As far as I can tell, "Industry Leading" just means "has a marketing department." (Ditto for "Market Leading").
"Industry Standard" doesn't actually mean what it says, either. These days it just means "We think lots of people do things this way, or at least claim that we think that."
I'm intentionally leaving the term "socialist" vague here, and admittedly it's probably not the best term. By it, I just mean a tendency towards government control (both in terms of regulation and in terms of how many services the government insists on running directly itself) centrally, at a nationwide level. Suggestions for a better "neutral" (e.g. not "fascist" or other emotionally-charged terms, since the word I'm looking for would not inherently imply injustice or oppression) are welcome, since by my working definition here, imposition of a state-mandated religion would be "socialist", and to my knowlege no modern nations who are generally tagged with the word "Socialist" (as opposed to being thought of as an outright "theocracy" or "dictatorship") really do that. At least not for the last couple-hundred years - the Church of England would once have qualified, but not in modern times.
In order to be more "socialist" (by my almost-certainly-non-canonical definition here) Government needs to have more power over its citizens in order to maintain its control, both through "overt" and obvious means (e.g. police and "internal" military) and less obvious (controlling access to and distribution of information and goods. The larger the population of the governed, the more force the government needs to keep everyone in line.
Obviously, it's a little more complicated than that in the real world - population density plays a role, too, as does availability of natural resources and technological capability. And, of course, the wealth that pays for it all. In the US, our approximately 300,000,000[1] people are spread out over a fairly huge area here. The entire state of Idaho has about as much population as the Sacramento area in California (including suburbs)...if that much. The amount of "power" required to spread control over that broad of an area is in addition to the amount required to just "control 300,000,000 people". The amount of "power" available, should our government be given any more access to use it, in the US due to our still rich natural resources and still very strong technology is somewhat frightening, hence our seeming-right-wing-nutjob attitude that we should try to avoid letting the government have that much power. Resistance to taxation serves a good purpose too - if the US Federal Government doubled its tax rate, that means it'd have that much more money to, say, pay CIA agents abroad, buy another fleet of aircraft-carriers, battleships, "Stealth" bombers and ICBM's, or just spread around the world to mess with the global economy in the US's favor (or at least, the US Federal Government's favor - say, as payback for domestic support for the government's policies by a struggling US industry?...)
Brazil, on the other hand, has a population of only around 175,000,000[2] people, and most of that is concentrated into a small (by comparison) area, and I suspect if you compared, say, US military technology and technological research with Brazil's, the difference would be very noticeable.
If the government of Brazil woke up one day and decided "Screw you guys, I say you're a threat to our national security and we're takin' you down!"....who would be frightened? Certainly they could probably put up a good fight against nearby countries, but do they really have the sheer power to wage an effective fight against a well-armed nation quite some distance away? Or even a not-so-well-armed nation, for that matter. If it had been the Brazilian government bouncing up and down excitedly over the prospect of invading Iraq and "Getting Saddam Hussein(tm)", would they have done as well[3] as the US has?
Now, back to the US - even now, there is still a lot of sentiment in the US that the government (or at least, specifically, the FEDERAL government) should keep its metaphorical hands out of various issues. The fact that we tend not to want, for example, a Federal Government Health Care system makes us seem like radical right-wing nutjobs to people in smaller (les
I tend to agree about Nader. I don't think he's serious about campaigning for president, only feeding his own ego and perhaps his wallet.
A couple of elections ago, when (as usual) the "third parties" were shut out of the presidential debates, C-SPAN organized a "third party" debate so the candidates would at least have some chance of airing and comparing their views where people could evaluate them all together. Harry Browne (Libertarian) was there, of course, as was Howard Philip of the rather creepy[1] "U.S. Taxpayers Party" (as far as I can tell, they are also called the "Independent" party and I think the "Constitution" party.) and I THINK they had someone from the "Peace and Freedom" (hardcore socialist/borderline communist[2]) party there, and of course at the time the Greens had Nader....oh, wait, no, Nader didn't show up. He was, according to the announcer on the show, too busy promoting his new book to bother.
That kind of tells me everything I need to know about Nader...
[1]- Disturbingly extremist (in my own opinion) bible-pounding, God-bothering rightists. As far as I could tell from the debate, that party's entire platform is composed of two claims:
Abortion is Murder(tm)
Sex Education causes Homosexuality
.
[2]- Disturbingly extremist (in my on opinion) wealth-hating, welfare-legislating leftists. Kinda helped balance with the other extreme party mentioned above. I'm guessing a lot of European people living in small countries where socialism won't necessarily become Stalinism[3] would tend to like these people
[3]- I still maintain that the degree to which a government can be "socialist" without being oppressive is inversely proportional to the size of the governed population. If California seceded from the US, I think they'd just BARELY be small enough to get away with a socialist government. If the entire US tried to do it on a national level, we'd end up with USSR II. Or so I maintain. I think this is why USAians - even Democrats - often seem "extreme right-wing" to Europeans.
