To answer some of my own questions (Go Google!) The CIO in question is probably James Ditmore who left Ameritrade in late June and joined Bank One a week later.
Who knows who that ousted CIO from Ameritrade is and where to find him for for a/. interview? What caused the schedule slip? Is Microsoft's characterization of what happened (CIO chose Linux after MS early wins, Linux didn't deliver, CIO out MS in) accurate?
Um, did you consider, that maybe you could trade on your celebrity and get all the Linux help/tutoring you wanted from Geeks who would do it so they could say "I helped Wil"?
I changed the DNS record for www.beerontheweb.com to address 127.0.0.1. While it doesn't make logging more efficient, it certainly addresses the problem.
Fortunately, I can have that website out of commission.
I write on the craft beer industry (I love it: Beer is a tax deduction.) for regional magazines. So I can view your problem from the other side of the fence.
My advice:
get a list of the journalists that would cover your stuff;
send them personal notes inviting them to check you out, (make those notes short and sweet);
seek them out at trade shows and make sure they see your stuff;
get to know them as you would a prospective client
It's also very good to do some pro bono/charity work and suggest they write about the charity you did the work for: The Northern State Cancer Society's new web space is the best in the US for helping patients.... This site, with technology donated by YOURFIRM.... NS Cancer Society Spokesperson said "We're so pleased with the generosity of YOURFIRM. Their database works great for us." and so on.
In kind donations are great for generating tax deductions and generating good PR and helping your community.
I can understand why the PR firm didn't do it for you. Press releases somehow manage to all go through the Great PR Homogenizing Machine on the way to release. Work on making your company the most noteworthy one in the crowd.
Herded cattle?
Roped Calves?
Plowed?
Pulled a calf?
a clue about what the previous question refers to?
Cut/stacked/bailed hay?
Branded cattle?
Eaten rocky mountain oysters?
I used to work for a large regional bank, the then Portland, Oregon based US Bank. In the branch system alone we had 600+ locations each with a server and between four and tweleve workstations.
In the back office we had thousands more desktop and server PCs all purchased from two of the Teir 1 PC vendor.
What happened when the preferred PC desktop vendor changed their keyboard BIOS and broke an in house application? (The keyboard no longer reported shift/alt/ctrl status of F11 and F12.)
1) They denied that anything changed.
2) They requested that we send the program we used to read keystrokes.
3) They then asked us to send one of the computers. It seems that the support lab didn't have any workstations that new.
4) They reported that their computer worked the same and clones and another tier 1 vendor.
My reply at this point was "We haven't been spending over a million on year for the last four years on clones or your competitor. We've spent the money with you. You changed the behavior of your hardware and we are requesting that you maintain compatibility - correct behaviour at that - with the millions of dollars of computers we have purchased in the past and intend to purchase in the future."
I then went to our sales rep with this story. He doubled checked with the tech support people. Then he pushed through getting our issue escalated to engineering. They had a patch for us a week later.
All in all this process took about three months.
Someone to point a finger at? Get a Grip! What color is the sky in your reality? If you sincerely believe that purchasing from a major manufacturer has a benefit because you can lean on them you have a bright future in management. Major manufacturers will stonewall even their largest customers. Getting past the support channel to the engineering channel is a nightmare. You are much better off with open source - where you can fix it yourself or deal with reasonable human beings that take pride in what they do and don't hide behind layers of beauracy.
Good to hear that the company says "Here's your budget, get what you can." My current employer gives all the same plan, and "one size fits all" never does.
I've used both Sprint and ATT. Sprint has a longer history of No Roaming or Long Distance charges. With ATT you have to make a decision based on your calling patterns, so it is not as clear, but what you are looking for is available.
I've found that ATT phones work better in areas of high electrical interferance - like trade shows. Mine works seemlessly as I go into elevators. My boss says this is because of the cell frequency assigned to the carriers and was a factor in choosing ATT for our company.
Sprint phones have a nice benefit of setting their clocks from the local cell towers. This is nice for when you land someplace and don't know the time zone or are just disoriented from too much travel. I certainly used the feature to keep in sync with my surroundings.
You might also want to Googlize your question, there are web sites that comparison shop for you. My ex employer used one to find that yes, I had chosen well when selecting Sprint.
The article you link to raises great questions with weak reporting. I find it hard to believe that 4% of ballots is a normal amount to discard for double punching. Yet, the author doesn't give any background on what is normal.
I live in Oregon's 3rd Congressional District. Jeff doesn't have much of chance against the incumbent. That might have been different without the filters getting in his way.
