its own.
Today, we don't have to make that choice between science fiction and quality. You can sit someone in front of a movie like Gattaca, or a television show like Galactica and they can get a full grasp of the drama that's occuring without the need to suspend too much disbelief.
What this means, though, is a shift in the style of storytelling. No more particles of the week, no more last-second reversals of warp coil polarity by the resident starship teen genius. It will be human drama -- stories of ordinary people in extraordinary situations.
I, for one, am thrilled at the prospect. Growing up on reruns of Buck Rodgers and the old Galactica, new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Captain Power, and watching movies like Star Wars, I'll always have a penchant for science fiction -- and it's great that what comes out now can satisfy both that and my desire for mature, thought-provolking drama.
Comparing the two is completely valid when you're discussing the benefits of task-customized hardware and general purpose computing. Are there limitations where a hardware-based TCP/IP stack will be useful in the desktop/server market, yes, of course there is. But for high-bandwidth applications, I can assure you that offloading the TCP/IP overhead onto an ASIC will not only give you better performance, but also free up primary processor time for other applications.
Also, Catalyst switches are not highly parallel. They can be parallel, depending on the exact model and configuration, as well as the exact path inside the switch that the traffic takes, but it's not even remotely the same in execution as having "hundreds of linux routers side by side."
Instead, it is the exacting way in which the various components of the switch pass data, the very specific purpose of each chip and circuit in the device that gives modern routers the speed they do. Special components such as content-addressable memory, tertiary content addressable memory (memory that allows you to store 0s, 1s, and wildcard values instead of just 0s and 1s, allowing for wire-speed match comparisons against ACLs and routing tables), etc. etc. It isn't merely a stack of GP CPUs all running in parallel to achieve a particular task.
Systems guys often mistake routers and switches for computers with a bunch of Ethernet jacks. They're far from it. They are highly specialized pieces of hardware designed from the bottom up to do one thing and do it well -- transport data. Computers are the opposite. They're designed from the bottom up to be able to do whatever you wish them to as fast as possible, but that flexibility comes with a price.
If you ever get the urge, you should read up on Catalyst switching architecture. You'll find it quite interesting.
Hardware implementation will most definitely be leaps and bounds faster than the general CPU. Can a Linux router route 720Gbps of traffic through hundreds of interfaces at once? No. But a Cisco 6500 can, because of hardware designed especially for the task.
Simply put, software on general purpose processors sucks for doing heavy computational work. Hardware tuned especially for a task has, and always will, be where it's at. However, the costs involved in creating ICs specific to a task usually mean that ASICs are only created where there is a need. Modern graphics cards are a great example. The on-board graphics processors are designed especially to create graphics, something that, if offloaded onto the GP CPU, would crush even the highest of the high end.
Also, offloading the TCP/IP stack on a normal workstation probably isn't going to be a huge performance boost. Where this will be useful is in situations where there is a need for high-throughput, low-latency network I/O processing.
That all depends on how it's done. Simply offloading the processing won't work, but replacing the TCP/IP drivers with simple hooks into a hardware-based I/O system can.
The Apollo missions, like most of our early space program, were largely a kludge, and, in some opinions, a huge waste of time and resources.
New technologies and PR aside, the Apollo program accomplished very little except getting some footprints on the moon. We'd focused all our energy on sending people to the moon, once that was accomplished, we were ten years behind in establishing a support base upon which to implement constant space exploration, and lack of motivation kept us slipping past that. We never really recovered, and today we aren't much further along than we were in 1962, except in terms of technology. The shuttle is of limited use, and the space station itself is nearly useless as an orbital base (thanks to its orbit and lack of any crew transfer mechanism except the oversized, over-expensive shuttle). Can't recall where I'd heard it, but there's a comparison to using the shuttle to get to the space station like using a semi to get to work. It's impractical, we need a small commuter car, and maybe an SUV for the mid-sized jobs as well.
That's not to say that nothing good came out of the Apollo program. But, we spent so much money on it that once we got there, the "now what" train of thought kicked in, and other programs that were less exciting (space lab, etc) received less funding.
