Not that you require any more validation, but I agree with your logic.
Frankly I find television idiotic. The fact that people would pay for it troubling. The fact that someone would go to the trouble of stealing it appauling. The fact that someone would go to the trouble of selling a kit designed to allow someone to steal TV the sign of a truely depraved society.
Hey, I'm still trying to get my users to not refer to the "Computer" as the CPU or the Hard Drive.
Say, what is the proper term for the whole computer, sans screen and peripherals? CPU really means the processor chip. I've always like "Computer". Workstation sounds impressive, but it usually refers to the whole setup (plus computer companies are reserving the word for their brawnier offerings.)
I'm seeing a vendor cart at the Bazaar, SCO - Santa Cruz Oxygen.
They have an compressor sucking the surrounding air, bottling it in tanks, and being sold for $1000/liter. The bottle comes with a free mask, what a deal!
When no one buys this SCOair, they call the constables over to complain about all the nose pirates. They insist that the elephant (IBM) next door it sucking all the air with his trunk and giving it to everyone.
Someone points out that just last week these same folks had tried a similar scheme with bottled water.
After an hour of SCO's screaming the authorities cart the SCOair people away for disturbing the peace.
I wouldn't sit up nights wondering what will happen if SCO should win. Frankly the law is going to take one look at the GPL, one look at the fact that SCO distributed this code under the GPL first as Caldera, and then as SCO, and throw the case out.
Where life is going to get interesting is who is going to be suing SCO for damages. They have made very public and very damaging accusations against just about everyone. Someone is going to sue for defamation, and probably win.
The problem is, a database is supposed to be a collection of facts. That someone is and african american is fine, if you have the photographs, or eye-witness accounts to prove it. That someone is a prostitute is ok, if they have a recent history of convictions for prostitution.
But if you take those two adjectives, and you use them to describe someone based soley on intercepted communications is wrong. I'm not talking about from a "bigotry" perspective, I'm talking about from a pure scientific reasoning perspective.
Listen to your typical "Yo", and you will find Whites, asians, and/or hispanics that have the same speech patterns as an urban hoodlum. The color of their skin doesn't enter into it. Frankly the only "black" pattern of speach I have noticed is that many are baritone or bases. Most of the males in my family (Caucasians, mind you) are ALSO baritones and bases. You can infer culture about grammatical patterns, but you cannot determine skin color.
As far as prostitution goes, what if someone has a smart-alec kid who changes the answering machine message one day? What if you happen to catch an amorous couple role playing over the phone? If that was not complicated enough, even if you have a prostitute, is she the street-walking drug huffing type, or the high-priced corporate concubine, or the Hollywood Hiede with a regular stable of influential patrons?
In short, a database is a collection of facts. Conclusions are ALWAYS left up to an individual to decide. Placing conclusions formulated by an individual into a database pollutes the value of that database as an information source, and has historically lead to problems in application.
Re:Yes, It's Worth It.
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
You, my friend, have discovered the way.
It took me a while. I always had to have the nice apartment, the new car, the hot wife, the really fat internet pipe, and stimulating job. When broke and going through school visions of these things kept me going. Through a bizarre set of coincidence and the ability to use good fortune I managed to achieve all of these things in the space of a year.
Was I fulfilled? No.
I was working long hours only to be playing catchup on the bills, and my relationship. I struggled for years with nagging doubt about what was wrong in my life. Hell, I even tried the church thing for a while.
In the end, it was the stress of living beyond my means that was stretching my soul. I realized this only later, after cutting my hours at work, and trading in my fancy apartment for a humble row-home, and paying the last payment on that new car (now 3 years old.)
I'm not claiming to be all that wise. This is just the observation from a bumbling fool through life.
The extreme volume of email I deal with would crush the server. I'm sidegrading to Postfix and Courier-Imap while will take a lot of the overhead out of message delivery.
But I've still found the simple "No executable" rule to be as effective as any kind of virus scan. The notable exception is, of course, MS office documents that can embed executables in the data. I need a virus scanner for that, because I don't think I'd ever get away with banning.doc files as attachments.
Re:No Overtime No Vacation
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
In Toaism there is the belief that everything returns to the root. The Greeks had the concept of hubris. The cult of Statistics believes in regression to the mean.
Capital is like raging waters. If pent up it will eventually destroy the vessel blocking its path, become fouled and unusable, or simply evaporate. Capital is energy not being applied, not in equilibrium, not serving the Toa.
