The A+(or any cert) is certainly not a guarantee of competence.
But take the pool of A+ qualified people.
Take the pool of non A+ qualified people.
Chances are, the A+ crowd has a higher percentage of actually competent people than the non A+. Sure, there are probably more non A+ people who are competent in raw numbers, but you are still taking a somewhat greater chance that way. A+ certainly cannot be the only way you judge, but it can be useful as a quick pre-qualification check to get the choices to a number you can actually spare the time to properly consider.
Of course, what you say about checking with previous employers/clients is still a good idea.
3 minutes? Thats absolutely insane. Even "my computer won't turn on" instant referrals tend to go over that, between pulling up their account and bringing up the contact information.
Was this customer service or a tech support position?
You don't have to be rude to get people to hang up on you.
I work for a cable internet tech support department.
I've gotten irate callers off the phone in around six minutes, referring them out because the issue was beyond the support we provide, and had them apologizing for being an asshole and praising my patience and politeness.
My average call time for the past couple weeks has been around 9 minutes. I'm never rude. I just go through the troubleshooting steps*, speak confidently and politely, and the vast majority of people are easy to handle. Aggravating perhaps, but not hard to handle or even to rush them off the phone. No rudeness needed, just being polite but firm in sticking to the scope of support we provide.
*- We don't have explicit scripts, but we do have troubleshooting outlines that we are expected to follow. This is a good balance- the steps are proven enough to work in virtually any situation our scope of support covers, but lack of explicit scripts lets us pull stuff out of our ass in the few areas the steps don't cover, and helps us easily shift gears and deal with issues that are a mixture of half a dozen different problems.
And, to some extent at least, having more resources available should give someone more responsibility to keep things safe. An organization with hundereds of millions of dollars to spare should be expected to keep their backyard safer than someone with mere hundereds of cents to spare.
Not saying this case is necesarily legitimate, just saying that having more money can in some cases make lawsuits more legitimate.
If I see anything notifying me of an account issue, if it looks like it could be legit, I go directly to the site by typing in the URL.
If there is a real account issue, and it's a company worth doing business with, I'll be able to find out how to resolve it without clicking on any external links to get there.
Now, if they have a way to crack into PayPals website and insert the dangerous link... thats a problem
Protecting the rights to the broadcast as a whole I like.
Believe it or not, there can be a great deal of creativity in how you present a broadcast of material copyrighted by others. This should be protected as a performance.
That said, if you copy a DJ set for instance, and cut it up into individual tracks, those individual tracks should not be covered by this "broadcast copyright", as they are divorced from the context that the broadcaster put them in, and copyright should go to the recorders/performers of the individual tracks.
In addition to the issues with interconnects, raw performance of individual nodes, and heterogeneous clusters...
Reliability becomes a big deal with such old computers. Sure, a well designed cluster will be able to route around a significant number of failed nodes, but computing efficiency will plummet and won't be terribly predictable(often, predictability becomes more important than raw burst performance). You might have 20 nodes working today, 12 tommorow, back up to 20 for a few weeks, then lose 6, 2 of which are completely dead leaving you with 18 after the repair... You see the problem here?
That said, such things can make for interesting projects, and might make decent production systems in some contexts. They are not, however, a panacea to a universities HPC needs.
Speaking of learnign experiment HPC systems, does anyone know if any of the virtual machine solutions available for PCs can be used to create a software simulation of an HPC cluster? I realize such a thing would be near useless for real work, but might make for an interesting learning exercise and useful testbed before you deploy to the live cluster.
A company you hear is generally pure hell to work at, a given department or team in a department may well be one of the best places ever to work. And a company with a stellar reputation for treating their employees well, might have a department or team within a department that is a crapfest of politics and incompetence.
So when researching a potential company, try to get as close to the specific job you are applying for as possible.
But they do have problems. We lost electrical power one day, for just a few seconds... and the firmware fried itself. Granted, they are built to allow for this- the TFTP server, and firmware updater, does work when the main firmware is dead, allowing you to reflash the firmware. But this is an involved process- set to 10mbps half duplex, static IP setting, and you have to use their Windows only firmware update application. Not terribly hard if you know what you are doing, but in a business critical situation, it would waste a lot of time.
