Or insert it into freenet, wait until at least one other node has your data then shut down freenet. In theory the data will still be in your node but encrypted and accessible!
I should sue Sony for not allowing me to play Xbox games on my Playstation2. I mean c'mon. The hardware supports it - the disks are the same size and all.
Libraries have never been purely about books. They have always been places where knowledge is kept. The form of knowledge doesn't have to be a book. CDs and DVDs may contain perfectly good knowledge, as does micro-film. There are a lot of things like local council records and the like that were traditionally kept in the council library system.
With the advent of computers and the Internet, a lot of that is being digitised and stored in the central library system of the state or country. Here, if you want access to old local council records you go to the state library in the city and there's all sorts of stuff. Previously some information was still available on micro film in the local branches of the council library.
I agree that libraries should get over the Internet; everyone has that, why do they need to provide it too? They should get back to focusing on what they're good at, and that is being a repository for (useful?) knowledge and providing the means to locate the specific knowledge you require.
I'm all for choice, as you described, but the best book on HTML (your example) for you is not necessarily the best for me. Libraries should be able to provide the choice. I don't want to buy 10 different books to find out they're all crap. I'd rather borrow them, try them out and purchase a copy of the ones that I find to be a useful reference for my style of learning/work, if I think that I'll need the book in the long term.
My particular anecdote points out that the library doesn't have that choice any more. It is full of idiots guides to basic things. I don't want an introduction to the introduction of something. I'm smart, I can dive in with a decent reference and figure it out. The library is missing all of that knowledge now, and if I want it I need to go to the... book store! I guess book stores are kind of like libraries with expensive one-time borrowing fees and no due dates.
Unless you're trying to parallel process stacks of tracks of audio and put effects on top of all of them then I doubt there is much difference between AMD and Intel for the same stuff.
I agree. Our local library has a lot of "photochop for dummies", "service your car for dummies", "the idiots guide to google" (you need instructions to use Google?) type books now.
It was once a treasure trove of useful technical manuals in fields like engineering, computer science, medicine and the like. The fiction section was even pretty good with a fairly wide range. Now it seems that it's mostly popular romance trite and not much more.
I still go there for the kids books (yes, a Slashdork spawned a child process), which they keep fairly current.
That said, I must concede I have a couple of electronics magazines that they have only recently resubscribed to.
I said "in most stores". Buying CDs online from places like Amazon is a bit cheaper but you ignore postage and delays. I don't know anyone who buys actual CDs online. Everyone here still goes to the stores unless they're looking for something more obscure that you can't find in the stores.
You are comparing apples to oranges anyway; online sales direct from HMV vs RRP in a magazine ad which meant a trip to the store. Why don't you walk down to your local music store and tell me the price of a mainstream CD.
I can tell you that here, it starts at $25 and goes up depending on the "artist". 10 years ago the price of a mainstream CD was around the $20 mark. I have actually just gone and checked my CD collection to make a point because a few still have price stickers on them that I couldn't be bothered ripping off 10 years ago.
Sure, I can buy online and save a few dollars but then they gouge me for postage anyway and it works out mostly the same.
The level of cheapness varies from person to person. The quality of the music from the big labels is usually fairly average. It's all the same dribble, over compressed and engineered to sound "popular".
Lowering prices will help encourage more people to pay for music. The price of a CD is more in most stores now than it was 10 years ago, yet the cost of manufacture has continued to decline.
When the big labels are out of the picture I'll imagine that there might be a bit more variety in music. There's a lot of variety now but you can't pick up a lot of it at your local big-chain CD store because they only carry what's popular and what carries the largest profit margins. If you want to get variety you either need to download it or find someone who sells the recordings; it's easier to find it in the intarwebs and download it.
The other reason people download music is that they obviously see no value in it. It might be the case that the real way to make any money is give the tracks away for free then make your money playing live shows and selling merchandise. If people want to get a CD of it then they can pay a small amount that covers the cost of making the CD and then a little bit. The RHCPs (I believe) started out a similar way and they were doing reasonably well for themselves before they were a mega band.
It is one thing to charge a small fee to cover someone's time to stand in front of the scanner/copier and feed in pages from your record. It's another to claim ownership of the record and extort the rightful owner of the record (the patient) to access their own information.
An unsettling issue is that the doctor or hospital generally considers that THEY own your record.
