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Comment Re:I don't think so... (Score 1) 530

From what I am reading --

Article only states he refused to hand out the network admin passwords to a room and speakerphone full of people he felt were unqualified. There was no mention of who exactly wanted the passwords -- or if a follow-up attempt by 'a superior' was made while not on speakerphone. If he is in trouble for JUST the refusal to give the password out on speakerphone and in a room with a dozen people, I'd give him a pat on the back and a bonus for proper IT security.

When I was an IT assistant at a high school, I'd pull the same stunt if my boss (or the principle) asked me on speakerphone to give out the local admin passwords on the computers to a dozen people (Staff, teachers)...

Just like Terry (If i read correctly)... I'd be protecting the computers and the network security by withholding the admin passwords from people unqualified to have admin access without admin intelligence in the field (i.e. not sticky-noting the local computer password to the monitor on the computer for kids to see)

Already was hard enough keeping kids from installing kazaa and other security hazards without admin rights... give out the admin password to a dozen non-IT security-unaware people? yeah right....

One of terry's listeners probably would have put the admin password on a stickynote to his work and home computers..

Comment Re:honestly... (Score 0) 530

While I agree with you that the City was irresponsible in not taking precautions against this crime, it doesn't justify the act.

Childs essentially held the City IT hostage. I have little patience for this kind of crap, after firing a little BOFH for being a BOFH, and discovered that the little prick had set up a chron job that regularly checked for the presence of his account in the userid list, and if missing, wiped the entire boot volume.

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to backup the entire volume before allowing the new IT guy to touch anything. The poor guy was only on the job for about half a day before the entire system went down, and for a while there he was sure that would be his only day on the job.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 204

Also shouldn't the manufacture's be responsible for this somewhat? It's obvious when you save a document to a computer that the drive needs to be wiped, not so obvious when it's a copy machine. Shouldn't there be big warning labels and a "wipe all" button on the back somewhere? Sharp apparently offers a product to wipe copy machine hard drives.... for $500:

I worked for a company a few years ago where one of the things I did was to oversee all leases and support contracts, including copier leases. Our support contracts had language specifying the requirement for drive wipes on location at the termination of the support contract (which, of course, coincided with the termination of the lease).

Comment Re:Semantics, bah (Score 1) 853

Even if Apple never responded, it wasn't -his-. He should never have kept it. It should have been turned in to someone who could get it back to the owner.

Most people choose to leave it at the bar and let the bartender handle it. Others choose the police station. For something this valuable, the police station was the better choice.

It was never an option to keep and sell it.

Submission + - Ubisoft DRM problems remain unsolved (ubi.com) 1

ocean_soul writes: "More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial "always on-line" DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forum threads where people can post if they are unable to connect keeps growing daily. The reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promis of 24/7 monitoring of the servers. The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday. Something to keep in mind for Christmas shopping..."

Comment Re:Reminds me of those Magic Eye pictures (Score 1) 495

And those are ridiculously easy once you get the trick. The first ones that were out, I remember, hit in the very early 90's in magazines like Popular Science. In those, you had two dots right above the picture, and the instructions were to visually split the dots and combine them in such a way there were now three. That achieved, look down at the picture.

Most, if not all of the later ones removed those instructions, and it became a game of "stare at this until you get it." For the really old-timers, we understood the real trick is to cross your eyes slightly and vary the degree until you hit the magic separation necessary to resolve the picture.

I'm not entirely convinced the effects are related to those used for 3D movies, since Magic Eye works through the transposition created by overlapping the two visual fields by crossing your eyes.

Comment Re:Red light cameras in St. Louis, Missouri (Score 1) 976

This is essentially how it is in Athens, GA. My wife (several times, unfortunately) got tagged by one of the 4 red light cams in Athens. The letter (no video, or link to video... just a Print Page from IE, completely with a URL at the bottom) showing 2 pictures of her van. The "ticket" was for me to pay the $75 fine, as the van is in my name. She forgot to pay it, and called the courthouse to see what would happen. The person there said "nothing will happen, wont go on your record, no warrants will ever be issued... you will just keep getting letters to pay".

They dont even report to credit agencies there, as there's no clear way to tell who's driving... so they'll just send you monthly letters saying "PAY ME Or or or.. I'll tell you to pay me again!"

Comment ENCODERS IDOTS ! (Score 3, Insightful) 501

its all about the encoders !

google can quite easily make reference but until there is High quality encoders then its pretty pointless

making decoder plugins for IE and mac is actually pretty easy in comparison

hardware reference designes need to be seeded also to the likes of TI and STMicroelectronics before it will even start to be useful after all where do all the camera's now do mp4 come from...

its all about the encoders !

regards

John Jones

Robotics

Submission + - Robot grocery shopping helper 3-month live test (examiner.com)

JoshuaInNippon writes: If you’ve ever wished you could have a four-foot tall metal robot that tells you it likes Mandarin oranges as a shopping helper for Grandma or Grandpa, your wish may just come true. A supermarket in Kyoto, Japan is carrying out live tests of a robotic shopping helper named Robovie-II, created by ATR, for the elderly and the disabled. Twenty elderly testers will be using Robovie-II until March of 2010 to see how well it interacts with them, as well as how useful it is. The robot will carry their shopping baskets and talk with them, making suggestions such as “Broccoli goes well with a salad,” or comments like, ““Mandarins oranges are tasty, aren’t they? I want to eat one.” One 67-year-old tester commented, “I felt like I was talking to a large grandchild, which is fun.” Now for a related question based on the video in the article, does anyone else see a strange resemblance with Johnny 5 from Short Circuit?

Submission + - AT&T's Net neutrality doublethink (infoworld.com)

GMGruman writes: George Orwell would be proud of AT&T, as Bill Snyder explains in this blog, for saying it supports Net neutrality when in fact it is working actively to scuttle proposed FCC rules that would clearly ban discriminatory practices against different types of data, such as video streaming or VoIP. It's also trying to get government subsidies to build a substandard broadband network for the underserved areas of the U.S. If it and its carrier partners win, "Internet freedom" will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons.

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