There isn't really any practical way to be completely sure, but one thing that can help is to not give him reason to want to attack the company.
Lay him off and pay him out a good severance pay and he is much less likely to leave disgruntled. There may also be other parting perks besides pay that can generate good will depending on the person.
This also give the added benefit of when something breaks in the old obscure undocumented part of the system only one person knows, that one person may be more willing to help. Tho how beneficial this is depends on how useless he is.
As for the technical stuff, only way to be sure with sysadmin is rebuild all the servers from scratch (an extremely time consuming task of course).
For programmer, the whole team should be doing regular code reviews anyway looking for any security bugs. Maybe an extra code audit would be a good idea.
* DNS servers (if you aren't virtualizing stuff) * email servers (if your spam scanning is external) * some database servers (generally io bound not cpu bound, tho it of course depends on the nature of the queries) * simple web hosting (stuff like a CDN serving static files needs almost no CPU) * monitoring servers * Camera/surveillance servers (video processing is mostly done by dedicated chips on capture cards)
Really, most servers are not CPU bound these days and would probably benefit from many low-clocked cores than few high-clocked ones. They are exceptions of course, that is why we have super-computers at the other extreme.
* Give me back my menu bar * Give me back my status bar * Stop dicking around with fancy visual effects in the browser window that cause bugs like this: http://i.stack.imgur.com/WPXGe.png * Switch to a multi-process model so flash and browser bugs don't take down everything in a crash * Build a proper download feature with the ability to do such basic things as resume http downloads (this should be a core feature, not a plugin)
Minor correction to your post, Google updater isn't persistent. It runs as a scheduled task (and maybe at startup too), does it's thing, then exits.
There is no excuse for software updaters that are left running all the time (even one open source program does this -- ClamAV), at least Google is smart enough to do better.
A friend and I each have FreeNas servers with multi TB raid-z.
Some of our data we keep mirrored between them.
The servers are physically brought together occasionally for a full sync, but most of the time rsync -n is done over the internet to see what needs to be updated and the data transferred on a removable hard drive.
Put the algorithm in the hardware if you can, then you can publish the library open source without any risks.
There is also the question of whether closed source will even protect the algorithm. Binaries can be disassembled and reverse engineered, so closing source just makes thing more difficult if it's something as simple as an algorithm you are trying to protect.
I used to think this way too until I gave the Yii framework a try. It really is a well designed framework that doesn't get in the way and force you to do stupid things.
In addition to things other people have mentioned such as gaming there is are some small thing missing that really affects productivity.
* Right mouse button drag context menu shell extensions. The fact that I can right mouse button drag a rar file and say "extract here" or "extract to (subfolder with archive name)" is a hugely useful/convinant way to deal with archives -- it is the only way I use them on a desktop system.
As far as I know (and please correct me if this has changed) there is no way to do that under any of the X shells.
* Good graphical SVN client. Under windows I use TortiseSVN which provides a great SVN interface. Allows individual files or subdirectories to be commited/updated/reverted via right click context menu, and overlay's the icons with symbols identifying their status (up to ddate, modified, conflicted, etc).
I have not been able to find a X svn client with similar user interface to that. I'm not sure that X shells are even capable of allowing software to overlay icons like that.
* Office. I have been using Open Office now for a while under Windows and what i have discovered is: It Sucks.
It has the functionality necessary to accomplish most tasks but it is in serious need of polish to do a good job. That lack of polish makes it awkward to use and reduces productivity.
Let me give a simple small example of that. (Excuse the [sup] but/. doesn't seem to support the necessary html) If I type in something like 1st it will autocorrect it to 1[sup]st[/sup]. That is fine, MS Office will do that to. The problem comes when I don't want the "st" superscript. In MS Office if I press backspace (or undo I believe) immediately after the change it will undo the autocorrect and leave me with 1st. In Open Office there doesn't seem to be any way to convince it to not superscript the "st" other than completely disabling the feature (which is not what I want when I only want to prevent it in one instance)
It may seem like something small, but it's the kind of little thing that bugs the hell out of people and lowers the value of the software.
IIRC the agreement says they are not allowed to have a surcharge for using credit cards (advertised price plus more), a cash discount (advertised price minus some) for not using them is allowed.
While in reality those are both the same thing, I'm pretty sure they can get away with the cash discount on a technicality.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I suspect the high incidences of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders definitely pull down the average.
more generic viagra spam in 3...2...
There isn't really any practical way to be completely sure, but one thing that can help is to not give him reason to want to attack the company.
Lay him off and pay him out a good severance pay and he is much less likely to leave disgruntled. There may also be other parting perks besides pay that can generate good will depending on the person.
This also give the added benefit of when something breaks in the old obscure undocumented part of the system only one person knows, that one person may be more willing to help. Tho how beneficial this is depends on how useless he is.
As for the technical stuff, only way to be sure with sysadmin is rebuild all the servers from scratch (an extremely time consuming task of course).
For programmer, the whole team should be doing regular code reviews anyway looking for any security bugs. Maybe an extra code audit would be a good idea.
