Of course this is all kind of moot considering you can install a loopback adapter on Windows and all services will attach to that interface instead of the public interface. That way internal services can still communicate as they always have without compromising the presence. If IIS isn't listening on the interface then it doesn't matter if its exposed. Windows without a firewall can still be secured. I will grant you that it is more difficult than it should be.
Beyond that the crappy documentation for most Linux services, Tomcat, I'm looking at you, is also something that counts against security in the other realm. I think on the whole a typical linux distro is definitely more secure out of the box, but the other end of the spectrum is usability. Security is the art of breaking services, if my nicely secured linux box can't talk to a file-share on another server by default I'm gonna be mighty annoyed. Naturally these days this is less of a problem but its still there. There has been enough progress that I imagine a lot of people could switch now but the reputation of the past will hinder adoption. The abundance of choice in the OSS world is both great and a challenge to its adoption. People complain about six editions of Vista but thats nothing to the number of specialty and general use distros out there. There is little commonality between them as well given the different package management systems in use.
I did enjoy your scenario though and respect that you understand that a firewall is indeed necessary as an added layer of protection and of course, not as the only layer of protection.
I think you miss how the whole deal works and why the parent makes such a bold claim. If you're willing to pay people what they are worth finding good people is not hard to do. That is the problem, they don't want to spend the money to make money so they take whatever shortcut they can despite the problems it brings. Especially in IT its very important not to have a lot of turnover as implementations are usually company specific. I've never seen two companies deploy their infrastructures in the same way. That means even talented people will take at least a little time to become familiar enough to properly take over a network. Turnover is a huge problem. The higher ups at my company used to just burn out every IT guy they came across until they met me, then they decide it was best to give me more money, open the wallet to get some quality equipment and now things are running smooth in a high redundant environment administered by myself.
I learn more and more about the business the longer I'm here and the more I learn the more I can do to help. I've more than made up my salary and equipment costs in other cost savings. That's the way at least in my opinion IT should work in a company. I got lucky of course as it was a combination of timing as well as skill.
Regardless, I've hired help that was inexperienced, we pay them competitively and teach them the environment and now I don't have to worry about help-desk work. It's simple, keep them around, problems will go away assuming you didn't hire an idiot which has happened to me in the past as well.
Their should definitely be more protections for H1B workers though, they should not have to live in fear anymore than an American should. Perhaps a complaint system could be created that would be government controller ensuring that the companies they work for would not know. If enough complaints are filed an investigation could then be triggered. This is much the same way sexual harassment works for ADP. Employees of member companies can file a complaint to them and they will start a 3rd party independent investigation. It prevents a lot of abuses of power.
Why? At least in Snow Crash everything turned out alright, sure a lot of people died but that's the wave of the future, population control don't you know.
With the formation of Second Life and all the political events these days it is looking crazy similar. We always jokingly considered William Gibson a profit, it looks like between Neal Stephenson and Gibson that we now have two profits who's vision is coming to life slowly but surely. Of course then I'm not so sure if its a bad thing. Hell, did you hear about the pizza delivery guy in Florida who got in a sword fight with gang that was trying to steal his pizza? Is that not crazy?
Sounds to me like you're forgetting the world is a big place, every year one part of the world has a worse season than another part. Weather is crazy, when Katrina hit during a bad year the rest of the world saw less storms. It's been happening for as long as we've been keeping records.
Despite what you seem to think the relationship between heat and the intensity of hurricanes is very well researched and documented. Just because its hot in one place one year doesn't mean that same place is going to be the hot spot the next year. Ocean currents and trade winds take quite a while to round trip the earth.
So yes, global warming contributed to the weather that we are currently enjoying, except for the fact that Florida is in drought and experiencing some mighty bad forest fires along with Georgia. Yep, no affect at all. Oh yeah, all those extremely powerful tornadoes, also not affected by increased temperatures. Climate change is violent, it always has been in the past, I have no idea why people seem to think it would be easy to deal with now.
Do we need to outlaw oil and stop all emissions? Of course not, but we need to do something about the problem at hand, the problem we can see now, projections of the future don't mean jack as we know now that the climate is changing and we're in a position to do something about it.
Ummmm... increased CO2 content is also a major reason why coral reefs are dying which will continue to rise with temperatures as we pump out more and more.
Coastal regions have not adapted well, one need only look at Katrina for a glimpse of the future. Don't get me started on the infrastructure in Florida and the rising cost of insurance driving people out of the state. At the coast rises there will be harm done not just to North American coast lines but also in Africa and Asia where you have millions of people just a few feet from sea level. Look at much devastation the tsunami caused. A 2 degree increase in temperate over the next say 80 years would be very likely to increase sea level by a few feet.
I'll give you one thing though, the bears can interbreed, they just don't because they are geographically seperated much like a Chinese person would have been with an African person 4000 years ago. Yes they can interbreed but will they? Not for another 3000 years when the geography was less of a problem. I don't think bears will enjoy the same fate.
I'm also curious where the hell you heard about the Antarctic gaining ice when you can look at satellite images over the last 30 years and clearly see that it is currently losing ice.
I'll agree there is lots of hysteria but it seems asinine to continue polluting and carrying on as we have when we know it is causing harm. The future matters not, we know we are causing harm now; we should take measures to prevent further harm regardless of what we think the future may hold. Time-lines are irrelevant, if it doesn't affect us soon it will effect our children or further down the line. Eventually it will and that is not in question, we need to do something about it now that we have some truly affective means to do so. Continued research is always a good thing and it looks like land values in Germany are going to rise in the future so maybe it's time to go invest in some land over there.
That was all in the past and technological hurdle has longed passed. At least with our Televantage setups we don't have any issues with NAT and having phones operate effectively. It seems to be more of an issue with phone support than a problem with the protocol itself. From my experience SIP is very flexible much like TCP/IP that means its not always the best choice but it wins because it is the most supported. H.323 is dying and rightfully so, it had a lot of problems behind NATs as it required a multitude of control ports that couldn't be effectively remapped. Of course now modern firewalls support SIP transformations so the issue has been solved and is no longer a problem for modern deployments. All of our trunking is SIP until we hit our PRIs and we've not had one issue is now a year of operation, not even during setup.
