I am a state government employee, and there's a number of cases where we use USB drives for the transit of data.
[1] We have a number of machines used for testing of new software prior to deployment. Proper risk management dictates that these be airgapped from the main network in case something goes wrong.
[2] My section manages a governmental website, hosted on a Sun/Apache box and administered by several Opensuse boxen. Our IT group will not allow this network to coexist with the Windows machines in the rest of the domain as it's a 'security risk' (I'm happy for my machines not to coexist with the Winboxen for much the same reason).
[3] My perception of governmental politics is that departments keep splitting / merging in some odd parody of the corporate world of mergers and selloffs. As a result our department has legacy systems from two other governmental departments, and we've recently been split more-or-less in half. Again, the corporate desktop environment is not suitable for maintenance of these legacy systems and so they're hived off from the main network. (In the case of our departmental split, there's yet to be network infrastructure between the two departments).
All the above _could_ be addressed using DMZs and the like, but the sad fact is that the organisation isn't particularly hot on IT. It's therefore easier (read: less likely to cause loss of service) to permit the use of USB sticks to transit data between the discrete islands and the main network.
Hope this goes some way to illustrate one public sector situation.
At my place of work, FTP streams are checked for dodgy code. This came to light when we needed to set up the transfer of some encrypted data from an educational establishment.
It failed, and I had to approach our network guys to have encrypted traffic from ftp:\\somedomain.com permitted through the gateway.
When I received the response "ftp:\\somedomain.com doesn't appear to be a valid e-mail address, can you clarify" I retreated into the server room for the rest of the day to meditate on what my life would have been like had I pursued my childhood dream to become a train driver.
If I had mod points, I'd have modded up. Copyright is supposed to benefit the _artist_, not some loosely-defined bunch of hangers-on (which may include family, acquaintances, or the **aa). Let them do something creative for a change.
The issue is that *someone else* also has possession of exactly those records, and had enjoyed possession of same for a period of up to three months before the customer was informed.
Or would you care to post your (assuming you're a US Citizen) SSN here as a 'backup'?
As I don't use it. But I found that for modifying NTFS permissions in XP, you can do the following if you don't want to muck about with cacls / subinacls:
I'd prefer a decently paranoid level of encryption.
Ever check out alt.binaries.encrypted? Non only have you very little chance of knowing what is being posted there, but you also have a relatively low chance of being able to find the target for such a message (given that the whole of usenet is potentially the target).
Couple that with the poster being able to bounce off a couple of anonymous proxies before hitting Usenet and your chance of being able to monitor the entire source -> target of the conversation approaches zero.
Given this I find that the original thrust of the summary (I didn't RTFA, this being/. after all) which is that a communications medium utterly owned and controlled by a single entity (Linden Labs - of which I cherish my ignorance, but suspect operates in the US and is therefore susceptible to government pressure) is a potential breeding ground for terrorists, somewhat naive.
Still, it sells newspapers and kills trees, so it's all good.
F_T
I think Terrorist is a pretty cool guy, eh yiffs furries and doesn't afraid of anything.
I'd also like to see 5.25" large-capacity drives given another try, unless there is a specific reason not to.
More than once when upgrading other people's machines I've been forced to use 3.5" -> 5.25" drive rails in order to get the cable placement just right, and these days a modern tower case will typically give you three or four 5.25" bays - after throwing a dual layer DVD+RW what else realistically needs those bays?
I'd like to see a largish-capacity 5.25" drive - not necessarily all that fast, as long as it's capable of transferring enough data to saturate gigabit ethernet (on my server -> workstation setup I get about 30% throughput, max). Say a terabyte, maybe in two platters, at perhaps 4200 revs. Any takers?
"Those cutscenes were worse than anything Pol Pot ever did and I demand that whoever suggested them be dragged to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity."
on the second point at least partially, although I suspect the line count would be problematic - once you're going to that sort of volume for logfiles and have Office installed, it's probably time to look at brewing your own routines using VBA. Quick and dirty for the win.
Never heard of PrimalScript before - will check it out. Thanks for the mention.
N.B. Who else measures files in megabits? Weird;-)
Ever used notepad with anything larger than a couple of hundred KB? Absolutely, unforgiveably, awfully slow.