The most practical reason to vote, IMHO, is to give your preferred candidate bragging rights. If you vote for
the eventual winner they get to add your head count to the margin of victory and crow about the mandate from the people
the second place candidate they get to see the base of support and hold that up and argue the mandate isn't so big so you'd better accomodate our viewpoint
another candidate, maybe you get them 5% and some federal funds or maybe not. But you will get to send a message to the dominant parties that they are losing voters and need to listen to the populace
Yes, vote. It does encourage them - to keep things the same or to change them. It depends on how people vote.
I'm an Oregon resident where we now vote by mail. There are no polling places to go into a booth and mark your ballot. You must mail it in or drop it off at a library, or election office, or other designated places. In mid October the state mailed a ballot to every registered voter. After you received your ballot you could immediately cast your votes and mail it back or wait until it was convienent.
I waited until last night for voting. It was on my list of things to do. Things like redo the leaky connection on the new water heater, take out the garbage, review a web site that I'm rebuilding. After all that cruft I grabbed a beer (Deschutes Jubelale) and sat down at the kitchen table with the 430 pages of voter pamphlets and my ballot.
I needed the pamphlets because we have an initiative process here in Oregon that put dozens of questions before the voters. Stuff like repealing a mandatory sentencing law, prohibiting steel traps for hunters, prohibiting the presentation of anything homosexual in schools, and a few tax measures. I needed the pamphlet for information on the measures I hadn't decided on, like should we dedicate our tobacco settlement money to a specified list of programs.
It was also a source of entertainment.
You see, anybody with $500 can put a paid statement into the voter's pamphlet. The measure on presenting homo- or bi-sexual information in schools had several "for" arguments that were scarcastic.
Like: "If we're going to teach personal religious beliefs in the public schools, let's tell students what Jesus had to say against homosexuality:
(a blank column, followed by)
That's right: Absolutely Nothing! . .."
Other "Arguments in Favor of Measure 9" decried the practice of eating oysters - which is also forbidden in the old testament - and called for the firing of all oyster eaters from positions in public education.
After getting some laughs by reading the Measure 9 arguments I went through the rest of the ballot at my kitchen table. Sippin beer, listening to the radio, chatting with my wife, filling in the ovals with my #2 pencil. It was really pleasent. Then I drove over to the election office and added my ballot to the pile underneath the mail slot. The pile was about six inches deep and three feet across so it seems lots of people voted last night. My wife wondered why I didn't just take my ballot to work today and drop it off at one of the places downtown. I'm not sure why I didn't, not sure why I wanted to delvier the ballot last night. I've been voting since Carter was elected to office. Maybe it's just the vestige of the polling place habit from those years of voting.
First, I recommend Bastille as a primer on Linux security issues for my co-workers who are just learning Linux. Running the Bastille install is a great way to teach someone about security while tightening up their box. Thanks for the tool.
What kinds of reactions have you had when approaching distribution vendors about pre-Bastilling their stuff before shipment? (anonymous please) Same for any vendor that ships Linux pre installed on a box.
Since a New Linux Convert is the least likely to know about and most likely to need Bastille how are you guys getting the word out to them?
This review struck me as so much BS that I sent the following letter to the letters section at the NT Times:
I the article "Anonymous Net Posting Not Protected" you printed "attorney
Bruce Fischman hailed the ruling, saying it would force Internet users to
`think a bit before they speak.'"
Unfortunately the real problem is that people are not thinking when
they read. To put any weight on an anonymous posting without verifying
the information elsewhere is to step forward foolishly.
We despise pigs for their reputation of wallowing in mud to stay cool.
Pigs don't wallow in their own shit. For that matter, they are among the cleanest of domesticated critters. Pig won't eat and shit in the same place. Unlike cows which will shit on their own food or dogs which eat shit.
If we were as concientious as pigs we'd be taking care of the environment.
I ordered USW DSL service the first day you could and was one of the first Portland customers to have it installed. My service is 512kbps bidirectional, as one of the early people I got the Cisco 675 for free, and I opted for 5 static IP addresses, I use uswest.net as my ISP so cost is ~$110 a month.
The Bad: support is very uneven. When you break past the tier one script readers it gets much better. Having to buy "business" level service in order to have static IP addresses sucks - especially when support weenies start balking at helping you after the word "hub" or "network" is mentioned. From what I've seen at houses where people have cable modems they get alot more downstream bandwidth.
The Good: full bandwidth is consistenly available. The use policy places no restrictions on what you do over your connection. There have been two service outages. Once the Cisco died, they FedExed a replacement to me. Another time an ice storm hit and my phone line quality dropped to the point that a connection wouldn't stay up. I don't see anyone's traffic but my own.
Is it just rumor that Google results are at least artially based on the number of links from other pages pointing to a page? robots.txt wouldn't (shouldn't?) have an effect on that.
The writer of the piece, Rob Landley, is a long time clued in about technology writer. He was the first Fool to write critical pieces stating that Microsoft is a monopoly. In November 1998 he devoted a week of columns to Microsoft criticism.