Linksys routers are designed, and best used, for home networks. They do pretty good in that context, trying to push them beyond that and you are taking an unnecesary risk.
"However I do blame the techs when they insist on reading a pre-canned script aimed at noobs from the top AFTER being told that I am a systems/network administrator with LOTS of Cisco training under my belt."
Most of the time people do this, they are the worst callers imaginable. They either don't know even 10% of what they claim, or they are the biggest assholes on the planet. You might not be this way, but there are a lot of people that don't understand there are different support issues when dealing with an HFC network of over 1.5 million subscribers than there are with a couple thousand node Ethernet, and think that they can diagnose a problem on our end without access to any of our diagnostic tools or logs, based on their experience with said ethernet.
That said, a network engineer worth a damn is a prized caller. Don't have to spell out "ipconfig/renew" fifteen times. Don't have to direct them to "Network Connections" in control panel. Don't have to explain that their modem can be connected to the internet, while they cannot get online with the computer attached to it(this gets fun when they demand credit for the downtime). Don't have to explain the difference betwen USB cables and Ethernet cables(just the visual difference mind you) 5 times and they still get it wrong. Good network engineers, that actually deserve the title, we can get done in two minutes what would take us 10 or more with a normal caller, to say nothing of the arrogant fucks that think an Ethernet and an HFC network work identically with identical support issues.
Quite often we ask you to do what you just did again because most subscribers are so fucking stupid that when they tried it, they unplugged, say, the ethernet cable when they were supposed to unplug the power cable.
Seriously, at least half the time when a subscriber has tried to troubleshoot on their own, and they get through to me, they've screwed things up even more than they were in the first place.
Don't blame the techs for making you repeat things. Blame your fellow subscribers for causing us to spend an hour on a five minute problem one too many times with their horrifically incompetent attempt at life.
This only restricts the exercise of free speech *in the performance of duty*. If employers could not restrict what employees said in the performance of duties, you could have "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" going out as an official government memo, and there would be little that could be done about it. Employers need to be able to restrict the speech of their employees while in an official capacity.
Even apart from enshrining racist forgeries as official government memos, not being able to restrict official speech makes it virtually impossible to enforce any sort of protocol. Without established, enforced, and respected protocol the entire chain of command, unity, and general discipline will break down and the organization will founder. The ability to restrict official speech is critical to this.
This ruling strikes a good balance. Makes it clear that you can't simply say anything *in an official capacity*, where you should be representing the interests of those who hired you, while leaving your rights to speak as your own person untouched.
There is proof that certain human activities are capable of damaging the ozone layers. Enough experiments were done that the possibility certainly exists.
The ozone layer was depleted more severely than known natural processes could account for. This is also pretty much fact.
Beyond that, it's basically an educated guess as to which of the following is more likely-
Are there ozone depleting natural reactions we are completely unaware are even possible?
Are the known natural processes happening with greater frequency than we currently are aware of?
Are human activities the primary cause?
Is the truth a mix of all three, and if so, what proportion is each effect?
And most importantly, regardless of the cause, is the question "What should we do about it?". Obviously we dont' want the ozone layer to go away completely. But whatever measures are taken to protect it must be moderated by an attempt to keep from throwing the rest of the ecosystem out of balance. It would do little good to restore the ozone layer only to throw the world into nuclear winter(extreme example, but it illustrates the point). It would be very bad to restore the ozone layer if an ozone depletion/restoration cycle was part of the Earth's natural housekeeping.
I haven't researched enough to really give many answers, just pointing out that there are important questions that almost never seem to get addressed in public releases. I'm sure a lot of this has been covered in the studies and experiments that led up to the ozone hole controversy, but very little of it seems to get into the public eye.
Not that much when compared to the cost of CD singles or vinyl.
The 12 tracks I picked up on Beatport, if I had gotten them in.wav would have cost 30 dollars(all older tracks in that purchase).
