I really don't understand what all the fuzz is about.
On the user side of the ISP: Me pays $10/month for 56k (I can't get anything else) and get about 40k/40k (up/down) An average user that can get broadband pays $20 for cable or DSL at 1024/128 An average slashdot reader that can get broadband pays $50-100 for it at 4096/512
on the other side of the ISP: An average company with a decent webfarm pays about $1000-2000/month for 50M/50M fiber.
Outside the ISP: The ISP pays AT&T and cronies a few $10000/month for a decent connection to the backbone.
On the other ISP: Google pays also a few $10000/month for a decent connection of one of their datacenters (they have many) for either a connection to the ISP or directly connected to the backbone (AMS/IX, AT&T)
Once the bandwidth is filled, I can't download faster than 5kbyte/s, on cable/dsl you can't get more than 2 connections at 1mbit/s (and usually you can't use your full bandwidth due to 100:1 overbooking by the ISP). I paid for my 5kbyte/s, the DSL user paid for his 4Mbit/s, Google paid for their 5000Mbit/s and nobody can get more through the line. If they want to, they should could more bandwidth or multiple carriers (like a DSL, Cable and Sattelite line in a Linux box with NAT and line balancing to get 25Mbit/5Mbit). In any way the ISP's get their money, the backbone-owners get paid by the ISP, everybody is or should be happy because in a healthy business (the ones that people invest in and that don't go bankrupt) the end price of the product you sell is your total cost of the product including money you pay people + a percentage of the profit.
If they are not earning enough to cover costs, they should raise the price and see their customers go somewhere else where there's a good cash management or all raise their price if it is so that currently ISP's are losing money. But I don't think that happens because if they lose just $0.50/customer, that would constitute about a loss of different millions and thus there would be no ISP's anymore because they would all be bankrupt.
I think it is thus allowed (imho) that certain ISP's get money from for example Google for only a 10:1 overbooking for their services or a leased line between their routers but that shouldn't make competitors slower than they already are. It is wrong that because you CAN pay (eg. Microsoft) you could get a higher bandwidth on the same overbooked bandwidth than your competitors (eg. linux.org) or that you ban certain hosts from your network or make them annoyingly slow because they don't want to / can't pay.
I am a recent convert to the faith of Mac. Currently I have a mixed environment at home consisting out of 1 iBook, 1 PowerBook, 1 HP laptop with Gentoo, 1 Windows PC and 2 Linux PC's with Debian and CentOS.
I have handled mixed environments at all my working places. What I've learned out of it:
McAfee broke a lot of times (automatic virus definition updates) causing different mail clusters to stop processing e-mails. On Windows it caused a lot of lock ups, lock downs (where no one could login anymore from remote) and sometimes it just plain stopped working. On Mac the same problems were spotted.
McAfee just churns out virus updates (sometimes every 4 hours) without decently testing them which causes a lot of sysadmin problems. Sometimes over 20 hours per week were spent just fixing the damn things.
On decently updated and secured Mac or Linux boxes I have never, ever seen a virus outbreak. This is due to the inherited security in the kernels. On decently updated and secured (as far as that is possible on for example Exchange boxes) Windows servers, I have seen different defaces through IIS and virus outbreaks but most of the time it were script kiddies or dumb users causing that to happen.
The problem with McAfee in a controlled environment is that it breaks more than secures stuff. I have used ClamAV as a stand in for McAfee on the mail clusters (working before the McAfee daemon) and after a week it was obvious that McAfee didn't do anything anymore. The point is, I wouldn't trust a Windows environment with ClamAV, but for the tinfoil hat users, I would recommend using ClamAV (or ClamAVX for Mac OS X) and it hasn't yet caused any more or big problems for me than McAfee did. Linux and Mac is so much more secure by design that imho it is not necessary yet to make big expenses on any commercial viruspackage.
I've got a list of all universities in the USA. Maybe the RIAA would be interested in buying it from me, for say, 10000$ and a life long guarantee that I won't get sued.
And how the heck are they going to filter all that? My file sharing goes through NNTP, HTTP and FTP (and recently more often through SFTP)
I am from the in-between generation...
on
Do Kids Still Program?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I went to school between the generation that had to program their C64 and the script-kiddies who just download their homework. I had a second hand 8086 when I was 8 and by the age of 12 the fastest computer at school was a 8088 on which we all had to learn to type. I could use a 80486 by the time I was 16 to learn the basics of Turbo Pascal on (for a mere 6 months) and we shared the 128kbit ISDN connection with 150 computers ranging from 486->PII
What I would like to point out is that schools have way underestimated and underbudgetted their IT and computer expenses. I have never had a decent teacher that could explain the least thing about computers, programming or anything else. Governmental school systems are way to slow to adapt to the new technologies. It takes on average 10 years to change something fundamental in the program, the other schools are way to expensive for the average joe's kids.