I had thought Skype became popular because it allowed people to call other people for free and it was very simple to use. Of course I've never used it as I've never needed to. SIP has come a long way over the last few years and especially in 2006. With Exchange 2007 supporting it things are only going to go more in the direction of SIP. Of course Exchange 2003 supports SIP too so that says something as well. I don't think NAT traversal is near as big an issue these days as it was even four years ago.
huh? That answer makes no sense, that's like saying you can only have one ftp client at a time connecting through a public IP address. I routinely have not 2 but 10 SIP phones communicating over the Internet back into my home office without a problem. You have your control port and then you have your dynamic port which is opened to accomodate the data transferring back and forth.
I'm not sure which SIP phones you're talking about that don't support NAT traversal. You might have had a point with H.323 but thankfully that is dying.
As far as the number of lines, thats limited by the number of ports that can be opened. The only advantage to IPv6 in this sense is that I could service more lines over the Internet by associating additional external address with my servers, but if I have that many remote users they are probably at a temporary site which would then have a PBX on-site they could connect to.
I think the real answer is that nothing is really driving IPv6 deployment since most companies don't want their internal computers to have external addresses. Securing it would not be trivial although a lot of methods that are employed for securing servers with external addressing could be deployed for workstations but that is a few orders of magnitude harder to setup.
That is a valid criticism as Windows is only now just barely coming into its own in regards to least privilege accounts. With that said, I setup a common computer for all my roommates to use. They all have their own logins with just basic user access. The machine has gone for three years without any instruction from me and not one virus, not even any spyware beyond cookies of course. My roommates are definitely the type to just click blindly which is definitely a problem. I'd say my experience is a bit of luck combined with reduced privilege accounts. When something needs to install I just right-click and runas my install user.
On my work computer its the same way, it takes a little more effort here but its worth it the day I tear open a suspicious email. Of course I do this in a VM so something funky happens and the network starts flooding I just shut off the VM and then all is well as the VM reverts on reboot. The tools are out there to play safely, more people just need to learn to use them.
I would do the same thing if my management computer were Linux based. VMs make great playgrounds. EMC/VMWare making Virtual Server was very wise in my mind as I am now looking at deploying some virtual machines for production use based on the benefits I've seen in that product. That means licensing some of the even cooler stuff they offer. Good for them.
I wouldn't call that a consensus either considering last I checked, applying a security template for Windows was exactly as difficult as running a script on most any Linux distro. I'd say they are pretty well on par these days.
Hell, with SMS I can run the scripts on Linux and apply templates to thousands of machines at once so automating it on a massive scale is even easy.
The real debate comes from the user perspective, who's better at protecting the user from themselves without upsetting the user? It's a debate as I believe both sides have pros and cons. With most distros I've used it will protect me from harming the system but at the price of not being able to do what I want to do unless I want to read a forum. With Windows it will give me a pop-up asking if I'm sure and then I go ahead and its done so the end result of both is that I do what I want to do but which is a better method for the home user?
The real issue at hand is that the home user invariably has difficult requirements from the corporate user. Linux distros and Windows try to cater to both and as a result have some pretty prevalent failings in one over the other. Of course in my mind the operating systems are irrelevant and web security is far more important.
It is worth noting that their are Linux distros which do cater to one over the other and they are on the right path in my mind. It is just that the major distros try to cover both.
One of my professors in college referred to security as the art of breaking services. He's as correct today as he was then. It would be great to open up the systems and allow anyone to do whatever they want, they're productivity would rise. Unfortunately the world doesn't work that way and we're forced to break stuff to the point where users can only do what they are explicitly authorized to do. This means no taking initiative and probably no learning of the system since I know at least in my organization the only people that know the full system are my coworker and myself. We're the only ones that know what the network is fully capable of which means we have to participate in a lot more meetings to make sure that people do utilize the automated approach instead of manually processing thousands of records.
From my experience with OS X we'd have a lot of the same problems as we do if it switched roles with Windows except we would lose are advanced management and monitoring capabilities. I know OS X likes to transmit everything unencrypted, it drives me crazy especially given that with each release Samba support just seems to get worse.
Of course Solaris and Linux have all the advanced management and monitoring capabilities as that's where they all originated. Tripwire is the savior of all. I'm not sure how the world would be if the two were dominant in the mid-level and home markets. Home users invariably will drop enough security to do what they want without thinking. This is the mentality that Microsoft has been dealing with for years. Of course now MS tries to lock their product down and the likes of Symantec and Mcafee are suing them because it will end their businesses. I don't envy any of their positions, I like being in the middle.
There are American soldiers in Columbia fighting the war on drugs as we speak, they have been there for decades. Communism is still around, as I said, there's China which turned communist when exactly? Attacking the symptoms in one location did not end the problem. Slavery did not die when America was reunited after the civil war and in fact still exists to this day. The problem did not go away as you seem to say it did.
As for conflict in the middle east, I said they've been fighting for a thousand years, not thousands, that is a perfectly accurate statement. The people of the region have been fighting non-stop over resources and religious sites. It's been the same issues since before the crusades even. Europe and America all fought wars yes, but each war was different and had different root causes. You also seem to forget that most of the wars you are mentioning did not take place in America or Europe, we were involved in those wars in remote regions. Europe there is no question has seen more conflict than America but they at least are pulling together and have ended long standing conflicts. Tell me, how many wars have their been in western Europe over the last 60 years? How many in the middle east? How many in East Asia? Hell, even South America is more peaceful now than it has been in the past. Everywhere on the planet except for the middle east you're seeing less war, not more. There is room for debate when it comes to Africa but it has a lot of the same problems as the middle east.