Instead of rushing to the Moon, if we'd focused first on establishing a permanent orbital presense along with a small suite of multipurpose reusable spacecraft (large cargo units like the Shuttle, along with small crewboats for crew transfers), and *then* gone to the moon, we'd be a lot further along now than we are.
Hopefully, NASA is looking further ahead than the next "big thing". Slow and steady wins the race, and planting feet on Mars will be meaningless if we don't follow it up with a continuious presence, a goal we abandoned following Apollo.
Movie age restrictions are a voluntary thing on the part of the theaters and the MPAA. There is now law forcing movies to be rated, nor are there laws mandating that theaters abide by those ratings. It's all self-regulating internal to the industry, coupled with public pressure.
Same thing with ESRB ratings. Nothing forces a game publisher to rate their game, nor are there laws forcing game stores to restrict the sale. It's all industry self-regulation, which is more difficult in the game industry since games can be sold in practically any retail outlet, large or small, as opposed to movie theaters which are fewer in number and usually more reputably ran.
In DC it's not just the sale of guns that are illegal, it's the possesion as well. Criminals can easily get guns and will bring them in and keep them in DC. Law abiding citizens can not. It's one of two reasons I live in Virginia instead of DC -- a lack of ability to protect myself, and an income tax rate that's 5% higher than surrounding states.
The District of Columbia has a penchant for making symbolic laws that don't do anything but inconvience law-abiding citizens, and sometimes cause harm.
For no one that lives around here, DC is very small and surrounded by Maryland and Virginia. The subway system extends into both other states. Local laws limiting purchases have a very limited effect.
Look at the handgun regulations. Neither Maryland or Virginia require licenses to purchase or own handguns, and all stores will readily sell to DC residents. All handgun laws have done in DC is to keep law-abiding citzens from owning them, the criminals have easy access.
These laws will do the same thing. Drive a few blocks into Maryland and get them there, or take the metro 2-3 stops south to Pentagon City or Crystal City malls and shop there, too.
Quantum encryption is a misnomer, it should be called (and is, in some circles) quantum key distribution. It's all about how the key is transmitted, not how the data is secured. The encryption method is independant of how the key is distributed. Contrary to popular belief, it typically cannot be a one-time pad, since the bandwidth on the "key" channel is very limited due to the exact nature of the transmission. It can be, though, a constantly shifting AES key, or other type of data, making the datastream as a whole effectively unbreakable.
The problem lies in that you have to have a single, unbroken fiber optic connection between the two points, and this fiber optic connection is very limited in the amount of loss that it can withstand. That means you're geographically limited on how far the circuit might be able to travel. You're looking at a few hundred kilometers, at the absolute maximum.
Considering the amount of money you'd spend on putting the circuit in place versus the amount of money you'd lose if the data was compromised, it's very unlikely that anyone, anywhere will have a practical use for QKD/QE. Government and defense, maybe, but then only in very limited applications.
There is a chance that, should quantum computing become a reality and modern encryption algorithms can suddenly be cracked very, very easily that this method may see some use, and by no means is development a waste of time and effort. But, QC is still very much in the early stages, if a working system is ever developed at all.
Thta being said, PKI and courier delivery of key material will continue to be the order of the day for quite some time.
It's an interesting concept, but it's one that can get game developers in a hotbed of legal problems. Basically, it means that the in-game data constitues something of value to the players. If a game company encouraged virtual trading using real-world dollars, it is conceivable that the game company could be held liable to maintain that value for the customer.
Take that to the ultimate extension. You're a player with enough in-game assets to constitue hundreds of thousands of dollars were it to be liquidated, and potentially hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month in income from the regular sale of those items.
Then, the game developer cancels the game, or there is a massive data loss, or the developer makes an arbitrary change to the game which shifts the economy and results in a total loss to you. In essense, you've just lost your total net worth, your income, etc. Logical people would say "well, too bad, so sad, shouldn't have relied on a game" Lawyers, on the other hand, are not always logical people. When something becomes someone's job, it's no longer a game to them. It's their life. Sanctioning virtual trades builds the expectation that that is a valid use of the game environment, and puts additional responsibility on the game company.
