There's a serious gap between technology, warez, and executives in big compagnies. I'll go on this a bit lower.
Also, if they are doing this to "save an industry that has serious money loss due to piracy", I don't like the comparison, but to put it in their perspective; when you bust a drug dealer, you just open a market for the others, when you bust a drug producer, you just clear the way for another to outsource his production. So this logic is a bit flawed. In my perspective, piracy in itself isn't the bad thing. In fact, a lot of people here probably got hold of a software because it was available cracked, and then they went in a company and made a license bought.
Going after those people won't change a thing, disrupt, maybe, change? probably not. What should be done seriously and ressources invested way more into is to hunt down and even close down (to name an example I am very familiar with) Multimedia companies producing video games/movies/web sites that run 95% off pirated software (and the 5% legit being the machines shipped with windows on it). Some of those companies are operating in over 8 digits revenues and CAN afford the license buying, even if it wouldn't be all in one shot, they could at least show sign of good faith and shell out on a regular basis on a budget.
Joe Pimple at home doesn't kill an industry, he learns a software/tool (thinking stuff like maya/xsi/autocad/etc) that he can't afford (well until recently, now most company got an educational discount or free version, i'll get to this). Those 7-8+ digits small and medium companies *ARE* the ones actually STEALING ACTUAL revenues from software manufacturer.
Yes there's the BSA... but a lot of you probably know a lot of companies that never got checked or heard about a friend working at a place that is running totally not legit. Why the heck does joe pimple gets his life fried while others are actually making way more money and are way more morally wrong than joe? Ressources like this should be helping organization like the BSA, and the BSA should be less picky on companies trying to balance their budget while trying to reach 100% legitimacy. Of course those 95% illegal companies are creating jobs, but again, that logic is wrong since they are "killing an industry" with high-tech jobs... (and most of those multimedia companies have crappy underpaid/overworked conditions where only the owners are getting filthy rich).
That's my rant. Next is the distribution channels and the fact that we're in 2004. For god's sake, why can't we just buy GTA Vice city for 20$ and leech it off a server instead of paying 40$ for a printed box, media, distribution channel, and retailer profit? Maybe *THAT* would help prevent piracy. I know for sure that I'd be jumping back in the gaming world if it wasn't so freakingly expensive to play a game. Last games I bought that were a good investment were quake 3+ team arena, and mech warrior 3. Next time I'll pay more than 40$ for a game it better grabs my attention and my addiction as bad as quake did, else it's just not worth more than 20$, period. Don't give me that "it costs to create and budget" thing, logic here is I didn't buy it because it's overpriced, I didn't pirate it, I tried a demo if it was available, found I had a bill to pay and didn't want to shell out that 40-60$. so they didn't "lose to piracy" they simply "lost because they can't adapt to what a lot of people have been asking for years and should be available in 2004". They lost a sale. Period. The price difference isn't profit loss, it's all that extra non-needed layers added to reach people that could go direct (you could have both, then you'd get the best of both world). Took too long for apple to come out with iTunes, so I guess we won't see a movie nor a game distribution channel based on this before quite some time and the dinosaurs running things will still hide behind the law to try and fix things, and unfortunately for them and also for us, it will damage more than help. People wi
yah tell that to the people who shorted it at the 10$ level and they had to rebuy it at 18-20$ making a nice 50% loss in profit.
Remember that when you short a stock, the broker can ask you to rebuy at ANY time, especially when it's going up.
Unless you follorw the legal issues very closely and very very seriously with strong due dilligence, chances are you'll get burned.
Worst thing you can do with stock trading is follow the direction of a single forum or group of people.
If you are a careful investor, you probably have something like a 10% of your stocks that is for "high risk", if you are more agressive, maybe more. Well this could be one of the "high risks" but heck, I'm staying clear of it, I was almost tempted to shor it at 12$... good thing I didn't.
I wouldn't be surprised of the statistics of about 90% of Anyone here who invested at least 20K of his saving in pure stocks, is still under his initial investment if he started 5 years ago.
So people, don't go and short or buy just because there's a tendency going that way. If there was an easy way to make 100K$, nobody would need to work.
And remember this issue won't be resolved by "logic", it's the Legal system, the american capitalist legal system, there's always room for surprises.
So is there a walk-through list for average joe?
on
Sun Opens Cobalt Code
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I see a bios image, I see source code.
I guess you can emulate the bios somehow because it won't be flashable in any motherboards, that doesn't take monkey brain to figure out, but what about the rest for non-linux users?
> I guarantee you that every virus writer and his(/her?) grandmother would flock to OS X and start writing viruses with reckless abandon. Apple, Linux, Amiga
Beleive me, the Amiga had plenty of viruses...
Heck, my first virus experience was with the Byte Bandit, you know, that clever virus that was residing in memory, infecting floppies one by one and rendering them useless the next time you'd use them? (and at that time HD drives were really expensive so nobody actually owned one).
