You're kind of missing the point in this example. Citywide 802.11x is not going to work. The protocol can't handle it. It doesn't scale up to even 100 users at once.
The obvious solution is to use some other protocol.
It's not like they're putting up one AP with a huge antenna. The major cost and limitation of a municipal WiFi network is obviously AP deployment. The obvious solution then is to reduce the number of APs required in order to make it more practical. That might include using a different protocol, but it could also mean implementing a different network topology such as a mesh network that requires a different routing protocol over the same transmission protocol just like the GP mentioned.
Wow, my phone bill used to be $34 including taxes with an alternate LD carrier and that's assuming I only placed one or two local calls that month. It would go up quickly if I made any additional phone calls. That didn't include unlimited anything or any features. Are you including taxes and other surcharges (which were the bulk of my bill)? You get unlimited LD in the U.S. and Canada for that price too? Who are your carriers?
He'll get 5 years at a country club and a bunch of great job offers after he gets out.
Considering that he did this to his own clients, I seriously doubt the load of job offers. It doesn't take a genius to take advantage of people who put their trust in you. Also, he's 26. It's not like he was 16 and he was innocently poking through someone's systems. I know many people who could've written the software necessary to do what he did at much more tender ages than 26. It doesn't even sound like he made a lot of money. He did absolutely nothing remarkable.
You americans are really crazy - instead of making good and cheap public transport system, you are inventing things as carpool lanes and foldable cars.
The problem is partly a social one and it's also about convenience. Many Americans don't want to sit on a train for an hour, switch to a subway, and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to ride the bus for 1.5 hours and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to worry about missing their subway, train or bus by a minute. When leaving for home, missing your ride could mean waiting another 30 minutes (or more depending on when you leave) just to go home. Taking the car in means 2 hours getting in but parking down the block from (or sometimes next to) your office.
The rest of the problem is infrastructure. Every day, the population of Prague travels in and out of Manhattan, which is an island with 1/10th of the space of Prague. We also have other dense population centers outside of Manhattan that are on the way to Manhattan. The trains here are already on a schedule that prevents additional trains from running (at least from where I live) into Manhattan. We would have to add additional train hubs (good luck finding room for that in Manhattan) and add additional rail roads outside of Manhattan. If you've visited the areas of New York City and New Jersey that are just outside of Manhattan, you'd see that we have no place to add rail road tracks (other than building over people's homes or digging hundreds of miles of tunnels). We don't even have room 30 miles away where I live. Our silly carpool lanes also help to support the buses, since they're allowed to use them.
To put things into perspective, New York City is Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The total population is over 8.2 million in a land area of about the size of Prague. Over 1.3 million people commute to Manhattan alone. Your experience is with the population of less than Manhattan in an area the size of all of New York City. People traveling from 20 miles (33.2km) away or more is common and they come in from all directions. I don't think that logistics of the problem directly translates, but I could be wrong.
I have a few questions for you though:
Do people who live outside of Prague usually drive to Prague or do you have a public transportation system that most of them use? Does your population nearly double during the work day? The Wikipedia entry for Prague indicates that you can get to within a 5 minute walk to most areas of Prague. Does that mean you can on a bus that takes you all over or do you need to transfer from bus to subway to bus again for some areas? Can you figure out this subway map look like this?:-)
It doesn't sound like that they hacked anything. One of them worked in the IT department and got a supervisor's username and password for PeopleSoft. Apparently, he was able to obtain other passwords with that clearance. (Why the passwords were seemingly stored with reversible encryption or possibly plain text is beyond me.) A data audit should be pretty straight forward. You're not actually looking at every record so the total volume of data is next to irrelevant. You just look at the changes (and not all of those either, since most of them would be inconsequential). The school was also running routine audits already, which is how the two got caught in the first place.
If you're going to equate crimes, this isn't like stealing from the teacher's desk. This is like using the keys in the secretary's desk to open the filing cabinets containing the student files and opening the lock-box that contains other keys. Is that identity theft? The grades would be changed on paper. I guess that's plain-old fraud instead of wire fraud (although I'm not clear why that's fraud at all since it's not theft or directly causing property or monetary loss). Conspiracy? To change grades? Please... All of the data in those files would potentially be compromised too. I guess they need a full audit (which would take a hell of a lot longer on paper). I'm not saying that they shouldn't be punished or criminally charged. What I don't get is why $crime + computer == $standard_punishment_for_crime * $mystery_factor or why charges that wouldn't normally be filed are filed because a computer is involved.
Funny thing is that I know what router is, I know what a switch is, but wouldn't have a clue what a 1U rack box is (I'm assuming it's something like the blade server thingy's).
A 1U rack box is simply a computer with a height that is equal to one rack unit (1.75"), commonly referred to as a "U". A 2U server would be 3.5" and so on. If you ever watch shows like 24 or CSI:NY, you'll see a bunch of rack mount servers of varying heights. A 1U server is also commonly called a "pizza box" because of its shape (although they're generally rectangular rather than square).