No amount of warnings and EULA could insulate a company from that kind of litigation. It's far easier, and safer, for the game company to toe the line, cancel a few accounts here and there and send out a few cease-and-desist letters.
The problem, sadly, is the inherent weakness in any online game that tries to build and semblence of a community in it. Finding a balance between giving those who will spend every waking hour of their lives in the game a challenge, while still giving opportunities to those who will play maybe 2-3 hours a week is very difficult, if not impossible.
Take a game I used to be heavily involved with, Eve. For someone in a corporation, who spends 4+ hours a day playing, losing a cruiser in a battle is no big deal. Corporations can pump them out like it was cool. For the lone player, though, who spends a few hours a week maximum, a cruiser can represent an investment of many weeks or months. When you get ambushed by a very superior force and have the sum total of months worth of effort erased in a matter of seconds.... you quit.
GPS is becoming more and more common in locating underground utilities. Basically, surveyor-quality GPS readings (using a surveyor GPS rig which not only uses satellite readings, but also local survey points) are taken of underground utilities every X number of feet. This, along with manual depth measurements, can create an accurate 3D utility map.
It's pretty interesting. Last major construction gig (major fiber plant/network rework) I was on we had a crew like this. They basically hung back waiting for the construction crews to either lay cable or conduit, and they'd take measurements before they buried it.
By definition, a novel is 40,000+ words. A novella is between 17,500 and 39,999 words. A novelette is between 7500 and 17,499. A short story is under 7500 words.
I'm a network engineer for the government, and have been in the federal/defense sector for the last seven years. Never once have I encountered an environment like the one you just described. I'd also like you to tell us about your "complex calculations," since you describe them with such flair and exacting numbers.
That being said, yes, the statements made by the manager were very much out of line and he should be disciplined for making such public statements.
The issue is not merely one of "did something bad." Its not like he skipped a step during a server build, or accidently hung up on a customer. Server techs in an enterprise environment are made fully aware of the rules and regulations regarding what does and does not go on a particular server. Any deviation, no matter how small, can affect the server, potentially impacting anything service-level agreements to the ability to access critical applications.
Such blantant disregard for rules and regulations, particularly if there has been a history of such behavior, can and should be grounds for disciplinary action, even termination if the affected devices are critical enough.
"Unauthorized software" means just that. Just because he was in the IT department doesn't give him free reign to do what he wants to with a production server.
Remember: Those servers, routers, switches, and workstations aren't yours, they belong to your employer. You're paid to do what your employer wants to them, and not do what said employer doesn't want. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you're stupid (yes, STUPID) enough to flaunt the rules because you think they don't apply to you, you deserve what you get.
The SPA tried this in the 90s with the MPC certification. Around nine months after that, technology had advanced to the point where they h ad the MPC2. Add another nine months, the MPC3.
The idea was the same -- games rated for a particular cert would play on a machine rated for that.
But, with the fast rate of changes, they essentially cancelled the program because of the headaches involved. Plus, game marketing didn't like it because if a game was labeled "MPC2", when MPC3 came out that made the game seem old.
Oh, well, those that don't learn from history...
No one can answer that question
on
Portable Storage?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why? It's too vague.
How portable do you need it? How much space do you need? What kind of interfaces do you have available? How fast does it need to be?
There is no one best storage solution, there are many different bests depending on what's needed at the time.
Throw out some more specifics, and maybe someone can help you out.
The concept is called TCO -- total cost of ownership. In most TCO equasions, licensing costs are approximately 20-30% of the typical TCO of a total IT solution.
Where does the rest come from? TCO is made up of two parts -- implementation/migration costs, and recurring, or ongoing costs.
Migration is how much it will cost to move your systems over to a new type of system. This includes any new required hardware, consultants to do the more tricky application migrations, the businesss impact of migration-related downtime and reduced productivity meshing with the learning curve, training costs to train your users and your admins to run the new system, among other things.
