1) Lieberman keeps the D after his name so that he can distance himself from the social stygma of being associated with the Republicans. But his voting track record much more strongly reflect the Republican party than the Democrat party.
2) Luckily for us, you didn't write the US Constitution. The US Constitution specifically states that all men* are created equal. (* men having the modernized meaning of people). The Constitution is a rule set for how the Government can interact with people. The Constitution does not GIVE you rights. You already HAVE rights, they are inalienable, you were born with them, along with every other person in the world. The Constitution defines what the Government can/cannot do in relation to those rights. It doesn't give you the right to free speech, it prevents the government from limiting your speech. It doesn't give you the right of habeas corpus, you already have it. It prevents the government from taking away anyone's right to habeas corpus.
The administration has been playing fast and loose with the rules, using fear, scare tactics, and marketing to twist people's view on what the constitution is, and the legitimacy of what they are doing.
The bitch about this specific law and the actions of the administration is that it IS unconstitutional. But congress doesn't have the votes to tear into it, and the supreme court is only going to hear cases where the plaintiff is someone who was detained. But if the detainees have no recourse, they have no way of filing for a hearing in front of the supreme court.
My Dad was the Computer Coordinator for a multiple small town school district (roughly 300-400 per graduating class). When I went to school there, computers were the new thing. There were a few digital systems, but grades, attendance, reprimands, lunch money, etc... was all handled the old paper and pen way. Since I've graduated my Dad worked on implimenting a system called 'Power School'. All I can say is that if that system where in place when I was going to school... I would have been screwed. I would have had much better grades, but I would have been screwed. Grades, homework assignments, teachers notes, lunch money accounts, detentions, all sorts of goodies. And it is accessible to parents via a simple web log-on.
Gone are the days of cutting class to catch a movie, making out in the back of the US History class with that cute blond girl, or getting booted out of auto for ripping on your teachers car... Heck, I will be able to know what kind of trouble my kid gets into at work before I get home.
Unfortunately, I fear what adventures in life he might miss out on as there are good lessons to be learned from snubbing authority, good memories to be had of cute girls, and pride to be taken in knowing that your car will smoke your auto teacher's POS.
There are parents who don't care about grades. Why should the values of others (good grades are important) be imposed on them?... "Right & wrong" are opinions of individuals and society. In most decently populated geographic areas in the US there are multiple video game stores, and the ease of purchasing online. If the parents don't care about their child's grades, they can either a) lie or b) let the kid buy the game elsewhere. This is a private company dealing with a private consumer, the is no state involvement and no constitutional issue. The medical field on the other hand has enough legislation wrapped around it that it takes the Supreme Court and teams of lawyers just to work around the tiniest issue.
How about a Nap Penalty? And we shouldn't stop at games or 24 hours. I won't stop fighting until we mandate 30 minute naps for anyone who pushes themselves through 6 hours of work (lunch and break included). In today's day and age there is no reason for people to be pushing their bodies through the post lunch sleepy time. By doing so they are putting everyone's life at risk! Studies have shown that more accidents occur when people are tired. Enforcing nap time will cut down on work related fatalities! And if you're not for that, you MUST be a terrorist!
Actually, until 2005 Trent was running Nothing, his own Label and Studio. And given his attitude to the industry (the record industry, not the musicians), and his past affinity for the internet and viral marketing, it would not be surprising to see him go to a fully independent internet only distribution system and start a new label once his contractual obligations to Interscope are done.
Funny, I thought China already had laws dealing with online gaming... Maybe they just need more laws. Laws will save us all! Yea laws! Because if it's illegal, no one will do it. We just need to make it more illegal.
Actually, given the $120 million dollars WoW is pulling in each month, and the number of competitors out there trying to create the next great game, hiring a person who has made it their goal of understanding the psychological, social, and economic drives inside the game, and the same factors outside the game, should be a very high priority.
I was following a game a few months ago. Solid looking graphics and network engine, decent sounding game engine. It looked like it had some great potential and they had a multi-million dollar budget. But they had absolutely no knowledge about handling their community or managing a MMO, and the whole thing crashed and burned a horrible death. They hired a fan from the forums to become their community rep. Nothing like taking a kid with nothing more than a high school degree and put him in charge of distributing knowledge to packs of rabid fans.
Had they brought in people with experience in managing MMOs, and people with an understanding of the underlying factors, they would have likely done much better.
