You can't manage IT like other organizations. IT is all about creativity and collaboration. When you manage IT like an assembly line, you never get better at what you do. You just churn out widgets. Who cares that Bob's team built a widget already for that other project? They steamrolled through it and produced something hard to maintain and understand, and since we too are due date-driven, it's faster for us to reinvent it than retrofit their solution.
I'm not sure I follow your logic here? Why can't IT be managed like other organizations? It has goals and budgets like other departments. This seems akin to saying you can't manage the mail room. They need to be creative as well to get their job done and hand out check stubs, magazines, etc.
Churning out widgets that perform their designed function is a great accomplishment in an efficient business. Accounting and Legal perform assigned tasks without being given "creative freedom". Your assertion that managed IT departments turn out "hard to maintain and understand" code is baseless. It is perhaps true in a badly managed IT shop, but a parent post posited that widget driven IT shops write bloated but easy to understand code. The output of any IT team is driven by the goals, directives and management of the team.
Even when you consider software development companies instead of general IT organizations in non-software companies, the really interesting thought and planning is done by senior architects, not the bulk of the programmer work force.
Too many people long for the good ole days when IT departments were new, productivity driving machines. These days IT is an understood cost center in nearly every business. IT is like the highway system in the US. It was great fun designing and building millions of miles of road and bridges. Now someone has to maintain those roads, repaint the stripes and inspect the bridges. It's not the most glamorous work, but it has to be done. Work your way to the top and you can get the best jobs where you get to design the few new projects available. I'm not sure why this is stated as a problem.
What's the point of owning a shiny new Macbook Pro if you're going to leave it at home for a year? If you don't want to take it, sell it and buy a new one when you get back. Carrying a laptop is a bit of a drag though. The iPod, camera, etc can pretty much be toted without any effort. A laptop is a real pain (5 pounds with cords,etc) and I'd find myself worrying about it too much. If you are traveling alone, only take what you can drag with you into the can.
Very nice. Wish I had mod points. What if you are using plain BIOS motherboard with no TPM? Good question. I suppose running on vmware or other vm would invalidate any certification based on running bare metal.
With SOX requirements of data retention, explosion of personal digital video, the increasing resolution of porn and just plain email retention there is no end in sight to data storage requirements. There are large firms buying 10-15TB of "throw-away" modular SAN storage a week. The storage vendors are doing well, the software vendors who are trying to wrestle the beast into managed submission are doing quite well. Tell me, when do you think storage requirements will go down?
We have hit a nice spot on the CPU power scale. There's little call for a new CPU speed race. The race there is to make CPU power denser. Fit more in the same rack space. Right now, storage isn't there yet. Storage is still in the Pentium II stage of development. Make it faster and hold more at nearly any cost. Once storage lifecycle software comes of age the escalating storage requirements of business may taper off to a normal replacement cycle. Until then, IT budgets may stay at 20-40% storage.
Oh yeah, get an education. Certs are a way in the door same as a degree. Difference is college is much more fun and can stay on your resume for 40 years. Try that with a Novell 3.x cert in 20 years. You might as well take a picture of yourself next to a VAX or holding some punch cards as all it'll do is show you've been around for a while. Another thing college gets you is an alumni network. For some reason, people like to hire, promote and socialize with people who went to the same university. ["Remember sitting in the quad with the huge pecan tree?" or "We got so drunk at the !"] No one talks about getting their cert at DeVry. NOBODY!
It sounds to me like Skype is saying, "Hey guys, if you let us use your networks we'll undercut all your prices and undermine your business models. Then all that money you spent to build out your cellular networks will benefit us instead of you! Deal?"
No. They are asking that customers be able to choose the hardware they use to access the network they are PAYING for. If one were to sign up with Verizon for a data plan with unlimited usage, one should be able to use all the bandwidth allowed according to the plan in any way desired. Why should Verizon have an approved list of devices you can only purchase from them? Any arguments about misbehaving devices is specious since the allocated spectrum isn't discretely divided in such a way that Verizon's phones use a different band from other cell providers. A bad device is just as likely to chirp on Sprint's spectrum as Verizon's.
They're trying it in Venezuela. What's the basis for doing it here? Why should Skype benefit and the cellular carriers gain nothing? What are they trying in Venezuela? Is this an attempt to link Skype's argument with a disliked foreign leader?
"Block consumer choice" is an interesting choice of wording here. I've heard most of these complaints before. Then again, T-Mobile allows me to install third-party apps on my BlackBerry, and I can even use it as a wireless modem if I hook it up to my laptop. Presumably I could then run Skype on the laptop (though how well it would work is another story). Kinda makes me wonder what Skype is actually hoping to achieve.
T-mobile is unique in not charging for Blackberry tethering. Cingular will charge for the privilege even though it is built into Blackberry phones as evidenced by T-mobile and EU phone plans. This is then a great example of cell companies limiting consumer choice. Cingular and T-mobile are GSM providers so I am not sure how Cingular would know if I tethered an unlocked Blackberry.
What do WiFi and Bluetooth have to do with running Skype over a cellular network? This sounds like a red herring to allow them to start talking about "crippling" again. How have the carriers "crippled" their WiFi-enabled phones anyway? This one I have not heard of.
Not familiar with this either.
And they manage to avoid the most important question: If Skype is encouraging the government to pass regulation to allow Skype into the telcos' markets, can we therefore assume that Skype is willing to itself be regulated, exactly as the telcos are regulated today?