Getting those 12 tracks on CD or vinyl would have cost me well over $100. Even picking up all the mixes, the CD or vinyl options would probably still be at least 40 dollars more. Thats a big deal... I have records where there are as many as 6 mixes of the track, and I hate all but one of them. Don't have the option to not buy the others with CD or vinyl, beatport you do.
beatport.com as well. At least, if you are into electronic dance music, it's a great place. 1.49 for older tracks, 1.99 for newer. 320kbps Mp3 or for an extra $1 you can get.wav. No DRM, no restrictions on personal use and they are legally clear for DJing with(provided the venue has their ASCAP license, just as with other formats).
I doubt Linux is any more immune to attacks than Windows is. Maybe a little, but not much.
A couple things do contribute to its virus free state.
One, it's a smaller target. Unless you have a specific enemy you are going after, you are generally going to want to hit as many people as possible. Targeting Windows gets you that. Whether you want to spread chaos or secure a botnet for whatever purpose, your time is best spent focusing on windows.
Also, the average knowledge of Linux users is greater than that of Windows users. Linux users are less likely to download random attachments or stuff from shady websites. This further reduces attack opportunities with Linux, before you actually get to attacking the kernel itself.
The one technical advantage is Linux makes it easier to mitigate the damage of a successful penetration. A limited user account on a Linux system can do damn near anything a user might need to do- Whereas with Windows, it can be very hard to fully use a system without admin priveleges. Linux also offers far better facilities for temporarily assuming administrator powers while logged into a normal user account. This seperation of userspace and adminspace doesn't decrease Linux's vulnerability to penetration in the first place, but it does decrease the damage a penetration can do once accomplished.
The average net use cannot figure it out in 15 minutes. A good chunk of them would be unable to figure it out if given full documentation written for their literacy level, *and* they dedicated the entirety of their being for their entire lifetime to meeting the challenge.
Never underestimate the stupidity of your average netizen. There are people I get calls from where I am left wondering how the fuck they are sufficiently intelligent to succesfully sign up for the service, or how their much smarter friend who actually signed them up could possibly have been persuaded to unleash such a monster on the net.
People are fucking stupid. Work a hell desk for the general public and you will understand completely why people need AOL to dumb things down for them. That is why AOL has succeeded thusfar, and why they probably will succeed with this. This stuff might not be for people who understand they need their computer out of the box before their ISP can get them online(hey, at least she knew she needed a computer at all), but believe me, a lot of internet users aren't even that qualified.
The above referenced item is something I have fought long and hard to excise from my memory, and to date I have not succeeded. I am considering a lobotomy.
Sometimes I think that might be intentional, a test to see how concisely you can write things and still have it legible, and how you manage it- do you abbreviate, do you write really small, do you leave out less important details, do you use a combination of these techniques?
At least, I hope its intentional. Theres no way in hell a remotely typical human can write all the information requested in normal size print in the amount of space normally provided. If they really expect us to do so, they're insane.
The idea is that if the US has not passed a statute that would invalidate the precedent set by pre-1776 British courts, those British court decisions and common law should be used to guide the judge.
US laws and court decisions since independence get priority, but in the absence of those(or where those give equal weight to different decisions), the common law traditions inherited from the UK should be considered.
Read up on Vietnam. The book I'd especially recommend would be "How We Won the War" by General Vo Nguyen Giap.
A revolution might not be able to hop in tanks and slug it out with an armored division, but superior strategy and tactics can still win. It's a matter of knowing how to pit your strengths against the enemies weaknesses. Take the fight on your terms, not the enemies. Another book I'd recommend is "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. Which you should read anyways, while mainly written about warfare it really is applicable to all forms of human conflict.
Well said. I nearly went down that road, it wasn't fun. Seriously screwed myself up on several levels.
You can't be the hero slaying the demons. You can certainly be the sidekick helping out, but they have to be the ones to do the real work of slaying their demons. You lose sight of that and your life is more or less over.
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The A+(or any cert) is certainly not a guarantee of competence.
But take the pool of A+ qualified people.
Take the pool of non A+ qualified people.