I have only heard one case of a doctor thinking they own the medical records of a patient. All other doctors I know are happy to share records with other doctors once they have confirmed that the patient actually consents to that. I've never had any trouble viewing my record with any of the doctors or specialists I've visited in my time.
The one case I heard of was a deceased doctor. His son took ownership of the doctor's practice and decided to make a quick bob by charging for access to parts of the record. He wouldn't pass on the whole record at once and he was charging some crazy amount like $50 per page scanned and emailed.
The shitty part was that this guy wasn't a doctor and as such wasn't bound by the doctor-patient privilege yet was reading patient files.
That said, I don't live in money-crazy US where I would believe it if someone claimed the reverse was true.
Yeah but the slash virgins would never get STDs even if they were having sex. They'd all be too paranoid about spawning unwanted processes:p to go without App Armour;)
You'd hope the relics would wither but instead they are rallying politicians and passing more draconian laws to further protect their interests (indefinite copyright is one).
These people/labels have realised that they are on the way out and they are setting themselves up to protect their income for at least their lifetimes. They don't give a shit what happens after that.
I shouldn't really say on the way out because that is not true. There will always be a majority element of popular society who buys into their dribble. The business model of the big labels will shift in time and their foothold will be further lessened. I doubt our lifetime will see them completely removed.
..Sysadmins have recently discovered they can improve uptime by eliminating routine maintenance.
s/Sysadmins/Managers/
Sysadmins know that regular scheduled downtime is necessary to keep things running smoothly. A well designed system can take certain parts offline without causing a noticible loss of service. The human brain runs roughly similarly; parts can come and go from service (sleep, etc) and the brain will keep running.
Regular scheduled downtime in controlled conditions keeps your machine running smoothly. Ignoring the routine maintenance and just keeping up 24x7x365x? will wind up with a critical failure in the xeon reprocessing unit (random BOFH excuse) that causes a downtime of indeterminate length while you wait for said EOL'd critical part to be shipped in from China.
The body is really no different. Sleep is the time that it does all the routine maintenance and even makes some fairly extensive repairs.
I concur; converting NSF to MP3... can't every geek worth his salt already do that? Winamp or XMMS or Beep have plugins to read NSF. XMMS had a MP3 output plugin or you could dump it to wav and use LAME on it.
You don't even want to think about what would happen if you lost the bag with all your most important documents, you just better hold on fucking tight.
I agree that this mess of documents is messy, but once you have a Medicare card you don't need to carry around all that ID. Your driver's license and Medicare card should be enough for almost any medical care you need.
You generally carry enough ID around in your wallet/purse on a daily basis anyway. Usually you know when you're going to open a bank account or replace your Medicare card, etc.
And I just don't see how this gives the government extra powers to spy on you.
Centralising data the way the government wanted to gives them much more power to spy on you. Currently your medical records are contained with your GP. Medicare just gets the type of consult rather than a complete detailed record. As I understand it the new scheme was trying to store the full record on a centralised computer. That's great if you're ever in an accident and can't pass on details of your regular GP(s) but other than that people can simply pass on the details of their previous care providers and the new one can get access to the medical record.
The Child support thing always shits me. They use your Australian tax file number to identify you. They print it in letters to you and your ex and pass it around to anyone who asks for information from them like it's your fucking name. Your TFN is kind of like your passport for the tax office. It's not the holy grail, but if someone who wants to fuck you up has it they can use it to access the tax office and pretend to be you or falsify tax documents to really mess you up. I can't see how a national ID card will help there. What really shits me is that a lot of this national ID card crap is to further strengthen the (already far too extensive) powers that the CSA has (for example, they can already ignore a court order on the grounds "we don't feel that it's beneficial to...").
Going to a national ID card will allow the government to better and easier centralise their tracking and profiling of you. Currently it's a little harder because they have to go digging around different sources to find it. I'd prefer to keep them digging for it because then they need to have a reason rather than profiling everyone automatically.
You move the trash outside the server room when you go home (if it's full) and move it back into the server room as needed.
I found that keeping the trash permanently outside the server room is a good way of never forgetting to put it out. Sure, you occasionally need to bring it in if you're working on something but usually it's not needed. If you're in the room the door is usually open (or should be, since few people have the key in case of emergency). Keeping the trash outside is also a good way of discouraging food and drink in the server room. If there's nowhere for those empty chip packets and disposable coffee cups people (plebs who retreive the backup tapes and the like) are less likely to take them in.