Heck, I'm still waiting for the one that uses the infected PC's existing saved emails to attach itself to and forward itself with. It'll be "funny" when major corporate executives start having their private, confidential, Microsoft(r) Outlook(tm) corporate emails spewed out to random people on the internet along with the virus...corporate budget planning emails, deal negotiations...it's all there...
Yes, I know (I have it, in fact) - what I meant was THAT code is, apparently, in need of being optimized (from a source-code perspective, not from a "compiler options" perspective).
What I was wondering is whether in the process of porting the code to Java, they'd done any optimization there which might make it run faster/more efficiently than the as-yet-minimally-optimized C code at the theora.org site...
Makes me curious - at this point, apparently, what Theora most needs is optimization of the code to make it work faster.
How optimized is this Java port of the codec, and will it be possible to compile it to 'native' code using GCJ for maximum performance?
"Live Action" Dilbert(tm) Roleplaying?...
on
Tech Team Traditions?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
promoted to manager of a young IT department[...]
Promoted from...where? Were you once one of the IT people? If so...would YOU have really wanted what you're suggesting?
would like to introduce a tradition and/or mascot for the upcoming season.
Numerous posters have pointed out the foolishness of trying to "impose" a tradition. A mascot I could see, but only if it was genuinely funny and not contrived. Nor intended to be taken seriously.
The goal of this is to add some excitement to the new team, unite the members and keep department moral high.
I assume you mean "morale", not "moral" - I think what you're proposing would inspire more IMmorality...
It might also be worth mentioning that I have recently added two more administrators to the team.
Do you mean more IT people (Network/System administrators), or more managerial staff? 'cuz I know nothing would make ME happier than having more people overseeing me and telling me what to do... (If you meant that you hired more people to help with the workload, you probably ARE on the right track there.)
Want some advice?
Try asking the people actually doing the IT work what would improve morale.
Buy a bunch of Dilbert books and read them. Anything that resembles any program that any of the "Pointy-Haired Boss" characters implement in those books should be recognized as Probably Not A Useful Idea. It sounds like you're dangerously close to crossing over to that category right now...
People who have to do tech-support-type work ARE a pretty cynical and jaded bunch, in my experience (heck, I know that describes ME), and are not likely to respond positively to contrived or ephemeral attempts to manipulate their attitudes.
(Note: If this is actually a clever plan to promote "team unity" by uniting the staff in their hatred and/or mockery of you, it just may work..."Can you believe this guy? He actually thinks he can MAKE us start a 'tradition' on purpose! And who in their right mind would think these 'Apshai, the Bug God' dolls would do anything for morale?")
A lot of satellite imagery that I have seen deals with climate measuring. It's not clear from reading the proposal itself if this "unclassified" data is included.
<AluminumFoilDeflectorBeanie mode="On"> might be a handy way to keep those filthy pinko commies and terrorists from showing evidence of climate change and messing up our plans to use up as much as possible before The Rapture(tm) comes, using our precious, precious unclassified photos...</AluminumFoilDeflectorBeanie>
That's the part that gets me - they're talking SPECIFICALLY about "unclassified" (i.e. NOT "Top Secret(tm)", etc.) information. The recommendation in the proposal explicitly mentions, in effect, the fact that, well, they COULD just classify the stuff that they don't want to show to potential commie terrorists (or the people who paid for it e.g. US Taxpayers) but that's just so inconvenient to have to do...
More grist for the Aluminum-Foil-Deflector-Beanie-defended conspiracy mill (from the proposal): "Compelled[by the FOIA, etc.] release of such data and imagery by the United States under FOIA defeats the purpose of these licensing agreements, removes any profit motive, and may damage the national security by mandating disclosure to the general public upon request. While the data and imagery could be protected from disclosure under FOIA by classifying them, the United States prefers to keep them unclassified. Unclassified matter is more easily shared with coalition partners in contingency operations and with State and local officials in disaster relief and homeland security operations.[emphasis added]
It's terrible to think what horrible disasters could befall the US while we dare to "remove any profit motive" from taxpayer-funded "remote sensing" (which, presumably, includes imagery from sources other than satellites as well?) projects. I know I would feel safer if I wasn't allowed to look at this unclassified material that I'm paying for... And, gosh, I also feel better knowing my highly-paid legislators are Doing Something(tm) about, um, I guess terrorists or environmentalists or something.
But somehow, during about K-4th grade, most of the kids in the US educational system seem to have that crushed out of them.
I've come to the conclusion that nearly all of human behavior can be summed up by the following two apparent facts about humanity (taken as a group):
People are lazy.
Thinking is work.
