Sendmail wants it's text file back. Just because it's a text configuration doesn't automatically mean you have all those advantages. Furthermore, IIS 5,6,and 7 all use an XML config file called the metabase which is quite easy to read and allows you to do all of the same tasks.
You're right though, it can be great, scripting has been easy for quite some time on Windows and naturally was always easy on Linux. Scripting is the only thing that keeps the sysadmin in me sane as I manage both Windows, Linux, and OS X. I rather hate OS X though as Apple seems to break things pretty regularly. Sometimes NFS shares will mount okay, sometimes they'll disappear randomly. Same with SMB connections. Annoys the hell out of me especially with the crappy defaults for SMB configuration. Linux and Windows play well together so at least those systems don't present me with issues regularly.
Over in VT there is also BigHeavyWorld which is similarly not evil. They are a non-profit label giving a good chunk of the money to the artist and donating the rest to charity after recouping actual costs of production. People volunteer from all over the state to help them out and their stuff sells, some of their bigger bands are doing just fine financially albeit not as fine as they would be if it was a larger label.
It's a great concept, I used to help them put on concerts back in the day. You can also download a lot of the music off their website. They don't want to pay for all the bandwidth otherwise they would host more. They would have no problems with finding the MP3s on a P2P site as the cd releases are advertising for their concerts which in my opinion is how it should be.
Except that there is 30 years of readily accessible prior art for this. Traveling data centers are not a new concept. Go to any large convention. A single Google search or MSN or whatever search engine of choice would reveal that it is obvious. I'd say the definition of obvious things at least should be information that is readily accessible. Unfortunately you have a point in that obvious is not defined specifically in patent law so perhaps that is something we need to address.
For a broader perspective anyone with reasonable knowledge of the industry would know that such things already exist and have existed for quite some time and is not a novel idea or implementation. Generally I've this logic used to defined something that is patentable. Of course that doesn't mean it necessarily has to be followed.
Except that you're not supposed to be allowed to patent obvious things. We buy road cases from Quantum Scientific which are shocked mounted and water proof. I have a 30TB SAN, 12 servers, routing and switching equipment, and battery backup power for about an hour in our road cases. That's on top of the 100 or so cameras we bring with us and all the phones we have specialized containers for shipping. Perhaps we should declare prior art? Except for the fact that the military does this all the time and so do AV guys traveling with concerts.
It is worthless if you have no way to quantify the number of prevented thefts. Reduce is a better word and is not misleading. Locking a car door will not prevent a theft from a determined criminal as they will just smash the window. The crime of opportunity will be smaller which is why the word reduce is more honest and straight forward. I will say it's not easy to quantify either phrasing. In both uses you only have the ends to justify your means which isn't enough information especially when you extend this discussion to include terrorism.
I don't believe you're associating the tea party with this topic given that it wasn't a boycott at all. It was the destruction of goods. The taxes were not overbearing for Americans at the time, the whole concept was that we were getting taxed without benefitting from it and without the ability to debate it. Taxation without representation became a polarizing concept throughout the colonies. I'll agree there are similarities but Americans didn't stop buying tea in the hope that the tax would get lifted. Further, that is a government entity applying the tax. Much like a government entity applying copyright.
As for the fur trade, the owner of the company I work for wears them so I don't think that was very successful at all. The whole north east never had a problem with it on a whole. It was never hard to find a bear rug, my roommate even has one. It is common in a number of places both in the south, and north east. I even hear its not uncommon in the north west.
Do you have a specific case where blacks boycotting worked to overturn an individual business practice? More often than not it was a stopgap measure while legislation was in progress.
I agree that noise needed to be made about all these issues but I question how successful boycotting is in general and especially for large organizations like the RIAA and the companies it represents. For smaller local businesses this can be very effective but I don't see anyone organizing enough to make an actual dent. In my own life I don't buy Sony and I won't purchase any music from RIAA sponsored labels. I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm making an impact though. I even speak about the evils with my friends and families but in the end, if the song they like is sponsored by an RIAA company then they will go out and buy it since that is the only source to get it.
Out of curiosity, is there an example in history where a corporation's behavior was changed using this sort of strategy? I don't know of any. I would love to be educated and my thoughts proven wrong but I don't see that ever working much like embargo's don't work either. Too much collateral damage.
I did notice that you didn't say it was silly but I know you're not comparing an in-depth discussion with a bumper sticker as far as raising awareness. A bumper sticker is ineffectual. It's the same problem with the elections in the U.S. Politicians can only speak in sound bites so they can't fully present their ideas.
