"Again, the only recourse is to refuse to buy Sony products until a VP is fired. Nothing else will work."
I agree - to an extent. Do you *really* believe that your senior managers need to know every technical detail of every product you have? I don't. They are there to manage, not to know the minutae of code. I suspect in Sony's case, some high up manager said "make sure our new CDs have some sort of copy protection on them" to one of his minions. From there, the message got passed down the chain, maybe through 5 or 6 people. Yes, the buck stops at the top, but is firing really the solution? Will firing a VP or two actually make a difference? Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not advocating what Sony have done - I think it's absolutely appalling. I also expect to see a lot of virii and spyware writers jump on the back of this and begin to copycat Sony - and things are bad enough already. I think one of the things Sony SHOULD do is issue a statement saying they made a mistake and that they are sorry. I also think that they should release a patch freely available on their website - none of this silly sign-up-an-email address cr*p. Will that happen? Who knows...
Yes...the bodies of mice. In all seriousness, every so often we get the most awful smell in our server room. That's when we call Rentokil, and they inevitably find the bodies of dead mice in our raised flooring in our server room. Bear in mind it's a couple of floors up....when people said to me "you are never more than 10 foot away from a rat when you are in London" I took it to mean horizontal distance, and not *actual* distance (I didn't imagine that many rats lived on every floor of buildings...)
Actually, there were a lot of plans which people put togther in the wake of 9/11 in case London ever did get bombed, and I for one have a lot of praise for the way the emergency services handled the situation. I think any attempt to improve security is a good thing (although you are right when you say it's a bit late...) however, I don't think there is an awful lot you can do - you cannot feasibly search every person coming into London.
As an offside, I'd like to know how they are going to install these scanners - anyone who works in central London will know how congested stations can get, so I hope that they don't reduce throughflow as this will make the tube even more of a nightmare than it is already.
Depends on the size of the station....some have multiple entrances serving multiple lines, some have one entrance with only one line. As part of the tube is now privatised, and not all the stations were owned by the tube anyway (there are a few which have always been owned by British Rail), I'd be interested to see if they all adopt this technology - I know that my local station (BR owned) didn't adopt the ticket machine entry for a good few years after it was standard at most other stations.
Not necessarily. I'm not a mathematician...however, if you take the stopping distances required for each speed, and you then take the theoretical distance that you should leave behind yourself and the car in front (dependent on the speeds you are travelling) there will be a point where increasing your speed will actually reduce the amount of cars who can use that piece of road in a given time (assuming that everyone sticks to the theoretical distances.....I know that in the UK, hardly anyone does:o( )
Someone once told me that the best speed for cars to be travelling to enable the most cars to use the road was a tad over 50MPH....could be complete BS though;o)
It breaks a lot of bespoke applications which run across networks and WANs. Also, it's hard for people who use remote access programs as if the firewall gets turned on, you can't connect into the PC. If you have a lot of different sites (we have 52), it's really hard to talk non technical people through turning the firewall off - yes, we document how to do it, but a lot of the office managers won't do a thing unless you are on the phone with them. It's not just pure laziness either - we've put SP2 on hold because we are in the middle of a migration and we don't have enough time to have one of us talking every office manager through how to turn the firewall off so that we can access all our PCs again.
Actually, the University I go to already uses computers for marking/grading in some courses. Half of our assignments are "standard" assignments and are marked by our tutors. The other half, we fill out a specialised form which gets fed through a computer and our grades come out the other end. It's not perfect - you won't get marks for "working", and you have to use the right grade of pencil otherwise the computer can't read your form properly, but it saves a lot of time and you get your results a lot faster.
Some people around my town are collecting on the streets. They wear no ID and when questioned, are elusive about which charity they are collecting for. I've seen some kids pocketing the money before, which is why I don't give to people on the streets. It does make you wonder how many of these collectors are real, and how much money is being lost.
The firm I work for use Outlook heavily - the personal calendars are used so that any secretary can book appointments into any consultants diaries (if they have appropriate permissions). I'm guessing that this feature is used heavily in a lot of firms. Mail is probably used as equally as the calendar functions are. We also use Blackberries and Palm tops - from the software installs we use, most installs seem to only really support Lotus Notes (bleugh) and Outlook, and this is another reason why we use Outlook - for connectivity away from the office. If a mail client didn't have these features, there's no way big firms like ours would even think of changing
I worked with one of them....I suspect if an email came in to my old IT Manager from Sco, she would buy them as not all IT Managers bother to read IT news, even news which might affect them (they ran a Sco box for their business software). I'm sure that however Sco contacted these people, they used persuasive wording and wouldn't mention the fact that they haven't beaten IBM yet. Even if they lost, I'm sure many of these people would still be none the wiser.