Everything I learned (PHP, C, C++, ASM) I learned on my own and I don't have a degree in any IT or computer field. I am currently freelancing as a PHP programmer and *Nix Systems Administrator and soon I am going to administer a hybrid IBM mainframe/Windows/MacOSX/Novell network and I am currently earning close to 75k (I am not even 25).
Kids who are interested in having a good job later, shouldn't care too much about schooling anyway imho. What they teach in schools was way deprecated (even geology, history and chemistry) when I learned it and I had to correct teachers on multiple instances on different subjects. I read 100's of books of decent size about Novell, Linux, C++, OS/2 and other and experimented with different programming languages, hardware and software when other kids were playing outside.
The current decay in interest is also because everything seems to be prepared for them thanks to projects as.NET, Ajax, Ruby on Rails and other 'Frameworks'. This takes the real thinking out of programming and even the dumbest ass can program in those languages. This doesn't mean it is good to learn the basics through such a 'languages' but I have been at a company that was programming their complete ERP system in VB,.NET and.NET2 for the last 4 years with 5 full-time programmers. The problem is that those 'programmers' don't understand that you can just stick to the same language if you use a core language like C or C++ and don't follow the framework flavor of the month. With some good design, you can even program quicker and more efficiently in a basic language and the product will be faster and have a smaller footprint AND be portable too.
Anyway, the problem is imho that kids don't get educated good enough and some organization let is seem that programming is just some easy thing to do, that everybody could do while the real work isn't being done by anyone anymore.
I have been looking into outsourcing to other country's just for the heck of it and unless you have a really big company with offices already in one of those countries (like Microsoft, IBM and some others might pull it off), the cost is fabulous.
The prices charged for those services are the same or more as if you would pay a programmer full time.
If you do it yourself in a company, you have to get one or more managers on both sides of the channel that DO speak English and know the company. The cost of moving your managers constantly and paying those extra managers quickly get up to the cost where you could pay some local programmers. Next to that your program is written without any comments or comments that nobody understands, so changing anything is going to get difficult.
Outsourcing your helpdesk is just bad for customers (anyone ever called to the helpdesk of Ensim knows what I mean)
The only problem I could think of is that your local programmers are connected to a union and thus refuse to work since you can't fire them (for example those guys at Verizon).
I also see in the neighbourhood that there is a shortage of good IT personnel. I am freelancing now and I am buried in work (I could earn close to 10k/month if I wanted to); I have other requests from multiple companies to be a full time systems administrator since no-one around seems to have any clue about Linux/Unix/Mac and that can integrate with Windows too. What the heck is so difficult about learning any *nix system or how to integrate/migrate from Windows (this is in really in high demand right now).
They were hiring and of course we went down in what they had etc.
The company still had a big IBM mainframe running batches that people had to fill from a green CRT. They still used Token Ring in their machine environment, just because they didn't change it since it works great. They are thinking about decentralizing for security reasons though.
I heard different researches still use them as you can calculate the latency and round-trip and for some tests that is really important.
Well, it's the old give a fish, learn to fish story. Give those poor kids access to sources how to prevent things like AIDS but also lots of other things (clean water, first aid, how to grow stuff without burning forests) for 100$ and you won't need billions of dollars to develop a 100$ medical treatment just for AIDS while they have a bunch of other things to worry about.
Of course, some get basic education now and a lot has been done to prevent AIDS but I think the Gates' foundation should view this as an opportunity to work together with open source to get them even further both through specialized funds against HIV from their side and good, stable education through the laptop projects.
As it looks now, those businesses sponsoring the against AIDS have much more in mind for those poor people as in buying them stuff now and give the message later that they owe it to buy their products keeping the circle alive that we had back in europe right after the industrial revolution: get the family to work at the factory for (little) money, get 'protection' (housing etc.) by the factory but you had to buy the overpriced products at the factory stores or you lost your job.
I don't want to say that what the businesses are doing is bad or all with bad intentions (sponsoring HIV drugs development etc.) the opposite actually but as long as you keep pouring money in a situation without changing the roots of the situation (under-educated people), nothing is going to change. Was Bill, Negroponte or Ghandi right? The future will tell...
Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute).
I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding.
The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues). That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server. And yes, Exchange CAN handle also shared calendar data etc. but so can IMAP and that was wat a lot of customers used it for while Exchange had performance problems when a secretary opened more than 3 executive calendars at the same time.
A cat in the narrow makes crazy jumps.
If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type
Well, broadband connection is not necessary imho. A lot of people in the US still have 56k (like me) because no broadband is available.
