Yes, we all have a gay old time making fun of those stupid users. But to be fair, we're talking about systems that should have been designed with the expectation that they would be used by stupid people. Yet these systems do not take that in to account. There must be a lot of stupid developers and admins.
4 in 10 respondents shared passwords with at least one person in the past year
Sure. I have accounts with information I share with my wife. For example, our joint bank account. [Do not feel free to add rant about online banking here.] One bank account = one set of sign in credentials. So how do we work this situation without sharing passwords?
Nearly as many people use the same password to log into multiple Web sites, which could expose their information on each of the sites if one of them becomes compromised. (A separate recent study revealed that 75% of people use the same password for Social Networking Sites and their email accounts)
I have a dozen different systems with separate sign-ons at work. No, this is not exaggeration. I am actually rounding down to a dozen. Should I remember a dozen different passwords? Because of course It's a no-no to write them down.
And that's just at work. Add to that the dozen or so social sites (/., fb, support boards for my tv, car, universal remote, NAS, DVR, etc.)
Is there anyone who doesn't reuse passwords? I bet it's just the folks using some password manager app. For those folks: did you write that app yourself? No? And yet you trust it with all your passwords?
Almost half of all users never use special characters (e.g. ! ? & #) in their passwords, a simple technique that makes it more difficult for criminals to guess passwords.
Why is this on a list of stupid things users do? I've seen plenty of systems that did not allow special characters in passwords. Admins can be stupid as well.
And this is actually not a good point at all. Allowing (or requiring) more characters in the password is better than adding special characters to a shorter password.
And see the previous point about reusing passwords. When I change my passwords at work, I chose a password that conforms to the least secure system (lowest max character limit, fewest allowed character classes, etc) so that I can have a single password for all those systems.
2 in 10 have used a significant date, such as a birth date, or a pet's name as a password - information that's often publicly visible on social networks.
One of the reasons why big business loves Windows and isn't that interested in Linux other than maybe Red Hat is because if things go horribly wrong, there's somebody with deep pockets to sue.
Yes, because Microsoft came to dominate its industry by paying out on lawsuits. Those deep pockets are more likely to go for paying for lawyers to fight your lawsuit.
As for protection from IP claims, this is the textbook definition of FUD. And it's a lie. Weren't customers of MS subject to lawsuits a few years ago based on IP in SQL Server?
Why does the outside world get 'heavier' as the black hole gets 'lighter'?
That certainly makes sense if, in the virtual pair, the particle escapes the event horizon and the anti-particle falls in to the black hole.
But isn't it just as likely the anti-particle escapes and the particle falls in the black hole? Doesn't that mean there is no net energy gained or lost? All the particles and anti-particles escaping cancel each other out.
Now, you could say, when a particle and anti-particle meet, the energy released is equivalent to the energy lost from the black hole. Except these are particles 'born' outside of the black hole to begin with. This is just energy outside of the black hole that has moved from one place/form to another.
Where in this process does the black hole lose energy?
Ideally, a mail client should track how often someone uses the 'high importance' flag. Someone where I used to work used it for every single mail that she sent to mailing lists, and they were never important. In contrast, my editor only uses it for stuff that I actually need to read and respond to urgently, maybe 1% of emails I get from him. A mail client could easily learn that the first person always abuses the flag, while the second person uses it appropriately, and only flag emails from him.
So it seems being able to sort message by sender would be useful in this situation. I know it would help me. It's one of the features I use most in Outlook at work.
Also a willingness to ask questions, because at least half the time what you're being asked to do is what someone thinks they need done, but not what they actually need done.
Notice there's no mention of code, development methodology, or any other IT concepts.
And that's fine by me, because all those things change. I don't need a Windows IIS guru, because we're likely to switch over to Apache Tomcat next year. I don't care how l33t your PHP skillz are, I want to know how useful you are going to be when we need to move all the code over to JAVA.
Basically, I want to know how well you can answer the questions I don't yet know to ask. New technologies, new challenges, new bugs. I need to know how well you can think.
There you are. That's the skill need in IT--past, present, and future. Can you think?
"It's to bad that it doesn't get dark until after my kids bed time. In another year or two, I really am looking forward to exposing him to the Perseids."
