Which is why when I doing something dangerous, like cruising the Blackhat underground, I use a virtual machine (or container) with a fresh snapshot before I set out. Handy beasts if you have the machine for it and the right level of paranoia.
Hear, hear! I'm sick and tired of the evangelism which probably means I'm hanging around in the wrong place {sigh}. These beasts are just tools and when I advise someone, or when I'm designing a machine for myself, I select the machine and OS to support the applications, not the other way around. That cart don't go so well with the horse behind it, IMNSHO. I have six computers and not a one of them has the same OS on them and it's a very mixed bag: 2000AS, WS2003Web, triple-boot WS2003Ent/*nix of the week/XP beta testing platform, Solaris 10, Novell/SuSE 9.2, and even Win 3.11 for duping 5 1/4's and really antique support;-). That doesn't even count the virtual OS's for testing other things which I can't talk about. See? That's my toolbox and those are my tools, not an evangelical pulpit.
Why people feel the need to shove something down other people's throats or evangelically browbeat them is a mystery to me. I'm here to solve people's problems, not make life more difficult. I present the options that are within their budget, explain the distinctions without bias, then let them decide. BTW, since they have made an investment (client buy-in), I've also found they are willing to put more time into learning their systems and learning about protecting themselves. I sometimes think we, the geek community, are our own worst enemy! Sheesh.
Frankly I haven't seen this problem for the people (clients) that I've worked with and yes, most of them do run as an administrator. Along with locking down their networks and systems, installing various free software, and such, I also give a running teach-in on simple security measures that they can use to protect themselves. I developed my lessons while I was in the US Navy administrating and repairing over 575 desktops and I don't know how many laptops (we never did get an accurate count) at a Naval Air Station. It got real old cleaning up systems after some id10t brought a disk from home, or opened the wrong attachment, so the training became mandatory and lo and behold the number of incidents dropped like a rock.
Not a single client of mine in over ten years has caught a worm or a virus. Users can learn, you just have to have patience and put it in terms they can understand. It also helps to reach out to their circle of friends to make sure that they are following safe practices as well. Unfortunately, I've noticed that all too many of my geek friends have neither the patience nor the willingness to speak anything resembling normal English or in terms people can relate to when talking about this subject. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Two weapons that you can use, which are free, are Root Kit Revealer and AutoRuns from the SysInternals web site. Tons of free system administration tools that allow you to go down to a very deep level if/when you need it. The article for Root Kit Revealer there gives more details about what it would take to circumvent it so I won't repeat it here.
As for the technique, every loving file on my Windows boxen are MD5 checksummed and the master list is kept in an encrypted volume along with all my NDA stuff using DriveCrypt. If I have any reason to suspect something has tinkered with on my systems, and once a month no matter what along with other major maintenance, I do a diff on checksums. It's not hard, just a bit of tedium until you script it, just as with monitoring log files. I consider it right up there with my regular virus checks despite the fact that my security policies here would prevent one from even getting into a system in the first place. Insurance (risk management).
Where have you been? That was true in the past but if you've updated XP to SP2 it certainly ain't true anymore. ActiveX and installation require that the user grant permission. In Windows Server 2003 it's even tighter as you have the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration to contend with unless you manually rip out that component. It doesn't allow a damn thing except straight HTML, zip, nada, nothing. You have to add a site to your trusted list, even Windows Update, before any active content or cookie is allowed to prompt you and even then it defaults to the restricted security zone and requiring authorization for every little thing you might want to do. That's actually pretty handy since I have the various ad servers blocked here that way;-).
Sorry, but you the (l)user have to give the openings before something happens now. Actually, with my setup here (WS2003Ent.), Firefox is the least secure browser I have which is strange to say the least. It's still my preferred browser though. I just had to put a proxy in front of it to filter out the active content, unless the site is granted permission, and tweak some settings away from the defaults.
Actually all it means is that the markets expect the Fed to increase short term rates but that within a short period of time they expect a reversal, i.e. an inflationary or rate spike is expected in the short term. It's all about expectations. Economics, when you actually get into the guts of how game theory and other fields interface with it, is just as much about psychology as anything else. You can have a lot of fun, or at least I did, working in the multi-disciplinary aspect of the field.