What about if you break a cheekbone or your nose? The article states that thousands of points are measured on your face and the system remembers the "geograpahy" of your face. I'm not a doctor, but I'm sure if you break a bone, there's no guarantee that it will heal in exactly the same way as it was before, so surely your facial structure will change, and the system may not recognise you?
Yes, people don't like to have to validate their game. And what about those of us who don't have internet access at home?! OK, so there's probably not many of us, however they have already lost a small percentages of sales because of this. I was a huge HL/CS fan and would love to buy HL2, but as you need a Net conn...well...I obviously won't be buying it now!
Is this not very similar to what NASA are doing? NASA's is free, but I think Google's has a much better resolution and can zoom in more detail.
However, I remember a while back NASA saying they would probably support Open Source in the near future with their project?
But mainly it's a lack of trust Absolutely...recently, the tax office over here "lost" a whole bunch of tax records for a huge amount of people. And no, they can't recover the lost data. Whilst I admit that this is not strictly speaking "government", to me, they boil down to the same thing. It worries me that they obviously haven't got simple safeguards in place, so what will happen if ID cards go ahead? If they can't be bothered with backups, are they really going to be all that bothered about the security of the data they hold?!
My first computer had an OS which was just under 4k in size.
I was actually given it as a present, but I *think* that it cost (in todays money) around £5000.
I work for a company where the bosses want "free Internet access for all". They are uninformed of the risks which is why they have chosen this route. Trying to educate them is pointless as they have made their decision and they don't want to listen - even though our entire network has come down a couple of times due to people opening up attachements in hotmail. Sometimes, you know what the ideal is, however achieving it is nearly impossible when you can't make the people who "matter" listen.
I'm not convinced it is looking up all that much.
The job market in the UK at the moment is not great, particularly if you are newly qualified. Many people are looking for you to have a good degree, and at least 3 MCP/CCNA etc qualifications, plus 3 years in industry. And they'll pay you £16k for the pleasure. I'm lucky in that I've found a company who employed me even though I had no formal qualifications whatsoever. Many of my friends have not been so lucky, and have ended up taking jobs that are non-IT related because there too many grads and not enough jobs.
I went to an all girls school. We had lots of computers, but we were actively discouraged from persuing computer-related subjects at University level. Even in computer class, we learnt to touch type, and that was about it. Asking questions was met with a dirty look and a hurried explanation that never actually answered your question. I think this is an attitude that quite a few schools like mine have adopted - I know our school wanted us all to be lawyers and medics....computers are not seen to be a thing that girls can do. When I mention I'm in computers now, people froom school tend to assume I'm doing data input, or working with sales of computers...
If any computing professional uses less than 1% of what was taught (not necessarily what was learned) then they probably shouldn't call them selves computing professoinals.
Just out of interest why? I do my job, and I do it competantly. Admittedly, I'm doing an IT and Computing degree rather than CS degree. However, to date, I have learnt Smalltalk, Artificial Intelligence techniques, how to design a program and a whole host of random maths. I do not personally believe that I will use much of this knowledge in my job, nor in future jobs. So should I not be calling myself a Computing Professional??
Personally, I don't believe a degree means an awful lot. But, in current times, you definitely need to have one.
I'm currently working as a sys admin, and I'm doing my degree at the same time. I can say that I have used less than 1% of the knowledge I have learnt via my degree in my job. When I get my degree, am I going to be a better sys admin? IMHO, no. However, it will be percieved that I will be able to do my job better....
Frankly, I think the best bet is to encourage users to just select longish (>8 characters), complex password (no word substrings, more than just alphabetic characters, etc), but don't force them to change it. After all, brute-forcing a complex, 8-character password is still a fairly difficult process.
Sometimes, I think the simpler passwords would be easier.
I've just inherited a network which was using 4 character passwords. So I changed it so the users had to use at least 8 chars, 20 password history plus complexity. I spent 2 days solid answering password questions and resetting passwords (bear in mind we only ahve about 50 employees here). Even now, when they have to change passwords, they can't. Quite a few of them I've had to change off the server for them. Which defeats the whole purpose of passwords because not only do I know the password, but anyone who has been listening to my conversation will know the password. They then tell the person next to them their new password in case they forget it. Or they'll write it down on a piece of paper (note that using password1, password2, password3 is not permitted any more) and stick it to their monitor. The more times you ask them to change their password, or the more complexity/length you ask them to have, the more common it is for them to either not be capable of changing their own password, and/or not able to remember it...