It is the natural order of things for those who horde to fall flat on their faces. For the once mighty to have the world spit upon them.
Hey, I'm still waiting for an upgrade that doesn't break something I already do. (My own software included.)
And 5 years from now M$ is going to ask why is everyone buying all this generic brand crap? Look at these features, it's stuff we've been doing since 1997!
You will also not that You are pulling away attachments on email. I have no idea what your company does. I work in the freight forwarding buisness. If I am not industry standard (and I believe email attachments are industry standard whatever industry you are in) then we will give up that on a competative front. I don't want my sales rep (who in the end bring in revenue that pays me) unable to recieve email that has a bid on it because I have become anal retentive on viruses. On workstations that have Outlook, I have simply disabled the ability to have any type of attachments except.doc,.pdf,.xls, and a couple others. Why couldn't you do the same thing?
To start, I wish to apologize for my hostile tone. Lets accept we live in 2 different worlds.
As I stated, by field is education. Email attachments have been an ongoing battle with my "users" because they never throw anything away. I'm not allowed to delete anything they create. Many times it is people within the same department (who have a shared drive on the RAID) who email each other large files because its "convienient."
These same folks then program their mail clients to check messages every minute, and send the email server into a complete and utter divebomb. I had to lock one guys account just so everyone could get email. That's an unneeded use of company resources.
I have an email virus filter that catches attachments during delivery. For a while we had Antivir. After the umpteen virus spread on the network and all of the virus companies took 3 days to fix it, I started supplimenting the virus scanner with "Sean's Razor." This system simply flagged and dropped any message with a potentially executable attachment. This combination has been working up until now, and I'm stumped.
Outlook is forbidden on our network for a variety of reasons already.
As far as the tape backups go, say what you will about antiqated tapes. I can go back in time and pull a file from last week. My Veritas software also does a hot backup of our MS SQL servers and our Linux-based RAID, at the same time.
Also, the DLT tapes we use can be dropped without trashing them. I can also send them offsite, should something smoke the datacenter.
Again, different needs. Different solutions. If I tried to make my way sound best, I'm sorry.
But I make no apologies about matters technical, nor on user policies. I am paid to make this system work. I have to juggle a zillion and 7 tasks. It that means USER A doesn't get some nifty feature, they always have the option of hiring someone to make that feature happen.
In the meantime I view my continued employment as tacit approval of my performance.
And let's be honest: Even if you would put a neon sign over the e-mail that read: "Don't open this: It contains a virus!", they would just go right ahead and open it. And NEVER underestimate how many people are totally stupid (I know from experience).
Twice a year we have someone wreck their workstation with the "Your computer is infected with a virus, just delete this file" chain letter.
We send memos, we beg, we just ask that folks call IT first. But nooooooo
Most modern office telephone systems have ways of disabling functions (such as speaker) on the telephone from the PBX or switch. Maybe you can tell the office administrator that cube-dwellers should have speaker disabled instead of damaging office eqiupment?
Amen.
Besides, cellophane over the toilet bowl is a MUCH more effective communication tool. Of course, I also like to leave stickies to call Al E. Gator at the local zoo too.
Half the reason my system works is because I have every stinking bugfix, workaround, patch, and compile option fine tuned for that box.
Under Windows I experimented with just about every VIA 4-in-1 driver set. I have the unnoffical ATI driver for the video board.
I'm one of the lucky guys with the XP1700 with a memory addressing problem. The workaround for Linux is to pass the nopentium flag to the kernel. (It's voodoo, I don't understand it, it works.) There are also a host of bugfixes in the Kernel compile options.
From what I understand its a goof with the AGP bus. Your links were helpful, but I've gotten so used to avoiding the XP partition on my machine...
I guess you could say that my system is stronger for having been bent and corrected. I was about ready to swear off whitebox machines altogether, when I remember all of the truely bizarre problems our Dells have at work.
I don't know where you people are getting all this 'XP is crap' stuff from.
I guess I'm just psychotic and the random lockups, bluescreens, the frustrating interface, games that don't work, and non-existant drivers were in my head.
And I'll also conceed that having an easier time getting linux support for the same hardware was a breeze by comparison was also a figment of my deranged mind. (That's not saying Linux was easy, mind you.)
I see now that there is in fact only one set of needs for everyone, and they are to buy the latest hardware with a factory installed operating system, and never touch it. Thank you!
