Working in a larger company's helpdesk, I often was requested/required to reimage rather than repair. But reimaging took about forty minutes, start to finish, saving and restoring all of a user's documents. There were some problems that required repair though, and these could take two hours or more, just trying to get Novell's client to behave properly with Win98 (both troublesome products, granted.) But when I could reimage, it saved a ton of time, and time is money.
Also consider the amount of pollution that went into the air forty years ago to make that classic car. The process may have been simpler, but pollution control was an afterthought at best, in factories and in the cars. I won't buy the statement that it's more environmentally expensive to make and drive a zero-emissions car than it was to make and drive a '57 Belair.
But the security of an OTP, as you touch on, is lost once the key is discovered. That's why a OTP is ONLY truly secure when used ONCE. So, say you have a six-port knock sequence, and you generate a long string of ports that makes up your OTP, and you print a copy out fo ryou to use. Then, every six ports that are knocked, you change your sequence. But this would screw you if someone was attempting to brute-force your server and then you try to connect, so bad idea. Instead, once the correct sequence is input, you have ten seconds or something to connect to the ultimate destination port. This, I suppose would be susceptible to DoS attacks as well, but more feasible, as your attacker would probably never actually brute force the first sequence, (65564 ports, length-n sequence, n^65564 combinations) let alone all the sequences in your OTP. Or use a time-based sequence. Or, as someone else mentioned, you black-list after a few attempts.
How is a series of ports not security? It's a combination. Do you really believe this provides zero security? When you lock a gym locker with a master lock, is the combination on that nothing but obscurity? Of course the lock can be cut, but there's still a degree of security provided there.
I disagree. While this isn't the most secure solution, and a static sequence could be sniffed and used, this provides no more or no less security than a password does, which for things like POP/IMAP, can be acquired through sniffing as well.
n^65564 provides a pretty good amount of variation, for a port sequence of length n. Want it even more secure? Specify special packets on certain ports. For example, ACK on 874, FIN on 9283, SYN+ACK on 29833, RSET w/fragment set on 9843.
Just an idea, but defintely more secure than just leaving FTP there, waiting to be brute-forced.
Yeah, watching movies while reaching through the steering wheel in your camaro to mess with your Archos is totally safe. Whereas fiddling in that dang console is really hazardous. Why else would car manufacturers put stick shifts down there, within easy and comfortable reach of the driver's right hand...and just imagine, if it were down there, your passenger could change the music while the driver...drives! How dangerous!
Seriously though, how about watching the road instead of how many RPMs your Z28 is whining along at?
Technically, yes. I guess it's just in my mind that VOIP means I can use it like a normal telephone. I've used skype twice to talk to a friend in Michigan, it works pretty well. But I don't want to have to sit at my computer to talk, nor do I want to have to call my friend on POTS to walk them through installing skype before I can talk to them on it. Not that it's tough, but I have some very non-pc-literate friends...
If I didn't have a cell, I'd have vonage for sure, though.
VOIP (i.e. Vonage) does not. VOIP provides a phone/voip gateway that switches your analog phone signal to data and sends it on to another VOIP gateway that switches your call back to analog.
This is Skype (or their marketing dept.) calling their Internet phone software VOIP.
Peer to peer means the other end must use Skype software as well. So this really isn't VOIP in the normal sense, whereas with a Vonage line, I can call any phone number. And the lack of a real-time guarantee is more or less fully made up by the speed of home broadband now.
And from what I can tell, the shirt is real. At least, it has a price. I didn't bother trying to order one though. Alright, I did. The hamster PC case has a price too, but calls you a silly monkey when you try to order one. Apparently the shirt is popular too, as they have order deadline stuff updated, stricken out, and in red.
What I want though is a computer virus starter collection. Melissa was so cute, and Nimda, who could forget Nimda!
How can I post a "self forfilling post" as well? And what does it mean to "forfill"? This is potentially the first interesting idea I've seen on/. this 4/1.
I'm amazed at the lack of creativity going into any of these April Fool's Day jokes. Two players control a head on a character? C'mon. They each control one leg or arm, too? I can see it now..."HAHAHA you can only walk in CIRCLES! Because I'm not moving MY LEG! HAHAHA" wtf...
Google is hiring for their moon base, wow, that's almost believable, and barely entertaining.
