It seems that China sent all of their super coders to participate in the NSA challenge, and they left the apprentices back at home writing the domestic software.
Are you sure that we aren't suited to being the world police? Our police state techniques are pretty damn good. We have a higher percentage of our population incarcerated or otherwise caught up in the penal system (parole and probation) than any other developed country. I'd say that when it comes to disenfranchising huge portions of the population, we're doing pretty darn well.
How do you prevent change in a political system? Strip the rights of everyone who runs afoul of it and might be inclined to change it.
Yeah you can always do a SharePoint search for what you want...
Unless SharePoint has gotten significantly better in the last few years, I wouldn't trust SharePoint search to find a file located in the root of the directory I point it at. When I was using it, SharePoint search didn't seem to understand the underlying hierarchy, so it required a lot of parameters and qualifiers to do what should have been a single search (Go find me blah.doc for example).
If they are working with a local host file, they need to modify that file every time their spoofed site gets shut down. If they point you to a malicious DNS server, they can just change the records on the server instead of thousands(?) of individually compromised machines.
Where'd you get the idea that my only sense of reward involves money? A single post does not the man make.
Would it be fair if I wrote,
"It's unfortunate that you can only jump to conclusions and make off the cuff character assassinations of complete strangers. But hey, I guess that's as American as apple pie! This country is so fucked."
??
The reward for the kid comes when they're twenty plus years old, and they look back and realize that their old man incentivized their learning. Although at the time they were only focused on the reward, by having to perform well to earn the reward, they managed to pick up the study skills and other abilities that have carried them into college, and given them a good foundation for the rest of their life.
You bring up a good point about the difference between hard work and intelligence. In my mind, it is about establishing a reward for the outcome. In the case of children and school, the outcome is good grades. Short of mental retardation or other birth defect, the odds of a couple having two kids with a forty point IQ difference is pretty unlikely.
With regards to the PhD, at twenty-two years old you have enough life experience and the grasp of time to comprehend what you are getting involved in. To a kid, the vague notion that "one day" after they graduate from school and get a good job they will see the reward of their hard work is impossible to comprehend. At twenty-two, you can look back on about seventeen years of schooling and look forward to five more and put it in perspective. Where does a six year old get that perspective? Do you expect a ten year old to say to himself... "Okay, I've been alive for ten years... now if I live my life all over again... and then live it all over again, again... I will have a PhD and see some reward." ??
On the subject of delayed gratification, it is even more difficult for children who have not been alive very long. Think of it this way. To a six year old who has been alive for 72 months, a 8 month school "year" is one tenth of their entire life. That is a LONG time. The equivalent time to a 30 year old is 36 months... or 3 years. Imagine telling a 30 year old that they are going to have to spend three years doing something before they get a reward. How would they react to it?
When I was growing up there were kids in my school who got paid for grades. I brought up the idea to my parents and they wanted nothing to do with it. On the other hand I had a pretty big allowance. The result is that I learned that money should come for free, and the idea of being financially rewarded for working is outrageous. I can assure you that when I have children, their allowance will be tied to their grades, and I will be there providing them the resources that they need to get good grades. When the report card shows up, they will have the opportunity to earn "a good amount" of money for their age.
As far as I'm concerned, paying kids for grades delivers the message... "If you work hard, you will be rewarded." School is the equivalent of work for kids. It gets them ready to go into the working world. It gives them an environment to develop the habits and abilities that they will need to become productive members of society. I don't have any problem rewarding them for progressing along the path to becoming a productive member of society.
Having been at Defcon 1 and seen how far things have come, I have nothing but respect for DT and what he has done. It's funny how times change. To have gone from an environment where people were paranoid about "the Feds" even knowing who was attending the conference, to having the organizer of the conference working for the Feds, is a real change. He has the contacts and the insider knowledge of what the threats are. The government made a smart choice by hiring him. Now, DT... since my tax dollars are going into your pocket, how about a free admission to the next con?
