People trained entirely on Windows will never, EVER be "really skilled." It is physically impossible.
That statement is one of the largest loads of shit that I have ever seen on slashdot. I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that it got modded up to insightful though.
I sysadmin at a school and one problem with letting people boot from a Knoppix CD is that I have no way of knowing if they are ripping the SAM from the hard drive and saving it to a floppy to bring home and run l0phtcrack on it thus getting (at a minimum) that boxes local admin password.
There are lots of far far worse security scenerios than the above that could result from a malicious student and a Knoppix CD but I am not going to list them as I don't want to give anyone any ideas.
Feel free to use the Knoppix CD idea but don't be suprised if the administration comes down hard on you for it. You would probably be better off getting to be friends with some of the more influential people in the schools IT staff and convincing them to load Linux on some of the older PC's that aren't being used anymore or something like that.
I am glad that someone with mod points modded that up because it has some truth to it. While I certainly would not condone the use of heroin, crystal meth or Crack at work I do know that there are plenty of really strong and legal hallucinagens (salvia, fly agaric, etc.) that one can buy over the internet.
I had to come into work when everyone else was on vacation because it was the perfect time to bring the servers down for some upgrades, so being alone in the building I ate about 2 caps of Amanita Muscaria (perfectly legal) and had all kinds of fun. What could have been a really monotonous day sitting in front of a monitor watching progress bars slowly move turned into an amazing adventure on par with Alice in Wonderland. I highly recommend it.
I find them useful when you dont need to sift through tons of BS to get to what you want.
Wow. My experience with the For Dummies books have been the exact opposite. Page after page of nothing but fluff with very little actual meat. I much prefer books that don't talk down to you but instead just give you all the facts. The O'reilly Nutshell series of books are what I think of when I think of being useful when you dont need to sift through tons of BS to get to what you want.
Right. I am a sysadmin at a large private school and I constantly get instructors, staff and students second guessing my decisions saying I should have done so and so instead or that X is a better choice than Y so I must be an idiot to choose Y, etc.
The thing is that none of these people really have the whole picture concerning what is going on with the network so they are observing small parts and making their opinion based on only a small part of the facts with everything else just inferred or assumed.
An example of what I'm talking about. One of the big worms from a while back (I believe MS-BLAST) was going around. I did everything to keep it out of our network but I did not patch many of our machines. Why? Because the official microsoft patch killed Autodesk files and we were running Autodesk software on those machines.
I did some other thngs (port filtering, etc.) that kept the computers from getting infected but I constantly had people saying "That guy is clueless, blaster is infecting everyone and he doesn't even have these boxes patched!" because they didn't have all the info, they didn't know that the patch killed Autodesk files.
The point of this rant is that it is really easy to criticize people when you simply do not have all the facts. Sometimes certain security measures cannot be implemented because they'll break applications and/or break the network. Sometimes certain security measures cannot be implemented because the sysadmin has his hands tied by higher authority within the company.
haven't had to resort to over sexual themes to achieve this success!
Just curious, what is wrong with over sexual themes? Lexx is one of my favorite SF shows ever and it is just one big over sexual theme. I also tend to enjoy classic Star Trek more than the newer ones just because all the classic episodes had all kinds of hoochie girls in ultra short skirts while all of the newer Star Treks are just way to god damn politically correct.
Personally, I'm anticipating this release, but I'm not gung-ho about it.
That is how I feel about it. I Loved Doom 2 and Half Life is one of my all time favorite games, as a result I'll be buying Doom 3 and Half Life 2. But I can't help but feel that these games are being way overhyped to the point that they just will not be able to live up to many peoples extremely high expectations.
I loved the original Wolfenstein games. ID then made Return to Castle Wolfenstein which was OK but didn't blow me away. ID made the original Doom games. ID is now making Doom 3 and I assume that it will be good but doubt that it will blow me away.
As far as Half Life 2 is concerned. The original Half Life was so damn good that even with updated graphics it will be hard to beat. There is the definite (though unlikely) possibility that both Doom 3 and Half Life 2 might dissapoint many people.