This applies to teachers as well as children - and dealing with the "smart kids", who tend to come up with odd, novel ways of looking at and asking about things makes the teachers have to think. Really good teachers LIKE that sort of mental challenge, but I think most are just ordinary people who don't like to "work". Discouraging time-consuming, thought-provoking smartness just makes their lives easier.
(Someone once told me that one of the few college degrees you can get that does not require ANY science classes is...a Bachelor's degree in Education. That, right there, says something if it's true. Can anyone confirm or refute this claim?)
Some nerds still try to fight against that tendency, though. One of the nerdliest humor publications I know of is The Annals of Improbable Research (yes, the same people that host the IgNobel Prizes every year...). Every issue of their magazine includes a very short, concise "teaching guide", which begins with:
"Three out of five teachers agree: curiosity is a dangerous thing, especially in students. If you are one of the other two teachers[...]"
Personally, I'd love to see copies of this getting plastered all over every "educational" institution, everywhere in the world (I find it hard to believe that the US is the ONLY place in the world with this problem, fundamental human nature being what it is everywhere...).
I know I've said this before, but that particular report of a "security problem" (why that's in quotes, I'll get to in a moment) in the Linux kernel is an excellent illustration of the difference between Microsoft's (and presumably other proprietary vendors) attitude to "security" vs. most open source projects.
This problem can be simplistically summarized thusly: "Someone who can log into a linux system can conceivably run a malicious program that might crash or lock up the Operating System". In Linux, this is characterized as a "Security Problem".
Now, think about it - if you called Microsoft (picking on them since that's the proprietary vendor we're talking about at the moment) and said "Hey, I have a program that when I run it, it crashes the system"...what kind of response will you get? "Well, don't run that program. It's obviously either defective or a trojan." Which would be the truth. But they have historically not considered that a problem in the OS AT ALL, let alone a security problem. Remember all those years ago when they claimed that most windows crashes are caused by anti-virus software?...)
Yes, FOSS also has flaws. Sometimes even serious ones. But it usually seems like FOSS projects more readily and more quickly address those flaws than proprietary ones do.
And you think it is easier to find a place with that kind of address?
Yes...but only because I'm used to it. If EVERYONE was using the boring-but-predictable grid system everywhere, it'd be really easy and make perfect sense, but right now it's mainly apparently around Utah and Idaho only, so streets named with multiple numbers and multiple directions just sound "wrong" and confusing.
Kinda like trying to get the metric system in use in the USA - it would be perfectly comprehensible if everyone started doing it, but since we've been 'stuck' on English measures so long, metric seems confusing to USAians despite being more consistent.
I'm not particularly religious myself, but the topic is fascinating. I would personally recommend to anyone interested in the historical CONTEXT of the bible (and the various other gospels that didn't make it into the canonical works, not to mention some very interesting heresies) to look up the lectures and/or books of Professor Bart Ehrman (link goes to one example at "The Teaching Company". His "Historical Jesus" lectures were very interesting as well).
No relation or anything, I just like his lectures. Same goes for "The Teaching Company" itself.
No but he believes that the Bible bans all forms of alcohol. Where he gets this from I do not know, I guess his Bible doesn't have the section about turning water into wine in it.
All of a sudden I have this image of a "Bootlegger Jesus" figurine...
I'm obviously too tainted by evil and corruption to get into heaven now, short of wiping all the tainted memories from my brain...
(Is that why so many stories of the sternest Born-Again(tm) Christians seem to go along the lines of "I fried my brains with drugs and alcohol and pornography featuring dead gay baby farm-animals, and then one day as I lay near-dead in a pool of various fluids from my own body, Jesus appeared to me and Saved me."? Maybe that's what it takes to wipe the Evil Thoughts out of one's brain?...)
(Yes, the latter was a JOKE, not a genuine insult to Christians, or even just Born-Again Christians. In poor taste, maybe, but a joke nonetheless...)
[...](2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000[...]
What, exactly, IS the retail value of a single track off of a commercial CD, I wonder? Or the retail value of a DVD Movie separated from the add-on content (which is often mentioned as a reason to buy a commercial DVD over a poorer-quality illegally-copied version), and/or a DVD or recorded-in-a-movie-theater-by-videocamera movie which has substantially lower quality video and sound than the commercial version would?
It sounds like this network, presuming most or all of the files on it WERE illegal copyright infringements rather than public-domain material or material which the sharers actually had permission to copy - probably a fair assumption - well exceeded the $1000 limit in any case. I just have this sneaky suspicion that, as usual, a single track from a CD is being counted as the full retail value of a whole CD (and therefore each individual track from that CD is being counted as a WHOLE CD...) to pump up the purported value "lost" by publishing corporations...("petabytes" of "stolen" copies! Including 1,976 copies of the same Metallica song, 978 copies of the same Britney Spears track, and 178,493 copies of the "Dance, Monkeyboy" Steve Ballmer video....?)