-Phax
Do you have any documented cases of where what you are scared of has actually happened?
The closest I've seen was the battle between Novell and Microsoft back in the mid-1990s. On NT4 workstations, every time a new service pack would come out, the Novell networking client would stop working and you'd have to revert to Microsofts "Client for Netware Networks". After six months or so, Novell coders would catch up, release a new version of the client, and then life would be good again... up until the next service pack. By the time SP5 for NT came out, I didn't even bother rolling it out until Novell caught up. I did test it out just to make sure that it would break the client, and it did.
So I'm with you on your fears... sort of. On the other hand, given how much of a beating Microsoft has taken in the last decade for interoperability issues, and given how homogeneous most networks are these days, I think the odds of them intentionally (or otherwise) breaking AD are pretty slim. When was the last time they actually released a PATCH for AD? I know it changes with each new release of the server. And when you buy products like Exchange the schema needs to be extended. I've never heard of Microsoft releasing a patch for the directory service though.
They are held responsible for their products, but not in the legal sense of the meaning responsible. They are held responsible in the marketplace. When the quality of their products sucks, they pay for it in market share. Their search technology sucks and Google owns them there. Their portable media player sucks and Apple owns them there. Their web browser is only alright, and there are a slew of other alternatives. Their most recent OS isn't all that great on netbooks and there are alternatives popping up there. Are you running an Microsoft web server? You'd be in a very small minority if you are. In places where Microsoft product quality isn't up to par, they pay for it.
I've never worked in huge enterprises that is for sure. My experience has been in medium sized organizations with budgets between $1-100 million a year. At the top end of the scale, the people doing the purchasing aren't the people doing the administration. No matter what the size of the organization, if the people in charge of purchasing are purchasing licenses they don't need, and spending money they don't need to be spending, then they are incompetent. Are you telling me that people putting Linux on servers in corporate environments are by and large incompetent, and that incompetence is leading them to purchase Windows Server licenses that they don't need, and that those license counts are causing inaccuracies in the metrics?
What qualifies as a "mixed" shop? Netware and Windows? Windows and Linux, with some OSX thrown in? Maybe some VoIP hardware in the mix? In this day and age, are there any shops out there that AREN'T mixed?
If an IT department is savvy enough to be installing Linux on their servers, then why the hell are they purchasing Microsoft licenses that they don't need? I work for an organization that runs Windows Server. We buy HP Proliant hardware. Every server box that we buy from HP comes as a bare metal box that we then load Windows onto. We also have a Proliant running Ubuntu for the web guys to do their dev work on. That came into the building as a bare metal box also.
Where are you getting the numbers to back up your statement that server installs of Linux/BSD far outnumber Windows? If one side is quoting "sales figures", what figures are you quoting? If you're talking about data centers, I'm sure that there are more *nix boxes than Windows boxes. On the other hand, if you're talking small and medium sized businesses (50-500 employees) with in house IT, I think you're going to see significantly more Windows installs.
The "test" part of reciting the alphabet backwards involves whether or not you attempt to do it. A sober person will laugh at the idiocy of the request and ask the officer "Are you detaining me, or am I free to go now?" A drunk person will to try to comply and make a fool of themselves doing it. If the cop arrests the person solely on the basis of refusing to recite the alphabet backward, any lawyer will get the charge thrown out, because like you stated, the majority of the population can't even recite the alphabet backward completely sober.
Renting comes with all sorts of obligations. Once you rent something to someone, they feel entitled to it. If you want it back before the rental period is up, they want their money back. If they can't get their work done within the rental period, they won't want to give you any more money because they already paid you once to rent it in the first place. Since they paid you for it, they don't feel the need to be careful with it.
Exactly! Nothing is worse than hearing, "Lets just be friends." It's alright to have a girl "friend" who you go out and meet other girls with. Usually the simple act of being social with other girls in their presence will soon get you laid, if not by the girls you're talking to, then definitely by the girl you're dragging along as bait.