A rack mount server is just a server designed to be installed into a rack. Part of its design goals is to allow service without being removed from the rack (just extended out on its mounting rails). A rack mount server has all of the standard components including power supplies and fans. A blade server is actually a minimized server designed to go into a blade chassis. The chassis provides power, cooling, and usually other connections for things like networking and external storage. The benefit of blade center is server density i.e. how many servers you can fit into the same space.
As for your actual point of interest, both data and equipment could be worth a lot of money, but the latter is more easily salable and easier to find. They were probably hit by professional thieves that found an easy target or it was an inside job as suspected. They could easily make off with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment (if not more) each time.
Small shops, usually, just don't have what you want...
There's usually some talent in a small shop (usually people with decent knowledge but not enough job experience to work elsewhere). The way that I reward places with competent and friendly staff is by looking to see what they do carry so that I can purchase something from them in the future (even if it costs a bit more). I get helpful information and they get a sale (even if it's not the item that I got help about).
That's just the nature of people. I work in car sales now and I get the same thing. Somebody comes in to the dealership, spends a whole bunch of my (or one of my co-workers') time going through the car, the options, etc. then has to leave to "think about it".
Some people are bastards. I generally buy from any place where I got help (assuming that it was quality help) and I wouldn't shop around and ask for help at any place I wouldn't consider buying from. I recognize the value of good customer service and am willing to pay a premium for it. What you're describing certainly constitutes abuse in my book and I'd tell them to go bother the people they bought it from, since you're obviously not getting a sale.
However, some people actually do leave to think about it (although having worked in retail, I would assume that this is the exception rather than the rule). Some people are actually looking at different cars and don't want to get ripped off by accepting the first offer. I helped a friend buy a car and she said the same thing to both sales persons--that she had to think about it. This was her first car purchase (and mine, actually) so I hope that you could understand that leaving the dealership to avoid any pressure was a reasonable plan and that yes, people sometimes need to think about a purchase that's more than half of their annual salaries. (She doesn't make much--it wasn't that the car was an exorbitant expense.) She was also considering a different car.
The first sales person tried aggressively to get us to stay. His first offer was $220/mo and he started to write-up the paperwork even before she agreed to a deal. She said, "I have to think about it." Then she got, "What's to think about? $200/mo! $180/mo! $170/mo! $160/mo! $150/mo!" I realize that a customer that leaves is almost always a lost sale. Still, that guy was freaking annoying. We didn't even go for a test drive.
The second sales person took us both out for a test drive (meaning that I got to drive the car too so that I could provide some input on the handling and such that she wouldn't notice on a first run). He gave her a monthly payment close to what she asked for ($180/mo or less) and she told him that she'd have to think about it. I crunched the numbers at home and realized that $180/mo. was a lot higher than the "bottom line" price that he gave her plus typical interest. (Apparently, the bottom line was just for the car with tax, title, etc. but not the options like security system so he would've made a bundle on the options.) We didn't just leave to go to a third dealership that would beat $180/mo. We didn't have a problem with the sales person so we just went back to get a better deal, which she got ($152/mo). Still, the first sales person probably has another story about having his time wasted by people who had to "think about it."
Who, or what, are you faulting? Are you blaming the coordinators for defining a project scope that's not as large as you'd like? The companies that are paying kernel developers to work on the project? The unpaid volunteers?
Even if a developer is being paid to work on this project, it's the employer that's volunteering the employee's time and it's up to them whether or not they want their kernel developer to spend time learning the internals of things like CUPS or gPhoto. I'm sure that the employers have no problem keeping their employees busy with work outside of this particular project. I'm sure that they have other developers working on other projects like CUPS, SANE, or gPhoto. The volunteers would be working on those projects already if they wanted to (and some probably are already). Part of the purpose of the project is to have a group of developers that would sign NDA's, but they're not getting enough cooperation from hardware manufacturers. That problem is mentioned in the article linked from the summary.
Also, there was no such claim that the Linux driver problem was overstated, at least not by the head of the Linux Driver Project. You're quoting the writer of the article, not Greg Kroah-Hartman. Here's the original post that the article references.
This is either an honest mistake, or a deliberate to mislead. You do not spray non-rr cultivars with roundup, as it will toast down anything that isn't resistant. The only thing you can use it for is controlling weeds outside your tillable ground, or possibly preplant/pre-emerge. Any other usages are inconsistent with the product's label, and actually a punishable offense.
Yes, it was an honest mistake. I wasn't aware that round-up basically killed everything that wasn't designed to be resistant. I'm not familiar with the farming industry or farming chemical manufacture, but I thought that herbicides were generally designed to kill everything but the desired plant or plants and that using the RR variety just meant that you could use a higher treatment level for greater effectiveness. From what you state, Roundup appears to have been designed exclusively for the use with Roundup Ready plants or they have modified their formula for that purpose. Since you seem to be intimately familiar with the case and the subject matter at hand, am I right in thinking that he was accused of growing RR Canola in 95-98 percent of his canola fields after only a year of discovering that it was on his land?