Slashdot Mirror
"Again, the only recourse is to refuse to buy Sony products until a VP is fired. Nothing else will work." I agree - to an extent. Do you *really* believe that your senior managers need to know every technical detail of every product you have? I don't. They are there to manage, not to know the minutae of code. I suspect in Sony's case, some high up manager said "make sure our new CDs have some sort of copy protection on them" to one of his minions. From there, the message got passed down the chain, maybe through 5 or 6 people. Yes, the buck stops at the top, but is firing really the solution? Will firing a VP or two actually make a difference? Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not advocating what Sony have done - I think it's absolutely appalling. I also expect to see a lot of virii and spyware writers jump on the back of this and begin to copycat Sony - and things are bad enough already. I think one of the things Sony SHOULD do is issue a statement saying they made a mistake and that they are sorry. I also think that they should release a patch freely available on their website - none of this silly sign-up-an-email address cr*p. Will that happen? Who knows...
Yes...the bodies of mice. In all seriousness, every so often we get the most awful smell in our server room. That's when we call Rentokil, and they inevitably find the bodies of dead mice in our raised flooring in our server room. Bear in mind it's a couple of floors up....when people said to me "you are never more than 10 foot away from a rat when you are in London" I took it to mean horizontal distance, and not *actual* distance (I didn't imagine that many rats lived on every floor of buildings...)
Actually, there were a lot of plans which people put togther in the wake of 9/11 in case London ever did get bombed, and I for one have a lot of praise for the way the emergency services handled the situation. I think any attempt to improve security is a good thing (although you are right when you say it's a bit late...) however, I don't think there is an awful lot you can do - you cannot feasibly search every person coming into London.
As an offside, I'd like to know how they are going to install these scanners - anyone who works in central London will know how congested stations can get, so I hope that they don't reduce throughflow as this will make the tube even more of a nightmare than it is already.
Depends on the size of the station....some have multiple entrances serving multiple lines, some have one entrance with only one line. As part of the tube is now privatised, and not all the stations were owned by the tube anyway (there are a few which have always been owned by British Rail), I'd be interested to see if they all adopt this technology - I know that my local station (BR owned) didn't adopt the ticket machine entry for a good few years after it was standard at most other stations.
Not necessarily. I'm not a mathematician...however, if you take the stopping distances required for each speed, and you then take the theoretical distance that you should leave behind yourself and the car in front (dependent on the speeds you are travelling) there will be a point where increasing your speed will actually reduce the amount of cars who can use that piece of road in a given time (assuming that everyone sticks to the theoretical distances.....I know that in the UK, hardly anyone does :o( )
;o)
Someone once told me that the best speed for cars to be travelling to enable the most cars to use the road was a tad over 50MPH....could be complete BS though
It breaks a lot of bespoke applications which run across networks and WANs. Also, it's hard for people who use remote access programs as if the firewall gets turned on, you can't connect into the PC. If you have a lot of different sites (we have 52), it's really hard to talk non technical people through turning the firewall off - yes, we document how to do it, but a lot of the office managers won't do a thing unless you are on the phone with them. It's not just pure laziness either - we've put SP2 on hold because we are in the middle of a migration and we don't have enough time to have one of us talking every office manager through how to turn the firewall off so that we can access all our PCs again.
Actually, the University I go to already uses computers for marking/grading in some courses. Half of our assignments are "standard" assignments and are marked by our tutors. The other half, we fill out a specialised form which gets fed through a computer and our grades come out the other end. It's not perfect - you won't get marks for "working", and you have to use the right grade of pencil otherwise the computer can't read your form properly, but it saves a lot of time and you get your results a lot faster.
Some people around my town are collecting on the streets. They wear no ID and when questioned, are elusive about which charity they are collecting for. I've seen some kids pocketing the money before, which is why I don't give to people on the streets. It does make you wonder how many of these collectors are real, and how much money is being lost.
The firm I work for use Outlook heavily - the personal calendars are used so that any secretary can book appointments into any consultants diaries (if they have appropriate permissions). I'm guessing that this feature is used heavily in a lot of firms. Mail is probably used as equally as the calendar functions are. We also use Blackberries and Palm tops - from the software installs we use, most installs seem to only really support Lotus Notes (bleugh) and Outlook, and this is another reason why we use Outlook - for connectivity away from the office. If a mail client didn't have these features, there's no way big firms like ours would even think of changing
I worked with one of them....I suspect if an email came in to my old IT Manager from Sco, she would buy them as not all IT Managers bother to read IT news, even news which might affect them (they ran a Sco box for their business software). I'm sure that however Sco contacted these people, they used persuasive wording and wouldn't mention the fact that they haven't beaten IBM yet. Even if they lost, I'm sure many of these people would still be none the wiser.