The effective savings rate is non-zero despite that web site. As with any form of statistics you have to take it with a huge grain of salt until you look at what they are actually measuring. Unfortunately the statistics there, and always the ones reported in the media, do not take into account the forms of wealth accumulation in our modern society. If you look at personal wealth rather than personal savings you see year in and year out growth throughout our society including among the so-called disadvantaged segments of our population. Mostly this is in the form of home ownership, the accumulation of wealth by paying down that mortgage and property value increases. It's worked for a long time, pretty much the entire period since WWII. These measures also usually do not take into account 401(k)'s, aggregate pension plan valuations, and other measures of accumulated wealth. What is more surpising is that the younger generations have written off social security entirely, they know it'll be bankrupt by the time they retire, and have significantly increased their mutual fund holdings, so it seems that the savings trend may be reversing itself. We shall see.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.
Too true. When I gave my oath (at age 17) it was to the Constitution first then there was the addendum that I obey the officers appointed above me. But the Constitution was the oath holder. Furthermore, that's the reason we won't obey an unlawful order despite what some people think. There's also the little matter of Posse Commitatus which Congress enacted back in the 1800's after the Civil War and reaffirmed in the 1990's which we are all very aware of, thank you.
However, it wouldn't be our job unless it was an absolute last resort to unass the President. That would be either the Secret Service, who answer to the Secretary of the Treasury, or the FBI, probably their Office of Professional Responsibility, perhaps the least humorous bunch of people on earth when it comes to the law and the Constitution.
We believe me, you don't want government run health care, especially the rationing part. You see I have it and it took them seven years before they would give me an MRI which ain't something you can go out of pocket on. By the time they found that 'round tuit, my condition was inoperable and as a result I'm terminal. So far I've managed to hang on over a year beyond my predicted expiration date but it hasn't been fun. The pain is extreme and there is no relief as they won't give me anything to relieve it. Give me private insurance any day of the week. Thank you Veterans Administration.
One more observation. Did you know that you have to ask permission of the federal courts to sue the VA for, say, malpractice? True. Bitter? Naw.
You aren't reading what the others have posted. There are two official numbers provided by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The first one is based off of unemployment claims and that is the figure you see, usually along with the number of new claims for the week, on the evening news. There is another category of worker, we call them disgruntled workers, who have exhausted their claims and are no longer seeking work. The Household survey picks them up so we can derive the actual number of total unemployed (and in more than few cases unemployable) workers as well. The same survey also establishes the number of disabled workers who cannot seek employment due to either temporary or permanent disability. The reason I use we is that I'm also an econometrician, among many other things, which is the type of career involved in establishing this kind of fact from the data collected.
It all depends on the facts you are looking at and the particular way the data was collected. Go to the BLS site if you are interested in actual hard numbers. They pack a lot of information on that site, but when that's your job, you do have to fill the available time;-).
When I was a teenager, back in the '70's, I used to sit in on classes at the University of California all the time with the instructor's (and Dean's) blessings. Hell, they used to give me time on the mainframe as well. After a year, I was helping out in the statistics and computer labs and following the IBM techrep around like a puppy, but it was a heck of a lot more fun than so-called High School which bored me to tears.
It really depends on the culture of the college as to what you can do and get away with, especially the policies of the Dean and the attitude of the instructors. It helps if you have a positive attitude and aren't disruptive. Save your questions for after the class. Works like a charm. Heck, still does and I'm in my fourties now.
Each CD here, except for one's burnt from ISO's such as the various *nix distro's, has a catalog. I create it by dumping the output of a recursive dir or ls -s to a file, fill out the rest of the line with a short description and tuck it into a file with the CD or DVD (I used DVD's now) title. Heck, this is so blindingly obvious it falls into the "well, duh!" category. I've been doing this since the early days of CompuServe as I was a librarian for numerous fora almost from the beginning. Even CompuServe didn't have infinite space.
See my reply in reply to parent. {Sigh}, I should learn to triple check where I'm at when I do something especially after a long night (and day!) of beta-testing. Sorry.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, the memory management code alone is quite different between the two. As a matter of fact, in the PowerPoint slides covering the WS2k3 and Vista memory management code, one of the slides pointed out that the WS2k3 memory management code was backported to Win'XP SP2. Since I do have Win'XP SP2 and WS2k3 SP1 installed side by side on different boot drives, I sometimes like to do a side by side comparison of the two. It's rather interesting in a geeky kind of way and there are more than a few files in System32 that do match, but not all or even most. Now I will grant you that the drivers are exactly the same, but not all the code and especially not the kernal were the same prior to Win'XP SP2.
Sorry, you are quite mistaken. Even at the kernal level they are quite different. Now I will grant that they started from the XP code base initially, but they forked the code as even such things as the memory manager are completely different. The fork occured before the release of XP as I was involved in the early betas of XP and WS2k3 at the same time.