Put at least one waist-high shelf right by the door to the server room for cups and food, and leave an empty cup there to help remind people (including yourself) to keep food out of the server "room."
That's some half reasonable advice. Qualified by leave the table/bench outside the server room so that people aren't even tempted to take stuff inside the door in the first place.
As for the best way to build your orifice, don't ask us. If you have windows insist on blinds.
If you have a door put the desk facing it - it's really shitty to have someone walk up behind you without notice or to stand outside the door looking over your shoulder without you even noticing. There are security implications with people being able to sneak up behind you. You may be accessing sensitive information.
If you get a cube rather than a full blown office try insisting on a larger cube with one fixed proper wall. If that's not possible insist on higher than average cube walls so people can't easily peek over the cube at your screen.
Power and networking. Where I worked we decided that every piece of cube (approx 900mm long) would have two power and two RJ45. One RJ45 was supposed to go back to IT's patch panel and the other was meant to go back to a central patch panel that was easier to make changes to without breaking the structured IT-provided networking. The bean counters decided that 4xpower and 4xRJ45 were all the was needed and they were all bunched together. The power was useless for wall warts and everything was usually in the worst place to have it - in the corner where the desk would butt up to so they were hard to access. Sure, it was cheap in the short term but there was a lot of wasted time with all the running around looking for extension leads and power boards to get power where it was needed really (other side of the cube).
The above arrangement would have worked out to 6-8 power and 6-8 RJ45 outlets in each cube, depending on whether you got 3+external wall or 4 cube segments. You'd be surprised how quickly 6 power points and 6 network points can disappear when you have 2xPCs and develop kit that requires ethernet to operate...
The biggest issue with power is multiple phases. You can get stung (or bitten if you're unlucky) by connecting equipment that is on different phases. Make sure that all outlets are clearly marked as per phase and ask that your office be kept to a single phase if possible. At the worst, keep the outlets on each wall on the same phase.
WE built a rackable system where I worked a few years ago. It seems it generated 300W of heat and getting all that heat out of the box was nigh-on impossible. The powers that be in management decided that redesigning the main boards so we could leverage the case as a heatsink was a bad idea. They went for the $20 high power blower fan to force air through some drilled holes in the PCB and past the hot components.
The thing was _noisy_. Very very noisy (round the 80dB mark from memory). You can imagine I had one running all day on my desk while I was trying to get the embedded software to boot on this nice new hardware. I ended up turning off the shitty fan and using a regular pedestal fan to get air moving past it.
If you end up with a rack full of these babies (or just 1 in the rack) you'll definitely want to partition them off and sound proof it!
The admin password for file vault is different from the system's admin password is it not? It's been ages since I enabled it so I don't recall.
Paying for warranty service is not unusual if you purchase extended warranties for some things. I have seen some extended warranties that make the consumer pay for labour to replace certain parts (like disks, which are most likely to fail) after the manufacturer's statutory warranty expires.
As for backups; the whole point of the article is not that he lost the data. It's that he lost control of a disk containing sensitive data. Backups don't help in that situation.
As for file vault being buggy and slowing everything down; It has its faults. The biggest I notice is that it won't auto-shrink the file system as large chunks are removed. Your encrypted volume can quickly grow to fill the disk even though there's nothing in it. The only way to get it to shrink the volume is to log off and wait for a potentially long time while it shrinks the volume for you. That is particularly annoying in my line of work because building software and storing the intermediate files in the FV means that it grows by a huge amount and shrinks fairly quickly.
I haven't run into any bugs with FV and I'm a pretty heavy user. I don't doubt that it has its bugs though.
There is a slight performance penalty for using it but everything is a trade-off between performance and security. I'd rather sit safe in the knowledge that if my laptop (mac or not) goes missing that whatever person gets hold of it can't easily access the highly sensitive data that's contained therein.
It's almost never impossible to recover data - it really depends on how much the data is worth to you and the damage to the disk or how well it was overwritten.
I'm guessing this is to help with fraud in the motor vehicle repair industry. There's a lot of lay people out there who wouldn't know what a carb-e-magig is let-alone why it needed to be replaced.
The exact same applies to computers except nobody wants to give the parts back. There's a lot of lay-people out there who really only know how to drive them badly and wouldn't know why they needed a new motherboard to fix "dll is missing" error.