Again, Skype is not asking to be allowed onto the phone companies network. They are asking for the cell network providers to start acting like the common carrier they are and sell themselves to be. If they want to be a wireless AOL, then just tell everyone when they sign up that they can only use the network to get to approved content in a manner determined by the phone company. There is nothing unusual about a phone company demanding the equipment on their network be bought and approved by them. AT&T made customers use their phones for years. Once that restriction was removed (not by AT&T's choice) the phone market exploded with choices of handsets that we all benefit from today. Yes, Skype would benefit from what they are proposing. Does that make the proposition automatically bad? Hopefully by 4G we will have a common platform that will make the CDMA/GSM division irrelevant in the US and allow real consumer choice based on the only real distinctions: the phone/device of your choice and the network which offers the performance, features and value which matches your needs.
Very good suggestion. Remember, the recruiter only gets credit for employees who stay for some period of time usually. A close friend of mine is a recruiter and tells me should would be VERY upset if all the hard work she put in to get a recruit through the hiring process was undermined at that stage. Use the recruiter and your new manager to get the situation resolved. Also, NEVER quit your first job until you have everything in writing. All the "i" dotted, all the urine tested, before you mention to your employer that you have an offer. There will likely be a counter from your employer if they like or need you.
Anyway, hope it works out. I relocated for a job a few years back. My new manager actually went above and beyond what I was promised. He got me extra money for "unforeseen" expenses and such. Great guy. Dying company.
What's not true? There are labor boards in many states who enforce labor laws on your behalf which do not interfere with your tort rights. Stupid troll. When did Rush Limbaugh get mod points?
He has no constitutional power to interpret the constitution.
Show me where in the Constitution it gives anyone the power to interpret the Constitution. It isn't specifically called out in the document. One of the great moments in our history was the court case Marbury v Madison when Congress and the Executive ceded the right to the Judiciary.
The Attorney General (AG) is the chief prosecutor and enforcer of the law in the land. From Wiki: The office of Attorney General was established by Congress in 1789. The original duties of this officer were "to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned, and to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law when required by the President of the United States, or when requested by the heads of any of the departments." His opinions are of great importance to the Executive which has the power to conduct searches, prosecute war, etc. Unless a case is brought before a court by a person "with standing" the courts cannot interpret or refute the AG's interpretation of the constitution. We have seen how difficult it is sometimes to get "standing" for a court when you cannot prove the exact person being affected. [See AT&T domestic spying case.]
That nitwit and complete idiot AG sat before Arlen Spector and minced words over whether habeas corpus is granted by the Constitution. That's outrageous. What a complete asshole. Where are the Press? Glad we have only two more years until the next Administration. I don't care who it is as long as they don't continue our march to the Unlimited Executive.
I think it important to note that the point I was making was in regard to cheap servers with 2 to 3 disks. If you have mission critical servers in 1U form factor, that is a mistake in itself unless there is some clustering or such to protect.
Rebooting a server takes on the order of minutes (many minutes, if it has a lot of physical drives attached to it). How much money does your company lose in a few minutes while the relevant service(s) is/are down ? Would it be enough to pay for a RAID controller ?
If we have many physical disks attached, we are not in the described scenario. Feel free to have RAID 1 in that case. Not every company decides on a solution that includes a RAID controller.
RAID isn't supposed to protect you against software failures (be they in the operating system or the operator), it's supposed to protect you against hardware failure.
You are changing my argument. I never said RAID 1 is supposed to protect against software errors or admin errors. In fact, I plainly state that it doesn't. It is part of my argument against using RAID 1 when ONLY two disks are available. With a system that contains only two disks, what is the likelihood that it also contains two separate disk controllers? Not likely. Your one hardware failure is still quite capable of taking out both disks and negating the advantage of RAID 1.
Your point about taking a while to bring up disks could be extended to refer to NAS and SAN disks. With Journaled Filesystems the time to bring them up should be reduced. If you are using raw partitions with Oracle or the likes, then a test of your environment should show how long to recover and that should be factored into a decision to deploy my proposed configuration or your preferred config. I'm not dogmatic about this if the data in an environment sways the balance toward RAID.
RAID protects you against hardware failure.
Yes. The degree of protection depends on the redundancy of the setup.
Backups (your "offline mirror") protect you against software failure. Yes, it can.
You need _both_ to have a reliable server (outside of some external functionality, like clustering). It is be nice to have both and sleep well at night with a quiet beeper/mobile. My argument was in reference to when you cannot have both.
Not really. Nice try with the bad analogy though. If you only have two drives, I prefer a second copy that is not part of a continuously mirrored set. There are generally a few bad things that can happen:
Dead disk. If this happens with Raid 1 you are usually OK. There are sometimes problems with performance as the drive dies but with a good RAID controller or software LVM, nothing dramatic should occur. With a dd copy or offline mirror you get a crash and boot from the alternate copy. If things are pretty static on that drive, little to no loss. You get a small amount of downtime. [Logs should go to a log server.]
Filesystem corruption. If this happens on a RAID 1 setup, you are toast. You have two very good copies of garbage you can try to recover. You can recover from tape or some other backup method. Not very fast and downtime is extended. With an offline copy, you boot from it and only lose small changes from last image write. Small downtime.
Bad patch or admin mistake. Depending on what you did [rm -Rf *] you could be really hosed with an online mirror. That patch set could really have messed up your system and you have to back out. You can use you package manager and/or OS variant tool to back out of your patches or you could reboot from your offline mirror and get your unplanned outage over with and start root-causing your issue. Downtime is variable with online mirror but longer (sometimes much longer) than with offline mirror.
