the late Sir Arthur Clarke's quote... As civilizations search for more energy. the expectation is that someone will screw up. Remember the kerfluffle about the LHC creating black holes ? (Yes, I know, rogue physicist using crappy math pushed that idea, mostly because he was pissed at being kept out of the project)
Right. And these idiots used the name of a completely addictive beverage that, once hooked, condemns the drinker to a lifetime of consumerism ? I've heard of tongue in cheek, but jeez... why not just name it Liquid Heroin and be done with it ?
""...here's what makes this campaign great in my estimation - each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it's simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest - three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar.""
Having managed projects ranging from R&D, defense systems, construction, and software development.. the MMM is all about work teams. Most successful project managers learn this sort of thing from experience (read pain and failure). Everybody thinks they have some sort of 'new concept' that is the magic bullet to 'solve software development problems'.
Forgetting that the one common element is... people. No matter WHAT methodology you claim to follow, I guarantee at least half of your team will think it's bullshit, and begrudge the paperwork that is getting in their way of just getting the job done.. THEIR WAY.
The best thing a good manager does is remove restraints and barriers, and filter bullshit. And let the team gel and get their shit done.
Some years ago my home network was zapped with a lightning strike that came in via the coaxial cable. Modem, router, and two switches died to save my computers. In military designs, we used opto-isolators to shield sensitive circuits from attack.
Despite the hysteria, this is not a 'broad attack threat'. The attacker needs physical access to the network, and will probably only compromise part of the network due to the energies and damage modes involved. Unless he's Nikola Tesla and carrying his own lightning bolt. Then all bets are off.
I do recommend that you isolate your network from power threats with surge suppressors on your coax line or RJ-45 line from your ISP, and of course your power lines.
Absolutely agree that it's much ado about nothing. AND bad statistics ! CERN as an example is a lot of nonsense... it's a HUGE project with a HUGE population of PhD's, grad students, undergrads, managers, technicians, and everybody else. All working towards a common goal. And the science developed by those thousands of authors is an enormous collaboration, enabled by... yeah, you guessed it, the World Wide Web. Which was INVENTED at CERN to enable... Collaboration.
WSJ, you look like a bunch of idiots. Stick to talking about stocks and rich people stuff. You suck at science.
Is there a possible benefit to getting a battery with fewer charge cycles in a swap ? I sort of saw this concept as a way to get a refurbished battery when yours is reaching end of life, or has a few dead cells.
At work we have a PC Board component inserter robot that runs off a PDP-8. Programmed with paper tape. Yes. Paper tape. OK, well, plastic punched tape. There is a short stack of 'spare' PDP-8 rack units sitting in the crib just waiting for a failure. But you know what ? Digital Equipment made some rugged machines.
And in my old job in the defense industry we used a surplus Nike-Ajax missile radar, that was run off a synchro computer. I designed a digital interface to run it off a Z-80 processor.
One industry that died with direct PC sales (Yes, you Mikey Dell) was the entire Value Added Reseller industry. There are a few still around, but the serried ranks of 'experts' went poof. This can be equated with the attempts to bypass the Auto Dealership model by Tesla.
I encourage this. The idea that consumers are too stupid to buy cars without expert assistance is as dumb as the idea that consumers needed help to buy complicated computers.
Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte (Systems, Applications, and Products).
www.sap.com
Basically it's one of the two the largest Enterprise Resource Planning software companies in the world. Oracle is the other one. And since most SAP systems are run inside a highly protected corporate network, the self-promoting hysteria from this article is so much bullcrap.
Since anti satellite technology is quite mature and tested, anyone who thinks that such a system would not have the equivalent of a few dozen nuclear shotguns permanently parked near it is... clueless. Of course the effect of having to destroy that would effectively make Earth orbit a no-go zone for decades until someone started sending up sweeper robots.
Properly shielded equipment uses different methods to 'break the cage'. It's been many decades, but some of the heavily shielded designs I did in the 80's involved opto-isolators. Yes, that's right. Want to avoid radiating information ? Use light.
Keep in mind that the structure of the faraday cage depends on the frequency of the data being transmitted. It does not have to be unbreakable tin foil. Properly sized metal mesh will also do the job. Just ask anyone who tries to get a Wifi signal through an old wall with expanded metal lath and plaster.
Yep. Ditto. I still recall one young smartass demonstrating to our boss that he could display what was on the Boss's computer monitor from about 30 feet away with an antenna and a circuit he built with a breadboard.