Chances are, the A+ crowd has a higher percentage of actually competent people than the non A+. Sure, there are probably more non A+ people who are competent in raw numbers, but you are still taking a somewhat greater chance that way. A+ certainly cannot be the only way you judge, but it can be useful as a quick pre-qualification check to get the choices to a number you can actually spare the time to properly consider.
Of course, what you say about checking with previous employers/clients is still a good idea.
3 minutes? Thats absolutely insane. Even "my computer won't turn on" instant referrals tend to go over that, between pulling up their account and bringing up the contact information.
Was this customer service or a tech support position?
You don't have to be rude to get people to hang up on you.
I work for a cable internet tech support department.
I've gotten irate callers off the phone in around six minutes, referring them out because the issue was beyond the support we provide, and had them apologizing for being an asshole and praising my patience and politeness.
My average call time for the past couple weeks has been around 9 minutes. I'm never rude. I just go through the troubleshooting steps*, speak confidently and politely, and the vast majority of people are easy to handle. Aggravating perhaps, but not hard to handle or even to rush them off the phone. No rudeness needed, just being polite but firm in sticking to the scope of support we provide.
*- We don't have explicit scripts, but we do have troubleshooting outlines that we are expected to follow. This is a good balance- the steps are proven enough to work in virtually any situation our scope of support covers, but lack of explicit scripts lets us pull stuff out of our ass in the few areas the steps don't cover, and helps us easily shift gears and deal with issues that are a mixture of half a dozen different problems.
And, to some extent at least, having more resources available should give someone more responsibility to keep things safe. An organization with hundereds of millions of dollars to spare should be expected to keep their backyard safer than someone with mere hundereds of cents to spare.
Not saying this case is necesarily legitimate, just saying that having more money can in some cases make lawsuits more legitimate.
If I see anything notifying me of an account issue, if it looks like it could be legit, I go directly to the site by typing in the URL.
If there is a real account issue, and it's a company worth doing business with, I'll be able to find out how to resolve it without clicking on any external links to get there.
Now, if they have a way to crack into PayPals website and insert the dangerous link... thats a problem
Protecting the rights to the broadcast as a whole I like.
Believe it or not, there can be a great deal of creativity in how you present a broadcast of material copyrighted by others. This should be protected as a performance.
That said, if you copy a DJ set for instance, and cut it up into individual tracks, those individual tracks should not be covered by this "broadcast copyright", as they are divorced from the context that the broadcaster put them in, and copyright should go to the recorders/performers of the individual tracks.
Sure, it can be.
In addition to the issues with interconnects, raw performance of individual nodes, and heterogeneous clusters...
Reliability becomes a big deal with such old computers. Sure, a well designed cluster will be able to route around a significant number of failed nodes, but computing efficiency will plummet and won't be terribly predictable(often, predictability becomes more important than raw burst performance). You might have 20 nodes working today, 12 tommorow, back up to 20 for a few weeks, then lose 6, 2 of which are completely dead leaving you with 18 after the repair... You see the problem here?
That said, such things can make for interesting projects, and might make decent production systems in some contexts. They are not, however, a panacea to a universities HPC needs.
Speaking of learnign experiment HPC systems, does anyone know if any of the virtual machine solutions available for PCs can be used to create a software simulation of an HPC cluster? I realize such a thing would be near useless for real work, but might make for an interesting learning exercise and useful testbed before you deploy to the live cluster.
A company you hear is generally pure hell to work at, a given department or team in a department may well be one of the best places ever to work. And a company with a stellar reputation for treating their employees well, might have a department or team within a department that is a crapfest of politics and incompetence.
So when researching a potential company, try to get as close to the specific job you are applying for as possible.
I love my WRT54G... pretty good most of the time.
But they do have problems. We lost electrical power one day, for just a few seconds... and the firmware fried itself. Granted, they are built to allow for this- the TFTP server, and firmware updater, does work when the main firmware is dead, allowing you to reflash the firmware. But this is an involved process- set to 10mbps half duplex, static IP setting, and you have to use their Windows only firmware update application. Not terribly hard if you know what you are doing, but in a business critical situation, it would waste a lot of time.