Shouldn't this also imply that someone sneaking a camera into a theater and putting the recording on the 'net has cost studios LESS (~$8.00US or so at current movie theater rates - the "retail value" of viewing the movie at the theater) than copying a a DVD of a decade-old movie ($15-$30US at current rates for the DVD...)?
No dear god no, they werent stealing where they?!!
No, they weren't. Nor were they committing piracy, unless they did their file trading while committing armed robbery of a moving vehicle.
They were, however, apparently infringing on someone else's copyrights, which is also a crime.
Yeah, I know, pedantic and probably dangerously flirting with a "-1 redundant" mod, but I think it had to be said. The "Stealing" and "Piracy" melodramatic hyperbole gets pretty annoying. Next it'll be called "attempted murder" (of the legal entity that the corporation is, by choking off it's profit supply "like a strangler"). Of course, I suppose we can always turn around and start referring to the MPAA/RIAA members' business models as "Sodomy", which IS still (on paper) illegal in many states in the US...probably mostly those that really like Ashcroft's approach to (ahem) Justice...
Taken to an extreme, it's not only boring but annoying.
The area around Salt Lake City, Utah names their streets in a grid-like fashion that ends up sounding more confusing than you'd think.
Imagine what it would be like to have the address (to make one up on the spot) like "1225 N 1900 E" (that's street address "1225", on the "N(orth)" portion of the street known as "1900 E(ast)".....). You'd think a rationally-gridded layout would be EASIER to interpret than traditional "(number) (name) (suffix)" (where suffix is "Street", "Avenue", etc.), but it doesn't seem to work out that way in practice.
If you thought Utah was a messed-up place before, there's some more fodder for your opinion...
If you're using a Prism-type chipset, you can either use hostap (for 802.11b) or the Prism54 drivers (for 802.11g) to run your card in "Master" (AP) mode. Instant linux-based AP.
I play with this off and on with my laptop and the high-powered SMC-2532W-B card, which can take an external antenna. Crank up Apache, set up BIND to return the laptop's wifi IP address to every query, and away I go (hey, wifi isn't JUST for The Internet(tm) after all). Or if I feel the need I can bridge to a wired connection, but that's boring - ANYONE can do that...
Anybody know if any of the 802.11g Prism-chipset-based PCMCIA/Cardbus cards exist that can take and external antenna?
In fairness to MySQL AB, I think they still feel that, for example, foreign keys are unnecessary. I just think they've put them in because they kept hearing "your program sucks 'cuz it doesn't support foreign keys" and (more importantly) "Gee, we'd like to use your product, but we insist that we must have foreign keys so we can't", so they gave in and added them.
I wonder, though. Any chance PostgreSQL might add a "MySQL-compatible" client library? There seem to be quite a few programs that currently only support MySQL as a database server - often programs that don't NEED more than basic database support (e.g. GPSDrive's use of MySQL to store its list of waypoints and Kismet-detected WAP's...) If there were a compatibility layer for PostgreSQL such that it could "fill in" for a MySQL server without re-writing the client side program that would be handy. If MySQL continues to expand to the point where it is no longer "leaner" than more heavily-featured database servers then backwards-compatibility will be the main reason left to stick with MySQL...
I would argue that PHP's "One Thing", in this case, would be it's ability to handle a variety of different types of data streams with a single simple set of functions.
Data from webservers, ftp servers, files, named pipes, and network sockets can all work more or less the same way. I find it nice to be able to talk to network servers with it just as easily as I can read and write plain files.
(except in California, where I believe this is the law)
This appears to be true - being a longtime Slashdot watcher I was mindful of the dangers of "Corporations owns your thoughts" clauses, but the employment agreement for my current employer includes mention of the California labor law clause that says (to summarize) that if you develop something on your own time without using the corporations resources that they can't steal it from you, though presumably you can SELL or GIVE it to them if you want to.
With that exception mentioned in the agreement, I felt reasonably comfortable agreeing to it.
The microsoft SMB or CIFS protocol is a big inefficient hog.
Somewhat off-topic, I know, but how do the speed of different WebDAV implementations compare to SMB/CIFS in terms of efficiency? Do I remember correctly that once the initial header goes across, the rest is just plain packet data with no further negotiation?
most hard drives can't push a gigabit/second from the platters
More on-topic now - that's a good point. I can get up to nearly 30MB/s (or VERY roughly 300Mbps) on a 5400RPM drive reading directly (hdparm -t), so assume even under ideal conditions and a 10,000RPM drive you'll get less than 60MB/s or so (or again VERY roughly 600Mbps = 60% theoretical maximum for Gigabit). Maybe try transferring a file large enough to get a good test but small enough to fit in the available cache RAM...and then transfer it immediately a second time (so it's being served from the cache?)