What I find weird is today, most worms writters are targetting IT infrastructure/bandwidth issues, while they could do way more damage like erasing drives, grab information and send it left and right, etc. Dunno if it's "good people that are trying to pass a message" or a "conspiracy theory about the antivirus software sellers writing "harmless" viruses to scare people into buying A/V software" or if it's the "writer scared to get too much heat if he makes more damage" but this seriously makes me wonder... before, viruses were doing actual damage to the data, today, it's more IT infrastructure that gets hit, and that's just because of the way the internet is designed.... anyone ever wondered about this?
Fluorecent lights, are consuming about 25% of the energy for the same luminosity than incandescent lights (for slower people: 25W Fluo gives about "100W" incandescent light output).
The price is reasonable considering they last about 5 to 10 times longer. in average my 100W fluo costed me about 8$ each...
The downside is the fact that the base is bigger than standard lights, thus it won't always fit in all lamp types.
LEDS will be interresting when they will give you a 10:1 ratio (as opposed to 4:1 for fluo) at the same price. The other advantage for leds is they are smaller and don't require the high tension transformer, so they can fit and replace just about every type of smaller lights as well.
If you have that much current flowing in, there are bills to be paid for this.
If you have that much machines running, there's a budget for maintenance.
If your employer tells you to fix it yourself with new wire and duct tape, he either doesn't give a sh*t about you and your safety, or he's completely insane.
Hiring an electrician to install some lamp wiring is stupid and overkill if someone in-house can do it, but playing in an electric box isn't.
For the price it would cost you to have it done by a professional
1. you will cut the downtime, 2. have a fully secured panel (and certified)
3. If it catches on fire you won't have problem with insurance claims since it was certified (whereas if you mess around in this yourself without the credentials, you could run in a PILE and I do mean a PILE of problems). This point alone should make a perfect argumentation to any "managers".
4. Your paycheck isn't worth you life, especially if you have to turn around to slashdot for advice.
5. If you are so much on a tight budget, sell off one machine to pay for the contractor, or try to find someone that would do it for cheap, still, you'll have to pay for the material and it doesn't come cheap. I don't beleive in "tight budgets" for critical things like this, again, if you can afford having this many machines running, you can afford to support them, if they are all put to use, surely you are generating revenues, if they aren't , they can be sold.
6. See point #4 as a personnal advice.
I'd be really scared to work at some company that couldn't afford an electrician for a job like this, if they are so tight, chances are your paycheck will eventually bounce, so risking that much for that little...
You pay someone minimal salary or a bit above to answer mails and phone about some products...
For the sake of an example let's take someone in computer science or electronics...If you want that supportperson to have education in any of those fields so that he understands what is really going on in the system and not troubleshoot with a simple "issue-solution" sheet, such a person will be demotivated really fast unless he doesn't have minimal objectives with his career.
The problem is usually those people are really incompetent if they end up in jobs like this especially if their education could get them 2x the salary or more. They either have to be really lazy or bad at their work (or the employment market to be really in a bad shape).
So what does that give, if the person isn't good enough to work in his field on practical projects, he won't be any better in troubleshooting it, minus some exeptions. If they would want to hire competent people they would have to raise the salary grid a bit, and even give extras because, lets face it, if you're told you'll be answering tech support issues for the next 5 years of your life, most people will be depressed.
The solution?
Well look at National Instruments for example, they have one of the Best support site on the planet, you search, you find. You call, you get the information. I am not a big user of their products (labview) but I was *really* impressed with this. So the solution is a mix of putting issues in a database and have experience stored somewhere so that someone else can use it (a bit like the trouble-solution sheet but more dynamic and with good search filtering) and as for non-computer approach, well, either make a better product, or for ***'s sake, pay the price to get decent people in. Having 3 monkeys to not answer questions properly and having the people re-phoning 30 minutes later, or having 1 good professionnal person that will be doing his job correctly and effectively will not only benefit in customer satisfaction, it will require less infrastructure and while it's going to cost a bit more, if you stop being a lame manager and use some common sence, the benifits (even financial) will be higher than the costs of keeping a crappy system.
Look at how many companies are starting to outsource their support center... this might work for some buisnesses like ISPs.... but for others it just shows that their system has failed and grew out of proportion... how many times people you know that used tech support had to phone back again because the problem wasn't resolved properly? This shouldn't happen for most of those calls right? well, there's your answer... putting more underpaid monkey won't solve the problem, it'll just cost more.
Surely there will be people responding to all that BS...
Fortunately, they will lose their money and SCO will be out of buisness after being flodded by lawsuits.
At this point I think this SCO story is more a "test" of the stock market and SEC, you gun against everybody, at some point it doesn't make sense, nobody logical enough (even the people working there) will think they will win this, so what is this REALLY about, modern stocks tactics? stress test the (d)efficiency of the SEC? see where this will end?
I mean, this would be an excellent Thesis for someone graduating in the highest education levels in economics (aside from the downside of losing his reputation):). I am just throwing ideas, obviously there must be somethign under all of this, it can't just be pure stupidity, or else it's a revolution of stupidity.