I'm not sure what your expertise is, but since you seem to be knowledgeable in at least one of the fields relevant to the case, I'd like to know if it is possible to collect enough seed from a small percentage of a farm to seed 95-98 percent of the fields after just one year.
Further reading of your own sources shows that the quantity of Roundup that he purchased was not the "first smoking gun."
"While Schmeiser did purchase 720 liters of Roundup in 1998, as noted by the plaintiff, Schmeiser says that he used this quantity of Roundup to clear his fields before spring planting and also to clear the weeds in the roadside ditches and around telephone poles. Schmeiser testifies that he would have used 515 liters of the herbicide to chem fallow his 1,030 acres leaving 205 liters for the ditches and right-of-ways. Zakreski's final brief includes a table depicting Schmeiser's use of the chemical in 1996, 1997, and 1998, demonstrating that the amount of Roundup used in 1998 was entirely consistent with the previous two years. Additionally, Schmeiser explains that if he had planted 100 percent Roundup Ready Canola that year, following Monsanto's recommended application rate of 1 liter/acre, he would have needed an additional 1,000 liters, a claim that not one of Monsanto's witnesses attempts to challenge." (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=gm-40#gm-40)
Therefore, I'm not sure how you arrived at this statement:
"The quantity of Round-Up be bought exceeded the amount that could be applied to his non-crop acreage, ruling out the possibility that it was purchased solely for border weed control etc. This was a very strong indication that he not only knew he was growing RR Canola, but that he was actively selecting for it by spraying his fields."
I don't doubt that the first few plants were accidental, either through unintentional cross-pollination or stray seed, but once he found that they were round-up resistant, he actively worked to integrate the rr the genotype into his own populations. He probably just didn't feel like he was doing anything wrong.
I wouldn't feel like I was doing anything wrong either. The reason is that if my herbicide of choice was Round-Up anyway (I'm not saying that it was his choice) and my neighbor was using RR Canola, a significant portion of my crop would eventually be RR Canola simply because it would be more likely to survive, even at lower treatment levels. Yes, it may take years or even decades, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's an inevitability if I don't actively purchase new, untainted seed. I find the whole thing to be an act of sabotage. It's a good business model for Monsanto though. Buy their seed or go out of business.
500GB is sold at $170, 1TB is sold at $350, will 2TB sold at $700 and 4TB sold at $1400? The capacity has increased, but the price hasn't drop much over the years. Harddisk price is making me bankrupt.
If you're talking about value (and not performance) drives: 500GB is ~$110 ($0.22 per GB), which gets the best bang for the buck right now. I once bought a 120GB drive for $160 ($1.33 per GB), which was a very nice price because they were normally around $200 at the time. I once bought a used 340MB drive for $250 ($735.29 per GB)
The prices aren't going down sharply as of late (in terms of flat cost) but the price per GB is significantly lower than it used to be. I remember when 1GB drives would set you back $2,000. I think that the 4TB drive is a better investment. Assuming that you need 2TB or storage, even in a RAID-5 configuration, you're looking at $550 for just the storage. (Granted, scaling larger with decent redundancy gets costly pretty quickly.) For storage prices to cause such a hardship, I assume that you need a new job that can feed your storage habit.;-)
A sysadmin that has a clue would be looking out for those types of changes. When the DST changes occurred here in the U.S., I manually updated the time zone data for severs running older distributions that were no longer supported. Windows 2000 Server and Pro didn't have a free update available so we made registry key changes to those systems too. Logs and other things that rely on time stamps should be using UTC and the time should be stored as UTC in the system clock as well. As long as you do those things, it's only a cosmetic problem on a Linux box.
I used to do that kind of work for a living and I still do similar work on a higher level (moving data across servers, among other responsibilities). The usual case was that they'd bring in their old drive and I would give back the hard drive and tell them to hold on to it for backup. If they brought in their old computer and gave us authorization to trash the computer, I'd still give back the hard drive. If they didn't want it back, I'd put it in an anti-static bag, label it, and I'd hold on to it for at least a week after the customer picked up the drive.
Giving the drive back put the responsibility back in to the customer's hands and holding on to the drive kept the customer from coming back screaming if the HD in his new computer happened to fail. Either solution made me look like a hero for planning ahead if the customer accidentally deleted something on the new computer. In all cases, it was just good customer service. Even if a customer handed me a hard drive and said, "I don't need anything on the drive, throw it out," I'd either tell him to do it himself (thus absolving myself of responsibility) or I would hold on to the drive for a while.
No matter what the situation was that caused someone to throw out the hard drive before the data was transferred, it was the store's fault. They simply didn't do what they were asked to do. If they had transferred the data and something happened to the data on the new computer, then it would no longer be their fault, although it's still poor customer service.