I'm not saying mirrors are bad, if I have three disks I keep two in a mirror and another as an offline mirror. With Solaris, I break the mirror and apply patches to the offline copy and then boot from it saving me time at night and reducing the patch window. I just prefer the offline mirror because it covers my ass in two ways vs RAID 1 that only covers my ass in case of disk failure. There are some performance benefits to RAID1, but I really don't need performance from my boot drive. I need performance from the data drives on the SAN or NAS where my reads and writes should occur.
If you disagree, then that's OK. There are many ways to admin boxes. As long as you have a justification and rationale for your decisions that make sense, you'll have a good reasoned response for the CEO when things fail. And they will.
Nice options, but I really prefer to not use RAID 1 since it doesn't protect against filesystem corruption. Your boot device is probably pretty static if your data resides on a SAN array or NAS device. Cron a dd, LVM mirror resync or ufsdump to occur every night or once a week or even every patch cycle. It depends on how static your environment is. A place I visited only updated the mirror a few days after patching to make sure the patchset burned in nicely.
I have been using Office 2007 for a month or more now. I set in preferences that ALL my docs should by default be saved in the older Office97/XP format. It doesn't nag very often about the format and I don't accidentally send.docx and.xlsx files to people. Compatibility problem solved. This could easily be set on large deployments as well.
Office 2007 is really the first upgrade to Office since 97 that is worth it. Kudos to the dev team on a nice rethinking of the apps. The ribbon is a big change for the better. Outlook is MUCH better [how secure is still a question]. Excel and Word feel the same. I don't use Access. OneNote is a freakin killer app! The ability to print boarding passes and anything else directly to a digital organizer is a time saver that's hard for me to really express enough. I find myself dreaming of a laptop with the flip down screen and tablet functionality for the first time. Plus, OneNote 2007 fixes little issues like a lack of tables in the first version. It still needs to import web items cleaner, though.
I am not a big MS fan, but people should really give them credit when the finally do something right.
It's probably your phone's fault. In rural areas, T-mobile has a roaming agreement with Cingular. If you can't get T-mobile service, you should roam to Cingular on 850Mhz. Same as dropping the 1800Mhz Cingular signal and picking up the 850 GSM when you're a Cingular customer.
I have driven across the country a few times and had good coverage from T-mobile (sometimes roaming on Cingular and other networks) most of the way. I-70 between Reno and Salt Lake City is a vast dead zone, so if that area matters to you, then maybe someone has a CDMA signal there.
I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three weeks last year for work and found the "Chip-and-Pin" to be a pain in the ass when you don't have a Chip-and-Pin card. I found quite a few places with new rules which forbade using cards without Chip-and-Pin! If you come in from another country which does not have Chip-and-Pin, you are screwed. Credit Cards have become the new international currency (backed by various government species). They should be very careful about changes that make some countries incompatible with the rest.
That said, I would prefer they bring Chip-and-Pin to the US. I much prefer my credit card staying within eyesight than having some aspiring actor walk off with it for 10 minutes.
Grease may be a problem. Oil? Doubt it. There is no reason why clean oils couldn't be used to prevent evaporation. That is exactly how flushless urinals work. The urine is heavier than the "cap" of light oil which sits atop and prevents a smell problem. You'll find more of these cropping up around the world to save on water, plumbing and maintenance.
I don't think anyone is defending THEIR rights. My problem with the treatment of sexual offenders is the double jeopardy. The Supreme Court decided a few years ago that it was OK to keep sex offenders in confinement if it could be shown that they would "likely" offend again. What is so special about sexual offenses that the Constitution needs to be ignored? Why not keep drug addicts in prison until we can find a cure for addiction? How about the poor? Should we keep criminals in prison until the can prove they have solid plans to join the middle class? How much worse is viewing child porn than the white collar crime of stealing the retirement and pension plans from thousands of senior citizens?
I have a child and family who have been victims of violent sex crimes. I also believe the AC above in that some of the predators committed crimes that could be thought of as worse than murder. Has everyone convicted of a "sex crime" committed worse than murder? Of course not. Those convicted of heinous crimes should be punished accordingly. The rest should be treated as the rest of America's criminals and not with some special distinction because the crime involved genitalia. Too many stupid laws are being written by pandering politicians because it's easy to claim they are "protecting our children". Violent crime is violent crime regardless of the motivation.
If you believe that sexual predators are more dangerous than other criminals, the length of imprisonment should reflect that. Permanent tracking and ridicule seems to be counter-productive to rehabilitation but if that is what the community wants to do, include it in the sentences at conviction. Below is an excerpt from the NY Times in 2001:
[Many] states have 'sexually violent predator' statutes that were enacted to keep potentially dangerous perverts off streets even after their sentences had been served; as of last year [2000], nearly 900 sex offenders around nation were locked away for indefinite terms; laws have withstood major legal challenges, including arguments that locking up criminal after he has served his sentence amounts to double jeopardy; United States Supreme Court has upheld laws twice; such laws are incredibly expensive, and cost only goes up as number of sex offenders committed in civil trials rises; in addition, such laws raise deeply troubling question: can prediction of behavior be good enough to justify locking someone away; given costs and legal troubles of such civil commitments, some states are exploring alternatives, such as longer terms of supervision for released sex offender
The RIAA and the honorable senator from Utah predict that everyone on/. has stolen or will steal software, music and/or movies digitally. As such, you should all register with the government as copywrite criminals to be tracked. At least until all music, movies and software can be verified "genuine" in all formats.