> Iranian satellite television station was knocked off of Loral Skynet's TelStar-12
And so it begins... Skynet has become self-aware... and picked a country that supposedly has loads of WMD and terrorists. Guess even AI can be fooled:)
While I find the idea of an Exchange replacement under Linux nice, it's also worthy to note that a lot of 2K/2K03 IT admins would probably like an exchange replacement running on Windows as well. It's not because you can afford a windows liscence that you can necessarely afford (or actually want to) shell out extra money for everything that could be replacable and potentially more stable/easier to manage.
What I hate about MS's licensing isn't the fact that it costs about 50$ per CAL seat after paying for the OS itself, that I can live with it. What I don't like is all those CAL seats for ALL the software after... it's nuts, CAL for SQL after buying SQL server, CAL (client access licenses) for MS Projects after shelling 1000$ for it, CAL for this CAL for that, in the end, your server for 50 users costs a fortune, and forget it if you want to run it in cluster mode; there's no rebate, you have to shell out exactly 2X for the licenses, plus Win2k costs you more for Advanced server (because win2k server cannot cluster). I think you can make 2 nodes with the standard 2003 server though, but still... you need 2x of everything.
At work I simply ditched Exchange and used a standard POP3/MAPI E-Mail server (merak) which came cheaper. For the contacts management and exchange of information, we run this through a local intranet that does its job pretty well. Of course having something like exchange would be really nice, but the horror stories I heard about it and the fact that I would have to shell out another few grands out from my budget simply made me back off.
If there's anything replacing Exchange and/or having some solid functionnality for outlook running under Windows out there, I'm sure there would be a lot of people willing to at least evaluate it.
Great, some companies FINALLY GET IT, 5 years later, to put stuff on a subscription/download system, and people still manage to bitch.
1. They need to make profit (yah yah let me get to the next points before jumping on the guns)
2. Other big players need to see that it's profitable to jump in, and ESPECIALLY NOT DISCREDIT THE SYSTEM AND SAYING "SEE? I told you it wouldn't work, online music is only good for piracy blablabla"
3. When many players jumps in, there's something called COMPETITION that sets in, which could be anything like better encoding technology, RAW files, cheaper prices, etc...
4. 10$ a month plus 79cents per song isn't cheap and doesn't necessarely beat the price of a CD in store, but you can actually PUT WHAT YOU WANT, in the order you want, from the bands you like, *LEGALLY* on a CD (if that's any comfort:) )
5. In the long run I'm sure there will be more little companies and artists using that delivery method and in any forseeable scenario, it's mostly positive for everyone (including the artists) exept the big record labels who should have come up with this 3-5 years ago (any small company would have DIED for such blattant blindness to new technology and opting for status-quo).
So before jumping off, tell youself that this is a good thing... if it makes money, it will invalidate all the claims and lies about anything that is online = piracy, and heck, it will bring us one step closer of being able to actually legitimately download movies like The Matrix Revolution not too far from now (wishful thinking)
I was a very early adopter of CD-R with sony's first CD-R drive at 2K$us back then when the CDs were over 20$ a pop.... I was always satisfied with the writer and never in my mind the doubt of "losing data" before 10 years really triggered....
With the pioneer, I went along the logic that they were the first to introduce a "end user" DVD-R unit (at 10K$ back then) so I thought that at the A04 revision it would be a winner... God I was wrogn, that unit pissed me off so much, first, the firmware issues, passing from 1.20 to upwards; you couldn't revert back to older firmware because pioneer locked the firmware with a key, you couldn't put cheap disks into it anymore, and the worst was the princo RW would never record correctly or freeze the drive off and I had to do some weird "leave the cd in while resetting the unit, boot windows, use dvddecrypt in debug and reinit + full erase RW" to recuperate the disk. Anyways, of course if you would use 5x more expensive medias you'd have less problems, but at that price point it was defeating the reason why I bought a DVD-R in the first place ($/megs/reliability). Nightmare aside, what pissed me off the most is when I started seeing reports of DVD failing after a short amount of time, even commercial grade one. Dunno if other people here will post more specifically about that subject but it got me worried to a point where I use cheap medias, and only use my drive as "second layer backup" for the time being and when I have something critical to put on disk I go out and shell more for a brand-name disc, which I find is way overpriced. Of course if you burn 2x on a 1x media with an hacked firmware, you're asking for trouble, but this isn't my case, I always burn at 1X to put every chances on my side.
