They didn't fire everyone because of automation. They fired everyone because the business was grossly inefficient and bankrupt, and it happened over several years. They automated because it was the only way to compete in their market and survive as a company.
Bob Beck has a pretty healthy track record of throwing verbal grenades with regards (but not limited) to open source licenses, security, and other people's code.
That said, looking at published vulnerabilities (CVEdetails.com), OpenSSH and OpenBSD have a tremendous record for fixing (or simply not having) serious security bugs. The total number of vulnerabilities in OpenSSH (application) since 1999 is 61 (11 being DOS) and NONE have known exploits. OpenBSD (an entire OS) has 136 (57 being DOS) since 1999 with 4 known exploits.
By Comparison, OpenSSL (a protocol library) has 87 (46 are DOS) with 5 known exploits.
None of these are egregious compared to other UNIX OS platforms like AIX (316), Solaris (533), and HPUX (278).
I don't think the OpenSSL folks are bad, but they let the product stagnate a bit. Getting some new perspective on it is a good thing.
I've never really had the time or inclination to be a BOFH, but you can't block any fantasy football sites because even managers "need" them.
I once had an issue with a woman that used to go to gambling sites at work. When we blocked them, she complained to her boss. I was amazed that her boss had the balls to ask us to allow it... but he was the CEO's brother.
I have witnessed BOFH-type abuse by a consultant against another IT person. The guys did not get along, so the consultant blocked all the sites that other guy went to, and when confronted about it, he pretty much said, "F-off. I am in charge of the proxy". Hardocp is the only one that comes to mind. It got so bad that one of the networking guys built another proxy server "for testing" and gave the IT folks access to it.
We fired the consultant about a month after I found out what he was doing.
I worked at a small software firm where the DBAs and programmers were one and the same. The problem came about when one of the owners decided that IT should report into the head DBA/Programmer. Unmitigated disaster. The head DBA truly believed that he understood servers and networks because he had written code that ran on them. It lasted about 3 weeks.
The crazy part was when they tried the same thing a few years later. It lasted about 6 weeks
Bingo! If there were no money/fame in opposing views, then we would not even be discussing it here.
Your point about skepticism hits home too, even though I consider myself to be a skeptical scientist. I was shocked while discussing this with a friend of mine from work. We batted around the auto, airline, fossil fuel industries, and government interference/influence therein, but when push came to shove, he pretty much had the "not in my back yard" view. He is an avid hiker and outdoorsman, but did not care about any environmental issues that occur, as long as they don't directly affect him or his family.
I'll give you points for sticking your neck out in a topic like this. I think this is just a flame fest.
FLAME ON!
IANA developer, but on the admin side, higher pay may be indicative of many factors including time and scope of responsibility. The factor to which I find a lot of lip service is paid is skill. I have worked for several companies that "hired me for my skills". The job descriptions were very particular with respect to skills required, and in some cases, my skills were tested prior to hiring. The scarcity of admins with my skillset drives up the price, which seems like basic economic stuff. The reality was that I was still expected to support and fix lots of stuff that was outside of my skillset, because the higher on the ladder the problem got, the less they care about skills and the more they care about money, as in how much money the problem is costing, or how much money they pay me. "It's a computer. Fix it."
Data recovery companies can fix the logic boards too. I would imagine that the poster would be concerned about data recovery companies seeing the data also though.
Another idea is to cook the drives. Heating a drive in an oven should give the data a good scramble. I'm guessing it is probably better than a degausser considering some of the comments here.
The complusive TV watching was what this immediately reminded me of. I know people (I'm sure you do too) that have gone so far as to have a mini TV or wall mounted TV in their kitchen or bathroom that they leave on even when they are not in the room. How many people do you know that turn on the TV as soon as they get home from work/school, eat dinner in front of it, and watch it right up until they go to bed? I'm not refering to doing it once in a while, but every day.
I know the spinoffs didn't work out, but Crusade was killed by the network (I can't remember if it was WB or TNT) according to JMS and others that worked on the series. I happen to think that Crusade had big potential based on the popularity of the Techno-Mages among fans.
