When my kid has that figured out, he's grown up enough to use it.
I told my kids (now 12 and 15) what Snort was, I showed them a session once, and told them that I can and will record everything that goes over the network. They're smart and well raised - I'm not worried. I saw a few Playboys when I was 14 - it didn't ruin me. I suspect that I've got less than 15 months before my son discovers youPorn (he's the younger one).
Perfect jobs don't exist. All jobs suck to at least some degree. (OK, sure somebody gets to be a porn star or something, but the most part, I feel safe in saying that all jobs suck at least a little.) In my experience, the jobs that paid the inexperienced folks the most were the poorest run companies. Microsoft and Accenture both hire tons of young folks, work them like dogs, and don't pay that much to start. Yet they seem to do OK as career entry points.
A lot of kids have fairly idealistic expectations about life and work, and realistically, those ideals are rarely met. I have had lots of kids work for me move on in search of that 'perfect gig' come back and tell me that they didn't realize how good they had it. If you can find a job where the people are decent to each other, your boss is at least half human, and the company is making money, think hard before you move.
At the end of the day, you can earn only as much as you contribute, and not even all of that, as the company has to cover rent and profit. If you want to make good money, figure out how to make good money for your company. Then the rest is just negotiation.
I have almost all the music CD's I've ever bought, including several from the late 80's or so, whenever CDs first started getting popular. I use tons of them in work for data, for at least about 7 years now. I have never yet come across one that is 'bad'. I'll get worried about this problem when I see the first one. Until then, it sure looks to me like CD's behave like other media, indeed, other possessions - take decent care of them, avoid temperature and humidity extremes, and you can be surprised at how long they'll last.
I'm not saying it can't happen. Like flat tires, I expect to see a bad CD eventually. I don't lay awake nights worrying about it, though.
Django absolutely rocks. As does Python. I cut my teeth on Basic, moved to C and Cobol (yes, at the same time). I dabbled in C++, there was some VB time, and then on to Java, Perl and C#. With Python I feel like I have found the one true language. I've flirted with Ruby, but I like Python better.
Not if you've done your homework as a manager and documented the lateness. I've done it. In the case of alcoholism, you can even remind the court, that if he -was- in fact an alkie, you've done him a favor by hitting bottom so that he'll get help.
Having a disability doesn't mean you don't have to do the job you're hired for. The responsibility, legal and moral, is merely to make reasonable accomodations. A reasonable accomodation would be providing a flexible schedule so that he can attend treatment. It does not mean, and no court is going to accept an argument that he doesn't have to perform the objective requirements of the job, meet performance goals, and generally act like a functional person.
It would be discrimination against a disability if my employer were to fire me because I have the trait that I can't control my drinking. However, if I can't make the 8:00am staff meeting half the time, and my work quality suffers because I'm close to rolfing most of the day, that is a perfectly valid reason for disciplinary action, because it would be a perfectly valid disciplinary reason for a non-alcoholic employee.
Drunks get fired all the time. People rarely call it that. Some bosses tell the employee privately that they need to get help. I've done that, too.
That's not quite true. You can't fire someone because he's an alcoholic, but you can easily fire him for being habitually late for work. You can actually fire him for no reason at all. You just cannot fire him, and tell him it's because he is [disabled|black|female|etc].
In most of the US, employment is at will, which means your employer can fire you for any reason he wants, except certain reasons proscribed by other law.
Your points about increased production, etc, are well taken, and it would be simplistic to deny them. However, overall price and income levels did decline, for whatever factors, and the gold standard was one of the contributing factors. The limited supply of gold was what let Jay Gould have so much fun cornering the market.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that unlimited expansion of the money supply is a good thing, far from it. I absolutely agree that a rampant increase in the available money supply by moetizing silver might have had the effect you describe. What was happening in the 1800's, and to a lesser extent in the early 1900's was that economic growth was outpacing the money supply. Since the supply of money was relatively fixed, this meant that the prices levels for goods declined, relative to money. This meant that anyone who borrowed money risked ending up having to pay the debt back with more expensive dollars than he borrowed. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 70's with houses. This caused widespread bankruptcies of farmers, and contributed to the urban migration. The farmers' issue was that they couldn't make their mortgage payments, because each year, their goods sold for less than the previous year. Overall production was increasing, but the supply of money was inadequate to allow nominal prices to stay stable or rise. Coincidently, wages were not doing anything great either during this time. The populace's dissatisfaction with this was evident in the political strife of the time.
