I've used 2007. We have software assurance so we get all of the recent products. We had to roll out Outlook 2007 because a couple of people wanted RSS feeds. (Yes I know there are other ways to get RSS feeds in Windows). There seem to be some quirky issues with the software though. I'm not sure if it's because we put it on boxes that previously ran 2003 and there are some registry turds, or if it's the software itself. But there are issues where users will be typing up an email (using Word as the email editor) and it will just lock up. All of the other windows are responsive, but the email composition window is frozen and can't be recovered. There are other issues where if an email is too long, it will lock the window. Issues like that shouldn't be occuring in release... what, 13 of a softare, 14? What version is Office up to now anyway?
As for the ribbons, you're probably right. I remember when XP came out I absolutely hated the Start menu functionality. After about six months I was used to it and found the Win2K menu to be limited. Microsoft has some good UI engineers, but they don't seem too concerned with retaining old conventions. I'm sure that helps them when new people use the latest version of the OS or application for the first time. For me, it's just kind of annoying have to relearn things every three to four years when they roll out fairly radical interface redesigns.
That's interesting. I was just having a conversation with my boss yesterday on this subject. I work for a non-profit too. He told me that unless we renew every two years, we are out of compliance with our licenses. That didn't make any sense to me, because my understanding is that once you buy the license, you own the license. However I didn't exactly put it past Microsoft to come up with some shady clauses like that. Do you get special non-profit pricing? We pay next to nothing for our licenses... I think somewhere in the $10-15 range for Office.
...if Office 2003 works, then why upgrade or change to OpenOffice?
Licensing costs and forced EOL. I'd be happy to stay on Office 2003 until 2013. It does everything that I need it to do. Microsoft will never let that happen though. They will EOL it, and then within 6 months there will be a "critical" patch that also happens to bork a DLL that Office relies on.
I avoided Vista, in part because of all the negativity surrounding it here, and in part because of actual experience with it running on what should have been lightning fast hardware (dual core CPUs, 4gigs of RAM but integrated, onboard video). I've used the Windows 7 beta, and now I'm not too concerned about moving off of XP when the time comes. That isn't to say that I'm leaving XP anytime soon (much like I didn't leave Win2000 until long after XP SP2 was out.) However Windows 7 is to Vista what Win98SE was to WinME. In other words, they got it right, after a serious misstep.
I thought that memes were ideas that spread virally. For example, "The world trade centers were brought down by the United States government as a false flag operation." would be a meme. On the other hand, a survey on Facebook isn't really a meme... is it?
One might think so, but as Blagojevich proves, knowing that they are being recorded does not stop them. Blagojevich's predecessor was brought down by a Federal investigation, and it didn't stop Blagojevich from dome very similar things to what got his predecessor busted.
That's what I am waiting for. It seems to be taken on faith here on/. and to some extent in the larger tech community that "threatening Microsoft with OSS conversion" is a way to extract concessions." It has become a meme at this point. It is only a matter of time until the Microsoft rep shrugs and says, "Good luck with that. We wish you the best. When you want to talk again in a few years, I'll be able to work out a, 'used to be a good customer' discount for you." Given the current economic climate, it is probably coming sooner than most people anticipate.
Slightly off topic, I work for a 501c3 non-profit and we get ridiculously good deals on Microsoft software. My understanding is that the education market receives similarly great deals. The non-profit sector specifically, and the education market in some cases are always notoriously strapped for cash. Those are the markets that are most likely to switch based on licensing cost, and it seems that because of that, those are the markets with the lowest licensing costs.
I'm also right on the front lines of the OSS/Microsoft debate. We have a new CFO whose background is centered in internet startups. He likes Linux and OpenOffice and has been making noises about conversion. I welcome the discussion, because I'm always open to efficiencies and better ways of doing things. However what I'm almost 100% certain he will release is that there are a lot of proprietary, MS-centric applications that are necessary tools for the work we do. Even beyond that, for being an OSS supporter, he still uses Office, and specifically Excel for all of his financial analysis. The guy is all into OSS though. Our first conversation involved him saying, "Where I used to work, we used SSH and VNC." to which I said, "Here is your VPN client and RDP software." I don't have anything against SSH and I like VNC. But the discussion highlights the main thing that keeps people who are on MS from switching to OSS. MS provides all of the functionality that people need.