Women know whether or not they want to sleep with you before the two of you even exchange the first words. They will give you a little bit of time to make a move, but if you take too long, its off to LJBF land forever.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that. However, he might have come up with $15,000 in cash and bought a few years old BMW or Benz to go along with the rest of his image. It's amazing how quickly cars depreciate, especially if you are willing to buy one with a salvaged title and don't care about resale value.
Or as another option, if you have a decently fast network and lots of room on the servers, you can just setup roaming profiles for the users. That way their desktop follows them where ever they go and if their PC crashes, you can just give them anotehr one and the profile will load itself from the server. The down side is that the profiles tend to grow rather quickly if you have users who are in the habit of saving a lot of files to their desktop.
In the context of the story, the issue at hand is that Google is being pressured by "the Linux community" to develop a version of their browser "for Linux". If your Debian desktop is different than my Fedora desktop, then we can't both run Chrome. Either Google targets Fedora, or Debian, or OpenBSD, or, or or... That's the "problem" (challenge?) with "developing for Linux." In many instances there isn't a Linux standard. Even different flavors of Linux have different versions of the kernel. If the kernel isn't even standard across distros, how are they supposed to standardize an API across them?
This situation has been going on for as long as I've been using computers. I remember when I was a kid, I had an Apple IIgs and when I visited Egghead, I found a bunch of great games in the IBM section that I couldn't play. Then I finally got a PC, and all of the Apple programs I had didn't work on it. That was in the 1980s. It hasn't changed significantly since then. Even companies that release applications for both platforms (like Adobe) can't manage to standardize the user experience. Sure, you can run Creative Suite on a PC, but I don't know a single graphic designer who does it. They all run it on OSX.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that China sent all of their super coders to participate in the NSA challenge, and they left the apprentices back at home writing the domestic software.
Are you sure that we aren't suited to being the world police? Our police state techniques are pretty damn good. We have a higher percentage of our population incarcerated or otherwise caught up in the penal system (parole and probation) than any other developed country. I'd say that when it comes to disenfranchising huge portions of the population, we're doing pretty darn well.
How do you prevent change in a political system? Strip the rights of everyone who runs afoul of it and might be inclined to change it.
Unless SharePoint has gotten significantly better in the last few years, I wouldn't trust SharePoint search to find a file located in the root of the directory I point it at. When I was using it, SharePoint search didn't seem to understand the underlying hierarchy, so it required a lot of parameters and qualifiers to do what should have been a single search (Go find me blah.doc for example).
If they are working with a local host file, they need to modify that file every time their spoofed site gets shut down. If they point you to a malicious DNS server, they can just change the records on the server instead of thousands(?) of individually compromised machines.
... steroids and "performance enhancing" supplements. So by that line of logic, mathematics education outside of America = ???
Lots of meth and piracetium?
Where'd you get the idea that my only sense of reward involves money? A single post does not the man make.
Would it be fair if I wrote,
"It's unfortunate that you can only jump to conclusions and make off the cuff character assassinations of complete strangers. But hey, I guess that's as American as apple pie! This country is so fucked."
??
The reward for the kid comes when they're twenty plus years old, and they look back and realize that their old man incentivized their learning. Although at the time they were only focused on the reward, by having to perform well to earn the reward, they managed to pick up the study skills and other abilities that have carried them into college, and given them a good foundation for the rest of their life.
You bring up a good point about the difference between hard work and intelligence. In my mind, it is about establishing a reward for the outcome. In the case of children and school, the outcome is good grades. Short of mental retardation or other birth defect, the odds of a couple having two kids with a forty point IQ difference is pretty unlikely.