One way to look at money is that it's just another good. It's particular value is that it is readily accepted by people for other goods. As such, it has a price, too. All goods exist in a price universe, and their price is really a conversion rate between each other. What we call 'price' is just the conversion rate between a good and the 'money' good. We like this because it's hard to quote the prices of Cheetos in terms of Toyota Camry's.
What governments have learned, to their embarrassment and pain, is that if you print more money than is needed by an economy, the value of the money declines to the level that is necessary to facilitate money's value, which is to enable trade. You can view this as prices rising of goods, but what is really happening is that the price of money is falling. If you have too much money, the nominal price of all goods, as measured by the money, rises to some new equilibrium level. If the recent rate of rise has been rapid, this tends to overshoot, which is a whole 'nother topic...
If you shrink the supply of money, what -must- happen for equilibrium to return is that overall prices must decline to the level where the nominal supply of money is sufficient to clear the markets. What starts happening is people get reluctant to buy goods, because they perceive money as more valuable, prices of other goods than money decline, so people's expectation is ratified, so they want to hold money even more, and so on. Unfortunately, this process is usually pretty painful, as was seen in the periodic panics and recessions in the 1800's. Many economists think that an insufficient money supply was one of the key contributing factors to the Great Depression. Certainly leaving the gold standard didn't hurt.
In today's world economy, linking a currency to gold would risk the same deflationary effect. The world's economy is growing faster than the supply of gold, which would constrain credit, and restrict economic growth. The probable effect would be reduction of salaries and wages, and an increase in the concentration of financial wealth. It would be good for people holding bonds, Tbills, and currency denominated assets. It would be bad for people who are paid in current dollars, but hold debts in old dollars, as well as people who own goods and real estate. In short, most of us.
You won't even see the Wall Street Journal or the Economist promoting a gold standard, and they mostly support the views of the class that would benefit.
You beat me to it. The Seattle Tacoma metro area has some 3 million people in it, and most of them are served with rain run off from several river systems. Most of our power is hydro as well, also fed by rain. The same is true for Portland Or, which has close to 1M people in the metro area. Vancouver BC would be another example.
You're not understanding the history. Let's say a farmer bought land in 1870. Under a rationally functioning market, the price of the land, either for sale or for rent, is a function of the productive capacity of the land. As measured in bushels of wheat, let's say the capacity of the land is 1000 bushels a year, and in 1870 dollars, let's say that was worth $1000 1870 dollars (my price levels are off). The rational rent for the land would be something like $1000 - the cost of producing and harvesting 1000 bushels of wheat. The rational sale price for the land would be some present value of the income stream of $1000 - the cost of producing and harvesting 1000 bushels of wheat over say, 20 years.
Now, imagine 10% annual deflation for 5 years. At the end of the five years, the farmer who bought the land has a mortgage that made sense when the land produced $1000 worth of wheat a year, except that now it only produces $650 dollars worth of wheat. His mortgage payment is the same, but his income, measured in dollars, has declined 35%. He's fucked. He can't make any more money renting the land, because the rental value of the land has declined as well. He can't sell the land for what he paid, because it's value has declined, due to the declining income stream associated with the land.
In your example, you posit that food prices would rise. In isolation, perhaps. You have to consider the overall purchasing activity, however. If your money supply is fixed, which is what a gold standard does, the overall price level, for all goods consumed, becomes a function of the size of the money supply. Food prices can't rise without reducing the purchases of something else, because people simply don't have the currency. So if food prices rise, demand for some other good falls, and that lowers the price of that good. Overall, if the supply of gold is small in relation to a growing economy, prices of goods in relation to gold will never catch up. The only way that the overall price level of a basket of goods can equalize with gold is if the size of the basket declines. That is, the size of the economy has to decline, either through emmigration or mass poverty.