As for fascism, it's not even close to dead, it's rearing it's ugly head more and more these days almost everywhere. It never went away, one need only have visited Brazil in the 50's to see how dead fascism was after WW2. Just because the problem moved somewhere else doesn't mean it was a victory, I would call that a miserable failure in fact.
If my reaction to network security was the same way I would just close a port that had a service with some vulnerability forcing an attacker to try another avenue forcing me to close additional ports until I'm not longer offering the public any kind of services. Patching a problem will make it less visible but it will not fix it. Much like taking a cholesterol pill will not fix the problem of heart disease. It will only slow it down until hopefully you can address the real issue of poor diet and exercise.
Last thing I'll add while you were ranting about the consolidation of Europe before it was even Europe, what was happening in the middle east at the time? How about China? How about everywhere else on the planet? Oh yeah, the exact same thing! The only difference being that Europe consolidated and created a cooperative body, much like China and Japan, and the middle east has made little if any progress. It's sad when a societies last great contribution to the world at large was Arabic numbering.
By historically always being in conflict I mean the region has never known peace. Europe and America has known peace for the majority of their existence. There have been exceptions and your point is valid that every region has had its conflicts but each conflict has been different as opposed to the middle east where its been pretty much the same conflict for a thousand years.
We didn't win the war on communism, as you might recall China turned communist, fascism didn't end with Hitler's death. When you fight a concept or ideology you simply can't win. Look at the war on drugs. It's a battle you can't win because the activities have underlying causes. If you attack the symptom you won't solve the underlying problem and thus it will always resurface.
You can't win a war against Islamic radicals either as you only make more by killing one. The only way to really encourage change in the region is to isolate and starve the countries into change. This would effect a lot of innocent people but ultimately you have to push those innocent people to take control of their governments and affect positive change. Our presence only makes it worse. We've attempted to push a group of people that we deem are innocent but we are most certainly not qualified to make that judgment.
The idea behind the Real ID would make your life easier as you would only ever have to provide one form of identification. Because of that though, if someone steals your identity which won't be any harder then you have nothing else with which to cross reference your identity and prove you are who you say you are. That sounds pretty scary to me. I'd rather go through the hassle of two forms of identification than take the risk of losing everything because some company was careless with data that I used to own cough AT&T cough. There was a time we owned our personal information in any database. That time has passed so they are free to sell or share that information with anyone. I suspect as this policy becomes more and more widespread the identity theft problem will get worse and worse.
I seem to recall a time where Total Information Awareness was on the legislative agenda. It seems that the Federal government feels it needs to know everything about everyone. It's amazing how they give it a new patriotic name and suddenly everything is there. The federal government needs to be doing less, not more, for the vast vast majority of my transactions my drivers license is enough, I don't see any reason to make it easier to open a bank account. It only takes my DL to get on a plane as well. What good will replacing one form of ID with another accomplish? Do people expect bars to change all their card readers to support Real ID? If it had be introduced 10 years ago it might have had a chance. As is, it's going to be just like DST updates. All these billions spend on updating and absolutely nothing to show for it.
I would say something that causes the United States to waste hundreds of billions of dollars is a good end goal for OBL. Tell me, how much do you think when all is said and done the Real ID will cost to implement? In the end we are no safer and it will not prevent identity theft. It will only make it harder to prove that you didn't do it when someone steals your identity and you're left picking up the pieces.
Personally, I doubt OBL is that deep of a thinker so I'm more inclined to think he was happy with the deaths of 9/11 and that was his whole plan. I think the whole take out our economy thing was just echoed by some extremists after the media trumped it up trying to come up with more reasons to keep the American populace scared of him and other terrorists.
Ultimately there is no winning a war on a concept, there will always be terror wherever someone feels they have no other options or feel that the other options won't suffice. We're wasting tons and tons of resources that we could use elsewhere to really do some good in the world. Instead we're making war and destabilizing further a region which has historically always been in conflict.
At any rate, I think the cons of the Real ID far outweigh any potential benefit from it, especially with the identity theft problem and banks not caring to try and solve it.
huh? Last I checked Vista still had SFC like XP did. If a built-in component mysteriously gets somehow corrupted then you can always run SFC and replace the corrupt components. Of course I'm not sure how that happens anyways since the system protections in place should prevent such things. I've never seen such an issue on XP although I suppose its quite possible with a few choice registry tweaks. Of course then fixing it is just a matter of restoring a previous registry. Fortunately Windows backs up the registry every-time you restart your computer so odds are you've got a fairly recent copy to restore.
I'd hazard saying that this is not an issue with Vista nor XP and that SFC is more of a malware removal tool.
The days of reinstalling Windows to fix an issue are long gone with functions like system restore and other self-healing technologies that have been employed for quite some time now.
Of course this all falls under the assumption the user is a firefox user. IE is still the weakest link.
On a long enough time-line everything is cyclic, the radioactive particle wasn't always radioactive. It is on the downward end of it's cycle. You are correct about the basic assumption that time exists. I am making that assumption based on perception so it could be wildly off. Definitely an interesting idea a universe without time. Course we're all in a machine somewhere just making electricity for the man.
This is all of course based on the assumption that time is linear. What is to say that the universe ever began? There was obviously some event to create the universe as we see it now but that doesn't mean the contents of it didn't come from another universe or even other dimensions. Just because we don't recognize that matter is lost doesn't mean it isn't. By the same token matter may be gained from another dimension or universe in a giant cycle. Sounds more feasible to me.
Everything so far is cyclic if you look at a long enough time-line so too it makes sense that the universe would follow this same basic principle.
While your statements are factually accurate the statement the terrorists have won doesn't necessarily mean the terrorists have accomplished their goals. The fact of the matter is there are thousands of groups all with different stated goals.
Many people say the terrorists have won because the American people have clearly lost a lot of values they hold dear. In the age of modern technology why do we have to torture? Why can we suddenly hold people indefinitely without charging them with anything? We've lost a lot of our civil liberties just in the last 6 years. We lost a few people then as well but the landslide has begun and a number of people are recognizing that the path we're on leads no where we want to go.