We had one of the project leads from the video game Prey come to a user group meeting last year. He talked about how they put all of the worst content onto that DVD knowing that if they didn't put the worst on that CD, that the penalties and lawsuits after going gold would crush them. He even talked about specific parts that they were worried different ratings boards would object to and had mods ready to change blood color on some environmental objects and even to remove the sphincter things. And Yes, those things are supposed to be assholes.
It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say Who cares what the scientists say? What does accounting, marketing and production say?!?!
Why on earth would we be going over a reversible encryption in a conversation about passwords and pass phrases? I am familiar with the difference. I was avoiding that part of the conversation because I assumed that anyone looking at encrypting passwords/phrases would know that you do not want there to be any possibility of decrypting the value. Hashing is a subset of Encryption. Saying Hashing != Encryption is like saying Car != Vehicle.
You keep jumping back and forth here. If you are going to brute force, then no, going 1-9 is not that much bigger than just 9, but if you're going brute force, then your English logic is not going to help you. And if you are trying to use the logic, you are going to be hampered by not knowing the length of the string. The other problem with that statement is that we aren't talking about 1-9 character passwords. We're talking about 15-100+ character passwords. 256^9 is a huge freaking number (close to 500 quadrillion?), but 256^100... you're talking about 6.6e240. Even if you figure your logic can cut the character count down to say 30:1 (mostly letter, slight possibility of upper case, etc...) you're still looking at 5.1e147 possibilities. Heck, lets toss in another 50% reduction for your English logic, even with 15:1 for each character you're looking at over 4e117 possibilities.
The point remains, if you are using Windows, and you want the most secure* password you can get regardless of your PC's or network's configuration, make sure your password is at least 15 characters long. If you do that, these rainbow files will not crack your password. And any attempt to brute force your password, including those attempting to apply pass phrase logic, will take such an inconceivably long time** that they are not a primary security concern***.
*most secure does not imply that the password is actually secure, just that it affords the most security as far as default password protection in Windows is concerned.
**obviously the caveat here is that if someone has your security data off site and has unlimited time and sufficient processing power, it is possible to crack. But with solid network security and expiring passwords, the likelihood of your password being cracked before you change it again is slim.
***Once again, not saying that the password is uncrackable, just that at that point there are other weaker links in the chain.
The problem isn't Bush listening in to 'all our calls'. Obviously, the sheer volume of communication constantly flowing is too great for anyone one entity to monitor "all" of it. No, the problem is with who is selected for monitoring, and how much oversight is involved in the process. With FISA (the old ruling) we knew at least that there was a panel of judges who watched over the process. These days, with Bush's "we don't need no stinking warrants" wiretap program, and the modifications to FISA, we as a public don't have a whole lot of faith in the oversight of the program.
So while Joe-schmoe from Baltimore probably isn't going to be monitored, what if Barrack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and John Edwards were? What if the information learned from the presidential candidates private communication was used to sway the election? Or what if smaller targets in influential positions were monitored? State representatives where district lines were being redefined, Governors, voting administrators in contested districts, Judges...
I enjoy my privacy, I would like to keep it and know that it is safe. But more so, I demand the privacy of others, such that a body in power can not abuse that power to prevent others from (peacefully and legally) taking that power from them.
I'm not sure I follow ya. If I grab an md5sum of a 17GB DVD rip, it will be 32bytes long. If I grab an md5sum of "Hi", it will be 32bytes long. Looking at an md5 hash, there is no way to determine the length of the seed (so far as I know). The LM hash does present this issue to an extent though as it is two 7 character blocks hashed. In the case of LM, yes you can determine if the password is 0-7 or 8-14 characters in length. But, as soon as you go to 15 character, Windows will not use LM to encrypt your password. So you will not be able to get the length of the passphrase, even to a block length, once it is longer than 14 characters.
There's a problem with your theory though. Password encryption is one way. It is lossey by design, and you will not be able to determine the length. Wether you type in 4 characters, or 40,000 characters, the encrypted value will only be 128b long (or how ever long your encryption system is geared around). We're not working with a phrase that ever needs to be decoded like you would with a communication.