Actually I'm seeing a lot of moves that way with Sun, *nix, and other moves but perhaps I'm seeing things that your average users won't see for a while as I'm particularly close to MS and other companies as a result of my my testing their products and I also follow the industry news very closely which doesn't seem to be something that/. does. This isn't a claim towards omnisence, but simply a statement of fact.
As for AAC and mpg4, I frankly could care less. That is one small piece of the pie when it comes to audio and video. We'll see a gun-fight in the media business as we've seen before about formats and eventually settle down to one particular format after a time. Whether it is an open format or a closed, proprietary, format I have no idea. And, frankly, I don't care. Someone like Jon will come along and open a format despite the best wishes of the format closers. What one man, or many men, can invent, another can deconstruct. If they don't do it, I will.
Which is a curious postition given that MS has moved in so many other areas to support interoperability. That they don't in the Office arena tells us exactly where the cash cow is for them. Personally I think they are shooting themselves in the groin and I will be telling them so. Will they listen? I doubt it.
I went paperless in 1997 and aside from network and systems configuratin information that may or may not be available when I walk up to a system, haven't gone back. That information is kept in a notebook thoughtfully provided by Veritas. New books are bought in the paper format but with the current, I won't call if flood but it is singnificant, release of various titles to electronic formats, I read books as much on my computers as I do in book format. My computer rests on a desk beside my bed so I can read at the desk or in bed.
As for CD's/DVD's, they get exactly one play on my system and that's to image it to my hard drives where I watch them ever after using Daemon. I do own these discs, but I see no reason to wear them out each time I use them and that's true of every disc product. If that's a problem with the copyright holders, frag 'em. I'm already on my fourth set of Diablo II discs, that's enough money sent Blizzard's way, don'tcha think? Ditto the other copyright holders.
As for the article, it'll take time for users to adjust to the new ways of doing things. It always does. I still wander the world setting the time in VCR's {chuckle}.
{Choking on laughter} Yep, you hit that nail on the head, pun intended! "That's interesting" is one of my regulars here quickly followed by "you piece of shjt!";-)
"Oops" hasn't happened in decades. The last time was when I was feeding a deck of 25,000+ cards into the remote job entry station for a statistical modeling program that I came up for the Army Corps of Engineers (at age 14 no less) and the RJE ate several cards. Retyping those cards was no fun at all as it was pure numbers. After that I fed the RJE station several cards diagonally to get that out of its system and it never ate a card again.
Years later I was talking to an IBM systems engineer and he said that I had the right idea. Those mangled cards I let it eat were cleaning the rollers, so I was vindicated. However, at the time everyone looked at me like I was absolutely crazy. Oh well. Here's to "sacrificial cards"!
I'm no atheist, I'm just in the category that admits that I have no idea if there is some being in charge, or who might have created this universe. {Shrug} When I don't know, I don't know and own up to it. Showing me a book and stating it is the gospel truth doesn't mean a durn thing here unless you can prove it. Still, the universe, and everything I look at and study, is rather miraculous. The whys and wherefores matter not a whit. It's beautiful and I'll miss it when I'm gone.
As for listening, a technician or engineer who doesn't listen ends up with a lot of dead people as a result. Arrogance needs to be checked at the door when you don't know something. It's fine when you do, and I'm intellectually arrogant to the bone when I do, but beyond that, it has no place.
That's been true of every tech or engineer I've met. Sometimes it's simply amazed me how a team of total individuals can coalesce into a group to solve a problem without even knowing each other beforehand, even by reputation. It's not like any other field of human endeavor that I've met, especially in the sciences and politics. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.
Completely off the topic, of course, but that happens.
As a matter of fact, no. Hawking developed the theory, which has been confirmed by observation, that due to particle/anti-particle formation at the Schwartzild radius, such quantum black-holes will disappear within a few nano-seconds, milliseconds at best. Jerry Pournelle had an excellent write-up about it titled "Black Holes Are Fuzzy But Have No Hair" way back when but it doesn't seem to be on the 'net sad to say.
Very nice post. And I will read the Principia Discordia which looks interesting in its own right. ROFLMAO. This article is the most entertainment I've had in months. Thank you!
Actually the intended that all who vote should own property, not necessarily land, and property included tools. Frankly I don't have a problem with that at all. People who own property, tools or land, tend to be more interested in the political process as a whole. Right now we are in the bread and circuses stage of history and it isn't working out very well as it didn't work out well for Rome or any other civilization.