* DNS servers (if you aren't virtualizing stuff)
* email servers (if your spam scanning is external)
* some database servers (generally io bound not cpu bound, tho it of course depends on the nature of the queries)
* simple web hosting (stuff like a CDN serving static files needs almost no CPU)
* monitoring servers
* Camera/surveillance servers (video processing is mostly done by dedicated chips on capture cards)
Really, most servers are not CPU bound these days and would probably benefit from many low-clocked cores than few high-clocked ones. They are exceptions of course, that is why we have super-computers at the other extreme.
* Give me back my menu bar
* Give me back my status bar
* Stop dicking around with fancy visual effects in the browser window that cause bugs like this: http://i.stack.imgur.com/WPXGe.png
* Switch to a multi-process model so flash and browser bugs don't take down everything in a crash
* Build a proper download feature with the ability to do such basic things as resume http downloads (this should be a core feature, not a plugin)
These should give you some ideas
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8977
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10089
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11075
http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/76
Aren't most software tokens smartphone apps? That still gives a reasonable air gap if you are using a computer as the primary access method.
How do you pronounce that?
But the amount of losses due to heat is easily calculated and factored in.
Could be very useful in large scale industry -- the energy required to produce CNG or Aluminum is pretty high.
Attaching a "3000-degree solar zinc reactor" to an aluminum plant isn't going to be a big deal.
Minor correction to your post, Google updater isn't persistent. It runs as a scheduled task (and maybe at startup too), does it's thing, then exits.
There is no excuse for software updaters that are left running all the time (even one open source program does this -- ClamAV), at least Google is smart enough to do better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Steam_explosion_risk
A friend and I each have FreeNas servers with multi TB raid-z.
Some of our data we keep mirrored between them.
The servers are physically brought together occasionally for a full sync, but most of the time rsync -n is done over the internet to see what needs to be updated and the data transferred on a removable hard drive.
Never underestimate the power of bribes.
Google has rules limiting the number of their ad spots you are allowed to use on one page.
Put the algorithm in the hardware if you can, then you can publish the library open source without any risks.
There is also the question of whether closed source will even protect the algorithm. Binaries can be disassembled and reverse engineered, so closing source just makes thing more difficult if it's something as simple as an algorithm you are trying to protect.
I used to think this way too until I gave the Yii framework a try. It really is a well designed framework that doesn't get in the way and force you to do stupid things.
http://www.yiiframework.com/
You turn sea water into steam and you have a big pile of salt to deal with.
IIRC this is a win 3.x bug you are thinking of.
In addition to things other people have mentioned such as gaming there is are some small thing missing that really affects productivity.
* Right mouse button drag context menu shell extensions. The fact that I can right mouse button drag a rar file and say "extract here" or "extract to (subfolder with archive name)" is a hugely useful/convinant way to deal with archives -- it is the only way I use them on a desktop system.
As far as I know (and please correct me if this has changed) there is no way to do that under any of the X shells.
* Good graphical SVN client. Under windows I use TortiseSVN which provides a great SVN interface. Allows individual files or subdirectories to be commited/updated/reverted via right click context menu, and overlay's the icons with symbols identifying their status (up to ddate, modified, conflicted, etc).
I have not been able to find a X svn client with similar user interface to that. I'm not sure that X shells are even capable of allowing software to overlay icons like that.
* Office. I have been using Open Office now for a while under Windows and what i have discovered is: It Sucks.
It has the functionality necessary to accomplish most tasks but it is in serious need of polish to do a good job. That lack of polish makes it awkward to use and reduces productivity.
Let me give a simple small example of that. (Excuse the [sup] but /. doesn't seem to support the necessary html) If I type in something like 1st it will autocorrect it to 1[sup]st[/sup]. That is fine, MS Office will do that to. The problem comes when I don't want the "st" superscript. In MS Office if I press backspace (or undo I believe) immediately after the change it will undo the autocorrect and leave me with 1st. In Open Office there doesn't seem to be any way to convince it to not superscript the "st" other than completely disabling the feature (which is not what I want when I only want to prevent it in one instance)
It may seem like something small, but it's the kind of little thing that bugs the hell out of people and lowers the value of the software.
It sounds like they are. The article says "...below is the full email from Gabe Newell to Steam members."
Keep in mind Steam has a hell of a lot of members. It can easily take several hours to send out that many emails.
A GUI for about:config? No geek needs a GUI :P (proud Linux commandline user here ;)
Built-in links to the documentation site would be nice.
Anyhow, if you don't like some of the shiny features, you can disable them
No, you can not. That is the problem.
Visiting her is nice, but people have lives, have to go to work, etc, and can't spend all their time with those they want to.
His initial request is still perfectly valid to give her something to do between his visits.
IIRC the agreement says they are not allowed to have a surcharge for using credit cards (advertised price plus more), a cash discount (advertised price minus some) for not using them is allowed.
While in reality those are both the same thing, I'm pretty sure they can get away with the cash discount on a technicality.
While not as good as an exit node, you could run a non-exit node and still be able to make some useful contribution to the Tor network.