I usually think of the boot camp scene in Stanley Kubricks Full Metal Jacket where the drill instructor is screaming at the recruits about "Little Suzy Rottencrotch."
Wow, talk about coincidence. I just installed DOS 6.22 on a VMware Virtual Machine last night. And just before coming to work today I checked out nibbles.bas and gorillas.bas. For some reason I couldn't get Gorillas.bas to run properly under VMware but nibbles.bas ran fine.
As long as I don't run things as root (which I never do), the most that will ever happen is that one user will be trashed and everything else will be fine.
Maybe in a perfect world. But in reality there has been plenty, and will always be more, exploits
that allow a normal user to gain root access. Or in this case, that will allow a virus running with normal user rights to run with roots rights.
"Ashes...ashes..." [supposed to be "achoos", the sound of sneezing]
I always thought that it was supposed to be ashes because they burned the bodies of plague victims?
Does it also point out where to get an assembler? I suspect that'll be a barrier of entry for a lot of kiddies.
I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic or serious so I will assume that you are serious.
Just about every skript kiddiot out there has a copy of MASM, TASM and/or NASM on his machine. If you do not believe me then you are underestimating the average skript kiddy. Go hang out in some script kiddy message boards or especially IRC and you will see that they may be obnoxious little scum but they are not quite as naive and incompetant as you make them out to be.
So should I just stop doing online banking at work because the computers happen to use the most popular operating system and browser in the world?
No. You should stop doing online banking from work because someone might be running a sniffer on your network (I keep Etherpeek running 24/7 on my network) or because, as others have said, there could be a keylogger on your computer.
This is slightly offtopic and only marginally related to your suggestion but I think that is still worth noting.
I used to (and still do) use WSH/WMI with vbscript for generic automation and sysadmin tasks on my network. I tryed switching over to Perl but the problem that I was running into was that I had to install a Perl interpreter on every machine on the network including on the laptops of employees visiting from other locations. It was a hassle. A minor hassle but still a hassle.
There were other problems like most windows scripting documentation and examples being written in vbscript and not Perl. Or the fact that Norton AV kept thinking that Activestate contained a virus. It was lots of nitpicky little problems like that which caused me to say "screw it" and switch back to just using vbscript.
install / configure apache, php, perl, etc, make firewalls, use nmap, and even write network apps if necessary
I can do all of that also and I consider myself a total Linux newbie. Make firewalls? Use nmap!? None of that stuff is in any way extraordinary. I am not flaming you or anything I am just saying that if you really are skilled at Linux then you should come up with some better examples of your mad Linux skills because the examples you gave are things that just about any Linux user can do.
Yeah, at my job we do lots of work with the Veterans Administration. To transfer data with them we have to use this old DOS application that the VA made along with a fscking 56K modem to to dial into this VA BBS thingy to give them the data that they request. Whenever I have to do that I feel like I am back in 1992!
There is lots of ancient software out here that is still in use and is still depended on by many businesses.
No. I don't think that it is replicating from the compact disc. It is installing itself from the compact disc, I think that there is a big difference.
If it is a virus then what exactly is it that it is infecting? normal.dot?.SYS files? PE files? It is not infecting anything because it is not a virus. It is just a program installing itself without the users knowledge. It doesn't infect anything or do anything to spread after installation.
If it apended itself to.COM files and whenever that.COM file was executed it would search the directory that it was executed in for other.COM files to infect, or did something similar then I would call it a virus. But as it stands there is no way that this thing could be classified as a virus.
Slashdot Mirror
People trained entirely on Windows will never, EVER be "really skilled." It is physically impossible.
That statement is one of the largest loads of shit that I have ever seen on slashdot. I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that it got modded up to insightful though.
I sysadmin at a school and one problem with letting people boot from a Knoppix CD is that I have no way of knowing if they are ripping the SAM from the hard drive and saving it to a floppy to bring home and run l0phtcrack on it thus getting (at a minimum) that boxes local admin password.