On a forum such as this though the more people talk about it the more peripheral conversations happen like you and I discussing it. I could see not wanting to buy a diamond from Africa as it more than likely contributed to some atrocity at some point. Diamonds from Russia are probably the same way. Diamonds from Australia probably not so much. As long as it's no De Beers it's largely okay.
Of course Canadian diamonds probably don't have blood on them either. It's definitely a challenge to vote with your wallet and is largely ineffectual but that doesn't mean the principle should be abandoned.
You're making a very bad assumption that the poster doesn't already do those things you mentioned in addition to finding an alternative supplier for laptops. This person is also raising the issue in a public forum raising awareness and asking questions which is only considered a good thing. I don't think it's misplaced at all, I just think there's no choice. If you buy one laptop from Lenovo and it lasts you 7 more years that is less money to the Chinese government than 7 laptops from another manufacturer because it doesn't last as long.
Ultimately when dealing with an International entity you have very little choice individually but when you raise the issue in a public forum you get other people thinking, a million people making the same decision will make a noticeable difference. Will it effect the Chinese government's policies? Of course not but it's better than condoning it outright. If the whole world did it then maybe some officials would change their minds.
Some others have raised the issue attempting to turn the tables on Americans. If you don't agree with the government then of course exercise the only vote you have from far away. The wallet is a powerful force for change when organized and used responsibly.
Of course one need only look at the diamond trade to see that it is most definitely not an easy task to sway people from their actions by not purchasing their exports. So perhaps it is silly afterall.
Talk about a myopic view of what's happened over the last seven years. Given the Real ID Act, all the RICO laws, all the drug enforcement laws, and tack on all the post 9/11 legislation and you have yourself a bona fide police state. I am no longer protected from illegal searches and seizures, I can be stripped of my citizenship and shipped off to remote place with little to no hope of ever getting a lawyer, let alone a trial.
The fact of the matter is that Congress has forgotten what the constitution means and the Executive branch became two branches of government without any referendum to approve this change. The constitution applies to the government, it's irrelavent where I am, where you are, where anybody is, the U.S. government is bound by the constitution.
We have definitely lost significant freedoms, you notice them when you open a bank account, you'll notice them in hospitals and fingerprints are now required all over the place.
You can use all the racial slurs you like, people will hate you but you won't be thrown in jail because of it. It's the fact that the majority don't notice the loss of protections that scares me. The people that can't put all the pieces together because they are either too lazy or too absorbed with their own lives to realize what's going on around them. We are most definitely not safer now than we were and there are strong arguments out there that we are even worse off for a creative criminal. Do you really think a terrorist would target a plane again? They would target something new where we don't have high security because we don't have high security on it. The only thing the security is doing for airlines is bankrupting them because people hate to go to airports. Then of course the airlines try to cut back on costs by reducing services making the flights even more unpleasant and then the government has to bail them out because so much business relies on flight transportation.
An investor for the company I work for actually rented and flew his own plane because U.S. Air was so incompetent they overbooked his flight twice so he couldn't fly down here for a time sensitive meeting. Combine that with my boss wanting to go to the lake for the weekend so he was going to fly there, it was about a 45 minute flight. After three engine failures resulting in delays he hopped in one of his cars and just drove the two hours or less.
In short, the constitution including the Bill of Rights is being used as TP by the administration and congress and no one is willing to do anything about it. I'd like to say election time will correct the misgivings of the past but given that both democrats and republicans share the blame for the erosion of our liberties there is very little hope we will get any of it back anytime soon. Perhaps when the baby boomers are out of office the next generation will have the good sense to improve things. We'll see, awareness of the problems is where it all begins.
I sincerely hope more realize what's going on in the world around them. Religion has been driven out of the federal level, it is resurgent at the local level, that is perfectly legal so as long as I get to vote on it I
I asked myself the same question, if it's true I have a lot more respect for Janet Reno given her reaction and subsequent success arising all the way to Attorney General of the United States. Makes me feel better about the world with Thompson falling flat on his ass while someone else with a more stable mentality goes on to succeed.
Given everything else being said it wouldn't really surprise me if it was true though. Of course it's Wiki so you never really know. Thanks the stars for a good search engine and cross referencing. I'm not going to take the time to do it but it's still amusing to think about.
Step out of the Blackberry crap if synching a new phone is a PITA for you. I just enter username and password along with servername and all my stuff shows up over my phone without the need for a tether. ActiveSync is great. All my tasks, contacts, emails get transferred. My music and work files I keep on an SD card. My laptop has a card reader so it's mighty convenient.
You're point is well made though about removable batteries being a must along with a proper SDK. I still have reservations about a touchscreen keyboard. It screams of problems to me. So far it seems to be holding up, I haven't heard many complaints about it getting dirty and whatnot.