Drives are comming down in price, which is a good thing, newer models have both +R and -R support so that stupid (very stupid) compatibility thing shouldn't be a problem anymore unless you run into firmware issues like I did. Even if you buy something cheap, READ the forums, read the firmware discussion groups, and like when buying a motherboard to build a server for example, ALWAYS read the tech support forums of the company or "unofficial supports" sites before making a decision if you are planning on using your device for stuff you'd want to keep for a while. This is where I failed, I took the pioneer brand for granted... I can tell you there are a buttload of unhappy customers with the A04 model, A05 came out shortly after with 4x support which was even more upsetting because it wasn't announced a decent time before the release (I would have waited). Now the A06 has dual support (+/- R/RW) But I'd go Sony or even LG before going back to pioneer, the tech support was lame and that firmware issue had ABSOLUTELY no justification, locking a firmware to not be downgradable and introducing support only for your DVD-Rs (1.20->1.31) as a feature is simply disgusting.
As for a standard... it's hard to tell, since all drives manufacturers seems to go for Dual-mode drives, the fight will probably stay there until the next leap happen (like those 20+GB dvds with backward compatibility, maybe they will limit it to 1 standard). The reason I chose -R over +R is because they were 2-3 years LATE into delivering the product from the "supposed launch date", I was planning on working with that about a year after the supposed launch date, 2 years after I was still waiting and I was really upset so I went the other way, and still got screwed a bit;)
Oh and a good source for firmware discussion/problems for most drives Firmware Page
They were really helpful into hacking that damn device and firmware so that I could downgrade it.
Am I the only one who was completely detached of that last buffy episode? well actually from the last 2 seasons? She could have died and I don't think it would have cared less... I was almost worried that she would die and Faith replace her for another stagnating 5 seasons....
I'm sure I am not the only one who was continuing to watch it because he "invested time into watching the 5 previous seasons that were really cool and I need to know how it will all end"... the ending of season 5 when she closes the portal by jumping into it was like...at least 10x better than yesterday's serie ending.... Its a good thing that this show finally ends eventho I was a big fan the 5 first seasons. When I see shows like family guy, B5 crusade and firefly being cancelled and see crap like this season's of buffy still on, it makes me wonder.
Now I just hope the Angel show doesn't go the same way.
One show that I really enjoyed this year was John Doe, is there a second season of this? this is probably one of the good findings this year, new actors good story, just enough "fiction" to keep it "real", I like the balance and the general concept.
Plus ionic-based filters will probably show in not a so distant future from now that it's harmful for the health. Breathing charged-particle of air must NOT be good in the long run.
I have a ULPA filter (a notch above HEPA) which is "medical-class" filter. It has the Ionize button so that I can turn it on and off. When I turned it on, and blew air at the computer, I was actially getting small discharges when touching the casing. Interresting:)
The new terminal service client is nice, 24 bits support, full encryption, Group Policy applicable to Terminal Service Clients loging to the server... nice little addons.
The web server edition is also nice, cheaper than buying a full blown server just to serve web page, with full support of COM+ and Terminal server remote administration (on a funny note, win2003 server web edition has a "win 2000 skin" default... the start menu is "winXP-like" but the windows and all that I was was like win2000:) Guess I am not the only one who hates XP's bloated interface.
Reading on their website, they make a big deal about the Group Policy editor, Didn't see it in action yet but that's one place they'd have plenty of room to maneuver; I hate active directory in current win2k server. Even with all patches applied, there's always that little thing somewhere hidden in some documentation deep somewhere that if you toggle on without being exactly sure on all the 2nd-effects of that action, you get burned. I have a hard time imagining somebody actually deploying an active-directory structure with remote offices and centralized servers with let's say 10 locations 50 servers and 5000 clients with some weird problems I've experimented recently, I can see why people are affraid of moving from NT servers and are always waiting for the second itteration of a technology before deploying it.
If activ directory is better in 2003 (which it should be) and there's less bugs, I won't mind upgrading it since I don't have a gazillion servers on site. The web edition is a nice add-on in their portfolio, again, depending on the final price it will sell for.
The only thing that would potentially make me NOT upgrade is that stupid activation crap. You're legit, you bought it, there's plenty of hacked keys or cracked version going around so if someone decides not to be legit, it's a no brainer..., if my system crashes or I have weird problems, the last thing I want is to be on the phone waiting for the right to "reactivate" my license while everybody will think "he needs tech support because he doesn't know what the problem is":). of course ghosting the machine helps, but if you want to upgrade your raid and add more ram, and you change network card to a gigabit for example, blam? no thanks; as much as I like the NT environment more than Unix, there's a limit to be masochist:) Hope microsoft won't be stupid on this one (well web server edition at least).
Slashdot Mirror
There's a serious gap between technology, warez, and executives in big compagnies. I'll go on this a bit lower.
Also, if they are doing this to "save an industry that has serious money loss due to piracy", I don't like the comparison, but to put it in their perspective; when you bust a drug dealer, you just open a market for the others, when you bust a drug producer, you just clear the way for another to outsource his production. So this logic is a bit flawed. In my perspective, piracy in itself isn't the bad thing. In fact, a lot of people here probably got hold of a software because it was available cracked, and then they went in a company and made a license bought.
