We're talking about a bunch of hackers here. When I went to my first Defcon, I was socially ackward as all get out. It would have been fantastic to observe real life social engineering in progress. Given the insane size of convention these days, I'm sure that even if a small fraction of the attendees are like I was, that's a few hundred people who would be interested in a social engineering demonstration. Hell, that they can even setup a soundproof booth to do the exhibition in the first place is a testiment to how far the con has come. It sure as hell wouldn't have fit in the tiny conference room in the Sands.
Maybe. I paid for the convenience of having it when I wanted it. But you're right. If I went online and waited a few days for standard shipping, I could have had it for $6. If I wanted it in any reasonable time, I would have given up most of my "savings" in shipping costs.
People have always tried to tell me that spam is automatically generated, but I KNEW BETTER! I knew, deep down in my soul that it was really millions of Chinese peasants, hooked up to TTY machines, flooding teh intarwebz with router clogging texts and Bayesian fooling, poorly constructed English non-sense.
High Speed cables on the other hand are tested to..
I'd be a couple bucks that the cables are more or less identical. One batch simply goes through a different QA process. My only experience with HDMI involves my Samsung LCD TV and my PS3. I bought the cheapest cables that Best Buy offered and haven't had any problems.
A buddy of mine tried to tell me that Monster cables are worth it because they come with a lifetime warranty and Monster will replace them for free. I told him that I can just go buy a new one and still come out ahead. Heck, I can do that five or six times.
On the other hand, a public library might not be updated as regularly as Wikipedia. Or if your library is like the ones in my neighborhood, the computers often have a wait time. This is something I think would be a great tool to be used in conjunction with a public library. At the start of every semester or school year, some kid's parent could go to the library and download the latest version of Wikipedia. Then the kid can access information at home. I know it's hard to believe, but not every home in America can afford a computer and a $30 a month DSL bill.
How times have changed. I guess the con is a little too big for everyone to get together with DT and the speakers in the hotel bar. I'm curious. When did the Ninja events start?
There are some downsides and a bit of overhead to pay for virtualization but I thought everyone had moved to this model...
And virtualization isn't always the way to go. It is great for a lot of environments, but sometimes you have an application that really does need all of the cores and all of the RAM a box might have.
From a human perspective, fuzzyfungus is right. Over-engineering is less likely to cost your job than failure. Plus, over-engineering is easy to justify.
Exactly. I'm working for a company that provides a software based service to law firms. The bill to a single client can eclipse $150,000 PER MONTH. With that kind of money being thrown around, the expectation is that the application will be up and running, ALL THE TIME. As odd as it, there are people connected into the system at 4am sometimes (with a 15 minute idle timer, you can bet they really are connected). The storage requirements of the system are pretty intense and only getting more so. Often times cases will sit in the system for years "just case". Quite frequently, the "just case" turns into "wow, we really did need that data again". It is worth it to us to hold onto the data for the clients at a rate of $50 a gigabyte. They aren't just paying for the raw disk space, they're paying for the accessibility.
We're using a mixture of drives. 15K SAS for the transaction logs and database servers. 7200RPM SATA for the file share stuff (scanned documents, etc).
We're growing so fast that we can barely keep up with the demand. Maybe I can run a few cross connects into my neighbor's cage and borrow some of their unused space?
The city wasn't running Microsoft on the back end. They were using Novell and Groupwise for email (along with just about every other government agency / municipality in California). They decided to replace Groupwise with GAPE... or I guess in this case, GAGE (Google Apps Government Edition).... soon to be known as GAG? (Only time will tell on that one).
That's what happens when you have senior sales guys meeting with managers.
Sales Guy, "Yeah, it will DO ALL OF THAT, and SAVE YOU OODLES OF MONEY."
Manager, "But does it work with my Blackberry? The IT guys tell me that Blackberry is important even though my kids have an iPhone and I like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit app."
Sales guy, "Yes, it does work with your Blackberry."
Manager, "Alright, I'm SOLD."
They obviously failed to properly scope the work. They failed to consider LAPD's needs.