So while they may not have accomplished their goals we have abandoned ours so I'd say that's grounds to say they won. The destruction of our freedom may not gain them anything but the people as a whole sure lose a lot. I don't think there is any positive way to spin it.
The whole situation reminds me of the bear attack on the Simpsons. The rock that keeps bears away. That's exactly the argument I keep hearing from people defending the erosion of our freedoms. There hasn't been a terrorist attack in 6 years, so we must be doing something right.
I'll add one more thing, terrorism in general has pretty severely altered our foreign policy towards a good number of countries alienating us from a number of our allies in the process.
I have no idea if our downward spiral is celebrated but I couldn't care less. How they feel about their current standings with us is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.
You will not find anyone that says global warming isn't happening. It is measurable and the basic science around it is accepted as fact. There is not even anyone arguing that humans are contributing to it. The only debate is to the level that humans are contributing and what we can do to stem the issue.
It is not all correlative. CO2 presence in the atmosphere does in fact trap heat. This has been tested repeated and is easily reproducible.
The thing that confuses me still is that on 9/11 when all the planes were stopped the world wide temperature changed. That alone tells you humans have an impact. So the question is why everyone seems to think going green would be bad for an economy? To me, a whole new industry of solar producers and the likes sounds like a good thing. Especially considering that oil companies receive billions in subsidies for this research. The same companies that made all the money with oil wouldn't have to die off, they have been given the tools to progress to the next level which is far more sustainable and ultimately more cost effective. Producing silicon for solar panels sure sounds easier than all the refineries and oil platforms and pipelines in existence today.
A big threat is decentralization of the power grid. Less energy will be lost in transmission and individual companies will make less money. I could convert my engine to run on hydrogen right now and with all the equipment to make my own fuel for about $1500 and that includes engine parts. Of course that doesn't include labor but I could do a lot of it myself. If I did that then I need only water and electricity to make my fuel on my own. If I do it on my own then a corporation doesn't make money off me. It's exceedingly easy to down and about a liter of water is all I need. This is part of the economic problem that keeps people fighting actions against global warming. The same problems exist in our food supply as money is keeping resources scarce which need no longer be scarce. In much the same way as the music industry. It used to cost real money to print and distribute media. Now the cost for distribution is negligible and a whole industry is fighting it. It's not surprising by any means as many people have foreseen this situation. The question is then, what do we do about it?
That's good info, I will have to try that on Monday. As I said, the whole thing is very confusing since it works just fine on Knoppix but now that would make at least a bit of sense. Defaults like that are another reason Apple isn't ready though. Sure it just works, but who cares if it just works slowly?
Anywho, thanks for the tip, a configuration issue I can deal with.
From Windows to a Mac isn't slow, from a Mac to Windows is slow. I know the setup is fugly but I've seen this on at least 4 OS X boxes now and not just on my network. I can't explain it since the Knoppix box does it so fast, not quite as fast as Windows to Windows but I expect a little crossover penalty. The gain I get from being able to read any type of drive on linux more than outweighs the time it takes extra to copy.
I've seen hundreds of message boards with problems with samba on OS X through every revision. First it was session signing, now its just slow. I'm sure there is a reason but when the default on a knoppix install is so fast I expect the default on OS X to be just as fast. Guess I just expect more from Apple given that they control the whole deal, from my perspective there is zero reason for faulty software and defaults from Apple. Of course that's not the reality given iTunes and all the remote vulnerabilities its enjoyed.
The samba part really confuses me. I'm trying to figure out how Apple screwed up samba support so bad. I had an OS X box copying 80gigs of photos to a Windows file server. It was going to take 30 hours. After 20 minutes watching it consistently go that speed I said screw that, pulled the hard drive out, popped it into a Knoppix box and copied all the photos using Linux and it took a little over 2 hours. That's insane! Both gigabit nics into a gigabit switch. Plus there is a weird subnetting issue I run into every now and again where it won't connect to a samba box if its on a different logical subnet. Of course sometimes it works so it's even more baffling.
I think Linux and Windows are definitely better options in the corporate world. Of course our corporate Intranet is fully accessible in Firefox because I didn't want to make my Mac users have to run Windows in addition to OS X which they are more comfortable with. It's all just crazy! There is no way Apple is ready for the big time. Perhaps in a few more years they'll get a clue but I doubt it, no one wants a single supplier of goods, it's dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket.
I was fortunate as I came from the northern route on the 40. No issues there except for damned toll roads in NY. How I hate toll roads. The majority of the trip was fun except for Oklahoma where there was a toll every 5 feet and NY where we had to pay once.
I've often considered getting a satphone, the service is cheap its just the phones are expensive.
That's funny, when I went to the Grand Canyon my sister's verizon cell phone didn't work while my Sprint phone did. You're right though, reception is spotty on the 17. I drove cross country and the 17 was the only place I ever lost reception.
The thing I still can fathom is why AZ doesn't use more solar power than it does with more 300 days of sun a year this is one of the best places on earth to try it out for real.
It sure is too bad you don't know anything about the case involved as it contradicts pretty much everything you just said. There were specific emails from 2005 back when litigation began that Intel was supposed to hold and they neglected to do so. At the time the emails were not deleted, they were deleted after the court ordered them to hold it. They screwed up, they admitted to it. Not necessarily evil on the Intel front. I've seen cases where email gets lost. In any case, AMD is hardly trolling as Intel has a long history and was even convicted of such practices in Japan back in 2005.
With that said, I work for company that had some ongoing litigation and as a result it became very clear that you are not to make negative comments in email. This goes for complaints about coworkers. In short, anything you wouldn't want to get out don't email. In addition to this we hold on to email indefinitely. Compared to the video and photo storage we have email is trivial even with the gigs we receive in a day. It's just good business to always be professional.