There are lots of far far worse security scenerios than the above that could result from a malicious student and a Knoppix CD but I am not going to list them as I don't want to give anyone any ideas.
Feel free to use the Knoppix CD idea but don't be suprised if the administration comes down hard on you for it. You would probably be better off getting to be friends with some of the more influential people in the schools IT staff and convincing them to load Linux on some of the older PC's that aren't being used anymore or something like that.
One word
I am glad that someone with mod points modded that up because it has some truth to it. While I certainly would not condone the use of heroin, crystal meth or Crack at work I do know that there are plenty of really strong and legal hallucinagens (salvia, fly agaric, etc.) that one can buy over the internet.
I had to come into work when everyone else was on vacation because it was the perfect time to bring the servers down for some upgrades, so being alone in the building I ate about 2 caps of Amanita Muscaria (perfectly legal) and had all kinds of fun. What could have been a really monotonous day sitting in front of a monitor watching progress bars slowly move turned into an amazing adventure on par with Alice in Wonderland. I highly recommend it.
I find them useful when you dont need to sift through tons of BS to get to what you want.
Wow. My experience with the For Dummies books have been the exact opposite. Page after page of nothing but fluff with very little actual meat. I much prefer books that don't talk down to you but instead just give you all the facts. The O'reilly Nutshell series of books are what I think of when I think of being useful when you dont need to sift through tons of BS to get to what you want.
Nor is this easy at all to defend from
Right. I am a sysadmin at a large private school and I constantly get instructors, staff and students second guessing my decisions saying I should have done so and so instead or that X is a better choice than Y so I must be an idiot to choose Y, etc.
The thing is that none of these people really have the whole picture concerning what is going on with the network so they are observing small parts and making their opinion based on only a small part of the facts with everything else just inferred or assumed.
An example of what I'm talking about. One of the big worms from a while back (I believe MS-BLAST) was going around. I did everything to keep it out of our network but I did not patch many of our machines. Why? Because the official microsoft patch killed Autodesk files and we were running Autodesk software on those machines.
I did some other thngs (port filtering, etc.) that kept the computers from getting infected but I constantly had people saying "That guy is clueless, blaster is infecting everyone and he doesn't even have these boxes patched!" because they didn't have all the info, they didn't know that the patch killed Autodesk files.
The point of this rant is that it is really easy to criticize people when you simply do not have all the facts. Sometimes certain security measures cannot be implemented because they'll break applications and/or break the network. Sometimes certain security measures cannot be implemented because the sysadmin has his hands tied by higher authority within the company.
haven't had to resort to over sexual themes to achieve this success!
Just curious, what is wrong with over sexual themes? Lexx is one of my favorite SF shows ever and it is just one big over sexual theme. I also tend to enjoy classic Star Trek more than the newer ones just because all the classic episodes had all kinds of hoochie girls in ultra short skirts while all of the newer Star Treks are just way to god damn politically correct.
Personally, I'm anticipating this release, but I'm not gung-ho about it.
That is how I feel about it. I Loved Doom 2 and Half Life is one of my all time favorite games, as a result I'll be buying Doom 3 and Half Life 2. But I can't help but feel that these games are being way overhyped to the point that they just will not be able to live up to many peoples extremely high expectations.
I loved the original Wolfenstein games. ID then made Return to Castle Wolfenstein which was OK but didn't blow me away. ID made the original Doom games. ID is now making Doom 3 and I assume that it will be good but doubt that it will blow me away.
As far as Half Life 2 is concerned. The original Half Life was so damn good that even with updated graphics it will be hard to beat. There is the definite (though unlikely) possibility that both Doom 3 and Half Life 2 might dissapoint many people.
What do we think of when we say "SuSE"?
I usually think of the boot camp scene in Stanley Kubricks Full Metal Jacket where the drill instructor is screaming at the recruits about "Little Suzy Rottencrotch."