Yeah, we had a guy calling people in our office asking for voicemail passwords. He dialed through a company in New Jersey one day, California the next. Our system doesn't allow dialing out through the voicemail system so we weren't really vulnerable but we have a simple policy which is very easy to understand. It says no one will ever ask for any password in person, email, or over the phone. IT does not need your password for any task whatsoever so never give it out.
Time came with this guy calling and asking and surprisingly no one gave him their password. My faith was restored. Of course this is a reasonably small company. Make it simple and people will follow it though. They can even encrypt their stuff and I still won't need their password ever because I have the recovery keys. All the mechanisms are their so it's up to sysadmins to make it simple and easy for regular folks to understand. Afterall, the folks in accounting know more about taxes than I do because that is their job. I know a little about how our taxes are calculated because I've needed to, just like they've had to learn a little about security practices. I'd say it's as fair a system as any.
Good luck figuring that out over a VPN connection.
I can see both sides of this argument pretty easily. Perhaps you have multiple gateways for different reasons but are too dumb to subnet/VLAN. Of course with 802.1X authentication I'm not sure how that would work without DHCP given that an address is assigned dynamically and RADIUS accounting determines when and if they gain access and for how long among other features.
Theoretically it could be done without DHCP although I imagine the software clients would have to get modified to support that.
Also, some of us use DHCP on non-routed networks like internal security cameras, IP phones, and IPTV.
I submit to you that a RGU is a better option for the home than a complicated iSCSI PXE boot process where you have to construct a new image for every new machine.
Naturally Matrox has this one covered. RGU Link Fanless, no moving parts, you have all your USB and firewire and you're free to have a noisy PC in the basement with all the power you want. Much easier to setup and use.
I do agree though, in the work environment I barely get by with gigabit and 10gigabit isn't cost effective yet. I'm looking at upgrading the links between two of my switches but some of them don't even have the option yet.
Of course the thing I'm wondering is when fiber channel is going to catch up. 8gigabit throughput to the SAN is tight so you end up multi-linking and load balancing to get more throughput which is harder on the server so you end up adding more servers and distributing the load with a proper Linux load balancer. The SAN has plenty of more throughput available given that there are over 200 spindles so it's a shame the bottleneck is the network.
Is there some new exploit I haven't heard of that lets people break WPA2? If they're cracking AES encryption along with private certificates then I'm impressed. Honest question though given that I manage a wireless network which is of course on its own VLAN.
Actually I patch about once a month on production web servers that face the Internet. Unless there is an IIS patch or something critical. Only port 80 and 443 face the Internet since my servers are firewalled so I can get away with extending my patch window. My DNS Windows based servers are the same way. The RPC vulnerability recently meant jack to me because I don't manage the servers directly over the Internet. I have a point to point connection which is totally private so most things you don't need to patch right away.
My Linux servers have the same patch schedule. It ensures that I'm looking at the server at least once a month. I recently deployed MOM however, so I don't need to monitor my servers physically anymore. I had to remote into a server all of once today.
Also, 99% of Windows updates actually don't require reboots. They merely require certain services to be restarted. Knowing which services allows you to do hot-patching. Of course I'm moving into a VM environment now so physical reboots will be pretty much unheard of. My patch window can then shrink significantly setting up a pilot set of servers with SMS. If the patch goes well the rest get patched and life goes on.
I was talking specifically talking about the Opteron vs Xeon, not Athlon vs Core2. The database benches I had done clearly put the Opteron in the winning spot but Intel has had time to improve. I'm not saying either are bad choices at this point. There is clearly healthy competition now. My experience with 64bit Xeon performance was the initial EMT64 offerings. They are not impressive by any means. I was not aware there has been significant improvement in this area.
Of course that is we research every year come acquisition time. Things change, I like AMD personally but there are times when I buy Xeon because it best suited for specific tasks such as some of my video streaming and encoding processes.
They are web servers for a site seeing millions of users. Over the course of the week they become less and less responsive. I schedule a reboot late at night preemptively to keep them available. The Opteron web servers stay up until I reboot them willingly because of security patching. Both sets are running Windows and running 32bit. I don't have any 64bit capable Xeons yet, I will soon though. We shall see. The servers in question are Dell PowerEdge 1750s running 2x2.8ghz Xeons with 4gigs of ram and have mirrored OS drives.
All of my Opteron based servers are rock solid with multiple chipset vendors. The days when that was a problem for AMD are long gone. There is a reason I have to reboot my Xeon servers once a week and my Opteron servers stay up until my maintenance window. They are both configured identically but the Xeons just aren't as stable. I haven't been able to play with the newer Xeons, only the crappy P4 based ones. I've got some new servers coming though so I'll get an update on the stability issue.