Ongoing costs are the long-term items, like warranty requirements, support contacts, paying your staff (remember, a Linux admin makes more than a Windows admin -- that makes Linux more expensive in that area). Another important calculation is reliability of the whole system, defined by mean time between failures in relationship to the mean time to repair, and the business impact of downtime associated with that.
The big trick is that TCO calculations are very subjective in nature. The criteria change from consulting firm to consulting firm, and the values used to support some of those numbers can come from a variety of different sources, and may be of questionable value.
In regards to hiring people who can 100% support something, that's not in line with current best IT practices. You hire admins who are competent enough to handle a majority of the types of issues your system will face on a day-to-day basis, and those who are intelligent enough to know when to call for help. A support contract from any company is far less than the yearly salary of a couple 20+ year Unix veterans who will happily throw a hammock up between racks in your server farm.
What you have to remember about IT is that it is not about the technology -- it is about the people and business that technology supports.
That's a router ACL. Perhaps I was a bit too vague, but my intention with that particular post was that "reverse firewalls" aren't what's needed at every house. Rather, very simple egress filtering as the responsibility of the ISP could mitigate a great deal of spam, and prevent spoofed packets (commonly used in DDoS attacks) from leaving the network.
ip access-list extended EGRESS_FILTER permit tcp any [smtp svr ip addr] eq smtp deny tcp any any eq smtp permit ip any any interface [whatever] access-group EGRESS_FILTER out
That's only the press you really see that in. Most soldiers and military planners accept the fact that guerilla tactics are and always will be the only effective way an inferior force can respond to a superior one. Hell, the American revolutionaries did it to the British. It's not always an issue of fighting to the finish...sometimes its possible to just make it so costly for your enemies to hold on to your territory that they just give up and leave.
Fact is, America hasn't been in a "fair fight" since Vietnam. Vietnam wasn't even technically a fair fight -- our force was clearly superior, but our tactics were not.
Thing is, only place you want a fair fight is in a boxing ring. You want to have the clear advantage over your enemy, so that casualties on your side are minimal and victory is assured.
In 2000, SA was replaced by a "capability to prevent hostile use of GPS and its augmentations while retaining a military advantage in a theater of operations without disrupting or degrading civilian uses outside the theater" [Source: 'US Policy Statement Regarding GPS Availability, March 21, 2003', www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/default.htm]
And it's not just instant-off that the EU is worried about -- it's also the potential of a long-term policy shift in the US government towards GPS. Because GPS has become so vital, they don't want to take the chance that some future regime would take steps to deny GPS access to the rest of the world.
It's unlikely, but a chance that the EU appears to be unwilling to take.
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That's not correct. You pay income taxes based on the state you are a resident of. In other words, lets say you work in DC, but live in Virginia, you pay Virginia taxes.
The only exception is for consecutive days. The usual rule is that if you spend an entire calendar month in a particular state, you become a resident of that state for income tax purposes. This is, of course, a general rule, state law varies from place to place, but usually, when you follow these guidelines, you're pretty much left alone.
I worked for two years on the road. I flew home once a month to avoid this very thing (Texas resident, ergo, no income tax).
While colloquially classified as "contractors," these individuals were not contract employees. They were full-time employees (W-2) of the contracting company, who in turn had a contract with the customer to provide a staffing service. The contract was with their employer -- not the employee directly.
The contractor vs. employee argument only comes into play when you're talking about true-blue contractors who work for a flat rate under a 1099, not W2 employees.
This was the situation in the famous Microsoft contractor vs. employee case. Contrary to common belief, the contractors were not the instigators in that case. It was the IRS who audited Microsoft and determined that they had incorrectly classified people as independant contractors as opposed to employees, and was therefore liable for back employment taxes (which, by the way, are paid if you're a W2 employee of a contracting company). The contractors then picked it up from there and demanded that, since the IRS classified them as employees, they were due the benefits give to full-time employees.