I work at an integration company. If my company gets paid overtime, I do too. I work more than most of the others on my own dime (as in figure out a problem that the customer would never pay for because of the sheer hours for the final solution) but that's what makes me better than most of my peers. If I didn't do it in the office, I'd just do it at home. I also walk in around 9:00AM even though we open at 8:30AM, go in later if I work late (since it's usually easier to go in late than to leave early), set my own hours on projects (as long as it's cool with the client), and they let me leave early on personal business without docking pay because they know that I work hard. If I'm done at a site at 4:00PM and will drive by my office at 4:45PM, I go straight home (unless if feel like swinging by the office to hang out, tie up loose ends, or to mess around and learn something new). Also, all of my salary increases have been 10% or better every year. It's still not the best situation (I'm mentally too tied into my work), but I hope that you've left and found something better than your previous jobs since they do exist.
I do think that removing IT (and other so-called "professional" classes) from the exemptions would be a good thing though, since as a class of workers, we're generally overworked and underpaid. Also, some bosses seem to live to screw over their employees (although that behavior isn't limited to IT).
I've been in IT for 10 years too. I don't get paid overtime but the smallest increase that I've gotten in those 10 years was a $5,000 raise. My typical increases are $8,000-$10,000, although I got a $15,000 increase one year. I bust my ass and my boss recognizes it. Overtime isn't the only form of compensation. If I didn't get overtime and was only getting 4% increases, I'd start looking for another job.
At worst, it shows that your personality is borderline sociopathic, in that you don't actually _care_ about the consequences of your actions.
That's not entirely true. I'm sure that he cared that he made 145,000 yuans, which is over 19,000 USD (according to Google convert). It's no more sociopathic than being a car thief. At least he gets paid better.
I think that the bigger issue is that an admin may create a similar regexp and inadvertently lockup a router. As a security issue, it's pretty minor, but accidental lockups are not a good thing.
This is a bit off topic, but I think that having a centrally located PC would have kept me from opening it as much as I did or performing "daring" experimentation such as removing random chips. It's not a problem if the kids are encouraged to do so, but I probably would've gotten in trouble for tinkering. I probably would've gotten into more trouble for programming for hours instead of going outside and exercising (or publicly exhibit muscle spams, as it would appear to be the case). Out of sight, out of mind. Considering that I now work in IT, I think that it would've inhibited my early growth in the area but unlikely to have affected my social development at the time.
Really, all you have to do is put your kids on 14.4kbps dial-up (or throttle their connection to the equivalent). They won't be able to sneak in the porn viewing without risking you coming home to see the half-downloaded picture on the screen. It'll keep them off of MySpace too--no blocking required.;-)
Make your kids watch you in a porno. They'll be put off porn for life...
No, just disseminate the video as much as you can and make sure your kid is aware of its existence. When Johnny surfs for porn, it'll be like trying to avoid land mines--land mines that make you want to rip out your own eyes and drill the images out of your head.
As someone who was a latchkey kid through high school and was home for a couple hours before my parents (who both worked) almost every day, this is a stupid statement.
I was in the same situation, but it doesn't mean that my parents thought it was a good thing that they weren't around that much. I don't think that it affected me much, but my parents wish that they had spent more time with me. Just because it wasn't a seriously bad thing doesn't mean that it wasn't a problem from my parents' perspectives--certainly a bigger issue than how much time I spent surfing (eh, dialing up) for porn. Parents put a little too much on themselves, but I assume that I'll do the same thing.
If there are identical MAC addresses on the network, there are going to be connectivity problems. ARP resolves the IP address to the MAC address. With duplicate MACs, a commercial grade switch will either pick one to transmit to (meaning either your device or the LAN PC loses connectivity) or will stop both if security is setup that way, send SNMP traps, etc. Also, port security means that you'd need to use that specific MAC address on that specific port, which means that you can't connect at another location so that you won't be detected. If you disconnect a computer and replace it with your nefarious network device®, someone will notice.
Hacking a switch (Cisco or otherwise) is tougher when you don't have access to anything. Chances are, if port security is in use, the management VLAN is separated so that you can't even remote into the switch unless you're coming from a set of physical ports set aside for switch management--not just protected by IP (if you're serious about your security). The GP was talking about physical security.
Explorer.exe becomes the parent of a process by default. Many trojans/spyware use svchost.exe to launch the respawn process. That process doesn't show up even in Process Explorer (much less Task Manager) and is what keeps the malware alive. Then the respawn process will launch the actual payload, which you see as a child process of explorer.exe. How are you confirming that it is explorer.exe that's actually spawning the processes? You could run Process Explorer, kill explorer.exe, kill the malware, and see if it still respawns. Just because explorer.exe actually touches the malware file, it doesn't mean that it's spawning it.
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You're kind of missing the point in this example. Citywide 802.11x is not going to work. The protocol can't handle it. It doesn't scale up to even 100 users at once.
The obvious solution is to use some other protocol.