A rainbow table is a pre-emptive brute force. You can do the brut force work at your leasure, then when you need to crack a LM Hash encrypted password, you just need to find a matching key in your table and enter the seed that generated that key. But the specific problem in the Windows case is the way LM Hash works. As soon as your password hits 15 characters though, the encryption runs through Kerberos. And I have not heard of any existing rainbow table solution to cracking a Kerberos password. Then again, I've been out of the security field for a year or two now, so I may have missed that memo.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with you. I would concur that if the pass phrase were written in sentence for with proper spelling, then yes, it would be easier to brute force then a random string of characters of the same length. Such an engine would have to be significantly more complex though, and there is no way to identify the number of words. So if we were talking about a 9 random word pass phrase, with an average of 100 possible mis-spellings per word, you are looking at 200,000^9 possibilities (~5e10^47) as opposed to a your rough estimate of 2000^9 (~3e10^29).
Heck, lets figure you can stick some grammar rules in there to bring the average likelihood of each word down to 1 in 500. Even then you are looking at 50,000^9 (2e10^42).
If you are using MD5 for encryption (32 characters, 1char = 2Bytes, 1 Byte = 8bits, 32 Char = 512bits) that means 64,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000TB of space. Although I'd venture a guess you'd start running into key collisions long before you made it there. Even then, to have every valid seed for every possible key would be like 512! bits. And 512! is a huge freaking number.
Or simply require your users to have passwords at least 15 characters long. There was an article out of MS a year or so ago about how the "password" is dead and that "pass phrases" will take over. Not a very well written article, but it did go over the weaknesses of short passwords, hashes, and rainbow files. They are essentially the same thing, only pass phrases are longer... much longer. Instead of having to remember "HYjK))w!x%" (which, if LM Hashed, can be cracked by a rainbow file in short order) you can remember "This is the passworrd for my new computerr". No one is going to carry a 5 terrabyte rainbow file around to try to crack a password that long. And brute force would take years. Given a few spelling mistakes and a dictionary attack will fail.
That's exactly what I found 2 years ago while working on my PDA based remote control (control your Windows MCE box from a Pocket PC on a wireless network. Volume, playback, record, channel, TV listings, schedules, etc... whether you are in front of the TV, or at work)
Many sites were already using Flash based interfaces for displaying listings, and others were so convoluted, it was totally not worth it. Zap2it Labs was a great solution. And had I stuck to my capstone project, I would have been working hard to convert it to one of the pay for service offerings.
I'll never forget the stories a good friend of mine used to tell about his job as a vet tech for the Henry Villas Zoo, specifically the monkey house. To quote...
And the percent of Netadmins who have the time, budget, knowledge, and inclination to do so is right about.001%
I agree that Virtualization is a great solution, but the vast majority of IT shops around the world don't have the knowledge or budget to pull it off these days. Give it another 5-10 years and it'll be the new standard, but right now it just doesn't have the market or education penetration. For the cost of investing in a Xen system and training, most IT shops will be financially better off just paying the extra electric bill.
My thoughts as well. Can you imagine if they stuck 3 cameras on that thing and did real time HDR imaging? No shadow too dark to hide in. No issues with objects being silhouetted by back light. Tons of options for growth with this project.
Yeah, we had those kits too. But software sales guys got the shaft. Hardware sales guys had a higher base salary and got commissions on big ticket items (monitors, PCs, laptops, printers, etc) and the only had to handle stocking the back wall and a few of the short isles. Software sales got crap base pay, only rewards if they sold x ESPs in a week, and were responsible for stocking and selling 90% of the stores inventory.
But cables were definitely where the profit was. My second time around with a CompUSA I was getting jaded, so if a customer ever asked me about a printer cable, I would tell them to go to Walmart and buy the same cable we sell for a third of the price. It was absurd the markup CompUSA had on cables. I picked up a VGA cable that sold for $65 and had a cost of $8. We would routinely charge $15-30 for a printer cable that had a cost of $5-10.
I did a few stints at Comp USA, and the management at both stores harped on the extended plans really hard. The hardware guys were on commissions, but us software guys weren't. We had a 'performance reward' though if we managed to push those pieces of crap. They even wanted us to peddle crap warranties on mice, keyboards, speakers, and other crap that is so cheap, there was no reason to worry about a warranty in the first place.
Not that Comp USA was a great place for management. I had 1 manager who was skimming the drawers. 1 who was convicted of evading taxes. Another that was caught raiding the RTM cage. 1 who was arrested for some sort of under-age porn thing. 2 that were their store's primary pot dealer (oddly enough, 1 of them actually ran a pretty nice store!)
Slashdot Mirror
1) Lieberman keeps the D after his name so that he can distance himself from the social stygma of being associated with the Republicans. But his voting track record much more strongly reflect the Republican party than the Democrat party.