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Of course this is all kind of moot considering you can install a loopback adapter on Windows and all services will attach to that interface instead of the public interface. That way internal services can still communicate as they always have without compromising the presence. If IIS isn't listening on the interface then it doesn't matter if its exposed. Windows without a firewall can still be secured. I will grant you that it is more difficult than it should be.
Beyond that the crappy documentation for most Linux services, Tomcat, I'm looking at you, is also something that counts against security in the other realm. I think on the whole a typical linux distro is definitely more secure out of the box, but the other end of the spectrum is usability. Security is the art of breaking services, if my nicely secured linux box can't talk to a file-share on another server by default I'm gonna be mighty annoyed. Naturally these days this is less of a problem but its still there. There has been enough progress that I imagine a lot of people could switch now but the reputation of the past will hinder adoption. The abundance of choice in the OSS world is both great and a challenge to its adoption. People complain about six editions of Vista but thats nothing to the number of specialty and general use distros out there. There is little commonality between them as well given the different package management systems in use.
I did enjoy your scenario though and respect that you understand that a firewall is indeed necessary as an added layer of protection and of course, not as the only layer of protection.
I think you miss how the whole deal works and why the parent makes such a bold claim. If you're willing to pay people what they are worth finding good people is not hard to do. That is the problem, they don't want to spend the money to make money so they take whatever shortcut they can despite the problems it brings. Especially in IT its very important not to have a lot of turnover as implementations are usually company specific. I've never seen two companies deploy their infrastructures in the same way. That means even talented people will take at least a little time to become familiar enough to properly take over a network. Turnover is a huge problem. The higher ups at my company used to just burn out every IT guy they came across until they met me, then they decide it was best to give me more money, open the wallet to get some quality equipment and now things are running smooth in a high redundant environment administered by myself.
I learn more and more about the business the longer I'm here and the more I learn the more I can do to help. I've more than made up my salary and equipment costs in other cost savings. That's the way at least in my opinion IT should work in a company. I got lucky of course as it was a combination of timing as well as skill.
Regardless, I've hired help that was inexperienced, we pay them competitively and teach them the environment and now I don't have to worry about help-desk work. It's simple, keep them around, problems will go away assuming you didn't hire an idiot which has happened to me in the past as well.
Their should definitely be more protections for H1B workers though, they should not have to live in fear anymore than an American should. Perhaps a complaint system could be created that would be government controller ensuring that the companies they work for would not know. If enough complaints are filed an investigation could then be triggered. This is much the same way sexual harassment works for ADP. Employees of member companies can file a complaint to them and they will start a 3rd party independent investigation. It prevents a lot of abuses of power.
Why? At least in Snow Crash everything turned out alright, sure a lot of people died but that's the wave of the future, population control don't you know.
With the formation of Second Life and all the political events these days it is looking crazy similar. We always jokingly considered William Gibson a profit, it looks like between Neal Stephenson and Gibson that we now have two profits who's vision is coming to life slowly but surely. Of course then I'm not so sure if its a bad thing. Hell, did you hear about the pizza delivery guy in Florida who got in a sword fight with gang that was trying to steal his pizza? Is that not crazy?
It was a dead hurricane season in 2006? Typhoons in Asia
Sounds to me like you're forgetting the world is a big place, every year one part of the world has a worse season than another part. Weather is crazy, when Katrina hit during a bad year the rest of the world saw less storms. It's been happening for as long as we've been keeping records.
Despite what you seem to think the relationship between heat and the intensity of hurricanes is very well researched and documented. Just because its hot in one place one year doesn't mean that same place is going to be the hot spot the next year. Ocean currents and trade winds take quite a while to round trip the earth.
So yes, global warming contributed to the weather that we are currently enjoying, except for the fact that Florida is in drought and experiencing some mighty bad forest fires along with Georgia. Yep, no affect at all. Oh yeah, all those extremely powerful tornadoes, also not affected by increased temperatures. Climate change is violent, it always has been in the past, I have no idea why people seem to think it would be easy to deal with now.
Do we need to outlaw oil and stop all emissions? Of course not, but we need to do something about the problem at hand, the problem we can see now, projections of the future don't mean jack as we know now that the climate is changing and we're in a position to do something about it.
Ummmm... increased CO2 content is also a major reason why coral reefs are dying which will continue to rise with temperatures as we pump out more and more.
Coastal regions have not adapted well, one need only look at Katrina for a glimpse of the future. Don't get me started on the infrastructure in Florida and the rising cost of insurance driving people out of the state. At the coast rises there will be harm done not just to North American coast lines but also in Africa and Asia where you have millions of people just a few feet from sea level. Look at much devastation the tsunami caused. A 2 degree increase in temperate over the next say 80 years would be very likely to increase sea level by a few feet.
I'll give you one thing though, the bears can interbreed, they just don't because they are geographically seperated much like a Chinese person would have been with an African person 4000 years ago. Yes they can interbreed but will they? Not for another 3000 years when the geography was less of a problem. I don't think bears will enjoy the same fate.
I'm also curious where the hell you heard about the Antarctic gaining ice when you can look at satellite images over the last 30 years and clearly see that it is currently losing ice.
I'll agree there is lots of hysteria but it seems asinine to continue polluting and carrying on as we have when we know it is causing harm. The future matters not, we know we are causing harm now; we should take measures to prevent further harm regardless of what we think the future may hold. Time-lines are irrelevant, if it doesn't affect us soon it will effect our children or further down the line. Eventually it will and that is not in question, we need to do something about it now that we have some truly affective means to do so. Continued research is always a good thing and it looks like land values in Germany are going to rise in the future so maybe it's time to go invest in some land over there.
That was all in the past and technological hurdle has longed passed. At least with our Televantage setups we don't have any issues with NAT and having phones operate effectively. It seems to be more of an issue with phone support than a problem with the protocol itself. From my experience SIP is very flexible much like TCP/IP that means its not always the best choice but it wins because it is the most supported. H.323 is dying and rightfully so, it had a lot of problems behind NATs as it required a multitude of control ports that couldn't be effectively remapped. Of course now modern firewalls support SIP transformations so the issue has been solved and is no longer a problem for modern deployments. All of our trunking is SIP until we hit our PRIs and we've not had one issue is now a year of operation, not even during setup.