Linksys routers are designed, and best used, for home networks. They do pretty good in that context, trying to push them beyond that and you are taking an unnecesary risk.
"However I do blame the techs when they insist on reading a pre-canned script aimed at noobs from the top AFTER being told that I am a systems/network administrator with LOTS of Cisco training under my belt."
/renew" fifteen times. Don't have to direct them to "Network Connections" in control panel. Don't have to explain that their modem can be connected to the internet, while they cannot get online with the computer attached to it(this gets fun when they demand credit for the downtime). Don't have to explain the difference betwen USB cables and Ethernet cables(just the visual difference mind you) 5 times and they still get it wrong. Good network engineers, that actually deserve the title, we can get done in two minutes what would take us 10 or more with a normal caller, to say nothing of the arrogant fucks that think an Ethernet and an HFC network work identically with identical support issues.
Most of the time people do this, they are the worst callers imaginable. They either don't know even 10% of what they claim, or they are the biggest assholes on the planet. You might not be this way, but there are a lot of people that don't understand there are different support issues when dealing with an HFC network of over 1.5 million subscribers than there are with a couple thousand node Ethernet, and think that they can diagnose a problem on our end without access to any of our diagnostic tools or logs, based on their experience with said ethernet.
That said, a network engineer worth a damn is a prized caller. Don't have to spell out "ipconfig
Quite often we ask you to do what you just did again because most subscribers are so fucking stupid that when they tried it, they unplugged, say, the ethernet cable when they were supposed to unplug the power cable.
Seriously, at least half the time when a subscriber has tried to troubleshoot on their own, and they get through to me, they've screwed things up even more than they were in the first place.
Don't blame the techs for making you repeat things. Blame your fellow subscribers for causing us to spend an hour on a five minute problem one too many times with their horrifically incompetent attempt at life.
This only restricts the exercise of free speech *in the performance of duty*. If employers could not restrict what employees said in the performance of duties, you could have "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" going out as an official government memo, and there would be little that could be done about it. Employers need to be able to restrict the speech of their employees while in an official capacity.
Even apart from enshrining racist forgeries as official government memos, not being able to restrict official speech makes it virtually impossible to enforce any sort of protocol. Without established, enforced, and respected protocol the entire chain of command, unity, and general discipline will break down and the organization will founder. The ability to restrict official speech is critical to this.
This ruling strikes a good balance. Makes it clear that you can't simply say anything *in an official capacity*, where you should be representing the interests of those who hired you, while leaving your rights to speak as your own person untouched.
There is proof that certain human activities are capable of damaging the ozone layers. Enough experiments were done that the possibility certainly exists.
The ozone layer was depleted more severely than known natural processes could account for. This is also pretty much fact.
Beyond that, it's basically an educated guess as to which of the following is more likely-
Are there ozone depleting natural reactions we are completely unaware are even possible?
Are the known natural processes happening with greater frequency than we currently are aware of?
Are human activities the primary cause?
Is the truth a mix of all three, and if so, what proportion is each effect?
And most importantly, regardless of the cause, is the question "What should we do about it?". Obviously we dont' want the ozone layer to go away completely. But whatever measures are taken to protect it must be moderated by an attempt to keep from throwing the rest of the ecosystem out of balance. It would do little good to restore the ozone layer only to throw the world into nuclear winter(extreme example, but it illustrates the point). It would be very bad to restore the ozone layer if an ozone depletion/restoration cycle was part of the Earth's natural housekeeping.
I haven't researched enough to really give many answers, just pointing out that there are important questions that almost never seem to get addressed in public releases. I'm sure a lot of this has been covered in the studies and experiments that led up to the ozone hole controversy, but very little of it seems to get into the public eye.
Not that much when compared to the cost of CD singles or vinyl.
.wav would have cost 30 dollars(all older tracks in that purchase).