Apple can't claim the manufacturer's warranty on the disk if they can't return the failed unit after they replace it. It would be sensible if they'd charge a token fee to cover some of their costs and just return the failed disk. Of course, it's been out of his hands by just taking it to the service centre; who is to say they didn't recover some data *checks tin foil hat*.
This is why I encrypt my disks. Everything. I've been doing it for a long time and I pay a considerable performance penalty for it. As disks get faster I need faster hardware to keep up. If a disk ever fails (or goes missing) I can live (mostly) safe in the knowledge that the data on it is junk to the next person without access to my super secret key.
Why wasn't he using File Vault; it's standard and part of OSX. Sure, Apple probably have back doors but it's one step in the right direction.
I wouldn't trust a sandbox of anything on Windows - the very design of Windows makes sandboxing nigh-on impossible, let-alone for IE which is integrated so tightly with the core system.
A VM running a snapshot disk or live cd like Knoppix is excellent for all your insecure web browsing. You can get malwared up as much as you like and simply quit the VM and restart it to have a clean slate.
In this way you could use the VM for secure stuff by reverting its state or just use the browser on your host because it's pretty much guaranteed to be secure if you only do your banking in it.
So you didn't know if it was or wasn't illegal, but thought the guy should be reported anyway? Congratulations, you're a Good German now, wear your badge with pride.
Yes, badge: Ich meine Abzeichen tragen mit Stolz (excuse my german, it's rusty)
As rich_r said, we (the pimply faced teens) realised it wasn't our call to make and passed it on to the someone else to deal with. Many others have said that if you see something that you think is illegal you should report it.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1459243 raises a similar issue. Customs officers _thought_ that some cartoons among a bunch of ADULT porn were illegal so they detained the guy. The whole thing there is now the police want access to the encrypted drive to see if there is or is not actually illegal porn there. That whole mess became significant because a judge ruled that the defendant can't be forced to even divulge that he knows the encryption key; let-alone actually give it to police. That guy was reported on the basis that somebody THOUGHT something was illegal, not because they were sure of it.
To pull a terrorism analogy here, if your neighbour was collecting lots of ammonium nitrate what would you do? Say "geez he must really care about his garden" or possibly report him. It is not your or my call to make if what the guy is doing is illegal. At the end of the day if it's not illegal and you do report him the worst that happens is the police knock on his door, he lets them poke about and they say sorry for bothering you.
Really, your post is a WTF moment of the day, at least.
WTF? You're entitled to your opinion I guess. There are varying levels of what is right and not.
Slashdot Mirror
Or insert it into freenet, wait until at least one other node has your data then shut down freenet. In theory the data will still be in your node but encrypted and accessible!
I should sue Sony for not allowing me to play Xbox games on my Playstation2. I mean c'mon. The hardware supports it - the disks are the same size and all.
Libraries have never been purely about books. They have always been places where knowledge is kept. The form of knowledge doesn't have to be a book. CDs and DVDs may contain perfectly good knowledge, as does micro-film. There are a lot of things like local council records and the like that were traditionally kept in the council library system.
With the advent of computers and the Internet, a lot of that is being digitised and stored in the central library system of the state or country. Here, if you want access to old local council records you go to the state library in the city and there's all sorts of stuff. Previously some information was still available on micro film in the local branches of the council library.
I agree that libraries should get over the Internet; everyone has that, why do they need to provide it too? They should get back to focusing on what they're good at, and that is being a repository for (useful?) knowledge and providing the means to locate the specific knowledge you require.
I'm all for choice, as you described, but the best book on HTML (your example) for you is not necessarily the best for me. Libraries should be able to provide the choice. I don't want to buy 10 different books to find out they're all crap. I'd rather borrow them, try them out and purchase a copy of the ones that I find to be a useful reference for my style of learning/work, if I think that I'll need the book in the long term.
My particular anecdote points out that the library doesn't have that choice any more. It is full of idiots guides to basic things. I don't want an introduction to the introduction of something. I'm smart, I can dive in with a decent reference and figure it out. The library is missing all of that knowledge now, and if I want it I need to go to the... book store! I guess book stores are kind of like libraries with expensive one-time borrowing fees and no due dates.
Unless you're trying to parallel process stacks of tracks of audio and put effects on top of all of them then I doubt there is much difference between AMD and Intel for the same stuff.
I agree. Our local library has a lot of "photochop for dummies", "service your car for dummies", "the idiots guide to google" (you need instructions to use Google?) type books now.