I had thought Skype became popular because it allowed people to call other people for free and it was very simple to use. Of course I've never used it as I've never needed to. SIP has come a long way over the last few years and especially in 2006. With Exchange 2007 supporting it things are only going to go more in the direction of SIP. Of course Exchange 2003 supports SIP too so that says something as well. I don't think NAT traversal is near as big an issue these days as it was even four years ago.
huh? That answer makes no sense, that's like saying you can only have one ftp client at a time connecting through a public IP address. I routinely have not 2 but 10 SIP phones communicating over the Internet back into my home office without a problem. You have your control port and then you have your dynamic port which is opened to accomodate the data transferring back and forth.
I'm not sure which SIP phones you're talking about that don't support NAT traversal. You might have had a point with H.323 but thankfully that is dying.
As far as the number of lines, thats limited by the number of ports that can be opened. The only advantage to IPv6 in this sense is that I could service more lines over the Internet by associating additional external address with my servers, but if I have that many remote users they are probably at a temporary site which would then have a PBX on-site they could connect to.
I think the real answer is that nothing is really driving IPv6 deployment since most companies don't want their internal computers to have external addresses. Securing it would not be trivial although a lot of methods that are employed for securing servers with external addressing could be deployed for workstations but that is a few orders of magnitude harder to setup.
That is a valid criticism as Windows is only now just barely coming into its own in regards to least privilege accounts. With that said, I setup a common computer for all my roommates to use. They all have their own logins with just basic user access. The machine has gone for three years without any instruction from me and not one virus, not even any spyware beyond cookies of course. My roommates are definitely the type to just click blindly which is definitely a problem. I'd say my experience is a bit of luck combined with reduced privilege accounts. When something needs to install I just right-click and runas my install user.
On my work computer its the same way, it takes a little more effort here but its worth it the day I tear open a suspicious email. Of course I do this in a VM so something funky happens and the network starts flooding I just shut off the VM and then all is well as the VM reverts on reboot. The tools are out there to play safely, more people just need to learn to use them.
I would do the same thing if my management computer were Linux based. VMs make great playgrounds. EMC/VMWare making Virtual Server was very wise in my mind as I am now looking at deploying some virtual machines for production use based on the benefits I've seen in that product. That means licensing some of the even cooler stuff they offer. Good for them.
I wouldn't call that a consensus either considering last I checked, applying a security template for Windows was exactly as difficult as running a script on most any Linux distro. I'd say they are pretty well on par these days.
Hell, with SMS I can run the scripts on Linux and apply templates to thousands of machines at once so automating it on a massive scale is even easy.
The real debate comes from the user perspective, who's better at protecting the user from themselves without upsetting the user? It's a debate as I believe both sides have pros and cons. With most distros I've used it will protect me from harming the system but at the price of not being able to do what I want to do unless I want to read a forum. With Windows it will give me a pop-up asking if I'm sure and then I go ahead and its done so the end result of both is that I do what I want to do but which is a better method for the home user?
The real issue at hand is that the home user invariably has difficult requirements from the corporate user. Linux distros and Windows try to cater to both and as a result have some pretty prevalent failings in one over the other. Of course in my mind the operating systems are irrelevant and web security is far more important.
It is worth noting that their are Linux distros which do cater to one over the other and they are on the right path in my mind. It is just that the major distros try to cover both.
One of my professors in college referred to security as the art of breaking services. He's as correct today as he was then. It would be great to open up the systems and allow anyone to do whatever they want, they're productivity would rise. Unfortunately the world doesn't work that way and we're forced to break stuff to the point where users can only do what they are explicitly authorized to do. This means no taking initiative and probably no learning of the system since I know at least in my organization the only people that know the full system are my coworker and myself. We're the only ones that know what the network is fully capable of which means we have to participate in a lot more meetings to make sure that people do utilize the automated approach instead of manually processing thousands of records.
From my experience with OS X we'd have a lot of the same problems as we do if it switched roles with Windows except we would lose are advanced management and monitoring capabilities. I know OS X likes to transmit everything unencrypted, it drives me crazy especially given that with each release Samba support just seems to get worse.
Of course Solaris and Linux have all the advanced management and monitoring capabilities as that's where they all originated. Tripwire is the savior of all. I'm not sure how the world would be if the two were dominant in the mid-level and home markets. Home users invariably will drop enough security to do what they want without thinking. This is the mentality that Microsoft has been dealing with for years. Of course now MS tries to lock their product down and the likes of Symantec and Mcafee are suing them because it will end their businesses. I don't envy any of their positions, I like being in the middle.
There are American soldiers in Columbia fighting the war on drugs as we speak, they have been there for decades. Communism is still around, as I said, there's China which turned communist when exactly? Attacking the symptoms in one location did not end the problem. Slavery did not die when America was reunited after the civil war and in fact still exists to this day. The problem did not go away as you seem to say it did.
As for conflict in the middle east, I said they've been fighting for a thousand years, not thousands, that is a perfectly accurate statement. The people of the region have been fighting non-stop over resources and religious sites. It's been the same issues since before the crusades even. Europe and America all fought wars yes, but each war was different and had different root causes. You also seem to forget that most of the wars you are mentioning did not take place in America or Europe, we were involved in those wars in remote regions. Europe there is no question has seen more conflict than America but they at least are pulling together and have ended long standing conflicts. Tell me, how many wars have their been in western Europe over the last 60 years? How many in the middle east? How many in East Asia? Hell, even South America is more peaceful now than it has been in the past. Everywhere on the planet except for the middle east you're seeing less war, not more. There is room for debate when it comes to Africa but it has a lot of the same problems as the middle east.