The place that MS fears OSS is emerging markets. Those people aren't already locked in. They don't have ten or twenty years of business processes built on top of the MS stack. OSS offers similar, or in some cases, exact, and in a few cases, better functionality than the MS offering. Nearly always it come at a fraction of the upfront cost. Just look at the netbook market. I know that there are a lot of people at MS losing sleep over what HP just did with their customized Ubuntu distro. The place to fight the MS beast is on the front lines of the emerging markets, not at a university or in corporate America.
If you use home row:
- ALT+F2: Same as the hunt-and-peck
- WIN+R: Bending either the left or right thumb inwards, extending index finger to the R key.
-----
WIN+R: Just curl your pinky, use the knuckle and hit R with the index. Or use right-hand thumb plus left index R. I think that's the best way to do it, and why most standard keyboards include Alt, Ctrl and Windows keys on both sides. I suppose one could say that the above requires removing your hand from the home row, but that's okay. Those funny feeling spots on the F and J are there to help you get right back to where you were.;)
Are they going to go after Apple for bundling Safari with OSX? How can a vendor even try to sell an OS in this day and age that doesn't come with a web browser?
If Microsoft actually goes along with this, the best they can do is to present users with a choice when they go to "the Internet". In IE7, users are given a choice to select their preferred search provider. It seems like they will have to expand that and make the user choose their preferred web browser. Of course they will make IE the default, and include out dated versions of the others. Or maybe someone at MS will have a sense of humor, and they'll come up with a Googlesque "Feeling Lucky" option. Of course Lynx will have to be available, if for no other reason than the WTF factor.
A is a great solution if you don't have too many walls to go through. I seem to remember reading that A has better transmit speeds at greater distances. The trade off is that signal doesn't pass through buildings as well due to the larger waves.
This may come as a surprise to you, but money makes the world go round. Just about everyone does what they do because on some level it involves making more money, or it involves securing already earned money.
I have had my car broken into and my laptop stolen. Now I make sure to put my laptop bag in the trunk and not the passenger seat. I have had my house broken into and electronics stolen. I continue to pay for insurance to cover the losses. Both instances sucked for me, but they were lessons learned. I'm not crying about them.
This thread is veering as far off topic as the original post. Just like people who write malware aren't serial killers, they also aren't burglars. With that in mind, I've had my browser hijacked. I've "wasted" time (that I get paid for) cleaning up malware. Just the other day I cleaned up an infection that someone got through Facebook. It was a lot easier to take care of than some of the malware that I had to clean up four years ago. The browsers and the OS are getting better. They are significantly more hardened than they were in the past. That's evolution and it is a good thing.
For every action there is a reaction. To use the misapplied burglar analogy, we can either cry about being robbed, or we can fund a police force, form neighborhood watches, and come up with better ways to secure our homes. Similarly, we can cry about malware authors and grumble over wasted time, or we can take the opportunity to patch the exploits that they use, and we can make money cleaning up after them.
I'm not going to defend what they are doing and say that it is a 100% good thing. I will however say that good does come from what they do.
Whatever doesn't kill an organism only makes it stronger. You won't find anyone out there arguing that Windows 95 is more secure than Vista. I'm not seeking to justify what they do. I am simply commenting on the effects of what they do. The malware authors are in fact making software better. They are exploiting the holes and because they exploit them, the holes get patched. You can't argue against that. You can say that they make people spend time fixing security holes when they could be better spending time doing something else. Sure, fine, you win that one. But sooner or later, someone was going to have to patch those security holes anyway.
There seems to be a big stretch between a serial killer and some guy writing malicious code. My primary interest in computers initially involved all sorts of fraud and outright criminality. I now work in IT and have a completely legit lifestyle. Anyone who has any real competency or natural inclination to understand computers will mess with them and figure out how to make them do things outside of the "normal" range.
The article talks about exploiting some incompatabilities between the Win32 and WinNT APIs. If there weren't guys like the subject of the interview, those incompatabilities would remain hidden. It takes mischevious people to come along and exploit the holes so that they get patched. By its very nature, software gets better when people push the boundries and tweak it. The person who writes code that leads to improvements in the most widely used operating system is not the same as the person who kills a bunch of people.
