Actually Xerox PARC, Alcatel and Bell Labs as well as many other labs (private and government) all over the world have contributed much to computer and telecommunication science, general science, public domain and garage tinkering before real management was replaced in the '90s by PHB's (at all levels) trying to turn a quick buck/promotion before they moved on. I think it was mostly the dot com bubble that killed off a lot of good research going on there. All of a sudden stockowners, bean counters and top managers wanted to see a huge profit similar to the.com boomers and a lot of the less profitable divisions were killed off and replaced with idiots trying to build the next best online app.
It's sad to see. I actually tried working at some of those places but they were all downsizing (like Alcatel) due to other divisions posting huge losses in what was expected to be huge but eventually never paid out.
Violating copyright is (in the US) breaking some type of law (because you're not allowed to do it). It's however not stealing. It would be like arresting somebody that's speeding for "theft of speed" or something like that. Theft is making somebody else goods disappear, depriving somebody else from a tangible object or the use of a non-tangible object. When you're breaking copyright, every/anybody you 'stole' it from can still 'use' their own copy so they're not deprived of anything but a small (if any) part of income similar to picking up somebody else's quarter on the street that fell out of their pocket.
This is old news. I'm a resident alien since 3 years. They took all 10 fingerprints an eyescan and a blood sample as well as mugshot pictures. A fingerprint and a picture is on your resident card
And yet, in other countries they seem to be able to pull it off. Maybe if they took out the importance of competition sports, racially-driven exchange programs and no-child-left behind and extend the hours of school to a level acceptable in the world.
a) Competition sports: There is no need for children to have more than 2h per weeks of sports classes nor is it necessary to have extracullicular sports activities count towards overall grades. Example: somebody in my family is in high school and is apparently very good at basket ball. His grades suck, he can't do math, physics or chemistry (my wife who is a chemistry major and math minor has finally given up on him) but he keeps on passing because he's good at basket ball. As long as he plays his coach told him he doesn't have to worry about his grades so although he doesn't really want to play basket ball he keeps doing it or he would flunk out. What signal does that send to a 14 year old or his classmates?
b) Racially driven exchange programs: For some or another reason smart kids from inner-city school in my locale (where primarily black people go to school) are being pulled out to go to suburban schools in exchange for smart white kids. The fact that those kids have to be on a bus for over 2 hours is already a big problem and will chip on their grades; while being in school, both the white and the black kids that are being exchanged are being picked on because a) they're geeks and b) they don't really fit in the culture. The goal: make smart black kids have a 'better' education, make inner city schools look better and less segregated. My view: Let the teachers exchange schools, segregation has been done away with since the 60's. If there is a social/financial reason why black people prefer the inner city then that reason should be solved by better schooling the current generation so the next generation will be better off, not screwing up the schedule of those kids which will make them perform worse. If the schools are so much better in the suburbs, then the teachers that don't perform in the inner city should be replaced with some from the suburbs if you really want to 'level-out' the grades over a district. Otherwise the non-performing teachers should be kicked out and better replacements hired.
c) No-child-left-behind: This is just encouraging and degrading respectively lazy and motivated students to perform less so that everyone will be as smart as the rest. That is simply stupid, not everybody is created equal and both the smart and the less-smart will have to live together and they will perform socially and financially according to what they can do. Once they get in the 'real world' there will be no more no-worker-left-behind, the smart will still be the professors, teachers and scientists, the less-smart will still be the cleaners, managers and politicians of this world.
d) I went to school in Europe but now I live close to a school in the US. It's amazing for me to see that kids are done with school AND HOME between 1 and 3 pm and they have less than 30m of homework. In my eyes this just breeds irresponsible kids and crime since parents aren't home when their kids are so they're free to do whatever and this time could be used for teaching. Where I came from we had school start at the same time: 8am; but we were done at 5pm (2x 15m break and 1h lunch break) except for Wednesday or Friday we had only until 1pm; we were at home by 6 or 7 depending on where you lived (yes, public bus or train which could take 2 hours) and then we still had to do hours of homework (some years I was working until 10 pm). In later years we were free but encouraged to work on certain lab or study projects during breaks.
The dude found out that you can have self-signed certificates or certificates signed with whatever CA you want. Here's another MITM angle: you can set up your own root CA (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/02/06/linuxhacks.html) and you can even become an intermediary (Secondary) CA authority by paying Verisign, Equifax or Thawte. Heck, if you pay enough money to Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera and adhere to certain standards they will include your servers in their set of root certificates.