I think $Federal_Government (USA or otherwise) ought to have a team of code security-auditing specialists that go over potentially useful (to the government) open-source projects and certify them as good...
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell, "Industry Leading" just means "has a marketing department." (Ditto for "Market Leading").
"Industry Standard" doesn't actually mean what it says, either. These days it just means "We think lots of people do things this way, or at least claim that we think that."
I'm intentionally leaving the term "socialist" vague here, and admittedly it's probably not the best term. By it, I just mean a tendency towards government control (both in terms of regulation and in terms of how many services the government insists on running directly itself) centrally, at a nationwide level. Suggestions for a better "neutral" (e.g. not "fascist" or other emotionally-charged terms, since the word I'm looking for would not inherently imply injustice or oppression) are welcome, since by my working definition here, imposition of a state-mandated religion would be "socialist", and to my knowlege no modern nations who are generally tagged with the word "Socialist" (as opposed to being thought of as an outright "theocracy" or "dictatorship") really do that. At least not for the last couple-hundred years - the Church of England would once have qualified, but not in modern times.
In order to be more "socialist" (by my almost-certainly-non-canonical definition here) Government needs to have more power over its citizens in order to maintain its control, both through "overt" and obvious means (e.g. police and "internal" military) and less obvious (controlling access to and distribution of information and goods. The larger the population of the governed, the more force the government needs to keep everyone in line.
Obviously, it's a little more complicated than that in the real world - population density plays a role, too, as does availability of natural resources and technological capability. And, of course, the wealth that pays for it all. In the US, our approximately 300,000,000[1] people are spread out over a fairly huge area here. The entire state of Idaho has about as much population as the Sacramento area in California (including suburbs)...if that much. The amount of "power" required to spread control over that broad of an area is in addition to the amount required to just "control 300,000,000 people". The amount of "power" available, should our government be given any more access to use it, in the US due to our still rich natural resources and still very strong technology is somewhat frightening, hence our seeming-right-wing-nutjob attitude that we should try to avoid letting the government have that much power. Resistance to taxation serves a good purpose too - if the US Federal Government doubled its tax rate, that means it'd have that much more money to, say, pay CIA agents abroad, buy another fleet of aircraft-carriers, battleships, "Stealth" bombers and ICBM's, or just spread around the world to mess with the global economy in the US's favor (or at least, the US Federal Government's favor - say, as payback for domestic support for the government's policies by a struggling US industry?...)
Brazil, on the other hand, has a population of only around 175,000,000[2] people, and most of that is concentrated into a small (by comparison) area, and I suspect if you compared, say, US military technology and technological research with Brazil's, the difference would be very noticeable.
If the government of Brazil woke up one day and decided "Screw you guys, I say you're a threat to our national security and we're takin' you down!"....who would be frightened? Certainly they could probably put up a good fight against nearby countries, but do they really have the sheer power to wage an effective fight against a well-armed nation quite some distance away? Or even a not-so-well-armed nation, for that matter. If it had been the Brazilian government bouncing up and down excitedly over the prospect of invading Iraq and "Getting Saddam Hussein(tm)", would they have done as well[3] as the US has?
Now, back to the US - even now, there is still a lot of sentiment in the US that the government (or at least, specifically, the FEDERAL government) should keep its metaphorical hands out of various issues. The fact that we tend not to want, for example, a Federal Government Health Care system makes us seem like radical right-wing nutjobs to people in smaller (les
I tend to agree about Nader. I don't think he's serious about campaigning for president, only feeding his own ego and perhaps his wallet.
A couple of elections ago, when (as usual) the "third parties" were shut out of the presidential debates, C-SPAN organized a "third party" debate so the candidates would at least have some chance of airing and comparing their views where people could evaluate them all together. Harry Browne (Libertarian) was there, of course, as was Howard Philip of the rather creepy[1] "U.S. Taxpayers Party" (as far as I can tell, they are also called the "Independent" party and I think the "Constitution" party.) and I THINK they had someone from the "Peace and Freedom" (hardcore socialist/borderline communist[2]) party there, and of course at the time the Greens had Nader....oh, wait, no, Nader didn't show up. He was, according to the announcer on the show, too busy promoting his new book to bother.
That kind of tells me everything I need to know about Nader...
[1]- Disturbingly extremist (in my own opinion) bible-pounding, God-bothering rightists. As far as I could tell from the debate, that party's entire platform is composed of two claims:
- Abortion is Murder(tm)
- Sex Education causes Homosexuality
.[2]- Disturbingly extremist (in my on opinion) wealth-hating, welfare-legislating leftists. Kinda helped balance with the other extreme party mentioned above. I'm guessing a lot of European people living in small countries where socialism won't necessarily become Stalinism[3] would tend to like these people
[3]- I still maintain that the degree to which a government can be "socialist" without being oppressive is inversely proportional to the size of the governed population. If California seceded from the US, I think they'd just BARELY be small enough to get away with a socialist government. If the entire US tried to do it on a national level, we'd end up with USSR II. Or so I maintain. I think this is why USAians - even Democrats - often seem "extreme right-wing" to Europeans.