2) Luckily for us, you didn't write the US Constitution. The US Constitution specifically states that all men* are created equal. (* men having the modernized meaning of people). The Constitution is a rule set for how the Government can interact with people. The Constitution does not GIVE you rights. You already HAVE rights, they are inalienable, you were born with them, along with every other person in the world. The Constitution defines what the Government can/cannot do in relation to those rights. It doesn't give you the right to free speech, it prevents the government from limiting your speech. It doesn't give you the right of habeas corpus, you already have it. It prevents the government from taking away anyone's right to habeas corpus.
The administration has been playing fast and loose with the rules, using fear, scare tactics, and marketing to twist people's view on what the constitution is, and the legitimacy of what they are doing.
The bitch about this specific law and the actions of the administration is that it IS unconstitutional. But congress doesn't have the votes to tear into it, and the supreme court is only going to hear cases where the plaintiff is someone who was detained. But if the detainees have no recourse, they have no way of filing for a hearing in front of the supreme court.
-Rick
USB 3 is 4.8 Gigabits per second. .6 Gigabytes per second. .6GB/sec = 600MB/s. .9TB = 900,000MB.
.9TB drive.
That's
900,000/600 = 1500 seconds
Assuming the drive itself is empty, formated and has a sequential write speed to keep up, you are looking at 25 minutes to fill a
-Rick
Come on Jack! Let's go to candy mountain! http://youtube.com/watch?v=JPONTneuaF4
-Rick
My Dad was the Computer Coordinator for a multiple small town school district (roughly 300-400 per graduating class). When I went to school there, computers were the new thing. There were a few digital systems, but grades, attendance, reprimands, lunch money, etc... was all handled the old paper and pen way. Since I've graduated my Dad worked on implimenting a system called 'Power School'. All I can say is that if that system where in place when I was going to school... I would have been screwed. I would have had much better grades, but I would have been screwed. Grades, homework assignments, teachers notes, lunch money accounts, detentions, all sorts of goodies. And it is accessible to parents via a simple web log-on.
Gone are the days of cutting class to catch a movie, making out in the back of the US History class with that cute blond girl, or getting booted out of auto for ripping on your teachers car... Heck, I will be able to know what kind of trouble my kid gets into at work before I get home.
Unfortunately, I fear what adventures in life he might miss out on as there are good lessons to be learned from snubbing authority, good memories to be had of cute girls, and pride to be taken in knowing that your car will smoke your auto teacher's POS.
-Rick
-Rick
How about a Nap Penalty? And we shouldn't stop at games or 24 hours. I won't stop fighting until we mandate 30 minute naps for anyone who pushes themselves through 6 hours of work (lunch and break included). In today's day and age there is no reason for people to be pushing their bodies through the post lunch sleepy time. By doing so they are putting everyone's life at risk! Studies have shown that more accidents occur when people are tired. Enforcing nap time will cut down on work related fatalities! And if you're not for that, you MUST be a terrorist!
-Rick
Actually, until 2005 Trent was running Nothing, his own Label and Studio. And given his attitude to the industry (the record industry, not the musicians), and his past affinity for the internet and viral marketing, it would not be surprising to see him go to a fully independent internet only distribution system and start a new label once his contractual obligations to Interscope are done.
-Rick
Funny, I thought China already had laws dealing with online gaming... Maybe they just need more laws. Laws will save us all! Yea laws! Because if it's illegal, no one will do it. We just need to make it more illegal.
-Rick
Actually, given the $120 million dollars WoW is pulling in each month, and the number of competitors out there trying to create the next great game, hiring a person who has made it their goal of understanding the psychological, social, and economic drives inside the game, and the same factors outside the game, should be a very high priority.
I was following a game a few months ago. Solid looking graphics and network engine, decent sounding game engine. It looked like it had some great potential and they had a multi-million dollar budget. But they had absolutely no knowledge about handling their community or managing a MMO, and the whole thing crashed and burned a horrible death. They hired a fan from the forums to become their community rep. Nothing like taking a kid with nothing more than a high school degree and put him in charge of distributing knowledge to packs of rabid fans.
Had they brought in people with experience in managing MMOs, and people with an understanding of the underlying factors, they would have likely done much better.
-Rick
We had one of the project leads from the video game Prey come to a user group meeting last year. He talked about how they put all of the worst content onto that DVD knowing that if they didn't put the worst on that CD, that the penalties and lawsuits after going gold would crush them. He even talked about specific parts that they were worried different ratings boards would object to and had mods ready to change blood color on some environmental objects and even to remove the sphincter things. And Yes, those things are supposed to be assholes.