The 12 tracks I picked up on Beatport, if I had gotten them in
Getting those 12 tracks on CD or vinyl would have cost me well over $100. Even picking up all the mixes, the CD or vinyl options would probably still be at least 40 dollars more. Thats a big deal... I have records where there are as many as 6 mixes of the track, and I hate all but one of them. Don't have the option to not buy the others with CD or vinyl, beatport you do.
beatport.com as well. At least, if you are into electronic dance music, it's a great place. 1.49 for older tracks, 1.99 for newer. 320kbps Mp3 or for an extra $1 you can get .wav. No DRM, no restrictions on personal use and they are legally clear for DJing with(provided the venue has their ASCAP license, just as with other formats).
Their flash interface is ungodly annoying though.
Nothing.
But the courts are restricted by the first amendment(at least on paper). Involving them on an issue of speech brings the first amendment into play.
I doubt Linux is any more immune to attacks than Windows is. Maybe a little, but not much.
A couple things do contribute to its virus free state.
One, it's a smaller target. Unless you have a specific enemy you are going after, you are generally going to want to hit as many people as possible. Targeting Windows gets you that. Whether you want to spread chaos or secure a botnet for whatever purpose, your time is best spent focusing on windows.
Also, the average knowledge of Linux users is greater than that of Windows users. Linux users are less likely to download random attachments or stuff from shady websites. This further reduces attack opportunities with Linux, before you actually get to attacking the kernel itself.
The one technical advantage is Linux makes it easier to mitigate the damage of a successful penetration. A limited user account on a Linux system can do damn near anything a user might need to do- Whereas with Windows, it can be very hard to fully use a system without admin priveleges. Linux also offers far better facilities for temporarily assuming administrator powers while logged into a normal user account. This seperation of userspace and adminspace doesn't decrease Linux's vulnerability to penetration in the first place, but it does decrease the damage a penetration can do once accomplished.
The average net use cannot figure it out in 15 minutes. A good chunk of them would be unable to figure it out if given full documentation written for their literacy level, *and* they dedicated the entirety of their being for their entire lifetime to meeting the challenge.
Never underestimate the stupidity of your average netizen. There are people I get calls from where I am left wondering how the fuck they are sufficiently intelligent to succesfully sign up for the service, or how their much smarter friend who actually signed them up could possibly have been persuaded to unleash such a monster on the net.
People are fucking stupid. Work a hell desk for the general public and you will understand completely why people need AOL to dumb things down for them. That is why AOL has succeeded thusfar, and why they probably will succeed with this. This stuff might not be for people who understand they need their computer out of the box before their ISP can get them online(hey, at least she knew she needed a computer at all), but believe me, a lot of internet users aren't even that qualified.
Don't google for it. Don't.
The above referenced item is something I have fought long and hard to excise from my memory, and to date I have not succeeded. I am considering a lobotomy.
Sometimes I think that might be intentional, a test to see how concisely you can write things and still have it legible, and how you manage it- do you abbreviate, do you write really small, do you leave out less important details, do you use a combination of these techniques?
At least, I hope its intentional. Theres no way in hell a remotely typical human can write all the information requested in normal size print in the amount of space normally provided. If they really expect us to do so, they're insane.
Not ignoring it.
The idea is that if the US has not passed a statute that would invalidate the precedent set by pre-1776 British courts, those British court decisions and common law should be used to guide the judge.
US laws and court decisions since independence get priority, but in the absence of those(or where those give equal weight to different decisions), the common law traditions inherited from the UK should be considered.
Read up on Vietnam. The book I'd especially recommend would be "How We Won the War" by General Vo Nguyen Giap.
A revolution might not be able to hop in tanks and slug it out with an armored division, but superior strategy and tactics can still win. It's a matter of knowing how to pit your strengths against the enemies weaknesses. Take the fight on your terms, not the enemies. Another book I'd recommend is "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. Which you should read anyways, while mainly written about warfare it really is applicable to all forms of human conflict.
Well said. I nearly went down that road, it wasn't fun. Seriously screwed myself up on several levels.
You can't be the hero slaying the demons. You can certainly be the sidekick helping out, but they have to be the ones to do the real work of slaying their demons. You lose sight of that and your life is more or less over.
It certainly needs to exist, but serious reform is necesary.
I loved the "Five years .NET development experience" I saw in 2002-2003...
There are jobs that pay more... but the days where answering "wheres the any key" got you 50k/yr are long past...