SSL is not supposed to be preventing MITM nor is it supposed to be for identifying purposes. We have other technologies for that like PGP but the internet relies on anonymity so you're never 100% sure that you're going to talk to the correct persons. Even with PGP, your initial communications will have to be trusted (eg. you personally hand over or get a key) or any subsequent communications will be compromised. SSL doesn't even go that far because every communication is viewed as an initial communication. If the certificate is re-signed or changed to another CA the next day, your browser will not complain as long as that CA is in it's trusted root certificates.
I personally think it's the government's fault that PGP didn't break through as a good authentication scheme because of their export limitations on firearms and it took a while before it was circumvented by opening up the standard. It's the browsers fault and the CA's as well (with VeriSign the biggest) by asserting that SSL certificates can be used to authenticate an entity rather than a communications. Lately there came to be the SSL-extensions but it's a) too little too late b) bolted on c) not a solution since that information can also be falsified using the exact same methods as described in the article since all it takes is a 'rogue' SSL signer that doesn't do it's job (or somebody impersonating the entity)
And that's why I'm happy I'm not a contractor anymore working for a publicly traded company.
Basically what such companies did for the last few years is they hire bunches of contractors and consultants (like the ones you see in your office from Oracle, SAP, IBM, TekSystems,...) for the last few years and many of us think... well, wouldn't it be cheaper just to hire somebody at 1/4 the price? Well, those companies have seen the recession coming for 2-3 years now and laying off people just looks plain bad in the papers and what I call the 'emotion-driven' stock will be dumped the moment that news hits the pressroom.
But cutting off contractors is simply called budgetary cuts, no headcounts down, no lay-offs. A company I once worked with cancelled in one day the contract with 450 contractors (including their whole advertising department) and none of that had to hit the news. Of course by doing that the permanent workers had to pick up the slack and a lot of the brains of the operation were gone, they couldn't bring out the new catalogs (which is bad in the fashion biz) and a few months later they had to lay off a bunch of people and their stock tanked and was eventually bought out by another company.
I had the same happen at another company and after that I noticed it became a trend and I decided to go back to work at a private organization which is right now doing very well.
First they came for the child pornography on the internet... and I did not speak up Then they came for the organized crime on the internet... and I did not speak up Then they came to 'protect the children' against 'vulgar images'... and I did not speak up Then they came for the illegal warez... and I did not speak up Then they came for my bittorrent... and I did not speak up Then they came for me... and there is no one left to speak up for me
Basically it's possible with a lot of games. I've had games before where part of a level was defective (scratched CD). The game would play until a certain point, some games would allow you to just replace the bad or non-existent level file with another level file. There were also some games you would have to switch floppy's or CD's to play further levels.
It's a simple trick, nothing innovative. Just because it's done 'over the internet' doesn't make it new.
I work in a 3 Tesla fMRI environment. You know, the thing with the superconductive, super cooled magnets that require a few kV to maintain and that eventually has enough power to align all water molecules in your body and then send another magnetic field through to take pictures of your physical structure. You know if your head needs to be scanned, we put it inside a head coil which is basically the secondary coil side of a transformer. I usually work on the computers right next to the power boxes (huge cabinets with transformers in them).
So far, fMRI has produced no cancers in me, the fMRI specialist who worked in fMRI for the last 20 years and is next to the machine on a daily basis, the technicians that maintain it or any of the subjects (except for the ones already having cancer or in which they induced cancer to study). Also, fMRI has no reported effects on pregnancy although we won't allow it because of the electricity that can be induced in the body but the main reason would be the contrast fluids.
I don't believe your mW sender/receiver has enough power to harm let alone kill anyone.
I say these days sometimes science is just as much religion and scientists are it's priests. Scientists and doctors of all types are the untouchables of this time, having the enlightened form of thinking and being that much closer to the explanation of everything than everybody else. Sometimes, they even feel like that and think they're infallible in their thinking.
It's not your decision. Since they're minors, their parents or guardians have the responsibility of caring for them. You don't have the right nor responsibility to police what they are doing. When they're in school, you can use ARD to monitor usage and abuse of the network but as soon as they leave the premises your authority ceases.