-Rick
-Rick
Why on earth would we be going over a reversible encryption in a conversation about passwords and pass phrases? I am familiar with the difference. I was avoiding that part of the conversation because I assumed that anyone looking at encrypting passwords/phrases would know that you do not want there to be any possibility of decrypting the value. Hashing is a subset of Encryption. Saying Hashing != Encryption is like saying Car != Vehicle.
You keep jumping back and forth here. If you are going to brute force, then no, going 1-9 is not that much bigger than just 9, but if you're going brute force, then your English logic is not going to help you. And if you are trying to use the logic, you are going to be hampered by not knowing the length of the string. The other problem with that statement is that we aren't talking about 1-9 character passwords. We're talking about 15-100+ character passwords. 256^9 is a huge freaking number (close to 500 quadrillion?), but 256^100... you're talking about 6.6e240. Even if you figure your logic can cut the character count down to say 30:1 (mostly letter, slight possibility of upper case, etc...) you're still looking at 5.1e147 possibilities. Heck, lets toss in another 50% reduction for your English logic, even with 15:1 for each character you're looking at over 4e117 possibilities.
The point remains, if you are using Windows, and you want the most secure* password you can get regardless of your PC's or network's configuration, make sure your password is at least 15 characters long. If you do that, these rainbow files will not crack your password. And any attempt to brute force your password, including those attempting to apply pass phrase logic, will take such an inconceivably long time** that they are not a primary security concern***.
*most secure does not imply that the password is actually secure, just that it affords the most security as far as default
password protection in Windows is concerned.
**obviously the caveat here is that if someone has your security data off site and has unlimited time and sufficient processing power, it is possible to crack. But with solid network security and expiring passwords, the likelihood of your password being cracked before you change it again is slim.
***Once again, not saying that the password is uncrackable, just that at that point there are other weaker links in the chain.
-Rick
The problem isn't Bush listening in to 'all our calls'. Obviously, the sheer volume of communication constantly flowing is too great for anyone one entity to monitor "all" of it. No, the problem is with who is selected for monitoring, and how much oversight is involved in the process. With FISA (the old ruling) we knew at least that there was a panel of judges who watched over the process. These days, with Bush's "we don't need no stinking warrants" wiretap program, and the modifications to FISA, we as a public don't have a whole lot of faith in the oversight of the program.
So while Joe-schmoe from Baltimore probably isn't going to be monitored, what if Barrack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and John Edwards were? What if the information learned from the presidential candidates private communication was used to sway the election? Or what if smaller targets in influential positions were monitored? State representatives where district lines were being redefined, Governors, voting administrators in contested districts, Judges...
I enjoy my privacy, I would like to keep it and know that it is safe. But more so, I demand the privacy of others, such that a body in power can not abuse that power to prevent others from (peacefully and legally) taking that power from them.
-Rick
I'm not sure I follow ya. If I grab an md5sum of a 17GB DVD rip, it will be 32bytes long. If I grab an md5sum of "Hi", it will be 32bytes long. Looking at an md5 hash, there is no way to determine the length of the seed (so far as I know). The LM hash does present this issue to an extent though as it is two 7 character blocks hashed. In the case of LM, yes you can determine if the password is 0-7 or 8-14 characters in length. But, as soon as you go to 15 character, Windows will not use LM to encrypt your password. So you will not be able to get the length of the passphrase, even to a block length, once it is longer than 14 characters.
-Rick
There's a problem with your theory though. Password encryption is one way. It is lossey by design, and you will not be able to determine the length. Wether you type in 4 characters, or 40,000 characters, the encrypted value will only be 128b long (or how ever long your encryption system is geared around). We're not working with a phrase that ever needs to be decoded like you would with a communication.
-Rick
A rainbow table is a pre-emptive brute force. You can do the brut force work at your leasure, then when you need to crack a LM Hash encrypted password, you just need to find a matching key in your table and enter the seed that generated that key. But the specific problem in the Windows case is the way LM Hash works. As soon as your password hits 15 characters though, the encryption runs through Kerberos. And I have not heard of any existing rainbow table solution to cracking a Kerberos password. Then again, I've been out of the security field for a year or two now, so I may have missed that memo.