Seriously? Kid can't stay up late for a meteor shower? No exceptions?
I suppose there's also no cake on his birthday, because you don't allow sweets.
You and your child are missing out. I have fond memories of my mother dragging us out of bed in the middle of the night for a lunar eclipse.
If someone makes a copy, you still have all your info, so you haven't really lost anything, right?
Isn't that what many folks here have been telling us? If you download data, it's just a copy. You're not depriving the owner of any property, so it isn't theft.
How is making a copy of your SSN or other identifying information theft or loss? Data wants to free, right?
The problem I see is that legislators cause a problem in the free market through legislation
Can you see that if legislators are able to cause problems through legislation, then the market is not free?
In a free market, a monopoly would mean the entire market has chosen a single provider. What's wrong with that?
If that provider decided to 'abuse' the monopoly by raising prices or decreasing service, customers would be free to move to another provider or even to start providing the service themselves!
I don't know what they teach in econ 101 these days, but in truth a free market would almost never result in a monopoly.
I'm not sure how removing private works from public domain would rise to the level of a constitutional violation.
It's a constitutional issue, but not a first amendment issue. The correct items in the bill of rights in this case are the forth and fifth amendments.
Freedom of religion, assembly, and press are not the issue here. The issue is the people had something--rights to these works in the public domain--and the government is taking that thing without compensation.
Re:Student loan debt not worth it
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Word.
How did the grand-parent post get modded up? If you leave PhD program in the sciences with any debt, it's either left over from your undergrad years or it's lifestyle debt (car, eating out, clothes, etc.)
Between teaching, research grants, and cleaning test tubes, grad school in the sciences will cost you $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food.
One of the most un-American things I've ever read
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's a lack of job opportunities.
If you want an education to set you up to take a job, train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job.
Furthermore, if there is this connection between education and job opportunities, why do we have art history departments? Are there that many museums on the hunt for curators? Or is it just for all the Starbucks that don't yet have the minimum number of people hanging out behind the counter?
There's a much much simpler explanation that doesn't have anything to do with different story telling media, and it is this:
I have a simpler explanation. Why wouldn't video game movies be awful?
It's like asking, why do kids who play video games commit violent crimes?
The answer has nothing to do with the video games, per se. The answer is, these days almost all kids play video games. Therefor the kids who end up committing crimes play video games. And the kids who commit no crimes play video games. You could just as easily (and truthfully) say most kids who get cancer have played video games. Does that suggest video games cause cancer?
Anyway, back to the movies.
Most movies made today are awful. Why should those based on video games be an exception? Why are most movies based on old TV shows awful? Why are most romantic comedies awful? Think of any genre of movie being made today by Hollywood.
Most are awful.
Why are comic book movies awful? Other than the remake of another movie (and most recent remakes are awful), the comic book or graphic novel format most lends it self to movie making. The source material is the farkin' story board.
Even so, I'd say the success rate of comic book movies is under 50%. Yes, the good ones can be really good. And even considering the/. audience, which is partial to comic books, most (as is more than 50%) comic book movies suck.
A few economists have also made the argument that too much cheap government money leaves next to no incentive to colleges to lower their rates. In fact tuition has been climbing pretty consistently for years now. This does nobody any good -- not the student who is absorbing more debt and will have less freedom of action when he/she finally finishes school, nor the taxpayer that is subsidizing the inflated tuition bill.
Well, let's look at the housing market as an analogous situation.
Money kept artificially cheap due to government guarantees. Next to no incentive to keep housing prices down or make accurate assessments of risk of default.
But people keep borrowing to keep buying, both in spite of and because prices keep going up. (I can always flip it for a big profit next year.)
It's the American dream. Families get a home of their own; communities get stability. It's win-win!
Two versions! You think there have only been two versions of svchost.exe on XP and 2003?
Not in all the universe. But I don't care about the universe, I just care about my company.
And in my company, with very few exceptions, all Windows systems get the same patches (that is, all workstations get the same workstation patches, all servers get the same server patches). So yes, at any one time, my Windows group can focus their attention on testing with those two versions of Windows--one XP and one Server.
Anyway, going back to how patches from MS are handled, not only are they made available for testing before pushed out to production, they are also pushed out in phases.