If anything, Microsoft made the mistake of making the computer too friendly. They released technologies that gave people too many options. In any sort of free environment, there will be people who abuse the freedoms that they are presented with. Malware authors are those kinds of people. It is easy to blame Microsoft for looking into the future and envisioning a world where web browsers are the central application on the computer. They rushed blindly into it and unleased things like ActiveX on the world. At the core, their intention was right.. they wanted to make it easy to execute code in a distributed environment like the internet. Yet the implementation sucked and it seems like they didn't pay any attention to security.
This is the attitude that I see the most. I recently was offered a job at a small company and I declined it. The question that I asked the recruiter was, "Do the owners of the company see the IT department as an enabler that will make their business better, or do they see it as a cost center that they have to put up with?" The guy was honest with me and told me that getting them to spend money on IT always required a lot of arm twisting. To quote him, "The owner of the company looks at each dollar spent on IT as one less dollar of profit for his company." I declined the position. If my first job hadn't been for a small company, and I hadn't seen my boss struggling with management for every necessary expense, I probably wouldn't have known to ask the question I asked.
The only benefit I can see from working at a small company is that once you get everything running, your job should be on cruise. It might take a year or two to get to that point, but once you're there, it will be easy street. The reason I quit my first job is because I got bored. There literally wasn't anything to do because management didn't want to spend money on IT. Everything was running smoothly and other than the occasional problem with a workstation drive crashing or something, my days were devoid of challenge.
Like someone else said, it depends on your personality. If you want to work hard and be rewarded accordingly, a small company probably isn't the best place to work (unless the company is going to be growing a lot). On the other hand, if you're good at IT but want to have a life outside of work, a small company might be good for you.
FWIW, I settled for an in between medium. After consulting for 8 years I now work at a moderate sized non-profit ($15 million a year budget), 250 workstations, 15 servers. I'm salary and work about 30 hours a week.
When you work that late, you should work out a compromise with your boss. "Since I was up until 3:30am last night, I'm going to take off at lunch twice nice week." Or, "I'm going to take next Friday off." In a well run IT shop, you will always have some down time. When the systems are working as they should, your work load should be relatively light. Those periods of light work should offset those infrequent occurrences of putting in serious overtime. If you find yourself putting in overtime frequently, either stop consulting;), start looking for a job in a shop where they know what they are doing, or figure out how to get yourself promoted around the person who has no clue what they are doing, and are therefore contributing to you having to work lots of overtime.
Also, it's only 10 million because they dont sell (or support to varying degress) the others anymore.
That is complete bullshit. It seems like every couple of months a story pops up here on/. about Microsoft extending the XP lifespan, again. You can still get desktops from OEMs loaded with XP. They have realized that Vista is a steaming pile of crap and because of that, they aren't going to force anybody to "upgrade" to it.
I read the original article in the Times a couple of days ago. One point that was being made is that when taken as a whole, all of the television sets in the state consume about as much power as the San Onofre reactor puts out. The article mentioned that there are obvious power spikes when people come home and power up their personal electronics. Those spikes are getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. In the mean time, new power generating capacity isn't coming online fast enough. As a California resident, I think it is a good thing. Keep in mind, I don't watch TV, so I might be a little biased. Brown outs are pretty common in my area. My UPS clicks on a couple of times a month to mitigate power irregularities.
You seem to be very concerned about enough criminals being punished, and at the same time you don't care the actual amount of harm that they cause to society.
If your impression is that I care about enough people punished, you're wrong. My experience has been that a lot of the laws are put into place to protect the slow and weak from the crafty and powerful. Laws don't encourage evolution so much as they protect the status quo. With regards to credit card fraud, I don't care how much "harm" is caused to society. The harm is part of the learning process. When enough "harm" takes place, people will adapt. Until then, they will slog along and suck it up. My belief is the best way to increase innovation and to bring about change involves giving people the inclination to change. So long as the financial sector continues to push the burden of security off onto the consumers and the law enforcement agencies, they will never change.