As for the people supporting the users, well, that is what open source has a community for as well as for the applications and the OS. Not everything has to run Windows for $500 and Office for another $500.
That the thing has a small screen is not a big problem. In my time, we called a 14" color CRT on 800x600 a BIG screen, heck even the "Origami" computers don't have such an amazing big screen.
Mister Bill is here of course talking in his own interest because he cannot sell a fully supported, fully loaded (both hardware and software) laptop-like computer for $100, just his OS costs more than that.
This means that you got laid before (about 15 years ago, probably when you were waiting to boot up your 8086 with DR-DOS) so you should have already delivered your geek license into the/. desk.
Back when I was young, when the Spanish Flu hit, we didn't have computers and still we contained it to Spain... and we had to go to work during the "pandemic" and we didn't have any cars, we had to walk, uphill, both ways...
Earlier this week suggestions that Apple needs a Security Czar, now that Google needs a CMO. Next week: Microsoft needs a good CEO, CTO, CSO and CMO, RedHat needs a Chief Hackers Officer and Novell a Kernel Czar.
I am also looking for a job, but I'm not suggesting new (unnecessary/redundant) jobs to any company's I would like to work at.
How do you install the rootkit? Yes, you guessed it, through an insecure operating system. This article is imho just another promotion FUD campaign for TCPA.
If your current operating system and security measures are good enough, such rootkits-with-virtual-machines are not even going to be able to be installed, heck as long as you don't have to login as administrator to print out a document or surf the web, you're pretty safe.
And as soon as you notice your box could be r00t3d, you take it out anyway and don't trust it. And if you don't notice one of your boxes is generating extra traffic or doing things it shouldn't, you shouldn't have to have admin privileges anyway.
Everybody here is bitching about what to do when it happens, simple for me:
I go to my bank, and I ask for a credit card. I have to sign for the thing. Together with that they state that you've read the agreement statements and other legal mumbo jumbo. I ask for those things, the bank representative gets me a copy out of which I scrap all the statements I do not agree with and rewrite them according to what I think of it. I ask for a signature of the bank representative (usually I deal with their manager by then) and a signed copy of that document.
If the bank director/manager/clerk agrees with it, he places his signature and I am free from crap like this. If they don't agree, I don't get their service (credit card) because I do not want it from them with those rules imposed to it. But usually (if you are like me only change the privacy statements) they agree and sign (they don't understand anyway).
Recently I did an overdraft of a certain checking account and they charged me $32 for it and some interest. I asked where I agreed with that, the bank clerk said it is all accounts that have that. I asked again for the document I signed agreeing to that. They got the bank director who remembered that I did not agree and got out the documents with the statement that I agreed to it only if all my accounts were overdrafted or to such an amount that the bank was actually loosing money on me as a customer (over all my accounts) and they agreed with that since I deposited quite a sum in a special savings account (saving up for a fully upgraded Quad G5) and me and my family has some international funds making me their special customer.
If they don't agree, then ask why. If it is just an answer along it being company regulations or whatever, I threaten to change my services to other company's. Usually they do agree when they are going to loose a good customer.
Really, in the USA company's do a LOT to keep their customers and giving them all kind of traits (because then you do not spread bad publicity). Of course if you order a credit card online or through mail, then you're usually screwed (although online could be debatable if you reviewed the correct information).
You can torture the architect (or his secretary for that matter - is more fun), for his name look on the big brass plate when you enter the bank. Since I do not condone torture or anything related to that: you could also just walk (or break) into his office and ask the plans of that and the surrounding houses for some student project or offer your computer services to them and they leave you alone for the day in a dusty archive office together with the server.
As for the guards being not there: Usually, after office hours when the bank is closed, there is no active force in the bank (at least not at mine). There are some camera's which you might want to conceal and maybe even get a tap on the communications (you could "repair" the telephone lines in the neighbourhood for instance). If you're going during the day, I honestly don't think there is an ACTIVE force in the building (almost-retired-guard)
Since the guards are not there, you do not need to sedate them so no agents required. If you do it in the middle of the day, swinging some big gun will do. For the security company who is doing the security, look for the shield-like tags on the doors of the bank. With a little luck you can even infiltrate in their company (if you are planning it a few years in advance)
Oh and by the way: in my bank the vault is usually open. If you want to know the codes (of my bank's vault) then order a box in the vault and if you're a big guy like me and go first thing in the morning you can look over the managers shoulder when they type it in.
Escape routes: well, my bank has a front and back - the front goes onto Main Street who is kind of narrow to escape on. The back door however has a big parking lot that connects parking lots of adjacent buildings and their parkings front entrance who is connected to multiple streets.