You realize that by trying so hard to not fit into a niche, you've fit yourself into a niche, right? You're in the, "I don't fit into any niche." niche. Gibson even had a character in one of his books with "your" inclination for clothing and removing labels. With your tattoos, you've taken yourself out of the "main stream corporate" niche, and filed yourself into the "individualistic rebel" niche. Although with the number of people I see in my neighborhood who have self designed (and honestly quite good looking) tattoos, I'm not sure that your self designed tattoos set you apart.
It's okay though, the rest of us can still love you as a person. You don't have to try so hard to be unique and different from everyone else. We're all pretty okay people. Now why don't you come on in out of the cold, and have a nice glass of cold iKool-Aid?;)
The meta message that the government has been getting at seems to be that companies can't sell crippled devices to consumers. If a company is providing a device to a consumer, they need to be ready to support the device. That means the entire device. Not the device with built in limitations that the manufacturer decided to arbitrarily hoist upon the consumer.
Apple isn't the only bad guy here. My girlfriend has a G1. She was running out of memory so I gave her a larger, 2GB SD card and suggested that she load the apps onto the SD card. It turns out that she can't do that. The phone hardware is capable of doing it, but only "developer models" have the functionality enabled. Given the government's ruling, it should be perfectly legal for her to enable loading applications onto an SD card.
I don't know what Google was thinking. One of the major profit centers of a smartphone is the related app store. If users can only install apps into the primary memory of the device, then they won't buy as many apps. The phone simply can't hold that many apps. (Sorry for the tangent.)
Given that the entire disaster seems to have been the result of cost and corner cutting on a massive scale, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't bother to buy hardware on the Windows HCL, or if they were using cheap hardware with unsigned drivers.
I've found it helpful to ask something along the lines of, "What went wrong along the way to accomplishing X" where X is an accomplishment they've listed. If they say nothing went wrong, they're probably full of it. Things very rarely ever work right the first time, especially if they are complex at all.
You could just fire up a VM for them to work with. Hell, it would probably be worth while to take a production system, purposefully break it and then save a snapshot of the broken machine. Use that snapshot as the test environment for new candidates.
I was thinking the same thing. When a server is running slow, especially ALL of the services, I am going to fire up performance monitor and check the CPU. If the CPU is fine then I will start branching out from there, and probably check to make sure that it isn't a RAM or disk space issue. The network is usually the last thing I check because 99% of the time. The network either works or it doesn't. If it has been working, it won't suddenly stop working unless there is a hardware fault. If services are running slowly it is probably because too many people are trying to access them, not because the connection to them is faulty.
I've seen it and it isn't pretty. In fact I just left that organization and have found a much better position with a more professional company. I feel sorry for my co-workers who stayed behind because they didn't have the flexibility to up and leave.
That's all good and well, but if there are no laws against drug use and if you have drug addict neighbors, you will have to put up with their all night shenanigans without any recourse.
No, you don't. There are laws against loud noises past certain times, disturbing the peace and all that. There are so many rarely enforced civil codes that can be trotted out to deal with unpleasant neighbors.
Society has mechanisms in place to deal with addicts. Criminalizing the possession of a substance only serves to make an already bad situation worse. People who are drug addicts eventually lose their jobs, friends, etc. That is enough of a punishment. A person can't be saved from themselves. They need to learn their own lessons.
the "drug war" is more about denying people access to their own minds.
Welcome to reality. The Feds crack down harder on LSD than absolutely anything else. A single hit of LSD carries a manslaughter charge if the DA wants to get overzealous about it. Anything that can disrupt the carefully calibrated fear loop that has been instilled in us is absolutely verboten.
The OP is right on target. I'm sure the government would consider "backbone routers at Tier1 ISPs" critical infrastructure. Given the compliant Congress and our society's lack of actually generating real material goods anymore, it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine the RIAA/MPAA convincing Congress that P2P is a serious threat to the economy. Oh noes, cyber-attacking pirates off the fiber-port bow!!! Shut down teh intartubez! Save the contents!!!