Going after those people won't change a thing, disrupt, maybe, change? probably not. What should be done seriously and ressources invested way more into is to hunt down and even close down (to name an example I am very familiar with) Multimedia companies producing video games/movies/web sites that run 95% off pirated software (and the 5% legit being the machines shipped with windows on it). Some of those companies are operating in over 8 digits revenues and CAN afford the license buying, even if it wouldn't be all in one shot, they could at least show sign of good faith and shell out on a regular basis on a budget.
Joe Pimple at home doesn't kill an industry, he learns a software/tool (thinking stuff like maya/xsi/autocad/etc) that he can't afford (well until recently, now most company got an educational discount or free version, i'll get to this). Those 7-8+ digits small and medium companies *ARE* the ones actually STEALING ACTUAL revenues from software manufacturer.
Yes there's the BSA... but a lot of you probably know a lot of companies that never got checked or heard about a friend working at a place that is running totally not legit. Why the heck does joe pimple gets his life fried while others are actually making way more money and are way more morally wrong than joe? Ressources like this should be helping organization like the BSA, and the BSA should be less picky on companies trying to balance their budget while trying to reach 100% legitimacy. Of course those 95% illegal companies are creating jobs, but again, that logic is wrong since they are "killing an industry" with high-tech jobs... (and most of those multimedia companies have crappy underpaid/overworked conditions where only the owners are getting filthy rich).
That's my rant. Next is the distribution channels and the fact that we're in 2004. For god's sake, why can't we just buy GTA Vice city for 20$ and leech it off a server instead of paying 40$ for a printed box, media, distribution channel, and retailer profit? Maybe *THAT* would help prevent piracy. I know for sure that I'd be jumping back in the gaming world if it wasn't so freakingly expensive to play a game. Last games I bought that were a good investment were quake 3+ team arena, and mech warrior 3. Next time I'll pay more than 40$ for a game it better grabs my attention and my addiction as bad as quake did, else it's just not worth more than 20$, period. Don't give me that "it costs to create and budget" thing, logic here is I didn't buy it because it's overpriced, I didn't pirate it, I tried a demo if it was available, found I had a bill to pay and didn't want to shell out that 40-60$. so they didn't "lose to piracy" they simply "lost because they can't adapt to what a lot of people have been asking for years and should be available in 2004". They lost a sale. Period. The price difference isn't profit loss, it's all that extra non-needed layers added to reach people that could go direct (you could have both, then you'd get the best of both world). Took too long for apple to come out with iTunes, so I guess we won't see a movie nor a game distribution channel based on this before quite some time and the dinosaurs running things will still hide behind the law to try and fix things, and unfortunately for them and also for us, it will damage more than help. People wi
yah tell that to the people who shorted it at the 10$ level and they had to rebuy it at 18-20$ making a nice 50% loss in profit.
Remember that when you short a stock, the broker can ask you to rebuy at ANY time, especially when it's going up.
Unless you follorw the legal issues very closely and very very seriously with strong due dilligence, chances are you'll get burned.
Worst thing you can do with stock trading is follow the direction of a single forum or group of people.
If you are a careful investor, you probably have something like a 10% of your stocks that is for "high risk", if you are more agressive, maybe more. Well this could be one of the "high risks" but heck, I'm staying clear of it, I was almost tempted to shor it at 12$... good thing I didn't.
I wouldn't be surprised of the statistics of about 90% of Anyone here who invested at least 20K of his saving in pure stocks, is still under his initial investment if he started 5 years ago.
So people, don't go and short or buy just because there's a tendency going that way. If there was an easy way to make 100K$, nobody would need to work.
And remember this issue won't be resolved by "logic", it's the Legal system, the american capitalist legal system, there's always room for surprises.
I see a bios image, I see source code.
I guess you can emulate the bios somehow because it won't be flashable in any motherboards, that doesn't take monkey brain to figure out, but what about the rest for non-linux users?
> I guarantee you that every virus writer and his(/her?) grandmother would flock to OS X and start writing viruses with reckless abandon. Apple, Linux, Amiga
Beleive me, the Amiga had plenty of viruses...
Heck, my first virus experience was with the Byte Bandit, you know, that clever virus that was residing in memory, infecting floppies one by one and rendering them useless the next time you'd use them? (and at that time HD drives were really expensive so nobody actually owned one).
What I find weird is today, most worms writters are targetting IT infrastructure/bandwidth issues, while they could do way more damage like erasing drives, grab information and send it left and right, etc. Dunno if it's "good people that are trying to pass a message" or a "conspiracy theory about the antivirus software sellers writing "harmless" viruses to scare people into buying A/V software" or if it's the "writer scared to get too much heat if he makes more damage" but this seriously makes me wonder... before, viruses were doing actual damage to the data, today, it's more IT infrastructure that gets hit, and that's just because of the way the internet is designed.... anyone ever wondered about this?
> They have to pay "$0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not."
Funny... I'm Canadian, I just bought a spindle of 100 CD-R for 29.99$CAD...
been like that for the past year.