In my humble, and non-lawyerish opinion, this case is entirely without merit. They were employees of the contracting company, and were given a benefit package that they agreed upon by becoming employees.
The biggest problem, in my mind, lies with the fact that usually science fiction and quality are two mutually exclusive quantities. A vast majority of science fiction films that are made are of very poor quality (case in point: SFC's recent advertising blitz for Mansquito). Even where there is solid story and drama, people had to look past the cheesy sets and cheesy effects to see the meat of it. Those of us who are/were science fiction fans were those that could suspend the disbelief, look past the genre's shortcomings, and appreciate the meat of it.
The last ten years or so, that's begun to change. Science fiction has become an acceptable medium to tell serious stories. Effects are inexpensive and ubiquitous enough so as not to overshadow the story being told. Quality actors and writers are enticed into the genre. This, coupled with the television industry's wider acceptence of serial dramas as opposed to more episodic adventure series (mainly thanks to shows like 90210 and ER, although Babylon 5 did a lot for that in the science fiction sphere), has let science fiction come into its own.
Today, we don't have to make that choice between science fiction and quality. You can sit someone in front of a movie like Gattaca, or a television show like Galactica and they can get a full grasp of the drama that's occuring without the need to suspend too much disbelief.
What this means, though, is a shift in the style of storytelling. No more particles of the week, no more last-second reversals of warp coil polarity by the resident starship teen genius. It will be human drama -- stories of ordinary people in extraordinary situations.
I, for one, am thrilled at the prospect. Growing up on reruns of Buck Rodgers and the old Galactica, new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Captain Power, and watching movies like Star Wars, I'll always have a penchant for science fiction -- and it's great that what comes out now can satisfy both that and my desire for mature, thought-provolking drama.
I hope it's not just a passing fad.
There was a four-hour miniseries that aired in December 2003. It's available on DVD now.
Comparing the two is completely valid when you're discussing the benefits of task-customized hardware and general purpose computing. Are there limitations where a hardware-based TCP/IP stack will be useful in the desktop/server market, yes, of course there is. But for high-bandwidth applications, I can assure you that offloading the TCP/IP overhead onto an ASIC will not only give you better performance, but also free up primary processor time for other applications.
Also, Catalyst switches are not highly parallel. They can be parallel, depending on the exact model and configuration, as well as the exact path inside the switch that the traffic takes, but it's not even remotely the same in execution as having "hundreds of linux routers side by side."
Instead, it is the exacting way in which the various components of the switch pass data, the very specific purpose of each chip and circuit in the device that gives modern routers the speed they do. Special components such as content-addressable memory, tertiary content addressable memory (memory that allows you to store 0s, 1s, and wildcard values instead of just 0s and 1s, allowing for wire-speed match comparisons against ACLs and routing tables), etc. etc. It isn't merely a stack of GP CPUs all running in parallel to achieve a particular task.
Systems guys often mistake routers and switches for computers with a bunch of Ethernet jacks. They're far from it. They are highly specialized pieces of hardware designed from the bottom up to do one thing and do it well -- transport data. Computers are the opposite. They're designed from the bottom up to be able to do whatever you wish them to as fast as possible, but that flexibility comes with a price.
If you ever get the urge, you should read up on Catalyst switching architecture. You'll find it quite interesting.
Hardware implementation will most definitely be leaps and bounds faster than the general CPU. Can a Linux router route 720Gbps of traffic through hundreds of interfaces at once? No. But a Cisco 6500 can, because of hardware designed especially for the task.
Simply put, software on general purpose processors sucks for doing heavy computational work. Hardware tuned especially for a task has, and always will, be where it's at. However, the costs involved in creating ICs specific to a task usually mean that ASICs are only created where there is a need. Modern graphics cards are a great example. The on-board graphics processors are designed especially to create graphics, something that, if offloaded onto the GP CPU, would crush even the highest of the high end.
Also, offloading the TCP/IP stack on a normal workstation probably isn't going to be a huge performance boost. Where this will be useful is in situations where there is a need for high-throughput, low-latency network I/O processing.