That's all well and good for you. For me, the situation is different, my needs are different. Or rather, my users' needs are different.
I run a network at a science museum. Many of our users DO actually frob numbers, and only know how to do it in Excel. Our marketing department and our finance department come to mind.
But most of the users are not office workers. They are out in the museum running shows, fixing equipment, or dealing with customers. They need something to generate signs, posters, and the ocassional memo.
Yeah, but it's the principle! That's it... Look at the monkey! You have me dead to rights.
For what its worth, we never had Outlook. I've not had to explain why functions are missing from our intranet, nor why they have to log into the website to get the staff directory and the calendar. My employers are just so delighted when stuff works, however it works.
Hell, when I started they were still distributing contact lists and phone books on paper! This was in 1999.
Of course, the problem with these law enforcement databases is not that they can exchange information, it's that the information in them is suspect, libelous, our outright wrong.
My mother was working on on such system for tracking survielance calls. You would see observations like "Sounds black" or "Probable Prostitute". The place was run by Ex-law enforcement types, and they really thought these sorts of things were appropriate to store in a database.
If I have learned anything running databases at my current job, and for a volunteer organization, its that bad data is like a disease. You get folks who don't understand what goes where, or what is appropriate to store, you find yourself doing a whole lot of cleaning up later.
On one form we ask volunteers for Emergency Medical information and Allergies. I had to explicitly instruct people to stop submitting hayfever or dairy products we only want to know what to tell the Paramedic if you are unconcious.
Interesting. When Microsoft stops supporting an OS after 7 years, it is irresponsible. When RedHat does it after 2 or 3, it is just hunky dory.
RedHat? Hell I run Gentoo.
And the major reason is that I got sick of reinstalling the OS every 9 months to stay up2date on all the packages.
(Flashback)...
rpm -Uvh glibc-whateverversion.rpm >> Sorry bub, need RPM version 4 rpm -Uvh rpm-versionwhatever.rpm >> Sorry bub, need glibc-whateverversion rpm -Uvh glibc-whateverversion.rpm pm-versionwhatever.rpm >> Well I'd do that, but that would break the following packages: >> (Just about everything you have installed) rpm -Uvh * >> Sorry bub, need RPM version 4
I had a friend of mine go into Volcanology after we graduated high school in '94. There were a lot of openings in the field of Vulcanology back then. 6 volcanolgists (and 3 other people) where killed during a volcano workshop on what was thought to be an dormant volcano on Galeras Volcano in Columnbia in 1993. It wasn't.
I'm happy that you have a budget that permits you to spend more than I can. Bravo. Now get off your high horse.
I'm charged with keeping the system operating with a dearth of resources and a limited labor budget. They aren't throwing money at me to buy equipment. Hell, I have volunteers going through our old stuff to find out what is worth selling on ebay.
You have more storage space for email than my entire flipping data center. Now tell me, what do you use to back that up? My measly 100GB array, plus our databases and the email server take about 20 hours to back up on a SCSI tape.
You do back your systems up every night, don't you?
You see, I don't have customers. I have people relying on me to keep this shop running come hell, high water, or hogs in sneakers. The last thing I need to be growing a storage farm because someone can't figure out how to delete a bloody attachment when they are finished with it.
You will also note that I while pulling away attachments on email, I am providing an alternative. This alternative answers another problem with attachments: namely if the email is not attached to it you can't remember why you have 10 BusinessPlan2002.doc files in your attachment bin.
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The state has NO sense of humor about profiteers.
Just make sure he does it in a way that doesn't stain the interior. No fair chipping away at whatever resale value is left.
Frankly I find television idiotic. The fact that people would pay for it troubling. The fact that someone would go to the trouble of stealing it appauling. The fact that someone would go to the trouble of selling a kit designed to allow someone to steal TV the sign of a truely depraved society.
Say, what is the proper term for the whole computer, sans screen and peripherals? CPU really means the processor chip. I've always like "Computer". Workstation sounds impressive, but it usually refers to the whole setup (plus computer companies are reserving the word for their brawnier offerings.)
They have an compressor sucking the surrounding air, bottling it in tanks, and being sold for $1000/liter. The bottle comes with a free mask, what a deal!
When no one buys this SCOair, they call the constables over to complain about all the nose pirates. They insist that the elephant (IBM) next door it sucking all the air with his trunk and giving it to everyone.
