I agree that for some desktop applications (like web browsing) it's useless. However for some other applications like content creation (movie or photo editing) or consuming (video playback, video chat with presentations) it is nicer to have a full screen available as in your random video game so you're not distracted by your e-mail counter or other random things that happen.
As you said, multitasking is hard and it's sometimes nicer to even work on a document or e-mail and simply have some type of solid, dark colored background away from all the apps that scream for your attention. Well implemented, your chat will detect it and put you on Away and other applications might not make a notification noise.
Mouse tracking is not an issue, just put your mouse sensitivity and acceleration higher. I can go from the left to the right on my 24" display with about a half inch movement of my thumb (trackball). In the beginning it's a bit odd but you get used to it. Also learn to use the keystrokes for your most used functions.
The problem with your statement is that you would need to create highly user-tailored applications in order to achieve this which is not feasible in the current programming model. Maybe when computers program for us (and can interpret our wishes) we could make such a thing happen where the program is stripped down to fit our needs but for now, we need to live with a stripped down, uniform version.
The iPad is great but costly. Androids in general have been sluggish in UI response and are somehow always behind the curve of the latest Android OS because the tablet makers don't want to bother with building an update for it. Too many tablet makers jumped on the ship of building an imitation iPad, few actually built a worthwhile tablet.
What I do want to use such knock-off tablets for is for home control - mount the thing against the wall or in your shower for intermediate touch screen access. Can't justify that at $500+ but I could definitely do it at $100-200. The electronics should be cheap enough, most of them are completely plastic and have shitty backlighting, are missing Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi and all the neat stuff that would make them expensive.
For the $15,000 it costs for one of those machines (they are nice and well worth the price if you need those features), you can easily buy 5-10 of the white box servers and a couple of VMWare licenses to shift around the VM's while they are running. The techniques used in the Sun (Oracle) machines were/are nice if you need big iron-style stuff like the financial sector but for most other applications they are outdone these days by smarter software.
Instead of rsync, use rdiff-backup. It's GREAT for keeping track of backups. For offsite storage there are so many to chose from. rsync.net, Amazon, BackBlaze, colocation,...
Isn't Azimov dead? Who is preventing anyone from publishing it? I have e-books from Einstein through the Gutenberg project. Oh wait, copyright. The problem is not the publishers, the problem is the copyright.
Any scientist that unnecessarily restricts education should not be funded by the government imho.
For a brute force attack, not for a dictionary attack. The passwords used in these compromised accounts seem to be simple dictionary attacks. These days dictionary attacks do include variations of numbers and characters on common passwords.
We told user to reject the password because of Kevin Mitnick. He used social engineering very well to get somewhere. Just impersonate someone and say "read me the modem numbers" or "the number on that sticky note" and you're in.
It also doesn't help against phishing attacks. What we need is a 3rd token (not something you know but something you have or are) for financial transactions. Could easily be handled with distributed authentication - you use a provider that gives you the right amount of security you want (or want to pay for) or you can do it yourself if you're paranoid.
If you can, replace the light fixture with one that allows for more directional lights (spot lights). There are some globe LED's but they're not as good. I use CFL's there as well.
Hot water heater on electricity? Unless you live in Europe or you generate your own electricity, it's going to be more expensive. You can get one of those more expensive electric water heaters (or add-ons) that use the hot air in your house to heat the water.
As far as the lights go, I put our outside lights on X10 as well as most of our downstairs lights. It is now regulated by dusk/dawn and X10 controls (turn it on and off randomly throughout the night). If the alarm goes on, I have a script running that turns everything else off.
TV's (even LED) sometimes vary wildly in power usage. You may save $50-150 on the cheaper units but their energy usage is often 50% higher as well. Also use fans instead of air conditioners during cool nights. I replaced all my air conditioners with one large 220V unit, a lot more BTU and less power usage (and more balanced as well) and put in fans in the bedrooms. If the air is cool enough at night, you just turn on the fans, the lower levels pulling air in, some pushing air out (heat rises) and it can easily drop 3-4 degrees in an hour in the middle of summer.
Lights these days should not the major energy expense anymore. I have a fairly large house and all-in-all less than 1kW of lights (LED's and CFL's combined, LED's in areas that are often lit, CFL's in places where nobody ever comes like storage rooms).
