Paris Hosts the Second Hacker Space Festival 55
zoobab writes "Hackers from all over Europe will meet at the end of the month (27-30 June) at the second Hacker Space Festival in Paris. The four-day schedule includes conferences and workshops on: Metasploit, HostileWRT, FPGA for beginners, ICT disaster recovery, software patents in Europe, Hadopi, and many other topics. The future of Hacker Spaces will also be debated. The event will be hosted by the first French hackerspace, /tmp/lab, located in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Paris."
Re:HACKING (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes it is faster. Time is money, too.
I could spend the time to figure out what the problem is, but at some point you realize that not only is it going to be faster to reinstall the OS, but it is going to be a BETTER solution.
The better question is, WHY are we reinstalling the OS?
If it's malware, spyware, weird persistent popups, then reinstalling the OS is the only SANE solution. You will never be absolutely certain you got rid of it, and if it is still doing something to your system. Reinstallation provides peace of mind in many cases as well, and is pretty much required in a corporate setting.
If it's just a problem relating to one specific program, then either update the program, or do a reinstall of that program. There are some cases where it is literally so fucked up, that you need to start with a fresh OS install just to get that program to work again. I personally have spent 8-10 hours trying to figure out why a program did what it was doing, before finally realizing that my time was going to be better spent elsewhere. Was that software developer going to give me anything for it? Unlikely. Could I have made money doing something else? Probably. The best example I can come up with off the top of my head is fucking Vongo. That was a nightmare crapware additive on HP laptops a few years back that had no solution (a working one) anywhere. Not from Vongo or HP. Their suggestion? Pay us more money.
Driver issues? Sometimes a reinstall is going to be required as well. You can only do so much, and when reinstalling the drivers and the tcp/ip stack does not work..... well you are screwed. You can get mad and spend hour after hour trying to fix the driver depending on your level of skill from dumbass to god-like kung fu, but your time would have still been better spent just reinstalling the OS and moving on.
What about imaging? If you perform a clean install, updates, and an installation of a basic software package that includes most of your tools and development platforms, and then set all your configurations correct and then create an image, how is using that image to fall back a "bad thing" as you seem to suggest?
I recommend to most people to keep their data on separate partitions and drives for a reason. That way you CAN reinstall the OS or go back to an image within 15 minutes and not be forced to use your time to get down deep into the OS and actually figure out what is going on.
Not everybody has that kind of time, dude. That is what some techs forget. Yeah, you can treat it as a challenge and a problem that must be solved. However, somebody is paying for your time one way or the other. If you can solve the problem quicker for your client and get them back up and running, well then you really should do that. Figure shit out on your own time. I don't know about you, but if I decide to go the 5 hour route to figure out the why, instead of the 20 minute route that I KNOW will fix the problem, it will cost my clients hundred of dollars.
My overall point being that you are being a little bit simplistic and condescending to hastily condemn somebody as ignorant and unsophisticated simply because they chose a path of least resistance instead of deliberately choosing the "challenge".