Dunno where you get your numbers but they are wrong.
> I'm just waiting for the RIAA to sue some deaf dude. You know it's only a matter of time
:)
Actually, that would be Hillary-ous
> What do you think powers my flying car?
:)
The same thing powering the on-board 22" OLED display computer playing Duke Nukem Forever I guess?
Fluorecent lights, are consuming about 25% of the energy for the same luminosity than incandescent lights (for slower people: 25W Fluo gives about "100W" incandescent light output).
The price is reasonable considering they last about 5 to 10 times longer. in average my 100W fluo costed me about 8$ each...
The downside is the fact that the base is bigger than standard lights, thus it won't always fit in all lamp types.
LEDS will be interresting when they will give you a 10:1 ratio (as opposed to 4:1 for fluo) at the same price. The other advantage for leds is they are smaller and don't require the high tension transformer, so they can fit and replace just about every type of smaller lights as well.
Sign up for Microsoft's security bulletins and your inbox will never be empty. Hell I got three today.
And that's only what they want to disclose publicly
If you have that much current flowing in, there are bills to be paid for this.
If you have that much machines running, there's a budget for maintenance.
If your employer tells you to fix it yourself with new wire and duct tape, he either doesn't give a sh*t about you and your safety, or he's completely insane.
Hiring an electrician to install some lamp wiring is stupid and overkill if someone in-house can do it, but playing in an electric box isn't.
For the price it would cost you to have it done by a professional
1. you will cut the downtime,
2. have a fully secured panel (and certified)
3. If it catches on fire you won't have problem with insurance claims since it was certified (whereas if you mess around in this yourself without the credentials, you could run in a PILE and I do mean a PILE of problems). This point alone should make a perfect argumentation to any "managers".
4. Your paycheck isn't worth you life, especially if you have to turn around to slashdot for advice.
5. If you are so much on a tight budget, sell off one machine to pay for the contractor, or try to find someone that would do it for cheap, still, you'll have to pay for the material and it doesn't come cheap. I don't beleive in "tight budgets" for critical things like this, again, if you can afford having this many machines running, you can afford to support them, if they are all put to use, surely you are generating revenues, if they aren't , they can be sold.
6. See point #4 as a personnal advice.
I'd be really scared to work at some company that couldn't afford an electrician for a job like this, if they are so tight, chances are your paycheck will eventually bounce, so risking that much for that little...
But.. but... why HAM and antenna... shouldn't HAM go with the icon of the previous story?
You pay someone minimal salary or a bit above to answer mails and phone about some products...
For the sake of an example let's take someone in computer science or electronics...If you want that supportperson to have education in any of those fields so that he understands what is really going on in the system and not troubleshoot with a simple "issue-solution" sheet, such a person will be demotivated really fast unless he doesn't have minimal objectives with his career.
The problem is usually those people are really incompetent if they end up in jobs like this especially if their education could get them 2x the salary or more. They either have to be really lazy or bad at their work (or the employment market to be really in a bad shape).
So what does that give, if the person isn't good enough to work in his field on practical projects, he won't be any better in troubleshooting it, minus some exeptions. If they would want to hire competent people they would have to raise the salary grid a bit, and even give extras because, lets face it, if you're told you'll be answering tech support issues for the next 5 years of your life, most people will be depressed.
The solution?
Well look at National Instruments for example, they have one of the Best support site on the planet, you search, you find. You call, you get the information. I am not a big user of their products (labview) but I was *really* impressed with this. So the solution is a mix of putting issues in a database and have experience stored somewhere so that someone else can use it (a bit like the trouble-solution sheet but more dynamic and with good search filtering) and as for non-computer approach, well, either make a better product, or for ***'s sake, pay the price to get decent people in. Having 3 monkeys to not answer questions properly and having the people re-phoning 30 minutes later, or having 1 good professionnal person that will be doing his job correctly and effectively will not only benefit in customer satisfaction, it will require less infrastructure and while it's going to cost a bit more, if you stop being a lame manager and use some common sence, the benifits (even financial) will be higher than the costs of keeping a crappy system.
Look at how many companies are starting to outsource their support center... this might work for some buisnesses like ISPs.... but for others it just shows that their system has failed and grew out of proportion... how many times people you know that used tech support had to phone back again because the problem wasn't resolved properly? This shouldn't happen for most of those calls right? well, there's your answer... putting more underpaid monkey won't solve the problem, it'll just cost more.
Surely there will be people responding to all that BS...
:). I am just throwing ideas, obviously there must be somethign under all of this, it can't just be pure stupidity, or else it's a revolution of stupidity.
Fortunately, they will lose their money and SCO will be out of buisness after being flodded by lawsuits.
At this point I think this SCO story is more a "test" of the stock market and SEC, you gun against everybody, at some point it doesn't make sense, nobody logical enough (even the people working there) will think they will win this, so what is this REALLY about, modern stocks tactics? stress test the (d)efficiency of the SEC? see where this will end?