My biggest expense ($25/month total) is my computer habit and air conditioning. But air conditioning will get cheaper as I got a 220V system that can single-handedly cool most of the house. The previous 110V systems combined used 1.5x the energy for 75% of the BTU.
Did you ever enforce minimum security standard passwords? First if you just add some complexity (eg. require digits or mixed case), they'll just use the same password and change or add 1 character to satisfy your needs. Once they get complicated enough, people start writing them down or keeping them in plain text files on their desktop or worse, on sticky notes or digital sticky notes that are always open.
Well, the problem with contact lists (in large companies at least) is that they are maintained by secretaries. If somebody then makes the mistake of typing seibm.com instead of se.ibm.com, EVERYBODY sends the wrong e-mail for hours if not days until it gets discovered.
The problem with commercial games is they stopped innovating. They want to churn out as much polygons as possible in as little times possible. Look at most games these days, it seems like the management just told the developers: take the Unreal/Quake/whatever engine, change the models and the backgrounds, add a few triggers and release it. Bug testing, bah, we'll just charge them for some DLC to fix the major bugs. Next year we'll just release a complete patch with a few new levels and call it BoringGame 2.
There are of course the few good ones - Blizzard until they got taken over by Activision released nice commercial, playable games. They continue working on it before and after release. Not that they're currently all bad but Activision seems to put pressure on them to release games like Diablo III without offline gameplay and even the SC2 content is being released staggered at full price per expansion pack.
A lot of indie games are a lot like the old games, they don't have access to the latest frame rate generator so they have to do something that makes their story or gameplay stand out. Minecraft looks like crap, Trine is a 2D scroller but in the end they're fun to play, bring unique game play and even if you don't like them, it's not like you lost $50 or $100, sometimes the investment is as low as $5, even if the game sucks or is too short, you can buy 10 games and you're bound to have 3 or 4 good ones.
I don't know how they calculate the odds, but 1 in 3500 is only twice as likely as you getting in a car accident. You also have to look at the number of incidents - we drive around with millions of cars and you have about 1 in 7000 chance to be in a car accident. There is 1 satellite falling and you have about 1 in 3500 chances of getting hit by it.
I think the odds are more than 1 in 21 trillion. The earth surface is 510,072,000 sq. km, 70% of that is water. This thing will probably destroy IF it hits land AND does not burn up completely in the atmosphere (whatever the chances of a sizable chunk falling to the ground are) affect at most about 0.01% of a sq. km. All humans together take up at most 7000 sq. km. (calculated at 1 sq. m per human). You are in 7 billion people.
Plus, we can probably precisely calculate where it will fall approx. and unless that falls into a very densely populated area (like say, NYC) we can clear the area of any humans for the timeframe we expect it to be there. Also, we could shoot it if we know it is going to fall and not burn with a missile high in the atmosphere and break it up further. Shouldn't be too hard for a couple of fighter jets to intercept it, they can shoot other flying stuff from hundreds of miles away.
Run softwareupdate -i -a from the command line. You won't ever need to restart although sometimes, if you do that, the applications you updated might not start (eg. iTunes and Safari).
Restart is necessary so it can reload the correct kernel extensions and clear out the applications that have it in-use. It's not super important in most cases but even if you unload/reload the kext files you could make the system unstable or make it panic. I usually don't restart the system especially the server systems for the simple application updates and even sometimes keep my clients alive (because someone's logged in or forgot to log out) - until the user complains that a component won't start or work.
The only way they can guarantee this is by making clear contracts. If you want to take over T-Mobile, for the next 10 year you are to license the spectrum freed to anyone newcomer that is not a spinoff or daughter of AT&T for free. Maximum prices should be established and follow the cost of wholesale bandwidth for the next 50 years. Also, no phones on the GSM network should be locked to the carrier unless more than 3 nationwide GSM carriers exist. Non-negotiable, non-refundable.
Buy a freakin' breast pump of the shelf. It's ~$200 for a really nice one, $50 for the hand pumps. The only difference between 'hospital grade' and 'consumer grade' is that consumer grade lasts for about 2-3 babies and the pump mechanism is not separated so if multiple people use it, diseases could spread.