A faraday cage IS the only way to protect against this with 100% reliability.
The implied assumption in the article and in the commentary indicates a deliberate misdirection or a simple understanding of the accounting principles involved in how a business accounts for a BAD DECISION. Every business has the ability to use this 'loophole'. But it's not a 'loophole'. It's a simple recognition that a capital purchase that turns out to not be a good deal should have the loss (cost of the purchase price minus the fair market value of the asset) amortized over the book life of the asset against the income produced by the asset.
Kids, this is basic accounting 301 (Intermediate management accounting). Most accountants will tell you that having good will on your books means you made a dumb decision at some point, and paid more than something was worth. The title SHOULD read:
"Ballmer pays twice what Basketball team is worse, can't write it off immediately, has to wait 15 years."
I keep an encrypted online database of my passwords. Sort of. I use a 'modular' password. One word is different, the other is always the same. So in my will I have the same word (and it's l33t combinations) written down, along with the address of the database. So anyone dealing after my death will know ALL my codes. My wife of 30+ years also keeps a copy of it, and knows the super secret codes.
I started this after being in a coma, and my wife having to deal with my PDA bleeping about meetings to her until the battery died. Which made her cry even more.
Good approach. Making a mortal enemy of the outgoing sysop, or simply his object of scorn, will screw you badly.
Other than to say "you're screwed", the big step is to also ramp up the professionalism and start building a better system governance policy and documentation process. The best way to explain that to management is to ask "Do you fail the Hit By a Bus Test? ".... If your key administrators are hit by a bus, will your systems go dark ?
I worked on a much more advanced and ultimately classified project for the Navy SEALS that produced a 'first shot kill' gun sighting system for the SEALs in... 1993. The sight was designed to go on crew served weapons and sniper weapons. It included aim point calculation, full ballistics computing, sensors, range finder, thermal and optical sighting, low light level, yadda yadda yadda. At the time the sofware was required to be ADA (thanks, DOD).
Just because you put a shiny Linux on something doesn't make it all new and stuff.
Bingo. I can recall being in the research reactor at U Mo in Columbia in the early 1970's. People forget how accessible facilities were before 9/11 . Apparently we're so used to the Police State that we've created that it's pretty much taken for granted.
Which is a great pity. The less accessible cool research is for our children, the less interested our children will be in becoming cool researchers. Big Bang Theory and Mohawk Guy nonwithstanding.
A quite logical extension of such thinking. When it comes to liberty of thought, the road to Orwell's 1984 is paved with 'good ideas' gone wrong.
In the late 1970's I purchased a copy (paper) of "the Anarchist's Handbook". Why ? I was doing research for a story I was writing for a Creative Writing class in college. I already *knew* how to make explosives.. I was an Engineering student !
Criminalizing people for their knowledge would mean that pretty much every Engineer will end up in jail. Yeah... that will definitely not help a modern world.
Sung to the copyrighted tune of "Feed the Birds". Extra points for Julie Andrews class voices.....
(These lyrics are lovingly given away for free as a public service an are in the public domain by me, their author)
Early each day on the steps of the Courthouse The little old lawyer comes In his own special way to the people he calls Come buy my bags full of briefs Come sue the little birds Show them your greed And you be glad if you do Their young ones are too fat Their nests all need stripping All it takes is a lawsuit from you---u
Sue the birds, a million a chirp million, million, million a chirp
Sue the birds, that's what he cries while overhead, bird guano fills the skies
All around the courthouse the judges and bailiffs look down as he sells his wares although you can't see it you know they are frowning each time someone shows his gre--ed
My wife works in Assisted Living. She's had many situations where residents have shown signs of mental or physical degradation because of medication interactions. Not because one doctor prescribed interacting drugs, but because separate doctors prescribed interacting medications. The multi-specialist medical industry assumes that the patient is a medical expert, and can keep track of their medications AND know the interactions. All responsibility is in the hands of the patient. And guess what ? Most of us did NOT get medical training.
So a central clearinghouse system that red flags things isn't a bad idea. Most health insurance companies do it now anyway.. why ? Because they'd rather not pay for medication issues.
There's of course a darker reason... finding people who are 'doctor shopping' to enable their abuse of prescription drugs. The more centralized data is, the easier it is for a well meaning government to abuse that data for some sort of control. So...
do you REALLY want all your medications to become a public record (because we all know governments stink at privacy and security) ?
