But if all my l337 friends are using a screwdriver to pound in a nail, doesn't that mean I'm obliged to follow them? "Yes, yes, please, by all means..." *stands around whistling, tapping foot and checking watch every few minutes*
"Ah, back already? That's a mighty nice cast you're sporting there! Now, what did you learn? And, what are you going to do next time your 1337 friends have a bright idea?"
My ideals are conservative, but I'm financially liberal; were these things weighted?
My ideals are liberal, but I'm a fiscal conservative. By this study, you and I are polar opposites, one of us is stupid and the other is lazy. I guess we have nothing in common and are destined to be enemies. Sorry. This works well for me as I've mentally noted the statistical chance of where we both stand on the issue of "the right to bear arms". Umm... You're not one of those pro-gun liberals, right? Right?!
(...)I think I will just wait a few days for M$ to shot themselves in the foot... This type of poor business behavior is not sustainable longterm... When you have an influx of cash in the way that they do, you can afford quite a bit of surgery to cover for your own stupidity, unfortunately. Then you become SCO...
Not to mention a consumer who: "...our records indicate that you have spyware on your computer (well, we're about to install some if you click here), using our flashy technology to enum some public properties of your computer (that the framework we're using isn't allowed to touch, other than display this read only data), you can see that you are not safe! Luckily, you can buy our (vastly inferior) monthly subscription (where we install crapware on your machine, hold it hostage, and you pay us to remove it), for only $19.95 (...more than the superior freeware product that we're hoping you don't know about). Aren't you glad we opened up this unsolicited window that is obviously made to make you think it's part of your operating system (in an attempt to steal your hard earned money; we hope you're elderly and don't have a grandson who could code circles around us. Please don't let him know you actually paid for our product! We haven't patched our servers in years!)"
I don't know about you, but if I find that my parents bought one of these programs, the last thing they'd hear are my packets screaming down their pipe when I smurfed them. "01d 5K001 pwn3d", for the script kiddies here.;)
Somebody should make a t-shirt with that. I like it. We can advertise it with web advertisements! I think you've entirely missed the point of this exercise, grasshopper. Go back to waxing on and off for a bit.
You have the scale from fascism/authoritarianism to liberalism, and yes considering the US Constitution, and the lack of rights in many parts of the world, the US is obviously much more liberal than many places. Yeah, I was talking about fascism as being complete police state and communism as anarchy without possessions or authority. But, I get what you're saying. I think you understood what I was trying to say a bit better than I did when I wrote it. So, yeah, guys - that's what I was going for!:)
I didn't read the article. I have a long day ahead of me and I don't want to read much about politics. That being said, I'm wondering how they qualified liberal vs. conservative? Especially when you consider that on the world wide spectrum, going from pure communism to pure fascism, even the conservatives in the US are fairly liberal. Our subset of the entire spectrum isn't a very long vector.
Also, are we talking about ideals, financial, or strictly both to qualify conservative or liberal? My ideals are conservative, but I'm financially liberal; were these things weighted? I'd say my socio-economical class doesn't much lean either way (white male, middle-middle class, 23), so is the question just which side I relate to more?
FWIW, I don't think binary labels are a good tool for representing an analog chunk of an analog spectrum without assigning weights to aspects that are of a social nature. Does anyone else feel that this entire study ended up with a group of people standing around grinning at their excessive cleverness at the end of the day, while no actual scientific work was accomplished?
I'm not familiar with that meme, could you fill in the uninformed? I stick with underpants gnomes since it has staying power; I can't keep up with all the new ones that come and go.
...It would take me about 2 hours to cut over - the only delay is DNS updates. I even test them from time to time, and once had to use it when primary hosting failed. Just as a caution - I don't know who your customers are, but try cutting over the DNS and seeing how long it takes an AOL account to find you. I think their DNS caches are like 24 hours or so. Same thing with a few providers, from what I've heard. This is all unreliable second hand info, though. Just thought I'd say something since it's something that I'd overlook until the 'oops' moment; I always remember something important just then.
A reference for those of you who don't have your fingers on the security pulse:
USB Hacksaw - Hak5
Description:
The purpose of this hack, dubbed USB Hacksaw for googleability, is to automatically and silently install on windows 2000, XP, or 2003 machines with either administrator or guest access. Installation consists of hiding the hacksaw tools in a hidden folder, add to either registry or startup folder depening on user rights, and start the program.