And since all this is just common user thinking (i'm not a crook, honestly) and is easily distilled out of just going regularly to the bank, I think everybody ever walking in a bank should get arrested.
Moved to the United Soviet States of R... America a few months ago and have already accumulated the following:
APC SurgeArrest Personal (for things not hanging at the UPS - screens)
APC Rackmount UPS (2200VA)
Apple iBook G3 (128M RAM)
HP Pavilion ze4400 (512M RAM)
HP OfficeJet Copier/printer/fax/scanner
Lexmark Inkjet printer (is a piece of crap, is going in my car)
2,8 GHz P4 (Gateway machine from someone who sold it for $200 because of some virus) 1G RAM
Netgear 10-port switch
2x rackmount Longshine Manageable 24-port switches (need to replace fans, they are making quite some noise (that is also why they were discarded))
AMD Thunderbird 700MHz (is my backup machine - 4x80G RAID5 with Adaptec RAID-5 controller, 64M cache and BBU) (512M RAM)
Cyrix 266MHz (is my router/firewall) with 128M RAM
VIA C3 1GHz (is becoming my multimedia car PC - works on 12V)
19" rack - yup a complete 19" rack for among other things my switches complete with cable gutter, rails)
I heightened the floor and lowered the ceiling (myself)
Quad Power Mac G5 (2,5 GHz) with WD 2x 74G Raptor and 2,5G RAM
Some loose discs (IDE/SATA) from 40G->250G for transport/backup in external enclosure.
4 Dish network rackmount HD-DVR (free installation in 4 rooms concentrated in my computer room - going into MythTV)
1 rackmount sattelite receiver for Dish Network
1 rackmount sattelite receiver for Internet connection
1 Cable/Sattelite modem
Running dual Ethernet and 2 phone lines throughout the house (in every room)
I found this article quite a while ago:
http://www.keelynet.com/energy/ford.htm
Model T Magnetic Engine - from TFA
My contact said there were three fellows who got wind of this story several years ago. They secured a first-run Model T and found it did indeed have strange slots on the bell housing. Magnets were inserted and when they cranked it, the flywheel began to spin on its own. Based on this initial verifying experiment, they eventually produced a 40hp version which was self-running, using the same magneto system. A demonstration was scheduled in a larger city and two of the men drove the prototype to the demonstration, the third man was ill and could not attend. The demonstration went off without a hitch and was enthusiastically received. Plans and contacts were made for duplicating the prototype for further tests that would be followed by marketing. As the two men were driving home late that evening with their prototype, their vehicle was run off the road. The next day, their vehicle was found overturned, both bodies lying in a ditch with their throats slit and the prototype was gone. The third man who had been too ill to attend the demonstration packed up everything and went into hiding. Word is, this man is still alive, very paranoid, yet he has not given up on the principle and has gone even further in his development of the principle.
I heard a lot of rumors about lots of prototype engines that are using alternative energy like water even small nuclear engines but either the inventors were bought out by oil company's or they were found murdered, had an accident etc.
Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." [Linus B. Torvalds]
As for myself, I upload my important stuff on FTP too. I have a local SVN on my laptop that is synchronized as soon as it is connected to the internal network on a SVN server on a RAID5 array (Linux server with 4x80G). Later it tar.gz's the SVN-tree with a timestamp, and sends it over FTP to my website.
Soon I will have an external 250G SATA HD in an enclosure that will mirror my RAID5 array (on a compressed filesystem) and saveguard "backups" of my ogg-files.
I for one welcome our new molded slimy robot-controlling overlords
AND
In Soviet America slimy molds control you (slimy molds being president/politicians/RIAA)
STATISTICS!!!! They all love statistics, don't they.
Well, I proved it this way: We were using el-cheapo boxes for serverhardware, I created a reporting feature for hardware breakdown with the possible reporting of OS, kind of hardware (Maxtor IDE disks of 40G or 80G) and RAID configuration. The Software RAID-1 configuration for Windows had 200% more harddisk breakdown with permanent data loss (backup or no recovery) over the same period of time over the same amount of boxes. Actually only 10% of the Windows boxes had their RAID setup intact after a crash of a single harddrive while for the Linux boxes it was over 90%.
Then I pulled statistics of the ticketing system for trouble reports and it concluded that tickets connected to Windows servers were 500% higher and that the resolution time was about 60% longer compared to the tickets connected to the same amount of Linux servers.
Although results for your company might differ, it is going to be similar to my conclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand what all the fuzz is about.
On the user side of the ISP:
Me pays $10/month for 56k (I can't get anything else) and get about 40k/40k (up/down)
An average user that can get broadband pays $20 for cable or DSL at 1024/128
An average slashdot reader that can get broadband pays $50-100 for it at 4096/512
on the other side of the ISP:
An average company with a decent webfarm pays about $1000-2000/month for 50M/50M fiber.