It's not like they're putting up one AP with a huge antenna. The major cost and limitation of a municipal WiFi network is obviously AP deployment. The obvious solution then is to reduce the number of APs required in order to make it more practical. That might include using a different protocol, but it could also mean implementing a different network topology such as a mesh network that requires a different routing protocol over the same transmission protocol just like the GP mentioned.
Introducing the new 007 Martini Phone! I prefer mine shaken, not stirred!
That sounds OK, but will it blend?
Wow, my phone bill used to be $34 including taxes with an alternate LD carrier and that's assuming I only placed one or two local calls that month. It would go up quickly if I made any additional phone calls. That didn't include unlimited anything or any features. Are you including taxes and other surcharges (which were the bulk of my bill)? You get unlimited LD in the U.S. and Canada for that price too? Who are your carriers?
He'll get 5 years at a country club and a bunch of great job offers after he gets out.
Considering that he did this to his own clients, I seriously doubt the load of job offers. It doesn't take a genius to take advantage of people who put their trust in you. Also, he's 26. It's not like he was 16 and he was innocently poking through someone's systems. I know many people who could've written the software necessary to do what he did at much more tender ages than 26. It doesn't even sound like he made a lot of money. He did absolutely nothing remarkable.
You americans are really crazy - instead of making good and cheap public transport system, you are inventing things as carpool lanes and foldable cars.
:-)
The problem is partly a social one and it's also about convenience. Many Americans don't want to sit on a train for an hour, switch to a subway, and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to ride the bus for 1.5 hours and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to worry about missing their subway, train or bus by a minute. When leaving for home, missing your ride could mean waiting another 30 minutes (or more depending on when you leave) just to go home. Taking the car in means 2 hours getting in but parking down the block from (or sometimes next to) your office.
The rest of the problem is infrastructure. Every day, the population of Prague travels in and out of Manhattan, which is an island with 1/10th of the space of Prague. We also have other dense population centers outside of Manhattan that are on the way to Manhattan. The trains here are already on a schedule that prevents additional trains from running (at least from where I live) into Manhattan. We would have to add additional train hubs (good luck finding room for that in Manhattan) and add additional rail roads outside of Manhattan. If you've visited the areas of New York City and New Jersey that are just outside of Manhattan, you'd see that we have no place to add rail road tracks (other than building over people's homes or digging hundreds of miles of tunnels). We don't even have room 30 miles away where I live. Our silly carpool lanes also help to support the buses, since they're allowed to use them.
To put things into perspective, New York City is Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The total population is over 8.2 million in a land area of about the size of Prague. Over 1.3 million people commute to Manhattan alone. Your experience is with the population of less than Manhattan in an area the size of all of New York City. People traveling from 20 miles (33.2km) away or more is common and they come in from all directions. I don't think that logistics of the problem directly translates, but I could be wrong.
I have a few questions for you though:
Do people who live outside of Prague usually drive to Prague or do you have a public transportation system that most of them use?
Does your population nearly double during the work day?
The Wikipedia entry for Prague indicates that you can get to within a 5 minute walk to most areas of Prague. Does that mean you can on a bus that takes you all over or do you need to transfer from bus to subway to bus again for some areas?
Can you figure out this subway map look like this?
It doesn't sound like that they hacked anything. One of them worked in the IT department and got a supervisor's username and password for PeopleSoft. Apparently, he was able to obtain other passwords with that clearance. (Why the passwords were seemingly stored with reversible encryption or possibly plain text is beyond me.) A data audit should be pretty straight forward. You're not actually looking at every record so the total volume of data is next to irrelevant. You just look at the changes (and not all of those either, since most of them would be inconsequential). The school was also running routine audits already, which is how the two got caught in the first place.
If you're going to equate crimes, this isn't like stealing from the teacher's desk. This is like using the keys in the secretary's desk to open the filing cabinets containing the student files and opening the lock-box that contains other keys. Is that identity theft? The grades would be changed on paper. I guess that's plain-old fraud instead of wire fraud (although I'm not clear why that's fraud at all since it's not theft or directly causing property or monetary loss). Conspiracy? To change grades? Please... All of the data in those files would potentially be compromised too. I guess they need a full audit (which would take a hell of a lot longer on paper). I'm not saying that they shouldn't be punished or criminally charged. What I don't get is why $crime + computer == $standard_punishment_for_crime * $mystery_factor or why charges that wouldn't normally be filed are filed because a computer is involved.
Funny thing is that I know what router is, I know what a switch is, but wouldn't have a clue what a 1U rack box is (I'm assuming it's something like the blade server thingy's).
A 1U rack box is simply a computer with a height that is equal to one rack unit (1.75"), commonly referred to as a "U". A 2U server would be 3.5" and so on. If you ever watch shows like 24 or CSI:NY, you'll see a bunch of rack mount servers of varying heights. A 1U server is also commonly called a "pizza box" because of its shape (although they're generally rectangular rather than square).