An Omniscient Protocol? It's already here, and it's called DRM. Thank you Intel/MS/RIAA/MPAA/etc.
At least last year,/. had a sense of humor with the evil bit, posted over and over. I think it took some people three different posts before realizing that no, Taco/Cliff/et. al. are not actually that stupid.
I hope someone puts a little creativity into one of these posts today. The chicken-warmed nukes was close, but that's true. Honestly, what government has a sense of humor? Let alone the British government...
I mean not to disagree, but just point out that a: I was one of those weird student employees that wasn't there to get paid while doing homework; b: I went the other way, student/University [student] employee to the real world, (and I've been there only six months) I'm just very good at "seeing things for how they are" for someone so young; c: administrative side, not academic.
I did TA for one semester, but stayed out of the department completely except to meet with the prof periodically, gather my pay stubs, and do what paperwork I had to in order to complete my degree. In short, the academic/departmental politics were outside my realm.
Campuses are indeed a beautiful place, especially when it gets warm out after very long MN winters. And the facilities are absolutely gorgeous. And the public-service/save-the-world aspect of the job has a very big appeal to me.
I someday hope to return to the academic side, be it University level, or high school. I just had to get away from the BS politics that were present in my department at the time.
Yes, it's a job. Yes, you have some sort of schedule. yes, you have a boss, co-workers, etc. That's probably about where the differences stop. As another poster stated, politics are huge around a University. Gossipers tend to run rampant, where, while they're present in the corporate world, they can't be so blatant about it all the time (from my experience.) Budgets are extremely important, and you may have to be there for awhile and make friends before you're ever able to acquire extra finances for a project you'd like to pursue. This, of course, depends on what you'll be doing, and how much your boss wants to take care of you (he probably already has the swing to get some extra funding for you.)
All in all, it's a trip. The thing I wasn't prepared for was the amount of laziness all around me. Granted, I worked in the Facilities Mgmt department, so not faculty or directly involved with the academics, and we had almost all of the union employees at the school. But still, the amount of maintenances guys I found napping, the difficulty in reaching half of the managers (most of which have since been fired, thankfully) was rediculous. And infuriating, considering I was a student employee making $10/hr doing helpdesk with four others making $50k, and I did more than any one of them, and usually more than any two of them combined. Now THAT would have been a nice gig. $50k, 40 hours, work stays at work when I walk out the door.
Anyway, I have since left and stepped into the corporate world, so I'm working backwords from where the poster is headed, but it's amazing the differences I've seen. Where I work now, the politics are there, but seem much more elusive, where in the University, the politics are right there in front of you, every day of every week.
Now that I am "staff", and I have a desk and chair designated for staff, and my manager has a desk and chair designated for a manager, and my principal a desk and chair for a principal, I kind of yearn for that laid-back and more enjoyable atmosphere.
Paul Garrett, the author of the first textbook, is easily the best Math professor I encountered during my time at the University of Minnesota. I took two courses with him: Error Correcting Codes and Cryptology. Both courses used a course packet or textbook written by him. Both books were very good, and fit in with his course material very well. Last I checked, he had all of his course notes freely available, which cover much of what is in the text.
His style tends to be slightly curt, but as stated, this fits with his course. His material provides very good overviews, and strives to explain everything in 'layman's terms,' something that almost every one of his students have problems with at first. As an example, he wants factorial explained when you use it the first time (he's not so mundane to make you do this every time on every assignment, thankfully.) This means you [theoretically] could read the book start to finish without too much previous knowledge, and understand most of it.
Definitely worth a look, and if you're currently at, or going to attend, the University of Minnesota, I highly recommend you look up Garrett's courses and consider taking them.
What you said is accurate, I think. The only thing is, if I return a "standard" Apple, the same exact costs apply, except for swapping a stick of RAM or a hdd. And for the "make sure customer x gets his custom rig," that cost is included in the extra parts. That's why extra RAM or hdd costs more from a mfr than an online store.
If Apple goes through that many refurbs, they're probably going to swap the hdd anyway, because you can image a drive in a hardware imager faster than using an Apple equivalent to Norton Ghost. After all, that hard drive has to be erased, "custom" or not. And if they're not going to sell it as new, having upgraded RAM and hdd may make it sell faster. I know when I've shopped for refurbed anything, I look for the best item I can find, because no matter how expensive, it's cheaper than if I bought the same thing new. So, most for my money, blah blah.