I am also wondering how much a hearing aid would cost if you just built it yourself. I mean, the electronics shouldn't be that hard (at the very basic, a miniature microphone, op-amp, battery and a miniature speaker would give you an 80s-style hearing aid) even if you want a microprocessor, you can always mimic a bluetooth headset and make it a tad bigger - BT headsets are what, $20 these days so you should be able to build it even in small numbers for under $500. Maybe it wouldn't be FDA approved but neither are those TV/Church crap hearing aids they sell to old people and can be found in the $5 bin at your average department store.
Many Mac/Win sysadmin may not know that you can control just about any Mac application using LDAP or Active Directory.
You can add/System/Library/CoreServices/Managed Client.app to WGM and you'll gain access to a lot of the MCX which you can then modify and apply to your groups. A lot of other Applications can be added as well and the settings managed like AD's Group Policy but a bit easier to use.
There are also Kerberos Ticket viewers, you can run security on command line to manage SSL Certificates.
Also install the Developer Tools for some nifty utilities, BlueTooth sniffers, Audio Lab which with you can fairly simple create a little application that can capture and send system audio over the network to another computer.
PWC from my experience don't do real audits. They're more like an insurance company. They may send out a drone that knows nothing about what he's supposed to be checking but the gross of the money you pay them probably goes to a fund in case you have a breach and sue PWC.
I think that may be true of a lot of other audit companies. There are few audit companies that actually do penetration testing etc.
Anyone with any guidance on WHAT happened? If the CA authority has suspicions, they should be as open as possible about it. We don't know what happened and I NEED to know (as I have people here that deal with sensitive projects and often travel into areas that have shown to be hostile towards privacy).
Do you really think that your phone line stretches all the way out to the receiver? As soon as it hits the box in your street, it goes over IP these days even if you're sending it to your neighbor. That's also how they know how much to bill you.
E-mail can be made secure with certificates and encryption. Fax cannot be made secure. A good e-mail system will thus be superior according to HIPAA standards than fax.
Also, it's easy to open and cut into the box hanging at the outside of an office building or house. Much easier and less noticeable imho than hacking and viruses.
Any decent office-grade all-in-one actually can send e-mail. I understand that some people need a little machine that does everything for them from start to end but they exist, people just need to be tought about it.
What we need is better interfaces on scanners especially Ethernet ones. I have an Ethernet scanner in my office but I still need to go back to my desk to make it do things.
The idea of identity on the Internet does not work. People have to stop using SSL certificates as a form of identity. They're there to secure a transaction. There are plenty of other ways even with valid certificates to trick a client (or end-user) into trusting a host (slightly different domain name, unicode tricks,...).
If you want to confirm identity between two parties you have to use 2 and 3-way, multi-channel authentication in both ways. That is more expensive than the current user-password and even user>-image because anyone can retrieve those images after a username is entered.
I've learned to type on AZERTY but have for most of my professional life used QWERTY. I had a stint with DVORAK but we techies type code and e-mails, not prose (although it would be much easier if either looked more like prose). The people that should benefit from DVORAK (are there any actual scientific tests that prove it is better?) have probably never heard there are different keyboard layouts in the world or how you can change them.
In the mean time, for most intents and purposes I want a keyboard I can smash someone in the head with. The Apple Keyboards are fine if you don't have much space and the one on my MacBook Pro is large enough too especially with the adaptive backlight. But all other manufacturers should follow the above 3 examples. Make it big enough for me not to feel cramped, make it small enough to fit in a tight space, make it beneficial in any circumstance you use a laptop in or DON'T MAKE IT.
Microsoft & Logitech, I'm talking to you. What are those little rubber buttons on the top of my keyboard - couldn't integrate them with the Function Keys - I have to lift my hand on top of a ridge to play music? Dell, why does the keyboard keep falling off it's little feet? HP, what the f* where you thinking with your dinky mess - it drops off someone's desk and the keys pop off? Toshiba, why are the multimedia/system controls lit up with a bright red or blue LED that has a reflection on the screen but there is no backlight especially since you have a totally awkward layout for the dead keys?
