Give them those digital books from that new cyber textbook company, Finkle-McGraw Hill.

Well then, get back at me when you know something about computers, Doc.

We do receive an alert at 80% utilization> it's just the fact that we only have ONE operator on each shift at night and there's always the chance that something could go wrong elsewhere and the message is missed. The powers that be have made this decision against the advice of our Sys Admin, so they know the risks. I hope.

I will ask him about adding volumes dynamically, but I'd gamble that's something he'd rather not do for whatever reason.

I'm pretty sure the person telling me this was a fucking MD and acting director of IT services for the non-profit health care org I work for.

Also, you're assuming that the only reason a doctor would need to see a record is when something goes wrong, but that's not the case. Records in this case could mean anything from treatment history to images. If you can't conceive of a situation where a surgeon would want imagery of what a patient looked like before they were cut open... uhhh...

Also, do you feel the same way about making system backups? I mean, I've done upgrades like this one a thousand times in my sleep, when I was sick and should have been in bed days ago. There's no way it'll fail this time, right? Na, no need to have a backup handy.

The example I was always given was to imagine being open on an operating table and the operating doctor needs to access your records to confirm something before proceeding and your records cannot be reached, so he sends a runner to obtain them, adding an extra 5 - 10 minutes to the procedure. time during which you're cut open and vulnerable to infection and blood loss. Not a fun scenario, but a very realistic one.

I'm currently inside a hospital data center and I can tell you that windows is behind the scenes of a lot of the systems we use. Everyone in "the know" thinks it sucks that the majority of the problems we encounter is because of borked hardware configurations in appliance machines or Windows servers. We are on mainframe (as of today, it's still the only way to get everyone's critical data to almost a dozen moajor sites at once with 99.9 uptime and I don't see us abandoning it anytime soon) and there is a god-damned Windows server that is only used to encode EDI transactions to the JES2 spooler that always crashes, causing the spool to fill up, endangering the entire system. It's a very serious problem as the only solution to it once JES is full is to IPL the system.

The server in question doesn't even show an error message. Well, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. you can stop and start the services all you like, but you're just wasting time as the JES2 spool gets bigger. The only solution is to reboot the Windows Server. It is redundantly mirrored, but we any of you with any sense will know that this does not make the situation any less frightening. The mirror is bound to be subject to the exact same problem, since it's software-related, which would put you back at square 1 in the event of a fail-over.

Don't even get me started about malware. Of course, all the workstations throughout the system are Windows systems. Those should not matter in case of a power outage or system-wide failure because we have downtime procedures in place, but let's face it, we'd be majorly crippled if we were to ever loose our entire network and it would likely impair our ability to serve customers. Although it shouldn't. So far we've been lucky.

First of all, I hope they got irradiated.

Second, no where in the article does it stay how far into the reactor facility they got. Merely having access to the premises is a bad enough breech, but I highly doubt they got through to any really sensitive area where controls could be accessed. I'm pretty sure if I tried my luck getting into a number of any type of secure facilities, I'd eventually find success. This should not be surprising.

What a good idea it is, however, to have regular, random pen tests for all facilities like these. This is about the only thing this accomplished aside from scaring a bunch of people who were already frightened by the word "nuclear" and know absolutely nothing about physical security.

After all, those poor shareholders expected INFINITE GROWTH and the company failed to deliver. They should apologize.

Seriously though, just like the first poster said they already have the answer: sell your stock. But the greedy fucks keep on looking for more. They should get what they deserve when people finally start to realize (probably right after 8 launches) that they shouldn't have to constantly pay for an OS upgrade and Microsoft's software division finally tanks like they already should have.

It's not the lube. it's the condom. Get her on the pill if possible. Your sex life will never be the same.

Eat it. No, seriously.

Goes to show that when you're a truly great hacker, you can hack anything.

The previous article is about social engineering BTW. ;D

I thought this was going to make me like Steve less, but it actually had the reverse effect. Funny how brilliant people are often like that; you begin disliking them, but later learn to view them in a completely different light.

... I say FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuu...

Diablo pioneered procedural generation and made it mainstream. I know it wasn't new at the time, but the game centered around Crafting a game around the random hadn't been done as a "feature" before that. It was also very free form with gamplay possibilities. You could do pretty much anything you wanted. Learn all the spells, wield any armor/weapon. D2 featured the same thing and turned it up a notch with item generation and customization via the Horodric cube. It got turned down a notch on the characterization side since spells were regulated to a tree instead learned from books. Which brings us to the most copied feature of Diablo, the skill tree. Blessing or curse, it continues to DOMINATE MMO gameplay to this day after it's use as the primary character advancement mechanism in WoW. Have you played a recent MMO? Everything is carbon-copied from WoW right down to the color-coding of item qualities. Even free to play Asian MMOS have implemented skill tree systems because it's the standard now. It's all about the illusion of choice and as of right now there's nothing better in existence, so that's what everyone uses.

Mock WoW all you want. I will agree on most points, as I am a former hardcore EQ1 player who is aware that even more hardcore games existed even prior to that, but you have to agree that WoW just took over MMOs for the past 8 years.

I used to think that way, but nope! Wrong! Blizz innovates and keeps on innovating. Proof is how all RPGs copied Diablo right down to the T and then D2 came out and it also got copied. And then the 2 RTS games. I'll agree that there was some prior art for RTS before Warcraft came out in the form of Dune and a host of other strategy games, but still, it did competitive RTS'ing right. Not even going to get into SC to any depth. Let's just say, that that's how any competitive game should be done regardless of whether it's video game, board game or any other medium; razor's edge balance and tons of fun regardless of play style. Then there's WoW. It innovated on so many different levels. Arguably, it hurt the genre. I could list a host of enjoyable things that died a painful death to WoW. But that's not the point. WoW innovated on other fronts, most discernibly in gathering and maintain a HUGE and loyal player base.

Blizzard is not dumb. They have a ton of metrics tools at their disposal and they use them. LOOK at how Diablo 3 is turning out and you'll see even more innovation. There's a lot that I hate to see go away, but at the same time I understand that it's almost impossible to make something old new again without getting rid of some of the old stuff! Blizzard isn't scared to throw away old systems in favor of something entirely new, or at least something that seems new. That takes guts. Keeping three triple-A titles under it's belt and not letting one of them slip is an accomplishment enough on it's own. But keeping those monsters in check while making each iteration feel completely different from anything you've ever played previously from any developer... that there's an astounding accomplishment!

It's a wired router. I don't do wireless. Sorry, I should have mentioned that.