Soooo true. I work for a configuration management software company. *Shameless plug for Configuresoft*. You would pretty much guess that we help customers with the configuratiom management part of their quest for "ITILification". If someone mentions ITIL in a meeting with a customer, there's a 50-50 chance that we end up trying to convince the customer that we know what ITIL means, since there are various degrees of their own ITIL knowledge. I understand that they are just making sure we are not blowing smoke, but when I was an corporate admin/engineer, I rarely survived 5 minutes of a BS meeting with a vendor without feeling the need to call them on it. There was actually very little need to challenge them though, since they would usually dig their own hole. Coming from the vendor side now, I see that you must set the terms and vocabulary on the table early to avoid any of those types of issues.
I would say that the question is best answered by 'teaching to fish'. The sysinternals article is the 'guide to fishing' if not the outright correct answer in this case. XP will run, but it may not do what you expect it to do. One would have to do a process of elimination to determine what they require to work.
I followed the steps laid out in that article to clean up a machine. Once I had it setup for what I needed, my needs changed and I had to tweak the setup. Having learned how to fish, I was able to do it myself.
Dr. Shanefield, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Shanefield one of my profs in college, thought that most electronics would use plastic substrates in the near future. That was 10-12 years ago, so his timing may be off, but he is no less correct.
It's kind of funny to see stuff like this because it reminds me how industry folks tend to think about near term (5-10 years) and academic types tend to think long term (>10 years). Dr. Shanefield was definitely an industry guy.
I have personally seen a company charge full price for a used item and claim it was new. That was the least of their deeds. Lets call them CrapIT.
They were the outsourced IT managment and staff for CompanyA. CrapIT had CompanyA buy all the hardware and software from themselves. Since CrapIT made all the IT decisions, with little or no oversight (more on that later), they could charge whatever they wanted for hardware and software. They also charged for hourly overtime when their staff "stayed late" or "worked" on the weekends. They were really playing online games using CompanyA's network.
I found all this out when CrapIT was fired for not running proper backups of the critical application servers. One of the servers died and CompanyA lost about two days work (valued around $20mil). CompanyA brought hired me and a bunch of other folks to run IT after that.
The real joke was the oversight, or lack thereof, by CompanyA. I found out CrapIT was giving out free laptops, plasma TVs, and home PCs to some of the execs at CompanyA. The CEO told the management team after we had been there a year that he wished he had never fired CrapIT because we cost more, but provided worse service. So the CEO bought his wife, the CFO, a new MB S500, announced the best financial quarter in company history, and started to fire the IT staff.
I know I learned a lot of new skills while I was there and I made some good contacts. I even got a WAY better job after they fired me. I am still bitter that I went through so much trouble and annoyance to do it.
The lesson I learned from that job was that fraud and kickbacks are all over because there are rotten people that work on both sides. The good people sometimes do something about it and sometimes they don't.
I have used the Treo 300, 600, and 650. My company switched from the 650 to the PPC6700 due to problems some people had with Versamail and Exchange 2003 integration. Half the people that switched are asking for their Treos back after a couple of months with the 6700.
I will be buying a 700p for myself. We have a hand-me-down system in the family and my wife wants my 650 and then her mother gets the old 600 that my wife uses.
Was charged with "98 counts of racketeering and fraud", but only served 22 months of a 10 year sentence. Paid $900 million in fines, but still had $1 billion when he got out of prison. He has spent a ton of money to buy back his "good name" and even made it to the cover of Fortune magazine in 2004 for his donations to medical research.
The real question is whether he is actually sorry for what he did, and is trying to pay back his debt to society, or if he just wants people to like him so much that he is willing to spend his money on what he thinks will improve his image.
If you read the Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood you will see that they are increasingly being translated into English. I would not be suprised to start seeing some of these appear on screens in the US, or more likely the UK, in the next ten years.