About 10% of the workstations in the company are in the pilot group and get MS patches about 5 days before everyone else. If this AV dat update was handled in the same manner, my company would have saved a few $million in lost productivity today. The issue would have been noticed before it went company-wide.
What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.
What you describe is not just most of Usenet, but most of the Internet itself. Would you be OK if Cox discontinued all Internet service, but continued to bill customers?
In fact, 1) Usenet is lot more than the dark alleys of the internet.
2) What does Google have to do with it? So what about Google Groups? What about options? There is Gmail, does that mean there should be no other email option?
3) What about all the things my newsreader does that Google Groups does not? Saving threads for reading off line, killfile, etc.
4) You contradict yourself. If Usenet is such an obscure feature used by very few, why would removing access result in a measurable reduction in traffic?
The truth is Usenet does some things better than your "zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites."
We have a corporate standard for XP on the desktop and Win 2003 for servers. Should only be those 2 versions of svchost.exe to test against.
Right now my employer is losing $millions as systems are down proactively until the issue is resolved. Manufacturing and labeling systems run on Windows:)
I know we test patches from Microsoft against the standard OS as well as the individual apps. As an application owner, I test the monthly patches from MS before applying in production.
Virus definition updates are not provided for testing prior to release.
Given how widespread this issue is, I think it would have been picked up in testing.
No it doesn't. You just treat getting fired for cause the same as quitting. I've been getting tuition paid by my company for the last 3 years.
If I quit, I owe them whatever I've been reimbursed over the last year. If I get laid off, I owe them nothing.
If I get fired after I slash my boss's tires because I'm too much of a d-bag to just quit, I still owe.
Now there is a wrinkle, and it is this: since starting I've put continuing education in to the formal yearly goals and milestones approved by my boss.
So who is to say education is part of my goals because I've taken the initiative to take courses, or that I'm taking courses because education is part of my company-mandated goals?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we all have a gay old time making fun of those stupid users. But to be fair, we're talking about systems that should have been designed with the expectation that they would be used by stupid people. Yet these systems do not take that in to account. There must be a lot of stupid developers and admins.
Sure. I have accounts with information I share with my wife. For example, our joint bank account. [Do not feel free to add rant about online banking here.] One bank account = one set of sign in credentials. So how do we work this situation without sharing passwords?
I have a dozen different systems with separate sign-ons at work. No, this is not exaggeration. I am actually rounding down to a dozen. Should I remember a dozen different passwords? Because of course It's a no-no to write them down.
And that's just at work. Add to that the dozen or so social sites (/., fb, support boards for my tv, car, universal remote, NAS, DVR, etc.)
Is there anyone who doesn't reuse passwords? I bet it's just the folks using some password manager app. For those folks: did you write that app yourself? No? And yet you trust it with all your passwords?
Why is this on a list of stupid things users do? I've seen plenty of systems that did not allow special characters in passwords. Admins can be stupid as well.
And this is actually not a good point at all. Allowing (or requiring) more characters in the password is better than adding special characters to a shorter password.
And see the previous point about reusing passwords. When I change my passwords at work, I chose a password that conforms to the least secure system (lowest max character limit, fewest allowed character classes, etc) so that I can have a single password for all those systems.
Okay. This is stupid.
One of the reasons why big business loves Windows and isn't that interested in Linux other than maybe Red Hat is because if things go horribly wrong, there's somebody with deep pockets to sue.
Yes, because Microsoft came to dominate its industry by paying out on lawsuits. Those deep pockets are more likely to go for paying for lawyers to fight your lawsuit.
As for protection from IP claims, this is the textbook definition of FUD. And it's a lie. Weren't customers of MS subject to lawsuits a few years ago based on IP in SQL Server?
Why does the outside world get 'heavier' as the black hole gets 'lighter'?
That certainly makes sense if, in the virtual pair, the particle escapes the event horizon and the anti-particle falls in to the black hole.
But isn't it just as likely the anti-particle escapes and the particle falls in the black hole? Doesn't that mean there is no net energy gained or lost? All the particles and anti-particles escaping cancel each other out.
Now, you could say, when a particle and anti-particle meet, the energy released is equivalent to the energy lost from the black hole. Except these are particles 'born' outside of the black hole to begin with. This is just energy outside of the black hole that has moved from one place/form to another.