Someone points out that just last week these same folks had tried a similar scheme with bottled water. After an hour of SCO's screaming the authorities cart the SCOair people away for disturbing the peace.
Where life is going to get interesting is who is going to be suing SCO for damages. They have made very public and very damaging accusations against just about everyone. Someone is going to sue for defamation, and probably win.
But if you take those two adjectives, and you use them to describe someone based soley on intercepted communications is wrong. I'm not talking about from a "bigotry" perspective, I'm talking about from a pure scientific reasoning perspective.
Listen to your typical "Yo", and you will find Whites, asians, and/or hispanics that have the same speech patterns as an urban hoodlum. The color of their skin doesn't enter into it. Frankly the only "black" pattern of speach I have noticed is that many are baritone or bases. Most of the males in my family (Caucasians, mind you) are ALSO baritones and bases. You can infer culture about grammatical patterns, but you cannot determine skin color.
As far as prostitution goes, what if someone has a smart-alec kid who changes the answering machine message one day? What if you happen to catch an amorous couple role playing over the phone? If that was not complicated enough, even if you have a prostitute, is she the street-walking drug huffing type, or the high-priced corporate concubine, or the Hollywood Hiede with a regular stable of influential patrons?
In short, a database is a collection of facts. Conclusions are ALWAYS left up to an individual to decide. Placing conclusions formulated by an individual into a database pollutes the value of that database as an information source, and has historically lead to problems in application.
It took me a while. I always had to have the nice apartment, the new car, the hot wife, the really fat internet pipe, and stimulating job. When broke and going through school visions of these things kept me going. Through a bizarre set of coincidence and the ability to use good fortune I managed to achieve all of these things in the space of a year.
Was I fulfilled? No.
I was working long hours only to be playing catchup on the bills, and my relationship. I struggled for years with nagging doubt about what was wrong in my life. Hell, I even tried the church thing for a while.
In the end, it was the stress of living beyond my means that was stretching my soul. I realized this only later, after cutting my hours at work, and trading in my fancy apartment for a humble row-home, and paying the last payment on that new car (now 3 years old.)
I'm not claiming to be all that wise. This is just the observation from a bumbling fool through life.
But I've still found the simple "No executable" rule to be as effective as any kind of virus scan. The notable exception is, of course, MS office documents that can embed executables in the data. I need a virus scanner for that, because I don't think I'd ever get away with banning .doc files as attachments.
Capital is like raging waters. If pent up it will eventually destroy the vessel blocking its path, become fouled and unusable, or simply evaporate. Capital is energy not being applied, not in equilibrium, not serving the Toa.
It is the natural order of things for those who horde to fall flat on their faces. For the once mighty to have the world spit upon them.
We just have to stop taking money seriously.
And 5 years from now M$ is going to ask why is everyone buying all this generic brand crap? Look at these features, it's stuff we've been doing since 1997!
But that is exactly the point.
To start, I wish to apologize for my hostile tone. Lets accept we live in 2 different worlds.
As I stated, by field is education. Email attachments have been an ongoing battle with my "users" because they never throw anything away. I'm not allowed to delete anything they create. Many times it is people within the same department (who have a shared drive on the RAID) who email each other large files because its "convienient."
These same folks then program their mail clients to check messages every minute, and send the email server into a complete and utter divebomb. I had to lock one guys account just so everyone could get email. That's an unneeded use of company resources.
I have an email virus filter that catches attachments during delivery. For a while we had Antivir. After the umpteen virus spread on the network and all of the virus companies took 3 days to fix it, I started supplimenting the virus scanner with "Sean's Razor." This system simply flagged and dropped any message with a potentially executable attachment. This combination has been working up until now, and I'm stumped.
Outlook is forbidden on our network for a variety of reasons already.
As far as the tape backups go, say what you will about antiqated tapes. I can go back in time and pull a file from last week. My Veritas software also does a hot backup of our MS SQL servers and our Linux-based RAID, at the same time.
Also, the DLT tapes we use can be dropped without trashing them. I can also send them offsite, should something smoke the datacenter.
Again, different needs. Different solutions. If I tried to make my way sound best, I'm sorry.
But I make no apologies about matters technical, nor on user policies. I am paid to make this system work. I have to juggle a zillion and 7 tasks. It that means USER A doesn't get some nifty feature, they always have the option of hiring someone to make that feature happen.
In the meantime I view my continued employment as tacit approval of my performance.