With regards to the PhD, at twenty-two years old you have enough life experience and the grasp of time to comprehend what you are getting involved in. To a kid, the vague notion that "one day" after they graduate from school and get a good job they will see the reward of their hard work is impossible to comprehend. At twenty-two, you can look back on about seventeen years of schooling and look forward to five more and put it in perspective. Where does a six year old get that perspective? Do you expect a ten year old to say to himself... "Okay, I've been alive for ten years... now if I live my life all over again... and then live it all over again, again... I will have a PhD and see some reward." ??
On the subject of delayed gratification, it is even more difficult for children who have not been alive very long. Think of it this way. To a six year old who has been alive for 72 months, a 8 month school "year" is one tenth of their entire life. That is a LONG time. The equivalent time to a 30 year old is 36 months... or 3 years. Imagine telling a 30 year old that they are going to have to spend three years doing something before they get a reward. How would they react to it?
When I was growing up there were kids in my school who got paid for grades. I brought up the idea to my parents and they wanted nothing to do with it. On the other hand I had a pretty big allowance. The result is that I learned that money should come for free, and the idea of being financially rewarded for working is outrageous. I can assure you that when I have children, their allowance will be tied to their grades, and I will be there providing them the resources that they need to get good grades. When the report card shows up, they will have the opportunity to earn "a good amount" of money for their age.
As far as I'm concerned, paying kids for grades delivers the message... "If you work hard, you will be rewarded." School is the equivalent of work for kids. It gets them ready to go into the working world. It gives them an environment to develop the habits and abilities that they will need to become productive members of society. I don't have any problem rewarding them for progressing along the path to becoming a productive member of society.
Having been at Defcon 1 and seen how far things have come, I have nothing but respect for DT and what he has done. It's funny how times change. To have gone from an environment where people were paranoid about "the Feds" even knowing who was attending the conference, to having the organizer of the conference working for the Feds, is a real change. He has the contacts and the insider knowledge of what the threats are. The government made a smart choice by hiring him. Now, DT... since my tax dollars are going into your pocket, how about a free admission to the next con? -Phax
I'm still writing my code using Notepad you insensitive clod!
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
There's nothing else to see here, move along.
Do you have any documented cases of where what you are scared of has actually happened?
The closest I've seen was the battle between Novell and Microsoft back in the mid-1990s. On NT4 workstations, every time a new service pack would come out, the Novell networking client would stop working and you'd have to revert to Microsofts "Client for Netware Networks". After six months or so, Novell coders would catch up, release a new version of the client, and then life would be good again... up until the next service pack. By the time SP5 for NT came out, I didn't even bother rolling it out until Novell caught up. I did test it out just to make sure that it would break the client, and it did.
So I'm with you on your fears... sort of. On the other hand, given how much of a beating Microsoft has taken in the last decade for interoperability issues, and given how homogeneous most networks are these days, I think the odds of them intentionally (or otherwise) breaking AD are pretty slim. When was the last time they actually released a PATCH for AD? I know it changes with each new release of the server. And when you buy products like Exchange the schema needs to be extended. I've never heard of Microsoft releasing a patch for the directory service though.
They are held responsible for their products, but not in the legal sense of the meaning responsible. They are held responsible in the marketplace. When the quality of their products sucks, they pay for it in market share. Their search technology sucks and Google owns them there. Their portable media player sucks and Apple owns them there. Their web browser is only alright, and there are a slew of other alternatives. Their most recent OS isn't all that great on netbooks and there are alternatives popping up there. Are you running an Microsoft web server? You'd be in a very small minority if you are. In places where Microsoft product quality isn't up to par, they pay for it.
I've never worked in huge enterprises that is for sure. My experience has been in medium sized organizations with budgets between $1-100 million a year. At the top end of the scale, the people doing the purchasing aren't the people doing the administration. No matter what the size of the organization, if the people in charge of purchasing are purchasing licenses they don't need, and spending money they don't need to be spending, then they are incompetent. Are you telling me that people putting Linux on servers in corporate environments are by and large incompetent, and that incompetence is leading them to purchase Windows Server licenses that they don't need, and that those license counts are causing inaccuracies in the metrics?