That all depends on how it's done. Simply offloading the processing won't work, but replacing the TCP/IP drivers with simple hooks into a hardware-based I/O system can.
The Apollo missions, like most of our early space program, were largely a kludge, and, in some opinions, a huge waste of time and resources.
New technologies and PR aside, the Apollo program accomplished very little except getting some footprints on the moon. We'd focused all our energy on sending people to the moon, once that was accomplished, we were ten years behind in establishing a support base upon which to implement constant space exploration, and lack of motivation kept us slipping past that. We never really recovered, and today we aren't much further along than we were in 1962, except in terms of technology. The shuttle is of limited use, and the space station itself is nearly useless as an orbital base (thanks to its orbit and lack of any crew transfer mechanism except the oversized, over-expensive shuttle). Can't recall where I'd heard it, but there's a comparison to using the shuttle to get to the space station like using a semi to get to work. It's impractical, we need a small commuter car, and maybe an SUV for the mid-sized jobs as well.
That's not to say that nothing good came out of the Apollo program. But, we spent so much money on it that once we got there, the "now what" train of thought kicked in, and other programs that were less exciting (space lab, etc) received less funding.
Instead of rushing to the Moon, if we'd focused first on establishing a permanent orbital presense along with a small suite of multipurpose reusable spacecraft (large cargo units like the Shuttle, along with small crewboats for crew transfers), and *then* gone to the moon, we'd be a lot further along now than we are.
Hopefully, NASA is looking further ahead than the next "big thing". Slow and steady wins the race, and planting feet on Mars will be meaningless if we don't follow it up with a continuious presence, a goal we abandoned following Apollo.
Movie age restrictions are a voluntary thing on the part of the theaters and the MPAA. There is now law forcing movies to be rated, nor are there laws mandating that theaters abide by those ratings. It's all self-regulating internal to the industry, coupled with public pressure.
Same thing with ESRB ratings. Nothing forces a game publisher to rate their game, nor are there laws forcing game stores to restrict the sale. It's all industry self-regulation, which is more difficult in the game industry since games can be sold in practically any retail outlet, large or small, as opposed to movie theaters which are fewer in number and usually more reputably ran.
In DC it's not just the sale of guns that are illegal, it's the possesion as well. Criminals can easily get guns and will bring them in and keep them in DC. Law abiding citizens can not. It's one of two reasons I live in Virginia instead of DC -- a lack of ability to protect myself, and an income tax rate that's 5% higher than surrounding states.
The District of Columbia has a penchant for making symbolic laws that don't do anything but inconvience law-abiding citizens, and sometimes cause harm.
For no one that lives around here, DC is very small and surrounded by Maryland and Virginia. The subway system extends into both other states. Local laws limiting purchases have a very limited effect.
Look at the handgun regulations. Neither Maryland or Virginia require licenses to purchase or own handguns, and all stores will readily sell to DC residents. All handgun laws have done in DC is to keep law-abiding citzens from owning them, the criminals have easy access.
These laws will do the same thing. Drive a few blocks into Maryland and get them there, or take the metro 2-3 stops south to Pentagon City or Crystal City malls and shop there, too.
Quantum encryption is a misnomer, it should be called (and is, in some circles) quantum key distribution. It's all about how the key is transmitted, not how the data is secured. The encryption method is independant of how the key is distributed. Contrary to popular belief, it typically cannot be a one-time pad, since the bandwidth on the "key" channel is very limited due to the exact nature of the transmission. It can be, though, a constantly shifting AES key, or other type of data, making the datastream as a whole effectively unbreakable.
The problem lies in that you have to have a single, unbroken fiber optic connection between the two points, and this fiber optic connection is very limited in the amount of loss that it can withstand. That means you're geographically limited on how far the circuit might be able to travel. You're looking at a few hundred kilometers, at the absolute maximum.
Considering the amount of money you'd spend on putting the circuit in place versus the amount of money you'd lose if the data was compromised, it's very unlikely that anyone, anywhere will have a practical use for QKD/QE. Government and defense, maybe, but then only in very limited applications.