Although I'll agree that Word is probably not the right tool for the job, I'd agree with the other posters that say that to do a job such as this, most of the standard MS-based tools are inadequate.
Disclaimer - I haven't used the Microsoft Logfile Parser which _may_ be better suited to this task, but I do a fair bit of work with large plain-text files in a Windows environment and usually end up using Programmers File Editor or Textpad.
Admittedly, you don't have any MS-based tools to edit the registry in recovery console but FixBoot should be able to resolve this pretty easily.
There are methods by which you can turn the recovery console into a more DOS-like environment (by default, you can't interrogate the file system directly). There's a little information here.
If the patch was delivered by a MSI package this runs (AFAIK) in the local system context, so restricting write privileges on such files as these wouldn't necessarily help.
If it was a 'true' executable (rather than an extractor for an MSI + a stub exec) then you might be able to restrict the operation against system files.
I have to say that this is one of the funniest things I've read in a long while. It looks like it's simply been the omission of a full stop that's caused this.
I also have to comment on the stability of DX2, which was absolutely dreadful.
I got the game shortly after its release, prompted more by its predecessor's success than any great hope in the sequel. I uninstalled it rapidly - the bog-awful performance on my machine at the time (AMD 3200+ / Geforce 5600 / 1GB RAM) discouraged me to the point of uninstalling.
A patch came that was supposed to improve performance. From it being unplayable it dropped to merely molasses-slow. No real improvement. Uninstalled again.
Short of entertainment, earlier this year I decided to retrieve DX2 and give it another go. I'm onto my second 64-bit twincore, there's 3GB of decent DDR2 behind it and an SLI rig. Installed and yes, it plays - reasonably. It doesn't seem as fast as HL2, Prey, Oblivion, or even Bioshock (all of which came much later) - but hey, that's maybe just me.
I got out of the early stages and into the Arcology in Egypt. Ok, the game isn't as good ad DX but I was in the mood for some hokum. While wandering about the city the game crashed. Hard. Gah.
Reloaded a number of times, and went back a couple of saves, but while wandering around Cairo the game would crash to desktop with appalling regularity.
Ok, the machine I'm trying to play DX2 on is not what the game was designed to run on, but I'd have thought I'd have been able to play through once. But no, it's been consigned back to electronic oblivion again.
I hope that the development team have their hearts in the right place and look towards Deus Ex for inspiration as this was one of the defining moments of PC gaming for me. But for god's sakes:
[1] No tiny levels. If I see the loading screen more than two times in a fifteen-minute period, then the levels are FAR too small.
[2] Don't steer me through the game. If I want to play something 'on rails', I'll go back to Half-Life 2.
[3] For god's sake, test the damn thing. On a current PC - not a godsdamned console.
There were a couple of games that required tape loading _after_ the 'main' section had been loaded. The only one that I can bring to mind is Outrun (on the Spectrum). Someone else mentioned Gauntlet, which did a similar trick.
In addition to the game engine, each stage was separate, with the first stage being loaded with the game engine. At the end of each stage there was a fork in the road with the player given the option to go left or right.
IIRC you had four stages to complete to win the game, so there were nine additional code sections as well as the main loader. The continual loading got old very fast.
I was lucky enough to have a Spectrum+ 128, which could cache a handful of levels. The first run through the game was painful because you had to preload the additional stages, then you could have an almost continuous run through.
Dell GX270 (P4, 256 RAM, 40GB HDD) - £99 (which included a 17" TFT I promptly sold for £60)
Seagate 320GB HDD (single one, as this is a backup of my main machine - Mirroring being applied to my main system. I therefore already have redundancy) - £45. This replaced the 40GB HDD, which was promptly sold.
A gig of memory I had lying around - worth about £40.
A dual-layer DVD-RW (so I don't tie up the burner on my main device) - £20. This replaced the CD-Rom, which has gone into the spares bin.
Second NIC (to face the Internet) which was lying around, worth about £5. I wanted the onboard NIC to communicate exclusively with my main rig.
Fedora Core 7 - free
SAMBA is a snap to configure on recent Linuxes (no more having to edit smb.conf to enable encrypted passwords, thank god). The Dell ain't much of a performer, but it's quiet enough to run 24/7, and has a gigabit ethernet port - which I hammered while transferring data across.
