These IT closets, AV rooms, and wire runs are beyond chaotic. Have you ever seen spaces like these at your jobs? We certainly hope not.
Usually when the media reports about computer viruses, they are this dark and threatening thing, that will seize and lock up your computer, demand ransom payments, or otherwise delete and destroy your files. Some news reports also suggest that after you get a virus, your computer hardware will be forever destroyed, although that’s pretty uncommon. In most cases, a damaged boot-sector can be re-written using a boot disk. Spyware is often lumped in with computer viruses — some of it is spread in a viral fashion, but more commonly installed by somebody allowing remote access to their computer to an untrusted party.
The truth is that computer viruses aren’t that scary if you use commonsense — something I’ve always believed and have been confirmed based on my research. Many computer viruses are just nuisances rather then harmful. Few viruses go after Linux desktop computers, as virus makers prefer more popular platforms like Windows or Mac OS X. Despite the advertising, hackers most likely aren’t trying to take over your computer — but do keep your software up to date to ensure you aren’t running buggy software that can make you a target.
Linux developers tend to patch up security bugs and holes after they are discovered, which makes it more difficult to hack and propagate viruses in. The permissions model in Linux is stronger then Windows, and it’s more obvious when your elevating something to root in Linux then Windows. Plus, Linux is fast and easy to update with apt-get and there are large software repositories from official sources, so you are rarely downloading programs or files from insecure servers on the Internet. But mostly Linux’s security comes from less then 2% of desktop computers.
Windows is more of a wild card, but even on the operating system, you are unlikely to get spyware or a virus installed on it if you use commonsense and keep your system up-to-date. The built-in Windows Defender is pretty good, especially for a very light Windows user like myself. They’ve fixed the Excel Macro Virus issue in recent years with better permissions, but I know I’m still very careful on what I download and use on Windows. And I would never let anybody remote access my computer, although I do have TeamViewer installed for work — but only with trusted connections of IT department do I run that app. I also keep an eye on the process viewer, logs, and try to be an informed user of Windows, although I don’t like how hidden so much of settings in Windows.
One thing I didn’t know much about was how secure Android is on my phone. Android seems to hide the guts of how operating system works. I really don’t like the Android operating system, but I often think that’s my only real choice as Linux for phones is under-developed and not well suited right now for phones. Fortunately, it seems based on my research that there are relatively few cellphone viruses at this point, although they are certainly possible to be written and some exist that get around Android permissions. Most of them come from outside of the Google Play store, and they aren’t widespread in United States. But that’s something to watch out for in the future.
The prospect of Web users being tracked by the sites they visit has prompted several countermeasures over the years, including using Privacy Badger or an alternate anti-tracking extension, enabling private or incognito browsing sessions, or clearing cookies. Now, websites have a new way to defeat all three.
The technique leverages the use of favicons, the tiny icons that websites display in users’ browser tabs and bookmark lists. Researchers from the University of Illinois, Chicago said in a new paper that most browsers cache the images in a location that’s separate from the ones used to store site data, browsing history, and cookies. Websites can abuse this arrangement by loading a series of favicons on visitors’ browsers that uniquely identify them over an extended period of time.
Air source heat pumps are a very bad news for the grid when they aren’t backed up by natural gas pre-heaters for when the air temperature is below 40 degrees.
That’s why Albany’s All Electric Skyscraper in 2006 – One Commerce Plaza – added gas pre-heaters. The electric pre-heaters were burning megawatts of electricity when it got below 40 degrees, a common condition in Albany during the winter. Except for the gas pre heaters in extreme cold, the building is still all electric as it has been since the 1960s.
Ground source heat pumps don’t have this issue as if you are below the frost line in most of America, it never gets below 40 degrees. Heat pumps don’t require pre-heating when it’s above 40 degrees or so.
2/10/21 by NPR
Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/118980596
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-381444908/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2021/02/20210210_fa_fapodweds.mp3?awCollectionId=381444908&awEpisodeId=966360714&orgId=1&d=2922&p=381444908&story=966360714&t=podcast&e=966360714&size=46656462&ft=pod&f=381444908
The world is on the precipice of cyber catastrophe, and everything is vulnerable, including our government, nuclear weapons, elections, power grid, hospitals, and cell phones. ‘New York Times’ cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth explains how the U.S. went from having the world’s strongest cyber arsenal to becoming so vulnerable to cyber attack. “We have to stop leaving gaping holes in software that could be used by adversaries to pull off some of these attacks,” she says. Perlroth’s new book is “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends.”
COBOL, an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language, is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. First released in 1959, it's designed to be easy to?read by a human, which Seay says makes the language easy for students to grasp.
"COBOL?is not a very difficult language to learn," he said. "It's very linear; it's very self-describing. The verbosity that people criticize it for, I think, is one of its strengths. It tells you what it does."
The past two laptops I’ve owned, I’ve kept Microsoft Windows installed in it, but I almost never use it. The only time I ever use Windows is to load a product upgrade or run a driver that isn’t working properly in Linux. Like for example, right now I am booted into Windows to read and reformat a memory card that Linux is refusing to see at all because it is corrupted. It seems to work okay.
Every time I’ve loaded Microsoft Windows, I’ve always noticed how truly slow the operating system is compared to the striped down version of Linux I run with the XFCE Window Manager. It also is trying to sell me some kind of new product, that is always free and easily installed in Linux like office software, software updates, and virus protection. Why pay for something that is already free and easier to install?
I agree that some hardware and software requires a bit more fiddling to get working perfectly. But on the other hand, not all Windows programs are easy to install, especially if you have to buy them, download them and run them through an installer — compared with the ease of apt-get. Linux’s powerful command line makes scripting, and basic repetitive tasks much easer to do then doing a lot of clicking. But for more complicated tasks, there are almost always easy to use GUI programs like OpenOffice and QGIS.