All that said, I have seen way more Japanese films than Indian films, but they were almost all older Kurosawa black and white films. India does not have the historical cultural influence on the US like it does in the UK, since it was once a British colony, but that is changing with the growing numbers of Indian nationals moving to the US for college, grad school, and/or work.
We did use the PDF printing/emailing option for one of the main user applications at a company I used to work for. We actually installed Acrobat on each server. It was our backup method for anyone with issues. We came out with a recommended printer list for remote users, and worked around most of the issues with funky legacy printers, but we were told that we had to support everything anyway, because IT is just there to fix the f*ing computers and not actually contribute to the business.
Citrix printing was flaky on several levels, such as USB printers, printer driver versions, etc. I was told be several people (other admins) that printing was much improved with the newer Citrix versions.
In defense of Citrix, their printing model was based on the MS standard printer driver. How many printer manufacturers actually adhere to the standards for printer drivers in Windows? I know that HP does not. And most of the multi-function printer/scanner/fax devices don't either.
RPC over HTTPS is the best thing since sliced bread, from a fully functional decently secure remote groupware standpoint. I have used it since it came out and it has always worked great for me.
The 'gotcha' here is that all the clients must use Outlook 2003 in addition to the server running Exchange 2003, which may require some significant upgrades. 6k users... maybe half of them need upgrades. That would be about $50 per user in volume... $150,000. That, of course, does not include the REAL cost: deploying the software to desktops and laptops. I hope they have a decent deployment method.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly, the original publication calls out the use of Google Inception v4 CNN in the Methods, but the CBS News article doesn't mention it at all.
They didn't fire everyone because of automation. They fired everyone because the business was grossly inefficient and bankrupt, and it happened over several years. They automated because it was the only way to compete in their market and survive as a company.
Bob Beck has a pretty healthy track record of throwing verbal grenades with regards (but not limited) to open source licenses, security, and other people's code.
That said, looking at published vulnerabilities (CVEdetails.com), OpenSSH and OpenBSD have a tremendous record for fixing (or simply not having) serious security bugs. The total number of vulnerabilities in OpenSSH (application) since 1999 is 61 (11 being DOS) and NONE have known exploits. OpenBSD (an entire OS) has 136 (57 being DOS) since 1999 with 4 known exploits.
By Comparison, OpenSSL (a protocol library) has 87 (46 are DOS) with 5 known exploits.
None of these are egregious compared to other UNIX OS platforms like AIX (316), Solaris (533), and HPUX (278).
I don't think the OpenSSL folks are bad, but they let the product stagnate a bit. Getting some new perspective on it is a good thing.
Wherefore art thou Dennis Ritchie?
I've never really had the time or inclination to be a BOFH, but you can't block any fantasy football sites because even managers "need" them.
I once had an issue with a woman that used to go to gambling sites at work. When we blocked them, she complained to her boss. I was amazed that her boss had the balls to ask us to allow it... but he was the CEO's brother.
I have witnessed BOFH-type abuse by a consultant against another IT person. The guys did not get along, so the consultant blocked all the sites that other guy went to, and when confronted about it, he pretty much said, "F-off. I am in charge of the proxy". Hardocp is the only one that comes to mind. It got so bad that one of the networking guys built another proxy server "for testing" and gave the IT folks access to it.
We fired the consultant about a month after I found out what he was doing.
I worked at a small software firm where the DBAs and programmers were one and the same. The problem came about when one of the owners decided that IT should report into the head DBA/Programmer. Unmitigated disaster. The head DBA truly believed that he understood servers and networks because he had written code that ran on them. It lasted about 3 weeks.
The crazy part was when they tried the same thing a few years later. It lasted about 6 weeks
Yeah, I'm an immature girl
Pictures, or it's not true. j/k
Seriously, those Enzyte commercials crack me up too! They seem to play them a lot during sports.
Bingo! If there were no money/fame in opposing views, then we would not even be discussing it here.