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We're talking about a bunch of hackers here. When I went to my first Defcon, I was socially ackward as all get out. It would have been fantastic to observe real life social engineering in progress. Given the insane size of convention these days, I'm sure that even if a small fraction of the attendees are like I was, that's a few hundred people who would be interested in a social engineering demonstration. Hell, that they can even setup a soundproof booth to do the exhibition in the first place is a testiment to how far the con has come. It sure as hell wouldn't have fit in the tiny conference room in the Sands.
Maybe. I paid for the convenience of having it when I wanted it. But you're right. If I went online and waited a few days for standard shipping, I could have had it for $6. If I wanted it in any reasonable time, I would have given up most of my "savings" in shipping costs.
People have always tried to tell me that spam is automatically generated, but I KNEW BETTER! I knew, deep down in my soul that it was really millions of Chinese peasants, hooked up to TTY machines, flooding teh intarwebz with router clogging texts and Bayesian fooling, poorly constructed English non-sense.
I didn't spend $60 on a cable. It was about $25.
The following is what really stood out to me...
High Speed cables on the other hand are tested to..
I'd be a couple bucks that the cables are more or less identical. One batch simply goes through a different QA process. My only experience with HDMI involves my Samsung LCD TV and my PS3. I bought the cheapest cables that Best Buy offered and haven't had any problems.
A buddy of mine tried to tell me that Monster cables are worth it because they come with a lifetime warranty and Monster will replace them for free. I told him that I can just go buy a new one and still come out ahead. Heck, I can do that five or six times.
On the other hand, a public library might not be updated as regularly as Wikipedia. Or if your library is like the ones in my neighborhood, the computers often have a wait time. This is something I think would be a great tool to be used in conjunction with a public library. At the start of every semester or school year, some kid's parent could go to the library and download the latest version of Wikipedia. Then the kid can access information at home. I know it's hard to believe, but not every home in America can afford a computer and a $30 a month DSL bill.
How times have changed. I guess the con is a little too big for everyone to get together with DT and the speakers in the hotel bar. I'm curious. When did the Ninja events start?
There are some downsides and a bit of overhead to pay for virtualization but I thought everyone had moved to this model ...
And virtualization isn't always the way to go. It is great for a lot of environments, but sometimes you have an application that really does need all of the cores and all of the RAM a box might have.
From a human perspective, fuzzyfungus is right. Over-engineering is less likely to cost your job than failure. Plus, over-engineering is easy to justify.
Exactly. I'm working for a company that provides a software based service to law firms. The bill to a single client can eclipse $150,000 PER MONTH. With that kind of money being thrown around, the expectation is that the application will be up and running, ALL THE TIME. As odd as it, there are people connected into the system at 4am sometimes (with a 15 minute idle timer, you can bet they really are connected). The storage requirements of the system are pretty intense and only getting more so. Often times cases will sit in the system for years "just case". Quite frequently, the "just case" turns into "wow, we really did need that data again". It is worth it to us to hold onto the data for the clients at a rate of $50 a gigabyte. They aren't just paying for the raw disk space, they're paying for the accessibility.
We're using a mixture of drives. 15K SAS for the transaction logs and database servers. 7200RPM SATA for the file share stuff (scanned documents, etc).
We're growing so fast that we can barely keep up with the demand. Maybe I can run a few cross connects into my neighbor's cage and borrow some of their unused space?
Inquiring minds want to know. Is the Ninja party so exclusive that not even the Goons can get in?
The city wasn't running Microsoft on the back end. They were using Novell and Groupwise for email (along with just about every other government agency / municipality in California). They decided to replace Groupwise with GAPE... or I guess in this case, GAGE (Google Apps Government Edition).... soon to be known as GAG? (Only time will tell on that one).
That's what happens when you have senior sales guys meeting with managers.
Sales Guy, "Yeah, it will DO ALL OF THAT, and SAVE YOU OODLES OF MONEY."
Manager, "But does it work with my Blackberry? The IT guys tell me that Blackberry is important even though my kids have an iPhone and I like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit app."
Sales guy, "Yes, it does work with your Blackberry."
Manager, "Alright, I'm SOLD."
They obviously failed to properly scope the work. They failed to consider LAPD's needs.