As for they being white, well they had a real problem back then with the slave owning states and that was the compromise that they came up with to get the Constitution adopted. They deferred it for another day and we got a Civil War as partially the result. Politics is about compromise and an ugly compromise it was.
Nope, just inconsistent in an inconsistent universe. I go by what works. Heck, as an engineer, I have to and that applies to societal structures, politics, and all the arenas of human interaction.
I'd still like to know what the hypocrisy is here. Jefferson and Madison also used the same approach as near as I can determine from their writings in the "Federalist Papers" (Madison) and elsewhere.
I've been lucky in this life with the mentors that I've had thankfully. Everything from a cigar smoking English Lady who taught me more than I thought I knew about statistics to a flaming Marxist who taught me more than I thought I knew about Critical Thinking (which should be required in all schools). Life has been good to me in the people I've learned from.
Now if you want my current mentor and intellectual equal, I give you Dr. Walter E. Williams. Oh my!
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why when I doing something dangerous, like cruising the Blackhat underground, I use a virtual machine (or container) with a fresh snapshot before I set out. Handy beasts if you have the machine for it and the right level of paranoia.
Why people feel the need to shove something down other people's throats or evangelically browbeat them is a mystery to me. I'm here to solve people's problems, not make life more difficult. I present the options that are within their budget, explain the distinctions without bias, then let them decide. BTW, since they have made an investment (client buy-in), I've also found they are willing to put more time into learning their systems and learning about protecting themselves. I sometimes think we, the geek community, are our own worst enemy! Sheesh.
Not a single client of mine in over ten years has caught a worm or a virus. Users can learn, you just have to have patience and put it in terms they can understand. It also helps to reach out to their circle of friends to make sure that they are following safe practices as well. Unfortunately, I've noticed that all too many of my geek friends have neither the patience nor the willingness to speak anything resembling normal English or in terms people can relate to when talking about this subject. Sorry, but that's the truth.
As for the technique, every loving file on my Windows boxen are MD5 checksummed and the master list is kept in an encrypted volume along with all my NDA stuff using DriveCrypt. If I have any reason to suspect something has tinkered with on my systems, and once a month no matter what along with other major maintenance, I do a diff on checksums. It's not hard, just a bit of tedium until you script it, just as with monitoring log files. I consider it right up there with my regular virus checks despite the fact that my security policies here would prevent one from even getting into a system in the first place. Insurance (risk management).
Sorry, but you the (l)user have to give the openings before something happens now. Actually, with my setup here (WS2003Ent.), Firefox is the least secure browser I have which is strange to say the least. It's still my preferred browser though. I just had to put a proxy in front of it to filter out the active content, unless the site is granted permission, and tweak some settings away from the defaults.
Actually all it means is that the markets expect the Fed to increase short term rates but that within a short period of time they expect a reversal, i.e. an inflationary or rate spike is expected in the short term. It's all about expectations. Economics, when you actually get into the guts of how game theory and other fields interface with it, is just as much about psychology as anything else. You can have a lot of fun, or at least I did, working in the multi-disciplinary aspect of the field.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.
However, it wouldn't be our job unless it was an absolute last resort to unass the President. That would be either the Secret Service, who answer to the Secretary of the Treasury, or the FBI, probably their Office of Professional Responsibility, perhaps the least humorous bunch of people on earth when it comes to the law and the Constitution.
Just my $0.02.
One more observation. Did you know that you have to ask permission of the federal courts to sue the VA for, say, malpractice? True. Bitter? Naw.
It all depends on the facts you are looking at and the particular way the data was collected. Go to the BLS site if you are interested in actual hard numbers. They pack a lot of information on that site, but when that's your job, you do have to fill the available time ;-).
It really depends on the culture of the college as to what you can do and get away with, especially the policies of the Dean and the attitude of the instructors. It helps if you have a positive attitude and aren't disruptive. Save your questions for after the class. Works like a charm. Heck, still does and I'm in my fourties now.
Each CD here, except for one's burnt from ISO's such as the various *nix distro's, has a catalog. I create it by dumping the output of a recursive dir or ls -s to a file, fill out the rest of the line with a short description and tuck it into a file with the CD or DVD (I used DVD's now) title. Heck, this is so blindingly obvious it falls into the "well, duh!" category. I've been doing this since the early days of CompuServe as I was a librarian for numerous fora almost from the beginning. Even CompuServe didn't have infinite space.