As for fascism, it's not even close to dead, it's rearing it's ugly head more and more these days almost everywhere. It never went away, one need only have visited Brazil in the 50's to see how dead fascism was after WW2. Just because the problem moved somewhere else doesn't mean it was a victory, I would call that a miserable failure in fact.
If my reaction to network security was the same way I would just close a port that had a service with some vulnerability forcing an attacker to try another avenue forcing me to close additional ports until I'm not longer offering the public any kind of services. Patching a problem will make it less visible but it will not fix it. Much like taking a cholesterol pill will not fix the problem of heart disease. It will only slow it down until hopefully you can address the real issue of poor diet and exercise.
Last thing I'll add while you were ranting about the consolidation of Europe before it was even Europe, what was happening in the middle east at the time? How about China? How about everywhere else on the planet? Oh yeah, the exact same thing! The only difference being that Europe consolidated and created a cooperative body, much like China and Japan, and the middle east has made little if any progress. It's sad when a societies last great contribution to the world at large was Arabic numbering.
By historically always being in conflict I mean the region has never known peace. Europe and America has known peace for the majority of their existence. There have been exceptions and your point is valid that every region has had its conflicts but each conflict has been different as opposed to the middle east where its been pretty much the same conflict for a thousand years.
We didn't win the war on communism, as you might recall China turned communist, fascism didn't end with Hitler's death. When you fight a concept or ideology you simply can't win. Look at the war on drugs. It's a battle you can't win because the activities have underlying causes. If you attack the symptom you won't solve the underlying problem and thus it will always resurface.
You can't win a war against Islamic radicals either as you only make more by killing one. The only way to really encourage change in the region is to isolate and starve the countries into change. This would effect a lot of innocent people but ultimately you have to push those innocent people to take control of their governments and affect positive change. Our presence only makes it worse. We've attempted to push a group of people that we deem are innocent but we are most certainly not qualified to make that judgment.
The idea behind the Real ID would make your life easier as you would only ever have to provide one form of identification. Because of that though, if someone steals your identity which won't be any harder then you have nothing else with which to cross reference your identity and prove you are who you say you are. That sounds pretty scary to me. I'd rather go through the hassle of two forms of identification than take the risk of losing everything because some company was careless with data that I used to own cough AT&T cough. There was a time we owned our personal information in any database. That time has passed so they are free to sell or share that information with anyone. I suspect as this policy becomes more and more widespread the identity theft problem will get worse and worse.
I seem to recall a time where Total Information Awareness was on the legislative agenda. It seems that the Federal government feels it needs to know everything about everyone. It's amazing how they give it a new patriotic name and suddenly everything is there. The federal government needs to be doing less, not more, for the vast vast majority of my transactions my drivers license is enough, I don't see any reason to make it easier to open a bank account. It only takes my DL to get on a plane as well. What good will replacing one form of ID with another accomplish? Do people expect bars to change all their card readers to support Real ID? If it had be introduced 10 years ago it might have had a chance. As is, it's going to be just like DST updates. All these billions spend on updating and absolutely nothing to show for it.
I would say something that causes the United States to waste hundreds of billions of dollars is a good end goal for OBL. Tell me, how much do you think when all is said and done the Real ID will cost to implement? In the end we are no safer and it will not prevent identity theft. It will only make it harder to prove that you didn't do it when someone steals your identity and you're left picking up the pieces.
Personally, I doubt OBL is that deep of a thinker so I'm more inclined to think he was happy with the deaths of 9/11 and that was his whole plan. I think the whole take out our economy thing was just echoed by some extremists after the media trumped it up trying to come up with more reasons to keep the American populace scared of him and other terrorists.
Ultimately there is no winning a war on a concept, there will always be terror wherever someone feels they have no other options or feel that the other options won't suffice. We're wasting tons and tons of resources that we could use elsewhere to really do some good in the world. Instead we're making war and destabilizing further a region which has historically always been in conflict.
At any rate, I think the cons of the Real ID far outweigh any potential benefit from it, especially with the identity theft problem and banks not caring to try and solve it.
huh? Last I checked Vista still had SFC like XP did. If a built-in component mysteriously gets somehow corrupted then you can always run SFC and replace the corrupt components. Of course I'm not sure how that happens anyways since the system protections in place should prevent such things. I've never seen such an issue on XP although I suppose its quite possible with a few choice registry tweaks. Of course then fixing it is just a matter of restoring a previous registry. Fortunately Windows backs up the registry every-time you restart your computer so odds are you've got a fairly recent copy to restore.
I'd hazard saying that this is not an issue with Vista nor XP and that SFC is more of a malware removal tool.
The days of reinstalling Windows to fix an issue are long gone with functions like system restore and other self-healing technologies that have been employed for quite some time now.
Of course this all falls under the assumption the user is a firefox user. IE is still the weakest link.
On a long enough time-line everything is cyclic, the radioactive particle wasn't always radioactive. It is on the downward end of it's cycle. You are correct about the basic assumption that time exists. I am making that assumption based on perception so it could be wildly off. Definitely an interesting idea a universe without time. Course we're all in a machine somewhere just making electricity for the man.
This is all of course based on the assumption that time is linear. What is to say that the universe ever began? There was obviously some event to create the universe as we see it now but that doesn't mean the contents of it didn't come from another universe or even other dimensions. Just because we don't recognize that matter is lost doesn't mean it isn't. By the same token matter may be gained from another dimension or universe in a giant cycle. Sounds more feasible to me.
Everything so far is cyclic if you look at a long enough time-line so too it makes sense that the universe would follow this same basic principle.
Hey, Stallone is an artist. Sample Artwork
While your statements are factually accurate the statement the terrorists have won doesn't necessarily mean the terrorists have accomplished their goals. The fact of the matter is there are thousands of groups all with different stated goals.