I mean, this would be an excellent Thesis for someone graduating in the highest education levels in economics (aside from the downside of losing his reputation)
Your theory works and is cool, cool until I get
"Then... A Mad Anal Storm"
Which is probably due to too many goatse.cx hidden links clicked in my humble life.
>Hey, how many of you checkout a vendor just because of a cute Booth Babe? Exactly...
Uhm.. this being Slashdot, I would have thought most people here would notice the booth babe AFTER being attracted by the Hardware
Sorry to tell you this but...
WRONG!!!
Some people just have too much spare time... oh look at me typing this at 1h50am, sure makes me a a winner too...
> Iranian satellite television station was knocked off of Loral Skynet's TelStar-12
:)
And so it begins... Skynet has become self-aware... and picked a country that supposedly has loads of WMD and terrorists. Guess even AI can be fooled
sorry but 640K$ should be enough for everyone...
Well depending of the interpretation, he could even put the arrow upwards :)
While I find the idea of an Exchange replacement under Linux nice, it's also worthy to note that a lot of 2K/2K03 IT admins would probably like an exchange replacement running on Windows as well. It's not because you can afford a windows liscence that you can necessarely afford (or actually want to) shell out extra money for everything that could be replacable and potentially more stable/easier to manage.
What I hate about MS's licensing isn't the fact that it costs about 50$ per CAL seat after paying for the OS itself, that I can live with it. What I don't like is all those CAL seats for ALL the software after... it's nuts, CAL for SQL after buying SQL server, CAL (client access licenses) for MS Projects after shelling 1000$ for it, CAL for this CAL for that, in the end, your server for 50 users costs a fortune, and forget it if you want to run it in cluster mode; there's no rebate, you have to shell out exactly 2X for the licenses, plus Win2k costs you more for Advanced server (because win2k server cannot cluster). I think you can make 2 nodes with the standard 2003 server though, but still... you need 2x of everything.
At work I simply ditched Exchange and used a standard POP3/MAPI E-Mail server (merak) which came cheaper. For the contacts management and exchange of information, we run this through a local intranet that does its job pretty well. Of course having something like exchange would be really nice, but the horror stories I heard about it and the fact that I would have to shell out another few grands out from my budget simply made me back off.
If there's anything replacing Exchange and/or having some solid functionnality for outlook running under Windows out there, I'm sure there would be a lot of people willing to at least evaluate it.
Great, some companies FINALLY GET IT, 5 years later, to put stuff on a subscription/download system, and people still manage to bitch.
:) )
1. They need to make profit (yah yah let me get to the next points before jumping on the guns)
2. Other big players need to see that it's profitable to jump in, and ESPECIALLY NOT DISCREDIT THE SYSTEM AND SAYING "SEE? I told you it wouldn't work, online music is only good for piracy blablabla"
3. When many players jumps in, there's something called COMPETITION that sets in, which could be anything like better encoding technology, RAW files, cheaper prices, etc...
4. 10$ a month plus 79cents per song isn't cheap and doesn't necessarely beat the price of a CD in store, but you can actually PUT WHAT YOU WANT, in the order you want, from the bands you like, *LEGALLY* on a CD (if that's any comfort
5. In the long run I'm sure there will be more little companies and artists using that delivery method and in any forseeable scenario, it's mostly positive for everyone (including the artists) exept the big record labels who should have come up with this 3-5 years ago (any small company would have DIED for such blattant blindness to new technology and opting for status-quo).
So before jumping off, tell youself that this is a good thing... if it makes money, it will invalidate all the claims and lies about anything that is online = piracy, and heck, it will bring us one step closer of being able to actually legitimately download movies like The Matrix Revolution not too far from now (wishful thinking)
I was a very early adopter of CD-R with sony's first CD-R drive at 2K$us back then when the CDs were over 20$ a pop.... I was always satisfied with the writer and never in my mind the doubt of "losing data" before 10 years really triggered....
;)
With the pioneer, I went along the logic that they were the first to introduce a "end user" DVD-R unit (at 10K$ back then) so I thought that at the A04 revision it would be a winner... God I was wrogn, that unit pissed me off so much, first, the firmware issues, passing from 1.20 to upwards; you couldn't revert back to older firmware because pioneer locked the firmware with a key, you couldn't put cheap disks into it anymore, and the worst was the princo RW would never record correctly or freeze the drive off and I had to do some weird "leave the cd in while resetting the unit, boot windows, use dvddecrypt in debug and reinit + full erase RW" to recuperate the disk. Anyways, of course if you would use 5x more expensive medias you'd have less problems, but at that price point it was defeating the reason why I bought a DVD-R in the first place ($/megs/reliability). Nightmare aside, what pissed me off the most is when I started seeing reports of DVD failing after a short amount of time, even commercial grade one. Dunno if other people here will post more specifically about that subject but it got me worried to a point where I use cheap medias, and only use my drive as "second layer backup" for the time being and when I have something critical to put on disk I go out and shell more for a brand-name disc, which I find is way overpriced. Of course if you burn 2x on a 1x media with an hacked firmware, you're asking for trouble, but this isn't my case, I always burn at 1X to put every chances on my side.