Your point about skepticism hits home too, even though I consider myself to be a skeptical scientist. I was shocked while discussing this with a friend of mine from work. We batted around the auto, airline, fossil fuel industries, and government interference/influence therein, but when push came to shove, he pretty much had the "not in my back yard" view. He is an avid hiker and outdoorsman, but did not care about any environmental issues that occur, as long as they don't directly affect him or his family.
I think it odd too, but then people pay for bottled water...
I'll give you points for sticking your neck out in a topic like this. I think this is just a flame fest.
FLAME ON!
IANA developer, but on the admin side, higher pay may be indicative of many factors including time and scope of responsibility. The factor to which I find a lot of lip service is paid is skill. I have worked for several companies that "hired me for my skills". The job descriptions were very particular with respect to skills required, and in some cases, my skills were tested prior to hiring. The scarcity of admins with my skillset drives up the price, which seems like basic economic stuff. The reality was that I was still expected to support and fix lots of stuff that was outside of my skillset, because the higher on the ladder the problem got, the less they care about skills and the more they care about money, as in how much money the problem is costing, or how much money they pay me. "It's a computer. Fix it."
Data recovery companies can fix the logic boards too. I would imagine that the poster would be concerned about data recovery companies seeing the data also though.
Another idea is to cook the drives. Heating a drive in an oven should give the data a good scramble. I'm guessing it is probably better than a degausser considering some of the comments here.
Having a "reason to go after him" and arresting him legally (according to US law) are completely different things. But IANAL (wannabe or not).
The Gb Broadcom NICs I have in servers at work do this. I am not sure about other brands.
Came out of my chair?
I came out of my grave!
The complusive TV watching was what this immediately reminded me of. I know people (I'm sure you do too) that have gone so far as to have a mini TV or wall mounted TV in their kitchen or bathroom that they leave on even when they are not in the room. How many people do you know that turn on the TV as soon as they get home from work/school, eat dinner in front of it, and watch it right up until they go to bed? I'm not refering to doing it once in a while, but every day.
I know the spinoffs didn't work out, but Crusade was killed by the network (I can't remember if it was WB or TNT) according to JMS and others that worked on the series. I happen to think that Crusade had big potential based on the popularity of the Techno-Mages among fans.
Soooo true. I work for a configuration management software company. *Shameless plug for Configuresoft*. You would pretty much guess that we help customers with the configuratiom management part of their quest for "ITILification". If someone mentions ITIL in a meeting with a customer, there's a 50-50 chance that we end up trying to convince the customer that we know what ITIL means, since there are various degrees of their own ITIL knowledge. I understand that they are just making sure we are not blowing smoke, but when I was an corporate admin/engineer, I rarely survived 5 minutes of a BS meeting with a vendor without feeling the need to call them on it. There was actually very little need to challenge them though, since they would usually dig their own hole. Coming from the vendor side now, I see that you must set the terms and vocabulary on the table early to avoid any of those types of issues.
Great response. I wish I had mod points.
I would say that the question is best answered by 'teaching to fish'. The sysinternals article is the 'guide to fishing' if not the outright correct answer in this case. XP will run, but it may not do what you expect it to do. One would have to do a process of elimination to determine what they require to work.
I followed the steps laid out in that article to clean up a machine. Once I had it setup for what I needed, my needs changed and I had to tweak the setup. Having learned how to fish, I was able to do it myself.
Dr. Shanefield, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Shanefield one of my profs in college, thought that most electronics would use plastic substrates in the near future. That was 10-12 years ago, so his timing may be off, but he is no less correct.
It's kind of funny to see stuff like this because it reminds me how industry folks tend to think about near term (5-10 years) and academic types tend to think long term (>10 years). Dr. Shanefield was definitely an industry guy.
I have personally seen a company charge full price for a used item and claim it was new. That was the least of their deeds. Lets call them CrapIT.
They were the outsourced IT managment and staff for CompanyA. CrapIT had CompanyA buy all the hardware and software from themselves. Since CrapIT made all the IT decisions, with little or no oversight (more on that later), they could charge whatever they wanted for hardware and software. They also charged for hourly overtime when their staff "stayed late" or "worked" on the weekends. They were really playing online games using CompanyA's network.