Where in this process does the black hole lose energy?
Or, you know, you could go with a computer less likely to be defective, so service isn't as much a concern.
Lenovo, FTW.
Wouldn't it be .\?
Ideally, a mail client should track how often someone uses the 'high importance' flag. Someone where I used to work used it for every single mail that she sent to mailing lists, and they were never important. In contrast, my editor only uses it for stuff that I actually need to read and respond to urgently, maybe 1% of emails I get from him. A mail client could easily learn that the first person always abuses the flag, while the second person uses it appropriately, and only flag emails from him.
So it seems being able to sort message by sender would be useful in this situation. I know it would help me. It's one of the features I use most in Outlook at work.
So Gmail, why won't you sort messages by sender?
Also a willingness to ask questions, because at least half the time what you're being asked to do is what someone thinks they need done, but not what they actually need done.
Your newsletter, I subscribe to it.
After my latest round of interviews for an open developer spot on my team, I decided the skills I'm looking for in IT can be identified by this test:
http://www.drunkmenworkhere.org/170
Notice there's no mention of code, development methodology, or any other IT concepts.
And that's fine by me, because all those things change. I don't need a Windows IIS guru, because we're likely to switch over to Apache Tomcat next year. I don't care how l33t your PHP skillz are, I want to know how useful you are going to be when we need to move all the code over to JAVA.
Basically, I want to know how well you can answer the questions I don't yet know to ask. New technologies, new challenges, new bugs. I need to know how well you can think.
There you are. That's the skill need in IT--past, present, and future. Can you think?
"It's to bad that it doesn't get dark until after my kids bed time. In another year or two, I really am looking forward to exposing him to the Perseids."
Seriously? Kid can't stay up late for a meteor shower? No exceptions?
I suppose there's also no cake on his birthday, because you don't allow sweets.
You and your child are missing out. I have fond memories of my mother dragging us out of bed in the middle of the night for a lunar eclipse.
How do you "lose" your personal info?
If someone makes a copy, you still have all your info, so you haven't really lost anything, right?
Isn't that what many folks here have been telling us? If you download data, it's just a copy. You're not depriving the owner of any property, so it isn't theft.
How is making a copy of your SSN or other identifying information theft or loss? Data wants to free, right?
My first thought was an Easy Bake oven
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/ezbake.shtml
If you'd been through one, you'd know it.
You don't walk through as with a metal detector. First, you'll be asked to empty your pockets, not just remove metals.
Then, you'll stand in the scan area, hands over your head, facing sideways while the scan is done.
The man is very real, not of straw.
The problem I see is that legislators cause a problem in the free market through legislation
Can you see that if legislators are able to cause problems through legislation, then the market is not free?
In a free market, a monopoly would mean the entire market has chosen a single provider. What's wrong with that?
If that provider decided to 'abuse' the monopoly by raising prices or decreasing service, customers would be free to move to another provider or even to start providing the service themselves!
I don't know what they teach in econ 101 these days, but in truth a free market would almost never result in a monopoly.
How quaint.
You wouldn't order from a site like Newegg, but you think your data is safe with PayPal.
I'm not sure how removing private works from public domain would rise to the level of a constitutional violation.
It's a constitutional issue, but not a first amendment issue. The correct items in the bill of rights in this case are the forth and fifth amendments.
Freedom of religion, assembly, and press are not the issue here. The issue is the people had something--rights to these works in the public domain--and the government is taking that thing without compensation.
Word.
How did the grand-parent post get modded up? If you leave PhD program in the sciences with any debt, it's either left over from your undergrad years or it's lifestyle debt (car, eating out, clothes, etc.)
Between teaching, research grants, and cleaning test tubes, grad school in the sciences will cost you $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food.
It's a lack of job opportunities.
If you want an education to set you up to take a job, train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job.
Furthermore, if there is this connection between education and job opportunities, why do we have art history departments? Are there that many museums on the hunt for curators? Or is it just for all the Starbucks that don't yet have the minimum number of people hanging out behind the counter?
There's a much much simpler explanation that doesn't have anything to do with different story telling media, and it is this:
I have a simpler explanation. Why wouldn't video game movies be awful?