What qualifies as a "mixed" shop? Netware and Windows? Windows and Linux, with some OSX thrown in? Maybe some VoIP hardware in the mix? In this day and age, are there any shops out there that AREN'T mixed?
Your chunking technique is good.
Help take some of the load off of the Pirate Bay and host some links to torrents.
If an IT department is savvy enough to be installing Linux on their servers, then why the hell are they purchasing Microsoft licenses that they don't need? I work for an organization that runs Windows Server. We buy HP Proliant hardware. Every server box that we buy from HP comes as a bare metal box that we then load Windows onto. We also have a Proliant running Ubuntu for the web guys to do their dev work on. That came into the building as a bare metal box also.
Where are you getting the numbers to back up your statement that server installs of Linux/BSD far outnumber Windows? If one side is quoting "sales figures", what figures are you quoting? If you're talking about data centers, I'm sure that there are more *nix boxes than Windows boxes. On the other hand, if you're talking small and medium sized businesses (50-500 employees) with in house IT, I think you're going to see significantly more Windows installs.
The "test" part of reciting the alphabet backwards involves whether or not you attempt to do it. A sober person will laugh at the idiocy of the request and ask the officer "Are you detaining me, or am I free to go now?" A drunk person will to try to comply and make a fool of themselves doing it. If the cop arrests the person solely on the basis of refusing to recite the alphabet backward, any lawyer will get the charge thrown out, because like you stated, the majority of the population can't even recite the alphabet backward completely sober.
Seeking a long term relationship and finding girls to hook up with are different.
Renting comes with all sorts of obligations. Once you rent something to someone, they feel entitled to it. If you want it back before the rental period is up, they want their money back. If they can't get their work done within the rental period, they won't want to give you any more money because they already paid you once to rent it in the first place. Since they paid you for it, they don't feel the need to be careful with it.
Exactly! Nothing is worse than hearing, "Lets just be friends." It's alright to have a girl "friend" who you go out and meet other girls with. Usually the simple act of being social with other girls in their presence will soon get you laid, if not by the girls you're talking to, then definitely by the girl you're dragging along as bait.
Women know whether or not they want to sleep with you before the two of you even exchange the first words. They will give you a little bit of time to make a move, but if you take too long, its off to LJBF land forever.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that. However, he might have come up with $15,000 in cash and bought a few years old BMW or Benz to go along with the rest of his image. It's amazing how quickly cars depreciate, especially if you are willing to buy one with a salvaged title and don't care about resale value.
Or as another option, if you have a decently fast network and lots of room on the servers, you can just setup roaming profiles for the users. That way their desktop follows them where ever they go and if their PC crashes, you can just give them anotehr one and the profile will load itself from the server. The down side is that the profiles tend to grow rather quickly if you have users who are in the habit of saving a lot of files to their desktop.
In the context of the story, the issue at hand is that Google is being pressured by "the Linux community" to develop a version of their browser "for Linux". If your Debian desktop is different than my Fedora desktop, then we can't both run Chrome. Either Google targets Fedora, or Debian, or OpenBSD, or, or or... That's the "problem" (challenge?) with "developing for Linux." In many instances there isn't a Linux standard. Even different flavors of Linux have different versions of the kernel. If the kernel isn't even standard across distros, how are they supposed to standardize an API across them?
This situation has been going on for as long as I've been using computers. I remember when I was a kid, I had an Apple IIgs and when I visited Egghead, I found a bunch of great games in the IBM section that I couldn't play. Then I finally got a PC, and all of the Apple programs I had didn't work on it. That was in the 1980s. It hasn't changed significantly since then. Even companies that release applications for both platforms (like Adobe) can't manage to standardize the user experience. Sure, you can run Creative Suite on a PC, but I don't know a single graphic designer who does it. They all run it on OSX.