Heck, I'm still waiting for the one that uses the infected PC's existing saved emails to attach itself to and forward itself with. It'll be "funny" when major corporate executives start having their private, confidential, Microsoft(r) Outlook(tm) corporate emails spewed out to random people on the internet along with the virus...corporate budget planning emails, deal negotiations...it's all there...
Yes, I know (I have it, in fact) - what I meant was THAT code is, apparently, in need of being optimized (from a source-code perspective, not from a "compiler options" perspective).
What I was wondering is whether in the process of porting the code to Java, they'd done any optimization there which might make it run faster/more efficiently than the as-yet-minimally-optimized C code at the theora.org site...
Makes me curious - at this point, apparently, what Theora most needs is optimization of the code to make it work faster.
How optimized is this Java port of the codec, and will it be possible to compile it to 'native' code using GCJ for maximum performance?
Promoted from...where? Were you once one of the IT people? If so...would YOU have really wanted what you're suggesting?
would like to introduce a tradition and/or mascot for the upcoming season.Numerous posters have pointed out the foolishness of trying to "impose" a tradition. A mascot I could see, but only if it was genuinely funny and not contrived. Nor intended to be taken seriously.
The goal of this is to add some excitement to the new team, unite the members and keep department moral high.I assume you mean "morale", not "moral" - I think what you're proposing would inspire more IMmorality...
It might also be worth mentioning that I have recently added two more administrators to the team.Do you mean more IT people (Network/System administrators), or more managerial staff? 'cuz I know nothing would make ME happier than having more people overseeing me and telling me what to do... (If you meant that you hired more people to help with the workload, you probably ARE on the right track there.)
Want some advice?
- Try asking the people actually doing the IT work what would improve morale.
- Buy a bunch of Dilbert books and read them. Anything that resembles any program that any of the "Pointy-Haired Boss" characters implement in those books should be recognized as Probably Not A Useful Idea. It sounds like you're dangerously close to crossing over to that category right now...
People who have to do tech-support-type work ARE a pretty cynical and jaded bunch, in my experience (heck, I know that describes ME), and are not likely to respond positively to contrived or ephemeral attempts to manipulate their attitudes.(Note: If this is actually a clever plan to promote "team unity" by uniting the staff in their hatred and/or mockery of you, it just may work..."Can you believe this guy? He actually thinks he can MAKE us start a 'tradition' on purpose! And who in their right mind would think these 'Apshai, the Bug God' dolls would do anything for morale?")
A lot of satellite imagery that I have seen deals with climate measuring. It's not clear from reading the proposal itself if this "unclassified" data is included.
<AluminumFoilDeflectorBeanie mode="On"> might be a handy way to keep those filthy pinko commies and terrorists from showing evidence of climate change and messing up our plans to use up as much as possible before The Rapture(tm) comes, using our precious, precious unclassified photos...</AluminumFoilDeflectorBeanie>
That's the part that gets me - they're talking SPECIFICALLY about "unclassified" (i.e. NOT "Top Secret(tm)", etc.) information. The recommendation in the proposal explicitly mentions, in effect, the fact that, well, they COULD just classify the stuff that they don't want to show to potential commie terrorists (or the people who paid for it e.g. US Taxpayers) but that's just so inconvenient to have to do...
More grist for the Aluminum-Foil-Deflector-Beanie-defended conspiracy mill (from the proposal):
"Compelled[by the FOIA, etc.] release of such data and imagery by the United States under FOIA defeats the purpose of these licensing agreements, removes any profit motive, and may damage the national security by mandating disclosure to the general public upon request. While the data and imagery could be protected from disclosure under FOIA by classifying them, the United States prefers to keep them unclassified. Unclassified matter is more easily shared with coalition partners in contingency operations and with State and local officials in disaster relief and homeland security operations.[emphasis added]
It's terrible to think what horrible disasters could befall the US while we dare to "remove any profit motive" from taxpayer-funded "remote sensing" (which, presumably, includes imagery from sources other than satellites as well?) projects. I know I would feel safer if I wasn't allowed to look at this unclassified material that I'm paying for... And, gosh, I also feel better knowing my highly-paid legislators are Doing Something(tm) about, um, I guess terrorists or environmentalists or something.
I've come to the conclusion that nearly all of human behavior can be summed up by the following two apparent facts about humanity (taken as a group):
This applies to teachers as well as children - and dealing with the "smart kids", who tend to come up with odd, novel ways of looking at and asking about things makes the teachers have to think. Really good teachers LIKE that sort of mental challenge, but I think most are just ordinary people who don't like to "work". Discouraging time-consuming, thought-provoking smartness just makes their lives easier.