What you have to do is a) talk to your bosses and school administrators to see what you legally HAVE to do to protect the students, yourself and your school from legal action b) Inform the parents on how to enable the Parental Controls (Go to System Preferences -> Accounts -> Parental Controls on 10.4; System Preferences -> Parental Controls on 10.5 or offer them to do it for them on a case-by-case basis. You can even do it using Open Directory: create several student groups (eg: liberal, concerned, restrictive, roman-catholic) and apply the preferences through the groups. c) Let the parents sign waivers/legal forms so that if the student gets around the parental controls, the controls don't work (they can be circumvented at several levels) or the parents botch it up, that you and your school is free from any blame or legal action
PHP is good for all types of projects. It's the use of PHP that makes the difference. If you write clear, intelligent and documented code it runs fine. It's even better if you use good function design and definitions. It's plenty fast too and can be pre-compiled or cached. It's also good at scaling because the programmer only has minimal interaction with threading, locking and similar issues and PHP leaves most of it over to the libraries (Apache, IIS, MySQL).
Programming in PHP is a lot like programming in Java: you have a bad developer and your code will run as slow as hell and will be difficult to maintain. Coding is simple and the optimization is minimal because it's a quite high level language. There are of course a lot of inherited problems in PHP (magic quotes and safe mode to start off with) but with PHP5 and PHP6 they are slowly being phased out. But if you do it well, you can write very secure and fast applications in PHP.
Of course Steve is going to kick the bucket soon, but so will Linus Torvalds, CowboyNeal and you. It's just how you define 'soon'. That's one of my biggest questions of the near future: All these people are becoming old and are eventually going to pull out. What's going to happen to all their projects (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X), how will the leadership change and what effect will it have on the project?
I don't know what IT shop you work at, but the only place I worked like that was my first work experience which was a helpdesk center. Those type of jobs don't expect you to stay (like working as an oil jockey in a local car shop) and are more a starter job to get you to know what jobs are like after you come out of school and as a jumping board to better jobs: second level support, junior sysadmins (just like you're not expected to keep being an oil jockey, you eventually get to be a mechanic).
I am in IT and I have never been treated like that after my initial work experience and if I ever would be treated like that (one of my previous jobs when I was a contractor was hinting at doing something similar) I just pack up and leave. The IT market is wide open there are enough decent jobs to go around so if you really deserve higher wages and less pressure, talk to your boss or go elsewhere. Of course, bosses are expected to turn a profit and they will use all means necessary but they will only (ab)use you if you let them. If they see you're going to leave and you're a good worker, they usually rather accommodate you and hire extra workers to offload you than having to let you go and find somebody else.
As I always say: you're in service to your boss but your boss is also in service to you. As a good employee you have more power than your boss and especially in IT you hold a lot of cards (knowledge, experience, specifics of the systems) and value. Losing somebody good in IT usually makes a dent in their profit or can even have a ripple effect throughout the company if they can't find somebody and train them to be as good as you in time. A boss or CIO that understands that is a good boss.
Simple question: wouldn't the reason for the crash (whether it is accessing memory out of boundaries or doing an illegal instruction), allow for a potential exploit.
NYS has been driving out businesses just by their costs and taxes. You pay taxes for everything and every piece of paper (permit, license,...) from the government costs at least $10 for individuals, $100 for businesses. It's so bad that you can live in NYC but any decent company (datacenters. stocks and banking) is right outside the border in NJ. The same goes for Buffalo: it used to be a big business city; they all moved to Erie, PA or Canada and now that city is as good as dead. If you look at the border-towns (eg. PA-border) the NY-side of the border has the smallest population, no businesses except for a bar and no real-estate market (people dump it way below market value). On the other side of the border (the PA-side) there is a decent sized rural town, the shopping mall and stores like Wal-Mart are literally 1/2 mile away from the border, clearly built at a location to draw out the NYS folk.
I work in an imaging department (fMRI). We're moving around usually gigabytes in datasets. If you need fast, simple, cheap storage for OS X we went with the Apple XRAID's which have now been replaced by the Promise machines. They're dirt-cheap for what they have to offer, they're plenty fast and provide all the safeguards (battery backup etc.) and tools you need. I am sometimes pumping 500 Mbps per machine over NFS and we are still on dual PowerPC G5's, the Intel's go even further.
If you need specifics on our configuration let me know, just contact me, I made some tweaks to the TCP/IP settings to get this type of throughput.