This was a very real experience in the late 1800's, and led to the free silver movement, which desired to monetise silver to increase the money supply.
The lesson monetarists have learned from this is that the money supply needs to be roughly stable in proportion to the size and activity of the economy, or you get distortive effects as people try to not hold either money or property. Slight inflation tends to be more popular with the masses, as it favors those who hold real estate and are paying off loans.
Where this relates to fiat money is that if your central banker doesn't understand what is happening here, it is easy to screw this up by going too far in the other direction, ala the US in the 70's, or any of a dozen banana republic countries we have heard about. Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1980's really understood this, and we all owe him a debt that few understand. People give Reagan accolades for the economic stability we enjoyed from the 80's on. Volcker was the one who is responsible, and Reagan fought him every inch of the way.
Actually, the problem under the gold standard was deflation. This was the driver for the Free Silver movement in the late 1800's. The problem was that goods became less valuable in monetary terms, so farmers, for example, were having to pay back loans with goods that were worth less and less in money terms. This was due to the scarcity of gold, which caused the currency to become scarcer and more valuable in relation to goods over time. This was great for bankers, but it sucked for the common man. It had the side effect of suppressing the economy overall, as people preferred to hold dollars over goods or investments. This little bit of history is usually unfamiliar to the gold bugs.
Oh, what things have come to when we are moaning that 100 Mbps is too damn slow for household use. Makes me remember the time when I upgraded from 300 bps to 1200 bps... (strokes beard and fumbles for walker...)
I'd try to learn one of the container environments and web development frameworks, just to show that you can. Tomcat and Struts would be good. Try to do a project for a charity using one of these environments, which demonstrates a lot of good things to a prospective employer
I'd get familiar with.Net. Like it or not, that drives a lot of work these days, and even knowing why or why not you'd like to use it will be good.
I'd read about XP and other agile methods, and mybe some of the older texts, such the Mythical Man Month, DeMarcos' Controlling Software Projects, and Code Complete.
I'd take economics and accounting, if you think you want to work in environments that handle money. If you want to do device drivers, then maybe not so much.
Last, I wouldn't worry about it. The fact that you're asking this question probably indicates hat you're the kind of person who will do well.
I don't see this. I do see Bittorrent throttling. I keep SSH and VPN connections open to a work facility for hours or days on end, with VNC sessions running constantly. These rarely drop (less often than when I'm in the office going over the corporate LAN/WAN. This is Comcast in the Seattle/Bellevue area.
So, having RTFA, it seems to me that at the very least, the little nasty is designed to work with the windows boot process, and currently would at least cause a grub based system to puke, giving you notice of a situation. Then you could use ahref=http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org//rel=url2html-8983http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org//>to fix your loader? On a sidenote, while SuperGrub isn't going to win any points for graphic style, it did an excellent job of fixing my Fully Ryobi'd windows/Fedora situation, and is a nice little tool written by some nice folks in Italy, http://forja.linex.org/ .
Obviously, a bad guy could extend the approach and anticipate Grub as well, trying to side step that, but it would probably be a much more complicated task, figuring out how to hide from all the kernel variants of Linux.
If a person wanted to be sure, couldn't you burn a boot loader onto a CD, have the CD boot first, and have that direct the loading? IANLWK (I am no Linux Whiz Kid), but in my imperfect knowledge of the world, that seems like it would completely defend against this type of attack. I yearn for correction of my ways if this wouldn't work.
Um, the entire Visa/Mastercard/ATM card apparatus is a hodgepodge of vendors that handle other people's data, most of which is outsourced. This has been true for over 20 years, and the vast majority of the time, things go just fine. The odds are slim that the issuer of your visa card maintains the data center for the account information, or runs the billing, or processes the sales transactions, or runs the collection system that duns you when you are late. Each of these systems knows quite a bit about you, which you should rightfully be cautious about. However, the track record of these companies is also pretty damn good for keeping tabs on the data, and the controls that I have to work under sometimes make the anal probing that Cartman endured seem preferable.
