I don't understand why people always try to "get around" these restrictions. If there is a legitimate business need, then get it approved. These preventions are put in place for a reason. The more open the network, the more risk. The more risk means more virus, trojans, botnets, data leakage, etc. IT then has to cleanup your mess.
Partially right. The problem is, that in many larger organisations the 'legitimate business need --> approval' process does not scale well with regard to the time required to get the approval. So even if you do have a legitimate business need, waiting for the approval might still keep you from getting your job done. Multiply this by say... 2,000 people waiting 10 days to get an approval for something. This will cost you real money.
It seems to be difficult to balance these things. But having a good zoning concept at hand might be of great help. It keeps the wrong people from tampering with critical resources, but it also allows employees to use necessary services e.g. SFTP. Yes, I've come across a situation were I was not allowed to get a patch from a vendor using SFTP. The idea was: SFTP may be used for stealing data. Use FTP, this is far more secure, as we can scan it with deep packet inspection.
Yes, we did have something like this happen where I work. Our IT group ended up blocking all social networking sites. Our marketing department raised a fit because they use Facebook for business purposes.
At the place were I currently work we have kind of a "feel free to use the internet as you wish" policy. This actually works out quite well. Sites are not filtered specifically. They basically say "hey, if you end up doing illegal stuff, you're screwed, otherwise we don't care as long as you get to do your work."
I used to work for a financial institution before that. And they had sort of a lockdown-mania. Filtering proxies (no checking your private web mail - could be used for stealing information), read-only USB mass storage, scanning outgoing e-mail attachments etc. I guess, these rules came in place because of management being scared to death by compliance requirements, not because of IT admins abusing their power.
And BTW: Had I wished to steal massive amounts of data, I could have still simply sent them via e-mail in a password-encrypted archive. It's a matter of trust, not only of making it difficult. So basically powerful and clueless management are equally effective as power-abusing admins.
What's happened is that countries without legacy copper and overbearing telcos have leapfrogged the US in terms of, well....pretty much everything mobile.
Indeed they may have. And it made a decent communication infrastructure available to them at a fraction of the cost. So it's also a decade of giving millions of people access to a phone. TFA does not mention this, but this might actually be more disruptive than packing a bazillion-pixel-camera into a feature-packed phone-crossbreed.
There's nothing particularly wrong with plain C as a first language. (I'd avoid all the intricacies of C++ syntax for a first-timer. The OO stuff is, in my opinion, totally unnecessary for a first-time programmer to learn.)
I'm tempted to disagree. It might come down to a "imperative programming vs. OOP" thing, but since most people will get into some contact with OOP anyway, why not start with it in the first place? A few people have already suggested Smalltalk and I'd second that. It has extremely simple, compact syntax. It is 100% object oriented and consistent. And once you've got the "Everything is an object. Everything happens by sending messages (to objects)." idea, you've got it. Since this is a very simple idea, it should be quite easy to understand. And if you've understood that, you can just go on and write programs.
I've started out with imperative programming (Pascal) and it took me a while to get behind the OOP idea, but after I've had a look at Smalltalk, I just had that enlightening moment, when I learned object-oriented thinking.
I guess that this object-orientation is much closer to how we naturally think. It's about "making things happen" and about "interaction of things with each other", not about picking everything apart into a big list of things to do, then making smaller lists of to-do-items we call functions and so on. And even with 100% object-oriented thinking, you still have the concept of doing things one after the other. But only in those places, where it is in the nature of the problem.
I really think you should! I've installed the alpha a few months ago (on a really crappy old system - 1GHz P3, 256MB RAM, slooooow (as in awfully slow) HDD) and it worked out surprisingly well. Boots (from Grub to responsive interface) in approx. 7 seconds on that old box, stays responsive all the time (even when running a few instances of that Teapot rendering w/o hardware acceleration), simply amazing. To say "it currently lacks a few application ports" would be understatement, but I fancy it a great single-user OS.
TFA states "Because I don't want to be hooked into the (proprietary) Google stack (Python, Django, BigTable, GoogleOS) just yet"... IMHO neither Python nor Django are proprietary. Or even proprietary in a way that the AWS stack is not?
They also praised it as a sort of über-OS for multimedia things on that German HomeShopping channel, showing it playing about 10 videos in parallel, encoding a video and doing some office work. It still works fluently but I think it is lame propaganda as I doubt that any of their computer-illiterate customers will ever be processing 10 videos at a time. They just push a product and I think they get nice profits from it, even though when I zapped into that channel (it's nice entertainment IMO) they were selling it with some kind of a PC they gave no real specs on.
And I do depreciate this way of luring unaware customers into buying products they really aren't able to use. But well then, maybe it's the only way of making computers a off-the-shelf product. I miss the "good old days" when computers where still protected by the simple "no-computer-cookie for dumb wannabe-user"-system and you had to go to some small, well-hidden, dusky shop to get your computer.