No sir, I do not subscribe to Social Darwinism. I never stated that "better" societies prevailed. I said "Advanced and healthy" and "Stronger" groups prevailed. To deny that European civilization was not more technologically advanced at the time than Native Americans would be absurd. To believe they were not stronger would of course deny the outcome. Just because disease played a major role in the outcome doesn't mean it isn't part of the equation that determines a healthy society. Cultures who were exposed by war and commerce to many other cultures and consequently their diseases had their populations strengthened eventually as in the case of measles and chicken pox. Measels became much less deadly over generations. Many people now are immune to the pox and I would consider that an enhancement which protects them.
Regardless of what you call accidents of history. The results of those accidents formed societies. Remember, I never said "better". China's rise to economic power does not mean we all bow to them. That's non sequitur. I certainly don't think everyone has been adopting the American society model (though some presidents seem to try and impose it). My discussion was about displacing entire peoples from their lands, not adopting Free Market Communism.
Are white people incapable of being different from one another. You imply that all white people are the same. I'm pretty sure there is a huge difference between a Bosnian and a Swede. There were different cultures in this country for many years. The differences have magnified over the years from a difference between English Puritans and the Danish to the current Mexican/Vietnamese/Cuban/Croat/Indian mixture we seem to have now. Cultural differences do not exist only where the skin pigmentation differs.
Plantation owners were a very small portion of the population. In the same way that billionaires are a part of the American population. The rich always fuck the rest of us. No matter who we or they are. Most people in colonial America didn't own slaves and certainly didn't screw them. I'm sure there were a few but that hardly defines a culture. Most cultures prior to then also had slaves. A lot of them had defined laws and customs regarding trade in sex slaves (American colonies had no such trade). No one seems to dwell on slave fucking when referring to Egypt, Rome, Spanish, Ottoman and Persian societies.
As for the "Europeans came and stole the land from peaceful people..." Get over it. Every piece of land in this world was once occupied by some other group of people. Why don't we start protesting that the English get out of England? Give it back to the Welsh. They were there first! Native American cultures were hunter gatherer societies. Very romantic in theory to live off the land, but ultimately a few thousand years behind Europe, Asia and parts of Africa. I feel bad about the Aztec and Inca being decimated because they had a fairly advanced culture, but even they were insular and technologically inferior. Had they invented the wheel? Sailing boats for commerce? Stopped sacrificing people to their Gods?
Advanced and healthy societies generally replace other societies. Stronger groups of people take the land from others. That's how the world has always worked. Stop feeling bad for the Native Americans, the victims of the Vandals, Mongols and Anglo-Saxons and everyone else who got their ass kicked by stronger populations. This guilt over our cultural dominance has to stop. You can't put the Buffalo back on the prairie and you can't have Oklahoma and Nebraska back. Get over it.
Are you arguing that Mexicans are COLONIZING the United States to establish a mercantilist economy in Mexico? You are supporting the parent's argument!
Besides, there are many differences between the present immigration wave and previous immigrant groups. Those other groups were people who wanted to become American. The Irish saw themselves as establishing a new home here and worked hard and fought to become integrated into the American society. The same with the Italians, Poles, Greeks, et al. Their cultures enriched ours as they became American. A large portion of Mexicans do not want to assimilate with Americans. They see their stay here as temporary -- a kind of sharecropping without permission of the farmer. A percentage of the fruits of their labor are transferred back to Mexico and Central America as cash instead of staying in the US as taxes, investments and savings. They form societies within our cities which have no intention of folding into the fabric of the surrounding communities and actually harbor a small percentage of radicals who espouse Mexico retaking the southwest.
I hope to someday have a prosperous neighbor to the south with strong trade and cultural ties to the US and Canada. Mexicans are a fun, energetic, intelligent and industrious people who deserve a better government and economy then they have at present. Their abundant natural resources should allow them to succeed without colonizing the US. Mexicans need to stay in Mexico and work hard there to make it a better neighbor and place to live.
I think the point of the discussion is being missed here. It is the rocketeer's contention that AP is NOT AN EXPLOSIVE. Therefore, it is not covered by current laws which allow our friends at the ATFE to regulate explosives. Unless there is a law which allows such regulation of fuels (which AP appears to be) they should be free to use and store as a fuel. That doesn't mean that there can't be reasonable rules for the storage of fuels in certain amounts. Every gas station and propane dealer has regulations to deal with in that regard whereas I as a small consumer are not required to keep my gasoline can in a locked cabinet outside my residence so many feet from a door.
If you believe that AP is an explosive, it is reasonable to expect the ATFE to regulate in a strict manner its use and storage. I also agree with fishbowl that I'd very much like to know if someone is housing a large amount of explosives next door. I don't really care however if he has something which simply causes his house to burn A LOT FASTER than normal. I just need to get my video camera ready quicker to capture the 5 minute complete meltdown of his two-story Victorian!
In either case, I hardly think I am a good arbitor of whether it is in fact an explosive. I would guess that not many of us on/. are well enough acquainted with the regulations and chemistry to decide this either. I simply want enough AP available in a local hobby shop for me to build a CATO with my kid as my father did with me.
For those who travel for a living, there is an office wherever you can find a network connection. I tried a 3G card from Verizon and wasn't happy with the coverage. I find myself in a Mariott, airport club or Starbucks often enough that free wi-fi and my T-mobile hotspot account are enough. Printing and faxing are the biggest problem. An easy backup method would be appreciated as Windows offline folders are a little unreliable. [Don't bother replying with Linux solution. Not an option.]