There are legions of companies providing outsourced services for credit scoring, bank account processing, credit card processing, insurance processing, and collection agency processing, to think of just a few. These companies handle each other's account and customer information in vast quantities, and seem to do so without bringing down the economy. To say that it's unrealistic to outsource functions that handle PCI data is naive and uninformed. It's a rare piece of PCI that doesn't see an outsourcer in it's life.
In general, the individual owning the PCI is far more often the risk factor in disclosing PCI than the outsourcers.
Re:The way it works isn't the problem
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
That's interesting, and is certainly contrary to my experience. However, I won't be the one that says it can't happen. I have years of experience with docs (mostly contracts and project documentation) that go through numerous edits, and have never seen what I could describe as corruption (non-command induced ruination of the file)
I dunno. I've been doing it since 1985. I make a comfortable six figure salary, have great employment prospects, and an enjoyable job. Maybe you need to work on building your skills and showing a bit of initiative. Java,.Net, SQL, and server OS's and apps are your friend.
Actually, the same is true of, say, electricity and indoor plumbing. Joseph Schumpeter wrote about this phenomenon, oh, 80 years or so ago. Basically, any given technology gives diminishing returns after it's introduction, and ultimately becomes a necessity rather than a differentiator if it provides value to the business.
To the article's point, while IT is providing less of a differentiator, that doesn't mean it's less important. It also doesn't mean that a company will cease to need people who know how to get IT done, whether through internal means or external means. Last I checked, it was hard to get to gmail without functioning PCs and network gear. Sure, EDS has a new competitor in Google and various ASP/SAS providers, but it's not like outsourcing is new. Certain companies still seem to manage to provide a competitive advantage through internal provision of IT. Can you say, "Amazon", or "Bank Of America"?
Slashdot Mirror
speaking as another parent, sounds about like the right approach, and well implemented. Good on you.
When my kid has that figured out, he's grown up enough to use it.
I told my kids (now 12 and 15) what Snort was, I showed them a session once, and told them that I can and will record everything that goes over the network. They're smart and well raised - I'm not worried. I saw a few Playboys when I was 14 - it didn't ruin me. I suspect that I've got less than 15 months before my son discovers youPorn (he's the younger one).
As well as how many of us are working at 9:30 at night, watching something run and reading /.
>>chasing the mythical perfect job.
>Exactly what is wrong with this?
Perfect jobs don't exist. All jobs suck to at least some degree. (OK, sure somebody gets to be a porn star or something, but the most part, I feel safe in saying that all jobs suck at least a little.) In my experience, the jobs that paid the inexperienced folks the most were the poorest run companies. Microsoft and Accenture both hire tons of young folks, work them like dogs, and don't pay that much to start. Yet they seem to do OK as career entry points.
A lot of kids have fairly idealistic expectations about life and work, and realistically, those ideals are rarely met. I have had lots of kids work for me move on in search of that 'perfect gig' come back and tell me that they didn't realize how good they had it. If you can find a job where the people are decent to each other, your boss is at least half human, and the company is making money, think hard before you move.
At the end of the day, you can earn only as much as you contribute, and not even all of that, as the company has to cover rent and profit. If you want to make good money, figure out how to make good money for your company. Then the rest is just negotiation.
"I'm really just looking for some validation that the place really does suck. And I'm not crazy for looking for employment elsewhere."
That place does indeed suck, and yes you should go find work somewhere else.
I have almost all the music CD's I've ever bought, including several from the late 80's or so, whenever CDs first started getting popular. I use tons of them in work for data, for at least about 7 years now. I have never yet come across one that is 'bad'. I'll get worried about this problem when I see the first one. Until then, it sure looks to me like CD's behave like other media, indeed, other possessions - take decent care of them, avoid temperature and humidity extremes, and you can be surprised at how long they'll last.
I'm not saying it can't happen. Like flat tires, I expect to see a bad CD eventually. I don't lay awake nights worrying about it, though.
Django absolutely rocks. As does Python. I cut my teeth on Basic, moved to C and Cobol (yes, at the same time). I dabbled in C++, there was some VB time, and then on to Java, Perl and C#. With Python I feel like I have found the one true language. I've flirted with Ruby, but I like Python better.