I would rather prefer if no criminal was ever caught, but their schemes were rendered ineffective rather than keeping people getting hurt and then catching some poster boys who "overreached".
That's nice. You're living in a fantasy world. That has become inherently obvious over the course of this thread. Your entire position seems to be based on some fantasy construct in your mind of how you would like the world to be. Meanwhile I have been putting it out there how things are.
How many agents does it take to turn off the server that they already have?
This argument is going around in circles. I've pointed out multiple times already that the FBI server wasn't the only venue for the fraud to take place. I'm done with this conversation at this point. But I will point this out one more time and give you a real world example. THERE ARE MANY NEARLY IDENTICAL SITES OPERATING THAT FACILITATE THE SAME THING THE FBI SITE DID. I used to courier warez. There were about five BBS' that I would upload to. If one of them was busy, I would upload to another that wasn't. If one of them was run by the FBI, them taking it down wouldn't prevent the warez from being spread around. If people weren't able to download from the FBI board, they would go download from one of the other ones. However, if the FBI had phone logs of me logging into their system and transferring copyrighted software, they could prosecute me and there would be one less person committing phone fraud to swap the fresh no day. Similarly, if the FBI takes down their carding site, the people with the codes will just find a buyer for them on one of the other sites. And just like with my warez BBS example, if the FBI has logs of someone committing financial fraud, they can prosecute that person. Sure, they can't go to Albania or Nigeria to get them, but they can get the people here in America. Just about everything that you've been spouting about the FBI contributing to the problem is baseless, because of the fact that they have to engage in it to deal with it. Just like if the DEA wants to figure out where the drugs are coming from, they have to dip into the drug trade. They have to setup sting operations. You have blown the FBI issue up way beyond proportion, and continue to make your assertions while completely ignoring, and failing to address this simple point that I will reiterate here again. IF THE FBI WASN'T RUNNING A SITE TO CATCH CARDERS, THERE WOULD STILL BE OTHER SITES THROUGH WHICH PEOPLE PASSED THE EXACT SAME INFORMATION THAT THEY TRADED ON THE FBI SITE. Just like if I couldn't upload the latest Razor 1911 release to to BBS1, I would go ahead and put it on BBS2.
I can argue that if they can't keep carders from exchanging massive amounts of data, how can they deter them from using it?
I can point out that you're working on two different logical levels. The carders exchanging the data are often times not the people using the codes. The guy who has the numbers makes his money selling the numbers. Someone else makes their money put
The entire argument can be summed up by simply stating that crime can never be completely prevented. The best that the law enforcement agencies can ever do is to attempt to keep it from getting completely out of control. The bottom feeders will always be the ones getting caught. 80% of all criminals eventually get busted because they over reach. They cross that invisible threshold where they attract too much attention and they get popped. The majority of the rest who get busted do so because of bad luck or bad social skills... they piss someone off, or someone they interact with gets busted.
If the FBI didn't crack down the script kiddies, everyone and their mom would be carding stuff left and right. The equivalent back in the day was cracking down on people using 950s. For a while a few people were phreaking 950s. Then the knowledge got out there and just about everyone was doing it. Most of the 950 companies moved to much longer PIN codes that took too long to crack, but good old Thrifty Tel stuck with the shorter ones. Pretty soon, everyone was using 950-1492. And then one day, the Feds came swooping down and busted everyone. By then most of the smart people had moved onto other things. Law enforcement will always be a couple of steps behind. That is simply the nature of the game.
I look at it like this. Either we can have the FBI running one fraud site that they monitor, or we can just give them wholesale license to wiretap everything. Which one do you want? And the answer can't be neither, because you've already said that the FBI and law enforcement needs to be there..
Left to its own devices it will grow higher and higher, so you need someone actually keeping it low. That, in its turn, can be done by actively preventing fraud and making it very risky, so you still need FBI after all.
Fraud can't be actively prevented much more than it already is. There aren't enough agents out there to prevent crime. The best that they can do is deter it. At this point in the game, fraud is mitigated. It is absorbed as a cost of doing business and life goes on. It has always been that way for as long as I can remember.
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I guess the past has gotten hazy. I thought that ME came out after 98SE.