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I agree that for some desktop applications (like web browsing) it's useless. However for some other applications like content creation (movie or photo editing) or consuming (video playback, video chat with presentations) it is nicer to have a full screen available as in your random video game so you're not distracted by your e-mail counter or other random things that happen.
As you said, multitasking is hard and it's sometimes nicer to even work on a document or e-mail and simply have some type of solid, dark colored background away from all the apps that scream for your attention. Well implemented, your chat will detect it and put you on Away and other applications might not make a notification noise.
Mouse tracking is not an issue, just put your mouse sensitivity and acceleration higher. I can go from the left to the right on my 24" display with about a half inch movement of my thumb (trackball). In the beginning it's a bit odd but you get used to it. Also learn to use the keystrokes for your most used functions.
The problem with your statement is that you would need to create highly user-tailored applications in order to achieve this which is not feasible in the current programming model. Maybe when computers program for us (and can interpret our wishes) we could make such a thing happen where the program is stripped down to fit our needs but for now, we need to live with a stripped down, uniform version.
The iPad is great but costly. Androids in general have been sluggish in UI response and are somehow always behind the curve of the latest Android OS because the tablet makers don't want to bother with building an update for it. Too many tablet makers jumped on the ship of building an imitation iPad, few actually built a worthwhile tablet.
What I do want to use such knock-off tablets for is for home control - mount the thing against the wall or in your shower for intermediate touch screen access. Can't justify that at $500+ but I could definitely do it at $100-200. The electronics should be cheap enough, most of them are completely plastic and have shitty backlighting, are missing Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi and all the neat stuff that would make them expensive.
For the $15,000 it costs for one of those machines (they are nice and well worth the price if you need those features), you can easily buy 5-10 of the white box servers and a couple of VMWare licenses to shift around the VM's while they are running. The techniques used in the Sun (Oracle) machines were/are nice if you need big iron-style stuff like the financial sector but for most other applications they are outdone these days by smarter software.
Instead of rsync, use rdiff-backup. It's GREAT for keeping track of backups. For offsite storage there are so many to chose from. rsync.net, Amazon, BackBlaze, colocation, ...
Isn't Azimov dead? Who is preventing anyone from publishing it? I have e-books from Einstein through the Gutenberg project. Oh wait, copyright. The problem is not the publishers, the problem is the copyright.
Any scientist that unnecessarily restricts education should not be funded by the government imho.
For a brute force attack, not for a dictionary attack. The passwords used in these compromised accounts seem to be simple dictionary attacks. These days dictionary attacks do include variations of numbers and characters on common passwords.
We told user to reject the password because of Kevin Mitnick. He used social engineering very well to get somewhere. Just impersonate someone and say "read me the modem numbers" or "the number on that sticky note" and you're in.
It also doesn't help against phishing attacks. What we need is a 3rd token (not something you know but something you have or are) for financial transactions. Could easily be handled with distributed authentication - you use a provider that gives you the right amount of security you want (or want to pay for) or you can do it yourself if you're paranoid.
If you can, replace the light fixture with one that allows for more directional lights (spot lights). There are some globe LED's but they're not as good. I use CFL's there as well.
Hot water heater on electricity? Unless you live in Europe or you generate your own electricity, it's going to be more expensive. You can get one of those more expensive electric water heaters (or add-ons) that use the hot air in your house to heat the water.
As far as the lights go, I put our outside lights on X10 as well as most of our downstairs lights. It is now regulated by dusk/dawn and X10 controls (turn it on and off randomly throughout the night). If the alarm goes on, I have a script running that turns everything else off.
TV's (even LED) sometimes vary wildly in power usage. You may save $50-150 on the cheaper units but their energy usage is often 50% higher as well. Also use fans instead of air conditioners during cool nights. I replaced all my air conditioners with one large 220V unit, a lot more BTU and less power usage (and more balanced as well) and put in fans in the bedrooms. If the air is cool enough at night, you just turn on the fans, the lower levels pulling air in, some pushing air out (heat rises) and it can easily drop 3-4 degrees in an hour in the middle of summer.
Lights these days should not the major energy expense anymore. I have a fairly large house and all-in-all less than 1kW of lights (LED's and CFL's combined, LED's in areas that are often lit, CFL's in places where nobody ever comes like storage rooms).