A final aside... some patients need medications that interact. My wife takes two medications that potentially interact. She's been taking them for years. But suddenly she 'cannot' because there 'is a risk'. Automating this refusal would deny patients who depend on these interactions for survival. Coding medical procedures is always a bad idea, because there has to be an exception process that involves actual human beings.
Such' 'spyware' is rife in the Corporate world, but it's called "Document retention" and "monitoring for legal cases". Corporate smart phones, computers, etc. are all equipped with methods to record everything we do. Just because some shyster could possibly want to use it as an axe to such money from our company.
You *CAN* get a job in industry writing this kind of code. Seriously. It's out there.
What you've done would cause any professional IT group to get out the hot tar, feathers, and rail. Or at least come into your office and ask you politely to remove the damn server from their facility. And never do this again. You must have missed all the security briefings, the issues with HIPPA, and whatnot when you were looking at systems. What you've done is to create a 'rogue system'.
Imagine one of your kids sets up a server in your house. You don't understand it, you don't know if it's happily sniffing network traffic to steal passwords so pizza can be ordered using your credit cards, serving up pr0n, or just running minecraft. Would you willy nilly allow the kids to open a port on your firewall without the ability to audit what they're doing ?
Of course not.
Personally I'm amazed that they only asked for an account on your little server. I would have gone over and watched while you removed it from the facility and put in in your car.
I used a Mentor Graphics Apollo workstation from 1982 for PCB design, software development, word processing, etc. It multi-tasked... compiling, reading errors (I mean *features*) and correcting the code in another window was awesome coming from a DEC environment. Windowing, mouse, etc. I never understood what all the hubbub was about... switched directly to a Mac after I left that company.
I'm sure some people will be offended, but gosh darn it.. any trained soldier will tell you that training to 'think like the enemy' is a good thing. It lets you anticipate him and kill him before he kills you. If the soldier's mom is offended, I'm sorry to hear about it, but it is distinctly possible that some of her son's squad may find their lives saved at a future date by playing simulations like this one.
I hope that someone takes her aside and explains that to her.
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the late Sir Arthur Clarke's quote... As civilizations search for more energy. the expectation is that someone will screw up. Remember the kerfluffle about the LHC creating black holes ? (Yes, I know, rogue physicist using crappy math pushed that idea, mostly because he was pissed at being kept out of the project)
Right. And these idiots used the name of a completely addictive beverage that, once hooked, condemns the drinker to a lifetime of consumerism ? I've heard of tongue in cheek, but jeez... why not just name it Liquid Heroin and be done with it ?
""...here's what makes this campaign great in my estimation - each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it's simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest - three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar.""
Having managed projects ranging from R&D, defense systems, construction, and software development.. the MMM is all about work teams. Most successful project managers learn this sort of thing from experience (read pain and failure). Everybody thinks they have some sort of 'new concept' that is the magic bullet to 'solve software development problems'.
Forgetting that the one common element is... people. No matter WHAT methodology you claim to follow, I guarantee at least half of your team will think it's bullshit, and begrudge the paperwork that is getting in their way of just getting the job done.. THEIR WAY.
The best thing a good manager does is remove restraints and barriers, and filter bullshit. And let the team gel and get their shit done.
Some years ago my home network was zapped with a lightning strike that came in via the coaxial cable. Modem, router, and two switches died to save my computers. In military designs, we used opto-isolators to shield sensitive circuits from attack.
Despite the hysteria, this is not a 'broad attack threat'. The attacker needs physical access to the network, and will probably only compromise part of the network due to the energies and damage modes involved. Unless he's Nikola Tesla and carrying his own lightning bolt. Then all bets are off.
I do recommend that you isolate your network from power threats with surge suppressors on your coax line or RJ-45 line from your ISP, and of course your power lines.
Absolutely agree that it's much ado about nothing. AND bad statistics ! CERN as an example is a lot of nonsense... it's a HUGE project with a HUGE population of PhD's, grad students, undergrads, managers, technicians, and everybody else. All working towards a common goal. And the science developed by those thousands of authors is an enormous collaboration, enabled by ... yeah, you guessed it, the World Wide Web. Which was INVENTED at CERN to enable... Collaboration.
WSJ, you look like a bunch of idiots. Stick to talking about stocks and rich people stuff. You suck at science.