You can find out more about him here. Or check out his August 20, 1998 Introduction to Linux
Most of the power consumption goes to the screen and disk drives. Much of the criticism of the Transmeta business plan from competitors says that power savings in the processor don't amount to much in the overall system.
Tommorrow is also the first day of the Oregon Brewers Festival. 72 Microbrews by the riverside. Starts at noon - I just took the whole day off for my sysadmin appreciation.
Slashdot Mirror
To answer some of my own questions (Go Google!) The CIO in question is probably James Ditmore who left Ameritrade in late June and joined Bank One a week later.
Who knows who that ousted CIO from Ameritrade is and where to find him for for a /. interview? What caused the schedule slip? Is Microsoft's characterization of what happened (CIO chose Linux after MS early wins, Linux didn't deliver, CIO out MS in) accurate?
/.ers have to know!
Um, did you consider, that maybe you could trade on your celebrity and get all the Linux help/tutoring you wanted from Geeks who would do it so they could say "I helped Wil"?
It's that social engineering thang.
I changed the DNS record for www.beerontheweb.com to address 127.0.0.1. While it doesn't make logging more efficient, it certainly addresses the problem.
Fortunately, I can have that website out of commission.
This train wreck of a worm is so virulent it's going to make CodeRed look like a tricycle tip over.
Some behavior updates:
I'm seeing hits from 65.x.y.z, 208.x.y.z and 207.x.y.z. My web servers are on 209.x.y.z.
Compared to CodeRed at ~60 probes a day, this one is averaging ~750 probes an hour.
Infected systems that contact me include fraternity Pi Kappa Phi and "leathernecks.net" Marie Corp appreciation site.
At the height of code red I was getting ~60 hits a day. This beast has hit my system over 3000 times today.
Yow.
one page among many. UC Irvine is pretty agressive about Art and Technology. I became aware of this when they hired Antoinette LaFarge.
My advice:
get a list of the journalists that would cover your stuff;
send them personal notes inviting them to check you out, (make those notes short and sweet);
seek them out at trade shows and make sure they see your stuff;
get to know them as you would a prospective client
It's also very good to do some pro bono/charity work and suggest they write about the charity you did the work for: The Northern State Cancer Society's new web space is the best in the US for helping patients.... This site, with technology donated by YOURFIRM. ... NS Cancer Society Spokesperson said "We're so pleased with the generosity of YOURFIRM. Their database works great for us." and so on.
In kind donations are great for generating tax deductions and generating good PR and helping your community.
I can understand why the PR firm didn't do it for you. Press releases somehow manage to all go through the Great PR Homogenizing Machine on the way to release. Work on making your company the most noteworthy one in the crowd.
CBN - have you:
Herded cattle?
Roped Calves?
Plowed?
Pulled a calf?
a clue about what the previous question refers to?
Cut/stacked/bailed hay?
Branded cattle?
Eaten rocky mountain oysters?
What happened when the preferred PC desktop vendor changed their keyboard BIOS and broke an in house application? (The keyboard no longer reported shift/alt/ctrl status of F11 and F12.)
1) They denied that anything changed.
2) They requested that we send the program we used to read keystrokes.
3) They then asked us to send one of the computers. It seems that the support lab didn't have any workstations that new.
4) They reported that their computer worked the same and clones and another tier 1 vendor.
My reply at this point was "We haven't been spending over a million on year for the last four years on clones or your competitor. We've spent the money with you. You changed the behavior of your hardware and we are requesting that you maintain compatibility - correct behaviour at that - with the millions of dollars of computers we have purchased in the past and intend to purchase in the future."
I then went to our sales rep with this story. He doubled checked with the tech support people. Then he pushed through getting our issue escalated to engineering. They had a patch for us a week later.
All in all this process took about three months.
Someone to point a finger at? Get a Grip! What color is the sky in your reality? If you sincerely believe that purchasing from a major manufacturer has a benefit because you can lean on them you have a bright future in management. Major manufacturers will stonewall even their largest customers. Getting past the support channel to the engineering channel is a nightmare. You are much better off with open source - where you can fix it yourself or deal with reasonable human beings that take pride in what they do and don't hide behind layers of beauracy.
Sorry about the rant. This is a pet peeve.
I've used both Sprint and ATT. Sprint has a longer history of No Roaming or Long Distance charges. With ATT you have to make a decision based on your calling patterns, so it is not as clear, but what you are looking for is available.
I've found that ATT phones work better in areas of high electrical interferance - like trade shows. Mine works seemlessly as I go into elevators. My boss says this is because of the cell frequency assigned to the carriers and was a factor in choosing ATT for our company.
Sprint phones have a nice benefit of setting their clocks from the local cell towers. This is nice for when you land someplace and don't know the time zone or are just disoriented from too much travel. I certainly used the feature to keep in sync with my surroundings.