Through the history of the Opteron though stability has never been an issue in my experience. The Athlon had problems as you were describing. There were plenty of Intel and AMD desktop chipsets that were horrible during that time. More of a chipset maker problem than a CPU maker. In both cases Intel and AMD had their own chipset out which did work. Although Intel motherboards declined sharply in quality around that time too. I remember having a bunch of xeons that would reboot and if you were lucky everything would come up okay. Firmware updates came out which gradually improved the issue. I do believe it took three firmware updates to get stability to what you would expect for a 24/7 server. Wasn't a problem with the CPU though.
Except that there is a very small performance difference in the 32bit world and a non-existent performance difference in the 64bit world. The Opteron actually outperforms quite commonly in the 64bit world much like the Athlons do against Core 2 Duo on the desktop side. Intel has an edge on 32bit optimization right now which is why the Core 2 Duo looks so good right now.
Add 4 and 8 sockets and you've got to be joking considering Intel's shared bus. They cores are chocked for memory throughput at that point while the Opterons just perform better and better as they scale. In a 2 socket system they compete very well. In a 4 socket system the Opteron is by far the superior choice both with power consumption and performance especially with 64bit database,email, and web servers.
So you're saying that fixing the problem we've run into at least twice now is Monday morning quarterbacking? This isn't a hindsight issue. Key people had very specific information including timing of a terrorist threat in the process of happening. There you go, you have your minority report.
I'm curious if you're just trolling or what your actual point is. Are you saying an email to the local Infragard rep for New York would not have prevented 9/11? To me that would have escalated very quickly if communication lines were open. This was a credible threat that went unreported before it was too late. This was all in the report. Just like Pearl Harbor, all the pieces were there to prevent it but they couldn't talk. In the case of Pearl Harbor technology could have sped up the process. There was no excuse for 9/11 as communication is instant now even if you're in the middle of the ocean. Here is the Infragard Site.
I'm sorry you think there is no way to tell if something bad is coming. I guess you think the CIA and NSA don't do anything. I almost didn't respond because of your reference to telling the future because your stance is completely absurd. There is also a mountain of evidence which we can see in hindsight was available. The problem was the road blocks in place. Additional spying is not going to solve this problem. I don't care how accurate CIA intelligence is if we can't act on the information. That's the whole point of it!
A very well reasoned argument. I was starting to think I was the only one with any understanding of the constitution. I was starting to think that my understanding was incorrect.
I'm continually saddened by the remarks of others stating that the constitution doesn't forbid something so the government can do it. I'm not sure at what point everyone forgot the 9th and 10th amendments.
They are not only wiretapping international calls. A judge finally struck down national security letters so that's at least a partial win but they shouldn't have been doing it to begin with.
Furthermore, calls belong to the two people communicating. Just like email it is considered private communication and subject to all privacy laws unless explicitly stated before the communication began that one end was being monitored. In some states both ends have to be aware of the tapping. In any case, one party has to be aware that there is monitoring going on. The only exception to this is with a warrant which the FISA court provides a very easy mechanism to obtain.
An email to the local FBI offices would have prevented 9/11. There were people from several government agencies with very vital information. This was all in the 9/11 report so I'm not sure what point you were trying to make. If an analyst with the NSA would have emailed someone at the FBI then the tragedy could have be averted. It's even easy to get an email address because of Infragard which was up and running even before 9/11. Of course now most regular folk aren't allowed anymore. It's a shame, I was a student member of Infragard until 9/11 happened, then they froze me out. I worked with our local FBI rep to see if we couldn't get the rules mended but there was so much paranoia it wasn't going to happen. At least he was up front and honest about it with me.
The sole problem was the road blocks in place preventing the FBI, NSA, CIA, and several other government agencies from sharing key information. I recognize the need for separation but exceptions need to be in place for national emergencies.
I should have been more clear, no one is stopping him from further clearly unconstitutional activity. No one is putting him up for impeachment, probably because they are even more afraid of Cheney. Bush is not being challenged. What you are I say on here in no way threatens his authority to continue.
I recognize that I've not lost all of my rights but I've sure lost a whole hell of a lot of them. I can now be stripped of my citizenship and held indefinitely in prison. That's a pretty big issue that no one is even trying to overturn. At least no one with any authority to do so.
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Sendmail wants it's text file back. Just because it's a text configuration doesn't automatically mean you have all those advantages. Furthermore, IIS 5,6,and 7 all use an XML config file called the metabase which is quite easy to read and allows you to do all of the same tasks.