A rack mount server is just a server designed to be installed into a rack. Part of its design goals is to allow service without being removed from the rack (just extended out on its mounting rails). A rack mount server has all of the standard components including power supplies and fans. A blade server is actually a minimized server designed to go into a blade chassis. The chassis provides power, cooling, and usually other connections for things like networking and external storage. The benefit of blade center is server density i.e. how many servers you can fit into the same space.
As for your actual point of interest, both data and equipment could be worth a lot of money, but the latter is more easily salable and easier to find. They were probably hit by professional thieves that found an easy target or it was an inside job as suspected. They could easily make off with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment (if not more) each time.
Small shops, usually, just don't have what you want...
There's usually some talent in a small shop (usually people with decent knowledge but not enough job experience to work elsewhere). The way that I reward places with competent and friendly staff is by looking to see what they do carry so that I can purchase something from them in the future (even if it costs a bit more). I get helpful information and they get a sale (even if it's not the item that I got help about).
That's just the nature of people. I work in car sales now and I get the same thing. Somebody comes in to the dealership, spends a whole bunch of my (or one of my co-workers') time going through the car, the options, etc. then has to leave to "think about it".
Some people are bastards. I generally buy from any place where I got help (assuming that it was quality help) and I wouldn't shop around and ask for help at any place I wouldn't consider buying from. I recognize the value of good customer service and am willing to pay a premium for it. What you're describing certainly constitutes abuse in my book and I'd tell them to go bother the people they bought it from, since you're obviously not getting a sale.
However, some people actually do leave to think about it (although having worked in retail, I would assume that this is the exception rather than the rule). Some people are actually looking at different cars and don't want to get ripped off by accepting the first offer. I helped a friend buy a car and she said the same thing to both sales persons--that she had to think about it. This was her first car purchase (and mine, actually) so I hope that you could understand that leaving the dealership to avoid any pressure was a reasonable plan and that yes, people sometimes need to think about a purchase that's more than half of their annual salaries. (She doesn't make much--it wasn't that the car was an exorbitant expense.) She was also considering a different car.
The first sales person tried aggressively to get us to stay. His first offer was $220/mo and he started to write-up the paperwork even before she agreed to a deal. She said, "I have to think about it." Then she got, "What's to think about? $200/mo! $180/mo! $170/mo! $160/mo! $150/mo!" I realize that a customer that leaves is almost always a lost sale. Still, that guy was freaking annoying. We didn't even go for a test drive.
The second sales person took us both out for a test drive (meaning that I got to drive the car too so that I could provide some input on the handling and such that she wouldn't notice on a first run). He gave her a monthly payment close to what she asked for ($180/mo or less) and she told him that she'd have to think about it. I crunched the numbers at home and realized that $180/mo. was a lot higher than the "bottom line" price that he gave her plus typical interest. (Apparently, the bottom line was just for the car with tax, title, etc. but not the options like security system so he would've made a bundle on the options.) We didn't just leave to go to a third dealership that would beat $180/mo. We didn't have a problem with the sales person so we just went back to get a better deal, which she got ($152/mo). Still, the first sales person probably has another story about having his time wasted by people who had to "think about it."
Who, or what, are you faulting? Are you blaming the coordinators for defining a project scope that's not as large as you'd like? The companies that are paying kernel developers to work on the project? The unpaid volunteers?
Even if a developer is being paid to work on this project, it's the employer that's volunteering the employee's time and it's up to them whether or not they want their kernel developer to spend time learning the internals of things like CUPS or gPhoto. I'm sure that the employers have no problem keeping their employees busy with work outside of this particular project. I'm sure that they have other developers working on other projects like CUPS, SANE, or gPhoto. The volunteers would be working on those projects already if they wanted to (and some probably are already). Part of the purpose of the project is to have a group of developers that would sign NDA's, but they're not getting enough cooperation from hardware manufacturers. That problem is mentioned in the article linked from the summary.
Also, there was no such claim that the Linux driver problem was overstated, at least not by the head of the Linux Driver Project. You're quoting the writer of the article, not Greg Kroah-Hartman. Here's the original post that the article references.
This is either an honest mistake, or a deliberate to mislead. You do not spray non-rr cultivars with roundup, as it will toast down anything that isn't resistant. The only thing you can use it for is controlling weeds outside your tillable ground, or possibly preplant/pre-emerge. Any other usages are inconsistent with the product's label, and actually a punishable offense.
Yes, it was an honest mistake. I wasn't aware that round-up basically killed everything that wasn't designed to be resistant. I'm not familiar with the farming industry or farming chemical manufacture, but I thought that herbicides were generally designed to kill everything but the desired plant or plants and that using the RR variety just meant that you could use a higher treatment level for greater effectiveness. From what you state, Roundup appears to have been designed exclusively for the use with Roundup Ready plants or they have modified their formula for that purpose. Since you seem to be intimately familiar with the case and the subject matter at hand, am I right in thinking that he was accused of growing RR Canola in 95-98 percent of his canola fields after only a year of discovering that it was on his land?