I don't like working in Kinkos. Too much like an office! Much prefer Starbucks. Just wish they'd all have a laserprinter in the corner.
When I upgraded to 939 from Socket A/AGP, I found the ASRock Dual 939 had an AM2 upgrade path. It should allow me to piecemeal my upgrade to AM2, PCI Express, DDR2. I have had great success with the board and love the ability to slowly upgrade to the next level. I am not one to brag about a commercial product, but this one has been a great buy.
I have been Intel free on the desktop since the K6 200Mhz. I have a Core Duo laptop and a Core 2 Duo coming soon. The performance is enough to make me consider jumping ship. I would have to buy all new gear except my drives.
Then there is the issue of acceleration. Shawyer has calculated that as soon as the thruster starts to move, it will use up energy stored in the cavity, draining energy faster than it can be replaced. So while the thrust of a motionless emdrive is high, the faster the engine moves, the more the thrust falls. Shawyer now reckons the emdrive will be better suited to powering vehicles that hover rather than accelerate rapidly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I follow your logic here? Why can't IT be managed like other organizations? It has goals and budgets like other departments. This seems akin to saying you can't manage the mail room. They need to be creative as well to get their job done and hand out check stubs, magazines, etc.
Churning out widgets that perform their designed function is a great accomplishment in an efficient business. Accounting and Legal perform assigned tasks without being given "creative freedom". Your assertion that managed IT departments turn out "hard to maintain and understand" code is baseless. It is perhaps true in a badly managed IT shop, but a parent post posited that widget driven IT shops write bloated but easy to understand code. The output of any IT team is driven by the goals, directives and management of the team.
Too many people long for the good ole days when IT departments were new, productivity driving machines. These days IT is an understood cost center in nearly every business. IT is like the highway system in the US. It was great fun designing and building millions of miles of road and bridges. Now someone has to maintain those roads, repaint the stripes and inspect the bridges. It's not the most glamorous work, but it has to be done. Work your way to the top and you can get the best jobs where you get to design the few new projects available. I'm not sure why this is stated as a problem.
What's the point of owning a shiny new Macbook Pro if you're going to leave it at home for a year? If you don't want to take it, sell it and buy a new one when you get back. Carrying a laptop is a bit of a drag though. The iPod, camera, etc can pretty much be toted without any effort. A laptop is a real pain (5 pounds with cords,etc) and I'd find myself worrying about it too much. If you are traveling alone, only take what you can drag with you into the can.
Very nice. Wish I had mod points. What if you are using plain BIOS motherboard with no TPM? Good question. I suppose running on vmware or other vm would invalidate any certification based on running bare metal.
Two words: Storage Admin
With SOX requirements of data retention, explosion of personal digital video, the increasing resolution of porn and just plain email retention there is no end in sight to data storage requirements. There are large firms buying 10-15TB of "throw-away" modular SAN storage a week. The storage vendors are doing well, the software vendors who are trying to wrestle the beast into managed submission are doing quite well. Tell me, when do you think storage requirements will go down?
We have hit a nice spot on the CPU power scale. There's little call for a new CPU speed race. The race there is to make CPU power denser. Fit more in the same rack space. Right now, storage isn't there yet. Storage is still in the Pentium II stage of development. Make it faster and hold more at nearly any cost. Once storage lifecycle software comes of age the escalating storage requirements of business may taper off to a normal replacement cycle. Until then, IT budgets may stay at 20-40% storage.
Oh yeah, get an education. Certs are a way in the door same as a degree. Difference is college is much more fun and can stay on your resume for 40 years. Try that with a Novell 3.x cert in 20 years. You might as well take a picture of yourself next to a VAX or holding some punch cards as all it'll do is show you've been around for a while. Another thing college gets you is an alumni network. For some reason, people like to hire, promote and socialize with people who went to the same university. ["Remember sitting in the quad with the huge pecan tree?" or "We got so drunk at the !"] No one talks about getting their cert at DeVry. NOBODY!
It sounds to me like Skype is saying, "Hey guys, if you let us use your networks we'll undercut all your prices and undermine your business models. Then all that money you spent to build out your cellular networks will benefit us instead of you! Deal?"
No. They are asking that customers be able to choose the hardware they use to access the network they are PAYING for. If one were to sign up with Verizon for a data plan with unlimited usage, one should be able to use all the bandwidth allowed according to the plan in any way desired. Why should Verizon have an approved list of devices you can only purchase from them? Any arguments about misbehaving devices is specious since the allocated spectrum isn't discretely divided in such a way that Verizon's phones use a different band from other cell providers. A bad device is just as likely to chirp on Sprint's spectrum as Verizon's.
They're trying it in Venezuela. What's the basis for doing it here? Why should Skype benefit and the cellular carriers gain nothing?
What are they trying in Venezuela? Is this an attempt to link Skype's argument with a disliked foreign leader?
"Block consumer choice" is an interesting choice of wording here. I've heard most of these complaints before. Then again, T-Mobile allows me to install third-party apps on my BlackBerry, and I can even use it as a wireless modem if I hook it up to my laptop. Presumably I could then run Skype on the laptop (though how well it would work is another story). Kinda makes me wonder what Skype is actually hoping to achieve.
T-mobile is unique in not charging for Blackberry tethering. Cingular will charge for the privilege even though it is built into Blackberry phones as evidenced by T-mobile and EU phone plans. This is then a great example of cell companies limiting consumer choice. Cingular and T-mobile are GSM providers so I am not sure how Cingular would know if I tethered an unlocked Blackberry.