I'm not a biologist either, but I do not think that the nucleis will react to the insertion of these probes in a way that they affect the observations. The nucleus is of 10-20 micrometres in size, whereas the inserted probes are made of a few hundred to thousand atoms.
The second thing is that I am quite sure that the guys at Berkeley Lab did think about interference with the intra-nucleus reactions. And if they can keep the things in there for hours and days, it's most likely not to interfere. It also says that the things are non-toxic (at the Berkeley Lab press relase) which IMO means that they did not cause any unusual reaction.
I also assume, that the illumination of the nucleus doesn't make any difference, as long as you do not use UV light. The cells of our skin are illuminated all day long, and they don't seem to bother as long as you protect then from excessive UV exposition.
In the computer I currently use the most (Athlon 1.2GHz), I had two of the old IBM-DTLA drives, one at 30, the other at 40 GB which I bought at an interval of about 2 months. I ran W2k on the smaller one, and SuSE 7.1 on the 40 gig disk. I loved those drives, they where incredibly fast (at the cost of the noise they emitted, which could I could hear when I was going up the stairs to my room). The 30 gig one crashed after 27 months of use.
I thought I was a lucky guy, as I had a backup of my personal data under each OS on the respectively other disk. I ordered a new one (a Seagate at 60 gig) and planned to copy the data onto the new disk. Well, the second one crashed a week before the new disk arrived. I was almost up to taking a nap on the railroad track;(.
I sold the new drive I got to a friend (at the price I paid for it, because it was new and he needed a HDD expansion)... and bought myself two Seagate 80 gig disks, which continue to serve very well. I keep backing up my data on the other disk, but I also maintain CD-R backups... well, on a more or less... ok, ok... more a less regular basis.
I think you are absolutely right. The terrorists' most powerful weapon are the media. Possibly if the media were not telling us about those attacks, no one would be afraid of being blown up. But what solutions to this problem should there be? The media cannot just stop informing us. One might tend to say they should not report on terrorist attacks. But there would surely be some other way of keeping people afraid. And who would be to decide what to hush up?
Government? No, this is a much too serious matter to be entrusted to a limited group of people!
I think the only solution is to make almost any information freely available. One would be less afraid of the Arab next door if one knew about his culture and just talked to him.
IMHO educated people have far less problems when dealing with new situations, simply because they get used to the feeling of being confronted with something new. You often face something new when trying to understand things.
Thus knowledge should be freely available and every human should be able to access it. Unfortunately this seems to be a utopian idea.
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I don't understand why people always try to "get around" these restrictions. If there is a legitimate business need, then get it approved. These preventions are put in place for a reason. The more open the network, the more risk. The more risk means more virus, trojans, botnets, data leakage, etc. IT then has to cleanup your mess.
Partially right. The problem is, that in many larger organisations the 'legitimate business need --> approval' process does not scale well with regard to the time required to get the approval. So even if you do have a legitimate business need, waiting for the approval might still keep you from getting your job done. Multiply this by say ... 2,000 people waiting 10 days to get an approval for something. This will cost you real money.
It seems to be difficult to balance these things. But having a good zoning concept at hand might be of great help. It keeps the wrong people from tampering with critical resources, but it also allows employees to use necessary services e.g. SFTP. Yes, I've come across a situation were I was not allowed to get a patch from a vendor using SFTP. The idea was: SFTP may be used for stealing data. Use FTP, this is far more secure, as we can scan it with deep packet inspection.
Yes, we did have something like this happen where I work. Our IT group ended up blocking all social networking sites. Our marketing department raised a fit because they use Facebook for business purposes.
At the place were I currently work we have kind of a "feel free to use the internet as you wish" policy. This actually works out quite well. Sites are not filtered specifically. They basically say "hey, if you end up doing illegal stuff, you're screwed, otherwise we don't care as long as you get to do your work."
I used to work for a financial institution before that. And they had sort of a lockdown-mania. Filtering proxies (no checking your private web mail - could be used for stealing information), read-only USB mass storage, scanning outgoing e-mail attachments etc. I guess, these rules came in place because of management being scared to death by compliance requirements, not because of IT admins abusing their power.
And BTW: Had I wished to steal massive amounts of data, I could have still simply sent them via e-mail in a password-encrypted archive. It's a matter of trust, not only of making it difficult. So basically powerful and clueless management are equally effective as power-abusing admins.
What's happened is that countries without legacy copper and overbearing telcos have leapfrogged the US in terms of, well....pretty much everything mobile.
Indeed they may have. And it made a decent communication infrastructure available to them at a fraction of the cost. So it's also a decade of giving millions of people access to a phone. TFA does not mention this, but this might actually be more disruptive than packing a bazillion-pixel-camera into a feature-packed phone-crossbreed.
There's nothing particularly wrong with plain C as a first language. (I'd avoid all the intricacies of C++ syntax for a first-timer. The OO stuff is, in my opinion, totally unnecessary for a first-time programmer to learn.)