Wow, talk about coincidence. I just installed DOS 6.22 on a VMware Virtual Machine last night. And just before coming to work today I checked out nibbles.bas and gorillas.bas. For some reason I couldn't get Gorillas.bas to run properly under VMware but nibbles.bas ran fine.
though the though of loosing my little girl
My Gawd! What kind of father are you? Somebody call the police!!
neurotoxin-impregnated ??
Me thinks you have been reading too much of ye olde William Gibson.
I don't know, maybe I'm doing something wrong. I followed your link but when I tryed to download Kazaa Lite this is what I got:
Old Versions Available
This program is currently unavailable for legal reasons.
Tron Guy could easily end up being the new goatsx guy. That jpeg is just disturbing.
but Windows --> *nix is like watching Star Trek 2, then watching Star Trek 1
I am sorry but I totally do not understand the anology. Maybe I am just not a big enough Star Trek fan or something.
As long as I don't run things as root (which I never do), the most that will ever happen is that one user will be trashed and everything else will be fine.
Maybe in a perfect world. But in reality there has been plenty, and will always be more, exploits that allow a normal user to gain root access. Or in this case, that will allow a virus running with normal user rights to run with roots rights.
"Ashes...ashes..." [supposed to be "achoos", the sound of sneezing]
I always thought that it was supposed to be ashes because they burned the bodies of plague victims?
Does it also point out where to get an assembler? I suspect that'll be a barrier of entry for a lot of kiddies.
I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic or serious so I will assume that you are serious.
Just about every skript kiddiot out there has a copy of MASM, TASM and/or NASM on his machine. If you do not believe me then you are underestimating the average skript kiddy. Go hang out in some script kiddy message boards or especially IRC and you will see that they may be obnoxious little scum but they are not quite as naive and incompetant as you make them out to be.
So should I just stop doing online banking at work because the computers happen to use the most popular operating system and browser in the world?
No. You should stop doing online banking from work because someone might be running a sniffer on your network (I keep Etherpeek running 24/7 on my network) or because, as others have said, there could be a keylogger on your computer.
You should try giving Perl a shot.
This is slightly offtopic and only marginally related to your suggestion but I think that is still worth noting.
I used to (and still do) use WSH/WMI with vbscript for generic automation and sysadmin tasks on my network. I tryed switching over to Perl but the problem that I was running into was that I had to install a Perl interpreter on every machine on the network including on the laptops of employees visiting from other locations. It was a hassle. A minor hassle but still a hassle.
There were other problems like most windows scripting documentation and examples being written in vbscript and not Perl. Or the fact that Norton AV kept thinking that Activestate contained a virus. It was lots of nitpicky little problems like that which caused me to say "screw it" and switch back to just using vbscript.
Although not exactly what you are looking for, I often use AccessEnum by Sysinternals when I want to see who has access to a specific file.
install / configure apache, php, perl, etc, make firewalls, use nmap, and even write network apps if necessary
I can do all of that also and I consider myself a total Linux newbie. Make firewalls? Use nmap!? None of that stuff is in any way extraordinary. I am not flaming you or anything I am just saying that if you really are skilled at Linux then you should come up with some better examples of your mad Linux skills because the examples you gave are things that just about any Linux user can do.
I like short posts
[Repeat 13 times]
-----------
If you don't get it, don't mod it down.
Yeah, at my job we do lots of work with the Veterans Administration. To transfer data with them we have to use this old DOS application that the VA made along with a fscking 56K modem to to dial into this VA BBS thingy to give them the data that they request. Whenever I have to do that I feel like I am back in 1992!
There is lots of ancient software out here that is still in use and is still depended on by many businesses.
Another problem is the fact that Microsoft won't be offering this service patch to those who hold pirated copies of Windows XP,
I seem to recall a not to old article that claimed just the opposite of this?
No. I don't think that it is replicating from the compact disc. It is installing itself from the compact disc, I think that there is a big difference.
If it is a virus then what exactly is it that it is infecting? normal.dot?
If it apended itself to