"And now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
I always hold this as the first rule to security:
If someone else has physical access to your box, it is no longer yours. Apparently there is a back door BIOS password of "merlin" for IBM BIOSes (reference: How do I reset a BIOS password?) which also has a hardware reset (reference: How do I reset an IBM ThinkPad BIOS password?) by shorting the CMOS.
Manufacturers always make it possible to circumvent passwords since users have a tendency to forget their passwords ("123456 - that's the combination to my luggage!").
If it's sitting on the desk, I open the box and short the CMOS for 3 seconds with its jumper, and then boot up and enter BIOS, which no longer has a password. I turn on USB and plug in my portable 80 gig drive which has all my tools.;)
Also, If it's windows 98, I can blue screen the thing with a con/con from the command line and hopefully you have the thing set to reboot on BSOD.
It was this or the announcement of Barbie Horse Adventures 2: The Gates Of Slaughter. Take your pick. I didn't even know they released that yet! I would have if we hadn't been wasting time discussing the GPL. I hate the firehose, nothing good ever gets picked up.
if going gets tough in one place, you can just move to another place.
Only if you are single and don't have kids.
The answer lies in the initial question you posted:
Would you really recommend IT to school kids evaulating future careers... Chances are that school kids who are interested in technology (especially programming) will be spending the majority of their lives this way... Sincerely, 23 year old single geek programmer. Not bitter, really.
I'm assuming that we're of the same age, I'm 23. I'm in college here in USA (I know, my age, I graduated at 19 and took 2 years off after high school to manage a McDonalds and got out when someone said 'Imagine, this could all be *yours* some day!') for software development. The situation is *precisely* the same.
I rarely can find someone that I would call my peer. I'm not saying that I'm better than them or anything, but while they're out partying, I'm writing code. There are few people in this field that have a genuine passion for it - and less who have the passion/skill combination. I got started with BASIC on a C64 and VIC20 that I got from a cousin, and then went to QBASIC on a 386 an uncle gave me. The thing had like 4 megs of EDO RAM and was running Windows 3.1. I used to have to make boot disks, playing with HIMEM, to play my favorite games so that I'd have enough memory. Doom needed to be 'clean booted' by holding down the left shift key right after POST. I still have the AT Keytronic keyboard that he gave me with it, and to this day it's still my favorite. I wish they still made 'clickies'.
I'm not sure if it's cultural that over in India people want to be in management, but I know that in the USA, the people who want to be in management usually get there since there is little competition from the geeks who just want to write code. I'd suck as a manager for lack of passion - I have the ability to lead, but passion is worth ability ten times over.
I think software development is one of those jobs where the best advice you can give someone entering the field is, "If you can picture yourself doing anything else at all, you should go do that instead." Unfortunately, no one ever tells this to freshmen with dollar signs obscuring their vision. Which is nice, as it makes the alpha geeks look all that much better, and they offer us an obscene amount of money to do what we would be doing for free in our spare time, regardless. This allows us to continue to do what we do without ever having to get a 'day job', other than the 8 hours where we get to play on the toys that someone else chooses for us.
and to the american un-initiated, cricket is an extremely cool game, and it beats baseball on all counts... Awww... why didn't you just start a 'vi vs. emacs' flame war - that, at the very least, would be somewhat resolvable.
Without it, who knows what backdoors they could be offering; it's especially concerning since it's specifically designed to penetrate firewalls. Beware!
The same thing can be said about any piece of software. At some point you have to take the risk that your machine might be exposed. Although a good point, with this type of software, you're expecting that you'll be receiving an inbound connection through the firewall; when you 'install' whackAMole.exe, which is a single player game, and find netbus connections in netstat, you know something is up. That, of course, isn't something that ever happened to me in my teens, but rather a story I just made up on the spot, really.
... As a veteran who served as an intelligence analyst with the US Army, I'm afraid I'd have to agree with your assessment 100%. And I'm sorry I just read that. I've been thinking about working for the gov. as of the last few weeks, I'm a very talented programmer in college - one of my biggest reasons was that I would get to work with the rest of the alpha geeks. I would give up a larger paycheck (that I could make in the private sector), to be able to walk in to an office every day and be the dumbest guy in the room. It's rather rare, lately, that I find anyone that I can both have an intelligent conversation about technology, and learn from at the same time. I was hoping intelligence was the place to be.