There is a chance that, should quantum computing become a reality and modern encryption algorithms can suddenly be cracked very, very easily that this method may see some use, and by no means is development a waste of time and effort. But, QC is still very much in the early stages, if a working system is ever developed at all.
Thta being said, PKI and courier delivery of key material will continue to be the order of the day for quite some time.
It's an interesting concept, but it's one that can get game developers in a hotbed of legal problems. Basically, it means that the in-game data constitues something of value to the players. If a game company encouraged virtual trading using real-world dollars, it is conceivable that the game company could be held liable to maintain that value for the customer.
Take that to the ultimate extension. You're a player with enough in-game assets to constitue hundreds of thousands of dollars were it to be liquidated, and potentially hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month in income from the regular sale of those items.
Then, the game developer cancels the game, or there is a massive data loss, or the developer makes an arbitrary change to the game which shifts the economy and results in a total loss to you. In essense, you've just lost your total net worth, your income, etc. Logical people would say "well, too bad, so sad, shouldn't have relied on a game" Lawyers, on the other hand, are not always logical people. When something becomes someone's job, it's no longer a game to them. It's their life. Sanctioning virtual trades builds the expectation that that is a valid use of the game environment, and puts additional responsibility on the game company.
No amount of warnings and EULA could insulate a company from that kind of litigation. It's far easier, and safer, for the game company to toe the line, cancel a few accounts here and there and send out a few cease-and-desist letters.
The problem, sadly, is the inherent weakness in any online game that tries to build and semblence of a community in it. Finding a balance between giving those who will spend every waking hour of their lives in the game a challenge, while still giving opportunities to those who will play maybe 2-3 hours a week is very difficult, if not impossible.
.... you quit.
Take a game I used to be heavily involved with, Eve. For someone in a corporation, who spends 4+ hours a day playing, losing a cruiser in a battle is no big deal. Corporations can pump them out like it was cool. For the lone player, though, who spends a few hours a week maximum, a cruiser can represent an investment of many weeks or months. When you get ambushed by a very superior force and have the sum total of months worth of effort erased in a matter of seconds
GPS is becoming more and more common in locating underground utilities. Basically, surveyor-quality GPS readings (using a surveyor GPS rig which not only uses satellite readings, but also local survey points) are taken of underground utilities every X number of feet. This, along with manual depth measurements, can create an accurate 3D utility map.
It's pretty interesting. Last major construction gig (major fiber plant/network rework) I was on we had a crew like this. They basically hung back waiting for the construction crews to either lay cable or conduit, and they'd take measurements before they buried it.
By definition, a novel is 40,000+ words.
A novella is between 17,500 and 39,999 words.
A novelette is between 7500 and 17,499.
A short story is under 7500 words.
And now, you know.
I'm a network engineer for the government, and have been in the federal/defense sector for the last seven years. Never once have I encountered an environment like the one you just described. I'd also like you to tell us about your "complex calculations," since you describe them with such flair and exacting numbers.
That being said, yes, the statements made by the manager were very much out of line and he should be disciplined for making such public statements.
The issue is not merely one of "did something bad." Its not like he skipped a step during a server build, or accidently hung up on a customer. Server techs in an enterprise environment are made fully aware of the rules and regulations regarding what does and does not go on a particular server. Any deviation, no matter how small, can affect the server, potentially impacting anything service-level agreements to the ability to access critical applications.
Such blantant disregard for rules and regulations, particularly if there has been a history of such behavior, can and should be grounds for disciplinary action, even termination if the affected devices are critical enough.
"Unauthorized software" means just that. Just because he was in the IT department doesn't give him free reign to do what he wants to with a production server.
Remember: Those servers, routers, switches, and workstations aren't yours, they belong to your employer. You're paid to do what your employer wants to them, and not do what said employer doesn't want. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you're stupid (yes, STUPID) enough to flaunt the rules because you think they don't apply to you, you deserve what you get.
The SPA tried this in the 90s with the MPC certification. Around nine months after that, technology had advanced to the point where they h ad the MPC2. Add another nine months, the MPC3.