-Rick
And the worst part is I wrote 128b the first time, then double guessed myself and wrote out the math (while screwing up the char to byte size).
-Rick
I'm not sure I entirely agree with you. I would concur that if the pass phrase were written in sentence for with proper spelling, then yes, it would be easier to brute force then a random string of characters of the same length. Such an engine would have to be significantly more complex though, and there is no way to identify the number of words. So if we were talking about a 9 random word pass phrase, with an average of 100 possible mis-spellings per word, you are looking at 200,000^9 possibilities (~5e10^47) as opposed to a your rough estimate of 2000^9 (~3e10^29).
Heck, lets figure you can stick some grammar rules in there to bring the average likelihood of each word down to 1 in 500. Even then you are looking at 50,000^9 (2e10^42).
If you are using MD5 for encryption (32 characters, 1char = 2Bytes, 1 Byte = 8bits, 32 Char = 512bits) that means 64,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000TB of space. Although I'd venture a guess you'd start running into key collisions long before you made it there. Even then, to have every valid seed for every possible key would be like 512! bits. And 512! is a huge freaking number.
-Rick
Or simply require your users to have passwords at least 15 characters long. There was an article out of MS a year or so ago about how the "password" is dead and that "pass phrases" will take over. Not a very well written article, but it did go over the weaknesses of short passwords, hashes, and rainbow files. They are essentially the same thing, only pass phrases are longer... much longer. Instead of having to remember "HYjK))w!x%" (which, if LM Hashed, can be cracked by a rainbow file in short order) you can remember "This is the passworrd for my new computerr". No one is going to carry a 5 terrabyte rainbow file around to try to crack a password that long. And brute force would take years. Given a few spelling mistakes and a dictionary attack will fail.
-Rick
That's exactly what I found 2 years ago while working on my PDA based remote control (control your Windows MCE box from a Pocket PC on a wireless network. Volume, playback, record, channel, TV listings, schedules, etc... whether you are in front of the TV, or at work)
Many sites were already using Flash based interfaces for displaying listings, and others were so convoluted, it was totally not worth it. Zap2it Labs was a great solution. And had I stuck to my capstone project, I would have been working hard to convert it to one of the pay for service offerings.
-Rick
I'll never forget the stories a good friend of mine used to tell about his job as a vet tech for the Henry Villas Zoo, specifically the monkey house. To quote...
"When in doubt, throw poo"
-Rick
And the percent of Netadmins who have the time, budget, knowledge, and inclination to do so is right about .001%
I agree that Virtualization is a great solution, but the vast majority of IT shops around the world don't have the knowledge or budget to pull it off these days. Give it another 5-10 years and it'll be the new standard, but right now it just doesn't have the market or education penetration. For the cost of investing in a Xen system and training, most IT shops will be financially better off just paying the extra electric bill.
-Rick
My thoughts as well. Can you imagine if they stuck 3 cameras on that thing and did real time HDR imaging? No shadow too dark to hide in. No issues with objects being silhouetted by back light. Tons of options for growth with this project.
-Rick
Yeah, we had those kits too. But software sales guys got the shaft. Hardware sales guys had a higher base salary and got commissions on big ticket items (monitors, PCs, laptops, printers, etc) and the only had to handle stocking the back wall and a few of the short isles. Software sales got crap base pay, only rewards if they sold x ESPs in a week, and were responsible for stocking and selling 90% of the stores inventory.
But cables were definitely where the profit was. My second time around with a CompUSA I was getting jaded, so if a customer ever asked me about a printer cable, I would tell them to go to Walmart and buy the same cable we sell for a third of the price. It was absurd the markup CompUSA had on cables. I picked up a VGA cable that sold for $65 and had a cost of $8. We would routinely charge $15-30 for a printer cable that had a cost of $5-10.
-Rick
I did a few stints at Comp USA, and the management at both stores harped on the extended plans really hard. The hardware guys were on commissions, but us software guys weren't. We had a 'performance reward' though if we managed to push those pieces of crap. They even wanted us to peddle crap warranties on mice, keyboards, speakers, and other crap that is so cheap, there was no reason to worry about a warranty in the first place.
Not that Comp USA was a great place for management. I had 1 manager who was skimming the drawers. 1 who was convicted of evading taxes. Another that was caught raiding the RTM cage. 1 who was arrested for some sort of under-age porn thing. 2 that were their store's primary pot dealer (oddly enough, 1 of them actually ran a pretty nice store!)
Ahh the memories.
-Rick