I found all this out when CrapIT was fired for not running proper backups of the critical application servers. One of the servers died and CompanyA lost about two days work (valued around $20mil). CompanyA brought hired me and a bunch of other folks to run IT after that.
The real joke was the oversight, or lack thereof, by CompanyA. I found out CrapIT was giving out free laptops, plasma TVs, and home PCs to some of the execs at CompanyA. The CEO told the management team after we had been there a year that he wished he had never fired CrapIT because we cost more, but provided worse service. So the CEO bought his wife, the CFO, a new MB S500, announced the best financial quarter in company history, and started to fire the IT staff.
I know I learned a lot of new skills while I was there and I made some good contacts. I even got a WAY better job after they fired me. I am still bitter that I went through so much trouble and annoyance to do it.
The lesson I learned from that job was that fraud and kickbacks are all over because there are rotten people that work on both sides. The good people sometimes do something about it and sometimes they don't.
Google "700p site:handmark.com" and you will see that it is listed as a supported model on most of the PalmOS software titles.
h andmark.com&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=700p+site%3A
I have used the Treo 300, 600, and 650. My company switched from the 650 to the PPC6700 due to problems some people had with Versamail and Exchange 2003 integration. Half the people that switched are asking for their Treos back after a couple of months with the 6700.
I will be buying a 700p for myself. We have a hand-me-down system in the family and my wife wants my 650 and then her mother gets the old 600 that my wife uses.
Allow me to introduce you to Michael Milken, 1980s Junk Bond King.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Milken
Was charged with "98 counts of racketeering and fraud", but only served 22 months of a 10 year sentence. Paid $900 million in fines, but still had $1 billion when he got out of prison. He has spent a ton of money to buy back his "good name" and even made it to the cover of Fortune magazine in 2004 for his donations to medical research.
The real question is whether he is actually sorry for what he did, and is trying to pay back his debt to society, or if he just wants people to like him so much that he is willing to spend his money on what he thinks will improve his image.
You may have seen more Japanese movies than Indian ones, but that does not make them any less popular or scarce. The chart from BusinessWeek shows 2002 numbers for Bollywood (Indian Hollywood) vs. Hollywood. http://www.businessweek.com//magazine/content/02_4 8/art02_48/a48tab37.gif
If you read the Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood you will see that they are increasingly being translated into English. I would not be suprised to start seeing some of these appear on screens in the US, or more likely the UK, in the next ten years.
All that said, I have seen way more Japanese films than Indian films, but they were almost all older Kurosawa black and white films. India does not have the historical cultural influence on the US like it does in the UK, since it was once a British colony, but that is changing with the growing numbers of Indian nationals moving to the US for college, grad school, and/or work.
We did use the PDF printing/emailing option for one of the main user applications at a company I used to work for. We actually installed Acrobat on each server. It was our backup method for anyone with issues. We came out with a recommended printer list for remote users, and worked around most of the issues with funky legacy printers, but we were told that we had to support everything anyway, because IT is just there to fix the f*ing computers and not actually contribute to the business.
Citrix printing was flaky on several levels, such as USB printers, printer driver versions, etc. I was told be several people (other admins) that printing was much improved with the newer Citrix versions.
In defense of Citrix, their printing model was based on the MS standard printer driver. How many printer manufacturers actually adhere to the standards for printer drivers in Windows? I know that HP does not. And most of the multi-function printer/scanner/fax devices don't either.
RPC over HTTPS is the best thing since sliced bread, from a fully functional decently secure remote groupware standpoint. I have used it since it came out and it has always worked great for me.
The 'gotcha' here is that all the clients must use Outlook 2003 in addition to the server running Exchange 2003, which may require some significant upgrades. 6k users... maybe half of them need upgrades. That would be about $50 per user in volume... $150,000. That, of course, does not include the REAL cost: deploying the software to desktops and laptops. I hope they have a decent deployment method.