I've used 2007. We have software assurance so we get all of the recent products. We had to roll out Outlook 2007 because a couple of people wanted RSS feeds. (Yes I know there are other ways to get RSS feeds in Windows). There seem to be some quirky issues with the software though. I'm not sure if it's because we put it on boxes that previously ran 2003 and there are some registry turds, or if it's the software itself. But there are issues where users will be typing up an email (using Word as the email editor) and it will just lock up. All of the other windows are responsive, but the email composition window is frozen and can't be recovered. There are other issues where if an email is too long, it will lock the window. Issues like that shouldn't be occuring in release... what, 13 of a softare, 14? What version is Office up to now anyway?
As for the ribbons, you're probably right. I remember when XP came out I absolutely hated the Start menu functionality. After about six months I was used to it and found the Win2K menu to be limited. Microsoft has some good UI engineers, but they don't seem too concerned with retaining old conventions. I'm sure that helps them when new people use the latest version of the OS or application for the first time. For me, it's just kind of annoying have to relearn things every three to four years when they roll out fairly radical interface redesigns.
That's interesting. I was just having a conversation with my boss yesterday on this subject. I work for a non-profit too. He told me that unless we renew every two years, we are out of compliance with our licenses. That didn't make any sense to me, because my understanding is that once you buy the license, you own the license. However I didn't exactly put it past Microsoft to come up with some shady clauses like that. Do you get special non-profit pricing? We pay next to nothing for our licenses... I think somewhere in the $10-15 range for Office.
Like being an all around prick to complete strangers on Slashdot?
Licensing costs and forced EOL. I'd be happy to stay on Office 2003 until 2013. It does everything that I need it to do. Microsoft will never let that happen though. They will EOL it, and then within 6 months there will be a "critical" patch that also happens to bork a DLL that Office relies on.
I avoided Vista, in part because of all the negativity surrounding it here, and in part because of actual experience with it running on what should have been lightning fast hardware (dual core CPUs, 4gigs of RAM but integrated, onboard video). I've used the Windows 7 beta, and now I'm not too concerned about moving off of XP when the time comes. That isn't to say that I'm leaving XP anytime soon (much like I didn't leave Win2000 until long after XP SP2 was out.) However Windows 7 is to Vista what Win98SE was to WinME. In other words, they got it right, after a serious misstep.
I thought that memes were ideas that spread virally. For example, "The world trade centers were brought down by the United States government as a false flag operation." would be a meme. On the other hand, a survey on Facebook isn't really a meme... is it?
(Flamebait)It shouldn't matter though because OSX running on proprietary Apple hardware with its uber *nix under pinings is supah secure.(/Flamebait)
One might think so, but as Blagojevich proves, knowing that they are being recorded does not stop them. Blagojevich's predecessor was brought down by a Federal investigation, and it didn't stop Blagojevich from dome very similar things to what got his predecessor busted.
That's what I am waiting for. It seems to be taken on faith here on /. and to some extent in the larger tech community that "threatening Microsoft with OSS conversion" is a way to extract concessions." It has become a meme at this point. It is only a matter of time until the Microsoft rep shrugs and says, "Good luck with that. We wish you the best. When you want to talk again in a few years, I'll be able to work out a, 'used to be a good customer' discount for you." Given the current economic climate, it is probably coming sooner than most people anticipate.
Slightly off topic, I work for a 501c3 non-profit and we get ridiculously good deals on Microsoft software. My understanding is that the education market receives similarly great deals. The non-profit sector specifically, and the education market in some cases are always notoriously strapped for cash. Those are the markets that are most likely to switch based on licensing cost, and it seems that because of that, those are the markets with the lowest licensing costs.
I'm also right on the front lines of the OSS/Microsoft debate. We have a new CFO whose background is centered in internet startups. He likes Linux and OpenOffice and has been making noises about conversion. I welcome the discussion, because I'm always open to efficiencies and better ways of doing things. However what I'm almost 100% certain he will release is that there are a lot of proprietary, MS-centric applications that are necessary tools for the work we do. Even beyond that, for being an OSS supporter, he still uses Office, and specifically Excel for all of his financial analysis. The guy is all into OSS though. Our first conversation involved him saying, "Where I used to work, we used SSH and VNC." to which I said, "Here is your VPN client and RDP software." I don't have anything against SSH and I like VNC. But the discussion highlights the main thing that keeps people who are on MS from switching to OSS. MS provides all of the functionality that people need.