1997 - He discovers the RR Canola
2000 - Monsanto sues Schmeiser over his 1998 crop
I'm not sure what your expertise is, but since you seem to be knowledgeable in at least one of the fields relevant to the case, I'd like to know if it is possible to collect enough seed from a small percentage of a farm to seed 95-98 percent of the fields after just one year.
Further reading of your own sources shows that the quantity of Roundup that he purchased was not the "first smoking gun."
"While Schmeiser did purchase 720 liters of Roundup in 1998, as noted by the plaintiff, Schmeiser says that he used this quantity of Roundup to clear his fields before spring planting and also to clear the weeds in the roadside ditches and around telephone poles. Schmeiser testifies that he would have used 515 liters of the herbicide to chem fallow his 1,030 acres leaving 205 liters for the ditches and right-of-ways. Zakreski's final brief includes a table depicting Schmeiser's use of the chemical in 1996, 1997, and 1998, demonstrating that the amount of Roundup used in 1998 was entirely consistent with the previous two years. Additionally, Schmeiser explains that if he had planted 100 percent Roundup Ready Canola that year, following Monsanto's recommended application rate of 1 liter/acre, he would have needed an additional 1,000 liters, a claim that not one of Monsanto's witnesses attempts to challenge." (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=gm-40#gm-40)
Therefore, I'm not sure how you arrived at this statement:
"The quantity of Round-Up be bought exceeded the amount that could be applied to his non-crop acreage, ruling out the possibility that it was purchased solely for border weed control etc. This was a very strong indication that he not only knew he was growing RR Canola, but that he was actively selecting for it by spraying his fields."
Next-up: Human genetic modification for curing diseases and requiring licenses to have children (and for your children to have children).
I don't doubt that the first few plants were accidental, either through unintentional cross-pollination or stray seed, but once he found that they were round-up resistant, he actively worked to integrate the rr the genotype into his own populations. He probably just didn't feel like he was doing anything wrong.
I wouldn't feel like I was doing anything wrong either. The reason is that if my herbicide of choice was Round-Up anyway (I'm not saying that it was his choice) and my neighbor was using RR Canola, a significant portion of my crop would eventually be RR Canola simply because it would be more likely to survive, even at lower treatment levels. Yes, it may take years or even decades, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's an inevitability if I don't actively purchase new, untainted seed. I find the whole thing to be an act of sabotage. It's a good business model for Monsanto though. Buy their seed or go out of business.
500GB is sold at $170, 1TB is sold at $350, will 2TB sold at $700 and 4TB sold at $1400? The capacity has increased, but the price hasn't drop much over the years. Harddisk price is making me bankrupt.
;-)
If you're talking about value (and not performance) drives:
500GB is ~$110 ($0.22 per GB), which gets the best bang for the buck right now.
I once bought a 120GB drive for $160 ($1.33 per GB), which was a very nice price because they were normally around $200 at the time.
I once bought a used 340MB drive for $250 ($735.29 per GB)
The prices aren't going down sharply as of late (in terms of flat cost) but the price per GB is significantly lower than it used to be. I remember when 1GB drives would set you back $2,000. I think that the 4TB drive is a better investment. Assuming that you need 2TB or storage, even in a RAID-5 configuration, you're looking at $550 for just the storage. (Granted, scaling larger with decent redundancy gets costly pretty quickly.) For storage prices to cause such a hardship, I assume that you need a new job that can feed your storage habit.
A sysadmin that has a clue would be looking out for those types of changes. When the DST changes occurred here in the U.S., I manually updated the time zone data for severs running older distributions that were no longer supported. Windows 2000 Server and Pro didn't have a free update available so we made registry key changes to those systems too. Logs and other things that rely on time stamps should be using UTC and the time should be stored as UTC in the system clock as well. As long as you do those things, it's only a cosmetic problem on a Linux box.
I used to do that kind of work for a living and I still do similar work on a higher level (moving data across servers, among other responsibilities). The usual case was that they'd bring in their old drive and I would give back the hard drive and tell them to hold on to it for backup. If they brought in their old computer and gave us authorization to trash the computer, I'd still give back the hard drive. If they didn't want it back, I'd put it in an anti-static bag, label it, and I'd hold on to it for at least a week after the customer picked up the drive.
Giving the drive back put the responsibility back in to the customer's hands and holding on to the drive kept the customer from coming back screaming if the HD in his new computer happened to fail. Either solution made me look like a hero for planning ahead if the customer accidentally deleted something on the new computer. In all cases, it was just good customer service. Even if a customer handed me a hard drive and said, "I don't need anything on the drive, throw it out," I'd either tell him to do it himself (thus absolving myself of responsibility) or I would hold on to the drive for a while.