Outside the ISP:
The ISP pays AT&T and cronies a few $10000/month for a decent connection to the backbone.
On the other ISP:
Google pays also a few $10000/month for a decent connection of one of their datacenters (they have many) for either a connection to the ISP or directly connected to the backbone (AMS/IX, AT&T)
Once the bandwidth is filled, I can't download faster than 5kbyte/s, on cable/dsl you can't get more than 2 connections at 1mbit/s (and usually you can't use your full bandwidth due to 100:1 overbooking by the ISP). I paid for my 5kbyte/s, the DSL user paid for his 4Mbit/s, Google paid for their 5000Mbit/s and nobody can get more through the line. If they want to, they should could more bandwidth or multiple carriers (like a DSL, Cable and Sattelite line in a Linux box with NAT and line balancing to get 25Mbit/5Mbit). In any way the ISP's get their money, the backbone-owners get paid by the ISP, everybody is or should be happy because in a healthy business (the ones that people invest in and that don't go bankrupt) the end price of the product you sell is your total cost of the product including money you pay people + a percentage of the profit.
If they are not earning enough to cover costs, they should raise the price and see their customers go somewhere else where there's a good cash management or all raise their price if it is so that currently ISP's are losing money. But I don't think that happens because if they lose just $0.50/customer, that would constitute about a loss of different millions and thus there would be no ISP's anymore because they would all be bankrupt.
I think it is thus allowed (imho) that certain ISP's get money from for example Google for only a 10:1 overbooking for their services or a leased line between their routers but that shouldn't make competitors slower than they already are. It is wrong that because you CAN pay (eg. Microsoft) you could get a higher bandwidth on the same overbooked bandwidth than your competitors (eg. linux.org) or that you ban certain hosts from your network or make them annoyingly slow because they don't want to / can't pay.
I am a recent convert to the faith of Mac. Currently I have a mixed environment at home consisting out of 1 iBook, 1 PowerBook, 1 HP laptop with Gentoo, 1 Windows PC and 2 Linux PC's with Debian and CentOS.
I have handled mixed environments at all my working places. What I've learned out of it:
McAfee broke a lot of times (automatic virus definition updates) causing different mail clusters to stop processing e-mails. On Windows it caused a lot of lock ups, lock downs (where no one could login anymore from remote) and sometimes it just plain stopped working. On Mac the same problems were spotted.
McAfee just churns out virus updates (sometimes every 4 hours) without decently testing them which causes a lot of sysadmin problems. Sometimes over 20 hours per week were spent just fixing the damn things.
On decently updated and secured Mac or Linux boxes I have never, ever seen a virus outbreak. This is due to the inherited security in the kernels. On decently updated and secured (as far as that is possible on for example Exchange boxes) Windows servers, I have seen different defaces through IIS and virus outbreaks but most of the time it were script kiddies or dumb users causing that to happen.
The problem with McAfee in a controlled environment is that it breaks more than secures stuff. I have used ClamAV as a stand in for McAfee on the mail clusters (working before the McAfee daemon) and after a week it was obvious that McAfee didn't do anything anymore. The point is, I wouldn't trust a Windows environment with ClamAV, but for the tinfoil hat users, I would recommend using ClamAV (or ClamAVX for Mac OS X) and it hasn't yet caused any more or big problems for me than McAfee did. Linux and Mac is so much more secure by design that imho it is not necessary yet to make big expenses on any commercial viruspackage.
I've got a list of all universities in the USA. Maybe the RIAA would be interested in buying it from me, for say, 10000$ and a life long guarantee that I won't get sued.
And how the heck are they going to filter all that? My file sharing goes through NNTP, HTTP and FTP (and recently more often through SFTP)
I went to school between the generation that had to program their C64 and the script-kiddies who just download their homework. I had a second hand 8086 when I was 8 and by the age of 12 the fastest computer at school was a 8088 on which we all had to learn to type. I could use a 80486 by the time I was 16 to learn the basics of Turbo Pascal on (for a mere 6 months) and we shared the 128kbit ISDN connection with 150 computers ranging from 486->PII
.NET, Ajax, Ruby on Rails and other 'Frameworks'. This takes the real thinking out of programming and even the dumbest ass can program in those languages. This doesn't mean it is good to learn the basics through such a 'languages' but I have been at a company that was programming their complete ERP system in VB, .NET and .NET2 for the last 4 years with 5 full-time programmers. The problem is that those 'programmers' don't understand that you can just stick to the same language if you use a core language like C or C++ and don't follow the framework flavor of the month. With some good design, you can even program quicker and more efficiently in a basic language and the product will be faster and have a smaller footprint AND be portable too.