The place that MS fears OSS is emerging markets. Those people aren't already locked in. They don't have ten or twenty years of business processes built on top of the MS stack. OSS offers similar, or in some cases, exact, and in a few cases, better functionality than the MS offering. Nearly always it come at a fraction of the upfront cost. Just look at the netbook market. I know that there are a lot of people at MS losing sleep over what HP just did with their customized Ubuntu distro. The place to fight the MS beast is on the front lines of the emerging markets, not at a university or in corporate America.
If you use home row: - ALT+F2: Same as the hunt-and-peck - WIN+R: Bending either the left or right thumb inwards, extending index finger to the R key. ----- WIN+R: Just curl your pinky, use the knuckle and hit R with the index. Or use right-hand thumb plus left index R. I think that's the best way to do it, and why most standard keyboards include Alt, Ctrl and Windows keys on both sides. I suppose one could say that the above requires removing your hand from the home row, but that's okay. Those funny feeling spots on the F and J are there to help you get right back to where you were. ;)
Are they going to go after Apple for bundling Safari with OSX? How can a vendor even try to sell an OS in this day and age that doesn't come with a web browser?
If Microsoft actually goes along with this, the best they can do is to present users with a choice when they go to "the Internet". In IE7, users are given a choice to select their preferred search provider. It seems like they will have to expand that and make the user choose their preferred web browser. Of course they will make IE the default, and include out dated versions of the others. Or maybe someone at MS will have a sense of humor, and they'll come up with a Googlesque "Feeling Lucky" option. Of course Lynx will have to be available, if for no other reason than the WTF factor.
A is a great solution if you don't have too many walls to go through. I seem to remember reading that A has better transmit speeds at greater distances. The trade off is that signal doesn't pass through buildings as well due to the larger waves.
I'll give you a hint. It wasn't the Microsoft shills.
This may come as a surprise to you, but money makes the world go round. Just about everyone does what they do because on some level it involves making more money, or it involves securing already earned money.
I have had my car broken into and my laptop stolen. Now I make sure to put my laptop bag in the trunk and not the passenger seat. I have had my house broken into and electronics stolen. I continue to pay for insurance to cover the losses. Both instances sucked for me, but they were lessons learned. I'm not crying about them.
This thread is veering as far off topic as the original post. Just like people who write malware aren't serial killers, they also aren't burglars. With that in mind, I've had my browser hijacked. I've "wasted" time (that I get paid for) cleaning up malware. Just the other day I cleaned up an infection that someone got through Facebook. It was a lot easier to take care of than some of the malware that I had to clean up four years ago. The browsers and the OS are getting better. They are significantly more hardened than they were in the past. That's evolution and it is a good thing.
For every action there is a reaction. To use the misapplied burglar analogy, we can either cry about being robbed, or we can fund a police force, form neighborhood watches, and come up with better ways to secure our homes. Similarly, we can cry about malware authors and grumble over wasted time, or we can take the opportunity to patch the exploits that they use, and we can make money cleaning up after them.
I'm not going to defend what they are doing and say that it is a 100% good thing. I will however say that good does come from what they do.
Whatever doesn't kill an organism only makes it stronger. You won't find anyone out there arguing that Windows 95 is more secure than Vista. I'm not seeking to justify what they do. I am simply commenting on the effects of what they do. The malware authors are in fact making software better. They are exploiting the holes and because they exploit them, the holes get patched. You can't argue against that. You can say that they make people spend time fixing security holes when they could be better spending time doing something else. Sure, fine, you win that one. But sooner or later, someone was going to have to patch those security holes anyway.
Of course they're morally bankrupt. However they also play an important role in the ecosystem.
There seems to be a big stretch between a serial killer and some guy writing malicious code. My primary interest in computers initially involved all sorts of fraud and outright criminality. I now work in IT and have a completely legit lifestyle. Anyone who has any real competency or natural inclination to understand computers will mess with them and figure out how to make them do things outside of the "normal" range.