Not if you've done your homework as a manager and documented the lateness. I've done it. In the case of alcoholism, you can even remind the court, that if he -was- in fact an alkie, you've done him a favor by hitting bottom so that he'll get help.
Having a disability doesn't mean you don't have to do the job you're hired for. The responsibility, legal and moral, is merely to make reasonable accomodations. A reasonable accomodation would be providing a flexible schedule so that he can attend treatment. It does not mean, and no court is going to accept an argument that he doesn't have to perform the objective requirements of the job, meet performance goals, and generally act like a functional person.
It would be discrimination against a disability if my employer were to fire me because I have the trait that I can't control my drinking. However, if I can't make the 8:00am staff meeting half the time, and my work quality suffers because I'm close to rolfing most of the day, that is a perfectly valid reason for disciplinary action, because it would be a perfectly valid disciplinary reason for a non-alcoholic employee.
Drunks get fired all the time. People rarely call it that. Some bosses tell the employee privately that they need to get help. I've done that, too.
That's not quite true. You can't fire someone because he's an alcoholic, but you can easily fire him for being habitually late for work. You can actually fire him for no reason at all. You just cannot fire him, and tell him it's because he is [disabled|black|female|etc].
In most of the US, employment is at will, which means your employer can fire you for any reason he wants, except certain reasons proscribed by other law.
Actually, pot was legal throughout prohibition. Is was the http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/taxact/taxact.htm Marijuana Tax Stamp Act of 1937 that caused pot to become verboten.
Your points about increased production, etc, are well taken, and it would be simplistic to deny them. However, overall price and income levels did decline, for whatever factors, and the gold standard was one of the contributing factors. The limited supply of gold was what let Jay Gould have so much fun cornering the market.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that unlimited expansion of the money supply is a good thing, far from it. I absolutely agree that a rampant increase in the available money supply by moetizing silver might have had the effect you describe. What was happening in the 1800's, and to a lesser extent in the early 1900's was that economic growth was outpacing the money supply. Since the supply of money was relatively fixed, this meant that the prices levels for goods declined, relative to money. This meant that anyone who borrowed money risked ending up having to pay the debt back with more expensive dollars than he borrowed. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 70's with houses. This caused widespread bankruptcies of farmers, and contributed to the urban migration. The farmers' issue was that they couldn't make their mortgage payments, because each year, their goods sold for less than the previous year. Overall production was increasing, but the supply of money was inadequate to allow nominal prices to stay stable or rise. Coincidently, wages were not doing anything great either during this time. The populace's dissatisfaction with this was evident in the political strife of the time.
One way to look at money is that it's just another good. It's particular value is that it is readily accepted by people for other goods. As such, it has a price, too. All goods exist in a price universe, and their price is really a conversion rate between each other. What we call 'price' is just the conversion rate between a good and the 'money' good. We like this because it's hard to quote the prices of Cheetos in terms of Toyota Camry's.
What governments have learned, to their embarrassment and pain, is that if you print more money than is needed by an economy, the value of the money declines to the level that is necessary to facilitate money's value, which is to enable trade. You can view this as prices rising of goods, but what is really happening is that the price of money is falling. If you have too much money, the nominal price of all goods, as measured by the money, rises to some new equilibrium level. If the recent rate of rise has been rapid, this tends to overshoot, which is a whole 'nother topic...
If you shrink the supply of money, what -must- happen for equilibrium to return is that overall prices must decline to the level where the nominal supply of money is sufficient to clear the markets. What starts happening is people get reluctant to buy goods, because they perceive money as more valuable, prices of other goods than money decline, so people's expectation is ratified, so they want to hold money even more, and so on. Unfortunately, this process is usually pretty painful, as was seen in the periodic panics and recessions in the 1800's. Many economists think that an insufficient money supply was one of the key contributing factors to the Great Depression. Certainly leaving the gold standard didn't hurt.
In today's world economy, linking a currency to gold would risk the same deflationary effect. The world's economy is growing faster than the supply of gold, which would constrain credit, and restrict economic growth. The probable effect would be reduction of salaries and wages, and an increase in the concentration of financial wealth. It would be good for people holding bonds, Tbills, and currency denominated assets. It would be bad for people who are paid in current dollars, but hold debts in old dollars, as well as people who own goods and real estate. In short, most of us.