What I would like to point out is that schools have way underestimated and underbudgetted their IT and computer expenses. I have never had a decent teacher that could explain the least thing about computers, programming or anything else. Governmental school systems are way to slow to adapt to the new technologies. It takes on average 10 years to change something fundamental in the program, the other schools are way to expensive for the average joe's kids.
Everything I learned (PHP, C, C++, ASM) I learned on my own and I don't have a degree in any IT or computer field. I am currently freelancing as a PHP programmer and *Nix Systems Administrator and soon I am going to administer a hybrid IBM mainframe/Windows/MacOSX/Novell network and I am currently earning close to 75k (I am not even 25).
Kids who are interested in having a good job later, shouldn't care too much about schooling anyway imho. What they teach in schools was way deprecated (even geology, history and chemistry) when I learned it and I had to correct teachers on multiple instances on different subjects. I read 100's of books of decent size about Novell, Linux, C++, OS/2 and other and experimented with different programming languages, hardware and software when other kids were playing outside.
The current decay in interest is also because everything seems to be prepared for them thanks to projects as
Anyway, the problem is imho that kids don't get educated good enough and some organization let is seem that programming is just some easy thing to do, that everybody could do while the real work isn't being done by anyone anymore.
I have been looking into outsourcing to other country's just for the heck of it and unless you have a really big company with offices already in one of those countries (like Microsoft, IBM and some others might pull it off), the cost is fabulous. The prices charged for those services are the same or more as if you would pay a programmer full time. If you do it yourself in a company, you have to get one or more managers on both sides of the channel that DO speak English and know the company. The cost of moving your managers constantly and paying those extra managers quickly get up to the cost where you could pay some local programmers. Next to that your program is written without any comments or comments that nobody understands, so changing anything is going to get difficult. Outsourcing your helpdesk is just bad for customers (anyone ever called to the helpdesk of Ensim knows what I mean) The only problem I could think of is that your local programmers are connected to a union and thus refuse to work since you can't fire them (for example those guys at Verizon). I also see in the neighbourhood that there is a shortage of good IT personnel. I am freelancing now and I am buried in work (I could earn close to 10k/month if I wanted to); I have other requests from multiple companies to be a full time systems administrator since no-one around seems to have any clue about Linux/Unix/Mac and that can integrate with Windows too. What the heck is so difficult about learning any *nix system or how to integrate/migrate from Windows (this is in really in high demand right now).
Apparently it IS possible to sell them for such a price. Why not here? This just proves that they CAN sell for less but do not WANT to.
They were hiring and of course we went down in what they had etc.
The company still had a big IBM mainframe running batches that people had to fill from a green CRT. They still used Token Ring in their machine environment, just because they didn't change it since it works great. They are thinking about decentralizing for security reasons though.
I heard different researches still use them as you can calculate the latency and round-trip and for some tests that is really important.
Well, it's the old give a fish, learn to fish story. Give those poor kids access to sources how to prevent things like AIDS but also lots of other things (clean water, first aid, how to grow stuff without burning forests) for 100$ and you won't need billions of dollars to develop a 100$ medical treatment just for AIDS while they have a bunch of other things to worry about.
Of course, some get basic education now and a lot has been done to prevent AIDS but I think the Gates' foundation should view this as an opportunity to work together with open source to get them even further both through specialized funds against HIV from their side and good, stable education through the laptop projects.
As it looks now, those businesses sponsoring the against AIDS have much more in mind for those poor people as in buying them stuff now and give the message later that they owe it to buy their products keeping the circle alive that we had back in europe right after the industrial revolution: get the family to work at the factory for (little) money, get 'protection' (housing etc.) by the factory but you had to buy the overpriced products at the factory stores or you lost your job.
I don't want to say that what the businesses are doing is bad or all with bad intentions (sponsoring HIV drugs development etc.) the opposite actually but as long as you keep pouring money in a situation without changing the roots of the situation (under-educated people), nothing is going to change. Was Bill, Negroponte or Ghandi right? The future will tell...
Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute). I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding. The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues). That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server. And yes, Exchange CAN handle also shared calendar data etc. but so can IMAP and that was wat a lot of customers used it for while Exchange had performance problems when a secretary opened more than 3 executive calendars at the same time.
A cat in the narrow makes crazy jumps.
If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type
Well, broadband connection is not necessary imho. A lot of people in the US still have 56k (like me) because no broadband is available.
As for the people supporting the users, well, that is what open source has a community for as well as for the applications and the OS. Not everything has to run Windows for $500 and Office for another $500.