The article talks about exploiting some incompatabilities between the Win32 and WinNT APIs. If there weren't guys like the subject of the interview, those incompatabilities would remain hidden. It takes mischevious people to come along and exploit the holes so that they get patched. By its very nature, software gets better when people push the boundries and tweak it. The person who writes code that leads to improvements in the most widely used operating system is not the same as the person who kills a bunch of people.
If anything, Microsoft made the mistake of making the computer too friendly. They released technologies that gave people too many options. In any sort of free environment, there will be people who abuse the freedoms that they are presented with. Malware authors are those kinds of people. It is easy to blame Microsoft for looking into the future and envisioning a world where web browsers are the central application on the computer. They rushed blindly into it and unleased things like ActiveX on the world. At the core, their intention was right.. they wanted to make it easy to execute code in a distributed environment like the internet. Yet the implementation sucked and it seems like they didn't pay any attention to security.
It's like Xi Sui Jing, without the decades of practice required.
This is the attitude that I see the most. I recently was offered a job at a small company and I declined it. The question that I asked the recruiter was, "Do the owners of the company see the IT department as an enabler that will make their business better, or do they see it as a cost center that they have to put up with?" The guy was honest with me and told me that getting them to spend money on IT always required a lot of arm twisting. To quote him, "The owner of the company looks at each dollar spent on IT as one less dollar of profit for his company." I declined the position. If my first job hadn't been for a small company, and I hadn't seen my boss struggling with management for every necessary expense, I probably wouldn't have known to ask the question I asked. The only benefit I can see from working at a small company is that once you get everything running, your job should be on cruise. It might take a year or two to get to that point, but once you're there, it will be easy street. The reason I quit my first job is because I got bored. There literally wasn't anything to do because management didn't want to spend money on IT. Everything was running smoothly and other than the occasional problem with a workstation drive crashing or something, my days were devoid of challenge. Like someone else said, it depends on your personality. If you want to work hard and be rewarded accordingly, a small company probably isn't the best place to work (unless the company is going to be growing a lot). On the other hand, if you're good at IT but want to have a life outside of work, a small company might be good for you. FWIW, I settled for an in between medium. After consulting for 8 years I now work at a moderate sized non-profit ($15 million a year budget), 250 workstations, 15 servers. I'm salary and work about 30 hours a week.
When you work that late, you should work out a compromise with your boss. "Since I was up until 3:30am last night, I'm going to take off at lunch twice nice week." Or, "I'm going to take next Friday off." In a well run IT shop, you will always have some down time. When the systems are working as they should, your work load should be relatively light. Those periods of light work should offset those infrequent occurrences of putting in serious overtime. If you find yourself putting in overtime frequently, either stop consulting ;), start looking for a job in a shop where they know what they are doing, or figure out how to get yourself promoted around the person who has no clue what they are doing, and are therefore contributing to you having to work lots of overtime.
That is complete bullshit. It seems like every couple of months a story pops up here on /. about Microsoft extending the XP lifespan, again. You can still get desktops from OEMs loaded with XP. They have realized that Vista is a steaming pile of crap and because of that, they aren't going to force anybody to "upgrade" to it.
I read the original article in the Times a couple of days ago. One point that was being made is that when taken as a whole, all of the television sets in the state consume about as much power as the San Onofre reactor puts out. The article mentioned that there are obvious power spikes when people come home and power up their personal electronics. Those spikes are getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. In the mean time, new power generating capacity isn't coming online fast enough. As a California resident, I think it is a good thing. Keep in mind, I don't watch TV, so I might be a little biased. Brown outs are pretty common in my area. My UPS clicks on a couple of times a month to mitigate power irregularities.
If your impression is that I care about enough people punished, you're wrong. My experience has been that a lot of the laws are put into place to protect the slow and weak from the crafty and powerful. Laws don't encourage evolution so much as they protect the status quo. With regards to credit card fraud, I don't care how much "harm" is caused to society. The harm is part of the learning process. When enough "harm" takes place, people will adapt. Until then, they will slog along and suck it up. My belief is the best way to increase innovation and to bring about change involves giving people the inclination to change. So long as the financial sector continues to push the burden of security off onto the consumers and the law enforcement agencies, they will never change.