Is there a possible benefit to getting a battery with fewer charge cycles in a swap ? I sort of saw this concept as a way to get a refurbished battery when yours is reaching end of life, or has a few dead cells.
At work we have a PC Board component inserter robot that runs off a PDP-8. Programmed with paper tape. Yes. Paper tape. OK, well, plastic punched tape. There is a short stack of 'spare' PDP-8 rack units sitting in the crib just waiting for a failure. But you know what ? Digital Equipment made some rugged machines.
And in my old job in the defense industry we used a surplus Nike-Ajax missile radar, that was run off a synchro computer. I designed a digital interface to run it off a Z-80 processor.
One industry that died with direct PC sales (Yes, you Mikey Dell) was the entire Value Added Reseller industry. There are a few still around, but the serried ranks of 'experts' went poof. This can be equated with the attempts to bypass the Auto Dealership model by Tesla.
I encourage this. The idea that consumers are too stupid to buy cars without expert assistance is as dumb as the idea that consumers needed help to buy complicated computers.
Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte (Systems, Applications, and Products).
www.sap.com
Basically it's one of the two the largest Enterprise Resource Planning software companies in the world. Oracle is the other one. And since most SAP systems are run inside a highly protected corporate network, the self-promoting hysteria from this article is so much bullcrap.
SAP can send and receive email. Your guys should know that. It's a sucky 1990's email system, but it works.
Disclaimer... I'm one of those 'SAP Guys' and have been doing it for a decade and a half.
Since anti satellite technology is quite mature and tested, anyone who thinks that such a system would not have the equivalent of a few dozen nuclear shotguns permanently parked near it is... clueless. Of course the effect of having to destroy that would effectively make Earth orbit a no-go zone for decades until someone started sending up sweeper robots.
Properly shielded equipment uses different methods to 'break the cage'. It's been many decades, but some of the heavily shielded designs I did in the 80's involved opto-isolators. Yes, that's right. Want to avoid radiating information ? Use light.
Keep in mind that the structure of the faraday cage depends on the frequency of the data being transmitted. It does not have to be unbreakable tin foil. Properly sized metal mesh will also do the job. Just ask anyone who tries to get a Wifi signal through an old wall with expanded metal lath and plaster.
Yep. Ditto. I still recall one young smartass demonstrating to our boss that he could display what was on the Boss's computer monitor from about 30 feet away with an antenna and a circuit he built with a breadboard.
A faraday cage IS the only way to protect against this with 100% reliability.
The implied assumption in the article and in the commentary indicates a deliberate misdirection or a simple understanding of the accounting principles involved in how a business accounts for a BAD DECISION. Every business has the ability to use this 'loophole'. But it's not a 'loophole'. It's a simple recognition that a capital purchase that turns out to not be a good deal should have the loss (cost of the purchase price minus the fair market value of the asset) amortized over the book life of the asset against the income produced by the asset.
Kids, this is basic accounting 301 (Intermediate management accounting). Most accountants will tell you that having good will on your books means you made a dumb decision at some point, and paid more than something was worth. The title SHOULD read:
"Ballmer pays twice what Basketball team is worse, can't write it off immediately, has to wait 15 years."
I keep an encrypted online database of my passwords. Sort of. I use a 'modular' password. One word is different, the other is always the same. So in my will I have the same word (and it's l33t combinations) written down, along with the address of the database. So anyone dealing after my death will know ALL my codes. My wife of 30+ years also keeps a copy of it, and knows the super secret codes.
I started this after being in a coma, and my wife having to deal with my PDA bleeping about meetings to her until the battery died. Which made her cry even more.
Good approach. Making a mortal enemy of the outgoing sysop, or simply his object of scorn, will screw you badly.
Other than to say "you're screwed", the big step is to also ramp up the professionalism and start building a better system governance policy and documentation process. The best way to explain that to management is to ask "Do you fail the Hit By a Bus Test? ".... If your key administrators are hit by a bus, will your systems go dark ?
I worked on a much more advanced and ultimately classified project for the Navy SEALS that produced a 'first shot kill' gun sighting system for the SEALs in ... 1993. The sight was designed to go on crew served weapons and sniper weapons. It included aim point calculation, full ballistics computing, sensors, range finder, thermal and optical sighting, low light level, yadda yadda yadda. At the time the sofware was required to be ADA (thanks, DOD).
Just because you put a shiny Linux on something doesn't make it all new and stuff.