See my reply in reply to parent. {Sigh}, I should learn to triple check where I'm at when I do something especially after a long night (and day!) of beta-testing. Sorry.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, the memory management code alone is quite different between the two. As a matter of fact, in the PowerPoint slides covering the WS2k3 and Vista memory management code, one of the slides pointed out that the WS2k3 memory management code was backported to Win'XP SP2. Since I do have Win'XP SP2 and WS2k3 SP1 installed side by side on different boot drives, I sometimes like to do a side by side comparison of the two. It's rather interesting in a geeky kind of way and there are more than a few files in System32 that do match, but not all or even most. Now I will grant you that the drivers are exactly the same, but not all the code and especially not the kernal were the same prior to Win'XP SP2.
Sorry, you are quite mistaken. Even at the kernal level they are quite different. Now I will grant that they started from the XP code base initially, but they forked the code as even such things as the memory manager are completely different. The fork occured before the release of XP as I was involved in the early betas of XP and WS2k3 at the same time.
As for AAC and mpg4, I frankly could care less. That is one small piece of the pie when it comes to audio and video. We'll see a gun-fight in the media business as we've seen before about formats and eventually settle down to one particular format after a time. Whether it is an open format or a closed, proprietary, format I have no idea. And, frankly, I don't care. Someone like Jon will come along and open a format despite the best wishes of the format closers. What one man, or many men, can invent, another can deconstruct. If they don't do it, I will.
Which is a curious postition given that MS has moved in so many other areas to support interoperability. That they don't in the Office arena tells us exactly where the cash cow is for them. Personally I think they are shooting themselves in the groin and I will be telling them so. Will they listen? I doubt it.
As for CD's/DVD's, they get exactly one play on my system and that's to image it to my hard drives where I watch them ever after using Daemon. I do own these discs, but I see no reason to wear them out each time I use them and that's true of every disc product. If that's a problem with the copyright holders, frag 'em. I'm already on my fourth set of Diablo II discs, that's enough money sent Blizzard's way, don'tcha think? Ditto the other copyright holders.
As for the article, it'll take time for users to adjust to the new ways of doing things. It always does. I still wander the world setting the time in VCR's {chuckle}.
"Oops" hasn't happened in decades. The last time was when I was feeding a deck of 25,000+ cards into the remote job entry station for a statistical modeling program that I came up for the Army Corps of Engineers (at age 14 no less) and the RJE ate several cards. Retyping those cards was no fun at all as it was pure numbers. After that I fed the RJE station several cards diagonally to get that out of its system and it never ate a card again.
Years later I was talking to an IBM systems engineer and he said that I had the right idea. Those mangled cards I let it eat were cleaning the rollers, so I was vindicated. However, at the time everyone looked at me like I was absolutely crazy. Oh well. Here's to "sacrificial cards"!
How's that for off-topic?
As for listening, a technician or engineer who doesn't listen ends up with a lot of dead people as a result. Arrogance needs to be checked at the door when you don't know something. It's fine when you do, and I'm intellectually arrogant to the bone when I do, but beyond that, it has no place.
That's been true of every tech or engineer I've met. Sometimes it's simply amazed me how a team of total individuals can coalesce into a group to solve a problem without even knowing each other beforehand, even by reputation. It's not like any other field of human endeavor that I've met, especially in the sciences and politics. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.
Completely off the topic, of course, but that happens.
As a matter of fact, no. Hawking developed the theory, which has been confirmed by observation, that due to particle/anti-particle formation at the Schwartzild radius, such quantum black-holes will disappear within a few nano-seconds, milliseconds at best. Jerry Pournelle had an excellent write-up about it titled "Black Holes Are Fuzzy But Have No Hair" way back when but it doesn't seem to be on the 'net sad to say.
Can I lift that for a tagline? That's priceless. Clarke's Law cubed!
Very nice post. And I will read the Principia Discordia which looks interesting in its own right. ROFLMAO. This article is the most entertainment I've had in months. Thank you!
As for they being white, well they had a real problem back then with the slave owning states and that was the compromise that they came up with to get the Constitution adopted. They deferred it for another day and we got a Civil War as partially the result. Politics is about compromise and an ugly compromise it was.
I'd still like to know what the hypocrisy is here. Jefferson and Madison also used the same approach as near as I can determine from their writings in the "Federalist Papers" (Madison) and elsewhere.
I've been lucky in this life with the mentors that I've had thankfully. Everything from a cigar smoking English Lady who taught me more than I thought I knew about statistics to a flaming Marxist who taught me more than I thought I knew about Critical Thinking (which should be required in all schools). Life has been good to me in the people I've learned from.
Now if you want my current mentor and intellectual equal, I give you Dr. Walter E. Williams. Oh my!