My biggest expense ($25/month total) is my computer habit and air conditioning. But air conditioning will get cheaper as I got a 220V system that can single-handedly cool most of the house. The previous 110V systems combined used 1.5x the energy for 75% of the BTU.
Did you ever enforce minimum security standard passwords? First if you just add some complexity (eg. require digits or mixed case), they'll just use the same password and change or add 1 character to satisfy your needs. Once they get complicated enough, people start writing them down or keeping them in plain text files on their desktop or worse, on sticky notes or digital sticky notes that are always open.
Your attractiveness however is inverse exponential to that. Now figure out the correct amount of beers to have maximum attractiveness on both sides.
Well, the problem with contact lists (in large companies at least) is that they are maintained by secretaries. If somebody then makes the mistake of typing seibm.com instead of se.ibm.com, EVERYBODY sends the wrong e-mail for hours if not days until it gets discovered.
The problem with commercial games is they stopped innovating. They want to churn out as much polygons as possible in as little times possible. Look at most games these days, it seems like the management just told the developers: take the Unreal/Quake/whatever engine, change the models and the backgrounds, add a few triggers and release it. Bug testing, bah, we'll just charge them for some DLC to fix the major bugs. Next year we'll just release a complete patch with a few new levels and call it BoringGame 2.
There are of course the few good ones - Blizzard until they got taken over by Activision released nice commercial, playable games. They continue working on it before and after release. Not that they're currently all bad but Activision seems to put pressure on them to release games like Diablo III without offline gameplay and even the SC2 content is being released staggered at full price per expansion pack.
A lot of indie games are a lot like the old games, they don't have access to the latest frame rate generator so they have to do something that makes their story or gameplay stand out. Minecraft looks like crap, Trine is a 2D scroller but in the end they're fun to play, bring unique game play and even if you don't like them, it's not like you lost $50 or $100, sometimes the investment is as low as $5, even if the game sucks or is too short, you can buy 10 games and you're bound to have 3 or 4 good ones.
I don't know how they calculate the odds, but 1 in 3500 is only twice as likely as you getting in a car accident. You also have to look at the number of incidents - we drive around with millions of cars and you have about 1 in 7000 chance to be in a car accident. There is 1 satellite falling and you have about 1 in 3500 chances of getting hit by it.
I think the odds are more than 1 in 21 trillion. The earth surface is 510,072,000 sq. km, 70% of that is water. This thing will probably destroy IF it hits land AND does not burn up completely in the atmosphere (whatever the chances of a sizable chunk falling to the ground are) affect at most about 0.01% of a sq. km. All humans together take up at most 7000 sq. km. (calculated at 1 sq. m per human). You are in 7 billion people.
Plus, we can probably precisely calculate where it will fall approx. and unless that falls into a very densely populated area (like say, NYC) we can clear the area of any humans for the timeframe we expect it to be there. Also, we could shoot it if we know it is going to fall and not burn with a missile high in the atmosphere and break it up further. Shouldn't be too hard for a couple of fighter jets to intercept it, they can shoot other flying stuff from hundreds of miles away.
Run softwareupdate -i -a from the command line. You won't ever need to restart although sometimes, if you do that, the applications you updated might not start (eg. iTunes and Safari).
Restart is necessary so it can reload the correct kernel extensions and clear out the applications that have it in-use. It's not super important in most cases but even if you unload/reload the kext files you could make the system unstable or make it panic. I usually don't restart the system especially the server systems for the simple application updates and even sometimes keep my clients alive (because someone's logged in or forgot to log out) - until the user complains that a component won't start or work.
The only way they can guarantee this is by making clear contracts. If you want to take over T-Mobile, for the next 10 year you are to license the spectrum freed to anyone newcomer that is not a spinoff or daughter of AT&T for free. Maximum prices should be established and follow the cost of wholesale bandwidth for the next 50 years. Also, no phones on the GSM network should be locked to the carrier unless more than 3 nationwide GSM carriers exist. Non-negotiable, non-refundable.
Buy a freakin' breast pump of the shelf. It's ~$200 for a really nice one, $50 for the hand pumps. The only difference between 'hospital grade' and 'consumer grade' is that consumer grade lasts for about 2-3 babies and the pump mechanism is not separated so if multiple people use it, diseases could spread.