If you really want to go cheaper, consider the NORCO DS-1220. It's a 12-bay eSATA enclosure. It needs a bit tweaking to get it to work properly but it's plenty fast and dirt cheap (enclosure is under $800 + 10 disks) Only use the 10 disks on the expanders though if you're limited in a 1U server. You can use the 4-channel eSATA controller to drive 2 enclosures that way (20 drives)
At this moment, the understanding of the federal law is as follow (State law may differ, IANAL):
1. You can store any data pointer on anyone in any format you like (plain text, SQL database,...) and transfer it any way you like. There are several protected data for Personal Identifiable Information. The usual suspects: Full names, full SSN, drivers license numbers or other photo ID numbers, (mug) pictures, birth dates, addresses, full credit card numbers, employer ID 2. If you encrypt, trim (eg. cut away all but the last 4 digits of an SSN) or obfuscate (ROT-13) the data of any or all of 1. at any point, every item that was encrypted or obfuscated ceases to be protected data. Losing the encrypted data in transfer (sniffing or losing a laptop) it would not be counted towards disclosure. 3. If you lose less than 3 of the data points (eg. a list of names and ssn, names and license numbers, names and addresses) you don't have to notify anybody 4. If you lose 3 or more data points but on several occassions, you don't have to notify anybody. If you know for sure the same party obtained all of the information on several occasions in a similar way, the data should not be able to be connected (eg. using foreign keys, unique identifiers or directories) after the fact. 5. There has to be a central documentation in an organization that keeps track of some or all of the data stores in which such information is stored at what location, what protection it has and what the risk and disclosure procedures should be when that particular part gets lost. 6. All data stores have to have a log and on basis of that log disclosures should be made about data loss. Certain logs (like personal health information under HIPAA) should be made on unalterable media (like WORM devices) but that's not necessary for personal identifiable information or personal credit information
Current problems with the law: Encryption: it is not specified as to how 'heavy' the encryption is to be; it is not specified what happens if encryption is easily cracked or even what happens if the password was sticky-noted on the keyboard. Data theft: It is not clear what happens if several entities obtain different information from several sites. If I get your name and SSN from one entity, it doesn't have to be disclosed. If I then use a phonebook or directory to find your address and I can open a credit card with that information, you wouldn't even know. Theft of point 5: If I can somehow steal the central document (because usually they're also stored somewhere in a database or a document with HR or another pencil-pushing department), I now know all the information about all the data stores and what protections I have to circumvent. I can pick the weakest target which I might previously not have known existence of. Circumvention of point 6: If I can somehow circumvent or block the system from logging my accesses then the organization wouldn't have to disclose anything even if they knew (or somebody found out) that I was accessing it.
I know there has to be some federal oversight on data loss but all that's currently happening is basically replacing the leaky bucket with a spaghetti strainer and in the mean time it's only enriching organizations that provide 'data protection services' and 'audits'
Dementia is a condition where the brain function degrades until it's not functioning anymore. Having a non-functional brain to start with is another condition. In literature this is often referred to as zombie-ism.
I don't know why anybody hasn't brought up rdiff-backup yet. It works great, the initial backup takes a bit but it's plenty fast, it only transfers the 'changed' bits and leaves you with a working mirror everywhere and an incremental backup on each destination. It uses the rsync library and I have been using it to back up ~8 TB (usually around 500 GB of change) on a weekly basis.
All that would do is enrich the advertisement industry. That seems to be their only fix, leave the stuff as it is and pour a few millions in advertisements wooing old people with what you could do with a computer 5 years ago. If you've seen their advertisements, they show MythTV and QuickTime photo stitching.
That's what my boss does. Nobody 'manages' me. I am expected to do my job and if somebody in the environment doesn't do it's job according to what is demanded, they get talked to and eventually fired. You are 'managing' 5 programmers? That's more like micromanaging to me and it brings only pointless meetings, cruft and endless delays in projects. What a programmer's manager does (what my boss does) is to keep me from having to deal with stupid people (upper management and HR) keep me from having to distract myself from my job for no good reason (support calls that get escalated etc.) and to keep me supplied with what I need (office supplies, budget and paycheck).
Just start out by making some coding guidelines (function and class namings, documentation, overview etc.) and then let them do their job. If they really are seasoned, they won't need much handholding if any. If you're in charge of a group of fresh programmers, you might have some more stuff to do with them and have a bit more meetings but in general once they get to know one another and get used to a certain regiment, they will 'grow up'.
And yes, programmers play a lot, they have a lot of fun, they're not always working while they actually could work, but we're like artists and you have to accept us the way we are, you don't rush us and do your job managing the managers (set reasonable deadlines and stuff) eventually you'll get a masterpiece. All you need to know is that it's going to be done when it's going to be done and maybe a status update once in a while. Just trust us that we know what we're doing.