What do WiFi and Bluetooth have to do with running Skype over a cellular network? This sounds like a red herring to allow them to start talking about "crippling" again. How have the carriers "crippled" their WiFi-enabled phones anyway? This one I have not heard of.
Not familiar with this either.
And they manage to avoid the most important question: If Skype is encouraging the government to pass regulation to allow Skype into the telcos' markets, can we therefore assume that Skype is willing to itself be regulated, exactly as the telcos are regulated today?
Again, Skype is not asking to be allowed onto the phone companies network. They are asking for the cell network providers to start acting like the common carrier they are and sell themselves to be. If they want to be a wireless AOL, then just tell everyone when they sign up that they can only use the network to get to approved content in a manner determined by the phone company. There is nothing unusual about a phone company demanding the equipment on their network be bought and approved by them. AT&T made customers use their phones for years. Once that restriction was removed (not by AT&T's choice) the phone market exploded with choices of handsets that we all benefit from today. Yes, Skype would benefit from what they are proposing. Does that make the proposition automatically bad? Hopefully by 4G we will have a common platform that will make the CDMA/GSM division irrelevant in the US and allow real consumer choice based on the only real distinctions: the phone/device of your choice and the network which offers the performance, features and value which matches your needs.
Very good suggestion. Remember, the recruiter only gets credit for employees who stay for some period of time usually. A close friend of mine is a recruiter and tells me should would be VERY upset if all the hard work she put in to get a recruit through the hiring process was undermined at that stage. Use the recruiter and your new manager to get the situation resolved. Also, NEVER quit your first job until you have everything in writing. All the "i" dotted, all the urine tested, before you mention to your employer that you have an offer. There will likely be a counter from your employer if they like or need you.
Anyway, hope it works out. I relocated for a job a few years back. My new manager actually went above and beyond what I was promised. He got me extra money for "unforeseen" expenses and such. Great guy. Dying company.
What's not true? There are labor boards in many states who enforce labor laws on your behalf which do not interfere with your tort rights. Stupid troll. When did Rush Limbaugh get mod points?
Show me where in the Constitution it gives anyone the power to interpret the Constitution. It isn't specifically called out in the document. One of the great moments in our history was the court case Marbury v Madison when Congress and the Executive ceded the right to the Judiciary.
The Attorney General (AG) is the chief prosecutor and enforcer of the law in the land. From Wiki: The office of Attorney General was established by Congress in 1789. The original duties of this officer were "to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned, and to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law when required by the President of the United States, or when requested by the heads of any of the departments." His opinions are of great importance to the Executive which has the power to conduct searches, prosecute war, etc. Unless a case is brought before a court by a person "with standing" the courts cannot interpret or refute the AG's interpretation of the constitution. We have seen how difficult it is sometimes to get "standing" for a court when you cannot prove the exact person being affected. [See AT&T domestic spying case.]
That nitwit and complete idiot AG sat before Arlen Spector and minced words over whether habeas corpus is granted by the Constitution. That's outrageous. What a complete asshole. Where are the Press? Glad we have only two more years until the next Administration. I don't care who it is as long as they don't continue our march to the Unlimited Executive.
Anyway, continue your debate.
I think it important to note that the point I was making was in regard to cheap servers with 2 to 3 disks. If you have mission critical servers in 1U form factor, that is a mistake in itself unless there is some clustering or such to protect.
Rebooting a server takes on the order of minutes (many minutes, if it has a lot of physical drives attached to it). How much money does your company lose in a few minutes while the relevant service(s) is/are down ? Would it be enough to pay for a RAID controller ?
If we have many physical disks attached, we are not in the described scenario. Feel free to have RAID 1 in that case. Not every company decides on a solution that includes a RAID controller.
RAID isn't supposed to protect you against software failures (be they in the operating system or the operator), it's supposed to protect you against hardware failure.
You are changing my argument. I never said RAID 1 is supposed to protect against software errors or admin errors. In fact, I plainly state that it doesn't. It is part of my argument against using RAID 1 when ONLY two disks are available. With a system that contains only two disks, what is the likelihood that it also contains two separate disk controllers? Not likely. Your one hardware failure is still quite capable of taking out both disks and negating the advantage of RAID 1.
Your point about taking a while to bring up disks could be extended to refer to NAS and SAN disks. With Journaled Filesystems the time to bring them up should be reduced. If you are using raw partitions with Oracle or the likes, then a test of your environment should show how long to recover and that should be factored into a decision to deploy my proposed configuration or your preferred config. I'm not dogmatic about this if the data in an environment sways the balance toward RAID.
RAID protects you against hardware failure.
Yes. The degree of protection depends on the redundancy of the setup.
Backups (your "offline mirror") protect you against software failure.
Yes, it can.
You need _both_ to have a reliable server (outside of some external functionality, like clustering).
It is be nice to have both and sleep well at night with a quiet beeper/mobile. My argument was in reference to when you cannot have both.
Not really. Nice try with the bad analogy though. If you only have two drives, I prefer a second copy that is not part of a continuously mirrored set. There are generally a few bad things that can happen:
Dead disk. If this happens with Raid 1 you are usually OK. There are sometimes problems with performance as the drive dies but with a good RAID controller or software LVM, nothing dramatic should occur. With a dd copy or offline mirror you get a crash and boot from the alternate copy. If things are pretty static on that drive, little to no loss. You get a small amount of downtime. [Logs should go to a log server.]