Drives are comming down in price, which is a good thing, newer models have both +R and -R support so that stupid (very stupid) compatibility thing shouldn't be a problem anymore unless you run into firmware issues like I did. Even if you buy something cheap, READ the forums, read the firmware discussion groups, and like when buying a motherboard to build a server for example, ALWAYS read the tech support forums of the company or "unofficial supports" sites before making a decision if you are planning on using your device for stuff you'd want to keep for a while. This is where I failed, I took the pioneer brand for granted... I can tell you there are a buttload of unhappy customers with the A04 model, A05 came out shortly after with 4x support which was even more upsetting because it wasn't announced a decent time before the release (I would have waited). Now the A06 has dual support (+/- R/RW) But I'd go Sony or even LG before going back to pioneer, the tech support was lame and that firmware issue had ABSOLUTELY no justification, locking a firmware to not be downgradable and introducing support only for your DVD-Rs (1.20->1.31) as a feature is simply disgusting.
As for a standard... it's hard to tell, since all drives manufacturers seems to go for Dual-mode drives, the fight will probably stay there until the next leap happen (like those 20+GB dvds with backward compatibility, maybe they will limit it to 1 standard). The reason I chose -R over +R is because they were 2-3 years LATE into delivering the product from the "supposed launch date", I was planning on working with that about a year after the supposed launch date, 2 years after I was still waiting and I was really upset so I went the other way, and still got screwed a bit
Oh and a good source for firmware discussion/problems for most drives Firmware Page
They were really helpful into hacking that damn device and firmware so that I could downgrade it.
Am I the only one who was completely detached of that last buffy episode? well actually from the last 2 seasons? She could have died and I don't think it would have cared less... I was almost worried that she would die and Faith replace her for another stagnating 5 seasons....
I'm sure I am not the only one who was continuing to watch it because he "invested time into watching the 5 previous seasons that were really cool and I need to know how it will all end"... the ending of season 5 when she closes the portal by jumping into it was like...at least 10x better than yesterday's serie ending.... Its a good thing that this show finally ends eventho I was a big fan the 5 first seasons. When I see shows like family guy, B5 crusade and firefly being cancelled and see crap like this season's of buffy still on, it makes me wonder.
Now I just hope the Angel show doesn't go the same way.
One show that I really enjoyed this year was John Doe, is there a second season of this? this is probably one of the good findings this year, new actors good story, just enough "fiction" to keep it "real", I like the balance and the general concept.
Plus ionic-based filters will probably show in not a so distant future from now that it's harmful for the health. Breathing charged-particle of air must NOT be good in the long run.
:)
I have a ULPA filter (a notch above HEPA) which is "medical-class" filter. It has the Ionize button so that I can turn it on and off. When I turned it on, and blew air at the computer, I was actially getting small discharges when touching the casing. Interresting
The new terminal service client is nice, 24 bits support, full encryption, Group Policy applicable to Terminal Service Clients loging to the server... nice little addons.
:) Guess I am not the only one who hates XP's bloated interface.
:). of course ghosting the machine helps, but if you want to upgrade your raid and add more ram, and you change network card to a gigabit for example, blam? no thanks; as much as I like the NT environment more than Unix, there's a limit to be masochist :) Hope microsoft won't be stupid on this one (well web server edition at least).
The web server edition is also nice, cheaper than buying a full blown server just to serve web page, with full support of COM+ and Terminal server remote administration (on a funny note, win2003 server web edition has a "win 2000 skin" default... the start menu is "winXP-like" but the windows and all that I was was like win2000
Reading on their website, they make a big deal about the Group Policy editor, Didn't see it in action yet but that's one place they'd have plenty of room to maneuver; I hate active directory in current win2k server. Even with all patches applied, there's always that little thing somewhere hidden in some documentation deep somewhere that if you toggle on without being exactly sure on all the 2nd-effects of that action, you get burned. I have a hard time imagining somebody actually deploying an active-directory structure with remote offices and centralized servers with let's say 10 locations 50 servers and 5000 clients with some weird problems I've experimented recently, I can see why people are affraid of moving from NT servers and are always waiting for the second itteration of a technology before deploying it.
If activ directory is better in 2003 (which it should be) and there's less bugs, I won't mind upgrading it since I don't have a gazillion servers on site. The web edition is a nice add-on in their portfolio, again, depending on the final price it will sell for.
The only thing that would potentially make me NOT upgrade is that stupid activation crap. You're legit, you bought it, there's plenty of hacked keys or cracked version going around so if someone decides not to be legit, it's a no brainer..., if my system crashes or I have weird problems, the last thing I want is to be on the phone waiting for the right to "reactivate" my license while everybody will think "he needs tech support because he doesn't know what the problem is"