Funny you say that... I was just thinking about an hour ago how much I hate SQL. The exact thought that shot through my mind was "SQL can only be qualified as a language when we consider Pig Latin to be a language!", or something to that effect.
Upon thinking about it, I've realized that it probably has to be somewhat ugly, being that it's a glue layer. We're stuck interfacing on both sides of the call, and interfacing interfaces to interfaces, via an interface (I know... just let it go, you know what I'm saying) is ugly because you're trying to create that piece of the puzzle that makes everything else fit and you're doing it in about 4 dimensions at the same time, sometimes blindfolded (see DAO documentation if you can find it).
And on top of that, there are 'dialects' for SQL, and JDBC is a slow implementation of a slow protocol. Check out ODBC vs. JET with a 3.6 MDAC, JET has committed a SQL query before ODBC has the connection fully open (I'm exaggerating, but not by much) - and JET is from the Access '95 era! What we need is to stop gluing interfaces and working between 5 layers. Let's simplify this mess by starting fresh with an RFC or something. 1 language, 1 engine programmed in that language, 1 dialect, 1 database object with which to interface.
I know it can't be done, and I know it's a bad way to do it, but it would make my life so much easier than trying to fix old Access '95 (upgraded to '97, upgraded to 2K) DAO code. I'm so sick of memory leaks from recordsets of workspaces of databases that haven't been explicitly closed in the correct order or scope (not that Access really has correct scoping, but we can pretend for my sanities sake) or whatever. Rant over. Thank you, I feel better, now... what was the question, again?
I've heard from an unreliable source (perhaps it was on slashdot, I can't recall) that a good method for doing this is rather to write data streams randomly. Something like an MP3 or any binary you'd like.
I guess the theory was that if you do this a few times with random sources, the magnetic characteristics (shadows) have not all been changed by the same amount, so you can't apply a logarithmic algorithm to figure out the possible states that the disk could have been in and see if they make any sense.
I'm pretty sure that magnetic shadows work on an inverse square equation, where you are left with 1/2^n (where n is the iteration) of the original images strength after each iterative change. Meaning that if I know that the bank destroys hard drives from their computers with 10 iterations of straight 0s then straight 1s, I could 'play back' the formatting. I'm just pulling that out of thin air, but I think I've heard it somewhere. Please correct me if I'm wrong, along with the corresponding wiki link;).
In the spirit of the law this is a crime, regardless of the letter of the law in whatever country it comes from. It breaks social 'laws' as well.
I have a feeling that in any country that doesn't have this in the letter of the law, they have other 'catch all' laws to use. Remember, Al Capone was finally brought in for tax evasion, of all things. Someone writing this thing has enough malicious intent that I'd guarantee they aren't keeping their nose clean in many other areas.
I just bought a Radeon, the drivers sucked and didn't work; I went back to Best Buy (this was an emergency - I needed PCIE and only had AGP on hand and I needed to install Solaris then), and shelled out double what I paid for the ATI to get my SLI ready Geforce.
I cursed ATI all the way to the counter trying to forget the 4 Meg 3D RAGE II that I played MechWarrior on as a child. I swore I'd never buy ATI again and tried to forget about the time I killed a fan on my $400 Geforce4 Ti4800 (I had to be the first kid at the LAN party with it - when I got there everyone else was sporting either another 4800 or a slightly more modestly priced 4600. Those jerks!) in high school, and it made this horrible clunkiddy-tick-whir sound. ATI and I were through!
Well, I'm in college now, and I've matured quite a bit since that Best Buy incident 3 months ago... I guess I'll be taking ATI back again. NVidia - we're through! I'm not even going to buy the second card to complete the SLI I had decided to do! I guess I need a new motherboard. Crossfire, here I come!
*Sorry for that, I'm the only one left in the building at work and I have to debug a legacy Access frontend that's been modified every year for the last 5 years... by someone else... caffeine run!*
Slashdot Mirror
*stands around whistling, tapping foot and checking watch every few minutes*
"Ah, back already? That's a mighty nice cast you're sporting there! Now, what did you learn? And, what are you going to do next time your 1337 friends have a bright idea?"
...then we nuke the entire graveyard from space. It's the only way to be sure. ...twice... I hear cockroaches survive nuclear fallout.And you, in turn, have missed mine. It seems we're all even now.