(Someone once told me that one of the few college degrees you can get that does not require ANY science classes is...a Bachelor's degree in Education. That, right there, says something if it's true. Can anyone confirm or refute this claim?)
Some nerds still try to fight against that tendency, though. One of the nerdliest humor publications I know of is The Annals of Improbable Research (yes, the same people that host the IgNobel Prizes every year...). Every issue of their magazine includes a very short, concise "teaching guide", which begins with:
"Three out of five teachers agree: curiosity is a dangerous thing, especially in students. If you are one of the other two teachers[...]"
Personally, I'd love to see copies of this getting plastered all over every "educational" institution, everywhere in the world (I find it hard to believe that the US is the ONLY place in the world with this problem, fundamental human nature being what it is everywhere...).
Who the heck pumped $678,000 into this effectively fraudulent scheme of theirs?....
I know I've said this before, but that particular report of a "security problem" (why that's in quotes, I'll get to in a moment) in the Linux kernel is an excellent illustration of the difference between Microsoft's (and presumably other proprietary vendors) attitude to "security" vs. most open source projects.
This problem can be simplistically summarized thusly: "Someone who can log into a linux system can conceivably run a malicious program that might crash or lock up the Operating System". In Linux, this is characterized as a "Security Problem".
Now, think about it - if you called Microsoft (picking on them since that's the proprietary vendor we're talking about at the moment) and said "Hey, I have a program that when I run it, it crashes the system"...what kind of response will you get? "Well, don't run that program. It's obviously either defective or a trojan." Which would be the truth. But they have historically not considered that a problem in the OS AT ALL, let alone a security problem. Remember all those years ago when they claimed that most windows crashes are caused by anti-virus software?...)
Yes, FOSS also has flaws. Sometimes even serious ones. But it usually seems like FOSS projects more readily and more quickly address those flaws than proprietary ones do.
Yes...but only because I'm used to it. If EVERYONE was using the boring-but-predictable grid system everywhere, it'd be really easy and make perfect sense, but right now it's mainly apparently around Utah and Idaho only, so streets named with multiple numbers and multiple directions just sound "wrong" and confusing.
Kinda like trying to get the metric system in use in the USA - it would be perfectly comprehensible if everyone started doing it, but since we've been 'stuck' on English measures so long, metric seems confusing to USAians despite being more consistent.
I'm not particularly religious myself, but the topic is fascinating. I would personally recommend to anyone interested in the historical CONTEXT of the bible (and the various other gospels that didn't make it into the canonical works, not to mention some very interesting heresies) to look up the lectures and/or books of Professor Bart Ehrman (link goes to one example at "The Teaching Company". His "Historical Jesus" lectures were very interesting as well).
No relation or anything, I just like his lectures. Same goes for "The Teaching Company" itself.
All of a sudden I have this image of a "Bootlegger Jesus" figurine...
I'm obviously too tainted by evil and corruption to get into heaven now, short of wiping all the tainted memories from my brain...
(Is that why so many stories of the sternest Born-Again(tm) Christians seem to go along the lines of "I fried my brains with drugs and alcohol and pornography featuring dead gay baby farm-animals, and then one day as I lay near-dead in a pool of various fluids from my own body, Jesus appeared to me and Saved me."? Maybe that's what it takes to wipe the Evil Thoughts out of one's brain?...)
(Yes, the latter was a JOKE, not a genuine insult to Christians, or even just Born-Again Christians. In poor taste, maybe, but a joke nonetheless...)
Hmmmm.....
[...](2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000[...]What, exactly, IS the retail value of a single track off of a commercial CD, I wonder? Or the retail value of a DVD Movie separated from the add-on content (which is often mentioned as a reason to buy a commercial DVD over a poorer-quality illegally-copied version), and/or a DVD or recorded-in-a-movie-theater-by-videocamera movie which has substantially lower quality video and sound than the commercial version would?
It sounds like this network, presuming most or all of the files on it WERE illegal copyright infringements rather than public-domain material or material which the sharers actually had permission to copy - probably a fair assumption - well exceeded the $1000 limit in any case. I just have this sneaky suspicion that, as usual, a single track from a CD is being counted as the full retail value of a whole CD (and therefore each individual track from that CD is being counted as a WHOLE CD...) to pump up the purported value "lost" by publishing corporations...("petabytes" of "stolen" copies! Including 1,976 copies of the same Metallica song, 978 copies of the same Britney Spears track, and 178,493 copies of the "Dance, Monkeyboy" Steve Ballmer video....?)
Shouldn't this also imply that someone sneaking a camera into a theater and putting the recording on the 'net has cost studios LESS (~$8.00US or so at current movie theater rates - the "retail value" of viewing the movie at the theater) than copying a a DVD of a decade-old movie ($15-$30US at current rates for the DVD...)?