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Actually Xerox PARC, Alcatel and Bell Labs as well as many other labs (private and government) all over the world have contributed much to computer and telecommunication science, general science, public domain and garage tinkering before real management was replaced in the '90s by PHB's (at all levels) trying to turn a quick buck/promotion before they moved on. I think it was mostly the dot com bubble that killed off a lot of good research going on there. All of a sudden stockowners, bean counters and top managers wanted to see a huge profit similar to the .com boomers and a lot of the less profitable divisions were killed off and replaced with idiots trying to build the next best online app.
It's sad to see. I actually tried working at some of those places but they were all downsizing (like Alcatel) due to other divisions posting huge losses in what was expected to be huge but eventually never paid out.
Violating copyright is (in the US) breaking some type of law (because you're not allowed to do it). It's however not stealing. It would be like arresting somebody that's speeding for "theft of speed" or something like that. Theft is making somebody else goods disappear, depriving somebody else from a tangible object or the use of a non-tangible object. When you're breaking copyright, every/anybody you 'stole' it from can still 'use' their own copy so they're not deprived of anything but a small (if any) part of income similar to picking up somebody else's quarter on the street that fell out of their pocket.
Yes there is Open Source solutions to his problem: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Solutions#Content_.26_Document_Management_Systems.2C_Search_Technology
Alfresco and Plone are the most known solutions and they're (much) cheaper than MS products and imho easier to implement and use
This is old news. I'm a resident alien since 3 years. They took all 10 fingerprints an eyescan and a blood sample as well as mugshot pictures. A fingerprint and a picture is on your resident card
And yet, in other countries they seem to be able to pull it off. Maybe if they took out the importance of competition sports, racially-driven exchange programs and no-child-left behind and extend the hours of school to a level acceptable in the world.
a) Competition sports: There is no need for children to have more than 2h per weeks of sports classes nor is it necessary to have extracullicular sports activities count towards overall grades. Example: somebody in my family is in high school and is apparently very good at basket ball. His grades suck, he can't do math, physics or chemistry (my wife who is a chemistry major and math minor has finally given up on him) but he keeps on passing because he's good at basket ball. As long as he plays his coach told him he doesn't have to worry about his grades so although he doesn't really want to play basket ball he keeps doing it or he would flunk out. What signal does that send to a 14 year old or his classmates?
b) Racially driven exchange programs: For some or another reason smart kids from inner-city school in my locale (where primarily black people go to school) are being pulled out to go to suburban schools in exchange for smart white kids. The fact that those kids have to be on a bus for over 2 hours is already a big problem and will chip on their grades; while being in school, both the white and the black kids that are being exchanged are being picked on because a) they're geeks and b) they don't really fit in the culture. The goal: make smart black kids have a 'better' education, make inner city schools look better and less segregated. My view: Let the teachers exchange schools, segregation has been done away with since the 60's. If there is a social/financial reason why black people prefer the inner city then that reason should be solved by better schooling the current generation so the next generation will be better off, not screwing up the schedule of those kids which will make them perform worse. If the schools are so much better in the suburbs, then the teachers that don't perform in the inner city should be replaced with some from the suburbs if you really want to 'level-out' the grades over a district. Otherwise the non-performing teachers should be kicked out and better replacements hired.
c) No-child-left-behind: This is just encouraging and degrading respectively lazy and motivated students to perform less so that everyone will be as smart as the rest. That is simply stupid, not everybody is created equal and both the smart and the less-smart will have to live together and they will perform socially and financially according to what they can do. Once they get in the 'real world' there will be no more no-worker-left-behind, the smart will still be the professors, teachers and scientists, the less-smart will still be the cleaners, managers and politicians of this world.
d) I went to school in Europe but now I live close to a school in the US. It's amazing for me to see that kids are done with school AND HOME between 1 and 3 pm and they have less than 30m of homework. In my eyes this just breeds irresponsible kids and crime since parents aren't home when their kids are so they're free to do whatever and this time could be used for teaching. Where I came from we had school start at the same time: 8am; but we were done at 5pm (2x 15m break and 1h lunch break) except for Wednesday or Friday we had only until 1pm; we were at home by 6 or 7 depending on where you lived (yes, public bus or train which could take 2 hours) and then we still had to do hours of homework (some years I was working until 10 pm). In later years we were free but encouraged to work on certain lab or study projects during breaks.
The dude found out that you can have self-signed certificates or certificates signed with whatever CA you want. Here's another MITM angle: you can set up your own root CA (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/02/06/linuxhacks.html) and you can even become an intermediary (Secondary) CA authority by paying Verisign, Equifax or Thawte. Heck, if you pay enough money to Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera and adhere to certain standards they will include your servers in their set of root certificates.