You're right though, it can be great, scripting has been easy for quite some time on Windows and naturally was always easy on Linux. Scripting is the only thing that keeps the sysadmin in me sane as I manage both Windows, Linux, and OS X. I rather hate OS X though as Apple seems to break things pretty regularly. Sometimes NFS shares will mount okay, sometimes they'll disappear randomly. Same with SMB connections. Annoys the hell out of me especially with the crappy defaults for SMB configuration. Linux and Windows play well together so at least those systems don't present me with issues regularly.
Over in VT there is also BigHeavyWorld which is similarly not evil. They are a non-profit label giving a good chunk of the money to the artist and donating the rest to charity after recouping actual costs of production. People volunteer from all over the state to help them out and their stuff sells, some of their bigger bands are doing just fine financially albeit not as fine as they would be if it was a larger label.
It's a great concept, I used to help them put on concerts back in the day. You can also download a lot of the music off their website. They don't want to pay for all the bandwidth otherwise they would host more. They would have no problems with finding the MP3s on a P2P site as the cd releases are advertising for their concerts which in my opinion is how it should be.
Except that there is 30 years of readily accessible prior art for this. Traveling data centers are not a new concept. Go to any large convention. A single Google search or MSN or whatever search engine of choice would reveal that it is obvious. I'd say the definition of obvious things at least should be information that is readily accessible. Unfortunately you have a point in that obvious is not defined specifically in patent law so perhaps that is something we need to address.
For a broader perspective anyone with reasonable knowledge of the industry would know that such things already exist and have existed for quite some time and is not a novel idea or implementation. Generally I've this logic used to defined something that is patentable. Of course that doesn't mean it necessarily has to be followed.
Except that you're not supposed to be allowed to patent obvious things. We buy road cases from Quantum Scientific which are shocked mounted and water proof. I have a 30TB SAN, 12 servers, routing and switching equipment, and battery backup power for about an hour in our road cases. That's on top of the 100 or so cameras we bring with us and all the phones we have specialized containers for shipping. Perhaps we should declare prior art? Except for the fact that the military does this all the time and so do AV guys traveling with concerts.
It is worthless if you have no way to quantify the number of prevented thefts. Reduce is a better word and is not misleading. Locking a car door will not prevent a theft from a determined criminal as they will just smash the window. The crime of opportunity will be smaller which is why the word reduce is more honest and straight forward. I will say it's not easy to quantify either phrasing. In both uses you only have the ends to justify your means which isn't enough information especially when you extend this discussion to include terrorism.
I don't believe you're associating the tea party with this topic given that it wasn't a boycott at all. It was the destruction of goods. The taxes were not overbearing for Americans at the time, the whole concept was that we were getting taxed without benefitting from it and without the ability to debate it. Taxation without representation became a polarizing concept throughout the colonies. I'll agree there are similarities but Americans didn't stop buying tea in the hope that the tax would get lifted. Further, that is a government entity applying the tax. Much like a government entity applying copyright.
As for the fur trade, the owner of the company I work for wears them so I don't think that was very successful at all. The whole north east never had a problem with it on a whole. It was never hard to find a bear rug, my roommate even has one. It is common in a number of places both in the south, and north east. I even hear its not uncommon in the north west.
Do you have a specific case where blacks boycotting worked to overturn an individual business practice? More often than not it was a stopgap measure while legislation was in progress.
I agree that noise needed to be made about all these issues but I question how successful boycotting is in general and especially for large organizations like the RIAA and the companies it represents. For smaller local businesses this can be very effective but I don't see anyone organizing enough to make an actual dent. In my own life I don't buy Sony and I won't purchase any music from RIAA sponsored labels. I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm making an impact though. I even speak about the evils with my friends and families but in the end, if the song they like is sponsored by an RIAA company then they will go out and buy it since that is the only source to get it.
Out of curiosity, is there an example in history where a corporation's behavior was changed using this sort of strategy? I don't know of any. I would love to be educated and my thoughts proven wrong but I don't see that ever working much like embargo's don't work either. Too much collateral damage.
I did notice that you didn't say it was silly but I know you're not comparing an in-depth discussion with a bumper sticker as far as raising awareness. A bumper sticker is ineffectual. It's the same problem with the elections in the U.S. Politicians can only speak in sound bites so they can't fully present their ideas.
On a forum such as this though the more people talk about it the more peripheral conversations happen like you and I discussing it. I could see not wanting to buy a diamond from Africa as it more than likely contributed to some atrocity at some point. Diamonds from Russia are probably the same way. Diamonds from Australia probably not so much. As long as it's no De Beers it's largely okay.