My ideals are liberal, but I'm a fiscal conservative. By this study, you and I are polar opposites, one of us is stupid and the other is lazy. I guess we have nothing in common and are destined to be enemies. Sorry. This works well for me as I've mentally noted the statistical chance of where we both stand on the issue of "the right to bear arms". Umm... You're not one of those pro-gun liberals, right? Right?!
"...our records indicate that you have spyware on your computer (well, we're about to install some if you click here), using our flashy technology to enum some public properties of your computer (that the framework we're using isn't allowed to touch, other than display this read only data), you can see that you are not safe! Luckily, you can buy our (vastly inferior) monthly subscription (where we install crapware on your machine, hold it hostage, and you pay us to remove it), for only $19.95 (...more than the superior freeware product that we're hoping you don't know about). Aren't you glad we opened up this unsolicited window that is obviously made to make you think it's part of your operating system (in an attempt to steal your hard earned money; we hope you're elderly and don't have a grandson who could code circles around us. Please don't let him know you actually paid for our product! We haven't patched our servers in years!)"
I don't know about you, but if I find that my parents bought one of these programs, the last thing they'd hear are my packets screaming down their pipe when I smurfed them. "01d 5K001 pwn3d", for the script kiddies here.
Also, are we talking about ideals, financial, or strictly both to qualify conservative or liberal? My ideals are conservative, but I'm financially liberal; were these things weighted? I'd say my socio-economical class doesn't much lean either way (white male, middle-middle class, 23), so is the question just which side I relate to more?
FWIW, I don't think binary labels are a good tool for representing an analog chunk of an analog spectrum without assigning weights to aspects that are of a social nature. Does anyone else feel that this entire study ended up with a group of people standing around grinning at their excessive cleverness at the end of the day, while no actual scientific work was accomplished?
I'm not familiar with that meme, could you fill in the uninformed? I stick with underpants gnomes since it has staying power; I can't keep up with all the new ones that come and go.
...It would take me about 2 hours to cut over - the only delay is DNS updates. I even test them from time to time, and once had to use it when primary hosting failed. Just as a caution - I don't know who your customers are, but try cutting over the DNS and seeing how long it takes an AOL account to find you. I think their DNS caches are like 24 hours or so. Same thing with a few providers, from what I've heard. This is all unreliable second hand info, though. Just thought I'd say something since it's something that I'd overlook until the 'oops' moment; I always remember something important just then.USB Hacksaw - Hak5
Description:
"And now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
If someone else has physical access to your box, it is no longer yours. Apparently there is a back door BIOS password of "merlin" for IBM BIOSes (reference: How do I reset a BIOS password?) which also has a hardware reset (reference: How do I reset an IBM ThinkPad BIOS password?) by shorting the CMOS.
Manufacturers always make it possible to circumvent passwords since users have a tendency to forget their passwords ("123456 - that's the combination to my luggage!").
There appears to be a way to get read access to BIOS as well, with $5 in parts from Radio Shack. Hacking IBM Thinkpad Bios Password
Also, If it's windows 98, I can blue screen the thing with a con/con from the command line and hopefully you have the thing set to reboot on BSOD.
Only if you are single and don't have kids.
The answer lies in the initial question you posted: Would you really recommend IT to school kids evaulating future careers... Chances are that school kids who are interested in technology (especially programming) will be spending the majority of their lives this way... Sincerely, 23 year old single geek programmer. Not bitter, really.
I rarely can find someone that I would call my peer. I'm not saying that I'm better than them or anything, but while they're out partying, I'm writing code. There are few people in this field that have a genuine passion for it - and less who have the passion/skill combination. I got started with BASIC on a C64 and VIC20 that I got from a cousin, and then went to QBASIC on a 386 an uncle gave me. The thing had like 4 megs of EDO RAM and was running Windows 3.1. I used to have to make boot disks, playing with HIMEM, to play my favorite games so that I'd have enough memory. Doom needed to be 'clean booted' by holding down the left shift key right after POST. I still have the AT Keytronic keyboard that he gave me with it, and to this day it's still my favorite. I wish they still made 'clickies'.
I'm not sure if it's cultural that over in India people want to be in management, but I know that in the USA, the people who want to be in management usually get there since there is little competition from the geeks who just want to write code. I'd suck as a manager for lack of passion - I have the ability to lead, but passion is worth ability ten times over.