Filesystem corruption. If this happens on a RAID 1 setup, you are toast. You have two very good copies of garbage you can try to recover. You can recover from tape or some other backup method. Not very fast and downtime is extended. With an offline copy, you boot from it and only lose small changes from last image write. Small downtime.
Bad patch or admin mistake. Depending on what you did [rm -Rf *] you could be really hosed with an online mirror. That patch set could really have messed up your system and you have to back out. You can use you package manager and/or OS variant tool to back out of your patches or you could reboot from your offline mirror and get your unplanned outage over with and start root-causing your issue. Downtime is variable with online mirror but longer (sometimes much longer) than with offline mirror.
I'm not saying mirrors are bad, if I have three disks I keep two in a mirror and another as an offline mirror. With Solaris, I break the mirror and apply patches to the offline copy and then boot from it saving me time at night and reducing the patch window. I just prefer the offline mirror because it covers my ass in two ways vs RAID 1 that only covers my ass in case of disk failure. There are some performance benefits to RAID1, but I really don't need performance from my boot drive. I need performance from the data drives on the SAN or NAS where my reads and writes should occur.
If you disagree, then that's OK. There are many ways to admin boxes. As long as you have a justification and rationale for your decisions that make sense, you'll have a good reasoned response for the CEO when things fail. And they will.
Nice options, but I really prefer to not use RAID 1 since it doesn't protect against filesystem corruption. Your boot device is probably pretty static if your data resides on a SAN array or NAS device. Cron a dd, LVM mirror resync or ufsdump to occur every night or once a week or even every patch cycle. It depends on how static your environment is. A place I visited only updated the mirror a few days after patching to make sure the patchset burned in nicely.
I have been using Office 2007 for a month or more now. I set in preferences that ALL my docs should by default be saved in the older Office97/XP format. It doesn't nag very often about the format and I don't accidentally send .docx and .xlsx files to people. Compatibility problem solved. This could easily be set on large deployments as well.
Office 2007 is really the first upgrade to Office since 97 that is worth it. Kudos to the dev team on a nice rethinking of the apps. The ribbon is a big change for the better. Outlook is MUCH better [how secure is still a question]. Excel and Word feel the same. I don't use Access. OneNote is a freakin killer app! The ability to print boarding passes and anything else directly to a digital organizer is a time saver that's hard for me to really express enough. I find myself dreaming of a laptop with the flip down screen and tablet functionality for the first time. Plus, OneNote 2007 fixes little issues like a lack of tables in the first version. It still needs to import web items cleaner, though.
I am not a big MS fan, but people should really give them credit when the finally do something right.
It's probably your phone's fault. In rural areas, T-mobile has a roaming agreement with Cingular. If you can't get T-mobile service, you should roam to Cingular on 850Mhz. Same as dropping the 1800Mhz Cingular signal and picking up the 850 GSM when you're a Cingular customer.
I have driven across the country a few times and had good coverage from T-mobile (sometimes roaming on Cingular and other networks) most of the way. I-70 between Reno and Salt Lake City is a vast dead zone, so if that area matters to you, then maybe someone has a CDMA signal there.
I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three weeks last year for work and found the "Chip-and-Pin" to be a pain in the ass when you don't have a Chip-and-Pin card. I found quite a few places with new rules which forbade using cards without Chip-and-Pin! If you come in from another country which does not have Chip-and-Pin, you are screwed. Credit Cards have become the new international currency (backed by various government species). They should be very careful about changes that make some countries incompatible with the rest.
That said, I would prefer they bring Chip-and-Pin to the US. I much prefer my credit card staying within eyesight than having some aspiring actor walk off with it for 10 minutes.
Grease may be a problem. Oil? Doubt it. There is no reason why clean oils couldn't be used to prevent evaporation. That is exactly how flushless urinals work. The urine is heavier than the "cap" of light oil which sits atop and prevents a smell problem. You'll find more of these cropping up around the world to save on water, plumbing and maintenance.
I have a child and family who have been victims of violent sex crimes. I also believe the AC above in that some of the predators committed crimes that could be thought of as worse than murder. Has everyone convicted of a "sex crime" committed worse than murder? Of course not. Those convicted of heinous crimes should be punished accordingly. The rest should be treated as the rest of America's criminals and not with some special distinction because the crime involved genitalia. Too many stupid laws are being written by pandering politicians because it's easy to claim they are "protecting our children". Violent crime is violent crime regardless of the motivation.
If you believe that sexual predators are more dangerous than other criminals, the length of imprisonment should reflect that. Permanent tracking and ridicule seems to be counter-productive to rehabilitation but if that is what the community wants to do, include it in the sentences at conviction. Below is an excerpt from the NY Times in 2001:
The RIAA and the honorable senator from Utah predict that everyone on
Rephrase that:
Do you have friends outside of Secondlife and/or WoW. You know, real life.
Great album. Won't help much with fixing your Mom's computer though.
No sir, I do not subscribe to Social Darwinism. I never stated that "better" societies prevailed. I said "Advanced and healthy" and "Stronger" groups prevailed. To deny that European civilization was not more technologically advanced at the time than Native Americans would be absurd. To believe they were not stronger would of course deny the outcome. Just because disease played a major role in the outcome doesn't mean it isn't part of the equation that determines a healthy society. Cultures who were exposed by war and commerce to many other cultures and consequently their diseases had their populations strengthened eventually as in the case of measles and chicken pox. Measels became much less deadly over generations. Many people now are immune to the pox and I would consider that an enhancement which protects them.