That the thing has a small screen is not a big problem. In my time, we called a 14" color CRT on 800x600 a BIG screen, heck even the "Origami" computers don't have such an amazing big screen.
Mister Bill is here of course talking in his own interest because he cannot sell a fully supported, fully loaded (both hardware and software) laptop-like computer for $100, just his OS costs more than that.
You say you have a daughter AND you are a geek?
/. desk.
This means that you got laid before (about 15 years ago, probably when you were waiting to boot up your 8086 with DR-DOS) so you should have already delivered your geek license into the
Back when I was young, when the Spanish Flu hit, we didn't have computers and still we contained it to Spain... and we had to go to work during the "pandemic" and we didn't have any cars, we had to walk, uphill, both ways...
Earlier this week suggestions that Apple needs a Security Czar, now that Google needs a CMO. Next week: Microsoft needs a good CEO, CTO, CSO and CMO, RedHat needs a Chief Hackers Officer and Novell a Kernel Czar.
I am also looking for a job, but I'm not suggesting new (unnecessary/redundant) jobs to any company's I would like to work at.
How do you install the rootkit? Yes, you guessed it, through an insecure operating system. This article is imho just another promotion FUD campaign for TCPA.
If your current operating system and security measures are good enough, such rootkits-with-virtual-machines are not even going to be able to be installed, heck as long as you don't have to login as administrator to print out a document or surf the web, you're pretty safe.
And as soon as you notice your box could be r00t3d, you take it out anyway and don't trust it. And if you don't notice one of your boxes is generating extra traffic or doing things it shouldn't, you shouldn't have to have admin privileges anyway.
Everybody here is bitching about what to do when it happens, simple for me:
I go to my bank, and I ask for a credit card. I have to sign for the thing. Together with that they state that you've read the agreement statements and other legal mumbo jumbo. I ask for those things, the bank representative gets me a copy out of which I scrap all the statements I do not agree with and rewrite them according to what I think of it. I ask for a signature of the bank representative (usually I deal with their manager by then) and a signed copy of that document.
If the bank director/manager/clerk agrees with it, he places his signature and I am free from crap like this. If they don't agree, I don't get their service (credit card) because I do not want it from them with those rules imposed to it. But usually (if you are like me only change the privacy statements) they agree and sign (they don't understand anyway).
Recently I did an overdraft of a certain checking account and they charged me $32 for it and some interest. I asked where I agreed with that, the bank clerk said it is all accounts that have that. I asked again for the document I signed agreeing to that. They got the bank director who remembered that I did not agree and got out the documents with the statement that I agreed to it only if all my accounts were overdrafted or to such an amount that the bank was actually loosing money on me as a customer (over all my accounts) and they agreed with that since I deposited quite a sum in a special savings account (saving up for a fully upgraded Quad G5) and me and my family has some international funds making me their special customer.
If they don't agree, then ask why. If it is just an answer along it being company regulations or whatever, I threaten to change my services to other company's. Usually they do agree when they are going to loose a good customer.
Really, in the USA company's do a LOT to keep their customers and giving them all kind of traits (because then you do not spread bad publicity). Of course if you order a credit card online or through mail, then you're usually screwed (although online could be debatable if you reviewed the correct information).
I'm left-handed you insensitive clod
Sure I'll do:
You can torture the architect (or his secretary for that matter - is more fun), for his name look on the big brass plate when you enter the bank. Since I do not condone torture or anything related to that: you could also just walk (or break) into his office and ask the plans of that and the surrounding houses for some student project or offer your computer services to them and they leave you alone for the day in a dusty archive office together with the server.
As for the guards being not there: Usually, after office hours when the bank is closed, there is no active force in the bank (at least not at mine). There are some camera's which you might want to conceal and maybe even get a tap on the communications (you could "repair" the telephone lines in the neighbourhood for instance). If you're going during the day, I honestly don't think there is an ACTIVE force in the building (almost-retired-guard)
Since the guards are not there, you do not need to sedate them so no agents required. If you do it in the middle of the day, swinging some big gun will do.
For the security company who is doing the security, look for the shield-like tags on the doors of the bank. With a little luck you can even infiltrate in their company (if you are planning it a few years in advance)
Oh and by the way: in my bank the vault is usually open. If you want to know the codes (of my bank's vault) then order a box in the vault and if you're a big guy like me and go first thing in the morning you can look over the managers shoulder when they type it in.
Escape routes: well, my bank has a front and back - the front goes onto Main Street who is kind of narrow to escape on. The back door however has a big parking lot that connects parking lots of adjacent buildings and their parkings front entrance who is connected to multiple streets.