So back to what got this started, new or 'custom', the only difference is swapping some parts which takes a few minutes on the part of a tech, and yes it costs money. But for a hot pink Ferrari to be returned, they will most likely have to repaint it to sell it used to recover at least the cost to manufacture the car. That's a lot more expensive, comparatively, and (continuing the 'what if') they probably wouldn't refund the cost to paing the car pink in the first place. And possibly withold enough to paint it a traditional color.
I'm just starting to ramble now. Ultimately, my point is there is no real reason why Apple can't accept a fully-functional return that was "customized" by adding a DIMM, hdd, whatever. Any other manufacturer can eat that cost, I think Apple can too.
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Working in a larger company's helpdesk, I often was requested/required to reimage rather than repair. But reimaging took about forty minutes, start to finish, saving and restoring all of a user's documents. There were some problems that required repair though, and these could take two hours or more, just trying to get Novell's client to behave properly with Win98 (both troublesome products, granted.) But when I could reimage, it saved a ton of time, and time is money.
Also consider the amount of pollution that went into the air forty years ago to make that classic car. The process may have been simpler, but pollution control was an afterthought at best, in factories and in the cars. I won't buy the statement that it's more environmentally expensive to make and drive a zero-emissions car than it was to make and drive a '57 Belair.
But the security of an OTP, as you touch on, is lost once the key is discovered. That's why a OTP is ONLY truly secure when used ONCE. So, say you have a six-port knock sequence, and you generate a long string of ports that makes up your OTP, and you print a copy out fo ryou to use. Then, every six ports that are knocked, you change your sequence. But this would screw you if someone was attempting to brute-force your server and then you try to connect, so bad idea. Instead, once the correct sequence is input, you have ten seconds or something to connect to the ultimate destination port. This, I suppose would be susceptible to DoS attacks as well, but more feasible, as your attacker would probably never actually brute force the first sequence, (65564 ports, length-n sequence, n^65564 combinations) let alone all the sequences in your OTP. Or use a time-based sequence. Or, as someone else mentioned, you black-list after a few attempts.
Would WinPCap provide this facility? I know it doesn't get as low-level as you can in Linux, but just a thought.
How is a series of ports not security? It's a combination. Do you really believe this provides zero security? When you lock a gym locker with a master lock, is the combination on that nothing but obscurity? Of course the lock can be cut, but there's still a degree of security provided there.
n^65564 provides a pretty good amount of variation, for a port sequence of length n. Want it even more secure? Specify special packets on certain ports. For example, ACK on 874, FIN on 9283, SYN+ACK on 29833, RSET w/fragment set on 9843.
Just an idea, but defintely more secure than just leaving FTP there, waiting to be brute-forced.
Seriously though, how about watching the road instead of how many RPMs your Z28 is whining along at?
run for the border! get the duck! You have nothing to worry about, unless the duck starts explaining the solution to you.
Thanks Timothy, because I almost missed this one the first time.
I'll second that!
I'd find that a little scary if I were Theo.
If I didn't have a cell, I'd have vonage for sure, though.
This year and in years past, I've gotten more copied CDs from friends than I have pirated music from online.
BAN TEH CD BURNERS!
VOIP (i.e. Vonage) does not. VOIP provides a phone/voip gateway that switches your analog phone signal to data and sends it on to another VOIP gateway that switches your call back to analog.
This is Skype (or their marketing dept.) calling their Internet phone software VOIP.
Peer to peer means the other end must use Skype software as well. So this really isn't VOIP in the normal sense, whereas with a Vonage line, I can call any phone number. And the lack of a real-time guarantee is more or less fully made up by the speed of home broadband now.
What I want though is a computer virus starter collection. Melissa was so cute, and Nimda, who could forget Nimda!
Funniest 4/1 post yet.
Simple amazing, a real story on April Fool's Day! Really poor quality, but you can make it out fairly well.
I told my brother he had to name one of his kids monkey, then I'll be a monkey's uncle.
How can I post a "self forfilling post" as well? And what does it mean to "forfill"? This is potentially the first interesting idea I've seen on /. this 4/1.