I'm tempted to disagree. It might come down to a "imperative programming vs. OOP" thing, but since most people will get into some contact with OOP anyway, why not start with it in the first place? A few people have already suggested Smalltalk and I'd second that. It has extremely simple, compact syntax. It is 100% object oriented and consistent. And once you've got the "Everything is an object. Everything happens by sending messages (to objects)." idea, you've got it. Since this is a very simple idea, it should be quite easy to understand. And if you've understood that, you can just go on and write programs.
I've started out with imperative programming (Pascal) and it took me a while to get behind the OOP idea, but after I've had a look at Smalltalk, I just had that enlightening moment, when I learned object-oriented thinking.
I guess that this object-orientation is much closer to how we naturally think. It's about "making things happen" and about "interaction of things with each other", not about picking everything apart into a big list of things to do, then making smaller lists of to-do-items we call functions and so on. And even with 100% object-oriented thinking, you still have the concept of doing things one after the other. But only in those places, where it is in the nature of the problem.
I suppose I should check out Haiku.
I really think you should! I've installed the alpha a few months ago (on a really crappy old system - 1GHz P3, 256MB RAM, slooooow (as in awfully slow) HDD) and it worked out surprisingly well. Boots (from Grub to responsive interface) in approx. 7 seconds on that old box, stays responsive all the time (even when running a few instances of that Teapot rendering w/o hardware acceleration), simply amazing. To say "it currently lacks a few application ports" would be understatement, but I fancy it a great single-user OS.
Warning - a lot of things look like they follow a power law.
Exactly. And in case it doesn't fit into a power law, you can probably make it fit into a Gaussian distribution.
TFA states "Because I don't want to be hooked into the (proprietary) Google stack (Python, Django, BigTable, GoogleOS) just yet" ... IMHO neither Python nor Django are proprietary. Or even proprietary in a way that the AWS stack is not?
They also praised it as a sort of über-OS for multimedia things on that German HomeShopping channel, showing it playing about 10 videos in parallel, encoding a video and doing some office work. It still works fluently but I think it is lame propaganda as I doubt that any of their computer-illiterate customers will ever be processing 10 videos at a time. They just push a product and I think they get nice profits from it, even though when I zapped into that channel (it's nice entertainment IMO) they were selling it with some kind of a PC they gave no real specs on.
And I do depreciate this way of luring unaware customers into buying products they really aren't able to use. But well then, maybe it's the only way of making computers a off-the-shelf product. I miss the "good old days" when computers where still protected by the simple "no-computer-cookie for dumb wannabe-user"-system and you had to go to some small, well-hidden, dusky shop to get your computer.
I'm not a biologist either, but I do not think that the nucleis will react to the insertion of these probes in a way that they affect the observations. The nucleus is of 10-20 micrometres in size, whereas the inserted probes are made of a few hundred to thousand atoms.
The second thing is that I am quite sure that the guys at Berkeley Lab did think about interference with the intra-nucleus reactions. And if they can keep the things in there for hours and days, it's most likely not to interfere. It also says that the things are non-toxic (at the Berkeley Lab press relase) which IMO means that they did not cause any unusual reaction.
I also assume, that the illumination of the nucleus doesn't make any difference, as long as you do not use UV light. The cells of our skin are illuminated all day long, and they don't seem to bother as long as you protect then from excessive UV exposition.
In the computer I currently use the most (Athlon 1.2GHz), I had two of the old IBM-DTLA drives, one at 30, the other at 40 GB which I bought at an interval of about 2 months. I ran W2k on the smaller one, and SuSE 7.1 on the 40 gig disk. I loved those drives, they where incredibly fast (at the cost of the noise they emitted, which could I could hear when I was going up the stairs to my room). The 30 gig one crashed after 27 months of use.
;(.
... and bought myself two Seagate 80 gig disks, which continue to serve very well. I keep backing up my data on the other disk, but I also maintain CD-R backups ... well, on a more or less ... ok, ok ... more a less regular basis.
I thought I was a lucky guy, as I had a backup of my personal data under each OS on the respectively other disk. I ordered a new one (a Seagate at 60 gig) and planned to copy the data onto the new disk. Well, the second one crashed a week before the new disk arrived. I was almost up to taking a nap on the railroad track
I sold the new drive I got to a friend (at the price I paid for it, because it was new and he needed a HDD expansion)
I think you are absolutely right. The terrorists' most powerful weapon are the media. Possibly if the media were not telling us about those attacks, no one would be afraid of being blown up. But what solutions to this problem should there be? The media cannot just stop informing us. One might tend to say they should not report on terrorist attacks. But there would surely be some other way of keeping people afraid. And who would be to decide what to hush up? Government? No, this is a much too serious matter to be entrusted to a limited group of people!
I think the only solution is to make almost any information freely available. One would be less afraid of the Arab next door if one knew about his culture and just talked to him. IMHO educated people have far less problems when dealing with new situations, simply because they get used to the feeling of being confronted with something new. You often face something new when trying to understand things. Thus knowledge should be freely available and every human should be able to access it. Unfortunately this seems to be a utopian idea.