It's like asking, why do kids who play video games commit violent crimes?
The answer has nothing to do with the video games, per se. The answer is, these days almost all kids play video games. Therefor the kids who end up committing crimes play video games. And the kids who commit no crimes play video games. You could just as easily (and truthfully) say most kids who get cancer have played video games. Does that suggest video games cause cancer?
Anyway, back to the movies.
Most movies made today are awful. Why should those based on video games be an exception? Why are most movies based on old TV shows awful? Why are most romantic comedies awful? Think of any genre of movie being made today by Hollywood.
Most are awful.
Why are comic book movies awful? Other than the remake of another movie (and most recent remakes are awful), the comic book or graphic novel format most lends it self to movie making. The source material is the farkin' story board.
Even so, I'd say the success rate of comic book movies is under 50%. Yes, the good ones can be really good. And even considering the /. audience, which is partial to comic books, most (as is more than 50%) comic book movies suck.
Why should video games be the exception?
The entire Mediterranean started out Christian and was itself invaded.
Seriously?
A few economists have also made the argument that too much cheap government money leaves next to no incentive to colleges to lower their rates. In fact tuition has been climbing pretty consistently for years now. This does nobody any good -- not the student who is absorbing more debt and will have less freedom of action when he/she finally finishes school, nor the taxpayer that is subsidizing the inflated tuition bill.
Well, let's look at the housing market as an analogous situation.
Money kept artificially cheap due to government guarantees. Next to no incentive to keep housing prices down or make accurate assessments of risk of default.
But people keep borrowing to keep buying, both in spite of and because prices keep going up. (I can always flip it for a big profit next year.)
It's the American dream. Families get a home of their own; communities get stability. It's win-win!
What could go wrong?
I don't have mod points today, but thank you for making it worth my while to bring my laptop (with clit) to this meeting.
Two versions! You think there have only been two versions of svchost.exe on XP and 2003?
Not in all the universe. But I don't care about the universe, I just care about my company.
And in my company, with very few exceptions, all Windows systems get the same patches (that is, all workstations get the same workstation patches, all servers get the same server patches). So yes, at any one time, my Windows group can focus their attention on testing with those two versions of Windows--one XP and one Server.
Anyway, going back to how patches from MS are handled, not only are they made available for testing before pushed out to production, they are also pushed out in phases.
About 10% of the workstations in the company are in the pilot group and get MS patches about 5 days before everyone else. If this AV dat update was handled in the same manner, my company would have saved a few $million in lost productivity today. The issue would have been noticed before it went company-wide.
What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.
What you describe is not just most of Usenet, but most of the Internet itself. Would you be OK if Cox discontinued all Internet service, but continued to bill customers?
In fact, 1) Usenet is lot more than the dark alleys of the internet.
2) What does Google have to do with it? So what about Google Groups? What about options? There is Gmail, does that mean there should be no other email option?
3) What about all the things my newsreader does that Google Groups does not? Saving threads for reading off line, killfile, etc.
4) You contradict yourself. If Usenet is such an obscure feature used by very few, why would removing access result in a measurable reduction in traffic?
The truth is Usenet does some things better than your "zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites."
I put this on my corporate IT.
We have a corporate standard for XP on the desktop and Win 2003 for servers. Should only be those 2 versions of svchost.exe to test against.
Right now my employer is losing $millions as systems are down proactively until the issue is resolved. Manufacturing and labeling systems run on Windows :)
I know we test patches from Microsoft against the standard OS as well as the individual apps. As an application owner, I test the monthly patches from MS before applying in production.
Virus definition updates are not provided for testing prior to release.
Given how widespread this issue is, I think it would have been picked up in testing.
It creates whole new classes of problem
No it doesn't. You just treat getting fired for cause the same as quitting. I've been getting tuition paid by my company for the last 3 years.
If I quit, I owe them whatever I've been reimbursed over the last year. If I get laid off, I owe them nothing.
If I get fired after I slash my boss's tires because I'm too much of a d-bag to just quit, I still owe.
Now there is a wrinkle, and it is this: since starting I've put continuing education in to the formal yearly goals and milestones approved by my boss.
So who is to say education is part of my goals because I've taken the initiative to take courses, or that I'm taking courses because education is part of my company-mandated goals?