And since all this is just common user thinking (i'm not a crook, honestly) and is easily distilled out of just going regularly to the bank, I think everybody ever walking in a bank should get arrested.
Moved to the United Soviet States of R... America a few months ago and have already accumulated the following: APC SurgeArrest Personal (for things not hanging at the UPS - screens) APC Rackmount UPS (2200VA) Apple iBook G3 (128M RAM) HP Pavilion ze4400 (512M RAM) HP OfficeJet Copier/printer/fax/scanner Lexmark Inkjet printer (is a piece of crap, is going in my car) 2,8 GHz P4 (Gateway machine from someone who sold it for $200 because of some virus) 1G RAM Netgear 10-port switch 2x rackmount Longshine Manageable 24-port switches (need to replace fans, they are making quite some noise (that is also why they were discarded)) AMD Thunderbird 700MHz (is my backup machine - 4x80G RAID5 with Adaptec RAID-5 controller, 64M cache and BBU) (512M RAM) Cyrix 266MHz (is my router/firewall) with 128M RAM VIA C3 1GHz (is becoming my multimedia car PC - works on 12V) 19" rack - yup a complete 19" rack for among other things my switches complete with cable gutter, rails) I heightened the floor and lowered the ceiling (myself) Quad Power Mac G5 (2,5 GHz) with WD 2x 74G Raptor and 2,5G RAM Some loose discs (IDE/SATA) from 40G->250G for transport/backup in external enclosure. 4 Dish network rackmount HD-DVR (free installation in 4 rooms concentrated in my computer room - going into MythTV) 1 rackmount sattelite receiver for Dish Network 1 rackmount sattelite receiver for Internet connection 1 Cable/Sattelite modem Running dual Ethernet and 2 phone lines throughout the house (in every room)
I found this article quite a while ago: http://www.keelynet.com/energy/ford.htm Model T Magnetic Engine - from TFA My contact said there were three fellows who got wind of this story several years ago. They secured a first-run Model T and found it did indeed have strange slots on the bell housing. Magnets were inserted and when they cranked it, the flywheel began to spin on its own. Based on this initial verifying experiment, they eventually produced a 40hp version which was self-running, using the same magneto system. A demonstration was scheduled in a larger city and two of the men drove the prototype to the demonstration, the third man was ill and could not attend. The demonstration went off without a hitch and was enthusiastically received. Plans and contacts were made for duplicating the prototype for further tests that would be followed by marketing. As the two men were driving home late that evening with their prototype, their vehicle was run off the road. The next day, their vehicle was found overturned, both bodies lying in a ditch with their throats slit and the prototype was gone. The third man who had been too ill to attend the demonstration packed up everything and went into hiding. Word is, this man is still alive, very paranoid, yet he has not given up on the principle and has gone even further in his development of the principle. I heard a lot of rumors about lots of prototype engines that are using alternative energy like water even small nuclear engines but either the inventors were bought out by oil company's or they were found murdered, had an accident etc.
Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." [Linus B. Torvalds]
As for myself, I upload my important stuff on FTP too. I have a local SVN on my laptop that is synchronized as soon as it is connected to the internal network on a SVN server on a RAID5 array (Linux server with 4x80G). Later it tar.gz's the SVN-tree with a timestamp, and sends it over FTP to my website.
Soon I will have an external 250G SATA HD in an enclosure that will mirror my RAID5 array (on a compressed filesystem) and saveguard "backups" of my ogg-files.
I for one welcome our new molded slimy robot-controlling overlords AND In Soviet America slimy molds control you (slimy molds being president/politicians/RIAA)
Bush (and 90% of the rest of the American population) doesn't know how to speak or read phonetics you insensitive clod.
;-)
The other 10% read Slashdot
STATISTICS!!!! They all love statistics, don't they.
Well, I proved it this way:
We were using el-cheapo boxes for serverhardware, I created a reporting feature for hardware breakdown with the possible reporting of OS, kind of hardware (Maxtor IDE disks of 40G or 80G) and RAID configuration.
The Software RAID-1 configuration for Windows had 200% more harddisk breakdown with permanent data loss (backup or no recovery) over the same period of time over the same amount of boxes. Actually only 10% of the Windows boxes had their RAID setup intact after a crash of a single harddrive while for the Linux boxes it was over 90%.
Then I pulled statistics of the ticketing system for trouble reports and it concluded that tickets connected to Windows servers were 500% higher and that the resolution time was about 60% longer compared to the tickets connected to the same amount of Linux servers.
Although results for your company might differ, it is going to be similar to my conclusions.
The place where we landed last time on the moon - in some studio near or in Hollywood.
The IP is translated into 127.0.0.1 I'm sure they are sharing music!!!
It was John Doe and John Smith, sue them!!!