It was once a treasure trove of useful technical manuals in fields like engineering, computer science, medicine and the like. The fiction section was even pretty good with a fairly wide range. Now it seems that it's mostly popular romance trite and not much more.
I still go there for the kids books (yes, a Slashdork spawned a child process), which they keep fairly current.
That said, I must concede I have a couple of electronics magazines that they have only recently resubscribed to.
Whoops, modded wrong and posting to reverse it.
*crash*
What happened, pilot?
Oh, sorry control. WE nearly missed that other plane.
Let's see here...
I said "in most stores". Buying CDs online from places like Amazon is a bit cheaper but you ignore postage and delays. I don't know anyone who buys actual CDs online. Everyone here still goes to the stores unless they're looking for something more obscure that you can't find in the stores.
You are comparing apples to oranges anyway; online sales direct from HMV vs RRP in a magazine ad which meant a trip to the store. Why don't you walk down to your local music store and tell me the price of a mainstream CD.
I can tell you that here, it starts at $25 and goes up depending on the "artist". 10 years ago the price of a mainstream CD was around the $20 mark. I have actually just gone and checked my CD collection to make a point because a few still have price stickers on them that I couldn't be bothered ripping off 10 years ago.
Sure, I can buy online and save a few dollars but then they gouge me for postage anyway and it works out mostly the same.
The level of cheapness varies from person to person. The quality of the music from the big labels is usually fairly average. It's all the same dribble, over compressed and engineered to sound "popular".
Lowering prices will help encourage more people to pay for music. The price of a CD is more in most stores now than it was 10 years ago, yet the cost of manufacture has continued to decline.
When the big labels are out of the picture I'll imagine that there might be a bit more variety in music. There's a lot of variety now but you can't pick up a lot of it at your local big-chain CD store because they only carry what's popular and what carries the largest profit margins. If you want to get variety you either need to download it or find someone who sells the recordings; it's easier to find it in the intarwebs and download it.
The other reason people download music is that they obviously see no value in it. It might be the case that the real way to make any money is give the tracks away for free then make your money playing live shows and selling merchandise. If people want to get a CD of it then they can pay a small amount that covers the cost of making the CD and then a little bit. The RHCPs (I believe) started out a similar way and they were doing reasonably well for themselves before they were a mega band.
It is one thing to charge a small fee to cover someone's time to stand in front of the scanner/copier and feed in pages from your record. It's another to claim ownership of the record and extort the rightful owner of the record (the patient) to access their own information.
I have only heard one case of a doctor thinking they own the medical records of a patient. All other doctors I know are happy to share records with other doctors once they have confirmed that the patient actually consents to that. I've never had any trouble viewing my record with any of the doctors or specialists I've visited in my time.
The one case I heard of was a deceased doctor. His son took ownership of the doctor's practice and decided to make a quick bob by charging for access to parts of the record. He wouldn't pass on the whole record at once and he was charging some crazy amount like $50 per page scanned and emailed.
The shitty part was that this guy wasn't a doctor and as such wasn't bound by the doctor-patient privilege yet was reading patient files.
That said, I don't live in money-crazy US where I would believe it if someone claimed the reverse was true.
Yeah but the slash virgins would never get STDs even if they were having sex. They'd all be too paranoid about spawning unwanted processes :p to go without App Armour ;)
You'd hope the relics would wither but instead they are rallying politicians and passing more draconian laws to further protect their interests (indefinite copyright is one).
These people/labels have realised that they are on the way out and they are setting themselves up to protect their income for at least their lifetimes. They don't give a shit what happens after that.
I shouldn't really say on the way out because that is not true. There will always be a majority element of popular society who buys into their dribble. The business model of the big labels will shift in time and their foothold will be further lessened. I doubt our lifetime will see them completely removed.
...that (actual, talented) musicians could actually be successful without a record label!
s/Sysadmins/Managers/
Sysadmins know that regular scheduled downtime is necessary to keep things running smoothly. A well designed system can take certain parts offline without causing a noticible loss of service. The human brain runs roughly similarly; parts can come and go from service (sleep, etc) and the brain will keep running.
Regular scheduled downtime in controlled conditions keeps your machine running smoothly. Ignoring the routine maintenance and just keeping up 24x7x365x? will wind up with a critical failure in the xeon reprocessing unit (random BOFH excuse) that causes a downtime of indeterminate length while you wait for said EOL'd critical part to be shipped in from China.