Right here...
(I guess I WASN'T the only paranoid conspiracy-theory whacko who had this sort of thought drift through his/her/its brain...)
No, they weren't. Nor were they committing piracy, unless they did their file trading while committing armed robbery of a moving vehicle.
They were, however, apparently infringing on someone else's copyrights, which is also a crime.
Yeah, I know, pedantic and probably dangerously flirting with a "-1 redundant" mod, but I think it had to be said. The "Stealing" and "Piracy" melodramatic hyperbole gets pretty annoying. Next it'll be called "attempted murder" (of the legal entity that the corporation is, by choking off it's profit supply "like a strangler"). Of course, I suppose we can always turn around and start referring to the MPAA/RIAA members' business models as "Sodomy", which IS still (on paper) illegal in many states in the US...probably mostly those that really like Ashcroft's approach to (ahem) Justice...
Taken to an extreme, it's not only boring but annoying.
The area around Salt Lake City, Utah names their streets in a grid-like fashion that ends up sounding more confusing than you'd think.
Imagine what it would be like to have the address (to make one up on the spot) like "1225 N 1900 E" (that's street address "1225", on the "N(orth)" portion of the street known as "1900 E(ast)".....). You'd think a rationally-gridded layout would be EASIER to interpret than traditional "(number) (name) (suffix)" (where suffix is "Street", "Avenue", etc.), but it doesn't seem to work out that way in practice.
If you thought Utah was a messed-up place before, there's some more fodder for your opinion...
If you're using a Prism-type chipset, you can either use hostap (for 802.11b) or the Prism54 drivers (for 802.11g) to run your card in "Master" (AP) mode. Instant linux-based AP.
I play with this off and on with my laptop and the high-powered SMC-2532W-B card, which can take an external antenna. Crank up Apache, set up BIND to return the laptop's wifi IP address to every query, and away I go (hey, wifi isn't JUST for The Internet(tm) after all). Or if I feel the need I can bridge to a wired connection, but that's boring - ANYONE can do that...
Anybody know if any of the 802.11g Prism-chipset-based PCMCIA/Cardbus cards exist that can take and external antenna?
In fairness to MySQL AB, I think they still feel that, for example, foreign keys are unnecessary. I just think they've put them in because they kept hearing "your program sucks 'cuz it doesn't support foreign keys" and (more importantly) "Gee, we'd like to use your product, but we insist that we must have foreign keys so we can't", so they gave in and added them.
I wonder, though. Any chance PostgreSQL might add a "MySQL-compatible" client library? There seem to be quite a few programs that currently only support MySQL as a database server - often programs that don't NEED more than basic database support (e.g. GPSDrive's use of MySQL to store its list of waypoints and Kismet-detected WAP's...) If there were a compatibility layer for PostgreSQL such that it could "fill in" for a MySQL server without re-writing the client side program that would be handy. If MySQL continues to expand to the point where it is no longer "leaner" than more heavily-featured database servers then backwards-compatibility will be the main reason left to stick with MySQL...
I would argue that PHP's "One Thing", in this case, would be it's ability to handle a variety of different types of data streams with a single simple set of functions.
Data from webservers, ftp servers, files, named pipes, and network sockets can all work more or less the same way. I find it nice to be able to talk to network servers with it just as easily as I can read and write plain files.
This appears to be true - being a longtime Slashdot watcher I was mindful of the dangers of "Corporations owns your thoughts" clauses, but the employment agreement for my current employer includes mention of the California labor law clause that says (to summarize) that if you develop something on your own time without using the corporations resources that they can't steal it from you, though presumably you can SELL or GIVE it to them if you want to.
With that exception mentioned in the agreement, I felt reasonably comfortable agreeing to it.
Somewhat off-topic, I know, but how do the speed of different WebDAV implementations compare to SMB/CIFS in terms of efficiency? Do I remember correctly that once the initial header goes across, the rest is just plain packet data with no further negotiation?
most hard drives can't push a gigabit/second from the plattersMore on-topic now - that's a good point. I can get up to nearly 30MB/s (or VERY roughly 300Mbps) on a 5400RPM drive reading directly (hdparm -t), so assume even under ideal conditions and a 10,000RPM drive you'll get less than 60MB/s or so (or again VERY roughly 600Mbps = 60% theoretical maximum for Gigabit). Maybe try transferring a file large enough to get a good test but small enough to fit in the available cache RAM...and then transfer it immediately a second time (so it's being served from the cache?)
Stem cells.
Maybe some variant of *BSD?
Or maybe something like SELinux?...
I think $Federal_Government (USA or otherwise) ought to have a team of code security-auditing specialists that go over potentially useful (to the government) open-source projects and certify them as good...