I would rather prefer if no criminal was ever caught, but their schemes were rendered ineffective rather than keeping people getting hurt and then catching some poster boys who "overreached".
That's nice. You're living in a fantasy world. That has become inherently obvious over the course of this thread. Your entire position seems to be based on some fantasy construct in your mind of how you would like the world to be. Meanwhile I have been putting it out there how things are.
How many agents does it take to turn off the server that they already have?
This argument is going around in circles. I've pointed out multiple times already that the FBI server wasn't the only venue for the fraud to take place. I'm done with this conversation at this point. But I will point this out one more time and give you a real world example. THERE ARE MANY NEARLY IDENTICAL SITES OPERATING THAT FACILITATE THE SAME THING THE FBI SITE DID. I used to courier warez. There were about five BBS' that I would upload to. If one of them was busy, I would upload to another that wasn't. If one of them was run by the FBI, them taking it down wouldn't prevent the warez from being spread around. If people weren't able to download from the FBI board, they would go download from one of the other ones. However, if the FBI had phone logs of me logging into their system and transferring copyrighted software, they could prosecute me and there would be one less person committing phone fraud to swap the fresh no day. Similarly, if the FBI takes down their carding site, the people with the codes will just find a buyer for them on one of the other sites. And just like with my warez BBS example, if the FBI has logs of someone committing financial fraud, they can prosecute that person. Sure, they can't go to Albania or Nigeria to get them, but they can get the people here in America. Just about everything that you've been spouting about the FBI contributing to the problem is baseless, because of the fact that they have to engage in it to deal with it. Just like if the DEA wants to figure out where the drugs are coming from, they have to dip into the drug trade. They have to setup sting operations. You have blown the FBI issue up way beyond proportion, and continue to make your assertions while completely ignoring, and failing to address this simple point that I will reiterate here again. IF THE FBI WASN'T RUNNING A SITE TO CATCH CARDERS, THERE WOULD STILL BE OTHER SITES THROUGH WHICH PEOPLE PASSED THE EXACT SAME INFORMATION THAT THEY TRADED ON THE FBI SITE. Just like if I couldn't upload the latest Razor 1911 release to to BBS1, I would go ahead and put it on BBS2.
I can argue that if they can't keep carders from exchanging massive amounts of data, how can they deter them from using it?
I can point out that you're working on two different logical levels. The carders exchanging the data are often times not the people using the codes. The guy who has the numbers makes his money selling the numbers. Someone else makes their money put
The entire argument can be summed up by simply stating that crime can never be completely prevented. The best that the law enforcement agencies can ever do is to attempt to keep it from getting completely out of control. The bottom feeders will always be the ones getting caught. 80% of all criminals eventually get busted because they over reach. They cross that invisible threshold where they attract too much attention and they get popped. The majority of the rest who get busted do so because of bad luck or bad social skills... they piss someone off, or someone they interact with gets busted. If the FBI didn't crack down the script kiddies, everyone and their mom would be carding stuff left and right. The equivalent back in the day was cracking down on people using 950s. For a while a few people were phreaking 950s. Then the knowledge got out there and just about everyone was doing it. Most of the 950 companies moved to much longer PIN codes that took too long to crack, but good old Thrifty Tel stuck with the shorter ones. Pretty soon, everyone was using 950-1492. And then one day, the Feds came swooping down and busted everyone. By then most of the smart people had moved onto other things. Law enforcement will always be a couple of steps behind. That is simply the nature of the game. I look at it like this. Either we can have the FBI running one fraud site that they monitor, or we can just give them wholesale license to wiretap everything. Which one do you want? And the answer can't be neither, because you've already said that the FBI and law enforcement needs to be there.. Left to its own devices it will grow higher and higher, so you need someone actually keeping it low. That, in its turn, can be done by actively preventing fraud and making it very risky, so you still need FBI after all. Fraud can't be actively prevented much more than it already is. There aren't enough agents out there to prevent crime. The best that they can do is deter it. At this point in the game, fraud is mitigated. It is absorbed as a cost of doing business and life goes on. It has always been that way for as long as I can remember.