The body is really no different. Sleep is the time that it does all the routine maintenance and even makes some fairly extensive repairs.
I concur; converting NSF to MP3... can't every geek worth his salt already do that? Winamp or XMMS or Beep have plugins to read NSF. XMMS had a MP3 output plugin or you could dump it to wav and use LAME on it.
In soviet Russia, NSFs convert you to MP3
I agree that this mess of documents is messy, but once you have a Medicare card you don't need to carry around all that ID. Your driver's license and Medicare card should be enough for almost any medical care you need.
You generally carry enough ID around in your wallet/purse on a daily basis anyway. Usually you know when you're going to open a bank account or replace your Medicare card, etc.
Centralising data the way the government wanted to gives them much more power to spy on you. Currently your medical records are contained with your GP. Medicare just gets the type of consult rather than a complete detailed record. As I understand it the new scheme was trying to store the full record on a centralised computer. That's great if you're ever in an accident and can't pass on details of your regular GP(s) but other than that people can simply pass on the details of their previous care providers and the new one can get access to the medical record.
The Child support thing always shits me. They use your Australian tax file number to identify you. They print it in letters to you and your ex and pass it around to anyone who asks for information from them like it's your fucking name. Your TFN is kind of like your passport for the tax office. It's not the holy grail, but if someone who wants to fuck you up has it they can use it to access the tax office and pretend to be you or falsify tax documents to really mess you up. I can't see how a national ID card will help there. What really shits me is that a lot of this national ID card crap is to further strengthen the (already far too extensive) powers that the CSA has (for example, they can already ignore a court order on the grounds "we don't feel that it's beneficial to...").
Going to a national ID card will allow the government to better and easier centralise their tracking and profiling of you. Currently it's a little harder because they have to go digging around different sources to find it. I'd prefer to keep them digging for it because then they need to have a reason rather than profiling everyone automatically.
I found that keeping the trash permanently outside the server room is a good way of never forgetting to put it out. Sure, you occasionally need to bring it in if you're working on something but usually it's not needed. If you're in the room the door is usually open (or should be, since few people have the key in case of emergency). Keeping the trash outside is also a good way of discouraging food and drink in the server room. If there's nowhere for those empty chip packets and disposable coffee cups people (plebs who retreive the backup tapes and the like) are less likely to take them in.
That's some half reasonable advice. Qualified by leave the table/bench outside the server room so that people aren't even tempted to take stuff inside the door in the first place.
As for the best way to build your orifice, don't ask us. If you have windows insist on blinds.
If you have a door put the desk facing it - it's really shitty to have someone walk up behind you without notice or to stand outside the door looking over your shoulder without you even noticing. There are security implications with people being able to sneak up behind you. You may be accessing sensitive information.
If you get a cube rather than a full blown office try insisting on a larger cube with one fixed proper wall. If that's not possible insist on higher than average cube walls so people can't easily peek over the cube at your screen.
Power and networking. Where I worked we decided that every piece of cube (approx 900mm long) would have two power and two RJ45. One RJ45 was supposed to go back to IT's patch panel and the other was meant to go back to a central patch panel that was easier to make changes to without breaking the structured IT-provided networking. The bean counters decided that 4xpower and 4xRJ45 were all the was needed and they were all bunched together. The power was useless for wall warts and everything was usually in the worst place to have it - in the corner where the desk would butt up to so they were hard to access. Sure, it was cheap in the short term but there was a lot of wasted time with all the running around looking for extension leads and power boards to get power where it was needed really (other side of the cube).
The above arrangement would have worked out to 6-8 power and 6-8 RJ45 outlets in each cube, depending on whether you got 3+external wall or 4 cube segments. You'd be surprised how quickly 6 power points and 6 network points can disappear when you have 2xPCs and develop kit that requires ethernet to operate...
The biggest issue with power is multiple phases. You can get stung (or bitten if you're unlucky) by connecting equipment that is on different phases. Make sure that all outlets are clearly marked as per phase and ask that your office be kept to a single phase if possible. At the worst, keep the outlets on each wall on the same phase.
WE built a rackable system where I worked a few years ago. It seems it generated 300W of heat and getting all that heat out of the box was nigh-on impossible. The powers that be in management decided that redesigning the main boards so we could leverage the case as a heatsink was a bad idea. They went for the $20 high power blower fan to force air through some drilled holes in the PCB and past the hot components.