You might also want to Googlize your question, there are web sites that comparison shop for you. My ex employer used one to find that yes, I had chosen well when selecting Sprint.
Dewey/Truman or Kennedy/Nixon
Hopefully we will hear more about this.
- the eventual winner they get to add your head count to the margin of victory and crow about the mandate from the people
- the second place candidate they get to see the base of support and hold that up and argue the mandate isn't so big so you'd better accomodate our viewpoint
- another candidate, maybe you get them 5% and some federal funds or maybe not. But you will get to send a message to the dominant parties that they are losing voters and need to listen to the populace
Yes, vote. It does encourage them - to keep things the same or to change them. It depends on how people vote.I waited until last night for voting. It was on my list of things to do. Things like redo the leaky connection on the new water heater, take out the garbage, review a web site that I'm rebuilding. After all that cruft I grabbed a beer (Deschutes Jubelale) and sat down at the kitchen table with the 430 pages of voter pamphlets and my ballot.
I needed the pamphlets because we have an initiative process here in Oregon that put dozens of questions before the voters. Stuff like repealing a mandatory sentencing law, prohibiting steel traps for hunters, prohibiting the presentation of anything homosexual in schools, and a few tax measures. I needed the pamphlet for information on the measures I hadn't decided on, like should we dedicate our tobacco settlement money to a specified list of programs.
It was also a source of entertainment.
You see, anybody with $500 can put a paid statement into the voter's pamphlet. The measure on presenting homo- or bi-sexual information in schools had several "for" arguments that were scarcastic. Like: "If we're going to teach personal religious beliefs in the public schools, let's tell students what Jesus had to say against homosexuality:
(a blank column, followed by)
That's right: Absolutely Nothing! . . ."
Other "Arguments in Favor of Measure 9" decried the practice of eating oysters - which is also forbidden in the old testament - and called for the firing of all oyster eaters from positions in public education.
After getting some laughs by reading the Measure 9 arguments I went through the rest of the ballot at my kitchen table. Sippin beer, listening to the radio, chatting with my wife, filling in the ovals with my #2 pencil. It was really pleasent. Then I drove over to the election office and added my ballot to the pile underneath the mail slot. The pile was about six inches deep and three feet across so it seems lots of people voted last night. My wife wondered why I didn't just take my ballot to work today and drop it off at one of the places downtown. I'm not sure why I didn't, not sure why I wanted to delvier the ballot last night. I've been voting since Carter was elected to office. Maybe it's just the vestige of the polling place habit from those years of voting.
I hope you have as good a time voting as I did.
What kinds of reactions have you had when approaching distribution vendors about pre-Bastilling their stuff before shipment? (anonymous please) Same for any vendor that ships Linux pre installed on a box.
Since a New Linux Convert is the least likely to know about and most likely to need Bastille how are you guys getting the word out to them?
I the article "Anonymous Net Posting Not Protected" you printed "attorney Bruce Fischman hailed the ruling, saying it would force Internet users to `think a bit before they speak.'"
Unfortunately the real problem is that people are not thinking when they read. To put any weight on an anonymous posting without verifying the information elsewhere is to step forward foolishly.
Pigs don't wallow in their own shit. For that matter, they are among the cleanest of domesticated critters. Pig won't eat and shit in the same place. Unlike cows which will shit on their own food or dogs which eat shit.
If we were as concientious as pigs we'd be taking care of the environment.
The Bad: support is very uneven. When you break past the tier one script readers it gets much better. Having to buy "business" level service in order to have static IP addresses sucks - especially when support weenies start balking at helping you after the word "hub" or "network" is mentioned. From what I've seen at houses where people have cable modems they get alot more downstream bandwidth.
The Good: full bandwidth is consistenly available. The use policy places no restrictions on what you do over your connection. There have been two service outages. Once the Cisco died, they FedExed a replacement to me. Another time an ice storm hit and my phone line quality dropped to the point that a connection wouldn't stay up. I don't see anyone's traffic but my own.
Overall, I'm happy with the service.
Is it just rumor that Google results are at least artially based on the number of links from other pages pointing to a page? robots.txt wouldn't (shouldn't?) have an effect on that.
The writer of the piece, Rob Landley, is a long time clued in about technology writer. He was the first Fool to write critical pieces stating that Microsoft is a monopoly. In November 1998 he devoted a week of columns to Microsoft criticism. You can find out more about him here. Or check out his August 20, 1998 Introduction to Linux
Most of the power consumption goes to the screen and disk drives. Much of the criticism of the Transmeta business plan from competitors says that power savings in the processor don't amount to much in the overall system.
Tommorrow is also the first day of the Oregon Brewers Festival. 72 Microbrews by the riverside. Starts at noon - I just took the whole day off for my sysadmin appreciation.