SSL is not supposed to be preventing MITM nor is it supposed to be for identifying purposes. We have other technologies for that like PGP but the internet relies on anonymity so you're never 100% sure that you're going to talk to the correct persons. Even with PGP, your initial communications will have to be trusted (eg. you personally hand over or get a key) or any subsequent communications will be compromised. SSL doesn't even go that far because every communication is viewed as an initial communication. If the certificate is re-signed or changed to another CA the next day, your browser will not complain as long as that CA is in it's trusted root certificates.
I personally think it's the government's fault that PGP didn't break through as a good authentication scheme because of their export limitations on firearms and it took a while before it was circumvented by opening up the standard. It's the browsers fault and the CA's as well (with VeriSign the biggest) by asserting that SSL certificates can be used to authenticate an entity rather than a communications. Lately there came to be the SSL-extensions but it's a) too little too late b) bolted on c) not a solution since that information can also be falsified using the exact same methods as described in the article since all it takes is a 'rogue' SSL signer that doesn't do it's job (or somebody impersonating the entity)
And that's why I'm happy I'm not a contractor anymore working for a publicly traded company.
Basically what such companies did for the last few years is they hire bunches of contractors and consultants (like the ones you see in your office from Oracle, SAP, IBM, TekSystems, ...) for the last few years and many of us think... well, wouldn't it be cheaper just to hire somebody at 1/4 the price? Well, those companies have seen the recession coming for 2-3 years now and laying off people just looks plain bad in the papers and what I call the 'emotion-driven' stock will be dumped the moment that news hits the pressroom.
But cutting off contractors is simply called budgetary cuts, no headcounts down, no lay-offs. A company I once worked with cancelled in one day the contract with 450 contractors (including their whole advertising department) and none of that had to hit the news. Of course by doing that the permanent workers had to pick up the slack and a lot of the brains of the operation were gone, they couldn't bring out the new catalogs (which is bad in the fashion biz) and a few months later they had to lay off a bunch of people and their stock tanked and was eventually bought out by another company.
I had the same happen at another company and after that I noticed it became a trend and I decided to go back to work at a private organization which is right now doing very well.
First they came for the child pornography on the internet ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and there is no one left to speak up for me
Then they came for the organized crime on the internet
Then they came to 'protect the children' against 'vulgar images'
Then they came for the illegal warez
Then they came for my bittorrent
Then they came for me
They want their Unreal Tournament back.
Basically it's possible with a lot of games. I've had games before where part of a level was defective (scratched CD). The game would play until a certain point, some games would allow you to just replace the bad or non-existent level file with another level file. There were also some games you would have to switch floppy's or CD's to play further levels.
It's a simple trick, nothing innovative. Just because it's done 'over the internet' doesn't make it new.
I work in a 3 Tesla fMRI environment. You know, the thing with the superconductive, super cooled magnets that require a few kV to maintain and that eventually has enough power to align all water molecules in your body and then send another magnetic field through to take pictures of your physical structure. You know if your head needs to be scanned, we put it inside a head coil which is basically the secondary coil side of a transformer. I usually work on the computers right next to the power boxes (huge cabinets with transformers in them).
So far, fMRI has produced no cancers in me, the fMRI specialist who worked in fMRI for the last 20 years and is next to the machine on a daily basis, the technicians that maintain it or any of the subjects (except for the ones already having cancer or in which they induced cancer to study). Also, fMRI has no reported effects on pregnancy although we won't allow it because of the electricity that can be induced in the body but the main reason would be the contrast fluids.
I don't believe your mW sender/receiver has enough power to harm let alone kill anyone.
I say these days sometimes science is just as much religion and scientists are it's priests. Scientists and doctors of all types are the untouchables of this time, having the enlightened form of thinking and being that much closer to the explanation of everything than everybody else. Sometimes, they even feel like that and think they're infallible in their thinking.
It's not your decision. Since they're minors, their parents or guardians have the responsibility of caring for them. You don't have the right nor responsibility to police what they are doing. When they're in school, you can use ARD to monitor usage and abuse of the network but as soon as they leave the premises your authority ceases.