The thing was _noisy_. Very very noisy (round the 80dB mark from memory). You can imagine I had one running all day on my desk while I was trying to get the embedded software to boot on this nice new hardware. I ended up turning off the shitty fan and using a regular pedestal fan to get air moving past it.
If you end up with a rack full of these babies (or just 1 in the rack) you'll definitely want to partition them off and sound proof it!
This is a reply to a few posts...
The admin password for file vault is different from the system's admin password is it not? It's been ages since I enabled it so I don't recall.
Paying for warranty service is not unusual if you purchase extended warranties for some things. I have seen some extended warranties that make the consumer pay for labour to replace certain parts (like disks, which are most likely to fail) after the manufacturer's statutory warranty expires.
As for backups; the whole point of the article is not that he lost the data. It's that he lost control of a disk containing sensitive data. Backups don't help in that situation.
As for file vault being buggy and slowing everything down; It has its faults. The biggest I notice is that it won't auto-shrink the file system as large chunks are removed. Your encrypted volume can quickly grow to fill the disk even though there's nothing in it. The only way to get it to shrink the volume is to log off and wait for a potentially long time while it shrinks the volume for you. That is particularly annoying in my line of work because building software and storing the intermediate files in the FV means that it grows by a huge amount and shrinks fairly quickly.
I haven't run into any bugs with FV and I'm a pretty heavy user. I don't doubt that it has its bugs though.
There is a slight performance penalty for using it but everything is a trade-off between performance and security. I'd rather sit safe in the knowledge that if my laptop (mac or not) goes missing that whatever person gets hold of it can't easily access the highly sensitive data that's contained therein.
It's almost never impossible to recover data - it really depends on how much the data is worth to you and the damage to the disk or how well it was overwritten.
I'm guessing this is to help with fraud in the motor vehicle repair industry. There's a lot of lay people out there who wouldn't know what a carb-e-magig is let-alone why it needed to be replaced.
The exact same applies to computers except nobody wants to give the parts back. There's a lot of lay-people out there who really only know how to drive them badly and wouldn't know why they needed a new motherboard to fix "dll is missing" error.
Apple can't claim the manufacturer's warranty on the disk if they can't return the failed unit after they replace it. It would be sensible if they'd charge a token fee to cover some of their costs and just return the failed disk. Of course, it's been out of his hands by just taking it to the service centre; who is to say they didn't recover some data *checks tin foil hat*.
This is why I encrypt my disks. Everything. I've been doing it for a long time and I pay a considerable performance penalty for it. As disks get faster I need faster hardware to keep up. If a disk ever fails (or goes missing) I can live (mostly) safe in the knowledge that the data on it is junk to the next person without access to my super secret key.
Why wasn't he using File Vault; it's standard and part of OSX. Sure, Apple probably have back doors but it's one step in the right direction.
I wouldn't trust a sandbox of anything on Windows - the very design of Windows makes sandboxing nigh-on impossible, let-alone for IE which is integrated so tightly with the core system.
A VM running a snapshot disk or live cd like Knoppix is excellent for all your insecure web browsing. You can get malwared up as much as you like and simply quit the VM and restart it to have a clean slate.
In this way you could use the VM for secure stuff by reverting its state or just use the browser on your host because it's pretty much guaranteed to be secure if you only do your banking in it.
Yes, badge: Ich meine Abzeichen tragen mit Stolz (excuse my german, it's rusty)
As rich_r said, we (the pimply faced teens) realised it wasn't our call to make and passed it on to the someone else to deal with. Many others have said that if you see something that you think is illegal you should report it.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1459243 raises a similar issue. Customs officers _thought_ that some cartoons among a bunch of ADULT porn were illegal so they detained the guy. The whole thing there is now the police want access to the encrypted drive to see if there is or is not actually illegal porn there. That whole mess became significant because a judge ruled that the defendant can't be forced to even divulge that he knows the encryption key; let-alone actually give it to police. That guy was reported on the basis that somebody THOUGHT something was illegal, not because they were sure of it.
To pull a terrorism analogy here, if your neighbour was collecting lots of ammonium nitrate what would you do? Say "geez he must really care about his garden" or possibly report him. It is not your or my call to make if what the guy is doing is illegal. At the end of the day if it's not illegal and you do report him the worst that happens is the police knock on his door, he lets them poke about and they say sorry for bothering you.
WTF? You're entitled to your opinion I guess. There are varying levels of what is right and not.