The idea was the same -- games rated for a particular cert would play on a machine rated for that.
But, with the fast rate of changes, they essentially cancelled the program because of the headaches involved. Plus, game marketing didn't like it because if a game was labeled "MPC2", when MPC3 came out that made the game seem old.
Oh, well, those that don't learn from history...
Why? It's too vague.
How portable do you need it? How much space do you need? What kind of interfaces do you have available? How fast does it need to be?
There is no one best storage solution, there are many different bests depending on what's needed at the time.
Throw out some more specifics, and maybe someone can help you out.
The concept is called TCO -- total cost of ownership. In most TCO equasions, licensing costs are approximately 20-30% of the typical TCO of a total IT solution.
Where does the rest come from? TCO is made up of two parts -- implementation/migration costs, and recurring, or ongoing costs.
Migration is how much it will cost to move your systems over to a new type of system. This includes any new required hardware, consultants to do the more tricky application migrations, the businesss impact of migration-related downtime and reduced productivity meshing with the learning curve, training costs to train your users and your admins to run the new system, among other things.
Ongoing costs are the long-term items, like warranty requirements, support contacts, paying your staff (remember, a Linux admin makes more than a Windows admin -- that makes Linux more expensive in that area). Another important calculation is reliability of the whole system, defined by mean time between failures in relationship to the mean time to repair, and the business impact of downtime associated with that.
The big trick is that TCO calculations are very subjective in nature. The criteria change from consulting firm to consulting firm, and the values used to support some of those numbers can come from a variety of different sources, and may be of questionable value.
In regards to hiring people who can 100% support something, that's not in line with current best IT practices. You hire admins who are competent enough to handle a majority of the types of issues your system will face on a day-to-day basis, and those who are intelligent enough to know when to call for help. A support contract from any company is far less than the yearly salary of a couple 20+ year Unix veterans who will happily throw a hammock up between racks in your server farm.
What you have to remember about IT is that it is not about the technology -- it is about the people and business that technology supports.
That's a router ACL. Perhaps I was a bit too vague, but my intention with that particular post was that "reverse firewalls" aren't what's needed at every house. Rather, very simple egress filtering as the responsibility of the ISP could mitigate a great deal of spam, and prevent spoofed packets (commonly used in DDoS attacks) from leaving the network.
Stupid HTML
ip access-list extended EGRESS_FILTER
permit tcp any [smtp svr ip addr] eq smtp
deny tcp any any eq smtp
permit ip any any
interface [whatever]
access-group EGRESS_FILTER out
Fixed!
ip access-list extended EGRESS_FILTER
permit tcp any eq smtp
deny tcp any any eq smtp
permit ip any any
interface
access-group EGRESS_FILTER out
Fixed!
That's only the press you really see that in. Most soldiers and military planners accept the fact that guerilla tactics are and always will be the only effective way an inferior force can respond to a superior one. Hell, the American revolutionaries did it to the British. It's not always an issue of fighting to the finish...sometimes its possible to just make it so costly for your enemies to hold on to your territory that they just give up and leave.
Fact is, America hasn't been in a "fair fight" since Vietnam. Vietnam wasn't even technically a fair fight -- our force was clearly superior, but our tactics were not.
Thing is, only place you want a fair fight is in a boxing ring. You want to have the clear advantage over your enemy, so that casualties on your side are minimal and victory is assured.
Really? How about this quote:
In 2000, SA was replaced by a "capability to
prevent hostile use of GPS and its augmentations
while retaining a military advantage in a theater of
operations without disrupting or degrading civilian
uses outside the theater" [Source: 'US Policy Statement Regarding GPS Availability,
March 21, 2003', www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/default.htm]
And it's not just instant-off that the EU is worried about -- it's also the potential of a long-term policy shift in the US government towards GPS. Because GPS has become so vital, they don't want to take the chance that some future regime would take steps to deny GPS access to the rest of the world.
It's unlikely, but a chance that the EU appears to be unwilling to take.