Of course Canadian diamonds probably don't have blood on them either. It's definitely a challenge to vote with your wallet and is largely ineffectual but that doesn't mean the principle should be abandoned.
You're making a very bad assumption that the poster doesn't already do those things you mentioned in addition to finding an alternative supplier for laptops. This person is also raising the issue in a public forum raising awareness and asking questions which is only considered a good thing. I don't think it's misplaced at all, I just think there's no choice. If you buy one laptop from Lenovo and it lasts you 7 more years that is less money to the Chinese government than 7 laptops from another manufacturer because it doesn't last as long.
Ultimately when dealing with an International entity you have very little choice individually but when you raise the issue in a public forum you get other people thinking, a million people making the same decision will make a noticeable difference. Will it effect the Chinese government's policies? Of course not but it's better than condoning it outright. If the whole world did it then maybe some officials would change their minds.
Some others have raised the issue attempting to turn the tables on Americans. If you don't agree with the government then of course exercise the only vote you have from far away. The wallet is a powerful force for change when organized and used responsibly.
Of course one need only look at the diamond trade to see that it is most definitely not an easy task to sway people from their actions by not purchasing their exports. So perhaps it is silly afterall.
Talk about a myopic view of what's happened over the last seven years. Given the Real ID Act, all the RICO laws, all the drug enforcement laws, and tack on all the post 9/11 legislation and you have yourself a bona fide police state. I am no longer protected from illegal searches and seizures, I can be stripped of my citizenship and shipped off to remote place with little to no hope of ever getting a lawyer, let alone a trial.
The fact of the matter is that Congress has forgotten what the constitution means and the Executive branch became two branches of government without any referendum to approve this change. The constitution applies to the government, it's irrelavent where I am, where you are, where anybody is, the U.S. government is bound by the constitution.
Of course over the last seven years what remained of the constitution and more specifically the bill of rights is gone. Last I checked the only right that remained was that we were still free from the burden of having to house soldiers. Habeas Corpus has been suspended indefinitely, the rights of the press have been trampled to high hell on numerous occasions. Link one, link two, and link three, are all just a couple of examples of hundreds of instances of censorship. Combined that with National Security letters forcing some U.S. citizens to give up their customers and thus their livelihood without any compensation or recourse.
We have definitely lost significant freedoms, you notice them when you open a bank account, you'll notice them in hospitals and fingerprints are now required all over the place.
You can use all the racial slurs you like, people will hate you but you won't be thrown in jail because of it. It's the fact that the majority don't notice the loss of protections that scares me. The people that can't put all the pieces together because they are either too lazy or too absorbed with their own lives to realize what's going on around them. We are most definitely not safer now than we were and there are strong arguments out there that we are even worse off for a creative criminal. Do you really think a terrorist would target a plane again? They would target something new where we don't have high security because we don't have high security on it. The only thing the security is doing for airlines is bankrupting them because people hate to go to airports. Then of course the airlines try to cut back on costs by reducing services making the flights even more unpleasant and then the government has to bail them out because so much business relies on flight transportation.
An investor for the company I work for actually rented and flew his own plane because U.S. Air was so incompetent they overbooked his flight twice so he couldn't fly down here for a time sensitive meeting. Combine that with my boss wanting to go to the lake for the weekend so he was going to fly there, it was about a 45 minute flight. After three engine failures resulting in delays he hopped in one of his cars and just drove the two hours or less.
In short, the constitution including the Bill of Rights is being used as TP by the administration and congress and no one is willing to do anything about it. I'd like to say election time will correct the misgivings of the past but given that both democrats and republicans share the blame for the erosion of our liberties there is very little hope we will get any of it back anytime soon. Perhaps when the baby boomers are out of office the next generation will have the good sense to improve things. We'll see, awareness of the problems is where it all begins.
I sincerely hope more realize what's going on in the world around them. Religion has been driven out of the federal level, it is resurgent at the local level, that is perfectly legal so as long as I get to vote on it I
I asked myself the same question, if it's true I have a lot more respect for Janet Reno given her reaction and subsequent success arising all the way to Attorney General of the United States. Makes me feel better about the world with Thompson falling flat on his ass while someone else with a more stable mentality goes on to succeed.
Given everything else being said it wouldn't really surprise me if it was true though. Of course it's Wiki so you never really know. Thanks the stars for a good search engine and cross referencing. I'm not going to take the time to do it but it's still amusing to think about.
Step out of the Blackberry crap if synching a new phone is a PITA for you. I just enter username and password along with servername and all my stuff shows up over my phone without the need for a tether. ActiveSync is great. All my tasks, contacts, emails get transferred. My music and work files I keep on an SD card. My laptop has a card reader so it's mighty convenient.