Regardless of what you call accidents of history. The results of those accidents formed societies. Remember, I never said "better". China's rise to economic power does not mean we all bow to them. That's non sequitur. I certainly don't think everyone has been adopting the American society model (though some presidents seem to try and impose it). My discussion was about displacing entire peoples from their lands, not adopting Free Market Communism.
Are white people incapable of being different from one another. You imply that all white people are the same. I'm pretty sure there is a huge difference between a Bosnian and a Swede. There were different cultures in this country for many years. The differences have magnified over the years from a difference between English Puritans and the Danish to the current Mexican/Vietnamese/Cuban/Croat/Indian mixture we seem to have now. Cultural differences do not exist only where the skin pigmentation differs.
Plantation owners were a very small portion of the population. In the same way that billionaires are a part of the American population. The rich always fuck the rest of us. No matter who we or they are. Most people in colonial America didn't own slaves and certainly didn't screw them. I'm sure there were a few but that hardly defines a culture. Most cultures prior to then also had slaves. A lot of them had defined laws and customs regarding trade in sex slaves (American colonies had no such trade). No one seems to dwell on slave fucking when referring to Egypt, Rome, Spanish, Ottoman and Persian societies.
As for the "Europeans came and stole the land from peaceful people..." Get over it. Every piece of land in this world was once occupied by some other group of people. Why don't we start protesting that the English get out of England? Give it back to the Welsh. They were there first! Native American cultures were hunter gatherer societies. Very romantic in theory to live off the land, but ultimately a few thousand years behind Europe, Asia and parts of Africa. I feel bad about the Aztec and Inca being decimated because they had a fairly advanced culture, but even they were insular and technologically inferior. Had they invented the wheel? Sailing boats for commerce? Stopped sacrificing people to their Gods?
Advanced and healthy societies generally replace other societies. Stronger groups of people take the land from others. That's how the world has always worked. Stop feeling bad for the Native Americans, the victims of the Vandals, Mongols and Anglo-Saxons and everyone else who got their ass kicked by stronger populations. This guilt over our cultural dominance has to stop. You can't put the Buffalo back on the prairie and you can't have Oklahoma and Nebraska back. Get over it.
Are you arguing that Mexicans are COLONIZING the United States to establish a mercantilist economy in Mexico? You are supporting the parent's argument!
Besides, there are many differences between the present immigration wave and previous immigrant groups. Those other groups were people who wanted to become American. The Irish saw themselves as establishing a new home here and worked hard and fought to become integrated into the American society. The same with the Italians, Poles, Greeks, et al. Their cultures enriched ours as they became American. A large portion of Mexicans do not want to assimilate with Americans. They see their stay here as temporary -- a kind of sharecropping without permission of the farmer. A percentage of the fruits of their labor are transferred back to Mexico and Central America as cash instead of staying in the US as taxes, investments and savings. They form societies within our cities which have no intention of folding into the fabric of the surrounding communities and actually harbor a small percentage of radicals who espouse Mexico retaking the southwest.
I hope to someday have a prosperous neighbor to the south with strong trade and cultural ties to the US and Canada. Mexicans are a fun, energetic, intelligent and industrious people who deserve a better government and economy then they have at present. Their abundant natural resources should allow them to succeed without colonizing the US. Mexicans need to stay in Mexico and work hard there to make it a better neighbor and place to live.
I think the point of the discussion is being missed here. It is the rocketeer's contention that AP is NOT AN EXPLOSIVE. Therefore, it is not covered by current laws which allow our friends at the ATFE to regulate explosives. Unless there is a law which allows such regulation of fuels (which AP appears to be) they should be free to use and store as a fuel. That doesn't mean that there can't be reasonable rules for the storage of fuels in certain amounts. Every gas station and propane dealer has regulations to deal with in that regard whereas I as a small consumer are not required to keep my gasoline can in a locked cabinet outside my residence so many feet from a door.
/. are well enough acquainted with the regulations and chemistry to decide this either. I simply want enough AP available in a local hobby shop for me to build a CATO with my kid as my father did with me.
If you believe that AP is an explosive, it is reasonable to expect the ATFE to regulate in a strict manner its use and storage. I also agree with fishbowl that I'd very much like to know if someone is housing a large amount of explosives next door. I don't really care however if he has something which simply causes his house to burn A LOT FASTER than normal. I just need to get my video camera ready quicker to capture the 5 minute complete meltdown of his two-story Victorian!
In either case, I hardly think I am a good arbitor of whether it is in fact an explosive. I would guess that not many of us on
For those who travel for a living, there is an office wherever you can find a network connection. I tried a 3G card from Verizon and wasn't happy with the coverage. I find myself in a Mariott, airport club or Starbucks often enough that free wi-fi and my T-mobile hotspot account are enough. Printing and faxing are the biggest problem. An easy backup method would be appreciated as Windows offline folders are a little unreliable. [Don't bother replying with Linux solution. Not an option.]
I don't like working in Kinkos. Too much like an office! Much prefer Starbucks. Just wish they'd all have a laserprinter in the corner.
When I upgraded to 939 from Socket A/AGP, I found the ASRock Dual 939 had an AM2 upgrade path. It should allow me to piecemeal my upgrade to AM2, PCI Express, DDR2. I have had great success with the board and love the ability to slowly upgrade to the next level. I am not one to brag about a commercial product, but this one has been a great buy.
I have been Intel free on the desktop since the K6 200Mhz. I have a Core Duo laptop and a Core 2 Duo coming soon. The performance is enough to make me consider jumping ship. I would have to buy all new gear except my drives.