I think software development is one of those jobs where the best advice you can give someone entering the field is, "If you can picture yourself doing anything else at all, you should go do that instead." Unfortunately, no one ever tells this to freshmen with dollar signs obscuring their vision. Which is nice, as it makes the alpha geeks look all that much better, and they offer us an obscene amount of money to do what we would be doing for free in our spare time, regardless. This allows us to continue to do what we do without ever having to get a 'day job', other than the 8 hours where we get to play on the toys that someone else chooses for us.
The same thing can be said about any piece of software. At some point you have to take the risk that your machine might be exposed. Although a good point, with this type of software, you're expecting that you'll be receiving an inbound connection through the firewall; when you 'install' whackAMole.exe, which is a single player game, and find netbus connections in netstat, you know something is up. That, of course, isn't something that ever happened to me in my teens, but rather a story I just made up on the spot, really.
... As a veteran who served as an intelligence analyst with the US Army, I'm afraid I'd have to agree with your assessment 100%. And I'm sorry I just read that. I've been thinking about working for the gov. as of the last few weeks, I'm a very talented programmer in college - one of my biggest reasons was that I would get to work with the rest of the alpha geeks. I would give up a larger paycheck (that I could make in the private sector), to be able to walk in to an office every day and be the dumbest guy in the room. It's rather rare, lately, that I find anyone that I can both have an intelligent conversation about technology, and learn from at the same time. I was hoping intelligence was the place to be.Upon thinking about it, I've realized that it probably has to be somewhat ugly, being that it's a glue layer. We're stuck interfacing on both sides of the call, and interfacing interfaces to interfaces, via an interface (I know... just let it go, you know what I'm saying) is ugly because you're trying to create that piece of the puzzle that makes everything else fit and you're doing it in about 4 dimensions at the same time, sometimes blindfolded (see DAO documentation if you can find it).
And on top of that, there are 'dialects' for SQL, and JDBC is a slow implementation of a slow protocol. Check out ODBC vs. JET with a 3.6 MDAC, JET has committed a SQL query before ODBC has the connection fully open (I'm exaggerating, but not by much) - and JET is from the Access '95 era! What we need is to stop gluing interfaces and working between 5 layers. Let's simplify this mess by starting fresh with an RFC or something. 1 language, 1 engine programmed in that language, 1 dialect, 1 database object with which to interface.
I know it can't be done, and I know it's a bad way to do it, but it would make my life so much easier than trying to fix old Access '95 (upgraded to '97, upgraded to 2K) DAO code. I'm so sick of memory leaks from recordsets of workspaces of databases that haven't been explicitly closed in the correct order or scope (not that Access really has correct scoping, but we can pretend for my sanities sake) or whatever. Rant over. Thank you, I feel better, now... what was the question, again?
I guess the theory was that if you do this a few times with random sources, the magnetic characteristics (shadows) have not all been changed by the same amount, so you can't apply a logarithmic algorithm to figure out the possible states that the disk could have been in and see if they make any sense.
I'm pretty sure that magnetic shadows work on an inverse square equation, where you are left with 1/2^n (where n is the iteration) of the original images strength after each iterative change. Meaning that if I know that the bank destroys hard drives from their computers with 10 iterations of straight 0s then straight 1s, I could 'play back' the formatting. I'm just pulling that out of thin air, but I think I've heard it somewhere. Please correct me if I'm wrong, along with the corresponding wiki link ;).
I have a feeling that in any country that doesn't have this in the letter of the law, they have other 'catch all' laws to use. Remember, Al Capone was finally brought in for tax evasion, of all things. Someone writing this thing has enough malicious intent that I'd guarantee they aren't keeping their nose clean in many other areas.
You took the words right out of my mouth... :)
I cursed ATI all the way to the counter trying to forget the 4 Meg 3D RAGE II that I played MechWarrior on as a child. I swore I'd never buy ATI again and tried to forget about the time I killed a fan on my $400 Geforce4 Ti4800 (I had to be the first kid at the LAN party with it - when I got there everyone else was sporting either another 4800 or a slightly more modestly priced 4600. Those jerks!) in high school, and it made this horrible clunkiddy-tick-whir sound. ATI and I were through!
Well, I'm in college now, and I've matured quite a bit since that Best Buy incident 3 months ago... I guess I'll be taking ATI back again. NVidia - we're through! I'm not even going to buy the second card to complete the SLI I had decided to do! I guess I need a new motherboard. Crossfire, here I come!
*Sorry for that, I'm the only one left in the building at work and I have to debug a legacy Access frontend that's been modified every year for the last 5 years... by someone else... caffeine run!*