You're point is well made though about removable batteries being a must along with a proper SDK. I still have reservations about a touchscreen keyboard. It screams of problems to me. So far it seems to be holding up, I haven't heard many complaints about it getting dirty and whatnot.
Yeah, we had a guy calling people in our office asking for voicemail passwords. He dialed through a company in New Jersey one day, California the next. Our system doesn't allow dialing out through the voicemail system so we weren't really vulnerable but we have a simple policy which is very easy to understand. It says no one will ever ask for any password in person, email, or over the phone. IT does not need your password for any task whatsoever so never give it out.
Time came with this guy calling and asking and surprisingly no one gave him their password. My faith was restored. Of course this is a reasonably small company. Make it simple and people will follow it though. They can even encrypt their stuff and I still won't need their password ever because I have the recovery keys. All the mechanisms are their so it's up to sysadmins to make it simple and easy for regular folks to understand. Afterall, the folks in accounting know more about taxes than I do because that is their job. I know a little about how our taxes are calculated because I've needed to, just like they've had to learn a little about security practices. I'd say it's as fair a system as any.
Good luck figuring that out over a VPN connection.
I can see both sides of this argument pretty easily. Perhaps you have multiple gateways for different reasons but are too dumb to subnet/VLAN. Of course with 802.1X authentication I'm not sure how that would work without DHCP given that an address is assigned dynamically and RADIUS accounting determines when and if they gain access and for how long among other features.
Theoretically it could be done without DHCP although I imagine the software clients would have to get modified to support that.
Also, some of us use DHCP on non-routed networks like internal security cameras, IP phones, and IPTV.
I submit to you that a RGU is a better option for the home than a complicated iSCSI PXE boot process where you have to construct a new image for every new machine.
Naturally Matrox has this one covered. RGU Link Fanless, no moving parts, you have all your USB and firewire and you're free to have a noisy PC in the basement with all the power you want. Much easier to setup and use.
I do agree though, in the work environment I barely get by with gigabit and 10gigabit isn't cost effective yet. I'm looking at upgrading the links between two of my switches but some of them don't even have the option yet.
Of course the thing I'm wondering is when fiber channel is going to catch up. 8gigabit throughput to the SAN is tight so you end up multi-linking and load balancing to get more throughput which is harder on the server so you end up adding more servers and distributing the load with a proper Linux load balancer. The SAN has plenty of more throughput available given that there are over 200 spindles so it's a shame the bottleneck is the network.
Is there some new exploit I haven't heard of that lets people break WPA2? If they're cracking AES encryption along with private certificates then I'm impressed. Honest question though given that I manage a wireless network which is of course on its own VLAN.
Actually I patch about once a month on production web servers that face the Internet. Unless there is an IIS patch or something critical. Only port 80 and 443 face the Internet since my servers are firewalled so I can get away with extending my patch window. My DNS Windows based servers are the same way. The RPC vulnerability recently meant jack to me because I don't manage the servers directly over the Internet. I have a point to point connection which is totally private so most things you don't need to patch right away.
My Linux servers have the same patch schedule. It ensures that I'm looking at the server at least once a month. I recently deployed MOM however, so I don't need to monitor my servers physically anymore. I had to remote into a server all of once today.
Also, 99% of Windows updates actually don't require reboots. They merely require certain services to be restarted. Knowing which services allows you to do hot-patching. Of course I'm moving into a VM environment now so physical reboots will be pretty much unheard of. My patch window can then shrink significantly setting up a pilot set of servers with SMS. If the patch goes well the rest get patched and life goes on.
Gotta love the modern world we live in.
I was talking specifically talking about the Opteron vs Xeon, not Athlon vs Core2. The database benches I had done clearly put the Opteron in the winning spot but Intel has had time to improve. I'm not saying either are bad choices at this point. There is clearly healthy competition now. My experience with 64bit Xeon performance was the initial EMT64 offerings. They are not impressive by any means. I was not aware there has been significant improvement in this area.
Of course that is we research every year come acquisition time. Things change, I like AMD personally but there are times when I buy Xeon because it best suited for specific tasks such as some of my video streaming and encoding processes.
They are web servers for a site seeing millions of users. Over the course of the week they become less and less responsive. I schedule a reboot late at night preemptively to keep them available. The Opteron web servers stay up until I reboot them willingly because of security patching. Both sets are running Windows and running 32bit. I don't have any 64bit capable Xeons yet, I will soon though. We shall see. The servers in question are Dell PowerEdge 1750s running 2x2.8ghz Xeons with 4gigs of ram and have mirrored OS drives.