Total cost to me has been about £150 - maybe $300. While it's early days yet, and I haven't yet got something to do an offsite backup (which will probably be best served by an overnight job onto an USB drive, cost maybe another £70), I'm now reasonably assured that all my important stuff is on three separate discs and is unlikely to be killed by regular disc failure.
Sorry if my previous was misinterpreted. "This one" was referring to my own post, not yours - please accept apologies if you thought I was attacking the parent.
"What has science done" and "where is your god now" are both memes from the *chan networks. Similarly dog curtains and homicidal answering machines are references to this wonderful piece of investigative journalism.
>> As for rude phone users - funny, that's not too much of a problem over here in the UK
You must live in a much more considerate part of the UK than I do.
I regularly travel on business via train. Some of the local train operators have in place "quiet zones" where the use of mobile phones and noisy electronics is discouraged. Guess what, the coaches are still full of ignorant f*ckpigs who blather on into their devices indiscriminately.
As there isn't going to be any change in the behaviour of these fools I would be happy to carry a jammer and nuke any conversation carried out in such an environment. And for any UK businesses out there curious about this, I would definitely selectively patronise any establishments with publicised no-mobile policies.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the current consensus is that Windows XP SP3 is due the latter half of this month. Think this was posted to /. a couple of weeks ago.
F_T
I am a state government employee, and there's a number of cases where we use USB drives for the transit of data.
[1] We have a number of machines used for testing of new software prior to deployment. Proper risk management dictates that these be airgapped from the main network in case something goes wrong.
[2] My section manages a governmental website, hosted on a Sun/Apache box and administered by several Opensuse boxen. Our IT group will not allow this network to coexist with the Windows machines in the rest of the domain as it's a 'security risk' (I'm happy for my machines not to coexist with the Winboxen for much the same reason).
[3] My perception of governmental politics is that departments keep splitting / merging in some odd parody of the corporate world of mergers and selloffs. As a result our department has legacy systems from two other governmental departments, and we've recently been split more-or-less in half. Again, the corporate desktop environment is not suitable for maintenance of these legacy systems and so they're hived off from the main network. (In the case of our departmental split, there's yet to be network infrastructure between the two departments).
All the above _could_ be addressed using DMZs and the like, but the sad fact is that the organisation isn't particularly hot on IT. It's therefore easier (read: less likely to cause loss of service) to permit the use of USB sticks to transit data between the discrete islands and the main network.
Hope this goes some way to illustrate one public sector situation.
F_T
At my place of work, FTP streams are checked for dodgy code. This came to light when we needed to set up the transfer of some encrypted data from an educational establishment.
It failed, and I had to approach our network guys to have encrypted traffic from ftp:\\somedomain.com permitted through the gateway.
When I received the response "ftp:\\somedomain.com doesn't appear to be a valid e-mail address, can you clarify" I retreated into the server room for the rest of the day to meditate on what my life would have been like had I pursued my childhood dream to become a train driver.
If I had mod points, I'd have modded up. Copyright is supposed to benefit the _artist_, not some loosely-defined bunch of hangers-on (which may include family, acquaintances, or the **aa). Let them do something creative for a change.
The issue is that *someone else* also has possession of exactly those records, and had enjoyed possession of same for a period of up to three months before the customer was informed.
Or would you care to post your (assuming you're a US Citizen) SSN here as a 'backup'?
Lurk more, pls.
F_T
As I don't use it. But I found that for modifying NTFS permissions in XP, you can do the following if you don't want to muck about with cacls / subinacls:
/user:ad\asadm5 "c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe c:"
runas
Tap in your password and you have an admin shell.
HTH
F_T
I'd prefer a decently paranoid level of encryption.
/. after all) which is that a communications medium utterly owned and controlled by a single entity (Linden Labs - of which I cherish my ignorance, but suspect operates in the US and is therefore susceptible to government pressure) is a potential breeding ground for terrorists, somewhat naive.
Ever check out alt.binaries.encrypted? Non only have you very little chance of knowing what is being posted there, but you also have a relatively low chance of being able to find the target for such a message (given that the whole of usenet is potentially the target).
