I think you do need to move, if owning a home matters to you. I bought a historic (circa 1870) 3-story Victorian home just outside of Philadelphia for about $230k.
Philadelphia is not the most expensive area for housing for the nation, but it's far from the cheapest. $1M for an average home cost is insane.
- Still currently an NT domain, due to some parent company issues (but if they keep dragging their feet, we'll probably go AD without them).
- We've had a firewall in place for years, blocking both inbound connections, and outbound connections that we don't want (such as SMTP that isn't going to one of our email servers).
- We have a corporate version of Symantec, so updates are automatic and centrally managed. And, yes, someone does track any issues or problems that come up. Note that antivirus vendors dragged their feet for a long time on dealing with spyware issues.
- We run an external mail server (on Linux) outside the corporate-mandate Exchange server, which filters incoming mail via Mimedefang and SpamAssassin.
- Systems are updated roughly on a bi-weekly basis, more often if critical issues come up.
- So they can install games, of course! Seriously , the worst problems are with management execs who won't put up with not being able to install software on their own machines. This is more of a business issue than a techinical one. Plus, not all of the current exploits actually require permission to install software to cause problems on a system, or the network it is connected to.
Our web apps already use a separate login that is database driven and single sign-on for all of the applications, with Apache2 as the web server, so that's not much of an issue.
I've gotten to make a lot of the policy decisions about these issues, because I'm also one of the primary developers here.
This issue seems to have come to a head in the past year or so, particular in the corporate environment.
I am IT director for a small division of a company near Philadelphia, and the problems caused by IE in our environment have increased greatly in the past year. We spend more time than ever fixing problems caused by spyware in particular.
This also falls into a timeframe when the browser alternatives have been getting much better (Mozilla, Firefox). We are currently planning to move everyone to Firefox as their default browser once it has been released as 1.0 or better.
That's fine if you don't need to do boot-level work with the machine. If you do, then a KVM is hard to replace.
Re:somewhat misleading..
on
Hardware Hacking
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That's a little harsh. There are always levels of understanding about any concept. Just a few of them:
1. Enough understanding to use an item. This can be rather little, if the internal details are encapsulated well enough.
2. Sufficient to interface to or enhance an item. This requires more information, but the interfaces generally mean that you need less information about the internal details as well.
3. Sufficient to build an item. This requires significantly more knowledge, but depending upon the state of the art attempted, may not require a professional practitioner.
4. Sufficient to design an item. This is really where professional training and practice come into the requirements, but this level is not required to be able to do interesting things with most hardware!
Umm, no. His point was that there were defined bad guys and good guys in war stories, and that's simply not the case for that series. It doesn't fit into his predefined choices.
Well, that's not true in all cases. Look at the fantasy series about The Black Company, by Glen Cook.
The Black Company is a mercenary company involved in a whole series of wars. Good and bad are ill-defined, and in many cases the choice is between bad and worse. The Company itself is certainly never seen as being heroic.
Slashdot Mirror
Philadelphia is not the most expensive area for housing for the nation, but it's far from the cheapest. $1M for an average home cost is insane.
- We've had a firewall in place for years, blocking both inbound connections, and outbound connections that we don't want (such as SMTP that isn't going to one of our email servers).
- We have a corporate version of Symantec, so updates are automatic and centrally managed. And, yes, someone does track any issues or problems that come up. Note that antivirus vendors dragged their feet for a long time on dealing with spyware issues.
- We run an external mail server (on Linux) outside the corporate-mandate Exchange server, which filters incoming mail via Mimedefang and SpamAssassin.
- Systems are updated roughly on a bi-weekly basis, more often if critical issues come up.
- So they can install games, of course! Seriously , the worst problems are with management execs who won't put up with not being able to install software on their own machines. This is more of a business issue than a techinical one. Plus, not all of the current exploits actually require permission to install software to cause problems on a system, or the network it is connected to.
Our situation is a bit larger, about 50 desktops will need to be moved, but still a small business situation.
Our web apps already use a separate login that is database driven and single sign-on for all of the applications, with Apache2 as the web server, so that's not much of an issue.
I've gotten to make a lot of the policy decisions about these issues, because I'm also one of the primary developers here.
This issue seems to have come to a head in the past year or so, particular in the corporate environment.
I am IT director for a small division of a company near Philadelphia, and the problems caused by IE in our environment have increased greatly in the past year. We spend more time than ever fixing problems caused by spyware in particular.
This also falls into a timeframe when the browser alternatives have been getting much better (Mozilla, Firefox). We are currently planning to move everyone to Firefox as their default browser once it has been released as 1.0 or better.
That's fine if you don't need to do boot-level work with the machine. If you do, then a KVM is hard to replace.
That's a little harsh. There are always levels of understanding about any concept. Just a few of them:
1. Enough understanding to use an item. This can be rather little, if the internal details are encapsulated well enough.
2. Sufficient to interface to or enhance an item. This requires more information, but the interfaces generally mean that you need less information about the internal details as well.
3. Sufficient to build an item. This requires significantly more knowledge, but depending upon the state of the art attempted, may not require a professional practitioner.
4. Sufficient to design an item. This is really where professional training and practice come into the requirements, but this level is not required to be able to do interesting things with most hardware!
Umm, no. His point was that there were defined bad guys and good guys in war stories, and that's simply not the case for that series. It doesn't fit into his predefined choices.
The Black Company is a mercenary company involved in a whole series of wars. Good and bad are ill-defined, and in many cases the choice is between bad and worse. The Company itself is certainly never seen as being heroic.
It's a good series, well worth your time to read.