No matter what the situation was that caused someone to throw out the hard drive before the data was transferred, it was the store's fault. They simply didn't do what they were asked to do. If they had transferred the data and something happened to the data on the new computer, then it would no longer be their fault, although it's still poor customer service.
I work at an integration company. If my company gets paid overtime, I do too. I work more than most of the others on my own dime (as in figure out a problem that the customer would never pay for because of the sheer hours for the final solution) but that's what makes me better than most of my peers. If I didn't do it in the office, I'd just do it at home. I also walk in around 9:00AM even though we open at 8:30AM, go in later if I work late (since it's usually easier to go in late than to leave early), set my own hours on projects (as long as it's cool with the client), and they let me leave early on personal business without docking pay because they know that I work hard. If I'm done at a site at 4:00PM and will drive by my office at 4:45PM, I go straight home (unless if feel like swinging by the office to hang out, tie up loose ends, or to mess around and learn something new). Also, all of my salary increases have been 10% or better every year. It's still not the best situation (I'm mentally too tied into my work), but I hope that you've left and found something better than your previous jobs since they do exist.
I do think that removing IT (and other so-called "professional" classes) from the exemptions would be a good thing though, since as a class of workers, we're generally overworked and underpaid. Also, some bosses seem to live to screw over their employees (although that behavior isn't limited to IT).
I've been in IT for 10 years too. I don't get paid overtime but the smallest increase that I've gotten in those 10 years was a $5,000 raise. My typical increases are $8,000-$10,000, although I got a $15,000 increase one year. I bust my ass and my boss recognizes it. Overtime isn't the only form of compensation. If I didn't get overtime and was only getting 4% increases, I'd start looking for another job.
At worst, it shows that your personality is borderline sociopathic, in that you don't actually _care_ about the consequences of your actions.
That's not entirely true. I'm sure that he cared that he made 145,000 yuans, which is over 19,000 USD (according to Google convert). It's no more sociopathic than being a car thief. At least he gets paid better.
I think that the bigger issue is that an admin may create a similar regexp and inadvertently lockup a router. As a security issue, it's pretty minor, but accidental lockups are not a good thing.
This is a bit off topic, but I think that having a centrally located PC would have kept me from opening it as much as I did or performing "daring" experimentation such as removing random chips. It's not a problem if the kids are encouraged to do so, but I probably would've gotten in trouble for tinkering. I probably would've gotten into more trouble for programming for hours instead of going outside and exercising (or publicly exhibit muscle spams, as it would appear to be the case). Out of sight, out of mind. Considering that I now work in IT, I think that it would've inhibited my early growth in the area but unlikely to have affected my social development at the time.
;-)
Really, all you have to do is put your kids on 14.4kbps dial-up (or throttle their connection to the equivalent). They won't be able to sneak in the porn viewing without risking you coming home to see the half-downloaded picture on the screen. It'll keep them off of MySpace too--no blocking required.
Make your kids watch you in a porno. They'll be put off porn for life...
No, just disseminate the video as much as you can and make sure your kid is aware of its existence. When Johnny surfs for porn, it'll be like trying to avoid land mines--land mines that make you want to rip out your own eyes and drill the images out of your head.
As someone who was a latchkey kid through high school and was home for a couple hours before my parents (who both worked) almost every day, this is a stupid statement.
I was in the same situation, but it doesn't mean that my parents thought it was a good thing that they weren't around that much. I don't think that it affected me much, but my parents wish that they had spent more time with me. Just because it wasn't a seriously bad thing doesn't mean that it wasn't a problem from my parents' perspectives--certainly a bigger issue than how much time I spent surfing (eh, dialing up) for porn. Parents put a little too much on themselves, but I assume that I'll do the same thing.
If there are identical MAC addresses on the network, there are going to be connectivity problems. ARP resolves the IP address to the MAC address. With duplicate MACs, a commercial grade switch will either pick one to transmit to (meaning either your device or the LAN PC loses connectivity) or will stop both if security is setup that way, send SNMP traps, etc. Also, port security means that you'd need to use that specific MAC address on that specific port, which means that you can't connect at another location so that you won't be detected. If you disconnect a computer and replace it with your nefarious network device®, someone will notice.
Hacking a switch (Cisco or otherwise) is tougher when you don't have access to anything. Chances are, if port security is in use, the management VLAN is separated so that you can't even remote into the switch unless you're coming from a set of physical ports set aside for switch management--not just protected by IP (if you're serious about your security). The GP was talking about physical security.
Explorer.exe becomes the parent of a process by default. Many trojans/spyware use svchost.exe to launch the respawn process. That process doesn't show up even in Process Explorer (much less Task Manager) and is what keeps the malware alive. Then the respawn process will launch the actual payload, which you see as a child process of explorer.exe. How are you confirming that it is explorer.exe that's actually spawning the processes? You could run Process Explorer, kill explorer.exe, kill the malware, and see if it still respawns. Just because explorer.exe actually touches the malware file, it doesn't mean that it's spawning it.