Couple that with the poster being able to bounce off a couple of anonymous proxies before hitting Usenet and your chance of being able to monitor the entire source -> target of the conversation approaches zero.
Given this I find that the original thrust of the summary (I didn't RTFA, this being
Still, it sells newspapers and kills trees, so it's all good.
F_T
I think Terrorist is a pretty cool guy, eh yiffs furries and doesn't afraid of anything.
I for one would like to welcome our monkey-controlled cybernetic overlords.
F_T
I'd also like to see 5.25" large-capacity drives given another try, unless there is a specific reason not to.
More than once when upgrading other people's machines I've been forced to use 3.5" -> 5.25" drive rails in order to get the cable placement just right, and these days a modern tower case will typically give you three or four 5.25" bays - after throwing a dual layer DVD+RW what else realistically needs those bays?
I'd like to see a largish-capacity 5.25" drive - not necessarily all that fast, as long as it's capable of transferring enough data to saturate gigabit ethernet (on my server -> workstation setup I get about 30% throughput, max). Say a terabyte, maybe in two platters, at perhaps 4200 revs. Any takers?
"Those cutscenes were worse than anything Pol Pot ever did and I demand that whoever suggested them be dragged to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity."
From the obligatory hivemind.
"The combined effect of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions had an estimated death toll of 750,000 to 1.7 million."
Come on. A little perspective please. It's only a video game, for chrissakes.
In case my irony detector's broken, let me at least throw Ben Cresslaw's take on Assassin's Creed. Amusing.
No apostrophe in Nazis. ;-)
on the second point at least partially, although I suspect the line count would be problematic - once you're going to that sort of volume for logfiles and have Office installed, it's probably time to look at brewing your own routines using VBA. Quick and dirty for the win.
;-)
Never heard of PrimalScript before - will check it out. Thanks for the mention.
N.B. Who else measures files in megabits? Weird
Ever used notepad with anything larger than a couple of hundred KB? Absolutely, unforgiveably, awfully slow.
Although I'll agree that Word is probably not the right tool for the job, I'd agree with the other posters that say that to do a job such as this, most of the standard MS-based tools are inadequate.
Disclaimer - I haven't used the Microsoft Logfile Parser which _may_ be better suited to this task, but I do a fair bit of work with large plain-text files in a Windows environment and usually end up using Programmers File Editor or Textpad.
Admittedly, you don't have any MS-based tools to edit the registry in recovery console but FixBoot should be able to resolve this pretty easily. There are methods by which you can turn the recovery console into a more DOS-like environment (by default, you can't interrogate the file system directly). There's a little information here.
If the patch was delivered by a MSI package this runs (AFAIK) in the local system context, so restricting write privileges on such files as these wouldn't necessarily help.
.\boot.ini
If it was a 'true' executable (rather than an extractor for an MSI + a stub exec) then you might be able to restrict the operation against system files.
I have to say that this is one of the funniest things I've read in a long while. It looks like it's simply been the omission of a full stop that's caused this.
Remember kids,
\boot.ini !=
F_T
I also have to comment on the stability of DX2, which was absolutely dreadful.
I got the game shortly after its release, prompted more by its predecessor's success than any great hope in the sequel. I uninstalled it rapidly - the bog-awful performance on my machine at the time (AMD 3200+ / Geforce 5600 / 1GB RAM) discouraged me to the point of uninstalling.
A patch came that was supposed to improve performance. From it being unplayable it dropped to merely molasses-slow. No real improvement. Uninstalled again.
Short of entertainment, earlier this year I decided to retrieve DX2 and give it another go. I'm onto my second 64-bit twincore, there's 3GB of decent DDR2 behind it and an SLI rig. Installed and yes, it plays - reasonably. It doesn't seem as fast as HL2, Prey, Oblivion, or even Bioshock (all of which came much later) - but hey, that's maybe just me.
I got out of the early stages and into the Arcology in Egypt. Ok, the game isn't as good ad DX but I was in the mood for some hokum. While wandering about the city the game crashed. Hard. Gah.
Reloaded a number of times, and went back a couple of saves, but while wandering around Cairo the game would crash to desktop with appalling regularity.