Google is hiring for their moon base, wow, that's almost believable, and barely entertaining.
An Omniscient Protocol? It's already here, and it's called DRM. Thank you Intel/MS/RIAA/MPAA/etc.
At least last year, /. had a sense of humor with the evil bit, posted over and over. I think it took some people three different posts before realizing that no, Taco/Cliff/et. al. are not actually that stupid.
I hope someone puts a little creativity into one of these posts today. The chicken-warmed nukes was close, but that's true. Honestly, what government has a sense of humor? Let alone the British government...
I did TA for one semester, but stayed out of the department completely except to meet with the prof periodically, gather my pay stubs, and do what paperwork I had to in order to complete my degree. In short, the academic/departmental politics were outside my realm.
Campuses are indeed a beautiful place, especially when it gets warm out after very long MN winters. And the facilities are absolutely gorgeous. And the public-service/save-the-world aspect of the job has a very big appeal to me.
I someday hope to return to the academic side, be it University level, or high school. I just had to get away from the BS politics that were present in my department at the time.
Yes, it's a job. Yes, you have some sort of schedule. yes, you have a boss, co-workers, etc. That's probably about where the differences stop. As another poster stated, politics are huge around a University. Gossipers tend to run rampant, where, while they're present in the corporate world, they can't be so blatant about it all the time (from my experience.) Budgets are extremely important, and you may have to be there for awhile and make friends before you're ever able to acquire extra finances for a project you'd like to pursue. This, of course, depends on what you'll be doing, and how much your boss wants to take care of you (he probably already has the swing to get some extra funding for you.)
All in all, it's a trip. The thing I wasn't prepared for was the amount of laziness all around me. Granted, I worked in the Facilities Mgmt department, so not faculty or directly involved with the academics, and we had almost all of the union employees at the school. But still, the amount of maintenances guys I found napping, the difficulty in reaching half of the managers (most of which have since been fired, thankfully) was rediculous. And infuriating, considering I was a student employee making $10/hr doing helpdesk with four others making $50k, and I did more than any one of them, and usually more than any two of them combined. Now THAT would have been a nice gig. $50k, 40 hours, work stays at work when I walk out the door.
Anyway, I have since left and stepped into the corporate world, so I'm working backwords from where the poster is headed, but it's amazing the differences I've seen. Where I work now, the politics are there, but seem much more elusive, where in the University, the politics are right there in front of you, every day of every week.
Now that I am "staff", and I have a desk and chair designated for staff, and my manager has a desk and chair designated for a manager, and my principal a desk and chair for a principal, I kind of yearn for that laid-back and more enjoyable atmosphere.
His style tends to be slightly curt, but as stated, this fits with his course. His material provides very good overviews, and strives to explain everything in 'layman's terms,' something that almost every one of his students have problems with at first. As an example, he wants factorial explained when you use it the first time (he's not so mundane to make you do this every time on every assignment, thankfully.) This means you [theoretically] could read the book start to finish without too much previous knowledge, and understand most of it.
Definitely worth a look, and if you're currently at, or going to attend, the University of Minnesota, I highly recommend you look up Garrett's courses and consider taking them.
If Apple goes through that many refurbs, they're probably going to swap the hdd anyway, because you can image a drive in a hardware imager faster than using an Apple equivalent to Norton Ghost. After all, that hard drive has to be erased, "custom" or not. And if they're not going to sell it as new, having upgraded RAM and hdd may make it sell faster. I know when I've shopped for refurbed anything, I look for the best item I can find, because no matter how expensive, it's cheaper than if I bought the same thing new. So, most for my money, blah blah.
So back to what got this started, new or 'custom', the only difference is swapping some parts which takes a few minutes on the part of a tech, and yes it costs money. But for a hot pink Ferrari to be returned, they will most likely have to repaint it to sell it used to recover at least the cost to manufacture the car. That's a lot more expensive, comparatively, and (continuing the 'what if') they probably wouldn't refund the cost to paing the car pink in the first place. And possibly withold enough to paint it a traditional color.
I'm just starting to ramble now. Ultimately, my point is there is no real reason why Apple can't accept a fully-functional return that was "customized" by adding a DIMM, hdd, whatever. Any other manufacturer can eat that cost, I think Apple can too.