What you have to do is
a) talk to your bosses and school administrators to see what you legally HAVE to do to protect the students, yourself and your school from legal action
b) Inform the parents on how to enable the Parental Controls (Go to System Preferences -> Accounts -> Parental Controls on 10.4; System Preferences -> Parental Controls on 10.5 or offer them to do it for them on a case-by-case basis. You can even do it using Open Directory: create several student groups (eg: liberal, concerned, restrictive, roman-catholic) and apply the preferences through the groups.
c) Let the parents sign waivers/legal forms so that if the student gets around the parental controls, the controls don't work (they can be circumvented at several levels) or the parents botch it up, that you and your school is free from any blame or legal action
PHP is good for all types of projects. It's the use of PHP that makes the difference. If you write clear, intelligent and documented code it runs fine. It's even better if you use good function design and definitions. It's plenty fast too and can be pre-compiled or cached. It's also good at scaling because the programmer only has minimal interaction with threading, locking and similar issues and PHP leaves most of it over to the libraries (Apache, IIS, MySQL).
Programming in PHP is a lot like programming in Java: you have a bad developer and your code will run as slow as hell and will be difficult to maintain. Coding is simple and the optimization is minimal because it's a quite high level language. There are of course a lot of inherited problems in PHP (magic quotes and safe mode to start off with) but with PHP5 and PHP6 they are slowly being phased out. But if you do it well, you can write very secure and fast applications in PHP.
Of course Steve is going to kick the bucket soon, but so will Linus Torvalds, CowboyNeal and you. It's just how you define 'soon'. That's one of my biggest questions of the near future: All these people are becoming old and are eventually going to pull out. What's going to happen to all their projects (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X), how will the leadership change and what effect will it have on the project?
What do you mean? It's christmas, you get a whole week off to work on that thing!
I don't know what IT shop you work at, but the only place I worked like that was my first work experience which was a helpdesk center. Those type of jobs don't expect you to stay (like working as an oil jockey in a local car shop) and are more a starter job to get you to know what jobs are like after you come out of school and as a jumping board to better jobs: second level support, junior sysadmins (just like you're not expected to keep being an oil jockey, you eventually get to be a mechanic).
I am in IT and I have never been treated like that after my initial work experience and if I ever would be treated like that (one of my previous jobs when I was a contractor was hinting at doing something similar) I just pack up and leave. The IT market is wide open there are enough decent jobs to go around so if you really deserve higher wages and less pressure, talk to your boss or go elsewhere. Of course, bosses are expected to turn a profit and they will use all means necessary but they will only (ab)use you if you let them. If they see you're going to leave and you're a good worker, they usually rather accommodate you and hire extra workers to offload you than having to let you go and find somebody else.
As I always say: you're in service to your boss but your boss is also in service to you. As a good employee you have more power than your boss and especially in IT you hold a lot of cards (knowledge, experience, specifics of the systems) and value. Losing somebody good in IT usually makes a dent in their profit or can even have a ripple effect throughout the company if they can't find somebody and train them to be as good as you in time. A boss or CIO that understands that is a good boss.
Simple question: wouldn't the reason for the crash (whether it is accessing memory out of boundaries or doing an illegal instruction), allow for a potential exploit.
NYS has been driving out businesses just by their costs and taxes. You pay taxes for everything and every piece of paper (permit, license, ...) from the government costs at least $10 for individuals, $100 for businesses. It's so bad that you can live in NYC but any decent company (datacenters. stocks and banking) is right outside the border in NJ. The same goes for Buffalo: it used to be a big business city; they all moved to Erie, PA or Canada and now that city is as good as dead. If you look at the border-towns (eg. PA-border) the NY-side of the border has the smallest population, no businesses except for a bar and no real-estate market (people dump it way below market value). On the other side of the border (the PA-side) there is a decent sized rural town, the shopping mall and stores like Wal-Mart are literally 1/2 mile away from the border, clearly built at a location to draw out the NYS folk.
I work in an imaging department (fMRI). We're moving around usually gigabytes in datasets. If you need fast, simple, cheap storage for OS X we went with the Apple XRAID's which have now been replaced by the Promise machines. They're dirt-cheap for what they have to offer, they're plenty fast and provide all the safeguards (battery backup etc.) and tools you need. I am sometimes pumping 500 Mbps per machine over NFS and we are still on dual PowerPC G5's, the Intel's go even further.
If you need specifics on our configuration let me know, just contact me, I made some tweaks to the TCP/IP settings to get this type of throughput.