Ok, the machine I'm trying to play DX2 on is not what the game was designed to run on, but I'd have thought I'd have been able to play through once. But no, it's been consigned back to electronic oblivion again.
I hope that the development team have their hearts in the right place and look towards Deus Ex for inspiration as this was one of the defining moments of PC gaming for me. But for god's sakes:
[1] No tiny levels. If I see the loading screen more than two times in a fifteen-minute period, then the levels are FAR too small.
[2] Don't steer me through the game. If I want to play something 'on rails', I'll go back to Half-Life 2.
[3] For god's sake, test the damn thing. On a current PC - not a godsdamned console.
There were a couple of games that required tape loading _after_ the 'main' section had been loaded. The only one that I can bring to mind is Outrun (on the Spectrum). Someone else mentioned Gauntlet, which did a similar trick.
In addition to the game engine, each stage was separate, with the first stage being loaded with the game engine. At the end of each stage there was a fork in the road with the player given the option to go left or right.
IIRC you had four stages to complete to win the game, so there were nine additional code sections as well as the main loader. The continual loading got old very fast.
I was lucky enough to have a Spectrum+ 128, which could cache a handful of levels. The first run through the game was painful because you had to preload the additional stages, then you could have an almost continuous run through.
Ah, the memories...
F_T
to perform a backup of my main rig.
Dell GX270 (P4, 256 RAM, 40GB HDD) - £99 (which included a 17" TFT I promptly sold for £60)
Seagate 320GB HDD (single one, as this is a backup of my main machine - Mirroring being applied to my main system. I therefore already have redundancy) - £45. This replaced the 40GB HDD, which was promptly sold.
A gig of memory I had lying around - worth about £40.
A dual-layer DVD-RW (so I don't tie up the burner on my main device) - £20. This replaced the CD-Rom, which has gone into the spares bin.
Second NIC (to face the Internet) which was lying around, worth about £5. I wanted the onboard NIC to communicate exclusively with my main rig.
Fedora Core 7 - free
SAMBA is a snap to configure on recent Linuxes (no more having to edit smb.conf to enable encrypted passwords, thank god). The Dell ain't much of a performer, but it's quiet enough to run 24/7, and has a gigabit ethernet port - which I hammered while transferring data across.
Total cost to me has been about £150 - maybe $300. While it's early days yet, and I haven't yet got something to do an offsite backup (which will probably be best served by an overnight job onto an USB drive, cost maybe another £70), I'm now reasonably assured that all my important stuff is on three separate discs and is unlikely to be killed by regular disc failure.
Hope this helps.
F_T
Sorry if my previous was misinterpreted. "This one" was referring to my own post, not yours - please accept apologies if you thought I was attacking the parent.
"What has science done" and "where is your god now" are both memes from the *chan networks. Similarly dog curtains and homicidal answering machines are references to this wonderful piece of investigative journalism.
F_T
As this one isn't particularly insightful or interesting.
But earlier on I saw mention on this on 4chan. I dismissed it out of hand as mindless trollery.
Now, seriously, I am wondering:
(a) What has science done?
and
(b) Where is your god now?
I'm now going to buy some dog curtains and get rid of the answering machine before it tries to slit my throat.
F_T out.
>> As for rude phone users - funny, that's not too much of a problem over here in the UK
You must live in a much more considerate part of the UK than I do.
I regularly travel on business via train. Some of the local train operators have in place "quiet zones" where the use of mobile phones and noisy electronics is discouraged. Guess what, the coaches are still full of ignorant f*ckpigs who blather on into their devices indiscriminately.
As there isn't going to be any change in the behaviour of these fools I would be happy to carry a jammer and nuke any conversation carried out in such an environment. And for any UK businesses out there curious about this, I would definitely selectively patronise any establishments with publicised no-mobile policies.
Spoken like a true gentleman, Sir - my tongue was firmly in my cheek with the foregoing comment.
Burn the MS-worshipping heretic!
ifconfig in Linuxland, surely, unless there's a subtlety in Ubuntu that I've missed?
F_T
I'm going to get myself a dog and close the curtains before I go on a HTML-scraping rampage.
F_T
about #1,000,000. 1,048,575 is where it's at, baby - anyone got that yet? F_T