I am also wondering how much a hearing aid would cost if you just built it yourself. I mean, the electronics shouldn't be that hard (at the very basic, a miniature microphone, op-amp, battery and a miniature speaker would give you an 80s-style hearing aid) even if you want a microprocessor, you can always mimic a bluetooth headset and make it a tad bigger - BT headsets are what, $20 these days so you should be able to build it even in small numbers for under $500. Maybe it wouldn't be FDA approved but neither are those TV/Church crap hearing aids they sell to old people and can be found in the $5 bin at your average department store.
It's easy to do from command line. I even wrote a package and distributed it to my machines that does the dirty work.
Many Mac/Win sysadmin may not know that you can control just about any Mac application using LDAP or Active Directory.
You can add /System/Library/CoreServices/Managed Client.app to WGM and you'll gain access to a lot of the MCX which you can then modify and apply to your groups. A lot of other Applications can be added as well and the settings managed like AD's Group Policy but a bit easier to use.
There are also Kerberos Ticket viewers, you can run security on command line to manage SSL Certificates.
Also install the Developer Tools for some nifty utilities, BlueTooth sniffers, Audio Lab which with you can fairly simple create a little application that can capture and send system audio over the network to another computer.
PWC from my experience don't do real audits. They're more like an insurance company. They may send out a drone that knows nothing about what he's supposed to be checking but the gross of the money you pay them probably goes to a fund in case you have a breach and sue PWC.
I think that may be true of a lot of other audit companies. There are few audit companies that actually do penetration testing etc.
Anyone with any guidance on WHAT happened? If the CA authority has suspicions, they should be as open as possible about it. We don't know what happened and I NEED to know (as I have people here that deal with sensitive projects and often travel into areas that have shown to be hostile towards privacy).
Do you really think that your phone line stretches all the way out to the receiver? As soon as it hits the box in your street, it goes over IP these days even if you're sending it to your neighbor. That's also how they know how much to bill you.
E-mail can be made secure with certificates and encryption. Fax cannot be made secure. A good e-mail system will thus be superior according to HIPAA standards than fax.
Also, it's easy to open and cut into the box hanging at the outside of an office building or house. Much easier and less noticeable imho than hacking and viruses.
Any decent office-grade all-in-one actually can send e-mail. I understand that some people need a little machine that does everything for them from start to end but they exist, people just need to be tought about it.
What we need is better interfaces on scanners especially Ethernet ones. I have an Ethernet scanner in my office but I still need to go back to my desk to make it do things.
The idea of identity on the Internet does not work. People have to stop using SSL certificates as a form of identity. They're there to secure a transaction. There are plenty of other ways even with valid certificates to trick a client (or end-user) into trusting a host (slightly different domain name, unicode tricks, ...).
If you want to confirm identity between two parties you have to use 2 and 3-way, multi-channel authentication in both ways. That is more expensive than the current user-password and even user>-image because anyone can retrieve those images after a username is entered.
I've learned to type on AZERTY but have for most of my professional life used QWERTY. I had a stint with DVORAK but we techies type code and e-mails, not prose (although it would be much easier if either looked more like prose). The people that should benefit from DVORAK (are there any actual scientific tests that prove it is better?) have probably never heard there are different keyboard layouts in the world or how you can change them.
In the mean time, for most intents and purposes I want a keyboard I can smash someone in the head with. The Apple Keyboards are fine if you don't have much space and the one on my MacBook Pro is large enough too especially with the adaptive backlight. But all other manufacturers should follow the above 3 examples. Make it big enough for me not to feel cramped, make it small enough to fit in a tight space, make it beneficial in any circumstance you use a laptop in or DON'T MAKE IT.
Microsoft & Logitech, I'm talking to you. What are those little rubber buttons on the top of my keyboard - couldn't integrate them with the Function Keys - I have to lift my hand on top of a ridge to play music? Dell, why does the keyboard keep falling off it's little feet? HP, what the f* where you thinking with your dinky mess - it drops off someone's desk and the keys pop off? Toshiba, why are the multimedia/system controls lit up with a bright red or blue LED that has a reflection on the screen but there is no backlight especially since you have a totally awkward layout for the dead keys?