Bingo. I can recall being in the research reactor at U Mo in Columbia in the early 1970's. People forget how accessible facilities were before 9/11 . Apparently we're so used to the Police State that we've created that it's pretty much taken for granted.
Which is a great pity. The less accessible cool research is for our children, the less interested our children will be in becoming cool researchers. Big Bang Theory and Mohawk Guy nonwithstanding.
A quite logical extension of such thinking. When it comes to liberty of thought, the road to Orwell's 1984 is paved with 'good ideas' gone wrong.
In the late 1970's I purchased a copy (paper) of "the Anarchist's Handbook". Why ? I was doing research for a story I was writing for a Creative Writing class in college. I already *knew* how to make explosives.. I was an Engineering student !
Criminalizing people for their knowledge would mean that pretty much every Engineer will end up in jail. Yeah... that will definitely not help a modern world.
Sung to the copyrighted tune of "Feed the Birds". Extra points for Julie Andrews class voices.....
(These lyrics are lovingly given away for free as a public service an are in the public domain by me, their author)
Early each day on the steps of the Courthouse
The little old lawyer comes
In his own special way to the people he calls
Come buy my bags full of briefs
Come sue the little birds
Show them your greed
And you be glad if you do
Their young ones are too fat
Their nests all need stripping
All it takes is a lawsuit from you---u
Sue the birds, a million a chirp
million, million, million a chirp
Sue the birds, that's what he cries
while overhead, bird guano fills the skies
All around the courthouse the judges and bailiffs
look down as he sells his wares
although you can't see it
you know they are frowning
each time someone shows his gre--ed
My wife works in Assisted Living. She's had many situations where residents have shown signs of mental or physical degradation because of medication interactions. Not because one doctor prescribed interacting drugs, but because separate doctors prescribed interacting medications. The multi-specialist medical industry assumes that the patient is a medical expert, and can keep track of their medications AND know the interactions. All responsibility is in the hands of the patient. And guess what ? Most of us did NOT get medical training.
So a central clearinghouse system that red flags things isn't a bad idea. Most health insurance companies do it now anyway.. why ? Because they'd rather not pay for medication issues.
There's of course a darker reason... finding people who are 'doctor shopping' to enable their abuse of prescription drugs. The more centralized data is, the easier it is for a well meaning government to abuse that data for some sort of control. So...
do you REALLY want all your medications to become a public record (because we all know governments stink at privacy and security) ?
A final aside... some patients need medications that interact. My wife takes two medications that potentially interact. She's been taking them for years. But suddenly she 'cannot' because there 'is a risk'. Automating this refusal would deny patients who depend on these interactions for survival. Coding medical procedures is always a bad idea, because there has to be an exception process that involves actual human beings.
Such' 'spyware' is rife in the Corporate world, but it's called "Document retention" and "monitoring for legal cases". Corporate smart phones, computers, etc. are all equipped with methods to record everything we do. Just because some shyster could possibly want to use it as an axe to such money from our company.
You *CAN* get a job in industry writing this kind of code. Seriously. It's out there.
What you've done would cause any professional IT group to get out the hot tar, feathers, and rail. Or at least come into your office and ask you politely to remove the damn server from their facility. And never do this again. You must have missed all the security briefings, the issues with HIPPA, and whatnot when you were looking at systems. What you've done is to create a 'rogue system'.
Imagine one of your kids sets up a server in your house. You don't understand it, you don't know if it's happily sniffing network traffic to steal passwords so pizza can be ordered using your credit cards, serving up pr0n, or just running minecraft. Would you willy nilly allow the kids to open a port on your firewall without the ability to audit what they're doing ?
Of course not.
Personally I'm amazed that they only asked for an account on your little server. I would have gone over and watched while you removed it from the facility and put in in your car.
I used a Mentor Graphics Apollo workstation from 1982 for PCB design, software development, word processing, etc. It multi-tasked... compiling, reading errors (I mean *features*) and correcting the code in another window was awesome coming from a DEC environment. Windowing, mouse, etc. I never understood what all the hubbub was about... switched directly to a Mac after I left that company.
I'm sure some people will be offended, but gosh darn it.. any trained soldier will tell you that training to 'think like the enemy' is a good thing. It lets you anticipate him and kill him before he kills you. If the soldier's mom is offended, I'm sorry to hear about it, but it is distinctly possible that some of her son's squad may find their lives saved at a future date by playing simulations like this one.
I hope that someone takes her aside and explains that to her.