I'm hoping the web-based format can provide a helping hand to organize the information, eliminate duplicates, and really lock down who gets what file.
It's been a backburner project for a while. This is just my latest excuse to actually do it.
Twice a year we have someone wreck their workstation with the "Your computer is infected with a virus, just delete this file" chain letter.
We send memos, we beg, we just ask that folks call IT first. But nooooooo
Amen.
Besides, cellophane over the toilet bowl is a MUCH more effective communication tool. Of course, I also like to leave stickies to call Al E. Gator at the local zoo too.
Hmmm. I'll have to look into that.
Half the reason my system works is because I have every stinking bugfix, workaround, patch, and compile option fine tuned for that box.
Under Windows I experimented with just about every VIA 4-in-1 driver set. I have the unnoffical ATI driver for the video board.
I'm one of the lucky guys with the XP1700 with a memory addressing problem. The workaround for Linux is to pass the nopentium flag to the kernel. (It's voodoo, I don't understand it, it works.) There are also a host of bugfixes in the Kernel compile options.
From what I understand its a goof with the AGP bus. Your links were helpful, but I've gotten so used to avoiding the XP partition on my machine...
I guess you could say that my system is stronger for having been bent and corrected. I was about ready to swear off whitebox machines altogether, when I remember all of the truely bizarre problems our Dells have at work.
Lets face it, everything sucks in different ways.
I guess I'm just psychotic and the random lockups, bluescreens, the frustrating interface, games that don't work, and non-existant drivers were in my head.
And I'll also conceed that having an easier time getting linux support for the same hardware was a breeze by comparison was also a figment of my deranged mind. (That's not saying Linux was easy, mind you.)
I see now that there is in fact only one set of needs for everyone, and they are to buy the latest hardware with a factory installed operating system, and never touch it. Thank you!
It has a Yamaha chipset, and which one escapes me at the moment.
I'm using the Analog outputs, but I do have a fiber-out to digital. My speakers, on the other hand, do not.
I run a network at a science museum. Many of our users DO actually frob numbers, and only know how to do it in Excel. Our marketing department and our finance department come to mind.
But most of the users are not office workers. They are out in the museum running shows, fixing equipment, or dealing with customers. They need something to generate signs, posters, and the ocassional memo.
I'm not calling them stupid, just busy.
For what its worth, we never had Outlook. I've not had to explain why functions are missing from our intranet, nor why they have to log into the website to get the staff directory and the calendar. My employers are just so delighted when stuff works, however it works.
Hell, when I started they were still distributing contact lists and phone books on paper! This was in 1999.
My mother was working on on such system for tracking survielance calls. You would see observations like "Sounds black" or "Probable Prostitute". The place was run by Ex-law enforcement types, and they really thought these sorts of things were appropriate to store in a database.
If I have learned anything running databases at my current job, and for a volunteer organization, its that bad data is like a disease. You get folks who don't understand what goes where, or what is appropriate to store, you find yourself doing a whole lot of cleaning up later.
On one form we ask volunteers for Emergency Medical information and Allergies. I had to explicitly instruct people to stop submitting hayfever or dairy products we only want to know what to tell the Paramedic if you are unconcious.
RedHat? Hell I run Gentoo.
And the major reason is that I got sick of reinstalling the OS every 9 months to stay up2date on all the packages.
(Flashback)...
I had a friend of mine go into Volcanology after we graduated high school in '94. There were a lot of openings in the field of Vulcanology back then. 6 volcanolgists (and 3 other people) where killed during a volcano workshop on what was thought to be an dormant volcano on Galeras Volcano in Columnbia in 1993. It wasn't.
I'm charged with keeping the system operating with a dearth of resources and a limited labor budget. They aren't throwing money at me to buy equipment. Hell, I have volunteers going through our old stuff to find out what is worth selling on ebay.
You have more storage space for email than my entire flipping data center. Now tell me, what do you use to back that up? My measly 100GB array, plus our databases and the email server take about 20 hours to back up on a SCSI tape.
You do back your systems up every night, don't you?
You see, I don't have customers. I have people relying on me to keep this shop running come hell, high water, or hogs in sneakers. The last thing I need to be growing a storage farm because someone can't figure out how to delete a bloody attachment when they are finished with it.
You will also note that I while pulling away attachments on email, I am providing an alternative. This alternative answers another problem with attachments: namely if the email is not attached to it you can't remember why you have 10 BusinessPlan2002.doc files in your attachment bin.