You won't even see the Wall Street Journal or the Economist promoting a gold standard, and they mostly support the views of the class that would benefit.
You beat me to it. The Seattle Tacoma metro area has some 3 million people in it, and most of them are served with rain run off from several river systems. Most of our power is hydro as well, also fed by rain. The same is true for Portland Or, which has close to 1M people in the metro area. Vancouver BC would be another example.
You're not understanding the history. Let's say a farmer bought land in 1870. Under a rationally functioning market, the price of the land, either for sale or for rent, is a function of the productive capacity of the land. As measured in bushels of wheat, let's say the capacity of the land is 1000 bushels a year, and in 1870 dollars, let's say that was worth $1000 1870 dollars (my price levels are off). The rational rent for the land would be something like $1000 - the cost of producing and harvesting 1000 bushels of wheat. The rational sale price for the land would be some present value of the income stream of $1000 - the cost of producing and harvesting 1000 bushels of wheat over say, 20 years.
Now, imagine 10% annual deflation for 5 years. At the end of the five years, the farmer who bought the land has a mortgage that made sense when the land produced $1000 worth of wheat a year, except that now it only produces $650 dollars worth of wheat. His mortgage payment is the same, but his income, measured in dollars, has declined 35%. He's fucked. He can't make any more money renting the land, because the rental value of the land has declined as well. He can't sell the land for what he paid, because it's value has declined, due to the declining income stream associated with the land.
In your example, you posit that food prices would rise. In isolation, perhaps. You have to consider the overall purchasing activity, however. If your money supply is fixed, which is what a gold standard does, the overall price level, for all goods consumed, becomes a function of the size of the money supply. Food prices can't rise without reducing the purchases of something else, because people simply don't have the currency. So if food prices rise, demand for some other good falls, and that lowers the price of that good. Overall, if the supply of gold is small in relation to a growing economy, prices of goods in relation to gold will never catch up. The only way that the overall price level of a basket of goods can equalize with gold is if the size of the basket declines. That is, the size of the economy has to decline, either through emmigration or mass poverty.
This was a very real experience in the late 1800's, and led to the free silver movement, which desired to monetise silver to increase the money supply.
The lesson monetarists have learned from this is that the money supply needs to be roughly stable in proportion to the size and activity of the economy, or you get distortive effects as people try to not hold either money or property. Slight inflation tends to be more popular with the masses, as it favors those who hold real estate and are paying off loans.
Where this relates to fiat money is that if your central banker doesn't understand what is happening here, it is easy to screw this up by going too far in the other direction, ala the US in the 70's, or any of a dozen banana republic countries we have heard about. Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1980's really understood this, and we all owe him a debt that few understand. People give Reagan accolades for the economic stability we enjoyed from the 80's on. Volcker was the one who is responsible, and Reagan fought him every inch of the way.
Actually, the problem under the gold standard was deflation. This was the driver for the Free Silver movement in the late 1800's. The problem was that goods became less valuable in monetary terms, so farmers, for example, were having to pay back loans with goods that were worth less and less in money terms. This was due to the scarcity of gold, which caused the currency to become scarcer and more valuable in relation to goods over time. This was great for bankers, but it sucked for the common man. It had the side effect of suppressing the economy overall, as people preferred to hold dollars over goods or investments. This little bit of history is usually unfamiliar to the gold bugs.
Oh, what things have come to when we are moaning that 100 Mbps is too damn slow for household use. Makes me remember the time when I upgraded from 300 bps to 1200 bps... (strokes beard and fumbles for walker...)
I'd try to learn one of the container environments and web development frameworks, just to show that you can. Tomcat and Struts would be good. Try to do a project for a charity using one of these environments, which demonstrates a lot of good things to a prospective employer
.Net. Like it or not, that drives a lot of work these days, and even knowing why or why not you'd like to use it will be good.
I'd get familiar with
I'd read about XP and other agile methods, and mybe some of the older texts, such the Mythical Man Month, DeMarcos' Controlling Software Projects, and Code Complete.