What about if you break a cheekbone or your nose? The article states that thousands of points are measured on your face and the system remembers the "geograpahy" of your face. I'm not a doctor, but I'm sure if you break a bone, there's no guarantee that it will heal in exactly the same way as it was before, so surely your facial structure will change, and the system may not recognise you?
Yes, people don't like to have to validate their game. And what about those of us who don't have internet access at home?! OK, so there's probably not many of us, however they have already lost a small percentages of sales because of this. I was a huge HL/CS fan and would love to buy HL2, but as you need a Net conn...well...I obviously won't be buying it now!
Is this not very similar to what NASA are doing? NASA's is free, but I think Google's has a much better resolution and can zoom in more detail. However, I remember a while back NASA saying they would probably support Open Source in the near future with their project?
But mainly it's a lack of trust Absolutely...recently, the tax office over here "lost" a whole bunch of tax records for a huge amount of people. And no, they can't recover the lost data. Whilst I admit that this is not strictly speaking "government", to me, they boil down to the same thing. It worries me that they obviously haven't got simple safeguards in place, so what will happen if ID cards go ahead? If they can't be bothered with backups, are they really going to be all that bothered about the security of the data they hold?!
My first computer had an OS which was just under 4k in size. I was actually given it as a present, but I *think* that it cost (in todays money) around £5000.
I work for a company where the bosses want "free Internet access for all". They are uninformed of the risks which is why they have chosen this route. Trying to educate them is pointless as they have made their decision and they don't want to listen - even though our entire network has come down a couple of times due to people opening up attachements in hotmail. Sometimes, you know what the ideal is, however achieving it is nearly impossible when you can't make the people who "matter" listen.
I'm not convinced it is looking up all that much. The job market in the UK at the moment is not great, particularly if you are newly qualified. Many people are looking for you to have a good degree, and at least 3 MCP/CCNA etc qualifications, plus 3 years in industry. And they'll pay you £16k for the pleasure. I'm lucky in that I've found a company who employed me even though I had no formal qualifications whatsoever. Many of my friends have not been so lucky, and have ended up taking jobs that are non-IT related because there too many grads and not enough jobs.
I went to an all girls school. We had lots of computers, but we were actively discouraged from persuing computer-related subjects at University level. Even in computer class, we learnt to touch type, and that was about it. Asking questions was met with a dirty look and a hurried explanation that never actually answered your question. I think this is an attitude that quite a few schools like mine have adopted - I know our school wanted us all to be lawyers and medics....computers are not seen to be a thing that girls can do. When I mention I'm in computers now, people froom school tend to assume I'm doing data input, or working with sales of computers...
If any computing professional uses less than 1% of what was taught (not necessarily what was learned) then they probably shouldn't call them selves computing professoinals. Just out of interest why? I do my job, and I do it competantly. Admittedly, I'm doing an IT and Computing degree rather than CS degree. However, to date, I have learnt Smalltalk, Artificial Intelligence techniques, how to design a program and a whole host of random maths. I do not personally believe that I will use much of this knowledge in my job, nor in future jobs. So should I not be calling myself a Computing Professional??
Personally, I don't believe a degree means an awful lot. But, in current times, you definitely need to have one. I'm currently working as a sys admin, and I'm doing my degree at the same time. I can say that I have used less than 1% of the knowledge I have learnt via my degree in my job. When I get my degree, am I going to be a better sys admin? IMHO, no. However, it will be percieved that I will be able to do my job better....
I have dial up. On a two hour cut off basis. I'm thinking my system may stay unpatched !
Frankly, I think the best bet is to encourage users to just select longish (>8 characters), complex password (no word substrings, more than just alphabetic characters, etc), but don't force them to change it. After all, brute-forcing a complex, 8-character password is still a fairly difficult process. Sometimes, I think the simpler passwords would be easier. I've just inherited a network which was using 4 character passwords. So I changed it so the users had to use at least 8 chars, 20 password history plus complexity. I spent 2 days solid answering password questions and resetting passwords (bear in mind we only ahve about 50 employees here). Even now, when they have to change passwords, they can't. Quite a few of them I've had to change off the server for them. Which defeats the whole purpose of passwords because not only do I know the password, but anyone who has been listening to my conversation will know the password. They then tell the person next to them their new password in case they forget it. Or they'll write it down on a piece of paper (note that using password1, password2, password3 is not permitted any more) and stick it to their monitor. The more times you ask them to change their password, or the more complexity/length you ask them to have, the more common it is for them to either not be capable of changing their own password, and/or not able to remember it...