buzzardsbay - Slashdot User

Submission + - Recession Pushes IT to Find New Value in Old Gear (channelinsider.com)

Submitted by

buzzardsbay

on Thursday December 18, 2008 @12:27PM

buzzardsbay writes: "Trying to put a bright spin on a gloomy subject, the folks at eWEEK unearth an emerging trend: There's a booming cottage industry of dealers in refurbished computer and networking gear serving folks on the hunt for "slightly used" and "new to you" equipment. The dealers selling the stuff tell eWEEK the equipment is paractically new, most of it less than a year old, and that the prices for things likes servers and routers are lower than they have been since the post dot-com / Sept. 11 days in 2001. Used gear isn't for everybody, obviously. Story points out that while many of these used IT dealers offer configuration services, they don't do installs, and most are not authorized resellers. They do, however, offer decent warranties, so if you can do some of the work yourself, you'll probably be OK."

Submission + - IT Workers Are Getting Fatter (channelinsider.com)

Submitted by buzzardsbay on Monday May 19, 2008 @12:17PM

buzzardsbay writes: While technologies such as virtualization, multi-threading and blade servers have made the data center leaner, those who work there are getting... well... not leaner. According to a new study by CareerBuilder.com, 34 percent of IT workers say they have gained more than ten pounds in their current jobs. A hefty 16 percent say they've gained at least twice that. That's 50 percent putting on weight. The culprits seem to be the stressful-yet-sedentary nature of tech work coupled with our famously poor eating habits. According to the survey, some 41 percent of IT workers eat out for lunch twice or more per week, making portion and calorie control difficult. A pale-looking 11 percent actually buy their lunch out of a vending machine at least once a week.

A Congressman Who Can Code Assembly 421

Posted by Zonk on Thursday March 13, 2008 @05:20PM from the at-least-its-not-haskell dept.

christo writes "In what appears to be a first, the US House of Representatives now has a Congressman with coding skills. Democratic Representative Bill Foster won a special election this past Saturday in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois. Foster is a physicist who worked at Fermilab for 22 years designing data analysis software for the lab's high energy particle collision detector. In an interview with CNET today, Foster's campaign manager confirmed that the Congressman can write assembly, Fortran and Visual Basic. Will having a tech-savvy congressman change the game at all? Can we expect more rational tech-policy? Already on his first day, Foster provided a tie-breaking vote to pass a major ethics reform bill."

Comment Re:And yet, a five-year study... (Score 1) 5

by buzzardsbay on Tuesday February 05, 2008 @10:49AM (#22306416) Attached to: E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections

That may well be true. But the study wasn't refuting the claim that there are security problems. The study refutes the premise in the original post that electronic voting undermines voter confidence. It does not. In fact, despite all its problems, it IMPROVES voter confidence. Reason? Places like Chicago and Boston and New Orleans have been proving for two centuries that paper ballot elections are quite easy to rig.

Submission + - PI License May Be Required for Computer Forensics (baselinemag.com)

Submitted by

buzzardsbay

on Friday January 04, 2008 @11:27AM

buzzardsbay writes: "The good folks over at Baseline Magazine have an intriguing — and worrisome — report on a movement to limit computer forensics work to those who have Private Investigators' licenses or those who work for licensed PI agencies. According to the story, pending legislation would limit the specialized task of probing deep into computer hard drives, network and server logs for telltale signs of hacking and data theft in the hands of the same people who advertise in the Yellow Pages for surveillance on cheating spouses, workers' compensation fraud and missing persons. Those caught practicing computer forensics without a license could face criminal prosecution, the story adds."

Submission + - Dems Dominate Contributions from Tech Types (baselinemag.com)

Submitted by

buzzardsbay

on Friday December 28, 2007 @02:21PM

buzzardsbay writes: "Baseline Magazine did a clever slice-and-dice of the federal campaign filings to come up with a list of presidential candidates who get the most money from folks who work in the tech industry. Ron Paul may get a lot of money from online contributors, but it's Hillary and Obama who lead the pack in techie contributions."

Submission + - iPhone Shellcode Hits the Web (techtarget.com)

Submitted by

buzzardsbay

on Wednesday September 26, 2007 @11:07AM

buzzardsbay writes: "Dennis Fisher at Tech Target is reporting that Apple is finally getting a chance to find out what it feels like to walk a mile in Microsoft's shoes. First, a New Jersey teenager published detailed instructions for unlocking the iPhone, and now a well-known security researcher has posted shellcode that can be used on the popular device."

Submission + - Apple's Woz Has Harsh Words for Open Source (eweek.com)

Submitted by buzzardsbay on Monday September 24, 2007 @02:00PM

buzzardsbay writes: In a rollicking interview with eWEEK magazine, Apple guru Steve Wozniak dishes on Jobs, the iPhone and, ultimately, open source, saying: "There's always a group of people that wants to undo the forces of industry that have given us so much in terms of wealth, and there's always people who want things to be free. The open-source movement starts with those sort of people." Woz does concede that open source has "good points that have nothing to do with whether it's free or not." And he was wearing a nixie-tube watch, so how much can you really dislike him?

Submission + - Microsoft continues to amass security brain trust (techtarget.com)

Submitted by

buzzardsbay

on Tuesday August 21, 2007 @03:24PM

buzzardsbay writes: "The good folks at Information Security Magazine are reporting that Microsoft recently poached Jakub Kaminski, one of CA's more talented and well-regarded antivirus researchers, along with three of his colleagues from CA's Australian lab. In the last year or so, Microsoft has made waves in the anti-malware community by hiring some of the top talent in the industry away from competitors such as Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. Is this an effort to improve their security efforts or silence their critics?"

Submission + - New Hack Exploits Common Programming Error (techtarget.com)

Submitted by

buzzardsbay

on Monday July 23, 2007 @09:37AM

buzzardsbay writes: "TechTarget's security editor, Dennis Fisher is reporting that researchers at Watchfire Inc. have discovered a reliable method for exploiting a common programming error, which until now had been considered simply a quality problem and not a security vulnerability. According to the article, the researchers stumbled upon the method for remotely exploiting dangling pointers by chance while they were running the company's AppScan software against a Web server. The good folks at Watchfire will detail the technique in a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas in August, Fisher writes."

Submission + - Time to spike Microsoft's Patch Tuesday

Submitted by

buzzardsbay

on Thursday May 10, 2007 @11:13AM

buzzardsbay writes: "Techtarget's resident security curmudgeon, Dennis Fisher, is calling for an end to Microsoft's monthly security patching cycle. Fisher points out that 'a hacker only needs one unpatched system, one little crack in the fence in order to launch a major attack on a given network. The sheer volume of the patches Microsoft releases each month makes it quite difficult for even the most conscientious IT department to get every patch out to all of the affected systems in a reasonable amount of time.'"

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