I'd take economics and accounting, if you think you want to work in environments that handle money. If you want to do device drivers, then maybe not so much.
Last, I wouldn't worry about it. The fact that you're asking this question probably indicates hat you're the kind of person who will do well.
I don't see this. I do see Bittorrent throttling. I keep SSH and VPN connections open to a work facility for hours or days on end, with VNC sessions running constantly. These rarely drop (less often than when I'm in the office going over the corporate LAN/WAN. This is Comcast in the Seattle/Bellevue area.
Try putting unsweetened lemon juice in the bottle, and see if it goes past the taste buds. Sez the father of two. ;-)
So, having RTFA, it seems to me that at the very least, the little nasty is designed to work with the windows boot process, and currently would at least cause a grub based system to puke, giving you notice of a situation. Then you could use ahref=http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org//rel=url2html-8983http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org//>to fix your loader? On a sidenote, while SuperGrub isn't going to win any points for graphic style, it did an excellent job of fixing my Fully Ryobi'd windows/Fedora situation, and is a nice little tool written by some nice folks in Italy, http://forja.linex.org/ .
Obviously, a bad guy could extend the approach and anticipate Grub as well, trying to side step that, but it would probably be a much more complicated task, figuring out how to hide from all the kernel variants of Linux.
If a person wanted to be sure, couldn't you burn a boot loader onto a CD, have the CD boot first, and have that direct the loading? IANLWK (I am no Linux Whiz Kid), but in my imperfect knowledge of the world, that seems like it would completely defend against this type of attack. I yearn for correction of my ways if this wouldn't work.
Clearly you have never held an infant sucking the stuff down like it was nectar. To the target user, formula tastes just fine.
Um, the entire Visa/Mastercard/ATM card apparatus is a hodgepodge of vendors that handle other people's data, most of which is outsourced. This has been true for over 20 years, and the vast majority of the time, things go just fine. The odds are slim that the issuer of your visa card maintains the data center for the account information, or runs the billing, or processes the sales transactions, or runs the collection system that duns you when you are late. Each of these systems knows quite a bit about you, which you should rightfully be cautious about. However, the track record of these companies is also pretty damn good for keeping tabs on the data, and the controls that I have to work under sometimes make the anal probing that Cartman endured seem preferable. There are legions of companies providing outsourced services for credit scoring, bank account processing, credit card processing, insurance processing, and collection agency processing, to think of just a few. These companies handle each other's account and customer information in vast quantities, and seem to do so without bringing down the economy. To say that it's unrealistic to outsource functions that handle PCI data is naive and uninformed. It's a rare piece of PCI that doesn't see an outsourcer in it's life. In general, the individual owning the PCI is far more often the risk factor in disclosing PCI than the outsourcers.
That's interesting, and is certainly contrary to my experience. However, I won't be the one that says it can't happen. I have years of experience with docs (mostly contracts and project documentation) that go through numerous edits, and have never seen what I could describe as corruption (non-command induced ruination of the file)
I dunno. I've been doing it since 1985. I make a comfortable six figure salary, have great employment prospects, and an enjoyable job. Maybe you need to work on building your skills and showing a bit of initiative. Java, .Net, SQL, and server OS's and apps are your friend.
Actually, the same is true of, say, electricity and indoor plumbing. Joseph Schumpeter wrote about this phenomenon, oh, 80 years or so ago. Basically, any given technology gives diminishing returns after it's introduction, and ultimately becomes a necessity rather than a differentiator if it provides value to the business. To the article's point, while IT is providing less of a differentiator, that doesn't mean it's less important. It also doesn't mean that a company will cease to need people who know how to get IT done, whether through internal means or external means. Last I checked, it was hard to get to gmail without functioning PCs and network gear. Sure, EDS has a new competitor in Google and various ASP/SAS providers, but it's not like outsourcing is new. Certain companies still seem to manage to provide a competitive advantage through internal provision of IT. Can you say, "Amazon", or "Bank Of America"?
I work for a fortune 200 company whose main business is outsourcing PCI data. So, sorry, please try again.