If you really want to go cheaper, consider the NORCO DS-1220. It's a 12-bay eSATA enclosure. It needs a bit tweaking to get it to work properly but it's plenty fast and dirt cheap (enclosure is under $800 + 10 disks) Only use the 10 disks on the expanders though if you're limited in a 1U server. You can use the 4-channel eSATA controller to drive 2 enclosures that way (20 drives)
At this moment, the understanding of the federal law is as follow (State law may differ, IANAL):
1. You can store any data pointer on anyone in any format you like (plain text, SQL database, ...) and transfer it any way you like. There are several protected data for Personal Identifiable Information. The usual suspects: Full names, full SSN, drivers license numbers or other photo ID numbers, (mug) pictures, birth dates, addresses, full credit card numbers, employer ID
2. If you encrypt, trim (eg. cut away all but the last 4 digits of an SSN) or obfuscate (ROT-13) the data of any or all of 1. at any point, every item that was encrypted or obfuscated ceases to be protected data. Losing the encrypted data in transfer (sniffing or losing a laptop) it would not be counted towards disclosure.
3. If you lose less than 3 of the data points (eg. a list of names and ssn, names and license numbers, names and addresses) you don't have to notify anybody
4. If you lose 3 or more data points but on several occassions, you don't have to notify anybody. If you know for sure the same party obtained all of the information on several occasions in a similar way, the data should not be able to be connected (eg. using foreign keys, unique identifiers or directories) after the fact.
5. There has to be a central documentation in an organization that keeps track of some or all of the data stores in which such information is stored at what location, what protection it has and what the risk and disclosure procedures should be when that particular part gets lost.
6. All data stores have to have a log and on basis of that log disclosures should be made about data loss. Certain logs (like personal health information under HIPAA) should be made on unalterable media (like WORM devices) but that's not necessary for personal identifiable information or personal credit information
Current problems with the law:
Encryption: it is not specified as to how 'heavy' the encryption is to be; it is not specified what happens if encryption is easily cracked or even what happens if the password was sticky-noted on the keyboard.
Data theft: It is not clear what happens if several entities obtain different information from several sites. If I get your name and SSN from one entity, it doesn't have to be disclosed. If I then use a phonebook or directory to find your address and I can open a credit card with that information, you wouldn't even know.
Theft of point 5: If I can somehow steal the central document (because usually they're also stored somewhere in a database or a document with HR or another pencil-pushing department), I now know all the information about all the data stores and what protections I have to circumvent. I can pick the weakest target which I might previously not have known existence of.
Circumvention of point 6: If I can somehow circumvent or block the system from logging my accesses then the organization wouldn't have to disclose anything even if they knew (or somebody found out) that I was accessing it.
I know there has to be some federal oversight on data loss but all that's currently happening is basically replacing the leaky bucket with a spaghetti strainer and in the mean time it's only enriching organizations that provide 'data protection services' and 'audits'
Dementia is a condition where the brain function degrades until it's not functioning anymore. Having a non-functional brain to start with is another condition. In literature this is often referred to as zombie-ism.
I don't know why anybody hasn't brought up rdiff-backup yet. It works great, the initial backup takes a bit but it's plenty fast, it only transfers the 'changed' bits and leaves you with a working mirror everywhere and an incremental backup on each destination. It uses the rsync library and I have been using it to back up ~8 TB (usually around 500 GB of change) on a weekly basis.
All that would do is enrich the advertisement industry. That seems to be their only fix, leave the stuff as it is and pour a few millions in advertisements wooing old people with what you could do with a computer 5 years ago. If you've seen their advertisements, they show MythTV and QuickTime photo stitching.
Putty is at putty.be ;-)
That's what my boss does. Nobody 'manages' me. I am expected to do my job and if somebody in the environment doesn't do it's job according to what is demanded, they get talked to and eventually fired. You are 'managing' 5 programmers? That's more like micromanaging to me and it brings only pointless meetings, cruft and endless delays in projects. What a programmer's manager does (what my boss does) is to keep me from having to deal with stupid people (upper management and HR) keep me from having to distract myself from my job for no good reason (support calls that get escalated etc.) and to keep me supplied with what I need (office supplies, budget and paycheck).
Just start out by making some coding guidelines (function and class namings, documentation, overview etc.) and then let them do their job. If they really are seasoned, they won't need much handholding if any. If you're in charge of a group of fresh programmers, you might have some more stuff to do with them and have a bit more meetings but in general once they get to know one another and get used to a certain regiment, they will 'grow up'.
And yes, programmers play a lot, they have a lot of fun, they're not always working while they actually could work, but we're like artists and you have to accept us the way we are, you don't rush us and do your job managing the managers (set reasonable deadlines and stuff) eventually you'll get a masterpiece. All you need to know is that it's going to be done when it's going to be done and maybe a status update once in a while. Just trust us that we know what we're doing.