Many people say the terrorists have won because the American people have clearly lost a lot of values they hold dear. In the age of modern technology why do we have to torture? Why can we suddenly hold people indefinitely without charging them with anything? We've lost a lot of our civil liberties just in the last 6 years. We lost a few people then as well but the landslide has begun and a number of people are recognizing that the path we're on leads no where we want to go.
So while they may not have accomplished their goals we have abandoned ours so I'd say that's grounds to say they won. The destruction of our freedom may not gain them anything but the people as a whole sure lose a lot. I don't think there is any positive way to spin it.
The whole situation reminds me of the bear attack on the Simpsons. The rock that keeps bears away. That's exactly the argument I keep hearing from people defending the erosion of our freedoms. There hasn't been a terrorist attack in 6 years, so we must be doing something right.
I'll add one more thing, terrorism in general has pretty severely altered our foreign policy towards a good number of countries alienating us from a number of our allies in the process.
I have no idea if our downward spiral is celebrated but I couldn't care less. How they feel about their current standings with us is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.
You will not find anyone that says global warming isn't happening. It is measurable and the basic science around it is accepted as fact. There is not even anyone arguing that humans are contributing to it. The only debate is to the level that humans are contributing and what we can do to stem the issue.
It is not all correlative. CO2 presence in the atmosphere does in fact trap heat. This has been tested repeated and is easily reproducible.
The thing that confuses me still is that on 9/11 when all the planes were stopped the world wide temperature changed. That alone tells you humans have an impact. So the question is why everyone seems to think going green would be bad for an economy? To me, a whole new industry of solar producers and the likes sounds like a good thing. Especially considering that oil companies receive billions in subsidies for this research. The same companies that made all the money with oil wouldn't have to die off, they have been given the tools to progress to the next level which is far more sustainable and ultimately more cost effective. Producing silicon for solar panels sure sounds easier than all the refineries and oil platforms and pipelines in existence today.
A big threat is decentralization of the power grid. Less energy will be lost in transmission and individual companies will make less money. I could convert my engine to run on hydrogen right now and with all the equipment to make my own fuel for about $1500 and that includes engine parts. Of course that doesn't include labor but I could do a lot of it myself. If I did that then I need only water and electricity to make my fuel on my own. If I do it on my own then a corporation doesn't make money off me. It's exceedingly easy to down and about a liter of water is all I need. This is part of the economic problem that keeps people fighting actions against global warming. The same problems exist in our food supply as money is keeping resources scarce which need no longer be scarce. In much the same way as the music industry. It used to cost real money to print and distribute media. Now the cost for distribution is negligible and a whole industry is fighting it. It's not surprising by any means as many people have foreseen this situation. The question is then, what do we do about it?
That's good info, I will have to try that on Monday. As I said, the whole thing is very confusing since it works just fine on Knoppix but now that would make at least a bit of sense. Defaults like that are another reason Apple isn't ready though. Sure it just works, but who cares if it just works slowly?
Anywho, thanks for the tip, a configuration issue I can deal with.
From Windows to a Mac isn't slow, from a Mac to Windows is slow. I know the setup is fugly but I've seen this on at least 4 OS X boxes now and not just on my network. I can't explain it since the Knoppix box does it so fast, not quite as fast as Windows to Windows but I expect a little crossover penalty. The gain I get from being able to read any type of drive on linux more than outweighs the time it takes extra to copy.
I've seen hundreds of message boards with problems with samba on OS X through every revision. First it was session signing, now its just slow. I'm sure there is a reason but when the default on a knoppix install is so fast I expect the default on OS X to be just as fast. Guess I just expect more from Apple given that they control the whole deal, from my perspective there is zero reason for faulty software and defaults from Apple. Of course that's not the reality given iTunes and all the remote vulnerabilities its enjoyed.
The samba part really confuses me. I'm trying to figure out how Apple screwed up samba support so bad. I had an OS X box copying 80gigs of photos to a Windows file server. It was going to take 30 hours. After 20 minutes watching it consistently go that speed I said screw that, pulled the hard drive out, popped it into a Knoppix box and copied all the photos using Linux and it took a little over 2 hours. That's insane! Both gigabit nics into a gigabit switch. Plus there is a weird subnetting issue I run into every now and again where it won't connect to a samba box if its on a different logical subnet. Of course sometimes it works so it's even more baffling.
I think Linux and Windows are definitely better options in the corporate world. Of course our corporate Intranet is fully accessible in Firefox because I didn't want to make my Mac users have to run Windows in addition to OS X which they are more comfortable with. It's all just crazy! There is no way Apple is ready for the big time. Perhaps in a few more years they'll get a clue but I doubt it, no one wants a single supplier of goods, it's dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket.
I was fortunate as I came from the northern route on the 40. No issues there except for damned toll roads in NY. How I hate toll roads. The majority of the trip was fun except for Oklahoma where there was a toll every 5 feet and NY where we had to pay once.
I've often considered getting a satphone, the service is cheap its just the phones are expensive.
That's funny, when I went to the Grand Canyon my sister's verizon cell phone didn't work while my Sprint phone did. You're right though, reception is spotty on the 17. I drove cross country and the 17 was the only place I ever lost reception.
The thing I still can fathom is why AZ doesn't use more solar power than it does with more 300 days of sun a year this is one of the best places on earth to try it out for real.
It sure is too bad you don't know anything about the case involved as it contradicts pretty much everything you just said. There were specific emails from 2005 back when litigation began that Intel was supposed to hold and they neglected to do so. At the time the emails were not deleted, they were deleted after the court ordered them to hold it. They screwed up, they admitted to it. Not necessarily evil on the Intel front. I've seen cases where email gets lost. In any case, AMD is hardly trolling as Intel has a long history and was even convicted of such practices in Japan back in 2005.
With that said, I work for company that had some ongoing litigation and as a result it became very clear that you are not to make negative comments in email. This goes for complaints about coworkers. In short, anything you wouldn't want to get out don't email. In addition to this we hold on to email indefinitely. Compared to the video and photo storage we have email is trivial even with the gigs we receive in a day. It's just good business to always be professional.