You realize that by trying so hard to not fit into a niche, you've fit yourself into a niche, right? You're in the, "I don't fit into any niche." niche. Gibson even had a character in one of his books with "your" inclination for clothing and removing labels. With your tattoos, you've taken yourself out of the "main stream corporate" niche, and filed yourself into the "individualistic rebel" niche. Although with the number of people I see in my neighborhood who have self designed (and honestly quite good looking) tattoos, I'm not sure that your self designed tattoos set you apart.
It's okay though, the rest of us can still love you as a person. You don't have to try so hard to be unique and different from everyone else. We're all pretty okay people. Now why don't you come on in out of the cold, and have a nice glass of cold iKool-Aid? ;)
Just figure whatever you have will be compromised. We were snarfing ESN/MIN pairs at Defcon 1 and it hasn't slowed down since.
The meta message that the government has been getting at seems to be that companies can't sell crippled devices to consumers. If a company is providing a device to a consumer, they need to be ready to support the device. That means the entire device. Not the device with built in limitations that the manufacturer decided to arbitrarily hoist upon the consumer.
Apple isn't the only bad guy here. My girlfriend has a G1. She was running out of memory so I gave her a larger, 2GB SD card and suggested that she load the apps onto the SD card. It turns out that she can't do that. The phone hardware is capable of doing it, but only "developer models" have the functionality enabled. Given the government's ruling, it should be perfectly legal for her to enable loading applications onto an SD card.
I don't know what Google was thinking. One of the major profit centers of a smartphone is the related app store. If users can only install apps into the primary memory of the device, then they won't buy as many apps. The phone simply can't hold that many apps. (Sorry for the tangent.)
Given that the entire disaster seems to have been the result of cost and corner cutting on a massive scale, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't bother to buy hardware on the Windows HCL, or if they were using cheap hardware with unsigned drivers.
I've found it helpful to ask something along the lines of, "What went wrong along the way to accomplishing X" where X is an accomplishment they've listed. If they say nothing went wrong, they're probably full of it. Things very rarely ever work right the first time, especially if they are complex at all.
You could just fire up a VM for them to work with. Hell, it would probably be worth while to take a production system, purposefully break it and then save a snapshot of the broken machine. Use that snapshot as the test environment for new candidates.
I was thinking the same thing. When a server is running slow, especially ALL of the services, I am going to fire up performance monitor and check the CPU. If the CPU is fine then I will start branching out from there, and probably check to make sure that it isn't a RAM or disk space issue. The network is usually the last thing I check because 99% of the time. The network either works or it doesn't. If it has been working, it won't suddenly stop working unless there is a hardware fault. If services are running slowly it is probably because too many people are trying to access them, not because the connection to them is faulty.
I've seen it and it isn't pretty. In fact I just left that organization and have found a much better position with a more professional company. I feel sorry for my co-workers who stayed behind because they didn't have the flexibility to up and leave.
That's all good and well, but if there are no laws against drug use and if you have drug addict neighbors, you will have to put up with their all night shenanigans without any recourse.
No, you don't. There are laws against loud noises past certain times, disturbing the peace and all that. There are so many rarely enforced civil codes that can be trotted out to deal with unpleasant neighbors.
Society has mechanisms in place to deal with addicts. Criminalizing the possession of a substance only serves to make an already bad situation worse. People who are drug addicts eventually lose their jobs, friends, etc. That is enough of a punishment. A person can't be saved from themselves. They need to learn their own lessons.
the "drug war" is more about denying people access to their own minds.
Welcome to reality. The Feds crack down harder on LSD than absolutely anything else. A single hit of LSD carries a manslaughter charge if the DA wants to get overzealous about it. Anything that can disrupt the carefully calibrated fear loop that has been instilled in us is absolutely verboten.
The OP is right on target. I'm sure the government would consider "backbone routers at Tier1 ISPs" critical infrastructure. Given the compliant Congress and our society's lack of actually generating real material goods anymore, it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine the RIAA/MPAA convincing Congress that P2P is a serious threat to the economy. Oh noes, cyber-attacking pirates off the fiber-port bow!!! Shut down teh intartubez! Save the contents!!!