All of my Opteron based servers are rock solid with multiple chipset vendors. The days when that was a problem for AMD are long gone. There is a reason I have to reboot my Xeon servers once a week and my Opteron servers stay up until my maintenance window. They are both configured identically but the Xeons just aren't as stable. I haven't been able to play with the newer Xeons, only the crappy P4 based ones. I've got some new servers coming though so I'll get an update on the stability issue.
Through the history of the Opteron though stability has never been an issue in my experience. The Athlon had problems as you were describing. There were plenty of Intel and AMD desktop chipsets that were horrible during that time. More of a chipset maker problem than a CPU maker. In both cases Intel and AMD had their own chipset out which did work. Although Intel motherboards declined sharply in quality around that time too. I remember having a bunch of xeons that would reboot and if you were lucky everything would come up okay. Firmware updates came out which gradually improved the issue. I do believe it took three firmware updates to get stability to what you would expect for a 24/7 server. Wasn't a problem with the CPU though.
Except that there is a very small performance difference in the 32bit world and a non-existent performance difference in the 64bit world. The Opteron actually outperforms quite commonly in the 64bit world much like the Athlons do against Core 2 Duo on the desktop side. Intel has an edge on 32bit optimization right now which is why the Core 2 Duo looks so good right now.
Add 4 and 8 sockets and you've got to be joking considering Intel's shared bus. They cores are chocked for memory throughput at that point while the Opterons just perform better and better as they scale. In a 2 socket system they compete very well. In a 4 socket system the Opteron is by far the superior choice both with power consumption and performance especially with 64bit database,email, and web servers.
So you're saying that fixing the problem we've run into at least twice now is Monday morning quarterbacking? This isn't a hindsight issue. Key people had very specific information including timing of a terrorist threat in the process of happening. There you go, you have your minority report.
I'm curious if you're just trolling or what your actual point is. Are you saying an email to the local Infragard rep for New York would not have prevented 9/11? To me that would have escalated very quickly if communication lines were open. This was a credible threat that went unreported before it was too late. This was all in the report. Just like Pearl Harbor, all the pieces were there to prevent it but they couldn't talk. In the case of Pearl Harbor technology could have sped up the process. There was no excuse for 9/11 as communication is instant now even if you're in the middle of the ocean. Here is the Infragard Site.
I'm sorry you think there is no way to tell if something bad is coming. I guess you think the CIA and NSA don't do anything. I almost didn't respond because of your reference to telling the future because your stance is completely absurd. There is also a mountain of evidence which we can see in hindsight was available. The problem was the road blocks in place. Additional spying is not going to solve this problem. I don't care how accurate CIA intelligence is if we can't act on the information. That's the whole point of it!
A very well reasoned argument. I was starting to think I was the only one with any understanding of the constitution. I was starting to think that my understanding was incorrect.
I'm continually saddened by the remarks of others stating that the constitution doesn't forbid something so the government can do it. I'm not sure at what point everyone forgot the 9th and 10th amendments.
They are not only wiretapping international calls. A judge finally struck down national security letters so that's at least a partial win but they shouldn't have been doing it to begin with.
Furthermore, calls belong to the two people communicating. Just like email it is considered private communication and subject to all privacy laws unless explicitly stated before the communication began that one end was being monitored. In some states both ends have to be aware of the tapping. In any case, one party has to be aware that there is monitoring going on. The only exception to this is with a warrant which the FISA court provides a very easy mechanism to obtain.
An email to the local FBI offices would have prevented 9/11. There were people from several government agencies with very vital information. This was all in the 9/11 report so I'm not sure what point you were trying to make. If an analyst with the NSA would have emailed someone at the FBI then the tragedy could have be averted. It's even easy to get an email address because of Infragard which was up and running even before 9/11. Of course now most regular folk aren't allowed anymore. It's a shame, I was a student member of Infragard until 9/11 happened, then they froze me out. I worked with our local FBI rep to see if we couldn't get the rules mended but there was so much paranoia it wasn't going to happen. At least he was up front and honest about it with me.
The sole problem was the road blocks in place preventing the FBI, NSA, CIA, and several other government agencies from sharing key information. I recognize the need for separation but exceptions need to be in place for national emergencies.
I should have been more clear, no one is stopping him from further clearly unconstitutional activity. No one is putting him up for impeachment, probably because they are even more afraid of Cheney. Bush is not being challenged. What you are I say on here in no way threatens his authority to continue.
I recognize that I've not lost all of my rights but I've sure lost a whole hell of a lot of them. I can now be stripped of my citizenship and held indefinitely in prison. That's a pretty big issue that no one is even trying to overturn. At least no one with any authority to do so.